The Seer - eARC (53 page)

“Yes, ser.”

“My Cohort brother Putar will help you with the least pleasant parts of this matter,” Innel said to the colonel. “You will restore order. I will look in on your child.” Part reassurance, part reminder. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, Lord Commander,” she said, voice low and quavering.

He was tempted to replace her, but she still knew the area and issues better than anyone. Would another commander do better? Would it matter?

More questions for the seer.

Innel watched Amarta stare into space and drew on his reserves of patience. Enough hours had gone by for Srel to have sent for multiple meals. Even Keyretura had come to look less impassive than bored.

Keyretura could afford to lose interest. He was not responsible for the welfare of an empire.

Amarta put the tips her first two fingers on the tops of the northern mountain range that stretched north to the ocean through the Labari Province.

“In the warm months ore shipments resume,” she said. “In autumn they slow. By winter they cease.”

It was the same answer she had given the last ten times he had asked this and similar questions. He had tried every variation he could conceive of.

“How can it not matter who leads the troops?” he asked.

Again, the far-away, slack-jawed look. How much of her expression was pretense, intended to convince him that she was actually seeing the future?

“Within the year, yes, ser, it changes. But three years hence, it is the same result.”

“Then—ten companies here—” he said, moving the small, painted red wooden markers. “Four to Lukata, four to Rott, the rest to Sinetel.” He looked at Amarta. “Well?”

She moved her fingers to the coast of Labari, drawing them across the paint and fabric of hundreds of miles.

“One year,” she said softly. “Two. Then three. The same result, Lord Commander.”

He swept five more red blocks north. “Here. Enough to destroy Sinetel entirely. Labari, Lukata, Rott—they’ll come into line if Sinetel goes down hard. Three years hence. Answer.” He could hear the harshness in his tone.

She had developed the habit of sucking on the knuckles of her right hand, which she did now. He was beginning to find it annoying.

“There are still troops here.” She pulled her hand from her mouth to point at the northern mining towns. “The miners refuse to work. The ore shipments stop.”

“You know nothing of this situation,” he snapped. “Look south. The mines of the Karmarn Range. Erakat. Garaya.” He walked down the side of the table, set troops beyond Munasee in Gotar’s mountain range.

“The cities, they—” She stopped, looked at him.

“Go on.”

“They claim independence.”

“No,” he said. “They do not.”

Garaya at least was in hand. He had sent Sutarnan south with twenty companies, well more than enough to stiffen the spine of the counter-rebellion his Cohort brother had cleverly arranged. Sutarnan had a general with him, an experienced veteran in the south, who had assured Innel the plan was sound. Innel had made it clear to them both that he wanted the corrupt governor brought back alive and whole to stand before the queen. The man had earned that at least: a spectacular and lengthy execution, one impressive and bloody enough to be told and retold across the empire.

Sweeping markers down the thin line of the Great Road, then east to the raised areas, he said, “Twenty more companies to Erakat and the Gotar Mountains.”

She was silent long enough that he looked from the table to her face. She again had that startled look of fear. So much emotion. It had to be pretense.

“Answer.”

With an inhale she walked around the table to the south end. Her hand trembled as she lifted the black and gold chain that separated Arunkel from Perripur and slowly dragged it north and west over small rises and dips, with a single movement taking cities, mining towns, and hundreds of miles of Arunkel Empire and turning it into Perripin lands.

“The cities, they claim—” she began.

“This, then—all these to the Munasee Cut, by ship.” He moved small blocks onto the blue of ocean and then south to below the borderline, moving the chain back where it belonged. “They march north from there to hold the trade routes, here and here. Favorable contracts to Erakat and the Gotar mines if they provide immediate support with no lapse in production. A new governor in Garaya. Lowered tax rates for merchants trading with Kelerre.”

She put a finger on the chain.

“Take your hand off that,” he said. She quickly pulled her fingers back. “Answer.”

