Wars and Rumors of Wars: Complete Edition (Blackmount Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Wars and Rumors of Wars: A Novel of Blackmount

  Dedication

  Preface - Be Not Afraid

  Elsewhere and Elsewhen

  Thon - Hunts Past and Present

  Arghas - Journeyman

  Thon - Man Without a Country

  Arghas - Nothing Prepares You

  Thon - The Second Person

  Gunthar - Good Help

  Arghas - Go West

  Thon - Bedfellow

  Ka - Take a Meeting

  Thon - Four or Two

  Sabo-tour

  Sponsorship and Gossip

  Ka/Thon - Press Tour

  Morning at Blackmount

  Melerié - A Day in the Life of a Bard

  Customs

  Thon - Trouble Making Friends

  Melerié - First Impressions

  Gunthar - A First Time for Everything

  Homeward

  Melerie - One Loose Thread

  Goblins Don't Forget

  Thon - Hangover at the Gates

  The War that Wasn't

  The Enemy of a Friend of a Friend

  Thon - A Surfeit of Hats

  Melerié - Entanglements

  Forward Motion

  Thon - Reform School

  Melerié - Day Fifty-two

  Witness to History - Discovery

  Creatures Great and Small

  Thon - No Such Thing as Plug and Play

  Gunthar - Conspiracy

  Melerié - Making Due

  Thon - Captive, Heathen.

  Thon - Homecoming

  Tal'aen - Jailbreak in Flashback

  Thon - Same as the Old Boss

  One Small Step

  Witness to History - Translator

  Arghas - Fragments of Day's Caravan

  Thon - Better Fences

  Arghas - Sore Eyes

  Melerié - About All Those People You Like

  More Than One Free Lunch

  Melerié - Marching Orders

  Arghas - Turning the Dragon

  Ka - Dubious Provenance

  Melerié - Objections of Conscience

  Thon - A Ticket Home

  Corruption in the Ranks

  First Among Equals

  Thon - Last Checks

  Ka - Ties of Clan and Family

  Melerié - Catching the Red Eye

  Paper Tiger

  Melerié - Stories Lie

  Ka - Unscorched Earth

  Witness to History - The Wash

  Afterword - Three Mornings After

  Wars and Rumors of Wars

  A novel of Blackmount

  M.G.Norris

  Dedicated to all those brave souls

  Who have walked the worlds these pages carry

  And gone on to tell the tale.

  The Silver Circle thanks you for your service.

  Preface - Be Not Afraid

  "There is a man in your world," the ancient stranger let his words sail alone through the gulf of understanding between himself and his guest with all the ponderous speed of tall ships, "who does not belong there."

  Remaining aloof to the pastiche of city sounds and revolutionary clamor that managed to breach the walls of his quiet urban hovel these three stories removed from street level in a city they now called Minsk, he watched the tells of recognition and then affirmation play out on his visitor’s face in the subtle interplay between eye corner tightness and pupil dilation, and offered a gentle nod in return that carried just the slightest trace of satisfaction.

  "And I would venture to guess that you would like him removed from it."

  This time the nod came from the younger man. It was a small thing, that nod. Not generally the sort of movement one might use to end a life, but its force would be sufficient, applied in this place, at this moment. One typically associates the murder of a man with images of contest, of violence. Oh, those images would follow, as surely as the sun would rise in too few hours on a world about to be irrevocably changed. But as is consistent with all acts of barbarism on a certain scale - when the victims eschew their given names and join their numbers together to become rounded figures and political currency - this one too began with two men, sitting somewhere dark, and sipping something expensive.

  "The price will be steep." The Old man spoke without irony, though both knew that resources were no concern for either of them. The elder, because he had arranged such things many, many times before; and the younger because finances are the province of the living, and this one had set aside that particular designation some decades ago, presumably in a bargain of one kind or another.

  Now though, with this conversation, he was setting aside something else, and the polite formality of such pretense helped him disguise the pain of it as being purely financial. The Old man had seen this before too, on other similar men; and he proposed the farce of spent treasure to allow a sensitive client to save face. Men who came to the ancient one to do what they themselves had failed to accomplish were all of a kind.

  This would be the first time the younger man had asked for help, he knew; no doubt the first time he had ever needed to. They never gave their names, the Old one's visitors. Some of them lied, others politely declined; still others knew of the power that names hold and were wary to give even a false one to such a man as the one sitting before them in their hour of most acute need.

  It was a simple enough thing to kill a man, in the mechanical sense. Life is fragile, improbable, and in its way even beautiful for that. To end it requires that one simply upset that perfect delicate balance of electricity and chemistry in just one of innumerable ways. This fact had from time to time caused the Old man to wonder why as the centuries passed, capable men of power and means came to him at all.

