GAME THEORY
Over the next weeks, they developed a routine. Lalania would come to his room in the castle every few nights and dose him. The pain never lessened, but in time he learned to deal with it. The paralytic effect began to slowly diminish. When he could move again after only an hour, she would nod in approval and the next time increase the dose.
The change in protocol did not go unnoticed. Christopher saw the way common soldiers looked at Lalania behind her back. She had long been a favorite of the men, generous as she was with her magic, her songs, and sometimes her affections. At the same time, she had always been their greatest fear. If Christopher took to enjoying the company of harlots, he would cease to be the transformative figure to whom they had pledged. As just another ruler, a conventional king, he would still be a thousand times better than the last one, but the commoners did not care. They dreamed of freedom, not merely the absence of tyranny. The hopes of the long dispossessed could not be bounded by pragmatism.
She responded by becoming almost prim. Her hemlines got longer, and her hair was tamed into a matronly bun. This stilled the soldiers somewhat, but he could still feel their attitude reflected in his interactions with the nobility, ripples spreading across a pond. He had made his career out of being utterly unconventional, and now the merest hint of conventionality made people pause and reassess. Could he be toppled? Could his holy quest be diverted, delayed, or canceled altogether? Was there room at the margins of his absolute law to still seek profit and promotion?
So far it was only calculating looks and occasional inappropriate conversational pauses. The White Church, still under Cardinal Faren’s iron hand, served him as loyally as they had served Saint Krellyan. The worst of the Dark lords were systematically being replaced with Bright vicars. Invariably, the disposed lords chose to take their chances in the Wild, marching off with a handful of loyal retainers in search of adventure and therefore treasure. Realistically, any one of them could stumble across some ridiculous long-lost artifact and return to destroy him, but he had to let them go. There were some traditions he dared not defy. Besides, he could never bring himself to murder people for nothing more than profit, even as much as he ached at watching the tael in their heads wandering off to vanish in the great dark forest.
Then one day, Lalania reported an unusual fact. The last lord to depart had left behind a fair amount of property in the hands of some of his retainers instead of selling it all off for portable wealth. This was the sort of thing one might do if one expected to return within a few years. Christopher’s reign had apparently acquired an expiration date.
“What should I do about it?” he asked her.
She shrugged. “Traditional tactics suggest you allow a plot to develop against you—encourage one even—so that you can ferret out the ringleaders, whom you then hang as an example to the rest.”
“I can’t do that,” he said, but she already knew that.
“In which case you must simply prepare for trouble. Unless you can hasten your final goal.”
“I can’t do that either,” he said glumly.
“We should step up our security protocols. Your castle is shockingly open to infiltration. There are still poisons you should fear. Or possibly spells whose trigger must be delivered manually.”
Neither of those seemed likely to him. By now the assassins of the kingdom should have learned to stop expecting poison to work, and the only two spell-casters of note were the Wizard and the Witch, both of whom knew he controlled an artifact that blocked magic. Or rather Lalania did.
“I don’t need more security. I just need you.”
She smiled. “Sweetly worded, but there are limits to what I can do. Yet there are limits to what the College can do, too. If we add agents in the capital that perforce means removing them from the provinces. And I would rather not be caught by surprise in either field.”
An idea began to form in his mind, half-shaped and misty. “Could you do more with more rank?”
“Always,” she said with a saucy smirk. “But we cannot pretend that rises to the bar of necessity you have established for promotion.”
The idea condensed, opaque.
“And yet it is my right to decide.”
“It is,” she said cautiously.
The silver vial hung heavy around his neck these days, although it was entirely psychological. Tael had no weight. He pulled it out from under his tunic and screwed it open. Inside were the winnings that Cannan’s sword had harvested, a solid lump that expanded to the size of a pomegranate when he took it all out. In this case, he poured out a smaller portion of precise quantity. It formed a tiny sphere in his hand, shining bright purple where the torchlight caught it.
Cannan, ever-present, glanced at him instinctively and then scanned the room on high alert. Lalania, the only other person in the room, managed to look both hungry and flirtatious at once.
“Is this enough?” he asked, unnecessarily.
“It is,” she agreed again. “It is cruel to make me argue against my own promotion, yet foolish to proceed. To raise me to Jongleur can only muddy the waters. Uma is Friea’s undisputed heir; you would throw the College as well as the kingdom into confusion with your intent.”
“On the contrary. You have argued for your case.” He handed her the lump before he could change his mind. Once the tael left his hand, he knew he had done the right thing. Whatever came next, Lalania had earned it.
She paused, her hand halfway to her mouth. “Tongues already wag. How shall they wave when I receive gifts from you? I cannot dress any more demurely without being mistaken for a widow. And I cannot keep this secret for very long. It will grant me a new rank of magic, which I will eventually use.”
“Use it right away,” he told her. “Leave your agents in the courts of the country lords. And leave the gossip to me.”
He watched her consume the purple ball. So did Cannan, the spectacle drawing his eyes away from watching for danger. It was a simple act fraught with the significance of life and death. In a single stroke, he had doubled the vitality of the woman and tripled her power. By his rough calculations, she was now a fourth-story figure: he could toss her out of a window on the fourth floor and her tael would be sufficient to let her walk way without a scratch. Cannan, although only third rank, was even more durable thanks to his profession; Christopher was somewhere around the fifteenth or sixteenth floor.
Once the tael was safely gone beyond recovery, Lalania frowned. “No good will come of this,” she warned.
“No,” he said, “I suppose it won’t.”
The idea taking shape in his mind formed a grinning leer. Good wasn’t the intent.
