They looked like Greys.
Garrette cleared his throat. "On the matter of, ahmn, Diamondwell, gentlemen—ah, gentle, mm, gentlefolk ... ?" Damn this bloody Westerling! Had he insulted them? The blasted language was purely clumsy. He was an Administrator, not some damned diplomat. He was uncertain as to the actual relationship between Diamondwell and House Mithondionne—weren't dwarfs and elves supposed to hate each other, or something? He couldn't remember if that idea came from Overworld history, or some damned fairy tale his mother had made him read as a boy.
And now they were staring at him, all five of them. Garrette's face began to heat up. The damned elves stared at him like they could read his mind.
"Ah, yes, Diamondwell," one of them said—Quelliar was the name Garrette had been given, and he'd taken this elf for the leader. "It was lovely. I guested there, mmm, perhaps it was in the second decade of Ravenlock—that would be, oh, nine hundred–odd years ago, as you humans reckon, Your Highness. Spectacular, it was. Caverns that gleamed of travertine, and a jolly, sturdy folk: fine cooks and uproarious dancers."
"Though no ear for music," another put in.
"Ah, but the rhythm," Quelliar countered. "For their taste, rhythm outweighs pitch."
"Hmm, true," a third said. "The stonebenders of those days did not speak of an ear for music, but rather of a heart for dance."
Garrette's face remained attentively blank, while inwardly he struggled to keep his frustration from boiling down to fury. This was some kind of damned game for them, he was sure of it.
A lovely place indeed, he sneered inside his head. He had seen those caverns: dark, dank, airless holes in the rock, their only real value lying ignored in the stone. Those dwarfs had been no better than savages, bowing down before their tribal fetish while the very walls around them gleamed and glittered with untold mineral wealth. The Company's geological survey still explored the caves, and each new report was more exciting than the last; stoping had begun around the first two drill sites, and the extracted ores had been found to be rich beyond imagining.
What a waste, Garrette thought, as he always did when he imagined all the centuries those dwarfs had squatted in the caves. Diamondwell was the latest example of one of Garrette's primary rules: If you don't know how to use something you have no call to complain when it's taken by somebody who does. The stunted little troglodytes didn't even really understand what they had lost.
But—as always—it seemed that the solution had constructed a problem of its own. These damned elves
One had to respect their power, though. Every report had made that clear. Elves can reach into your mind; they can make you hallucinate on command. This was why every door to this room was posted with Overworld Company secmen—the "Artan Guard"—wearing the latest magick-resistant ballistic armor and bearing chemically powered assault rifles. At the very first indication that Garrette saw something in this room that didn't belong, one shout would bring six heavily armed men through those doors, and they would come in shooting. He would not take the slightest chance.
And if the damned elves could read his mind, let them read that there. Maybe then they'd give him his due respect.
He forced the thought away. That was nothing but a conflict rehearsal. He did this too often; it was a bad habit that he'd been trying for years to overcome. Rehearsing a conflict brings that energy into your life, he repeated to himself. It was another of his primary rules.
Back to business: He took a deep breath and tried again. "The, ah, Diamondwell resettlement camp is not far from Thorncleft. Perhaps in the morning, I might take you to it? You could see for yourselves how well they are cared for."
Quelliar's eyebrows slanted even more. "Like pets?"
"Like partners," Garrette corrected firmly, but Quelliar seemed not to hear.
"Humans and their pets," he said, impenetrably patronizing. His voice chimed with alien laughter. "Who owns whom?"
"Valued partners," Garrette insisted. Two could play that I-don't-hear-you game, he told himself. "They have been of such very great assistance in our mining—"
"Perhaps our difficulties arise from language," Quelliar said graciously. "In Mithondion, the sort of partners that must be confined by fences are called cattle. Do you not know that word?"
Garrette pasted on his professionally blank Administrator's smile while he strove to guess at an appropriate response. He was rescued by the opening of a door. A secman, assault rifle slung, took one uncertain step inside and closed the door behind him; then he came to attention and saluted, his right hand to the brow above the silver-mesh face shield of his antimagick helmet.
