Forest For The Trees (Book 3) (26 page)

They entered a flat area at the top with four benches
facing outward in a square.  Four pillars supported the stone roof, the
stairwell descending from the center of the bench formation, the walls absent
to provide a view over the expanding city.  Marik deduced that this vista must
rest atop one of the highest points of the low hill on which the original
Thoenar was situated.  Despite taller buildings than the bell tower rising less
than a half-mile away, the view revealed both the Starshine and Pinedock Rivers
twinkling in the moonlight.  Their waters flanked the sprawling cityscape.  In
the distance could be seen the rising hills that housed farmlands on the city’s
southern outskirts.

They sat without speaking, side by side, Marik
enjoying the beauty of the world in a way he rarely did.  To often he took it
for granted.  When he felt Ilona’s fingers trace lightly over his left face, it
was as if he had been waiting for it.

“A close one,” she whispered.

“That’s right.”  The breeze blowing through the loft,
a bit sharp with the last icy breath of a dying winter, seemed to contain the
unspoken truth of his simple acknowledgement.

“What were you thinking about when it happened?”

He collected his thoughts before answering honestly. 
“Hard to say.  It’s fuzzy.  It happened so fast, but felt as if it lasted
forever.  I’m not sure I thought about anything specifically.”

Her fingers left his face to reach around his
shoulders.  He matched the gesture.  “I would have been suspicious if you said
you were thinking only of me.  It sounds too much like the bard.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t…think of you.  Every day.”

“I know that.”  He heard a crinkling, and felt a
rolled paper pressed into his hand.  No doubt what it must be.  “But anyone can
be eloquent when it suits their purposes.  Running the Spell has taught me
never to trust a poet.  Actions will always speak louder to me than any words.”

“When words are all you can use, it’s hard to find the
right ones.”  He kept his gaze fixed out over the distant land.  “And if you
do, you’re not sure if they are.”

“Women like Rosa enjoy having their heads swoon over
romantic phrases.”  At his snort, she cuffed his ear gently.  “Don’t judge
people on their appearance.  I would have thought you had learned that by now.”

“That’s funny if you consider what it took for me to
catch your eye.”

This time her cuff was followed by a painful pinch to
his earlobe.  “My point was that I’ve been hardened by the world.  Words can’t
be trusted if there’s no action to support them.”

“I meant every word I said in this.”

He felt her warm breath when she leaned closer to
whisper.  “Then you’ll have to prove it.  And spend a long time proving it.”

Despite the scant moonlight, he could sense the
endless expanses of crystalline brown that existed within her perfect eyes.  “I
hope to.  For years…and longer.”

*        *        *        *        *

Marik pounded on the tabletop.  “If you don’t know,
then how is anyone else supposed to?”

Inora kept her cool.  “Are you expecting a definite
answer when all we can do is guess?  This is utterly unlike
anything
we’ve ever
dreamed
of!  How can we figure out in a day something we
never expected would be possible at all?”

“You’ve had more than a day,” he nearly snarled.  “In
fact, you’ve had time since before
I
ever learned of it!  If we can’t
come up with anything by tonight…”  He trailed off, at a loss for any suitable
threat he could make good on.  Too much responsibility, no power to reinforce
it.  Lovely.

The lady geomancer returned to the large tome she had
been perusing.  It sat on a horseshoe of tables the mages had formed around the
scrying window that displayed the floating mountain.  Each table was buried
beneath countless books and documents gathered from every corner of Thoenar,
from the palace library to private collections to the sprawling city library
that kept house in the Second Ring.

King Raymond Cerella’s royal enclave only had two pure
geomancers.  Six others possessed the talent in conjunction with others, such
as Caresse did, the mercenary band’s own wizardess.  Of the six, one was a
wizard.  The other five were two mystics who were twins, two witches and a
warlock…which were in fact the same blend.  Tollaf had never explained why the
males were called warlocks while the females were witches.

These eight people were the ones tasked with
discovering everything the council needed to know regarding the impossibly
airborne peak.  So far, none of their ideas had sounded satisfactory, not to
their own ears let alone anyone else’s.

Marik left them to stalk up the stairs to reach
Celerity’s workroom.  Entering, he bitterly pondered why it was hers at all. 
Tru used it every day.  Most of the room’s contents were his, or there to aid
his magician’s spells.  The enclave’s chief had yet to make personal use of it
once within Marik’s sight.

He bypassed the newest reports stacked on the table by
the door.  At the room’s far end he flung himself into the comfortable stuffed
chair Celerity used as an unofficial throne when she deigned to be present. 
“Any luck?” he barked.

Tru glanced away from staring into the large mirror
only inches off his nose.  He looked fish-eyed.  “What say who?”

With great effort of will, Marik prevented a sigh. 
“Any luck with scrying my father or the Red Man?”

“Does this,” Tru replied with a wave of one hand,
“look empty or does it look full?  It would have been better if you’d brought
back the glass Rail had been drinking out of, or strands of his hair.  Then I
could force through the block around them, probably, then block the block so we
couldn’t get blocked.”

“I wasn’t counting on them vanishing into thin air!” 
Marik stopped his teeth from clenching any worse.  The last several mornings he
had awakened with aching jaw muscles.

Minna strode purposefully toward him.  He accepted
that with equal parts relief and jaundice.  She had been annoyed at him
entering into their routine at first, especially as a new analyst.  Once she
realized he would be taking every scrap of heat from the council in place of
them all, she had changed her attitude.

“These just came over, tagged for you specifically. 
Your friend made sure they were routed directly to us before going through army
intelligence.”

