Conspiracies ought to be worked upon in darkness, however justified their objectives, he thought as he reached for the ornamental rankadi knife on his blotter.
He picked it up, closed his eyes, and reached out once more—not with his hands, this time, but with his Gift. His very powerful Gift, which no one outside the Council of Twelve and his own immediate line family suspected that he had.
It hadn't been easy, putting that Gift aside. Denying himself its use as he fitted himself into the narrow template of an officer in the Union of Arcana's Army. Nith mul Gurthak had been born Nith vos and mul Gurthak, of high shakira caste, as well as one of the traditional military families of Mythal. But he had systematically concealed the strength of his Gift, starting in early boyhood. Private tutors had trained him in its use with brutally merciless rigor, beginning years earlier than even shakira youths normally began their schooling. There had been more times than he could count when young Nith had wept himself to sleep at night, but he had never complained, never even considered shirking his responsibilities. He had been selected for his role, his duty to the caste, even before he had been born, on the day when the marriage between his shakira father and multhari mother was first arranged, and that was an honor no shakira worthy of his caste could possibly have rejected. The strength of his Gift, and the skill with which he had learned not simply to use it, but to conceal it, as well, had only justified that choosing.
Now his shoulders relaxed, ever so slightly, as his questing Gift confirmed that the privacy spells about his office were all in place, up, and running. There was nothing particularly spectacular about those spells; they were standard, Army-issue spellware, supplied by the Union of Arcana to ensure its military officers' security in the execution of their duties. That was just fine with mul Gurthak. No one else in Fort Talon—or, for that matter, the entire universe of Erthos—could match the strength of the Gift no one knew he had, and it would have taken hours of preparation for him to penetrate those privacy spells. No one else could have hoped to do that without alerting him to the security breach in ample time to deal with it.
Satisfied that no one could possibly observe him, he rolled up the left sleeve of his uniform blouse and drew the gleaming, razor-sharp rankadi blade. He held it under the light, before his eyes, clearing his mind of extraneous thoughts as he focused upon that glittering steel. The steel which had been used no less than eleven times to cleanse his bloodline of weakness and failure. The steel which was consecrated to the Great Task of the shakira by the blood it had shed, the honor it had preserved.
He felt his heart and mind fall into shared focus, settle into the perfect balance of thought and emotion appropriate to his sacred purpose, and a serene smile touched his mouth as he closed his eyes. He held the blade across his forehead with both hands while he murmured the words of the second verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Secrets, and then, without opening his eyes, pressed the blade's wickedly sharp edge against the inside of his left forearm. A line of blood sprang up against his dark skin, and he moved forearm and dagger carefully, with the smoothness of long practice, to gather that blood on the flat of the blade.
He opened his eyes once again and maneuvered the rankadi blade over the personal crystal sitting on the blotter of his desk. He spoke a single word in ancient Mythalan, then tilted his right wrist carefully and watched as a single drop of his blood fell from the dagger's tip to the fist-sized crystal. It glittered there, like a fallen ruby, for perhaps ten seconds. Then, without fuss, fanfare, or any spectacular glow and flash of arcane power, it simply disappeared . . . and the PC flickered alight.
Mul Gurthak inhaled deeply as he saw the brief menu of commands. He'd done this any number of times, especially once he'd begun rising in rank within the Union Army, and yet there was always that moment of tension, that anticipation, almost as if somewhere deep inside he truly believed the carefully crafted spellware might have somehow failed since its last use. Which was ridiculous, of course. Spells researched and developed at the Mythal Falls Academy simply didn't fail.
He picked up his stylus and tapped the menu entry he needed. Then he sat back in his seat, raised both hands to cover his eyes, and bent his head in ritual submission and greeting.
"Mightiest Lords," he said in a dialect so ancient that no more than a handful of people in the entire multiverse would have understood it, "the least of your servants begs you to receive his report and consider his actions, that they may redound to the glory of the shakira and the high holiness of their purpose and the completion of the Great Task."
He waited, head still bent, for a full ninety seconds before he allowed his hands to fall to the blotter and his spine to straighten. Then he cleared his throat and began to speak once more, this time in modern Mythalan.
"Mightiest Lords, I trust that by now you have received my earlier messages. I will endeavor to be as brief as possible in updating you upon my progress in the service of the Great Task. As always, I await any instructions from you."
Should anyone outside the most trusted servants of the Council of Twelve ever gain access to the messages he had recorded over the years and decades of reports to the Council and its members, the consequences would have been disastrous. The damage to the Great Task would have been incalculable, and the consequences to mul Gurthak himself would have been far worse than merely fatal, but the commander of two thousand had never worried about the security of his messages.
