‘Yes, somewhere below the Girdle,’ said the Grand Master.
‘Have any of you received reports from your agents south of the Girdle recently?’
Glances were exchanged, and finally a woman named Veronica said, ‘No. But then it’s not unusual to not hear from them for months. There is very little that happens in the Confederacy that has any particular bearing on our interests, save the oc casional magician who is found and recruited for the Academy or your island.’
Pug nodded. ‘If our enemies know us as well as I think they do, where better to stage a massive operation against us than somewhere we just choose to ignore?’
Daniel, a highly-placed warrior in the martial order known as The Hammer, stood up. The Hammer was a disavowed sect putatively associated with the Temple of Tith-Onanka. In fact they were close to being a mercenary army, tolerated on both sides of the border between Kesh and the Kingdom. They answered only to their leader, the Knight-Marshal of the order, and it had taken years for Pug to place an agent within their ranks: like other martial orders associated with the temples, they were wary of spies and had magical means by which they could ferret them out. ‘How big was the fleet you saw, Pug?’ Daniel asked.
‘I counted over one hundred ships making for Port Vykor or Krondor.’
‘If they’re sending that many ships into the Bitter Sea, they have other fleets as well. They’ll not leave their coasts un protected from pirates, raiders, retaliation, or other disasters. Moreover, the combined fleets of Roldem and Isles in the Sea of Kingdoms needs be met with a show of strength.’ Daniel paused, thinking. ‘To muster such a fleet south of the Girdle and then sail up to the Straits of Darkness and into the Bitter Sea within a few weeks to catch the Kingdom unawares . . .’ He stopped. ‘What I’m trying to say is the execution may have only taken weeks, but the planning . . . that’s been months, perhaps years. Food, weapons, drinking water: it’s a massive cargo! It all has to be moved somewhere out-of-the-way, somewhere they have a reasonable expectation of privacy.’ Daniel looked around the room as if looking for someone to argue against his point. No one did.
‘South of the Girdle would be an obvious choice,’ said Magnus. ‘We presume, perhaps wrongly, that the Empire is primarily in a position to pacify, not to be used as a staging area.’
‘Ah, but there’s more than simply hauling a few casks of water, some loaves of bread, hogsheads of hard cheese and dried beef and leaving them on a beach for ships to pick up,’ continued Daniel. ‘Moving goods through the market sets up ripples.’ He looked at the tall, white-haired magician. ‘You’re smarter than most, Magnus, but like all of us you’re ignorant about one thing or another.
‘I’m in logistics, and that’s how I made my way into The Hammer, feeding the bastards.’ He laughed. ‘The point is, if I wander into a city and buy up enough food for a thousand men, prices go up, others can’t find what they’re seeking, and word goes out to the world that that city needs whatever it is I bought. Shippers then scramble, buying whatever they think they can quickly get to market where I am, and that creates more demand further away.’ He wiggled his fingers. ‘Ripples, you see? Like a rock in a pond. The thing is: with this bastard of a fleet sailing around there are no ripples.’
Pug nodded. ‘Which means goods are being supplied from outside the normal channels of supply. From somewhere we have no informants.’ He waved his hand and an image appeared in the air. ‘This is a likeness of a map I found years ago in Macros’s library, of the southern half of the Empire. From what I’ve learned since I found it, the borders are fluid, the clans and nations variable, and little can be fixed beyond the location of a few big towns on the coast.’
‘It looks as if it’s mainly desert, swamps, and mountains,’ said Daniel. ‘And I know what little farmland is down there is old, worn out and dry. The Confederates are always looking for an excuse to push north. And any large supply of food there would get be eaten, not warehoused.’
Magnus pointed. ‘What about that large island to the south?’
‘That’s the Island of Snakes,’ said Daniel. ‘No one lives there. the north side’s a cold, forlorn place, and that’s the good side. The southern half is close enough to the pole you get winter most of the year and summer’s nothing to call warm and inviting.’
