only took us four or five hours to get it dug. The biggest problem was hauling in the water to fill it after we got it properly excavated.” She looked back at Erlis. “We were only an hour or two behind you on the way out, so the mud had plenty of time to cure.”
“So I see.”
Erlis stretched out her hand to help Saltha out of the mudhole while she considered the victors. The three hundred didn’t like losing, but she had to admire Leeana’s tactics. The manufactured pothole had been a masterstroke, an obstacle which was certain to stop the wagons but which hadn’t set off any mental alarms because they’d already had to deal with so many mudholes. And as she looked further into the grass on either side of the road, she saw the blinds Leeana and her three companions had painstakingly constructed to conceal them until they struck.
It’s a good thing they weren’t really trying to kill us, she reflected with more than a little chagrin. All eight members of the escort-except Garlahna-bore large, bright splotches of chalk dust from the beanbags which had been substituted for the far more lethal throwing stars (or knives) which would have come their way if Leeana had been serious. I must be getting old to let the young hellion get away with it this way!
Yet even as she thought that, she knew that wasn’t the true reason. Yes, she really should have been more suspicious-or alert, at least-but that wouldn’t have mattered in the end, given how carefully Leeana had organized things. The girl had come a long way in the six and a half years since she’d fled to the war maids. She was still not quite twenty-two years old, yet she was already a commander of seventy-five, and whether she realized it or not, Erlis and Balcartha Evahnalfressa, the commander of five hundred who commanded the City Guard, were quietly grooming her for far higher rank. Indeed, Erlis was beginning to wonder if Kalatha would be allowed to keep her. The war maids were legally obligated to provide troops in the Crown’s service in return for the royal charter which had created them in the first place, and any field commander in his (or her) right mind was going to want an officer of Leanna Hanathafressa’s caliber. No matter what challenge Erlis and Balcartha threw at her, she took it in stride, and she was so cheerful even old sweats like Saltha couldn’t seem to take offense when she effortlessly ran rings around them.
Or got promoted past them, for that matter.
“All right,” she said finally. “You won; we lost. So you get the bathhouse first tonight and you get the three- day passes.”
Leeana and the other members of her team looked at one another with broad grins, and Erlis let them have their moment before she gave them a rather nasty smile of her own.
“And now that you’ve won, why don’t the four of you just wade out into that marvelous mudhole of yours and help us get this wagon out of it?”
Chapter Three
The small, carefully nondescript man sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes as the flickering glow died in the heart of the water-clear gramerhain crystal on the desk before him. His name was Varnaythus, or that was the one he most commonly went by among those who knew who (and what) he truly was, at any rate. He looked to be no more than in his mid-forties, yet he was actually well past eighty-there were some advantages to being a wand wizard willing to manipulate blood magic-and no one had learned his true name in at least the last sixty years. It was safer that way.
Of course, “safe” was a relative term.
He climbed out of his chair and began pacing back and forth across the small, luxurious (and carefully hidden) room. There were no windows, and the light from the oil lamps was dim, despite the highly polished reflectors, to eyes which had become accustomed to the grammerhain’s brilliance. He could have flooded the room with clear, sourceless light, but black wizards who wanted to stay alive in Norfressa avoided that sort of self-indulgence. Wizardry was outlawed upon pain of death in virtually all Norfressan realms, and however much Varnaythus might resent that, he couldn’t pretend he didn’t understand it. That reaction had been inevitable after the Wizard Wars destroyed the Empire of Ottovar and turned the entire continent of Kontovar into a blasted wasteland which had needed a thousand years to recover. It was actually quite useful to Vanaythus’ Lady and her fellows, in many ways. It certainly reduced the opposition’s strength and ability to respond to arcane attacks, at any rate.
There were wizards here, but most of them tended to be at best a dingy shade of gray. The fact that they were already outlawed and condemned made it far easier for the Carnadosans to recruit them, as well, and not even the ones unwilling to actively serve the Dark themselves would be interested in calling attention to himself if he happened to notice that another wizard was practicing the art in his vicinity. Unfortunately, if Varnaythus didn’t have to worry about being turned in by another wizard, he did have to worry about magi.
He puffed his lips in familiar frustration as he paced. The wizard lords of Kontovar still didn’t understand how the mage talents worked. Varnaythus himself had picked up far more about the effects and consequences of their various abilities, including some interesting…intersections with the art, but he’d gathered that information very cautiously indeed. Much of it had been gleaned by picking the brains (in some cases literally) of other nonmagi, while the rest had come from wary, circumspect observation with the stealthiest scrying spells he could command. And all of it, unfortunately, remained largely theoretical, since he had absolutely no desire to risk his own personal hide in order to test his conjectures. Quite a few wizards who’d done that sort of thing had never found the opportunity to report back on their success, for some reason.
Still, they did know at least a little about them. For instance, it was obvious the talents themselves were products of the Wizard Wars, the result of some deep change in the very being of the current magi’s ancestors, although it had never manifested in Kontovar even after the Fall. He suspected there’d been very, very few of them in the beginning, when refugees from all of Kontovar first flooded into Norfressa. There couldn’t have been many, since no one had really recognized their existence at all for over seven hundred years, and they’d only become sufficiently numerous to begin organizing their mage academies in the last three or four centuries.
The Carnadosan lords of Kontovar hadn’t even noticed them at first, and by the time they’d begun to realize just how…inconvenient they might prove to their own ultimate plans, the magi had been too firmly entrenched to eliminate. Efforts to acquire live magi for study hadn’t worked out well, either. The bastards were slippery as fish and even more elusive, and trained magi had a nasty tendency to die, often taking any wizard unfortunate enough to have been interrogating them at the moment with them, if they were captured. Not to mention the fact that many of them could call for help telepathically over even lengthy distances. Varnaythus knew of at least three expeditions to capture magi which had come to unfortunate ends when the magi in question managed to guide cruisers of the Royal and Imperial Navy to intercept the ships carrying them to Kontovar. The effort hadn’t been abandoned, but it was one of those tasks to be approached very, very cautiously, and he was more than happy to leave it to someone else, like Tremala. Or even better, now that he thought about it-however serious a rival Tremala might be, he actually liked her, after all-someone like that insufferable, egotistical, irritating pain Rethak.
More to the point, however, the accursed magi could sense the use of the art. Some were more sensitive than others-in fact, some of them were damned bloodhounds where sorcery was concerned! — but all of them had at least some sensitivity to it. And unlike Norfressan wizards, they had no reason not to report any sorcery they detected. In fact, the mage academies’ Oath of Semkirk required magi to fight dark wizardry and blood magic, and the bastards had been growing steadily into ever more of a pain in the arse for the last two hundred years.
Nor was their ability to sense wizardry the only threat they posed to Kontovaran ambitions. They had other talents as well-from the ability to speak mind-to-mind across vast distances, to healing, to distance-viewing, to the ability to unerringly detect lies, plus Phrobus only knew what else. Thankfully, none of them had more than three or four such talents each, but groups of them could combine their abilities into the sort of threat which had to make any wizard wary, and they were oathbound to use their abilities to serve others, which made them disgustingly popular with the very people who most hated and feared wizardry. Many rulers welcomed them into their realms, often relying upon them as agents, investigators, and representatives, and King Markhos of the Sothoii had opened his arms even more broadly to them than most. There was no mage academy in his kingdom-Sothoii mages were trained in one of their Axeman allies’ academies, ususally at either Axe Hallow or Belhadan-but there were dozens of them wandering around Markhos’ capital of Sothofalas, and all it would take was for one of them to stroll past
