Forest For The Trees (Book 3) (13 page)

“Conjuror,” Marik muttered, reviewing what he knew of
the class.  “She has the sorcery talent too.  And, what…she helps the
cityguard?”

“Right.  She isn’t that strong, you know.  Or else the
enclave would have taken her into the palace.  The cityguard has a few dozen
mages who help them find whatever they can’t find.”

“A few dozen!”  The number sounded absurd.  He
remembered how the mage numbers in the Nolier war had been considered crucial,
how the Crimson Kings’ magic users added significant strength to counter what
mages Nolier employed.  There had been roughly fifteen mages dedicated to
magical combat on top of the regular, lower-strength users employed by the
army.  Army mages were primarily used for duties such as communication,
detection or general usefulness depending on the individual’s skills.

How many mages did the army regularly claim, he
suddenly wondered?  Within the army ranks, how many ‘sub-mages’ might be
drifting about, magic users considered of no consequence by the men who
should
be tallying every scrap of strength they could muster.  Mages so weak they were
not worth counting as such.

Tru, reacting to Marik’s startled tone, responded by
arching his thick eyebrows.  “Crime is not so bad as that.  The guards can
figure out most crimes themselves, or else the city’s business mages would be
pressed harder to work for the crown.”

“Then where,” Marik sighed, hoping he sounded more
tolerant than he felt, “would the people go to buy their good-luck charms and
have their lives foretold?”

“They’d be better off without them anyway.  But we’re
better off without them, so it works out.”

“Perhaps.”  Turning away from the table, he added, “On
a different matter, did you ever manage to locate my father?”

“I would have said so, wouldn’t I?”

“I wanted to know if you had any better luck since
then.”

“No.  I didn’t have much in components.”

Marik scowled.  “I left you plenty to work with!”

“Enough for eight or nine tries.  I can only use a
component once.  That’s why you should have pissed in the bottle.”

“If you couldn’t find him after nine attempts,” Marik
growled through gritted teeth, “then I doubt it would have made any
difference.”

Tru shrugged it off.  “Last try I tried was before the
first snow last winter.  Always the same.  My spells couldn’t find anything to
latch onto.”

“You’d know if he were dead.  That must mean he’s
still alive.”

“Right.  Once I’m done with this,” the man gestured
with a wave over the many plates, “I can try again if you like.  It’s been
months so things could have changed.”

“That would be good,” Marik answered.  Any chance to
uncover new information regarding his father would be accepted eagerly.  To
bolster Tru’s enthusiasm for the search, he deliberately mused allowed, “If you
haven’t found the man with the red eyes yet, then Celerity must be desperate to
find out what she can about him.”

“Yes.  That’s why she didn’t assign me any jobs until
Tybalt started shouting last night.”

His words brought Marik up short.  “No?  So instead of
‘if you like’, it’s ‘as soon as I can stick my knife in your arm’.  I should
have guessed as much.”

Marik waited patiently while Tru finished his duty. 
Most of the plates had been pushed to the table’s far side already, leaving
only four to be examined after Tru scooped as much sand as he could recover
back into his pouch.  In the spare moments, Marik gazed about the room, setting
the doings he observed in his mind, gaining a better feel for the controlled
chaos.  He used his magesight to study the scrying spells, unable to determine
any specifics regarding their structure due to the foreign magics that gave
them life.

When Tru pushed aside the last vessel, Marik believed
he understood the majority of what transpired.  As he had earlier supposed, the
royal enclave, with no enemies or threats at hand to vanquish, directed their
efforts at painting a detailed picture of these invaders.  The brushes they
used to accomplish this ranged from the mysterious occult to the mundane ink on
paper hurriedly scratched out by men across the battlefront.

Beside the entry door sat a man who had adopted the
sanctimonious doctrine inherent to a fanatical religion Marik had long since
grown to despise.  Clerking.  Not for an instant did Marik believe him to be a
mage, either weak or strong in his talents.  His purpose lay in his quill’s
non-stop journey across his parchment, hardly glancing at what he wrote, his
eyes fixed on the various notes delivered every other minute by mages who never
spoke a word.  He transformed their findings into passages the council would be
able to comprehend.

It would be a minor miracle if the report ended up
containing any information that forced the council to appreciate the dire
situation.  Scattered fragments strewn over a dozen pages would do little
toward that end.

Tru worked for a moment to affix the sand pouch among
the rest dangling from his belt.  Once satisfied it would remain where he
intended it, he addressed Marik.  “When do you want to see the mountain?”

“What?  Celerity is supposed to show me the
information you have on these black soldiers.  Is there much that I don’t know
already?”

“How am I supposed to know what you don’t know?”

Marik ground his teeth.  “Well, if you don’t know,
then when will Celerity be back?  I’m not going to stand like a coat rack all
day, waiting for others to let me do what I came to do.”

“To see the mountain, right?”

“To see whatever you have about the black soldiers. 
Show me what you have.  That way when Celerity returns we won’t have to start
from the beginning.  It sounds like she might take a while.”

The magician nodded in perfect agreement.  “Council
meetings are always several candlemarks.  This way.  We’ll look at the mountain
later.  It’s still too early to see it good.  Dawn comes later that far west,
you know.”

Marik had no idea what Tru meant by that.  He ignored
it in favor of getting the day’s work underway.  Dawn had already broken a mark
earlier.  Asking would only distract the man, delaying them in their work still
further.

Tru brought him around a desk cluster to the wall
opposite the scrying window.  There they found paper mountains burying a long
worktable.  A second clerk, little different from the first except for the fact
of her gender, ran her fingertip down these towering piles, fanning the papers’
protruding edges.

