Twenty years, the thought was bitter on the queen mother’s tongue. Twenty years of trickery and manipulation, of struggle to maintain the pretense of a mundane nature as she cajoled and connived the Turaleean mages into “discovering” the magicks necessary for the pool’s creation. Twenty years of prohibitively costly search for the sometimes rare, sometimes unique components and ingredients.

And now it was gone. Gone along with the single most talented practitioner in its use upon the second world. Gone with eleven of the fifteen people on the second world who had even an inkling of how to use it, let alone rebuild it. She kicked angrily at a bit of dusty rubble, wincing at the pain in her toes, cursing her soft slippers silently.

“Milady,” the lord chamberlain whispered from well behind her.

Sighing heavily, she turned to regard this most faithful of retainers. Fear shone in his face, and he stood rooted as he awaited her pleasure. She frowned. He couldn’t know anything, could he? There was talk, of course; one couldn’t be found sobbing, naked, buried to the knees in pulverized rubble, and not create a certain clamor. But there was nothing more than conjecture to fuel it. She alone had survived the explosion that had reduced the tower to fist sized chunks. None but she to carry the tale, and she wasn’t about to illuminate the ignorant.

Could he suspect? How? Had she let something slip? Possible... he’d been in her shadow for fifteen years, and he was not stupid. He’d not have been useful had he been stupid. Perhaps it was time to look into a replacement; someone who had no catalog of minutia regarding her actions through the years.

“Milady,” he repeated gently.

“Yes, Lord Chamberlain,” she breathed. “What is it now?”

“The remaining journeymen and apprentices, milady,” his voice was concerned. “Those with knowledge of the pool, that is. All of those with knowledge of the pool and its use.”

“Get on with it, man,” the queen mother interrupted.

“Er... they’re gone, Majesty.”

“What?”

“Vanished. Absconded during the night. Can’t find a manjack of them.”

“Have you—?”

“I’ve had every rathole and cobwebbed corner in the city searched. I’ve the spies out in such force they nearly outnumber the populace, and the palace guard is marching four deep in the streets. The seeing mages are not in the city nor in the surrounding towns or villages.”

The queen mother put hand to forehead, squeezing her eyes shut as a sharp ache spread from temples to crown. Gone. All of them. She was blind. Turalee was blind. Without knowledgeable assistance, even abandoning all pretense, there was no possibility of reconstructing the pool in less than five years.

“The pool is lost to us, then,” she rasped past her massaging hand. “We shall have to make due with what we do have.” She paused to consider. Loathe as she was to admit it, there remained one last force to harness.

Sighing heavily, she lowered her hand and waved it at the lord chamberlain. “Scribes, milord. We shall have scribes. Find me sufficient scribes to collate the sphereist reports and sufficient managers to interpret such reports.”

Another sigh, this one epic. “We shall further bloat the monster of bureaucracy, and pray that we have not released a danger greater than that we oppose.”

“As you wish, Majesty,” the lord chamberlain bowed himself out rather more rapidly than was his wont.

Alone again, she turned back to regard the rubble. For twenty years and more, she’d been cloaked in human garb, insinuating and learning while the all squatted in the ice and plotted. Twenty years and more encased in soft, vulnerable flesh, subject to cold and heat, wind and rain. And with each passing day.... She shivered and squared her shoulders. The all was everything. The all was omnipotent. If the all had decided it correct to reassert control of this splinter and destroy the greatest of her tools, why then, there must be a good reason for it.

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She snorted mockingly as she turned away from the ruined tower for the last time. Pride, perhaps. Arrogance, maybe. Foolishness, certainly. Odd that these traits had never manifested before their time on this world.

Moving quietly through the awakening palace, the taste of heresy sweet upon her tongue, she turned her thoughts to the young courtier who’d been sharing her bed of late. Odd how this body, all squishy and weak, so outstripped her older, stronger form in the anticipation and culmination of such pleasures. Unconsciously, her pace quickened. He’d still be asleep after his night’s exertions, and if she reached him before he arose and awakened him correctly, this whole ugly business might be forgotten for a time.