Pug was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘Snakes? Snakes don’t live in cold, barren places. I’ve never seen snakes where there’s snow on the ground for much of the year.’
‘Who drew the map?’ asked Creegan.
‘Macros himself,’ said Pug, making it vanish with a wave of his hand. ‘He often took old scraps of things he found, pieced them together like puzzles, then annotated them. I’ve taken to annotating his annotations,’ he added with a rueful smile, ‘where I know he made a mistake.’
‘Maybe “snakes” is a mistranslation,’ said Daniel. ‘Or maybe it referred to snakelike rivers, or some other thing.’
‘Or maybe it’s a place where cold-weather snakes exist,’ countered Pug. ‘Still, whatever the reason for the odd name, that’s where I’d be warehousing my foodstuffs and weapons.’
‘I’d have my ships sail out of the Keshian ports,’ Daniel continued, ‘for they’d only need a normal supply of provisions, then run down there to pick up whatever else I needed. Then I could make the long run along the southern coast, up the western coast into the Bitter Sea, then on to Krondor. The currents along the western coast of Kesh are from the south, so it’s a fast run. Keeps the need for provisions for the crews and soldiers to a minimum.
‘Still,’ said Daniel, ‘you’d think if they were stockpiling goods and food and weapons down there, we’d still have had some sort of hint over the last year or so.’
‘Those weapons must be coming from somewhere, Father,’ agreed Magnus. ‘One would assume that should Kesh’s armourers and weapon-makers be increasing production lately, some attention might be paid by one of our agents, or one of the Kingdom’s.’
Daniel agreed. ‘There would be a demand for raw materials, Pug. More iron from the mines, more ships carrying it to the foundries, more coal for the forges, more leather, more wood; all that someone, somewhere would surely have noticed.’
‘Maybe they did,’ said Pug absently.
Everyone stared at him.
At last, he said, ‘Over the years our enemies may have proved mad by our standards, but they have also proved to be cunning. Leso Varen almost captured and controlled two nations, Olasko and Great Kesh itself, working essentially alone both times. Belasco managed to bring a small demon army into our realm before we were able to close off that gate.
‘What if it’s just been going on long enough that we never noticed an increase in the demand for weapons and other necessary equipment?’ He looked at Daniel. ‘Where does The Hammer buy its swords?’
Daniel shook his head as if caught by surprise. ‘Ah . . . places. We have sword-makers in several cities we regularly do business with. Some of the brothers of the order are gifted craftsmen, so we manage most of the repairs ourselves.’
‘So if one of your sources were suddenly to start making twelve swords instead of ten . . .?’
‘I think I understand,’ said Daniel with dawning comprehension. ‘If a sword-maker in Elarial was given an order for fifty new blades by The Hammer but produced fifty-five, and sent the extra five along in a shipment of other goods somewhere else . . . who would notice?’
‘Yes,’ said Pug. ‘But let us not dwell on how, but rather who and where.’
‘Well, that damn snake place seems a likely where,’ said Daniel.
‘Yes,’ agreed Pug. ‘And if that is the place, then we’ll soon know who.’
‘You’re sending someone?’ asked Magnus.
‘No,’ said Pug. ‘This time I’m going myself.’
‘Really?’ Magnus sounded shocked.
‘I’ve been sitting on this island feeling pity for myself far too long, son.’ He flashed a smile Magnus hadn’t seen in years. ‘It
’s time for me to get out and do some of the hard work myself. Besides, it’s a part of this world I’ve never visited before. It should be interesting.’
Ruefully, Magnus said, ‘Let’s hope it’s not too interesting.’
Chapter Ten
Reversal
SANDREENA SPRINTE.
Not for the first time in her life she was thankful for the rigorous training her order had inflicted on her. Her ability to move suddenly and rapidly while wearing heavy mail armour, holding a sword and shield, had saved her life more than once.
