“When do you make your move?” the King asked.
“It’s too early to worry about that.” Concern creased Mist’s perfect brow. “We have to find out what’s happening first. If it gets too bad out there we’ll drop it.”
“What the hell for?” the King demanded.
“You forget she isn’t interested in destroying the Dread Empire,” Varthlokkur said. He eyed his friend. There was a touch of monomania in the man these days. “Only in seizing control.”
“Yeah. Well. Let’s set up in the War Room. Looks like we’ll be busy for a while.”
Mist said, “My place would be better. I’m already in touch with my people out there.”
The King looked at Varthlokkur. The wizard nodded. The King said, “In two hours, then.”
Varthlokkur turned and took another look at the fire-gutted sky. Worms writhed in his guts. What bold fools we are, challenging the man who has that dancing at his fingertips.
Once Mist was out of earshot, the King whispered, “Are we backing the wrong horse?”
“We? This was your idea.”
“Uhm. So it was.” Bragi made a sour face.
Lord Ch’ien made a small gesture. Mist glanced up. The King was standing in the doorway, agog. It had been years since he had been here on the top floor of her home. She had made changes.
He strode over. “How about I replace your sentries with mine? We’ll draw enough attention without having orientals standing around.”
“Right.” She beckoned an Aspirator from the runner pool, gave him his orders. Taking the King’s arm, she indicated a bank of seats which had been constructed along the nearer and side walls of the room. The entire third floor had been stripped of partitions. The windows were heavily curtained. The far wall was bare and shadowed. A huge table occupied the center of the room.
“Ask your staff to sit and stay put,” she said. “And tell them to stay away from the south wall. They could get us killed if they stumbled through a portal.”
A man stepped out of thin air. He reported to the gentleman in charge of the room’s centerpiece. Mist listened with one ear. A routine report.
“I’d about give my left arm for a map like that in my War Room,” the King murmured. The map atop the table was thirty feet long and fifteen wide. It represented Shinsan and the empire’s tributaries. Every city of significance was noted, as were all major geographical features. The whereabouts and movements of the empire’s many legions were marked in bright colors.
Another messenger popped into the room. A tableman listened, began spreading red sand.
Mist told Bragi, “Sit down.” Then, “My people are doing better than I expected. I’m getting first-rate information. Probably because Lord Kuo is keeping his head down.”
No probably about it, she thought. Lord Kuo was laying low somewhere, letting the thing take shape. She rose, took a pointer, tapped the map. “Somewhere in all this blank space he’s hidden his reserve army. In a few days he’ll drop a big hammer on the Matayangans.”
“How is Southern Army doing?”
She kept her opinion to herself. “You see the map. It’s maintaining the integrity of its lines. Against the odds, that’s all you could ask of any army. Just a minute.”
A messenger had appeared. She moved round to where she could catch snippets of his report. “Damn!” she said, though softly.
The table chief moved small, numbered black markers into a cluster at the map’s easternmost edge. He moved others to a riverbank two hundred miles behind the cluster.
“What’s all that?” the King asked.
She told the whole truth when she replied, “We’re not sure. Communications are muddled. Eastern Army is under attack.”
“Matayanga caught them with a surprise ally?”
“This started before the southern thing. It’s been on more than a week.”
“There’s a whole second war there?”
“Something awful is happening... “She controlled herself. Bragi might be an old friend, and an old fighting companion, but he wasn’t part of the family. One did not show one’s fears to the outside world. “Before he disappeared, Lord Kuo gave Eastern Army a new commander. Lord Ssu-ma Shih-ka’i. He’s an old peasant who came up the hard way. Goes way back. Very capable, and stubborn as hell.”
“Uhm.”
She sighed. Good. He wasn’t interested in the east.
“Any notion when you want to move?”
“Not before Lord Kuo comes out of hiding. I don’t want to jump in blind.”
“If we’re going to be a while, I’d better make arrangements for my people.” The King rose, grunting as he did so. Mist watched him go. He was feeling very tired, very old. She felt a moment of empathy. She, too, felt tired and old. And she’d feel much more so before this was done. The danger would mount by the minute, and every minute would increase the odds against the coup attempt remaining secret. “Wen-chin,” she murmured, “please don’t waste any time.”