"Apologies for interrupting, Administrator," he said in English. "The Monastic Ambassador is in the hall."
"Raithe?" Garrette said, frowning. What on Earth would the Ambassador be doing here at this hour?
"Yes, sir. In the hall outside."
"What does he want?"
"He wouldn't say, sir. But he insists that it's extremely urgent."
For that matter, how the devil had the Monastic Ambassador gotten this far into Thornkeep without Garrette having been informed? Garrette gave his head an irritable shake. "Very well," he said crisply. "Tell his Excellency that as soon as I have completed this business ..."
His voice trailed off as the door swung silently inward to reveal Ambassador Raithe standing patiently in the hallway beyond. The Ambassador stood very straight and very still, his robes of crimson and gold draped like folds of stone. He held his hands clasped before him in an unusual manner, his fingers knotted in a way that Garrette's eyes could not clearly resolve.
"Oh," Garrette said faintly. Relief and gratitude flooded through him. "Oh, thank God . . ." Raithe was here! At last! Garrette hadn't realized how much he had missed Raithe, how much he had needed the simple reassurance of his friend's presence. "Raithe!" he said, brightening. Now that he was here, Garrette could breathe again. "Please, come in, come in. I can't tell you how happy I am to see you."
The Monastic Ambassador paced into the room. "And I am grateful to have arrived in time. Send your guard back to his post."
"Of course, of course." Garrette gestured to the secman, who went back to join his partner in the hallway. "And shut the door, you idiot!"
"No need," Raithe said quietly. He stared at the door, and the door swung closed.
By itself.
Garrette's mouth dropped open. "What?"
Raithe gazed down at the lock, and his colorless eyes narrowed. The lock gave out a flat snikt that echoed in the silence like a rifle being slowly and deliberately cocked.
"What?"
From the door opposite came a similar click; Raithe glanced at the third door, and its lock clicked. One by one the siege shutters banged closed over the windows, and their locks secured as well.
"Raithe?" Garrette ventured uncertainly. "Raithe, what are you doing?"
Raithe compressed his lips slightly and met each pair of eyes in turn. He offered them all a narrow smile. "I am preventing the escape of these assassins."
Quelliar turned with the inhumanly deliberate grace of a cobra seeking the sun. "Human child," he said. The chime of his amusement became the toll of distant bells, ancient and cold. "I am the Eldest of Massa. The petty tricks you display? I taught them to ten generations of your ancestors, a thousand years before your birth, when humans were no more than our—" A dark glance at Garrette. "—partners. Do not force us to demonstrate that your elders are also your betters."
Though the elf neither moved nor even changed expression, he was somehow the source of a chilling wave of awareness that broke over Garrette and drenched him with dread. It was as though Garrette suddenly awoke from some inexplicable dream: he stared at the Monastic Ambassador in growing horror. Friends? How had he believed they had ever been friends? He barely knew the man, and privately considered him a tiresome fanatic, a borderline personality who wavered between earnest dullness and freakish monomania. And the look Raithe gave Quelliar, an unblinking
stare of expressionless, psychopathic fixity, began to transform Garrette's sudden dread into actual physical fear.
"I am Raithe of Ankhana," he said, and struck his hands together: a rasping, scraping clap as though he dusted sand from his palms in Quelliar's direction.
Nothing happened.
The elves still stared at him curiously. Garrette barely dared to breathe, praying that this was some ungodly prank. Raithe folded his arms, a tiny smile of grim satisfaction wrinkling the corners of his eyes. Quelliar coughed, once. His companions turned to him.
Garrette flinched, afraid to look, unable to resist.
The elf's feathery brows drew together in astonishment; his head cocked like that of a puzzled puppy. He sank slowly to his knees. Still looking only surprised, not even alarmed—much less in any kind of pain—Quelliar vomited a gout of black blood that splashed across the carpet. "I'm sorry," he said quietly, to Garrette. "I'm very sorry."
