The Warden, page 13
He wheeled on them then, showing his bald, puckered face, with his gray eyes still as sharp and bright as any in the room. “Well, I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen. A hunch, an intuition, a guess, a gut feeling—whatever you like to call it—they are the most helpful and the most dangerous thing you’ll deal with as Wardens, if indeed any of you are ever worthy of that august and esteemed title.”
He leaned both hands on his stick for a moment, pulling himself up to his full height, or as near to it as he could.
“Sometimes, a hunch will seem to take you from the clear sky, and it will seem as pure and bright and visible as Peyron’s moon. And some of those times, it’ll even be right,” he added, once more tapping his way across the front of the hall.
“Other times—most times, in your early days—it’ll be dead wrong. And the thing you have to do then is learn that a hunch is not something to cling to; you’ll have to discard it like broken glass. At best, its remnants can be melted down and reused.” He cleared his throat with a harrumph and muttered, “Metaphor gettin’ away from me.” There was a titter of laughter from the front of the hall and he whirled, his staff suddenly flying into his hands.
“I’ve killed men for less than laughing at me,” Bardun Jacques shouted, and Aelis thought in that moment, with the knot on the end of his staff already glowing red, that the old Invoker was not lying.
The crowd got deathly quiet and he lowered his staff with a faint sneer on his wrinkled, gray-whiskered face.
“But every time you get a hunch—every time that feeling crawls up from your stomach into your mind and your tingling hands, you’ll run it down. Every time. Because the one time in ten, or twenty, or a hundred, depending on how thick you are, that the hunch is right, it’ll save lives.”
* * *
Rus carefully set the purse, with its drawstrings pulled tightly shut, down on the table in front of Aelis, while she carefully watched Maurenia and Timmuk.
“It looked,” the dwarf was saying, “for all the world, like an orc hoard…”
“Orcs don’t bury hoards of coin. They prefer practical objects and wearable wealth, and silver into the bargain,” Aelis said. “They’ll trade gold, but they disdain it because of how soft it is, or so it is said. So why would orcs have a hoard of gold?”
“It wasn’t any hoard,” Maurenia put in. “It was just two chests of it in an otherwise unremarkable ruin.”
“How big were the chests?”
“Still got ’em on the wagon,” Timmuk said. “Do you want—”
“Yes,” Aelis said before he even finished asking. The dwarf slid off the bench and went to the stairs, calling out in his guttural language. Soon, Andresh came stumping down and the two disappeared into the falling dark outside.
Maurenia watched them go before turning her startling eyes back to Aelis, who had to resist shivering. “What do you think the boxes might tell you?”
“More than they tell someone who is not Lyceum-trained,” Aelis replied coldly. While they waited, she carefully picked open the knots in the drawstring of the coin purse before her and drew the bag open.
A single orange-tinted gold coin slipped out onto the table, and Aelis bent down, studying it.
“Coins like this haven’t been struck in my lifetime,” she said. “It’s got Old Ystain marks.”
“Well, that makes sense,” the half-elf said, “as we found it in Old Ystain.”
“And yet it looks as bright and clean as though it were fresh from the mint and untouched by anyone,” Aelis said. “Does that not strike you as odd?”
“On the frontier, you don’t stand about asking questions about found treasure.”
Aelis looked up from the coin. “Out there it may be all well and good to say that gold has no provenance. Down here, where folk live…” She trailed off and looked back to the strangely orange gold. It was bright and the edges of the design it bore were sharp; a crowned helm with a fox standing over it, and tiny script beneath it, illegible without a glass to magnify it. She knew what it said, though: Astride the Mountains, the motto of Old Ystain. Hesitantly, she flipped it over with one fingertip. It was cold to the touch, and her skin tingled from the contact in a way that could only mean one thing.
“There is magic in this gold, of a kind,” Aelis said.
“How do you know?”
“Felt it with a touch.” Aelis sat up straight and pushed back the sleeve of her robe.
“Can’t you tell what kind?”