  It had led him to decide long ago that while causing the life functions of a given specimen's body to cease was simple, especially for men like his clients who were often no strangers to the practice, when they came to him it was invariably to kill someone who would later be important. Children who would grow to become wise leaders; Candidates who would win power and use it uncompromisingly; the lovers and families of rivals who would crumble without their support; messiahs and tyrants yet unbearded; As if somehow, the implications of those particular deaths were too broad and too far-reaching for their would-be-killers-turned-contractors to take hold of. The ancient harbored no such superstition himself.

  No, a life was merely a house of cards, and he merely a very skilled, very precise, very sudden gust of wind. That was why creatures much more powerful than he brought their riches to his table rather than doing the deed themselves. Power they had, surely, but these acts required payment in a currency scarce among the powerful. It required them to admit their fear. And neither power nor prowess nor all measure of worldly wealth could ease that effort's doing. The murder that prevents a rival from becoming your equal or your better is a cowardice none of the Old man's clients could ever play party to by performing it themselves. Even in this there was dishonesty, and most of them recognized the cheat even as they attempted it.

  True strength was not the power to eliminate your rivals as most weak minds supposed it to be. Rather, the Old man knew, strength is the capacity to endure them without harm, to stand apart from and above them despite their every effort, and show no ailing. To remove a rival greater than oneself is triumph. To remove he that is merely your equal is a compromise to that strength. To remove one before he rises to oppose you at all... Some cowardice is wisdom, but power fosters ego which is the death of wisdom. And only the unwise would seek the Old man's aid.

/>   It was best to have no dealings with the remnants of the Old world, if one could help it. What came before had been a dangerous place of hidden significances and rules unwritten yet strictly enforced. The New world was a place of safety, of order, yes, but what it had lost in becoming so was one of the few things the murderous elder had ever mourned. Where once in every action there was meaning, now the world had become filled with strange utterances like "now made with sixty-percent real butter" and "second marriage."

  The change had begun slowly, he remembered, and only in the last century had this new order truly come into its own. There had been a time before it, six hundred years or so long, when the world was too busy changing to notice what it was losing. Even now though, the New world was too young to know more than a little of its past. Surveys of the masses revealed that nearly all the occupants of this current age knew somewhere deep down that the world had lost something, and that better times had come before. That said something about the nature of the soul, thought the Old man wistfully. It remembers so much, yet tells its mortal carriage so little. Perhaps there had been a shift in language, over the millennia, such that the mind no longer recognized the Old tongues spoken by an Old soul. The masses knew without knowing one other fact for which they could give no account and would likely not admit directly.

  Magic was real, and it was dangerous.

  From time to time, sitting in the park feeding ducks, the Old man overheard talk of biodiversity and the loss of species due to habitat destruction. That may have been what had happened to the Old world. Habitat Destruction. So much of that world had relied on the spaces between presumably known things being broad enough to hold and enwrap mysteries. Thinking back on some of the species lost to time and memory, he thought it probably best that some of them had passed beyond the veil into non-being.

  Advertising had driven off the Unicorns. The Dragon had died to chivalry, and chivalry had then died to lewdness, then lewdness had died a slow death giving way to a sort of halting timidity masking undereducated desires for things that would never truly satisfy, but everyone was privately sure they were supposed to want. The Truth had become personal truth, which everyone knew was subjective and given to interpretation. And the mighty Wonder which had once fueled humanity's drive to know and feel and appreciate, now held on by a thread, relegated to the province of children beneath the age of speech.

  People still knew of Hope, and would strive for it, vote for it, write about it, but had in large part forgotten the need for it, and so would never recognize that its purpose was more than mere aspiration. Cynicism had, in most cases, long since overtaken its traditional nesting grounds anyway, now that everyone 'knew better.' The list went on and on and the Old man had done his part in writing some of it. As a participant in the world's steady alteration, he was permitted to remain a part of it.

  The Old man's client was dead, yet in many of the most observable ways still seemed to appear otherwise. He had not touched his drink, which the Old man thought was odd. Usually the sort of man who came to him was also the sort of man to find solace in cognac when faced with a situation he could not control. He breathed, the Old man noticed too, though he was almost entirely certain that his client had no need to. It was academic curiosity, more than anything else, that impelled the ancient to guess at his client’s taxonomy. This one, at first glance, had seemed rather ordinary.