Her opponent was obviously unprepared for just how fast she closed the distance, and when she drove her shoulder into him, he flew backwards as if struck by a battering ram. The man was wearing a buff-coloured coat over jack armour – a rough suede vest over a thick, quilted singlet – effective for arrows that didn’t strike full on and glancing blows from swords. For a fully armoured Sergeant Knight-Adamant slamming into him, he might as well be naked. He lay sprawled out for a moment, then tried to move, but collapsed backwards with a groan of pain, his eyes going in and out of focus.
Sandreena gave him a quick glance and decided she might have broken a few ribs as well as having stunned him. Levelling her sword at his throat, she waited until he either passed out or regained consciousness.
He passed out. She sighed as she put up her sword. She looked around to make sure he had been alone, but if he had had confederates, they were making good their escape. She knelt to check that the man wasn’t shamming. A firm poke into ribs that were at the very least bruised if not broken brought no response. She knew he was not engaging in any sort of mummery. It was a lucky thing for her assailant that she had been leading her horse up the trail; had she been on horseback, she’d have ridden him down and he’d be in even worse shape.
She took one minute to circle around the ambush spot: it was hard to believe this idiot would have taken on a Knight-Adamant of the Order of the Shield of the Weak alone. She saw he was armed with a short bow that might have caused her injury if he had been a good enough archer to strike at one of the tiny openings in her armour. It was highly unlikely though: the loop chain she wore would keep all but the sharpest broad-head arrows launched by the most powerful longbows from doing anything more than irritate her. He didn’t even have a sword, just a dirk and a buckler, which told her he was first and foremost an archer, since it was the shield of choice among bowmen. Some of the really practised archers could fire their bows while wearing a buckler on their forearms, already in place if the bow needed to be dropped in hand-to-hand combat.
Sandreena sat on a rock next to the unconscious attacker and took a long breath. It had been a hard day. In fact, it had been a hard month.
The Grand Master of her Order had given her free rein to hunt down any remnants of a group known to her as the Black Caps. Five years earlier they had almost killed her, but that wasn’t her only reason for wanting to ferret out any last enclave of the murdering scum.
A mixture of fanatic believers and hired mercenaries who had come under the control of the mad magician, Belasco, they had aided in the summoning of a Demon King, Dahun, into this realm. Only the quick action of Pug and his Conclave along with Sandreena and her former lover, Amirantha the Warlock, had balked their plan.
But rather than any sense of triumph, everyone had come away with a sense of foreboding. For every answer they had uncovered, they had been left with more questions.
Hours of long discussion had followed the events in the abandoned fortress in that portion of Kesh known as the Valley of Lost Men, between Amirantha and another demon-summoner, an elf named Gulamendis, Pug and Magnus and the other magic-users. They examined all manner of theories as to what was occurring in the demon realm that would cause a Demon King to attempt to possess a human and enter the world of Midkemia undetected. They even consulted a book they had purloined from the archives of the Island Kingdom of Queg, and pored over it endlessly.
Sandreena’s experience with demons was far more prosaic. She saw a demon; she killed it. Or, using her clerical magic, banished it back to whence it came. Even so, she recognized there were bigger problems in play now, and she was content to let the Grand Master, the Demon Masters and the magicians worry about that, content for her task to be out in the world seeking information for them.
She just wished it didn’t always involve this much tedium.
Rumours had surfaced lately that a group of men was gathering near the south-eastern foothills of the Peaks of the Quor. They sounded a great deal like the thugs who had almost killed her in her first encounter with them. Beaten, raped, then thrown off a cliff onto the rocks below, she had survived only by the Goddess’s mercy. In her final battle at the Demon Gate, she had taken an additional measure of revenge against those murderous dogs.
She regarded her unconscious companion and vowed that if he was another of those bastards he’d soon be joining them, even though her Order had strictures on what was and was not acceptable behaviour in a Knight-Adamant, and murder out of hand, even if it was labelled ‘execution’, was not permitted. She knew she’d dispatch any member of that gang without hesitation then petition the Goddess for forgiveness later.
