She didn't waste time on farewells; Lady Moth was not one to waste time on anything, as Kyrtian recalled. A brief embrace for him, and a sketchy salute for Gel was all she gave, then she was out of the tent and back on her way to her waiting human escort.
Gel followed her out, to be sure she got back safely through the lines. While he was gone, Kyrtian folded the maps, tidied
the tent, and removed the bronze plaque from the teleson. He wanted to talk to Lady Lydiell about this while it was all still fresh in his mind. It was worth the chance of being "overheard," although given that this was a very odd hour to be talking to her, that was less likely this time.
Lydiell listened to his brief summary with her eyes alight. "If this had been anyone other than Moth, I would have said it was too good to be true," she said when he was finished. "But it is Moth, and frankly, it's exactly the sort of thing I would expect out of her. Well—look what she's done on her own, discovering how to negate the collar-spells and get them off without hurting the slaves!"
"Useful bit of information, that," Kyrtian murmured, thinking out loud. "It would have to be a human that did it, though; I wouldn't want to chance either poisoning by the metal or magical backlash. Mother, how am I going to keep Lord Kyndreth from suspecting that something is up when all resistance suddenly melts away?"
"By staging more of a rout at this next mock-battle than you're likely to get from the handful of former gladiators there," she said instantly. "You and I will create a Gate from here to there, and we'll send through all of our people that can fight. They'll pose as slaves of the Young Lords—they'll hold a line, then break and rout—straight back to the Gate and home. That will give you something to convince Kyndreth that you've won a conclusive victory."
"A Gate? Can I do that?" he asked doubtfully. "Am I strong enough?"
"Not by yourself—but remember what you discovered about combining magic from several people?" she countered. "You have me and the others here; together we will have quite enough to create a Gate."
He nodded, and began to feel more confident. "Perhaps I should invite Lord Kyndreth to observe?"
"At a distance," she answered. "With the Council. There's an old viewing-teleson in the Council Chamber; they probably haven't used it since the disastrous debacle with Lord Dyran."
"But if I choose where to put the teleson-sender, they'll see
what I want them to see." This was coming out better and better. "And with all of the Great Lords jostling about, they aren't going to notice the Gate—"
"They won't notice it anyway," Lydiell said with confidence. "It's very noisy, but they won't be expecting it and they'll be too far away. They'd have to know something like that was going on."
"Oh, I can cover it with some levin-bolts anyway," Kyrtian decided. "They'd be expecting something of the sort. Mother— I think this is going to work—"
"I never doubted that you would find a way," she said serenely.
When they ended their conversation, and he had covered the teleson-screen again, he waited impatiently for Gel to return so that he could work out all the details of this addition to the plan.
For the first time since he had taken over the command of the Great Lords' army, he began to hope he could save, not only his own people, but everyone involved. Or at least, almost everyone. And that was so much more than he had ever thought he'd be able to do, that he felt as if he had just drunk an entire bottle of sparkling wine.
Now, let's hope all this doesn't prove to be as ephemeral as wine-joy!
18
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The ears outside Lord Kyrtian's tent are a lot keener than he has any reason to guess, Keman thought with glee, as he heard Kyrtian concluding the second conversation of the day with Lady Lydiell. So, Elvenlord, why haven't you figured out that you have dragons on your doorstep—literally?
Keman, Shana's foster-brother, was, of course, that dragon. So was his partner in this spying endeavor, although she came
from a Lair that had never known there were other dragons in the world until she met him. Dragons, with their ability to shapechange into virtually anything they chose, were uniquely suited to spying on the Elves, who could easily crack any disguise wrought with illusions. In spite of the fact that in his real form he was easily forty or fifty times the bulk of even the strongest and tallest male human (or Elf) he'd ever seen, the draconic gift of being able to push mass and weight elsewhere—they called it, "into the Out"—made it possible for him to masquerade as even a small child.
He and Dora had shapechanged themselves into human fighters and insinuated themselves into the Great Lords' army as soon as it became obvious that this new commander was just as brilliant as the old one had been incompetent. When they first began this task on Shana's behalf, they had gone from one Great Lord's household to another in the forms of various slaves—since no Great Lord ever bothered to take note of a mere human so long as he didn't disobey and had no hint of magic as an Elf understood it about him. They had actually been in Lord Kyndreth's household as a pair of pages when the first news of Lord Kyrtian's victories came in. From there it had been a matter of simplicity to insinuate themselves into the company of fighters the Great Lord sent to augment the army.
The only hard part had been slipping away at night every so often to hunt, for a dragon needed vastly more food than a human. Even that hadn't been too horribly difficult, and they had been keeping Shana informed faithfully of all that this new commander was doing. It had taken him a little time to get used to his partner's outward appearance, however; having a grizzled, muscle-bound, surly male look at him while he was hearing Dora's voice in his mind was a little unsettling. And it hardly needed to be said that while they were in these guises, they could not even make the most casual of affectionate gestures towards one another, not even the sorts of things that had been possible as pages. Only when they flew in their own shapes could he court her as she deserved.
Keman and Dora weren't the guards just outside the tent flaps of Lord Kyrtian's tent—that position was reserved for the
handful of men that Sergeant Gel had tested and tried and found trustworthy. For one thing, although both dragons might look like fighters, they didn't have any real skill with the formidable weapons that they held—skill did not come with the shape, alas. They hadn't even been among the volunteers hoping for such a position. No, they were guarding the wagons holding the possessions of the other Elvenlords serving as Kyrtian's officers, possessions which had not been unpacked for days (much to the disgruntlement of their owners) since the speed of march had not permitted the kind of leisurely camping with luxuries that the previous commander had allowed.
