Rift in the Races (69 page)

“My Queen,” ventured Vorvington, after bowing deeply in deference to her mood as much as to her station, “I think it could not come to that. They are a military people, as we are. They understand well enough the nature of war. The girl is merely a casualty of these turbulent times. While I am sure they will not be happy about it, I am also sure they will recognize the situation for what it is.”

She nodded. “I believe you are right. And besides, their new admiral is softer than the last. I am sure I can convince that one of nearly anything I need to.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“And furthermore, they are beholden to us now for their escape.”

“Your Majesty?”

She regarded him down the length of her nose, then ticked and shook her head, feigning disappointment. “Then you haven’t heard. And here you fancy yourself the man with the friends in all places.”

“Your Majesty, while I do have a convenient acquaintance here and there, on this matter of an escape for the Earth people, I confess that I am entirely in the dark. Though, I’ve been very busy lately, and perhaps it’s just slipped past my notice in recent days.” This last part he tossed out in the manner of making an excuse.

She laughed at him. “Oh, Vorvington, you doppelganger, you. You haven’t been busy since your mother pushed you out. Don’t play the beleaguered lord with me.”

“Majesty,” he said defensively, “have I not brought
Citadel
and the Tinpoa mining project along most efficiently?”

She laughed again. “You hired the right man when you found that boy Aderbury, I credit you that, but the rest,
hah
! How long has your project, the one you are so proud of just now, been without its properly working Earth machine?”

“Majesty?”

She laughed yet again. “You see, you don’t even know what your project is about.”

His jowls colored to match the velvet cushion of Her Majesty’s throne. He had nothing to say in his defense. The truth was, he let his nephew keep him updated, and, well, his nephew was not the most dutiful of kin, particularly since the Queen had insisted the commoner Aderbury be in charge of
Citadel
, leaving the less prestigious Tinpoa mine to the young lord.

The Queen pressed him with an amused grin, like a cruel older sibling frightening a younger one. “The Earth ship
Aspect
ran into a bit of trouble when they reached the … sun system of the Hostile world, and all our teleporters were stunned to unconsciousness. When their captain tried to contact us to request fast-cast amulets, nobody was waiting to operate their communications machine on
Citadel
.” She sat back and watched him blink for a few moments. “That is the sort of thing that I can expect to be under your purview, is it not?”

“Why, hmm, yes, Your Majesty,” he flustered. “I had no idea.”

“Of course you didn’t. Which is why I found myself having to respond to them from a position of complete surprise when we finally heard from them yesterday, a week and a half after the incident.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yes. They’ve spent the last week and a half at top speed trying to withdraw from Hostile territories in space, and all the while with no way to call for help from us, their allies, until yesterday.” The complete vacancy in his expression prompted her to go on. “It seems our people have issues drawing mana near that star. Whatever the issue was, they had to get far enough away to make it stop, at which point they then had to ask one of my telepaths to contact us and ask if I could explain why my people have no idea where their officer is, much less why she isn’t operating their machine!” She found herself once more gripping the pommel of her dagger. She forced herself to relax again. In a lower tone—perhaps more frightening for Vorvington—she continued. “Having to explain that Miss Pewter is most likely dead did not improve the conversation, as I’m sure even you can understand, and in the end we come off looking like a kingdom full of idiots. It’s hardly the sort of thing that is conducive to building good interplanetary relationships, don’t you think?” Condescension oozed like tree sap squeezed from her narrowed eyes.

“Yes, My Queen. But I … well, how could I have known the orcs killing Master Tytamon and the Earth girl would have any impact on the fleet, way out there?” He raised a pink-fingered hand, pointing skyward to indicate the fleet, though, in truth, it would have been more accurate had he pointed at an angle through the floor.

She relented. “Relax, Vorvington.
You
of all people could not be expected to have thought of that. It is the advantage of stupidity, I suppose.” She slumped back into the throne and crossed one armored leg over the other, the chainmail links at the back of her upper leg rasping roughly against the burnished golden plate covering the thigh beneath.

His eyes bulged wide and white at the insult, but he kept his emotions in check. “Of course, My Queen.”

She couldn’t help but smile at that. The poor fool. If he wasn’t blood, she might have considered putting him out of his own misery. “Get in contact with your man Aderbury and see what he can do about figuring out how to make the Earth machine work on his own. Have him interview the miners who came back from Tinpoa to see if any of them are familiar enough with that sort of thing to figure it out.”

“Yes, Majesty.”

“And Vorvington…”

“Yes, Majesty?”

“Tell him I want
Citadel
ready to fly by the end of the week. It’s become obvious the Earth people are incapable of dealing with the Hostiles alone, and they may have just kicked the bee hive in the process of discovering they have no way to bring the honey home.”

“Yes, Majesty.” Vorvington, unlike the messenger before him, had the pride and experience to wait until the doors were closed to make his own hasty retreat.

The doors opened a few moments later to admit the lord chamberlain and the sergeant-at-arms, the latter guardedly holding something wrapped in sackcloth. A soldier of the city guard followed behind them, tugging by the chains that bound his wrists a young man who looked to be a prosperous member of the merchant class. The Queen did not recognize him, but judged him wealthy to the point of thriving by the state of his attire, if not by his present circumstance or the fact that he was bleeding from his nose and the corner of his mouth.

The Queen sighed. She had no time for these sorts of trifles, whatever it was, not with two wars and the potential for a diplomatic nightmare unfolding presently. She slumped sideways and leaned heavily on the arm of the throne. She wound her hand in the air impatiently as they all made the required genuflections. “Get on with it,” she urged and, in the same breath, called to the men guarding the door, “No more today.” They bowed, and one of them went out to shoo off the rest of the day’s applicants and lingering courtiers.

