Douglas Niles - Circle at center

“Look-we’ve knocked all of them out of the fight!” cried a crewman on the Swallow.

Whoops and shouts swept from the elven ships as the fleet of caravels wheeled away. Druids cast their magic, and as wind again filled the sails it was a triumphant fleet, with pennants flying and crews cheering, that sailed back to the anchorage below the Mercury Terrace.

Z ystyl clumped across the encampment and nodded to the two guards, giants who stood outside Sir Christopher’s palisade. He couldn’t see them, of course, but their auras-of scent, sound, and vitality-clearly marked them in the Delver’s mind. The first was full of lust, he sensed, yearning for a giantess he hadn’t seen in a long time. The second was a dullard, head fogged by too much firebrew consumed the previous night.

Numerous adaptations allowed the Unmirrored commander to move about under the light of Nayve’s sun, which had at first been almost unbearably painful to all his senses. A shield of silver was now attached to his helmet, deflecting the horrible light and providing him with an area of permanent shadow. His body was cloaked in a silk of fine weave and bright white color, a covering that extended right down to his fingertips. Only his sensitive nostrils were bared-as always, those moist apertures sniffed and sucked at the air, drawing in sensations that were far deeper than mere odors.

Leaving the giants behind, Zystyl relished the cool shade of the knight’s great stone-walled house. Shrugging the silken cloak from his shoulders, he allowed the sensations of warmth and chill against his skin to locate the walls and arched doorways surrounding him. With unerring accuracy he started toward the knight’s audience room.

And then, hearing the sound of a harsh voice, he halted, listening.

“… a time when I would have had you killed… burned at the stake.” It was the knight, Sir Christopher, speaking patiently, as if to a recalcitrant child. “You should be grateful that you have lived all these years, have been granted the chance to serve me.”

Zystyl listened and smelled, ensuring that he was alone in the great hall. Soundlessly he sidled closer to the closed door of the audience chamber.

“You are a fool-a blind fool,” snapped another voice, which then dropped into a register of bleak despair. “Or perhaps it’s myself who’s the fool… laboring in your name for all these years. How do I know you don’t hold me with an empty threat?”

Christopher laughed. “The druid crone is allowed to live at my sufferance… and my sufferance depends upon your steady labors. Do not think to change our arrangement now, or I assure you that your precious Miradel will pay the price. Take a look at her villa tonight, blacksmith… look long and hard, for it is only your labors on my behalf that keeps your precious druidess alive.”

A door slammed in the distance, and the Delver knew that someone had just left the audience room by a different exit. And he knew who that person was.

After a moment Zystyl cleared his throat and stomped noisily toward the room. He heard Sir Christopher rise out of his chair when he entered. The dwarf could smell the anxiety in the man, hear the tension in the rapidity of his breathing. Beneath his gauze mask the Delver’s metal mouth twisted into a smile-he had his ally at a disadvantage, and he would make use of the opportuntity presented to him.

“Your galleys have been driven from the lake, those that survive,” said Zystyl bluntly.

“We were met by a new weapon,” snapped the human. Frustration and fury thrummed beneath the surface of his voice, and the Delver relished the knight’s agitation. “Something we have never seen before. Globes of metal flung through the air from the deck of the enemy’s caravels… they shattered, and burned like the fires of the devil on my ships.”

“I heard the springs,” Zystyl replied. “It is a mobile battery, much like the weapons that the Seers used in the First Circle. Quite deadly, I imagine, to thin-hulled wooden ships. They have a command of metal technology, in Circle at Center-it is no surprise that they are putting it to such good use.”

“These are the uses of Satan!” Sir Christopher retorted. “Not the forging of good, honest steel-in the manner God intended for His warriors of virtue.”

“Ah… the forging of metal. You continue to get many tools-all your swords and armor, yes-from the druid prisoner?”

“As I have for all these years, yes.”

“It was a fortunate thing for you that you captured the man who, among all druids, is the one who knows the forging of steel.”

“It was the will of God.”

“Then let us use that will for more constructive purposes.”

“What do you propose we do?”

“What I have suggested for years. Now, perhaps, you will listen to me?”

“You may speak. But remember, the man who shapes steel is mine… he answers to my commands, and only I know the secret of his bondage.”

Zystyl nodded, knowing the human would observe the gesture, accept it as a positive response. In the heart of his mask, the metal jaws twisted into a cruel smile.

Belynda tried to take some encouragement from the columns of figures on the pages before her, the tallies of recruits and armaments that should have been good news. She saw the proof of a growing army, a force that steadily gained might, confidence, and experience. Every cycle, more elves made the decision to join the Nayvian forces-seventy-four of them in the last forty days alone, most drawn from right here in Circle at Center. When added to the goblins recruited by the loquacious “Captin” Hiyram, the giants who steadily emigrated from the Greens and crossed the lake by raft in the dark of the night, and the young centaurs who rallied in answer to Gallupper’s entreaties, Natac’s army had gained another two hundred souls in this, the third interval of the twenty-fifth year of the war.

But then there were pages with other columns, different figures, such as the dolorous list of thirty-two brave elves who drowned when their caravel had been shattered by giant-thrown boulders, the four giants who had perished in recent skirmishes on the causeway, and the dozens of goblins who were killed during the routine brawls that rocked their camp with inevitable frequency. Always the gains were balanced against the losses, as they had been since the Battle of the Blue Swan. Even if that balance showed that the army defending the city was continuing to grow, as it had in nearly every interval of every year of the war, it amazed her that she could muster even the pretense of dispassion as she pondered such matters of life and death.

And to what purpose?

It had fallen to her to be the organizer, to gather the mortal fodder that Natac, and his lieutenants such as Tamarwind, Karkald, and Rawknuckle Barefist, sent into battle. Often they won, and sometimes they lost. Always warriors died, and others were recruited to take their places.

The sage-ambassador sighed, and rose from her writing table. She went to the window, looked across the Center of Everything, saw the great loom rising from its base in the shallow valley. Her colorful songbirds regarded her from their branches, still and silent. Beyond the garden and the valley she was aware of the teeming city, for the most part still going through the days as though nothing had changed. Music reached her ears, the tune wafting from some idle street-corner concert within a nearby elven neighborhood.

Even farther beyond, past the outskirts of the city and the once-placid lake, Belynda felt-though she could not see-the presence of the Knight of the Crimson Cross. Her hatred flared unbidden as the awareness seeped through her mind, burning in her breast and surging with all the force of that brutal night so long ago. She caressed that malice with her thoughts, holding it close, breathing the fetid smell of his sweaty flesh, remembering the anguish that had pierced her when he pressed home his brutal assault. Sometimes it seemed to be all that kept her going, that hatred, and so in her own way she cherished it, recalled it willingly, knowing that amid the inaction and apathy of Circle at Center she, at least, had a powerful cause, a reason for waging this war.