David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

It hadn't been easy, putting that Gift aside. Denying himself its use as he fitted himself into the narrow template of an officer in the Union of Arcana's Army. Nith mul Gurthak had been born Nith vos and mul Gurthak, of high shakira caste, as well as one of the traditional military families of Mythal. But he had systematically concealed the strength of his Gift, starting in early boyhood. Private tutors had trained him in its use with brutally, merciless rigor, beginning years earlier than even shakira youths normally began their schooling. There had been more times than he could count when young Nith had wept himself to sleep at night, but he had never complained, never even considered shirking his responsibilities. He had been selected for his role, his duty to the caste, even before he had been born, on the day when the marriage between his shakira father and multhari mother was first arranged, and that was an honor no shakira worthy of his caste could possibly have rejected. The strength of his Gift, and the skill with which he had learned not simply to use it, but to conceal it, as well, had only justified that choosing.

Now his shoulders relaxed, ever so slightly, as his questing Gift confirmed that the privacy spells about his office were all in place, up, and running. There was nothing particularly spectacular about those spells; they were standard, Army-issue spellware, supplied by the Union of Arcana to ensure its military officers' security in the execution of their duties. That was just fine with mul Gurthak. No one else in Fort Talon-or, for that matter, the entire universe of Erthos-could match the strength of the Gift no one knew he had, and it would have taken hours of preparation for him to penetrate those privacy spells.

No one else could have hoped to do that without alerting him to the security breach in ample time to deal with it.

Satisfied that no one could possibly observe him, he rolled up the left sleeve of his uniform blouse and drew the gleaming, razor-sharp rankadi blade. He held it under the light, before his eyes, clearing his mind of extraneous thoughts as he focused upon that glittering steel. The steel which had been used no less than eleven times to cleanse his bloodline of weakness and failure. The steel which was consecrated to the Great Task of the shakira by the blood it had shed, the honor it had preserved.

He felt his heart and mind fall into shared focus, settle into the perfect balance of thought and emotion appropriate to his sacred purpose, and a serene smile touched his mouth as he closed his eyes. He held the blade across his forehead with both hands while he murmured the words of the second verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Secrets, and then, without opening his eyes, pressed the blade's wickedly sharp edge against the inside of his left forearm. A line of blood sprang up against his dark skin, and he moved forearm and dagger carefully, with the smoothness of long practice, to gather that blood on the flat of the blade.

He opened his eyes once again and maneuvered the rankadi blade over the personal crystal sitting on the blotter of his desk. He spoke a single word in ancient Mythalan, then tilted his right wrist carefully and watched as a single drop of his blood fell from the dagger's tip to the fist-sized crystal. It glittered there, like a fallen ruby, for perhaps ten seconds. Then, without fuss, fanfare, or any spectacular glow and flash of arcane power, it simply disappeared … and the PC flickered alight.

Mul Gurthak inhaled deeply as he saw the brief menu of commands. He'd done this any number of times, especially once he'd begun rising in rank within the Union Army, and yet there was always that moment of tension, that anticipation, almost as if somewhere deep inside he truly believed the carefully crafted spellware might have somehow failed since its last use. Which was ridiculous, of course. Spells researched and developed at the Mythal Falls Academy simply didn't fail.

He picked up his stylus and tapped the menu entry he needed. Then he sat back in his seat, raised both hands to cover his eyes, and bent his head in ritual submission and greeting.

"Mightiest Lords," he said in a dialect so ancient that no more than a handful of people in the entire multiverse would have understood it, "the least of your servants begs you to receive his report and consider his actions, that they may redound to the glory of the shakira and the high holiness of their purpose and the completion of the Great Task."

He waited, head still bent, for a full ninety seconds before he allowed his hands to fall to the blotter and his spine to straighten. Then he cleared his throat and began to speak once more, this time in modern Mythalan.

"Mightiest Lords, I trust that by now you have received my earlier messages. I will endeavor to be as brief as possible in updating you upon my progress in the service of the Great Task. As always, I await any instructions from you."

Should anyone outside the most trusted servants of the Council of Twelve ever gain access to the messages he had recorded over the years and decades of reports to the Council and its members, the consequences would have been disastrous. The damage to the Great Task would have been incalculable, and the consequences to mul Gurthak himself would have been far worse than merely fatal, but the commander of two thousand had never worried about the security of his messages.

The spellware which supported and protected them was the very finest in the entire multiverse … and no one outside the Council even suspected that it existed. Without mentioning it to anyone else, the researchers at Mythal Falls Academy had perfected a technique which archived material at a compression rate of over five hundred thousand-to-one. A single second of crystal recording could contain the equivalent of no less than a hundred and forty hours of normally recorded data or imagery.

The messages which mul Gurthak routinely sent in would be less than a flicker in the stream of a normal crystal recording, imperceptible to anyone who lacked the special spellware required to strain them back out of the flow once more, and Mul Gurthak's reports had all been carefully hidden away in the long, chatty letters he routinely recorded and sent to his brother-in-law. His third sister's husband had no idea of mul Gurthak's actual duties, much less of the power of the two thousand's Gift. Nor did he have any idea that mul Gurthak's letters to him were routinely intercepted by the Mythalan postal service and routed very quietly to agents of the Council of Twelve to be scanned for messages from the two thousand before they were passed on to him.

The transmission pipeline itself was as close to perfectly secure as fallible mortal beings could hope to come, yet the Council hadn't stopped there. Even if the message could have been detected and recovered by anyone else, it could not have been read. The encryption program, like the compression spellware itself, was the product of secret research at the Academy. It was unique in that there was no encryption key anyone could enter. The encryption was embedded in the sarkolis of the originating PC itself, and only two other PCs in the multiverse could decrypt it. All three of them had been enspelled simultaneously, and then one of them had then been issued to mul Gurthak, while the others had been placed in the care of two separate members of the Council of Twelve. Those three PCs, and only those three PCs, could read material generated from the secret spellware concealed behind the activating cantrip mul Gurthak had just used, and no one could activate-or even detect-that spellware without both the blood of the PC's proper owner and the proper ritual to control its shedding.

Should the existence of that elaborate encryption program ever come to the attention of mul Gurthak's non-Mythalan superiors, questions would undoubtedly be asked. Unfortunately for those superiors'