Page 27 of Beyond

“Now, let’s see about working out a clear schedule,” he said. “There literally is no time to waste.”

* * *

Delia hardly knew what to say during that meeting. Over the course of the past couple of days she had somehow gone from being essentially her sister’s hanger-on to one of the lynchpins of a desperate plot.

But what bothered her the most about all of this had nothing to do with her. Because all she could think about was the peril that Kordas was walking into. Willingly! And he knew very well what he was doing!

This is insane …

But if it was insane, it was the sort of insanity that made more sense than the “sanity” of the Emperor’s toadies.

She found herself agreeing to help Jonaton and the Six with the creation of the temporary and “permanent” Gates—apparently she was useful, not because she was a mage, but because she was not. She wouldn’t be affected as much, or at all, if certain things went wrong, it seemed. And once the big Gate was up, she had an even more important job, since it would be her task to carry messages from Isla to coordinate the exodus….

“I don’t understand how this is going to work,” she finally confessed to her sister, as Kordas left the planning group to consult with Grim about the tribute-horses, Hakkon and the other non-mages went off to continue the charade that the only important event in the entire Duchy was that the Emperor had demanded his tribute early, and Jonaton and the Six went into a huddle to decide exactly how they were going to create two curved, wooden horn-like objects that were two stories tall.

“You don’t understand how what is going to work?” Isla asked, motioning to her to follow.

“How are we going to keep the Emperor’s spies from noticing that people are disappearing?” she asked as they headed for Delia’s rooms—those rooms being the ones least likely for anyone to be using as a scrying point to spy on the people in the manor. After all, who was she to the Empire? A mere female of no importance.

Isla shrugged. “They won’t notice, mostly because so far as the people in power are concerned, the ones that will disappear were invisible in the first place.” Isla opened the door into Delia’s rooms, motioned her inside, and shut the door again. “Let’s just take Lord Merrin as an example. He is the Emperor’s spymaster in Valdemar. As such, he is a very minor functionary in the Emperor’s service. Do you think that outside of his hand-picked spies, his personal body-servant, and perhaps his steward and his seneschal, he actually knows any of the people who serve him?”

“I—don’t know,” Delia confessed.

“Well, I can tell you for a fact that he doesn’t. Because I have three spies of my own in his household. One is a housemaid, because housemaids are almost literally invisible and yet see and hear an amazing amount. One is a gardener for the same reason. And the third is one of his minor clerks. He might take notice of the clerk, but only because he might need something written or fetched from the library or archives, and even then, all he’ll see is a pair of hands. The others? For him they are faceless nonentities, to the point that my housemaid was once forced to stand on a staircase facing the wall because he paused on that stair to have a long and quite interesting discussion with one of his spies, and a housemaid’s orders are to draw no attention to herself, ever, which she would have done if she’d tried to go down past him. It literally never occurred to him that as she stood there, as dumb as her broom, she was busy listening to every word he said.”

“But—these people are doing things, doing the work of the Duchy!” Delia protested. “Won’t Lord Merrin notice if that work doesn’t get done on the other manors and holdings and farms?”

“What if the work isn’t there to be done?” Isla replied. “Remember, we’re stripping as much as we can as we leave. As people leave, their work will leave with them. The spies won’t notice if more fields are fallow, or if there are fewer sheep in them. They won’t notice if there are fewer shepherds or coppicers or thatchers or threshers if there is no work for those people to do. Just like Lord Merrin, the spies are going to concentrate all their attention on Hakkon and to a lesser extent, me. The important people of the Duchy, the people who do the most hard work, are the ones that are beneath their notice.”

“But they’ll have to notice eventually—” Delia pointed out.

“Well … Hakkon says he has a plan for that, which I should not ask about. I’ll take his word for it. Very likely I would not like it,” Isla admitted.

“Oh.” Delia licked her lips, thinking that there were a lot of things Hakkon could do about Lord Merrin that would come under that heading.

“In the meantime, you and I need to work out something plausible that will send you all over the Duchy carrying messages for me,” her sister said. “Something important to me, but which will seem utterly trivial, even frivolous, to a man like Lord Merrin.”

* * *

As Hakkon had stated, the tribute was very generous this year—five horses more than were actually required. Ten of the horses were Chargers, ten were Fleetfoots, and ten were Sweetfoots, and leading them all were the two False Golds. The Emperor did enjoy horse races, and of course he enjoyed always winning, so one third of the tribute was always in Fleetfoots. Kordas had cleared out the general stable to put them all in one place for the convenience of seeing that they were in top condition, their hooves were trimmed, and they were properly shod. This was not an easy task, since the False Golds, the Fleetfoots, and the Chargers were all stallions. Mature stallions. Fortunately, they were also all well trained, or things could have gotten chaotic or worse.

The Fleetfoots pretty much had to be stallions; there is no point in racing a horse you couldn’t send out to stud if he was a winner. And the Emperor’s dunderheaded idiot Knights of the Throne would refuse to ride a mare or a gelding. This made absolutely no sense at all, of course. If Kordas had been an enemy commander, one of his first moves would be to send a loose, wild mare in heat out onto the battlefield as soon as the Knights put in an appearance, but in the Empire, when masculine ego came into play, logic flew right out the window.

The only reason the entire yearly undertaking didn’t descend immediately into chaos was that there were no mares in the herd. Since the Emperor had never expressed a preference for the gender of the Sweetfoots, the Duchy always sent geldings. There had never been an objection, so he saw no reason to change that now.

Merrin’s spies were bumbling around the place like fat flies, standing out by always being in the way, until Grim got sick of them and put them all to cleaning stalls. Two of them vanished as soon as Grim turned his back, and the third looked thoroughly miserable, which cheered Kordas up no end.

But he should have realized that extreme interest meant that something was going on, other than Merrin making daily reports. What that something was, he discovered when at last the herd got put into harness and he and Grim sorted them into their “strings” for the trip.

Now, normally, one did not put horses into harness to move them from one place to another. Normally, you would just herd them, like cattle. But these were mostly stallions, and allowing them to be loose in a herd was not just asking for trouble, it was sending trouble a hand-made, gilded, and highly decorated invitation. So instead, they were harnessed up in three “strings” of ten each. There would be a groom riding the lead and tail horse of each string, and Kordas and Beltran would each ride one of the False Golds, one at the front of the procession, and one at the rear.

Kordas was hoping that someone in the Emperor’s staff would take pity on them and send them straight from the Valdemar Land Gate to the Imperial Palace Gate, but he wasn’t expecting that. This was why each of the horses carried a bag of oats and a skin of water, and each of the humans had a small rucksack of provisions.

They had formed up in front of the stables and were ready to ride off, when suddenly, a swarm of servants followed by Isla came racing out of the manor. The servants were burdened with four large packs, and Isla was accompanied by his seldom-employed valet, carrying a full Court outfit.

The full Court outfit, complete with the ceremonial rapier, and the Ducal sidearm. A “Spitter.”

Oh, how he detested that thing, not for what it did, but for what it meant!