“Minna, Marik,” Tru said simply, nodding his head at
each by way of introduction.  “He needs to know whatever we know about the
people we don’t know about.”

The woman straightened, keeping her finger at one
point on the stack while she glared at Tru.  After a heavy moment, she shifted
her look to Marik.  “Exactly what is it you need?”

“I’ve been told to review all the information you have
about the black soldiers.  I’ll add it to what I learned first-hand from
fighting them in battle.”  He stopped there, mindful of the seneschal’s warning
about saying too much to the wrong ears.

She graced him with an irate expression that told
much.  In the proper scheme, it was the
clerks’
duty to sort out
information and evaluate it, or failing in that, the duty of clerks
specifically trained to work with army analysts.  Her eye fell without comment,
at least without audible comment, on his clothing.  He was easily the shabbiest
in the room.

“All the information
we
have,” she coolly
informed him, “is
here
.”  With her free hand, she patted the thousands
of pages.

“I…”  A leaden weight sank into his stomach at seeing
a month’s hard reading waiting in ambush for him.  “I don’t think I need that
much.  A, um…a summary on the current positions of their forces.  Evaluations
of their manpower, supplies…anything like that.  I only need a current picture
of them.”

She clearly found this to be nearly as foolish as
Tru’s earlier comment.  Minna ignored him long enough to resume her finger’s
trail down the stack, skipping over protruding tabs with letters too small for
Marik to read.  When she found what she wanted, she braced the stack with her
body and did a masterful job of removing a quarter-inch report from its midst.

“There are no such summaries available.  We are in the
process of breaking down the information that we’ve received, which, I might
add, only started coming in an eightday ago.  Before that, all we had to work
with were what trickles the mages came up with.”

“I need to understand where the enemy is and what they
are up to.”

“So does everyone else.  By tomorrow or the day after,
we’ll have the beginnings pieced together.”

“I don’t have that long,” Marik asserted.  He kept his
voice level.  “What I need is the useful information by this afternoon, and in
such a way that we understand what we’re facing.  I don’t need snippets about
squads scattered across fifty miles.”

“If we had such available to us, do you not think it
would have been presented to the king’s advisors long since?”  Her tone grew
waspish, her patience short.

“The information is right here, according to you!” 
Marik could feel his tone slipping to match hers.  “Every mark spent is a mark
those black soldiers have to dig in and fortify.  Detailed facts about them are
needed, and right now!”

“With a flood of—” Minna started hotly, until Tru
moved between the two, hands raised to placate them.

“Easy.  You want the same thing.  You’re on the same
side.”

Minna reserved her judgment on that.  Whatever sides
she perceived were a far cry from Galemar versus an unknown adversary.  In all
probability she thought in terms of laboring workers versus inept and brainless
oafs placed in positions over her by gods in the mood for a hearty laugh.

Marik sucked in a breath to steady his composure, curtailing
the inhalation to avoid calling attention to the action.  “L—” he began, then
stopped sharply.  He had been about to start with ‘Look, I’m…’, deciding as his
lips formed the syllables that it sounded a bit childish.

Resolutely, he quashed his temper, which had been
flaring since arriving at Trask’s camp.  Very rarely had he encountered trouble
controlling it since his first winter in Kingshome.  Before, it had been
wilder, prone to erupt at the worst times.  Discipline mastered through his
combat training and unearthing sporadic answers in his quest to locate his
missing father had gone a long step toward taming the beast.

“I am not an army officer who instantly demands faster
results when he hears a prediction, no matter what it is.”  He kept his tone
calm, firm as he could manage.  Which might not be overly much.  “I am simply
speaking the truth.  We need to use the facts we have to get an idea of what we
are facing.  How old are the reports we have?”

Minna hardly looked mollified.  “It’s all in a mix. 
The field reports are two to three eightdays old, from every part of the
southwestern lands the invaders stole.  These,” she motioned to the left side
of the table, which seemed to strain under the load’s weight, “are from the
mages over there, using their mirrors.  The newest is a half-mark old.  We
haven’t had time to sort it out.  All we can do is rush partial information to
the council.”

Marik shifted his attention to Tru.  “How widespread
is the scrying?”

“Spotty, there and everywhere.  It’s hard to focus on
any one area, especially when it’s further away from the towns.  We can’t put a
lock on any of their forces since the catalyst is always ours, not theirs.  And
those armor chunks will only show us the men they came off.  They’re all
sitting outside the city.”

“I see.  Right.”  A second breath and he was ready to
begin.  “We need to figure out which information is worthless.  Eightdays ago? 
They will have moved their forces since then, either away from where they were
or moving additional men in.  We need to find out everything we can about the
monsters they use, especially how many they have under their control.  Tru, if
there’s any information on how the white robes control the beasts, I want to
hear about it.  Minna, you and I will start sorting out the newest reports on
who’s stationed where, and how many in each position.  We also need to find any
reports, old or new, that deal with the overall size of the enemy, especially
any references to a command structure the reporter might have noticed.”

They stood looking at him.

“Let’s get started.  There’s a lot of work,” Marik
ordered, stepping toward the overflowing table.  Minna quickly rushed after him
before his heathen hands could disrupt her filing system.  After a moment
without comment, she began handing him thick reports.

It relieved him tremendously.

Truth be told, he expected little enough difference if
the evaluation were finished today or tomorrow.  His motivations were simple.

Once people start listening to you, they would likely
continue to listen to you.  If a man got people to obey him, those people would
keep obeying until he gave them a suitable reason not to.  The challenge was to
be levelheaded, to offer no reason for them to believe he might be incompetent
or lacking in any manner.  Landon had taught him that last summer after the
contract to protect Hilliard had begun turning sour.