She had been frustrated to find the rumours unfounded; but one small item of information had caught her attention: a demand for more fish than usual from traders heading south. The local fishing villages along that rocky stretch of coast had sold off their excess catch for years to passing traders. Salted properly, the fish was standard fare on long-haul shipping out of the deepwater ports heading across the sea to Novindus, or south around the landmass, to the western coast of the Empire or even up to the Bitter Sea.
But a chance remark in a tavern from a fisherman about how his newfound wealth would allow him to buy a second boat so his sons could expand the family trade got her to wondering, and after some investigation, she’d uncovered a pattern: everyone along the long, usually impoverished, coast of the peninsula below the Peaks of the Quor was enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Her interest was doubly piqued when she found a village making weapons. The local smith had been an armourer for the Empire until his army service of twenty years was over, and he had retired to this forlorn coast in the hope of some quiet. He had made his living fashioning iron fittings for wagons, making and repairing farm tools, and hardware for fishing boats. Then had come an order for a dozen short swords, of the fashion employed by Kesh’s army of Dog Soldiers.
She had tracked that shipment down to Hansulé where she found an incredible number of ships coming and going. She continued to pick up rumours and by the time she’d been in that city for a week, she was certain something important was coming together. She had reported to the local shrine of Dala in the city asking for word to be passed back to her Order in Rillanon, then continued nosing around.
Another shipment heading south caught her notice. It was a very odd mix of farm equipment and livestock gear, traces, halters, wagon reins, and other leather goods. It was heading south. Kesh did little trading with the people in the subject regions of the Keshian Confederacy and the annual tribute from the South barely covered the expense of collecting it. Only enough trade goods headed south to keep the region pacified, but it was a trickle.
Until recently. Now it was a flood.
After a week of watching, listening, and occasionally taking off her armour and arms, donning the trappings of her earlier trade as a brothel denizen, she had amassed enough information from enough different sources to come to the conclusion that her first instincts were correct, and something big was underway.
Ships were now coming in to Hansulé, and not just coasters. Deep-water vessels were anchored off the coast, and warships of all sorts were coming by in squadrons. And those that departed, all went south.
So she did, too.
Now she found herself in very cold hill country just a few miles from the southern coast of Triagia. The Confederacy was unlike anywhere she had visited before. South of the Girdle of Kesh sh
e had been viewed with suspicion, even hostility, in the villages and towns where she had stopped. Only her heavy arms and obvious ability to use them, as well as her clear identifi cation with a temple Order kept the harassment to a minimum.
There was only one minor temple of Dala in this region, where even those monks and priests viewed her arrival with some concern. No Knight-Adamant of the Order of the Shield of the Weak had visited that temple within the memory of the oldest member of the Order.
She asked that messages be sent back to the mother temple in Rillanon. The head priest was polite but vague. She had a suspicion that Grand Master Creegan would be reading her report a few years after whatever mystery she was chasing was found, identified, and resolved.
She was thankful the Conclave had other agents throughout Kesh, for she was sure something this big would attract notice. It would be a tragedy if Pug and the others were solely dependent on her for intelligence.
She kept an eye on the unconscious man before her as she recounted her travels. First to one town, then another, as a pattern began to emerge. Empty hovels on farmsteads, towns with half the buildings abandoned, tiny villages deserted. There had been no signs of sickness, no plague, no famine, though food was always scarce in this region. Sandreena had seen such places after war, but there was no sign of any destruction. It was as if people had just picked up their belongings and left. It was early autumn south of the equator, and rain was falling frequently. The trails were muddy and washed out, but she could see signs of movement, many people on foot, wagons, and livestock, all moving south.
Where were they going?
She had been following such a trail when she had reached a village an hour’s ride to the north of where she sat now. As she had cared for her horse, she had seen half a dozen heavily-laden wagons followed by one obviously occupied by a family: father and mother, three children and a dog that happily ran after the wagon but didn’t trouble the horses. The children were fractious, the women looked haggard, and the men suspicious.