Then he pitched face first into the spreading pool of bloody vomit. He convulsed, writhing, gagging up great scarlet-laced chunks that plopped from his lips, as though something had diced his stomach, his liver, and his intestines and now forced pieces of them up his throat. A spray of cherry-black droplets splattered across the delicate embroidery of a Louis XIV couch.
Finally, he made only fading aspirated grunts—"hghkh ... gkh .. . gkh . . . ghhss"—and lay still.
"A pleasure to make your acquaintance," Raithe said serenely. He raised his eyebrows at the other elves, but their leader's sudden death seemed to have astonished them into immobility. Garrette drowned in terror, shaking, unable to breathe, certain that the elves somehow communicated with each other without word or gesture, planning some unimaginable alien vengeance; Raithe, on the other hand, turned aside as though they could be utterly dismissed.
Once again he folded his hands in that unusual way, and Garrette's fear vanished; even the memory of having been afraid shredded like smoke and blew away. "Call your guards," Raithe said. "Have these murderers shot."
And because Raithe was, after all, one of Garrette's oldest friends, that was precisely what he did.
9
The Railhead once had been a square, a plaza in the midst of Lower Thorncleft; the buildings that faced and surrounded it still stood beneath a ceiling that was a graceful arc of steel beams and armorglass—like a medieval street preserved in an Earthside tourist trap—and armorglass formed the walls that sealed the streets that once had led into the plaza. Only the steel ribbons of the railways entered unhindered. Massive steam-powered locomotives hauled laden freight trains into the Railhead five times an hour. Little sunlight could enter through armorglass blackened by near-constant coal smoke; gas lamps illuminated the Railhead's interior twenty-four hours a day. Even at noon, all within took on a greenish moonlit cast. Now, at night, everything became pale and alien.
The Overworld Company offices occupied a large building that once had been the townhome of a prosperous merchant. It stood adjacent to the warehouse that had been converted to hold the Overworld link of the transfer pump, and so a trace of ozone and sulphur always hung in the office air: it smelled like Earth.
In what had been the merchant's basement was the true nerve center of the offices: nestled snugly below ground, within an Earth-normal field powered by the transfer pump next door, was the Data Processing Center. Here, where the EN field protected sensitive electronics from the randomizing effects of Overworld physics, lay the computers and Earthside communications equipment that were the brains of the Company.
Crossing the threshold of the DPC awakened Garrette with a shock like a bucket of ice water had been dumped on his head. He staggered, gasping, reaching blindly around himself for something, anything, to hold on to, to support himself against a shattering surge of panic.
A strong hand took his; then a muscular arm enfolded his shoulders with comforting warmth. He found himself staring into the ice-colored eyes of Ambassador Raithe from close enough to kiss.
Garrette screamed.
But only a muffled moan came out past the hand Raithe clamped over his mouth. "Shhh," Raithe murmured soothingly. "It's all right, Vinse; I won't hurt you. Shh."
Garrette trembled with shock, too frightened to struggle. He tried to swallow, failed, and panted harshly through his nose until Raithe finally took the hand away from his mouth. "What—? How did you—? My God—"
He remembered it all: the death of Quelliar, the roar of assault rifles as the secmen had broken down the doors of his drawing room and shot the elves to rags. He remembered inviting Raithe to accompany him while he made his report on the incident to his superiors—remembered sitting in the carriage beside him, chattering like a schoolgirl, all the way from Thornkeep to the Railhead
Remembered ordering everyone out of the DPC‑
Oh, my God, Garrette moaned inside his head, and his eyes rolled wildly in renewed panic. All that returned his gaze were the mindless patterns of screen savers flickering across the screens in empty cubicles. Oh my God, I did it, I sent everybody out of here—I'm alone with him!
Raithe gazed into his eyes as though his heart could be read there like a book. "Vinse," he said slowly, cajolingly, "Vinse, Vinse, Vinse. Calm yourself. I'm on your side. We're partners, now."
"But, but, but, what did you do to me? How did you make me bring you in here? And why? Why?"