* * *

“The camp is silent,” Joblar told the trader just donning his boots. “No movement, no smoke. Animals and slaves still penned, though they would normally be readying for the day’s labors by this time.”

“Good,” Koli replied as he moved to the captured cart and began loading fresh powder into the flash pans of his pistols and those of the deceased officers and mage. “Perhaps we’ll find the lot of them dead and have an easy time of it.”

He hated these sorts of doings. He’d much rather have simply bribed the guards away from their charges. Still, there was a debt to be paid. A debt whose coin of necessity was steel, lead, and blood. So be it. They’d give full measure and a bit for the lads in the back.

The sun was full up, shining warm upon the backs of the two of them, for they’d be approaching from out of the dawn’s glare, just in case.

“Shall we then?” Koli invited.

Joblar shrugged the soldier’s cloak more squarely across his wide shoulders and moved quietly toward the camp. The garment came barely to his knees, and wouldn’t close around his wide frame. He’d managed a pair of breeches by slitting the legs halfway up and notching the back to clear the base of his stub tail, but hadn’t been able to find a shirt or tunic he could squeeze into at all. Still he was at least through gadding about naked as a savage. The mace he held loosely at the end of his arm, tapping it idly against his leg.

Coming in from down wind as they were, the scent of the grain they waded through had to fight with the stench of unwashed bodies and untreated disease to reach them– an increasingly hopeless battle as they drew nearer.

Koli found himself, with nose wrinkled, regarding Joblar out the corner of one eye, wondering what the dalla was feeling— if the stench which had no doubt become such a part of his life as to be unnoticeable were any the worse for its temporary absence. The dalla’s face was grim and closed, and Koli decided he didn’t need to know just now.

They separated well clear of the barracks. It was Joblar who first found sign of the camp’s occupants. Halfway between the shack and the privy the sergeant lay, limbs twisted into an agonized ball, the cruelty of his final hours written upon his ugly face. It had not been a kind poison the trader had brewed up from prairie flowers and pond grubs.

In the privy itself, another body leaned against the plank wall, blood staining the wooden seat and running down its legs.

How many guards were there? Joblar strained to remember. He’d killed a hand of them himself in his escape, and The Tairn had slain another hand of them. Now here were an additional pair. Out of a compliment of what? There was the rub. A slave hadn’t much chance in the chains to note or catalog the number of his captors, and Joblar had been too flummoxed upon seeing the returning guards to count them. Always assuming all of those had remained and no more had arrived since.

The dalla shook himself. He was dithering. It mattered not how many there were. He and the were were here to kill them. And kill them they would, however many there were.

Easing around behind the privy, he edged an eye past the raw planking and was able to see the cabin door, albeit at an extreme angle. Nothing. No movement, no sound. Sweeping his gaze abroad, he spied the were at the stable door. That one held a hand aloft, a single finger extended. Joblar replied with two of his own.

Leaving the guard’s cabin for last, the two raiders filtered quietly through the camp, alert for the slightest movement. The slave pens were locked tight, and with new locks. Joblar found himself wondering how they’d gotten them so quickly.

The pair of them met up at the far side of the camp, behind the wagon shed.

“How many do you reckon?” Koli asked.

“I wish I knew.” Joblar shrugged. “With the one you found, we’ve accounted for two hands-three of them, I think. I’d sort of gotten it into my head over the years that there were four hands of them around, but that’s only an impression, and not a hard and certain fact.”

“So we’re probably looking for seven more, more or less.” Koli scratched absently behind his left ear.

Joblar repeated the shrug, but didn’t add anything else.

“And they’re either out of the camp or in that cabin,” the trader finished.

“In the cabin, I think,” Joblar pointed with the mace. “Along with the keys to the shiny new locks on the slave pens.”

“You still can’t—?”

“Still only the iron,” Joblar confessed. “Perhaps some day, but not today.”

“Well, they’re probably dead anyway, so what are we waiting for?