She shook her head. “I’m no Diviner. If I were, I’d delve it—push my awareness into the magical existence of the thing, and see the space it occupies and how much of it.” She flicked her eyes from the coin on the table to Maurenia and said, “If I start to do anything untoward, knock it out of my hand.”
Then she snatched the coin off the table with one sweep of her hand. When her fingers closed around it she felt the slight tingle of magic in the coin clashing with the power contained in her own flesh. As a wizard, she had a natural resistance to magical objects, even benign amulets and potions.
As a Warden, she also had an acquired resistance, learned through years of mental and physical training at the Lyceum. She’d often heard it said that Abjurers were particularly resistant to the magic of devices, but she’d never seen real evidence of it.
The training she had was dual-purpose; to resist and to allow. She took a deep breath and slowed her breathing, spreading her hand so that the coin rested on her palm. Then she slowly, deliberately gathered up her power and pulled it deeply within herself. She had an immediate physical reaction; the heat of the fire beside her was suddenly stronger, the coin heavier, its weight comforting and reassuring.
In fact, the weight of the coin was a wondrous thing. It was gold, heavy and pure, and it was hers. Why shouldn’t it be? She’d done a good deal of work for these people in the scant few days she’d been in town, and with nothing to show for it but a drafty tower full of bird shit, a goat that wouldn’t leave her alone, and a pestering child.
Yes, this gold was hers by right, as was the rest of the bag. She had half a mind to dip her hand into it and let the heavy warmth of the coins seep into her skin, to heft them and feel their weight. Slowly, her hand closed around the coin and she began to reach for the bag with her other hand.
Suddenly her hand stung and the coin went flying away. Aelis looked up in startled anger, and her hand was on the hilt of her sword and drawing it out before she even looked from her now empty palm to the half-elf across from her.
Maurenia’s eyes were open wide, and Aelis saw fear in their blue ice, in the slightly open O of her mouth. Then the power she’d withdrawn into herself rolled back into her body, out to the very tips of her fingers and beyond. She shook with the shiver of it, the kind one might get from a metal washstand on a cold winter morning, and snapped back to her senses.
“This gold is dangerous. Unbelievably so,” Aelis said, carefully lowering both hands to the table, her palms flat. “I am sorry, Maurenia, but I have to confiscate it. And I need to question the Thorns.”
“I’ll be damned if you’re confiscating our legally won property,” Timmuk said from the door, which had just opened. He and Andresh had long, narrow brass-bound cedar chests resting easily on their muscled shoulders. “Or questioning my company as if we were common criminals.”
“Maliciously enchanted objects are illegal by their very nature,” Aelis said, standing and turning on the dwarf. “I am afraid, Master Dobrusz, I am not going to give you a choice. If you attempt to resist me on this matter, you will be criminals.”
Every figure in the room was suddenly tense. Aelis was ready to drop her wand into her hand or draw her sword or both. Behind the counter, Rus watched like a hawk, a rag held inches above the surface in one hand. Leather creaked as Andresh flexed his free hand into a fist and then straightened the fingers out. Timmuk stared hard at her, his jaw bunching.
From behind she heard a soft rustle as Maurenia stood up and took a deliberate, slow step back.
“Warden,” the half-elf said, her voice still and soft, “I promise you we did not knowingly bring enchanted gold to Lone Pine. But please understand that this represents the vast majority of our realized profit from an expensive expedition.”
“As to the first, I can determine that easily enough,” Aelis said, still unwilling to break her eye contact with Timmuk. “Subject yourselves to a simple First Order Enchantment, a compulsion to speak truth, and that is settled. As to the latter…”
Maurenia walked around to stand halfway between Aelis and the Dobrusz brothers. “Could you not … dissolve the magic you’ve found? Release the enchantment?”
“It’s possible,” Aelis said. “But the process of researching that could take weeks, and we all know you can’t stay in Lone Pine that long. It’s possible I could work out compensation with the Lyceum.”
“Fuck that for an idiot’s game,” Timmuk spat. “I used to be a banker and a moneylender, Warden. I know exactly how likely an institution like the Lyceum is to give up gold once it has got it in its hands … and I know how badly they need it to train up a new generation of wizards and Wardens. Not a fucking chance.”