“The mountain regions will declare independence because Perripur will offer them . . .” She faltered, glanced at Keyretura. “What the empire does not.”

“Which is what?”

“The chance to rule themselves.”

“No troops, then,” Innel said. “Half the tax rate. Protections for all trade. What now?”

“The mountain towns will seem to cooperate, but within five years they will claim independence and—”

“Enough,” Innel said. “There are other answers. You don’t know enough yet. But you will.”

“Yes, ser. Maybe—” she began.

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe it’s like a fishing net with too many fish. If you try to hold them all, the net breaks.”

It astounded him, the things that she thought it sensible to say. He walked toward her. She took a step backward.

“Have you ever held such a net, Amarta?” She shook her head, retreating as he advanced. “You would stand with it at the edge of the water and you would starve. You are here to tell me what I want to know, not to blather about nets and governance revealing the astonishing depth of your ignorance. If you want to keep your tongue, you will use it to answer my questions. Is this clear?”

She swallowed repeatedly, nodding. “Yes, ser.”

Maybe Keyretura was right: maybe she only had an instinct for speculation. Flawed and unreliable. He exhaled frustration and turned from the table, still seeing red blocks against green lands from his hours of focusing. “Land grants to leaders in the mining towns and to the new governors of the cities. What changes?”

“These areas.” She pointed to the southern provinces. “They have Perripin names now.”

“What?” he shouted, outraged, aware that his temper was fraying. He turned his back on her and walked to the window. From here he could see the Houses of Nital, Sartor, and Kincel. But even these Houses, working in wood and stone and textiles, needed metal for their tools. Metal was the spine of the empire.

And Perripur—he could almost feel the country to the south watching, biding its time, wondering if Arunkel was still strong enough to defend itself, or ripe enough to bite. The chain must not slide north.

He turned back to the table and moved all his red wooden markers to the chain.

“Look again, Seer,” he said. “With care.” He looked at Keyretura. “Every troop to the Perripur border. All of them. Now what?”

Keyretura did not even blink.

For some time she stared, the blank look again on her face. The minutes stretched until he could stand it no longer.

“Well?”

“There is no more red and black here,” she whispered. “So much death.”

He ignored this. “Where is the border? In five years? In ten? In twenty?”

She looked around the room, at the high walls, the weapons, then back at him, wide-eyed, silent.

This was what all the years of searching and expense had bought him? A blank stare and useless answers? He felt a craving to hit her until she spoke sense. “Answer,” he said.

“In twenty years only this city will call itself Arunkel.”

His entire empire reduced to one city? It was beyond possible. What was she attempting here?

At his look, she cringed.

“You are tired,” he said flatly. “Not seeing clearly. We will try again tomorrow.”

He went to the door, instructed the guards to take her back to her room. Then he carefully moved all the troops back to where they belonged, adjusted the chain minutely.

“Well?” he asked Keyretura at last. “Is she lying?”

“Many people believe their visions. That does not make them true.”

“Her answers are unacceptable.”

“Perhaps you’re asking too gently.”

“Perhaps.”

“And perhaps you give her too much credit for a few clever guesses, and some of them not all that clever.”

“She can predict the toss of a coin, High One.”

“So? A coin is a small thing. The answers you want are a bit wider in scope than that. If her answers are not sound, ignore them, and keep her as a token to frighten your enemies. Or kill her and be done with it.”

“I think she is keeping something from me.”

“The location of the sister and nephew, at least.”

This thing that she seemed to care most about. A loose end he would prefer not to have dangling.

“If I want her dead?”

“Easily done. Do you want this now?”

“No.” Not yet.

He gave the mage a thoughtful look. Mage, yes, but also a Perripin, from a land where many stood to profit from the confusion and strife the empire was already facing.

“Should I be concerned about your loyalty to your homeland, High One?”

The mage barked a rare laugh. “You trust an ignorant commoner girl to advise you on troop movements, yet you doubt my word? A Perripur-Arunkel war would merely entertain me, and my home is remote enough that I could watch it in comfort. Our contract is sound, Commander.”

