Kero gave the sketch a cursory glance, and shrugged. 'Nothing I know,' she said.
'Let me see that,' Darkwind said, suddenly, urgently. She handed it to him, and he frowned over it for a moment.
'I have seen this somewhere - within a day,' he said, his brow creased as he stared at it. 'No - I saw it today, this very morning. In a book. No, not in the book, I remember now!'
He reached down to the pile of books at his feet and looked just inside the covers of each of them in rapid succession. Finally he exclaimed, 'Here!' and held up the book for all of them to see.
'That's the device, all right,' Ragges said decisively. Kero shrugged again, but Elspeth took the book from Darkwind and leafed through it. It was in Valdemaran so archaic she had taken it for another language entirely until this very moment. But she had not noticed the very first page before, which looked a great deal more modern. She went back to that first page when she simply could not puzzle out any of the script. As she had hoped, in a modern, scholar's hand, she found a history of the book itself. This was a copy, not the original, but the scribes had faithfully reproduced every handwritten marginal note and scribbled diagram.
For this was a copy of a very important tome; one of the books brought to this land before it was a Kingdom, before it was even a nation.
By the Baron Valdemar, who became, by declamation, King Valdemar the First.
'According to this,' she said, slowly, puzzling out the words and feeling cold fear growing in the pit of her stomach, 'the device inside the cover of this book is that of the former owner - the one that King Valdemar 'borrowed' the book from, when he ran west with his people.'
No one would ever have anticipated this; no one could have.
Kero frowned. 'I have the sinking feeling I'm not going to like what you're going to tell me.'
'It's the personal arms of the ruling family of the Eastern Empire,' Elspeth said, her throat closing until her voice was hardly more than a harsh whisper. All her life she had heard tales of the horrors and injustices that the Emperor wrought on his subjects, and always the refrain had been 'be glad the Emperor is too far away to notice us.' Valdemar had run for years with his people before settling here, but the memories of what he had escaped still haunted every scholar's nightmares. There was no name for the Eastern Empire; it didn't need one. It covered the entire Eastern coastline, a monolithic giant from which not even rumors escaped. 'The Emperor of the East himself has sent an envoy to Ancar's court - '
'The Emperor's personal envoy is playing footsie with Hulda?' Kero exclaimed, her voice rising sharply. 'Old Wizard Charliss? The Emperor of the East? Bloody hell'
Whatever else she might have said was lost as someone pounded urgently on the door. 'It's Jeri!' said Kero's assistant, with strain audible in her voice. 'There's been a relay-message from the east, and they sent a page out here to get you. They need you people in Council right now! Ancar's troops are attacking our border!'
'Bloody hell!' Kero cried again, then snatched open the door and headed out at a dead run, with Elspeth and Darkwind right on her heels.
The ax had fallen, and it was worse than Elspeth had feared. Nightfall brought three more messages as soon as lanterns could be seen from relay-tower to relay-tower, with word that a Herald with more detail was on the way.
But the messages, although they were clear and concise, made absolutely no sense.
Elspeth rubbed her eyes and fought back the urge to sleep; no one in the Council chamber had slept for three days. Right now Selenay was reporting what little the Council knew to her chief courtiers while Prince Daren held her seat. Elspeth was trapped between exhaustion and tension. There was no time for sleep; there was no time for anything, now. A trainee put a mug full of strong, hot tea discreetly by her hand; she took it and emptied it in three swallows.
Ancar's forces had crossed the border shortly after noon on the first day of the attack. As Kero and Elspeth had feared, they seemed to be more of his magically-controlled conscript-troops, and they continued to remain under control long past the point when spells had lost their effectiveness in the past. So the barrier was down, just as Vanyel had warned.
What was insane was that they had overrun the first garrison in their path, and had lost at least half their men taking it. Now they were fortifying it and holding it against a counterattack, while more of Ancar's troops came in over the border at their back - and given the rate at which they were losing men, in a day or two they would have to replace the entire force that had mounted the attack in the first place!
'This isn't like Ancar,' Kero said tiredly, as she and the Lord Marshal shoved counters around on a map in response to every message from the border. 'He just doesn't fight like this. That garrison is of no value whatsoever; there's no one of any importance there, there's nothing valuable there, it's just one more place on the border. It isn't even strategically valuable. He just doesn't go after targets that aren't worth anything - he certainly doesn't continue to hold them afterward!'