“The wheels of the Lyceum’s bureaucracy grind slowly,” Aelis said, “but if you were to petition—”
“The petitioners would have to appear in person at the Lyceum’s whim or it would all be forfeit. No. And I’ll thank you not to go rooting around in my or my company’s heads after you’ve stolen our gold to the bargain,” Timmuk snarled.
Andresh’s fist flexed again. Aelis heard movement on the stairs, a creak of wood that almost matched the leather for menace, someone in soft-heeled boots treading carefully and quietly and up to no good.
“What if,” Aelis said, “I wrote you a letter of credit for an agreed-upon sum to offset the loss of the gold?”
Timmuk raised his chin. “Does the Warden of Lone Pine get paid in aught more than bread and mutton and butter?”
“For the purposes of this letter, I would not be writing it as the Warden of Lone Pine, but as Lady Aelis Cairistiona de Lenti un Tirraval,” she said, even as she was thinking, Please, Father. Forgive me.
“De Lenti un Tirraval…” Timmuk said the words slowly, as if tasting them. Maurenia’s eyes widened, but only briefly, before the half-elf resumed her typically imperturbable mask.
“My father is Guillame Robert de Lenti un Tirraval,” Aelis said. “More properly styled Count un Tirraval. I assure you, a letter of credit in my full name will more than repair your losses.”
The footfall on the stairs stopped. Maurenia regarded her carefully, lifting her chin and tossing her auburn hair lightly. Timmuk and Andresh lowered their burdens.
“I think,” Timmuk said, “there’s an accord to be made,” and he strode forward, thrusting out a gloved hand.
“Later,” Aelis said, drawing a deep breath of relief at the change in the dwarf’s posture. “First, I need to know who took gold from you, and how much. Because I have to go get all of it back.” She glanced over her shoulder to find Dashia halfway down the stairs, one hand resting prominently on a hilt.
“Right,” Timmuk said, clapping his hands. “Dashia, go get your brother. We’ve a list to make.”
* * *
Aelis was up the night through, knocking on doors. Before she’d gone, she’d taken up a collection—from Rus, the Thorns, and her own purse—to come up with enough silver to cover the cost of all the gold she was setting out to confiscate.
While the Thorns worked up a list, she went over the details in her mind. The coin wanted me to keep it. And it would’ve made me do violence to hold it and keep more of it if Maurenia hadn’t knocked it away.
Timmuk had been busy, making accords for the purchase of supplies for their trek hundreds of miles south to their homes in Lascenise; mutton, salt, cheese, beer, wood to make repairs for the wagon, fodder for their horses. All in all, he’d stimulated the economy of Lone Pine to an extent that was going to drain much of Aelis’s ready silver, and she noted the hungry-eyed looks Rus and the adventurers gave her as she ventured out of the inn clutching a heavy purse.
She was a half dozen or more long steps out into the growing darkness before she heard the door open and then shut behind her. Aelis turned to see the long, lean form of Maurenia following after her.
“This is Warden business,” she began.
“There’s naught in your warrants about working alone at all times, I’m sure,” the half-elf said, cutting her off. “Besides, I saw the light that single piece of gold put into your eyes. Imagine what a handful of three will do to an ordinary peasant.”
“Probably rather less,” Aelis said, as they fell into step together. “Wizards are made, not born—but one of the ingredients is an increased sensitivity to the magic that circles the world with the moons. We’re drawn to it, and it is drawn to us. As we’re taught to manage that, we learn to harness that sensitivity into a shield. But in order to determine the nature of the magic in that coin, I had to drop my defenses.”
“So it seized hold of you faster than it might a farmer?”
“Almost certainly.”
“Well,” Maurenia said, “that’s brightened our prospects considerably. Speaking of bright, couldn’t you use some light? My eyes do well enough with starlight, but…”
Aelis cleared her throat. “Onoma’s moon is rising. It provides light … of a kind.”