The spellware which supported and protected them was the very finest in the entire multiverse . . . and no one outside the Council even suspected that it existed. Without mentioning it to anyone else, the researchers at Mythal Falls Academy had perfected a technique which archived material at a compression rate of over five hundred thousand-to-one. A single second of crystal recording could contain the equivalent of no less than a hundred and forty hours of normally recorded data or imagery. The messages which mul Gurthak routinely sent in would be less than a flicker in the stream of a normal crystal recording, imperceptible to anyone who lacked the special spellware required to strain them back out of the flow once more, and Mul Gurthak's reports had all been carefully hidden away in the long, chatty letters he routinely recorded and sent to his brother-in-law. His third sister's husband had no idea of mul Gurthak's actual duties, much less of the power of the two thousand's Gift. Nor did he have any idea that mul Gurthak's letters to him were routinely intercepted by the Mythalan postal service and routed very quietly to agents of the Council of Twelve to be scanned for messages from the two thousand before they were passed on to him.
The transmission pipeline itself was as close to perfectly secure as fallible mortal beings could hope to come, yet the Council hadn't stopped there. Even if the message could have been detected and recovered by anyone else, it could not have been read. The encryption program, like the compression spellware itself, was the product of secret research at the Academy. It was unique in that there was no encryption key anyone could enter. The encryption was embedded in the sarkolis of the originating PC itself, and only two other PCs in the multiverse could decrypt it. All three of them had been enspelled simultaneously, and one of them had then been issued to mul Gurthak, while the others had been placed in the care of two separate members of the Council of Twelve. Those three PCs, and only those three PCs, could read material generated from the secret spellware concealed behind the activating cantrip mul Gurthak had just used, and no one could activate—or even detect—that spellware without both the blood of the PC's proper owner and the proper ritual to control its shedding.
Should the existence of that elaborate encryption program ever come to the attention of mul Gurthak's non-Mythalan superiors, questions would undoubtedly be asked. Unfortunately for those superiors' curiosity, mul Gurthak would have been under no legal obligation to answer their possible questions. The two thousand found that deliciously ironic, since it was the Ransaran insistence on a citizen's right to privacy which had deprived military and law enforcement agen
cies of the police power to legally demand access to private encryption spellware or the personal messages it protected.
"As I've already reported," he continued, refocusing his thoughts and attention on the task in hand, "the sudden appearance of these 'Sharonians' and Olderhan's involvement in the first contact, not to mention the incredible ineptitude of Bok vos Hoven, left me with no option but to improvise."
He might, he reflected, be taking a not-insignificant risk in his characterization of vos Hoven. The incompetent idiot's family connections were just as exalted as he'd claimed, and making enemies that highly placed could be . . . prejudicial to a man's life expectancy. By the same token, though, mul Gurthak had amply demonstrated his own competence, judgment, and value in the Council's service over the past twenty-plus years. He had patrons of his own, at least as highly placed as vos Hoven's relatives, and even if he hadn't had them, the recognition, identification, and repair of flaws in the Great Task's execution was a critical component of the mission he'd been assigned. Any attempt to sugarcoat vos Hoven's shortcomings would have been a betrayal of his duty to the caste.
"I believe that, so far at least, events are transpiring much as I had hoped they might. It was fortunate the members of the Council had seen fit to arrange to provide me with significant assets in my area of responsibility, despite its distance from Arcana. This gave me far more influence at critical points than would have been the case without them. By the same token, however, I've been required to commit all of them, and I fear that few of them will survive. Indeed, it seems increasingly likely that their continued survival beyond the end of their immediate usefulness would, in itself, pose a considerable threat to the Great Task.
"According to my most recent dispatches from Two Thousand Harshu, Rithmar Skirvon has disappeared. Either he was killed in the otherwise successful Special Operations mission which clearly managed to kill the Sharonians' Voice at Fallen Timbers, or else he was captured and is currently the prisoner of the handful of Sharonians who appear to have so far evaded capture themselves. I have little doubt that he will have told them anything he knows by now. Fortunately, his actual knowledge is strictly limited, and the possibility that his captors will be in any position to utilize what he may have told them is slight. Nonetheless, it would be prudent, in my judgment, to make arrangements for his elimination as soon as possible after his recovery by our own forces. Indeed, the best resolution would be for him to be killed in the crossfire when our troops attempt to rescue him, and I am cautiously exploring possible avenues for arranging that outcome.
"Thousand Carthos, on the other hand, has now been placed in command of an independent advance up a second line of universes. While this deprives him of further opportunity to shape the main thrust to our liking, it also means he no longer has Harshu or Toralk looking over his shoulder, and his natural attitude towards these Sharonians is much closer to our own than either Harshu's or Toralk's. I feel confident that we could have relied upon him to generate a significant number of 'atrocities' in his own command area even without my . . . instructions to him.
"Two Thousand Harshu is proving rather more . . . problematical than I'd originally hoped," mul Gurthak admitted. "Unfortunately, his seniority made him the only choice, other than myself, to command the expeditionary force. The good news is that he's reacted very much as I anticipated to the 'discretionary instructions' I sent him. I believe you will have discovered by now, from the copy of my instructions to him which I appended to my last report, that it must be crystal clear to any impartial reading that I never ordered him to launch this attack. Indeed, I intend in the next few days to send him dispatches admonishing him for having taken too much upon himself in launching any offensive beyond the Hell's Gate universe itself. I will also be sending copies of those dispatches up the official communications pipeline to the High Commandery. Of course, now that he's committed us to actual operations, I have no option but to support him to the very best of my ability in order to ensure that those operations succeed."