The interminable wait became a deathwatch. The Matayangan attack went on and on and on, and still the time did not ripen. Tempers began to flare.
“Lord Kuo must have nerves of stone,” Mist opined to Lord Ch’ien. “I don’t think I could have held off this long.”
Lord Ch’ien tapped the map with the tip of his pointer, sketching the outline of the bloody stain of Matayangan advance. His hand quivered. The red sand thrust deep into Shinsan. Mist’s informants said the original Southern Army hardly existed anymore. Some hard-hit legions had been disbanded and their survivors distributed as replacements. There was a huge gap in the army’s line. Matayangans were pouring through.
Lord Ch’ien said, “My limit has been surpassed. Maybe that’s why Lord Kuo is in command.”
“Tut-tut. No second-guessing at this stage of the game.” The King appeared. He scanned the map. “It’s been two days,” he said. “All this courier traffic has to leave traces. How long before somebody starts adding things up?”
“I know! I know!” Mist snapped. “Pretty soon we’llhave to assume they know. Damn the man! Lord Kuo, I mean. Why doesn’t he move?”
“He hasn’t got them where he wants them yet,” Bragi observed laconically. He considered the map again. “But if he waits much longer, there won’t be anything left for you to take over.”
“Compare the size of the cancer with the whole,” she snarled. Then, “Lord Ch’ien. The time. If he hasn’t moved within fifty hours, I’ll do so myself.”
“In the dark?” the King asked.
“If I have to. I won’t be able to trust my people much longer than that. By then if one defected they’d all stampede.” Wearily, she added, “It would take ten years to put it all together again.”
Aral seated himself beside her while she was talking. He said something meant to be soothing. He tried to take her hand. In front of Lord Ch’ien. She pulled away.
It was time to put paid to this nonsense. She shouldn’t have started it. Fool. Man-weak fool. She’d lost the Tervola once because of Valther. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.
She ignored Aral’s look of pain.
Lord Ch’ien hadn’t caught the byplay, she saw, but Bragi had. He was nodding to himself. She felt her cheeks reddening. He didn’t comment, though. He said, “It’s late. I’m going to get some sleep.”
She watched him speak with his captains before leaving. Their continuous presence irked her. They had eyes like hawks. She had to keep them in mind every instant. Damn this having to depend on outsiders!
Her irritation mounted as the hours passed. Her men, too, were tense. They couldn’t speak without snapping at one another. The conspiracy was about to shake itself apart. And still time twisted the springs of tension tighter.
The night churned slowly onward. The red stain of Matayangan invasion seeped across the table. Confused messengers arrived from the far east, their reports only further obscuring the situation there.
“Lord Ch’ien.”
“Princess?”
She tapped the map with the pointer. “Do we dare move while this is happening?”
Lord Ch’ien eyed the east briefly. “I think we can discount it. For the moment. Our people there will keep those forces uninvolved.” The weariness edging his voice made it more husky and hollow than normal. Mist shuddered.
Lord Ch’ien volunteered, “Western Army will be the real worry. I’ve heard that Lord Hsung has an agent in the palace here. By now everybody in this squalid village knows something is happening. The stupidest spy would have sent a message mentioning it.”
“Time. The invincible enemy. Are we going to manage it, old friend? Or will time do us in?”
“I couldn’t say, Princess. But I do have a feeling we’re close to the moment of decision. There’s a new tension in the blanklands there.”
Mist stared at the unmarked portion of the map, closing out all else. And, yes, Lord Ch’ien was right. She could feel a great something flexing its muscles there, tensing, like a serpent coiling to strike. So. It wouldn’t be much longer.
“Princess?”
“Lord?”
“The moment approaches. And still we haven’t decided what to do with these people once they’ve served their purpose.”
This was a discussion she had hoped to avoid, and yet had known to be inevitable. “I don’t follow you.”
