High Iron Page 10

  “You have this letter?” Wilhelmina asked.

  “We do,” Maghran answered. “But first, if I may ask for a moment from you, I have a gift I would like to present. A token from my family in Stenhall.”

  He held up the arovis gem and gave it to her.

  “Very handsome,” she said. “I know the value that dwarves place on such jewels, so I appreciate your gesture.”

  I suspected she was insinuating that she herself did not place value on such things, but Maghran bowed.

  “You are welcome,” he said. “And now the letter.”

  Britta handed it to her. She walked nearer the light, by one of the trees, and held it up before her eyes. She seemed to relish it.

  “The seal of Somoroveln himself,” she said.

  “So we saw,” Britta answered.

  “Very good,” she said. She scanned the letter. “Very good. Written by a clever man, or a clever woman. I would guess it was not actually written by Somoroveln. I don’t know that he is a cryptographer.”

  “You can read the letters?” Britta asked.

  “They are not letters,” she said. “They are parts of words. There may not be enough words in this message to tell me how many characters are being used, and that is one way to distinguish letters from syllables. But there are few characters to each word, and that is another way. It is not likely that a message would be composed completely of such short words.” She barely nodded and repeated: “One, or two, or three letters per word? Not likely. So therefore each symbol must stand in for several letters. Several letters.”

  She continued to read, and began to move her right hand in the air, absently; she was apparently drawing the characters, and also making occasional circles. Then she began to sway back and forth, very slightly. Britta glanced at me. The dwarves stood, unmoved.

  “This writing,” she then said; but she caught herself, and glanced toward the messenger.

  “Shall we enclose that one in a chest?” she asked us.

  “Well,” I said. I looked at Maghran to try to gauge his opinion; he seemed to raise his eyebrows.

  “Honestly, we do not feel a need to antagonize this man if we don’t need to,” I said. “Not any more than we have already, that is. We could take him outside, if you like.”

  “Let us just speak quietly, then,” she said. “There is an easy clue to the code here. The dunter army is outside of Stenhall and Emmervale. Between them, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “There are two words which occur next to each other and repeat themselves several times, in the beginning. If I suppose that these are Stenhall and Emmervale . . . and I assume that they are writing in the language of Caranniam . . . ” she trailed off and was silent a moment.

  “It will do for a start,” she said, almost to herself. “It will do for a start. For a start,” she repeated, her voice quieting even more. She raised her fingers to twirl her already unruly hair, absently.

  “What tails and crosses we have here,” she murmured. “Tails and crosses, indeed . . . and crosses and tails.”

  Then she called out to all of us, abruptly:

  “There is bread in a shelf by the fireplace. Other food. This will take time.”

  She said no more. She began to pace, now, still holding the letter before her.

  When she was some distance across the room, Maghran spoke to me in a low voice.

  “You say she is no wizard, but there is magic in this place.”

  “You believe so?”

  “Look at its stones. I can’t believe these walls are still standing.”

  “Some of them are not.”

  “But it’s remarkable that any of it at all is still upright.”

  “It was built solidly.”

  He shook his head. “Just gaze around you. You build a bit in stone, also—even your masons could see how weak these walls are.”

  I let this slight pass, and he continued.

  “They should have fallen. Large sections have bowed in so much that they should have collapsed.”

  “Maybe the vines hold it firm.”

  Maghran shook his head. “And she has no protection. Any fool could drop in near those trees. And she is clearly no fool herself; so she must have reason to feel safe. Some reason that we cannot see. This is quite an odd friend you have, Master Shearer.”

  By now the Duchess had sat down at one of the tables. Britta and Jed walked, somewhat slowly and shyly, over to the fireplace to see about the food she had mentioned. Soon they found it and offered it to all of us.

  “Is there a well here?” Maghran asked.

  “I haven’t seen one.”

  “She might have it in here, and not outside, as large as this place is. I will search.”

  We ate, and then waited. Maghran found water and shared it, even with the prisoner. I watched as we made ourselves more and more at home in this ancient hermitage. It was not hard to do so, what with all the chairs and lounges. Britta lay down to nap. Even the prisoner sat down, though of course we left his hands and feet bound.

  Jed busied himself picking up leaves and sticks which had blown in through the holes in the roof. The sticks he piled by the fireplace, and the leaves he threw outside.

  Through all this the Duchess did not move from her seat at the table. Her long hair had fallen forward to the point where it looked as if she had drawn a curtain around herself.

  The afternoon wore on. Britta, Hrond, and Inman again took their guns and set out to search for game.

  “Will she mind if we shoot?” Britta asked me.

  “We have to eat,” I said. “And of course we’ll share with her.”

  “I mean, will it break her concentration?”

  “Ah, that’s what you mean. Well, if the noise of six of us and a prisoner rambling about her home doesn’t bother her, I don’t imagine she’ll be distracted by hunting.”

  They left. Some time later we did hear three shots; the Duchess flinched a bit but did not take her eyes off the paper, and did not move.