Marik took the papers.  He recognized Dietrik’s tidy
scrawl though the routing note bore no flavor of him.  Trask could not have
cared less, and so Dietrik had taken an active role in the duty of reporting
what progress was made with the Arronathian prisoners.

And what a sack of worms that simple word had opened
up.  Using the information Rail had bequeathed him in the Queen’s Head, Wyman
had attacked the few prisoners who understood Traders with the title.  Simply
the word “Arronath’ had instantly cracked many of their steadfast foundations. 
They were no longer certain they were held captive by ignorant serfs who would
eventually receive the wrath of whichever god they worshiped.

Too bad it had yet to crack them enough to form a
spring head.  Wyman continued to work on it, carefully mining them, hoping to
tap that information well.  By all accounts, the man could be skilled at such
delicate work.  Marik never would have expected it of the silent lone wolf.

Then again, he might only be a silent loner when Marik
was close at hand.  The wedge his mage talent drove between him and his unit
mates frustrated him to no end.  If it weren’t for Dietrik acting as a bridge,
he would hardly know what half of them looked like.

He flipped off the first page which never held
anything worth reading.  It was filled with hundreds of minor notations scribed
by Trask’s report drafter, each completely useless as far as practical
knowledge went.  A conviction had gradually grown within Marik that army
intelligence was not half so complicated as they wanted everyone to believe. 
They only made the job as confusing to outsiders as possible to justify their
outrageous pay, then to cover up any blatant errors on their part that had cost
soldiers their lives.

Dietrik had gone a long way toward simplifying the
camp’s reports, much to Marik’s delight.  Naturally, this had irked the
knight-marshal, who employed it as one of the pry bars in his arsenal to have
Marik sent back to his band where he belonged.  Security against potential
enemy spies or similar nonsense.  As if a skulking Arronathian operative could
understand Galemaran script in the first place.  The council meeting had mostly
been spent defending himself, especially after requesting further time.

Overall numbers look to be approximately
one-hundred-thousand Arronaths detailed with Tullainian campaign.  Holding
garrisons in kingdom and border stations along Perrisan border require
estimated eighty percent of total personnel.  Arronathian beasts, classified
through interrogation as ‘Taurs’, are of primary use as frontline breakers.  As
such, the majority of available Taur forces suffered major damage in Galemaran
assault.  Believed of original five-hundred Taurs claimed, potentially half
might remain after Tullainian/Galemaran battles.

Marik read it twice, trying to come to terms with the
threat facing him.  After tapping the papers against his lips, he noticed the
last page was an extra, outside the report’s usual parameters.  It bore a
simple note from Dietrik, thoughts meant for him alone.

There are several points in conflict, so don’t be
rattled by the flap.  This is only a general estimate until we can make the
different stories tally with one another.  If you ask me, Trask’s man is
‘worst-casing’ it.

The page was unsigned.  Marik jotted the salient
details he needed on Dietrik’s sheet before handing the stack back to Minna,
keeping the last page.  That drew a frown.  She disliked anyone tampering with
her documents.

Tru had resumed his attempts to locate the Red Man. 
Celerity still wanted him found, the information Marik had passed her
notwithstanding.  She would only trust the story once she had questioned the
man personally.  Secretly, he hoped the chief mage
did
find the Red
Man.  No doubt she would receive a rude awakening.

Except he remembered the man’s painfully bright and
bizarre aura.  If Tru scryed the man, it would only be because he wanted to be
found, and not a heartbeat sooner.

With Tru busy and Minna fuming at him, Marik stepped
to the darkest corner to be alone with his thoughts.  Twenty-thousand possible
black soldiers.  Two-hundred-fifty possible…what were they?  Taurs, he reread.

It could easily be the worst case, as Dietrik
believed.  The problem was that worst case scenarios existed because they were
the worst eventuality that really could happen.  If there weren’t
twenty-thousand hostile soldiers in Galemar at the moment, there might be by
this time tomorrow.  And the monsters…

Most of the reports bowing a table downstairs dealt
with wild Taurs on the loose.  Massive meat-eating predators that had escaped
during the Rovasii battle.  Beasts that prowled the surrounding lands on their
own.  The Arronaths were attempting to recapture them with limited success. 
How many of the potential two-fifty were lurking in woods and forests, waiting
to attack a mobile army detachment long before they expected to reach contested
areas?

One or two on their own would not pose much trouble…if
the men were expecting to face the beasts.  He knew well…
very
well,
exactly how much damage the beasts could lay on the best fighting forces when
they descended without warning.

“Minna,” he called.  The woman looked up from her
private desk.  He had arranged for her to have it outside the chaos of the main
scrying room.  “Did we ever get word back on available crossbows we can use?”

“Two days ago,” she answered in a tone that conveyed
what she thought of him being unaware of the fact.  “It is in the stack along
with the other equipment reports from the Thoenar Division quartermasters.”

He followed her wave to the piles he had charged
past.  After twice collecting sheaves his fumbling hands scattered across the
floor, he located the report he wanted.  Marik flipped the cover page away without
looking at it, cursing Dietrik’s absence among the men running the equipment
stores for all army forces and training programs near Thoenar.

At last he found the
one
piece of information
he had
requested
sandwiched between a hundred other details he had no
interest in.  Only two-hundred crossbows were in store that were reliable.  A
further hundred were questionable, possibly still in condition to be repaired. 
The best ones had already been taken by army divisions heading east to the
Nolier border.

That was only marginally helpful.  If they knew
exactly where the Taurs would attack, they might be able to position their few
crossbows to best effect.  What were the odds on being that lucky?  Not even
Kerwin would bet on them.  The safest way to take on the Taurs would be with,
at minimum, five heavy crossbows dedicated to each furry body.