“Forgive me, High One, I had to ask.” Something else occurred to Innel. “The sister and nephew. Without knowing where they are, even what country they might be in, does it not seem to you I am constrained in how I can keep them safe from all those over whom I have command or influence?”

The mage gave Innel a look. “You propose to circumvent the contract?”

No chasing the subject around, then. But that was one of the advantages of Keyretura: he existed outside the usual web of delicately spoken truths and layers of veiled lies.

“I question how much safer they might be, guarded by the forces at my command and your excellent attention. Many of those who act at my direction will not know of their protected status. These are dangerous times. Anything could happen.”

Was that a flicker of amusement across Keyretura’s face?

“Let me be sure I understand your intention, Commander. After assenting to my witnessing this contact with the seer, are you now asking me to make sound a pursuit of the sister and nephew within the scope of that contract? Or are you asking me, under the terms of my contract with
you
, to compromise my witnessing obligations?”

And this, Innel was quickly coming to understand, was the problem with dealing with mages: they were often already standing where you were only looking to go.

“Let us say the first of those options, the one that keeps the seer’s contract whole.”

“The terms of the contract are that you and the crown of Arunkel do not harm the sister and her child, and further that you give them food and shelter if they should want it. Nothing was said of their liberty.”

“Though—abducting them . . . ?”

“I am confident that I can preserve the safety and full bellies of a woman and child while I move them somewhere safer.”

“You?” Innel blinked in surprise.

“Yes.”

The mage’s overwhelming confidence was a heady drink.

Innel made a thoughtful noise, then a dismissive one, and turned back to the table. “Irrelevant, though; they could be anywhere in your country or mine. I have no time to start another long search. Yes, if we happen across them, but otherwise—”

“When the seer came from Kelerre with your hire, there was someone else with them.”

Innel turned back. “What?”

“On your seer is the faint but unmistakable scent of my
uslata
, Commander. Marisel has touched her.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course. I know my own.”

Marisel dua Mage, also traveling with the seer? He wondered what that meant. “And so?”

“And so I now have a very good idea of where the sister and nephew are.”

This was entirely unexpected. “Where?”

“I might obtain them in a matter of weeks, perhaps a month, in a manner consistent with and within the bounds of the contract that I witnessed, provided you have a safe and comfortable location to which I can deliver them. I suggest something well away from the city. Isolated. Quiet. Fortified.”

Innel could find such a thing. The crown had a number of distant residences.

“Truly? You can do this?”

“Do you need me to repeat myself? Shall I speak more slowly?”

“No, High One. I—” He what? It seemed too good to be possible. “Yes. I understand you.”

Innel’s contract with Keyretura was costing a very great deal of money, and perhaps this was why: because the mage could do what he said he could. He stared at the mage and wondered briefly what was between them, Keyretura and his former apprentice Marisel, and what the mage intended.

“If you wish, I can leave immediately,” Keyretura said. “This is, however, a greater level of effort on my part, and does not fall under our current contract.”

“Ah, of course.”
With mages, there is always more to pay.
“What more do you need, High One?”

“Not coin. Marisel dua Mage.”

“I can hardly deliver her to you. I could not even keep her here.”

“You need do nothing. If she comes here, when she does, you agree not to interfere.”

Interfere? How would he interfere?

Unbidden, the image of the glass plains came to him, from the one time he had glimpsed them from a distance, desolate and vast.

He inhaled, let it out. “I am told that when mages fight, everyone dies except the mages. Perhaps this is not a wise plan, High One.”

A small smile. “That risk only exists when the mages are of similar power. This is not that circumstance. Do not presume you know my intent. I assure you, not a stone on your precious walls will be so much as scratched.”

“Then—it seems a price easily paid.” Perhaps he should ask more, find out what this might be about. Or perhaps the business of mages was best left to mages. “I accept your amendment.”

Keyretura stood. “I will need a set of your fastest horses.”