Maurenia stopped in her tracks. “Explain.”
Aelis sighed. In truth, this was a far more delicate subject than the natural sensitivity of wizards to magic.
“I can’t, really. I’ve always been able to pinpoint the position of Onoma’s moon.”
“Well, that’s simply a matter of algebra. Surely you mighty wizards study that.”
“We do, but I could do only enough of it to pass the basics. Advanced math, horology, and astronomy are beyond me.” Or too boring to concentrate on, she thought. “I just know. I have since I was eleven. And the more Necromancy I learned, the better I became at knowing it. And then it started to light the sky for me.”
“How?”
Aelis shrugged. “Hells if I know. It simply does. As long as Onoma’s moon is in the sky—even a sliver—the night is not dark for me.”
They’d been talking as they walked and had now come upon some of the houses they needed to visit. Maurenia bowed coquettishly and smiled. “After you, Dread Necromancer.” Aelis grumbled and walked on, raising her hand to the door of the nearest house.
She knew that before they were done they’d be dragging people out of their beds. There were too many houses on the list Rus and Martin had drawn up in concert with Timmuk for it to be any other way, and Aelis had no intention of waiting for the morning.
Now she realized it was the house of the shepherd family whose fence she’d helped mend with a ward when she’d first arrived.
She knocked as gently as she could and as loud as she dared, and called out softly, “Warden here. Please come speak to me.” It was a few moments before the door opened, and even then, Bruce had a long-bladed farmer’s knife in his hand.
The only light cast from inside the house was that of a banked fire, and the man wore a simple long nightshirt; the whites of his eyes were bright, wide open with unease, if not fear.
“Bruce,” Aelis began, giving him no chance to ask questions, “I need you to listen to me. Earlier tonight, a dwarf of the adventuring company purchased supplies from you—sheepskins, I’m told. He paid in gold. I need you to get the gold coin or coins he gave you, and bring it to me. I will exchange it for an equivalent amount of silver.”
His eyes narrowed and his brow furrowed as she spoke, until, when she finished, they were clouded, just this side of angry. “Here now,” he began, “what right have you to—”
“Every right,” Aelis said, trying to make her voice snap the way Bardun Jacques’s had when he lectured. “Questioning my motives is going to waste time that I do not have. Fetch the gold. You are losing nothing in this exchange. For each gold coin you bring me, I’m going to give you three silver.”
His nose wrinkled. “Four.”
“Did I give the impression this was a negotiation?” Aelis reached to the purse on her belt, prized it open, took three coins out, and held them on her palm. “Go now. Do not make me wait a moment longer.”
With a sigh and a longing look at the silver—and the heavy purse it had come from—Bruce turned and walked back into his cottage, setting down the knife he held on a sideboard.
He was gone only a few moments, and Aelis—resolutely standing outside his threshold but filling the frame of the door to make it impossible to close—could hear him murmuring to other occupants of the house.
Bruce came back clutching a single gold coin in his callused hand. His eyes were fixed upon its glow in the darkness of his doorway. Before he could say a word, Aelis snatched it from his hand and scooped it into a second purse on her belt, this one hanging empty. She pulled the drawstrings tight and dropped the silver coins into his palm before he even blinked.
“Thank you for your cooperation, goodman. Sleep well,” Aelis said as she stepped back, leaving him gawking in his doorway. Then, when Aelis and Maurenia were a few steps away, the door was shut and the heavy bar was thrown over it.
“This is going to be a long night if you have to talk them all into it. Can’t you just enchant them to it?”
“Not one at a time like this. With the power I’d have to expend, you’d have to carry me home before we were half done.”
Maurenia chuckled. Aelis turned toward her and saw the half-elf woman’s mouth open as if she were about to speak, then her lips clamped shut. She thought for a moment. “Gather them all together, then?”
“And deal with dozens of folk at a time being told to trade in their gold for silver in an exchange they may not think is fair? I don’t think ‘Dear Magisters, I incited a riot, town in flames, locked in tower, please advise’ is the kind of message I want to be sending to my superiors.”
