Soarers Choice (21 page)

“And
no one wanted to reduce your power because they feared each other?”

“And
Samist,” pointed out Khelaryt. “If I could, I would make you the next Duarch,
just to watch how you would handle such fighting. I cannot, and that means I
will likely have to remove one of the High Alectors, if only to prove that I
can.” Khelaryt was still an impressive alector, but the huge mass of Talent
that had surrounded him and radiated from him had dissipated. “For what you
have done, Marshal, there is a price.”

“Sir?”

“I
am dispatching you immediately to deliver the same message to Duarch Samist.
You will deliver that message.” A cold steeliness filled his words.

Dainyl
understood.

The
Duarch walked to a small side table and opened the single drawer. From it,
Khelaryt extracted a purple sash trimmed in green, with the eight-pointed star
of the Duarch emblazoned in gold on the section that would cross the chest.
“This will allow you entry to Samist directly. If anyone would deny you, it
provides you the justification to do what is necessary to speak to the Duarch
of Ludar. You may have to destroy even a High Alector to reach the Duarch. Do
not hesitate to do so, or all of Acorus may be lost. You are to go to the Hall
of Justice and translate immediately to Ludar. Do not let anyone delay you for
any purpose. Is that clear?”

“Yes,
sir.”

“When
you return — if you return — we will discuss what must be done next. Return
here. Do not speak to anyone except Samist, and especially do not speak to
Zelyert.” Khelaryt extended the sash. “Put it on now.”

Dainyl
took the sash and donned it.

As
Mykel rode out from the garrison on Duadi, a cold breeze blew out of the
northeast, even though it was close to midmorning. The penetrating chill of the
wind suggested that the coming winter would be anything but mild in Iron Stem.
He turned the roan southward on the eternastone high road, with the green tower
behind him, heading toward the ironworks.

The
first structure south of the open space that surrounded the Cadmian garrison
was a small school, set on the east side of the road, with battered brick walls
that had once been whitewashed, but now held only scattered and peeling white
remnants of the wash. Immediately south of the school was what passed as a
green or a park, bordered by low stone walls, but Mykel saw only a few patches
of grass and no bushes. There were stone benches, set almost at random.

South
of the park were dwellings, small houses with narrow windows that ran for
nearly a vingt before giving way to shops and dingier buildings. As he
continued south, the ironworks loomed larger and larger on the west side of the
road that had become the main north-south street of Iron Stem. Here and there,
women, small children, and old men hurried through the chill morning, bundled
in faded and heavy woolen coats. None looked in Mykel’s direction.

The
closer he got to the ironworks, the more each breath he took burned, as the air
itself became acrid with a mixture of fine dust and smoke and vapor from the
ironworks. Just ahead of him, one of the short black wagons, bearing iron pigs
and drawn by eight dray horses, groaned as the teamster eased it onto the high
road, heading south for Dekhron.

Mykel
turned the roan up the paved way leading to the works. In the loading yard to
his left, on the south side, he counted seven mals working two of the winches
that lifted the iron pigs onto the transport wagons. Three armed guards,
wearing gray, watched from the loading dock, their iron-tipped staves casually
ready. Mykel rode on, up to the compact brick building that Hamylt had said
held the works’ supervisor’s spaces. There, he tied his mount to the iron
hitching rail and dismounted. The door lever was coated with grime, but Mykel
opened it anyway and stepped inside.

“Sir?”
A narrow-faced young man, barely more than a youth, looked up from a stack of
papers he appeared to be sorting on the table before him.

“Majer
Mykel to see Supervisor Curosyn.”

“Yes,
sir.” The young clerk hurried to the half-open door on the left. “Sir, it’s the
new Cadmian majer to see you.”

“Have
him come in.” The tired voice barely carried to Mykel.

The
lander who stood behind a table desk piled with stacks of papers was probably
only five years older than Mykel, but his forehead was already heavily lined,
and his eyes were slightly sunken in a pallid face. “Curosyn, Majer. Welcome to
the ironworks. Such as they are.”

“You’re
in charge?” asked Mykel. “Of both the mines and the ironworks?”