  Once-human, life-and-service-for-power arrangement with some fragment of the Old World, no doubt; That was the usual way dead men remained so lively. There was something wrong though, about this one. The Old man couldn't put his finger on what it was, and so he set aside the nagging sense that begged for study and returned his attention to the conversation. He had just finished signing his portion of the contract by rote practice, along with an explanation of his chosen method for this execution, when he rejoined the present moment already in progress, and found that he had in his hand a pixelated photo of a little girl that the client had handed him and that he had spent the better part of his reverie pretending to study in detail. Now though, looking up from the small rectangular slip of glossy paper in his hand - paper that was suddenly feeling too light and flimsy to the touch, as if cut from the pages of a department store catalog - he began to realize that things were not at all in hand.

  The client was on his feet, standing much taller than he had appeared just moments earlier. It was less the sudden stature of the younger man that led the ancient murderer toward this sense of rising alarm though, than the young man's three stunning pairs of radiantly feathered wings. They had been there the entire time, he reflected. It was odd in retrospect that they just hadn't seemed very important to him. Now though, those wings and their implications were quite nearly everything. The Old man composed himself by force, and the mildly tense look on his face 'smoothed' back to wizened impassiveness as the younger man was saying, "For your trespass admitted in your own word, I place you under lock and bond in the name of the one true God." It was a formality really. The end had come and there was no returning to business as usual. A relief, then, that his greatest work, his noblest enterprise, had already been set in motion many worlds away, and would require no more of his interventions now, for a good while now to come. Did they know? Were any aware of what he’d done? Surely not. If the true scope of his subtle enterprise had been unmasked, the Host would never have sent just one to deal with him. Not that more would have been required. Understanding that there was nothing the he could do in his current state, the Elder decided there was no harm in being congenial.

  "You don't look much like an angel." He began, testing the waters to see what had been beneath the impeccably-crafted facade that had earned the angel's way past two levels of intermediaries and the runic wardings by the door.

  "Yes well, Everyone's dressing down these days, aren't we?" The angel's voice contained both notes of camaraderie and pity, and he nearly let the sentence go at that but must have decided better of it, because after a moment, he finished, "Azkadel."

  The Old man's discarded name hit him like a truncheon. The One used to call him by it often, and those moments of commendation had been to him the trophies of a job well done. More than that. Fulfillment of a life’s core purpose. Yet for the crime of coming to love and enjoy his work, The Merciful had barred him from it, called him monster. He had fled, and become the Old man he was today. He had sustained himself through all the intervening years by freelancing; the very practice that had once lost him everything. It was easy work, and plentiful.

  There would always be those who needed to die, their bodies stopped while their souls continued home to judgement. Possibly quite a few of them to reward too, but he had never picked his clients, the Old man who still fondly remembered being called Angel of Death had consoled himself. They had always picked him.

  "You didn't say it, you know." Azkadel said almost petulantly. The younger man said nothing. "I would've recognized you in a second if you'd said it. In the Old days, it almost passed for an introduction for our kind." Silence lingered for a moment. “Be Not Afraid?” the ancient volunteered in a rote’ repeat after me’ sort of way when his captor failed to respond.

  Finally, with no malice and with what might even have been sadness, "I did not," the younger man with the Seraph-comb on his back acquiesced.

  "Because you should be."

  Elsewhere and Elsewhen

  Suspended in the mist of an old-fashioned hard-light holography projector, almost half a dozen feet in total height, hung an image of the Old man being led away in chains of amber light, and looking anything but threatened. In the moments just before the viewer faded out and plunged the room to shades of black, the truth was, he’d looked far closer to smug.

  “Apologies for that… The angel appears to’ve been a fluke, sir. Unrelated. The book does that sometimes. Our interface isn’t perfect yet. I’m getting it back on-track now.”

  The voice came from a uniformed officer, leaning over a wide mahogany railing in
scribed with the letters “S.C.V. 155-03 Witness to History” to manipulate the outmoded hard-light control interface, suspended in the space before him. The only illumination on the starship's dim-lit bridge, now that the projection had gone dark, was the light shed on the officer’s face by his own control console, blue light on dark brown, and from similar arrangements ringing the outer wall of the broad semicircular control room high seat overlooked the center of.

  “Any chance we can tune the translation filter in the process? The narration’s coming through a little thick.”

  “I like it. It’s poetic.” Said a robed elf at another station.

  “It’s off-topic and distracting. Stalking remnants of the Old world gets us no closer to the Advent Champion’s remains. We should be focussed on the Orcs.” Ringed below, mostly around the railing, a mixed gathering of gray-uniformed and silver-robed spectators looked on in the semidarkness.

  “I still don’t understand why we’re relying on two hundred year old technologies on a mission that’s got funding from both the P.A.C. and Civilian FleetCom. Why shell out resources for three ships this size, diplomatic accommodations, only to scrimp at the last minute on the control interface?”