Raymond Feist - Magician’s End

Martin said, ‘That we went through a pointless exercise?’

Jim nodded. ‘Yes. What else?’

It was Brendan who answered. ‘No one is where they’re supposed to be.’

‘Exactly.’

Hal said, ‘So if another threat materializes, no one is in the correct position to deal with it.’

Martin calculated, then said, ‘The West.’

Jim nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘I need to get back to Crydee!’ said Hal.

‘No,’ said Jim. ‘You need to stay here until my grandfather tells you to go somewhere else. Most likely to Prince Edward.’ He looked at Martin and Brendan. ‘You must return to Ylith and explain to the Keshian commander that he’s in the way and you need to go poking around. My intelligence tells me you’ve got a reasonable chance to have him agree for the right bribe – he is Keshian, after all, as long as you only go with a small patrol. If he doesn’t, you need to find a clever way to get around his objections without starting another war out there. Sneaking past his line should prove little trouble to a couple of bright lads like you.

‘But you need to get into the Far Coast, north of the garrisons at Carse and Tulan, so my best guess is somewhere near the taredhel and that city they’re building, perhaps near the dwarves.’

‘Who?’ asked Brendan. ‘Besides Keshian Dog Soldiers and elves and dwarves, who would be there?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jim. ‘That’s what I need your brother and you to find out.’

The brothers spent a long night with Jim Dasher discussing as much of the political situation with Great Kesh as could be extrapolated from what Martin and Brendan had seen during the defence of the city and after. They matched what they had seen with reports from the West that had reached the king’s court, which in this case meant Jim Dasher’s personal attention.

The long and short of it was that it was a mess. Kesh had withdrawn to the ancient borders of Bosania, so a few miles of road to the west of the City of Ylith were open to the crest of the foothills of the Grey Towers Mountains, as well as the southwest highway, leading to the Free Cities which were still currently occupied by Kesh.

By the time they were finished examining all their options and what needed to be done, the sun was rising in the east. Martin was convinced Jim Dasher was perhaps the cleverest man he had ever met, or at least the most cunning. And Martin was also convinced that Jim was correct: the entire war with Kesh and the plot behind it was designed to put both the Kingdom of the Isles and the Empire of Great Kesh at a military disadvantage in the Far West.

No military action of any kind could quickly be mounted should a threat arise in the Duchy of Crydee or the Free Cities, or the Grey Towers Mountains. It might take days, or even weeks, for news of any outbreak of trouble in the west to reach Prince Edward on the Fields of Albalyn, and if he instantly dispatched some of the western lords’ commands to answer, it would be weeks before they reached any site of trouble. And that was dependent on being able to spare men with the possibility of a military confrontation with Prince Oliver looming. By sunrise, Jim and the brothers were convinced the Far Coast and the Western Realm were as defenceless as a day-old kitten.

Martin was a student of history and it didn’t take him more than an hour of looking at suggested Keshian deployment in the Far Coast and Free Cities to come to the same conclusion as Jim. The safest location from any counterattacks from the combined armies of the Kingdom of the Isles and the Empire of Great Kesh that wasn’t on the bottom of some ocean or one of the moons, was in the centre of the Grey Towers Mountains; very close to the site of the original Tsurani rift into Midkemia.

As the cock crowed in the distance, the three looked at the now-empty carafe of coffee and wordlessly exchanged the shared opinion that they had reached a conclusion. ‘The Grey Towers,’ said Martin. ‘Neither Kesh nor the Kingdom nor the Free Cities can answer the kind of threat the Tsurani posed when they arrived …’

‘Where the Star Elves are building their city,’ continued Brendan.

Jim rose. ‘Well, the sun’s up and we’ve beaten this topic to death. It’s time to move and I think we’d best be getting on with it. It’s still before dawn in Krondor so you—’ he indicated Martin and Brendan, ‘—can still be leaving there at sunrise, once we get you there.’ To Hal he said, ‘You need some rest. You’re going to have to withstand a lot of charm, guile, and bald-faced lies before we’re done, but I’ll be at your side most of the time and your best course of action is to nod and say you’ll consider what’s been suggested. Edward’s enemies are not all on the field under arms. There are a lot of poisoned tongues still in the palace.’

Hal embraced his brothers and bade them a safe journey.

Jim took Martin and Brendan with him through a palace that was never truly asleep, as servants scurried to ensure that every resident’s needs were met before dawn.

Reaching Jim’s personal quarters, they entered a tidy office adjacent to his sleeping room and he quickly set about penning a travel document. He signed it with a flourish, poured wax and applied a seal to it.

‘Isn’t that the duke’s signet?’ asked Brendan.

‘It’s a twin,’ said Jim. ‘My grandfather gave it to me to reduce his own need to sign things; he finds it annoying.’

‘And did you just sign his name?’ said Martin.

‘Of course,’ said Jim as if this was quite normal. ‘Wait here.’

A short time later, he returned with a woman of middle years, with greying dark hair, and a no-nonsense demeanour. ‘This is Gretchen. She will take you where you need to go.’

Before Martin or Brendan could speak, Gretchen reached out and seized their wrists and suddenly they were in a different room. ‘Krondor,’ she said, and vanished.

Apparently the comings and goings of magicians in what was revealed as Jim Dasher’s private suite in Krondor were commonplace enough that the palace guards did not react when two men unexpectedly walked out of a room that had been empty only moments before.

The brothers had been in Krondor only twice before: a leisurely visit to Prince Edward’s court when Martin had been small (Brendan had still been a baby), and their hurried visit on the way to Rillanon just weeks before.

‘What now?’ said Brendan.

Martin shrugged. ‘Find someone in charge, I suppose.’

It took the better part of an hour to find the acting city commander, a man named Falston Jennings, hastily elevated from the rank of prince’s squire to baronet of the court, so that he could lawfully be considered a noble. He was obviously in over his head and anxious to see if what he said made sense to the brothers from Crydee, especially as they had introduced themselves as ‘Princes Martin and Brendan, the late king’s cousins’.

They had endured Jennings’s near-babbling conversation over as informal a break fast meal as the palace had likely seen in a century, for many of the key servants had travelled east with Prince Edward, attending his baggage-train and pavilion to ensure his comfort on the journey to Rillanon.

Martin left that meal with a jumble of facts he could barely make sense of, let alone organize into coherent intelligence. Brendan had been amused by the entire course of events, but of the three brothers he was the one most easily amused.

From what they could get from Jennings’s ramble, Kesh had withdrawn her ships to a point behind an imaginary line extending from a point halfway between Land’s End and Durbin in the south to the border between the Free Cities and the Kingdom, in the north. Kingdom ships were given free passage up to Sarth, but no captain dared sail farther north as the island kingdom of Queg had declared a state of emergency – a pretext for them to board and seize any ship that sailed ‘too close’ to their imagined ‘sphere of influence’, which at the moment meant from their beach to ankle-deep water on the Kingdom shore north of Sarth.