“For
the moment. Since the end of harvest. I’m really an assistant mining engineer,
but Miramyn and Faosyr left town once Majer Hersiod started trying to find ways
to execute anyone who disagreed with him. That was the story, anyway. No one
has seen them since.” Curosyn shook his head. “I’m the acting supervisor. I
report to the High Alector of Engineering in Ludar, or rather to some alectress
who’s his assistant.” Belatedly, he gestured to the single chair in front of
the table desk. “How can I help you?”

Mykel
took the chair. “Why did the miners refuse to .keep mining?”

Curosyn
took a deep breath. “Every year we’ve had to go deeper to follow the coal
seams. Every year we’ve lost a few more miners than the year before. Then when
the old barracks burned, things got worse. Miramyn couldn’t get brick or stone,
and he finally worked out something for timber. I guess it was against the
Code, because the Myrmidons showed up, and they had the forester flogged.
Someone took a shot at one of them with a crossbow ... and one of them flamed
some loggers. That got back to the miners, and a bunch of the mals broke out
and headed out to join up with the Reillies ...”

Mykel
listened, intently, concentrating on both what the engineer said and how he
said it, but he could detect no sense of untruth. The longer he listened, the
more he was convinced that some alector, perhaps the old marshal, had
deliberately set things up to go wrong. No matter what the dispatches and
records had reported, he couldn’t believe that anyone who had been thinking
clearly wouldn’t have seen what had happened. But then, it could be that the
missing engineers had seen things clearly, and had been quietly removed and
replaced by an assistant so overwhelmed that he could barely keep things
together. Why someone wanted matters to go wrong was another question, and one
for which he had no answer. Not yet.

He
let Curosyn talk, before finally asking, “What are your production levels right
now? What they used to be? Three-quarters of that? Half?”

“A
little more than half for the coal mines ... we’re still working on trying to
clear one of the main shafts for number two. You can’t operate a blast furnace
without coke, and you can’t make coke without coal. We’re only at
three-quarters production on the iron ore, but I’m having them stockpile the
ore we can’t process now. Once coal production is back up, we’ll run through
the backlog pretty quickly. The iron’s playing out, though. I reported that
more than a year ago. The alectress just told me to mine as much as we could as
fast as we could for as long as we could.” Curosyn shrugged, then sighed. “You
do what you can.”

As
much as possible as quickly as possible — someone had wanted as much iron as
they could get. The High Alector of Engineering? “Did anyone say why they
needed all that iron?”

“No,
sir. I asked once in a dispatch, indirectly, of course. I never got an answer,
and I didn’t want to press.”

“I
heard that the miners were gathered peacefully, and Majer Hersiod rode up and
shot them down. Is that true?”

“You’ve
been talking to the outholders. It wasn’t that simple. Some of the Squawt and
Reillie hotheads were there, too, and they were trying to get the miners to
take up weapons. That was because Majer Hersiod rounded up some of them to work
in the mines. That didn’t work. They either escaped or got shot. So when the
Cadmians showed up, some of the Squawts and Reillies fired at them. They
thought it was another roundup. That’s how that all started.”

That,
unfortunately, made more sense ... but raised another question. “What were they
doing out there? I thought the mals were confined to the compound.”

Curosyn’s
laugh was short and bitter. “What compound? The walls are maybe two yards high.
We never did get the timber and brick to rebuild the burned barracks, so the
mals are jammed in at night in the newer ones. We’re short of guards, and we
can’t get the golds to hire more. The only reason most of them stay is that
they’ve got no coin and they get fed, and they have nowhere else to go. The
townspeople would just as soon gut ‘em as talk to them, and the women here are
as tough as the men, sometimes tougher. We lose a miner to them almost every
week, dumped in the streets behind the brothel. No one ever knows anything.”

“They
could go to the Reillies.”

Curosyn
laughed. “You have to survive in the wild for a week before they’ll even talk
to you. Most mals are townies.”

Mykel
shook his head sympathetically. “You’ve got your hands full.”

“I’d
just as soon leave, but there’s nowhere to go these days — except as a laborer
— and I’m not that desperate.”