"We're here, Vinse, because as soon as you left my presence, you would have realized that you had acted under my influence. We came here to speak because I wish you to be persuaded, not controlled. Here—" His gesture took in the cubicles and the glowing deskscreens. "—as you will understand, given only a moment's thought, no power at my command can force your mind against your will. For our partnership to prosper, I must reach your reason."
"My reason—? Partnership?" Garrette squirmed and pushed himself away from Raithe's encircling arm and turned to face him, livid with terrified anger. "My God, man! Partnership? You've started a war!"
"No, Vinse," Raithe said calmly. His lips bent in a smile both warm and sad. "You started the war. All I've done is give you the chance to strike the first blow."
Somehow that smile stifled Garrette's urge to bluster. Instead, he turned away and sank into the nearest chair. He swiveled around so that he could lean on the desk and rest his face on his hands. "You're talking about Diamondwell."
"Of course I am. The Diamondwell stonebenders have been allied with House Mithondionne since before the Liberation. More than a thousand years. If those legates had returned to T'farrell Ravenlock, having seen what they had seen, war would have come whether you willed it or no. The war began when you poisoned the Diamondwell aquifer."
"Oh, my God," Garrette whispered. He dug his thumbs into the corners of his eyes, struggling with a sudden suicidal urge to jam them in, to gouge his eyes right out of his head. "Oh, my God. Why didn't you tell me? You were here—you knew, you could see what was happening. Why didn't you tell me?"
Raithe shrugged. "Why should I?"
Garrette lifted his head to stare at the Ambassador. His face felt raw and numb, as though he'd been scalded by boiling water though the pain had not yet hit.
"Stop a war between the limitless power of Arta and the greatest enemy of Humanity?" Raithe said reasonably. "I would be mad to do so. Why should the Monasteries care what losses you take? To rid the world of elves, no price is too high—and war between the two of you costs us nothing at all."
"Then w-why—" he stammered, "what are you doing . . . ? Why ... ? I mean, you said, partnership ... ?"
"Oh yes, Vinse. I am not blind to one vital, essential, overwhelming fact: Artan or no, you are as human as I am."
I'm a lot more human than you are, you crazed savage, Garrette thought, but he kept his expression perfectly neutral. Right now his situation was so impossibly desperate that he'd take any help, from anyone—even this fanatical psychopath.
"And I know, too," Raithe went on, "that you are not a warlike man. I know that you prefer
negotiation to violence, and that is admirable, Vinse; it is truly—so long as there is a chance that negotiation will succeed. But there can be no peace between species, Vinse; negotiation would only give the elves more time to mass their forces and organize their campaign. That is why the legates had to die as they did. Now, war is inevitable. It is your sole remaining option. And it may be weeks, even a month, before House Mithondionne learns the fate of its legates. Now, you are the one with time as an ally. Use it wisely, Vinse. Prepare your strike."
"But, but you don't understand," Garrette said hopelessly. "I can't just declare a war! I don't have the authority . . . I have superiors, to whom I am accountable—and even they are accountable to the, to the, er, the nobility of Arta. Most of the, uh, the nobility would never accept a war--I would be ordered to pursue a purely diplomatic solution."
Raithe shrugged. "Can you not merely appear to do so? I may be able to offer you clandestine allies to do the actual fighting."
Garrette squinted at him, calculating. He imagined himself speaking before the Leisure Congress, cloaked in statesmanship; he imagined offering the Company's services as a peacemaker, an arbitrator, a go-between seeking an end to the violence between two of Transdeia's valued neighbors
Not only might he be able to protect the Company, his own career might yet be saved.
"Allies?" he said.
"Mm, yes," Raithe replied judiciously. "I should think allies would be very possible. What would . your superiors ... say to an alliance with the Ankhanan Empire?"
"Ankhana?" Garrette was dazzled by the sheer boldness of it. "You could arrange an alliance with Ankhana?"
"Very likely. Oh, to be sure, it would be informal—even secret, at first-but I should think that the common interests of Arta and Ankhana could only serve to bind them together more and more closely as time passes."
"How—how would we go about this?"