  “I feel useless,” Maghran said. “Had I known it would be like this, perhaps she could have ripped that thing in half and given part of it to us to sort through.”

  “I don’t feel I’m up to it,” I said.

  It turned out that the hunting party had taken down a deer. By now it was nearly evening, and most of the party—everyone but Maghran and me—moved outside to start a large fire to cook dinner.

  We ate a prodigious amount; we roasted a portion for the Duchess; we looked about for any ice room or ice cave where she might store such things, but found none; we put out the fire, moved the remainder of the carcass well away, and returned back inside; and still she worked on the letter.

  The night was well into darkness, and the Duchess had long since lit a lamp, when she suddenly stood. Only Inman and I were awake. Inman nudged Maghran, who was on the floor beside him.

  She glided back toward us. She still did not seem to move her eyes from the letter.

  The she looked over at the prisoner. He was now lying on the ground some distance away.

  “You understand,” she said to us, quietly, “that there is a grand alliance between Varenlend and Caranniam.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Unprecedented in our time. An alliance which, combined with the masses of Red Gorge, can level your cities, and neutralize Searose, and isolate the other dwarves and also the elves.”

  “Such is their plan,” Maghran answered. “Isolate us, or worse.” Inman, standing next to him, nodded.

  “Yes. But this is quite a letter you have intercepted,” she said. “Do not look back at that messenger as I say this, just in case he is awake. Now. This letter is directing the Caranniam army at your doorstep, once they have massacred you, to march back to Varenlend and destroy it.”

  I was astounded at this news.

  “You have been able to read everything?” Maghran asked.

  “Yes. I can show you. See these here?
These words are the names of Stenhall and Emmervale, as I said. And then we have a bit of quick luck: the first symbol in the code for Stenhall starts the salutation of the letter; this might mean it is addressed to a lord. A lord of Caranniam.”

  “Lord Sterovannar, the leader of their guard.”

  “Yes. Exactly the man we would suspect to lead the dunter army and the other men who direct it,” she said. “And he has a long name, with several symbols. One of which is similar to another in the word Varenlend, which occurs further down the letter. This confirms my guess.

  “Only one other especially long word occurs repeatedly in this letter, and I surmise that to be Caranniam. So you see. We can make five educated guesses about patterns we would see with these five coded words, and that gives us the symbols for a number of syllables already. Over a dozen of them.

  “This is a direct coding of Cranam. And one word we can put together from the others is vacar, war march. Its components we know from the code for Sterovannar and Caranniam. And it appears before Varenlend; further confirmation that we are making the right inferences, and that Varenlend is to be attacked. This is how I decoded this. There were many more steps along the way, but this is how.

  “The alliance is over after your towns fall. Or that was the plan, at least, until you came across this. Tell me: Is it known if that army from Red Gorge has units attached from both Varenlend and Caranniam, along with all the dunters? Or is it only Caranniam?”

  “It sounds as if you may know as well as we do, Duchess,” Maghran answered. It was the first time he had used her chosen title, I noticed. “But our understanding has been that elements from both of the wizards’ cities are in that army.”

  “That would make sense, from this letter. And that means there will be a hard night for the Varenlend contingent when this message is received. Or there would have been.”

  Maghran shook his head and said:

  “We must positively thank these fool wizards for dissolving, on their own, this alliance which might have allowed them to conquer all of us. This is more than we could have hoped to engineer ourselves.”

  “And now, what shall we do with this knowledge,” she said. “Or what will you do with it. It belongs to you. Your captured messenger, your letter, your towns under attack.”

  “We must get the letter to them, of course,” Maghran said. “We might send this messenger straight off. With our blessing and a bottle of spirits for his trouble.”

  “We can keep our spirits,” I said. “But of course we might be able to make even more of this.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “We have their messenger and their code.”

  “Yes. Well?”

  “Do you think we could alter it? Alter the message? Could you change just a few words in the beginning, Duchess?”

  “To what?”

  “Keep in all the bit about marching to Varenlend, but instruct them to call off the attack on our cities. Instead of ‘after destroying,’ change it to ‘leave immediately.’ Something along that line. And then we could get this new message to them.”

  “Get it to them,” Maghran repeated. “You mean to that army camped out by our homes? Directly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” Maghran said. “That is a fine idea. That is genius, young man. If the Duchess can help us write.”

  “I can, yes,” she said. “They will never know my version is not straight from Caranniam.”

  “Perfect,” Maghran said, and he bowed. “Although the delivery might be difficult. We would need someone to attempt to pass himself off as this gentleman messenger of ours. Someone who looks a bit like him. A man, of course.”

  He looked at me and continued:

  “Someone who might wear that fine red clothing.”

  “You are mad,” I said. “You want me to pretend I am him?”

  “You’re just a messenger, who would know? It’s only a scourge of dunters. They won’t look very hard at you.”

  “Only a scourge of dunters,” I repeated. I imagined myself riding alone into that camp. “First, thank you for your confidence in sending me into a crowd of savages as an impostor with a forged message. Second, we know that this message will not go to just anyone, but rather to the command from Caranniam.”