It was a good thing that darkness cloaked any faint signs of his impatience, for Keman could hardly contain himself. They had known for some time that Lord Kyrtian was very unlike Lord Levelis, the previous commander, in more ways than simple competence. For one thing, his method of training was astounding—using magic to counterfeit blades and other weapons, so that it was possible to acquire real skill without ever getting hurt! For the first time, a human slave delegated to the position of "fighter" stood a decent chance of surviving— and would manage to get through his training period without being killed or maimed.
That in and of itself had brought excitement among the ranks to a fever pitch, but there was soon more to rejoice in. Rumor in the ranks had soon been proved truth—that Lord Kyrtian actually cared about the humans who served in the ranks and was not inclined to throw them into combat and use them up the way his predecessor had. But until tonight they had not realized how wildly different his attitudes toward humans were from those of other Elvenlords!
It seemed that Lady Moth and the late and lamented Lord Va-lyn were not the only ones of their kind to regard humans as something other than objects of possession, creatures destined by birth to serve and be consumed and tossed away at the whims of their Elven masters. Even the rebellious Young Lords had proved something of a disappointment once they had a modicum of power—the humans under their control might not have to fear the terrible punishments inflicted on them by magic
anymore, but they were still slaves, and treated as such. Not so with Lord Kyrtian, whose very second-in-command was a human, much to the further disgruntlement of the Elvenlords serving as officers.
Wait until Shana hears all this! he thought, hardly able to contain himself and wait for the next shift of guards to come and relieve them.
It was clear to Keman at least that someone from the Wizards was going to have to approach Lord Kyrtian. They couldn't afford not to, now. It was clear from his two conversations that he did not want to find himself forced to hunt down the Wizards, which he would, if he managed to defeat the Young Lords.
What was more, it was entirely likely that he could find them and beat them in combat. The one thing that had saved them in the past was that the Elvenlords had used mostly magic against the Wizards—and the Wizards had used mostly magic against their foes. The problem was that the Wizards' main defense now was the use of iron—which was brilliant, but did prevent them from using magic offensively. The dragons could help, but they were as vulnerable to real weapons as humans and halfbloods were—and Lord Kyrtian could field an army of slaves that would have no difficulty in defeating any Wizard army.
Unless, of course, the Iron People could be convinced to help. Ah, but why should they? Why should they actually fight, when they themselves were in no real danger from the Elvenlords and they could always go back to the south and safety? Their leader, the Iron Priest Diric, certainly liked Shana and her friends, but he was a pragmatic sort, and he could lose his position if he advocated something that would bring danger to the Iron People with little or no reward.
Ah, but now they knew that Lord Kyrtian didn't want to fight the Wizards. True, he might find himself in the position where he had to appear to fight them, but if the Wizards were in secret partnership with Lord Kyrtian, he could obey the orders to do so with every appearance of obedience to the Council. If, for instance, he knew where the Wizards actually were, he could hunt unsuccessfully, but dutifully, everywhere that they weren't until the Council got tired of it all and disbanded the army.
Sooner or later they would do just that; especially if the Wizards were able to help in that direction. It wouldn't be difficult to stage scenes of abandoned camps and great desolation, to make it look as if, once chased from the haven of the Citadel, the Wizards had found it impossible to survive in the wilderness.
Keman's thoughts filled with contempt for the "Old Whin-ers." They would have had that very problem if it hadn't been for Shana and the dragons. Caellach Gwain and the others like him were no more equipped to take care of themselves than the pampered Elvenlords themselves would have been if stripped of magical powers. Put some forlorn "settlements" together, . made of mud huts with crumbling walls and caved-in roofs, and scatter a few bones about, and leave them for Lord Kyrtian to "discover" and the Elvenlords might be convinced that if any halfbloods did survive they were not worth pursuing.
And then, Keman thought, when we're secure again, we might even be able to secretly trade with Lord Kyrtian for things that we need. Although he liked Diric and the Iron People, and the folk of the Trader clans, enormously, it made him very uneasy that the Wizards now depended on these two sets of relative strangers (who after all had agendas of their own) for the things they couldn't produce themselves. Keman could never forget that the Iron People had once held him, Shana, Mero, and Father Dragon captive—Iron Priest Diric had nearly been toppled from his seat of power once, and it could happen again. Keman would rather that his friends and foster-sister had one more layer to their net of survival.
The Wizards had once stolen what they wanted from the supply-wagons of the Elvenlords themselves, but that had all come to an end when the Elvenlords realized that they still existed and were pilfering supplies. Such thefts were too dangerous now and, in fact, had been forbidden by the tenuous treaty that the Elvenlords had agreed to with them—but the Wizards were not craftsfolk or terribly successful farmers. Hunters—oh my, yes—they merely had to magically transport an animal from the forest or fields by magic to kill it, and even the least skilled of them could do that, for magic was one stalker that no beast could scent. Meat of all sorts they had in abundance, and
hides, and the rather lovely horns of alicorns, but the best they were able to do in the way of agriculture was a bit of vegetable-gardening. Shana, one of the few Wizards to manage the transportation spell that enabled her to move living creatures intact, had been able to bring the flock of sheep that had been at the old Citadel, and had purloined some chickens that had strayed and so were technically not Elvenlord property. Keman and Kalamadea had brought them goats, and even horses, but the terrain around the caves they had taken to live in was simply unsuited for cultivating grain.
And as for crafts, well, at some point they were going to run out of cloth, and there weren't more than a dozen of the fully-human ex-slaves among them that knew how to spin and weave. There was one single potter, and no glassmakers. As for metal-smiths, well, the less said, the better. True, the Iron People had smiths in plenty, but they were down in the plain, and thus far there hadn't been a great deal that the Wizards could provide that the Iron People wanted in trade.