Mul Gurthak paused the recording and leaned back in his chair, interlacing his fingers across his chest while he considered what he'd already recorded. He thought about it for several seconds, then straightened and resumed.
"The bad news is that Harshu is clearly up to something. At this time, I'm not certain exactly what, but I suspect he's more of a throwback to the old Andaran honor code than I'd believed. If my suspicions are accurate, he's deliberately engineering a situation in which any blame for atrocities and excesses committed in the course of this expedition will be seen as his, and only his, personal responsibility. Should he succeed in doing so, it will almost certainly result in at least some mitigation of the consequences of those excesses upon public opinion.
"Despite that, I believe the basic objectives will still be attained. Five Hundred Neshok, in particular, is working out very well. His personality is just as sociopathic as our evaluating spellware suggested, and his violations of the Kerellian Accords continue to mount steadily. No matter what Harshu may want, Neshok's actions are going to have a huge impact on public opinion in the home universe. The Ransarans' repugnance will be impossible to overstate, and the more traditional elements of Andara will be equally horrified. The fact that Neshok, Carthos, and Harshu are all Andarans themselves will, of course, fasten responsibility for this entire fiasco upon Andara and the Andaran officer corps. It was an Andaran—Harshu—who launched the attack in an excess of militarism and personal ambition which far exceeded my instructions to him. And it was two other Andarans—Neshok and Carthos—who proved themselves to be merciless butchers and sadists.
"I was unable to be too explicit in my suggestions to Neshok about the best way to use the traitor vos Dulainah's death to further our objectives. It's become clear, though, that he understood the concept quite well. He's also been rather more subtle than I anticipated by insisting that his briefings on vos Dulainah's death are a 'best guess reconstruction of events' based on 'reports which cannot be substantiated at this time.' That gives him—and, indirectly, me—a certain degree of insulation. Despite those qualifications, however, they've spawned dozens of independent atrocities—all of which appear to have been committed either by Andarans or by runaway garthan—which will further blacken Andara's reputation, especially in Ransaran eyes."
He paused once more, his face carefully expressionless despite the malicious glee that bubbled deep inside at the thought of using the traitor Halathyn vos Dulainah's death to finally smash Andara's grip upon the High Commandery. The fact that the atrocities his supposed murder at Sharonian hands was spawning among the Andarans and fugitive garthan who had idolized the senile old lunatic would hammer a wedge between the components of the Andaran-Ransaran political alliance which had always frustrated Mythal's objectives, as well, only made it even sweeter to contemplate.
"The fact that I was forced to improvise with so little warning has forced me to run certain risks," he continued after a moment. "The connection between us—specifically, between myself, the Central Bank, and Carthos—is particularly worrisome. In addition, both Neshok and Five Hundred Klian represent lesser risks.
"Neshok will cease to be a problem as soon as I decide his usefulness is at an end. He's unaware that one of the troopers assigned to his intelligence section has very specific . . . instructions where he's concerned."
Mul Gurthak allowed himself a thin smile. Of course Neshok was "unaware" of those "instructions," since Javelin Lisaro Porath was unaware of them himself. Nor was there any reason for Neshok to suspect anything of the sort was even possible. The technique mul Gurthak had used to implant them required someone with a Gift vastly stronger than the one anyone outside the Council of Twelve knew mul Gurthak possessed. It also happened to have been proscribed, along with all other mind-ripping spellware, at the time the Union of Arcana was formally ratified. Unfortunately for the demands of the pious Ransaran reformers, the Council of Twelve had already been in existence for centuries at that time, an
d the Councilors had taken steps to preserve the knowledge which so many others—including so many shakira, who ought to have known better—had been prepared to simply throw away.
When Porath received the activation signal from mul Gurthak, he would obey the commands the two thousand had imprinted. Alivar Neshok would die quickly, before Porath—in an obvious paroxysm of guilt over the hideous crimes he had committed under Neshok's orders—hanged himself. And the most amusing aspect of the entire thing, as far as mul Gurthak was concerned, was that the signal would be a routine dispatch from him promoting Porath from javelin to sword on the basis of Neshok's glowing reports.
"Carthos, however, is beyond my immediate reach, as is Harshu," the two thousand continued. "We can always hope that one or both of them might become casualties once Sharonian resistance finally begins to solidify. We obviously cannot count upon that happy outcome, however. I believe that ultimately, Harshu will be almost as useful to our purposes alive as he would be dead. In a best-case scenario, his court-martial for permitting and condoning violations of the Kerellian Accords should constitute a significant self-inflicted wound for Andara.
"If not for Carthos' links to myself and the CBM, his court-martial—or disgrace, at least—would probably prove almost equally useful. In his case, however, any investigation by the Inspector General's Office would be entirely too likely to discover those links. For that matter, Carthos himself might well reveal them—and the 'suggestions' I gave him before sending him out to join Harshu's command—in return for being permitted to plead guilty to some lesser offense. As a consequence, I believe his removal to be imperative. Unless otherwise instructed, I intend to use the Gorhadyn Protocol to terminate him at the appropriate moment."