Michael Stackpole - Of Limited Loyalty

Owen closed his journal. “That’s wonderful news, Hodge. If I can help in any way…”

“You have done, sir. Just the fact that you mentioned me so nicely in your book-she liked that.”

“Good. We survive what comes, you’ll get an even greater mention.” Owen laughed. “And I am certain you’re right. This land will have need of many surveyors. It’s a wise choice.”

“Thank you, sir. Shall we do more readings, or go back to camp?” Hodge studied the sky for a moment. “Going to be clear, which means it will be cold.”

“I think we go back now, start a fire, stay warm.”

“I’ll pack up then, sir.”

Back in camp, which consisted of a small lean-to nestled against the southern side of a cliff near a stream, Owen set about transferring notes into his larger journal. Prince Vlad had noticed that messages shifted register up or down depending on certain phenomena. Having the check number incorporated helped guard against errors in transcription. The Prince had also dictated that the messages begin with the same phrase, so transcribers could check that known value against what they heard, indicating if they needed to adjust their note values up or down. The Prince was even considering adding the means to quickly retune a thaumagraph so the correction could be done immediately.

Owen’s survey, and he assumed that he was not the only one doing such work, had showed two things. When messages flowed across lines-and rivers were the easiest to plot-or upriver, the notes moved lower. The Benjamin, being a broad and deep river, tended to push them lower than a shallow stream, and the stream’s effect might not even be noticed depending on how strong the sender was and the distance the message traveled. Long messages tended to have the tones even out.

If the message traveled with the river, the notes rose. A storm, depending on its ferocity, would make the notes rise, but also tended to mute the message, to the point where some notes might not get through at all. Some initial messaging trials with the thaumagraphs had produced evidence of the speeding and slowing effects of rivers, and they had detected something else which had been labeled ghost rivers.

The Prince’s initial thought was that the disruptions on dry land might have been at the site of ancient riverbeds which had since gone dry and had become overgrown. The difficulty with that idea was that these ghost rivers didn’t show up where rivers might have run. Instead of just trailing through a valley, they would cut across it in a way that water would never run. Moreover, they ran in straight lines from point to point, then broke at angles. Some seemed to be very broad, but then became narrower as they split, just to broaden again at another point where others connected up. And, like wet rivers, the ghost rivers definitely had a speed to them, but appeared to flow both directions simultaneously.

Hodge and Owen had been sent west into Bounty to map out rivers, streams, and ghost rivers to create an image of how messages would move over the land. A message that might take two days to go from Temperance to Plentiful, could travel significantly faster if the sending and receiving station were on the same ghost river line. While a message traveling from point to point along a ghost river might actually travel further than a direct-line message, the speed of transmission would still make it quicker, and tended to override interference from storms and streams.

To conduct their survey they’d started from the Count’s home and worked west, paralleling the Benjamin River. They would pick a point, then test for ghost rivers in a circle at one hundred yards. If they found something, they’d mark it, then test further along that line. When they lost any sign of it, they’d work to locate the split, then use that as a starting point to see where ghost rivers radiated from there. This method had sent them on a zigzag course to the west, and had produced a trickle of leads for ghost rivers shooting off in all directions along that path.

Owen had hoped the Prince would give them a thaumagraph to take into the field, but he didn’t have many of them, and didn’t want to chance losing one. Owen understood, but he wanted the Prince to get the information as fast as possible. As it was, they had one more day in the field, and had to be back to Temperance inside a week.

Not having a thaumagraph is likely best. Owen had been one of the first trained on the thaumagraph which, until November, had consisted of wheels that clicked and spun. Depending on the power of the person sending, the wheels might jump about, and recording a message required the operator to watch a wheel, then look at paper to jot the number down, and back to the wheel. That made it easy to miss a number.

He’d trained Bethany Frost and her brother, but she’d been the one to suggest the substitution of notes for clicking wheels. The Prince had recalled thinking of how he first thought the thaumagraph might amount to nothing more than a remotely played pianoforte, so had little trouble redesigning along the lines suggested by Bethany and his wife. Bethany had mastered the new model quickly, and ended up teaching Owen how to work it.

He’d found something soothing in how her messages had sounded. Words encoded as numbers produced discordant music, but she managed a rhythm to the notes which made her messages easy to listen to. There had been times when she was in Temperance and he was in the Prince’s laboratory where they abandoned the codes and just spelled words out using a simple five by five grid to relate numbers to letters. To practice they chatted about everyday things, silly things, and he often found himself smiling or laughing aloud, even if a story might take a tortuously long time to unfold or ghost messages interfered.

There had been nothing improper in their chats. Either or both would mention his wife freely. They discussed his family, including Becca, who had become part of his household. Bethany would mention times she’d seen Catherine in Temperance-always at a distance and always polite. The discussions tended largely to be matter of fact, but he found it easy to imagine her listening, smiling, her eyes twinkling. He even took to writing out some messages in his journal in code, so he could send them quickly, and they reduced certain phrases, like common greetings, to abbreviations that only they could decipher.

Catherine really had been doing her best through the winter. She’d stopped nagging him and accepted that he could say little or nothing about his work for the Prince. She devoted herself to caring for Miranda and Becca. She often took them into Temperance-especially when he was traveling for the Prince-and they all sat together in the Cathedral for weekly services.

She had become the wife he remembered, save in sharing the marital bed. Granted, in the winter, when winds howled and the house became very cold, there was little reason to stop Miranda and Becca from joining them in bed. But even when they had time alone, Catherine appeared fatigued. Owen attributed it to her putting out a tremendous effort to make Mystria her home. She always seemed happier after a trip to Temperance. She loved city life and her being forced to choose between it and her husband was exhausting her.

Sex had trickled to nothingness as the winter moved into spring. That wasn’t much of a surprise. Their physical relations had always waned as sailing season approached. Even though she remained pleasant and didn’t even hint at traveling to Norisle, he suspected past resentment lurked in her heart. Becca’s addition to the household obviated the need for another child immediately, but he and Catherine played the game with well-wishing busybodies, claiming they were working on increasing their family one way or another. The lack of lovemaking he could accept as the price of a peaceful home.