“You know who they are and what they’ve done, Princess. This petty King. This sorcerer Varthlokkur. These carrion-eaters who orbit them.” He indicated several of the King’s men. “We have to decide what to do if we’re successful.”
Mist sighed. “They’ve dealt honorably with us, Lord Ch’ien.” She couldn’t tell him that they were her friends. A princess of the Dread Empire did not have friends. Not foreign friends.
“For their own ends. They hope to weaken the empire, to delay the inevitable day of reckoning. The King... He would destroy us if he could.”
She could not deny that. She didn’t try.
“Who knows what treacheries they have afoot, planned for the moment of our success.”
Serpents wrestled in her bowels. She’d been too long in the west. She’d become infected with its softnesses. Damn that villain Valther! If he hadn’t insinuated himself through the walls surrounding her emotions...
“You’re in charge, Lord Ch’ien. Do whatever seems appropriate.” She fixed her gaze on the map and tried not to think about what she had done. Moral abdication was as great a sin as any. After a time she left her seat and went downstairs, hoping a meal would ease her tension and soften her self-disgust.
One of the King’s men dragged Mist out of her kitchen. He gobbled incoherently and pointed. Baffled, she allowed herself to be pulled to a window.
The east was afire again. Lord Kuo had begun moving. And she had been so tired, so dispirited, so self-involved that she hadn’t felt it start. “Thank you.” She hurried upstairs.
The air had changed. The old stink of fear and tension was gone. Now a different tenseness filled the place, the tension that develops just before the battle. The eager, wary tension of soldiers about to strike. Everyone was moving faster now, more crisply, with a bounce in their steps. They had forgotten their weariness. They paused when she entered the room. She waved them back to work.
“Reports are beginning to come in already,” Lord Ch’ien said. “The indications are favorable.”
“Good.” She turned to one of Bragi’s men. “Will you get the King?” She turned back. “What do we know?”
Some time later she glanced up from her ongoing conference and discovered that Varthlokkur had arrived. The wizard was surveying the room from a high seat against the north wall. He looked rested and alert. He would miss nothing.
The King arrived moments later. He spoke with several of his men. She watched him listen and nod, question, listen, and nod. He paused longest with the wizard. Then he came to her, and led her to the eastern end of the table. “Mist, do you know anything more about this business here?”
She felt almost relieved. About this she could speak the whole truth, could speak without having to worry about choosing each word. “We don’t know. We’ve had one garbled message this morning. It said Northern and Eastern Armies still support us, but that they’re too busy with the Deliverer to become directly involved.”
“The Deliverer?”
She glanced up, startled. Varthlokkur had come over, as sudden as a surprise thunderstorm.
“The enemy chieftain out there. They call him the Deliverer. Some kind of prodigy, apparently. He’s decimated Eastern Army. Northern Army and Eastern Army have decided to make a stand on the Tusghus.”
“Uhm.” Bragi studied the map, then glanced at Varthlokkur. “How come you’re so interested?”
“Ethrian. He’s out there somewhere.”
“He’s alive, then?”
Sweat sequined the wizard’s forehead. He rubbed it away. Mist watched him closely. There was something here she hadn’t been aware of before, some strain between the two men. Varthlokkur said, “I’m not sure. Intuition says yes.”
“Maybe we can bring him home. Great for Nepanthe. A new daughter, then her lost son restored.”
“I don’t think so. This isn’t the son she lost. If it is Ethrian, she won’t want him back.”
“You don’t know her very well, then.”
Mist became very attentive. Ethrian? Not dead?
What?... She examined the wizard. Never had she seen him so bleak.
“What is it?” the King demanded.
“I’ll never tell her about this-if it’s what I suspect. Forget I mentioned his name. She’s had enough hurt from life.”
Mist frowned. The man wasn’t making sense.
“But... “the King said.
Varthlokkur interrupted. “She doesn’t need the pain. All right? I don’t want her to see her child grown into a monster. I warn you. Tell her and you’ve lost my help forever.”
“Take it easy, man. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Do you, Mist? What are you trying to do, Varthlokkur?”
