Glen Cook - Working God's Mischief

Hourli’s irritation did not get past the old Seeker, nor the leathery hardcase Lord Arnmigal took to be the Widow. She stank of lethal power in a supernatural direction, as though she was halfway to ascendance via sheer violent inertia.

His gaze met hers.

The world stopped. His vision went tunnel. For a moment there was nothing but her eyes, fathomless darknesses. Then she reeled away.

Contact broken, Lord Arnmigal felt as though he had looked into some dark mystic mirror from the arsenal of the Old Ones. Or as if he had peered into the deeps of his own blighted soul.

The Widow was more shaken than he. She collapsed. The old Maysalean caught her, tried to sustain her dignity.

Lord Arnmigal thought the man seemed vaguely familiar. Where? When? But … there stood Nassim Alizarin. Madouc of Hoeles observed from farther back. People reentered his life, some again and again.

The stage of the world might be large but those pulled by similar threads of fate would inevitably collide when warp met woof as the blind sisters spun the thread and wove the tapestry of destiny.

Such heresy!

He looked down, turned slowly.

He did have a shadow today.

Needlessly, not apropos of the conversation, he said, “Keep an eye on those two.” Meaning Rogert du Tancret and Clothilde, who had left moments earlier, du Tancret supposedly intent on showing his cousin the quarters he had had prepared. Really, they hardly pretended that they did not mean to begin conniving immediately.

Head shakes all round, his people, Gherig’s, the Firaldians and the Connectens. He would win no friends trying to micromanage people here. These folks did not recognize his right to give orders in the first place.

Hourli said, “Suppose we focus on the matter that brought us together? On the lion roaring beyond the light of the campfire.”

Lord Arnmigal agreed. “You do the talking, Your Grace.” Unlike Helspeth, Hourli did not mind the honorific.

She bobbed her head in irritation recognized all round. She was the Empress. She needed neither permission nor instruction from any general.

The goddess stand-ins were touchier than the woman they played.

Having Helspeth do the talking was the plan. Lord Arnmigal did not want to be seen as bulling in to take over. Nurture of allied egos was as important as maintaining your weapons when at war.

So far he sensed real resentment only from Nassim Alizarin and, more strongly, from Nassim’s Lucidian mentee.

Young Azim did not want the old man’s thunder taken. Nassim, meanwhile, did not like the changes he saw in a one-time Sha-lug hero who had, somehow, reforged himself as a prince of the Unbelievers.

The others were more inclined to defer to the man with the loudest weapons and nastiest resources. Lord Arnmigal suspected that Aldi had not offered them any real appreciation of the magnitude of the latter.

The gallery included Special Office brethren of stony mien. They would suffer this congress with the Night only until the horror in the Idiam was extinct.

Those humorless men had no true apprehension of what was spawning out there. Why should they take the word of Nassim Alizarin? The man was an Unbeliever, for Aaron’s sake!

Yet they were convinced that something dreadfully big was shaping.

Hourli said, “The Righteous have brought several mystic tools that will help.” She neither enumerated nor described those tools. The Special Office gentlemen were distressed enough. The Church insisted that those were imaginary toys associated only with rustic fantasies like the Shining Ones. Total fairy-tale stuff, they. “Most noteworthy is a new formula of firepowder. The sorcerer will find it uncongenial. It is much harder to set off from a distance.”

Lord Arnmigal caught a whiff of steaming unhappiness floating around that remark.

“The new firepowder won’t be proof against the sorcerer’s spells, just more resistant. Our falcons will be able to get close enough to gift him with some truly unpleasant weather.” She did not report that only limited quantities of the new formulation existed. What her audience did not hear, er-Rashal was unlikely to learn. Once the falcons started firing the sorcerer should be too busy dodging to find time to create inconvenient new spells. “He won’t get the leisure to look for ways around his new problem.”

Lord Arnmigal puffed up with pride. Pella, assisted by his artillery mentors, had reformulated the firepowder. His idea had been stunningly simple, if not obvious, but, alas, was also stunningly expensive. They added a minuscule amount of silver dust to make the firepowder spell-resistant. Less expensive, but of weaker effect and so necessary in greater volume, copper and tin also worked. Even lead might help.

The metals certainly caused colorful muzzle blasts.

Pella and his accomplices had not yet gotten close enough to the Rascal to test the new powder under combat conditions.

These people would understand that. Still, new powder would buoy morale, heading into the Idiam.

Lord Arnmigal also had a notion that it would be handy to head into unfriendly country with a clearer picture of what waited there.

The Shining Ones scouted reluctantly. They were disinclined to alert er-Rashal to the magnitude of what was coming.

Lord Arnmigal wondered if there was more to the story. He did not fully credit anything anyone told him these days. Sometimes he even doubted Titus’s reports, again having misgivings about Consent’s religious conversion. Pella he did not trust, either, though in the boy’s case because the kid was determined to do things denied him only because his mother would never forgive his father if something went wrong.

“General Alizarin, they say you know er-Rashal best. As Her Grace reported, the Righteous have some unusual resources. I’d like to hear your thoughts on how those might be used.”

He and the Shining Ones meant to use the Great Sky Fortress relics to bump the Rascal through the gates of Hell.

The allies would be encouraged to believe they were in charge but the real power would reside with the Shining Ones. The rest would serve to keep the villain from running away. He would stroke their egos, though.

He did not hide his thinking that well. The others began to suspect. They grew increasingly uncomfortable. The Righteous staff and the Shining Ones became least comfortable of all.

He strove hard against the quickening megalomania-seemingly with lessening success.

In his secret heart, stirring ugly, lay the dread that he had begun to walk the road already taken by Gordimer the Lion. Might he be unable to turn back even while aware of how he was changing? Could it be that the spite of the old women hidden in the shallows of Night made them weave inescapable evil destinies?

No sisters of fate at all, they, but sisters of malice instead?

The talk was done. Argument was at an end. Accords had been accorded, every participant with secret reservations. Negotiations with the Ansa, heavy on the “gifts,” had been finalized. A loose picket line slowly became a siege line as the encirclement of Andesqueluz shrank. A city’s noose, Titus declared it.

Skirmishes with er-Rashal’s resurrected sorcerer-defenders took place, brief encounters of pain dealt exclusively to the Rascal’s minions. Anxious rage inside the ruins grew steadily. Though the darkness inside Andesqueluz was supernatural rather than quotidian, those drawing the noose tighter swore that a black glow waxed and waned there, like the beat of a great slow heart.

The Shining Ones guarded against demonic outbursts while soldiers of the Righteous, the Brotherhood, the Vindicated, and Pinkus Ghort’s Firaldian volunteers, with the Ansa and even Black Rogert, labored unto dehydrated exhaustion hauling water and supplies, and dragging falcons to positions Pella chose. The boy picked his sites based on scouting done by the Shining Ones. His choices favored the finest lines of fire.