When
he left the ironworks supervisor, Mykel walked slowly to his roan and mounted.
Iron
Ste.
was a side of Corus he hadn’t seen before,
and one he almost wished he hadn’t. How could the alectors have let the
situation get so far out of hand? Or didn’t they care?

As
he turned the roan northward and rode back toward the garrison, he reminded
himself to pass the word about the women in Iron
Ste.
to the rankers. He wasn’t about to put the town off-limits, not yet, not unless
the townspeople started killing Cadmians.

“Don’t
wait for me this time,” Dainyl told Sharua as he left the duty coach outside
the Hall of Justice, straightening the sash he had gotten from Khelaryt. “I’ll
be a while.” And that would be if he were skillful and fortunate. “Yes, sir.”

Under
a cloudy sky that promised a cold rain long before he returned from Ludar,
Dainyl hurried up the stone steps, then skirted the main area of the receiving
hall, where, for once, Zelyert himself was listening to the petitioners who
assembled. Grateful that he would not have to explain anything to the High
Alector immediately, Dainyl made his way through the concealed entrance and
down the steps to the lower level.

“Good
day, Marshal,” offered one of Zelyert’s newer assistants, who peered out of her
study as Dainyl approached the closed door to the Table chamber. Her eyes
widened at the sash he wore.

“Thank
you.” Dainyl opened the door to the foyer, closing it behind him before opening
the inner door and stepping into the Table chamber.

One
of the gray-clad guards glanced toward Dainyl but for a moment before returning
his attention to the Table itself. There stood a blocky and muscular alectress
in a purple coverall, her squarish face intent on Chastyl, who stood at the end
of the Table.

Dainyl
caught a glimpse of the figure of an older alectress, her dark hair streaked
with silver, sprawled beside the Table, just before her figure disintegrated
into dust.

“You
... killed her ...” stammered the alectress on the Table.

“Do
you have a pass from a High Alector on Ifryn?” Chastyl’s voice was almost
bored.

The
blocky alectress laughed bitterly. “At my age ... with my figure?”

“What
skills do you have?”

“I
was an assistant to the concertmaster of Cheutorl.”

“Doing
what?”

“Whatever
he wanted.”

“Do
you play an instrument?”

“No
... I — “

Chastyl
nodded to the guard. The lightcutter flared, and the alectress toppled off the
Table, her body beginning to disintegrate even before it reached the stone
floor.

“She
was one of the older ones, hanging on,” Chastyl said to Dainyl. “They’re too
much of a drain on lifeforce unless they have special skills or they’re
pregnant. She didn’t have any real skills, no abilities. We tend to forget that
there are alectors who aren’t much better than steers, particularly on Ifryn.”
He took in the sash. “To Ludar? Give my best to Puleryt if you get the chance.
You better translate before we get another batch.”

“Have
there been that many?”

“Four
this morning. A half-score yesterday. The numbers are going up.”

If
the other Tables were getting those numbers of long translation attempts, that
was another indication of how bad conditions were on Ifryn and how order was
breaking down.

“That’s
a sign of more trouble to come.” Dainyl stepped up onto the Table and
concentrated, dropping through the silvered surface and ...

...
into the chill purpled darkness beneath. He immediately pressed a Talent link
toward the brilliant yellow locator that was Ludar. Still... in the timeless
instants in the darkness, he sensed strong purple lines and wavering ones, and
an occasional flash of brilliant green.

The
entire translation tube shuddered, pulsing and contracting. Was that because
something was happening on Ifryn — or even Acorus — or because so many Ifrits
were trying to leave Ifryn ?

Pushing
away his unease, Dainyl focused on the Ludar locator, sweeping through the
silver-yellow barrier, and...

...
holding his shields firm as he emerged on the Table in Ludar. Although there
were five armed guards in gray watching the Table, none lifted a weapon. The
chamber was quiet as Dainyl stepped down off the silvery surface of the Table.

Puleryt
— the Recorder of Deeds at Ludar — gaped momentarily at Dainyl and the sash.
Finally, he spoke. “Marshal... you have an urgent message for the Duarch?”