Mist drifted over to Lord Ch’ien and related what she had heard. “I think you’d better send someone to see what’s happening out there,” she said. “This could be important.”
Lord Ch’ien nodded, beckoned a reliable man from the messenger pool.
Mist turned back to the wizard and King just as Michael Trebilcock came into the room.
She’d never learned the details of Trebilcock’s disappearance and sudden return. Evidently he had gone into the desert kingdom of Hammad al Nakir and found evidence linking the attack on General Liakopulos with the regime there.
The King waved to her. She went over. Bragi said, “Michael says there was an uprising in Throyes. Hsung put it down.”
“I know.”
“He says Hsung is going to deploy the Argonese army in his flanking counterattack against the Matayangans.”
She was surprised. “Is that reliable news, Michael?”
“No. A rumor out of the Throyen command. But it’s certainly his style.”
“It is that. I’ll accept it as fact.” She stepped away. That wasn’t good news. If Lord Hsung deployed the Argonese, then he would have troops of his own still free to resist her stroke. “Lord Ch’ien?” She explained. He looked grim.
She backed away to one of the chairs, sat watching the map. The long red arm thrusting into the empire’s underbelly had begun to develop a waist near its root. Lord Kuo was going to amputate it, going to isolate a huge army in enemy territory. The Matayangans could not endure being cut off long.
“Will it work?” she asked Lord Ch’ien, pointing.
“Depends on how much Lord Kuo has to work with,” he replied. “It’s a bold stroke, certainly. Deserving of honor even if it fails. The impression we get from the reports is that the reserve was stronger than Southern Army itself was.”
“Any problems in that for us?”
“We won’t know till we jump
in. His security has been superb.”
Mist chewed a thumbnail and studied the map. Her eyes kept drifting to the mystery war in the east. Her nephew Ethrian was there? Part of that? How? Why?... She forced her attention back to the main show.
The moment of decision came. Go or abort. Attack and risk shattering the hope of saving the empire from these southern barbarians? Stand fast and surrender all hope of ever recovering her throne? It would be never if she didn’t grab it now. If Lord Kuo pulled this out, he would become untouchable...
She decided, looked up. “The King,” she said. “Where is the King?”
Someone said, “He just left, ma’am.”
“Get him. I need him here. Now.”
Bragi clomped back into the room a few minutes later. Mist guided him to the map, indicated the pincers nipping the Matayangan arm. “We’re going to go. When the heads of these prongs are ten miles apart. Lord Kuo will be completely preoccupied. Lord Ch’ien estimates that will be four hours from now. We’re alerting my people. I’ll need three of your assault teams. My people will take over everywhere else while yours are hitting Lord Kuo’s headquarters and arresting him.” She indicated her people. “Most of my Tervola will go with you. They’ll sort out the confusion for you.”
The King’s eyes narrowed. A subtle something entered his face. She didn’t identify it until he replied. “You ain’t number one yet, Mist. You’re Chatelaine of Maisak till the dust settles.” He glanced at Varthlokkur. The wizard remained seated, watching blandly.
She stamped a foot irritably. These damned touchy barbarians. Had to remind you where the power lay... She forced an apologetic smile, softened her features. Just a few hours more. Then she would be dependent upon no one.
“I’ll start assembling them now.” The King turned away, gathered his captains.
Mist returned to Lord Ch’ien’s side. She glanced back once, found the wizard Varthlokkur gazing her way. His face was expressionless, yet she had the feeling he was amused. She shivered.
She hadn’t been paying him enough attention. He was the real threat here in the west. Without him Bragi could not have survived the Great Eastern Wars. Without him the Dual Principiate would never have fallen, and none of this would have come to pass... He seemed so inefficacious in person you forgot just how deadly he could be... Now, more than ever, she’d best remember. He hated the Dread Empire. This might be his moment to enter a silent dagger and accelerate the destabilization begun with the deaths of her father and uncle... It hardly seemed possible that less than two decades had passed since the fall of the Princes Thaumaturge. The empire had had more masters and mistresses since than during all the centuries that had gone before.