  “So you would speak with them. You could pull it off.”

  “Perhaps—unless they know this man. And I would guess it is quite likely that they do. He is likely a noble, and they probably are, also, and I would think they all know each other, Maghran.”

  “Hmm. Perhaps.”

  “We’ll need another way.”

  “We could send in the horse, with no rider, but carrying the new message in the bag. We could drench the saddle in blood. Someone in the camp would get the letter to the command.”

  “Unless the horse turns around instantly and heads back to Caranniam,” I said. “But you are right; something like that is the thing to do. We would have to make them think that they had recovered the letter untouched.”

  “We would want to get close to the camp in order to pull this off. Make it more likely the horse and message would end up there.”

  Inman, still with us, shook his head.

  “But Maghran, and Master Shearer,” he said. “We must take this false letter to the camp, or close to it, so that it will be captured.”

  “Yes.”

  “But obviously we must not be captured ourselves. And this delivery must look like a genuine loss, a genuine mistake of ours. Genuine enough so that the dunters, or the men, who recover the letter do not suspect it is fake.”

  “I doubt the dunters would have the acuity to suspect anything,” I said.

  “The men, then,” Inman said. “It could be a man we encounter. And we are supposed to pretend to run away in a panic and drop something this important. And to mishandle a horse, if we have it along. There is too much that can go wrong here.”

  “Inman is right,” Maghran said. “We can’t afford a mistake.”

  “I think Master Shearer has to ride it in,” Inman said. “But perhaps he could simply thrust it into someone’s hands and then turn back. You could just bark orders to deliver it and then leave, comrade. I think that’s what we might expect from our high-born friend here anyway,” he said, nodding toward the messenger. “I don’t believe he would stop and chat with any dunters.”

  “And in case some Caranniam noble in that camp is expecting you to pay him a call and stop for tea, you could let it be known that you must rush, due to the very news you carry,” Maghran said. “You can just snap at them in Lower and depart. It’s what this man would shout at dunters anyway.”

  “I do speak Cranam, if it comes to it,” I said.

  “Well then, all the better. And once they see that letter, no one will question why you rode off quickly,” Inman seconded. “They will see that the war is continuing.”

  I nodded. “Very well. I see the sense in this. So our journey here would once again become longer. Duchess, we might trouble you to ask for some food to take along. Can you write this new message for us tomorrow?”

  “I can do it tonight,” she said. “I can sleep the day after.”

  “The paper will have to look right, of course.” Maghran said. “And it should have that seal of Somoroveln copied.”

  “These are no obstacles,” she said.

  She set immediately back to work, this time with a paper and ink. We woke Britta and Jed, and Hrond, and spoke with them.

  Then the Duchess sat at a table and wrote as Maghran and I reviewed the words.

  “There is no elaborate penmanship with this code?” Maghran asked. “Yours will look the same?”

  “The same,” she said. “You see the characters; there are no flourishes, no ornament. Merely shapes, with some legs and tails. I shall tell them to call off the attack?”

  “Perhaps simply ‘leave forthwith.’ Or ‘right away’—is the rest of its language more formal, or informal?”

  “I would s
ay formal,” she said. “Written by a learned man.”

  “Very well, ‘forthwith,’ ” I said. “You can piece that word together from the symbols you know, Duchess?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And should we supply a reason? They might be suspicious, without one.”

  “Yes,” Maghran said. “How about if we tell them that Varenlend has attacked Caranniam? That would explain the quick move. And it would sow confusion, and discord—something I would like to see as soon as possible.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Again we found ourselves biding our time in the keep of the Duchess while she labored for us at something with which we could provide her no help. A few of our party dozed. Inman produced whetstones from his pack and sharpened his axe, which I doubt needed it.

  I had enjoyed the quiet time, in this strong and eccentric ancient tower of the Duchess, during the hours she spent deciphering the letter; but now that she was altering it, an obvious plan formed in my mind and occupied me. If she were successful, and we were successful, in inducing the invaders to leave our land, our work would not be finished. I tried to ignore our opportunity, but I could not.

  “Maghran,” I said. “If we pull this off—if this united army of Caranniam and Varenlend and Red Gorge really abandons its attack—we will have to take the attack to them.”

  “I thought the entire point was to let them fight each other,” he said.

  “Caranniam and Varenlend, yes. But think of Red Gorge. It will be wide open if Caranniam takes all those dunters to the battle of Varenlend.”

  “And what would we do, the six of us? Install ourselves in the main hall of Red Gorge and bar the door?”

  “Of course would have to send for our own armies,” I said. “Of men and dwarves. And we could then march into Red Gorge and dismantle it.”

  “You mean cart away all their bricks?” he said.

  “Come, Maghran. I mean spike their mills, ruin their foundries. Take over their city, if we can. At the least, demolish their industry.”

  “It seems the elves have already done that,” he said.

  “And you want to leave that work to them?” I asked him. “You are depending on elves? It seems unlike you.” I smiled.