“Your Majesty,” began the sergeant-at-arms, “this guardsman arrested this man near the docks carrying this …” He immediately unfolded the cloth package he’d brought and displayed a black metallic object of a type the Queen recognized immediately. It was one of the side arms worn by the fleet officers from Earth.

She sat bolt upright and glared at the weapon. Outrage flit across her countenance at first, as it struck her the fleet might have been secretly selling weapons to her people, but she quickly pushed the idea away. Of course the Earth people weren’t selling arms on the black market. They had no need of Prosperion wealth. They’d said as much, bluntly, and more than once. The alternatives to simple greed were worse.

“Where did you get it, man?” she demanded. “Tell me quick or I’ll have that hand of yours off right here where you stand.”

The young merchant spilled the story as rapidly to her as he already had to the lord chamberlain twice, the sergeant-at-arms five times and the chain of command at the city guard headquarters fifteen: “It was an arms dealer near the River Gate.” The glances and nods between his three previous interlocutors confirmed to the Queen that the story hadn’t changed in any of the accounts, and, therefore, neither she nor they needed a diviner to determine if it was the truth. The pool of urine at the man’s feet confirmed, more than anything a diviner could do, the veracity of what he’d said.

“I trust you’ve got men looking into the arms dealer?”

“Yes, My Queen,” said the sergeant-at-arms. “The constable and sheriff have been notified as well.”

“See that I am kept up to date on any new information the moment you get it.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” This from them all.

“The
moment
, gentlemen.”

“Yes, Majesty.”

When they were gone, the Queen slumped sideways across her throne, one leg thrown over an arm of it as she slowly turned the great gold-and-diamond ring on her right index finger to the rhythm of her grinding teeth. The vibrations carried through her skull, the gritting sound amplified like a horn by her heavy golden crown. Light coming from a window high above glinted from the ring at regular intervals as she turned it, making a rainbow pattern that flashed around the room, lighting up surfaces in prismatic passes as if it were a lighthouse warning wayward ships from the rocky shores of her mood.

She stared at the puddle of urine at the bottom of the steps. Something was wrong. One does not rule a kingdom for two centuries without having a sense of things, and this felt like the gathering of some gods-begotten storm.

The lighthouse spun its colorful beams for nearly an hour before the Queen finally spoke, in a low voice, as if to herself. “Shadesbreath, stop skulking and show yourself.”

The elf appeared at her side as if conjured by an illusionist. He made no attempt to conceal the leafy hues of his skin. The Queen was long past the need for any ruse regarding his humanity.

“There is a missing pawn on the chessboard, my loyal friend. Go see what you can find. Nicely if you can, elsewise if you can’t. But be quick about it. I’m getting a bad sense about all of this.”

The breeze of his passing rippled the piddle on the floor, the only evidence he’d ever been in the room.

Chapter 51

S
everal days went by before Orli could be persuaded to leave her room again. The events that had culminated in the incident with Thadius’ underground zoo had upset her to the point of lethargy. She was absently aware of the fact that she was slipping back into depression, she could feel it coming on, sense the now familiar spiral into darkness that, once begun, was nearly impossible to stop. The dreams made it worse, and each night, several times at least, she dreamt of the great blackness, the thing that seemed to hound her with anger and sorrow equally mixed. She couldn’t get a decent night’s rest.

Worse, every time she asked for information about the fleet or about the investigation into Tytamon’s murder and her abduction, she was given answers like “the falcon’s in the air, Miss Pewter” or “they continue to flip the stones and throw the bones, my dear.” So she’d taken to flipping through the
Crown City Sentinel
, hoping to find better information there instead. For nearly a week there was nothing of interest in it for her, but on her fifth morning in residence at Northfork Manor, she finally found a headline that stood out to her as she sat on the couch in the sitting room outside her bedchamber:
28 Die in Leekant by Wrath of Gods
.

While not what she was looking for, it was also not the kind of headline most people would pass up, so she read the article. It seemed a priestess in Leekant had lost control of a spell so badly that an entire neighborhood was destroyed, the renegade magic killing the priestess and twenty-seven other people in a display of power that should have been far outside her abilities as a G-class conjurer. According to the article, “… the lightning storm continues to rage at this time, three days after the fact.” When asked, a Church official, High Priestess Maul of the Temple of Anvilwrath, had explained the power discrepancy as “evidence that the young acolyte’s pride had angered the gods and brought the fury of Anvilwrath himself upon the city.” The high priestess was quoted as having called the event “a clear sign and portent of Anvilwrath’s return.”

Orli wasn’t so sure about all that. It was a sad story, without question, but to her it seemed more like the kind of misfortune Altin had spoken of, more the sort of accident that can come with learning new magic than some punishment being meted out by an angry pantheon of gods. Altin had told her frightening stories of what could happen to someone experimenting with Liquefying Stone. He’d told her what happened to him on his first try. His stories were a lot like the one in the newspaper. She could not help but wonder if the priestess had somehow gotten hold of Altin’s missing bit of Liquefying Stone. This was just the sort of mishap Tytamon had said would happen too: runaway lightning, unchecked fire, or possibly something worse.

For the briefest instant, she wanted to go and tell Thadius immediately. Surely he, being so well connected and all, would have access to more information. The article said nothing of a yellow stone, but perhaps Thadius could get word through his connections in Crown. She resolved to put on a smile and not refuse his company when he came to check on her today—which he did every day, each time trying to convince her to come out for a meal, a walk around the grounds or even a horseback ride.