A week later he added fuel to the fire. He called his pet witch Fae and her coterie of apprentices to court. The woman had always been a sharp-featured beauty; now, with her cherubic two-year-old daughter in tow, she was a veritable Madonna. Her apprentices had mastered the art of fashion and no longer dressed like a peasant’s idea of a seductress. Instead, they dressed like actual seductresses. All of whom pitched at him for all they were worth even while they curtsied modestly in his presence.
“I’ve decided to promote you for your service to the realm.” The witches refined his sulfur. He had promoted them before, advancing them along the apprentice track. Today he handed each of them enough tael to reach the first true rank of wizardry.
The look on their faces was more powerful than all of Lalania’s art. Adoration beamed out, replaced by rapture when he nodded and they gulped down the tiny purple pellets.
“You are free of my tutelage,” Fae told them, hiding her resentment reasonably well. “Sooner than any apprentice ever dared hope. And yet not without merit. Our lord’s wisdom seals your rise.”
“Not entirely,” Christopher said. “I would prefer you keep an eye on them for the time being. To that end, I have a promotion for you as well.” He handed Fae a substantially larger ball of tael.
She was too calculating, too cynical, to give into simple adoration. Yet the invitation in her eyes was no less real. He had just promoted her two ranks, opening a new level of magic. The damage she had done with just the first level made this a seriously questionable act, but the ghost of the strategy in his head smiled on it.
“You reward us beyond our service,” she whispered. Only he could hear her despite the crowd gathered in the throne room. “You must know we would serve you however you desire. Trial our true feeling against the artifice of your troubadours. Let us shower you with our personal gratitude.”
It was a heady compliment delivered in a husky voice of desire. It was also relatively easy to resist. Fae scared him, and her girls evoked the same feelings a passel of tiger cubs did. Cute, but you wouldn’t want to be around them when they grew up.
The strategy took over his mouth and formed words. “Come to my chambers sometime,” he whispered. There were at least a dozen people in the room who would have read his lips, and that only counted the ones who worked for him. He added an unnecessary condition solely for the eavesdroppers. “Discreetly, if you please.” Fae didn’t need to be told; it was the nature of wizards to keep secrets.
Beside him he felt Lalania’s smile freeze. Her jealousy sent a little thrill through him, which was far more discomforting than all of Fae’s innuendo.
It was several days before Fae took him up on the offer. She had sequestered Sigrath’s old apartments in the castle and seemed to be establishing it as a second residence. With their promotions, the apprentices could now handle the powder mill in Knockford, leaving Fae free to take up the role of court wizard. That was a position he could not deny her, but he was still surprised to turn around in his own bedchamber at night and find her standing there.
Cannan had his sword out in a heartbeat, raised to strike. The woman ignored him, her face serene above the flimsy lace pretense of a dress she wore.
“My lord,” she said, bowing low.
“How did you get in here?” Christopher asked. “Did anyone see you?” He wanted to add “In that ridiculous outfit,” but decided not to introduce the topic.
“I assure you, my lord, I was unseen. Your bards picked over Master Sigrath’s possessions quite thoroughly but could not deny me his spell-books. Your benefice already manifests itself.”
He was pretty sure that was a complicated way to say that she could now turn herself invisible. Everything about the woman was complicated.
“That’s great,” he said, and handed her a bathrobe. “Put this on. You must be cold.” It was always cold in the castle.
“If you insist,” she answered, taking the robe without looking at it.
“That she comes alone implies she also evaded the bard,” Cannan observed. He was glaring at her.
“The lady is skilled,” Fae conceded in a way that made it clear she was about to backhand the lady with a compliment, “but few are skilled enough to defeat magic.”
That was the point of his strategy. His enemies were drowning in magic. He wasn’t going to beat them with skill.
“Tell me about divinations,” he said, sitting on a chair next to the fireplace. She took another chair and folded the robe across her lap.
“An odd choice, Christopher.” She cocked her head at him, and he almost laughed. The very instant he wanted something from her, their relationship reverted to a first-name basis. “Divination is more oft associated with divinity. For the arcane it is generally limited to inspection of the here and now.”
“Scrying isn’t about the here.” Keeping up points with her was both instinctive and necessary in any conversation.
She smiled condescendingly. “I meant here as in ‘on this plane.’”
It was also hard.
“But I assume you mean foretelling,” she continued. “It is normal for the head of state to demand a generic divination every week. I would assume you do it yourself, though. Or perhaps the Cardinal?”
He did let the Cardinal do it. The old man had volunteered and understood how to interpret the results better. Faren had assured him that if the realm were going to be destroyed, he’d have a week’s forenotice, though anything less dire than that was likely to slip through the net.
“I do mean forecasting. How does it work?”
She looked at him for moment. “Not as well as one would hope. A week’s advance is normally the limit. At best it reveals the probable course of events; should someone else divine that you have divined their plan, they may well change their plans and thus invalidate your foreknowledge. At worst the entity you contact has no knowledge of the affairs that concern you. Gods and demons have vast sight, yet it falls far short of omniscient. Events can be concealed by high-rank magic; facts no longer in the memory of the living may be unknown to even the greatest power. But why haven’t the bards already explained this?”
He sighed. In a minute she was going to lecture him for revealing secrets. Namely, that the College could not do forecasting, which is why they couldn’t answer his questions.
“They did,” he said as truthfully as he could. “As much as they know. I wondered what a wizard’s take on it is.”
“My take is that it’s not worth the risk. For you to chat with an extraplanar entity is business as usual. For us it is fraught with peril. We do not wish to be servants or allies of such creatures. They do not wish to reveal anything for free. Binding a demon to physical service is straightforward and relatively safe. Asking it for advice is asking for trouble.”
“I think the Wizard of Carrhill did it once.”
“I am not surprised. He takes inordinate risks.”
Christopher thought about the woman’s precious toddler, sleeping elsewhere in the castle, and looked at her dubiously.
She colored, slightly. “I concede the point. Being in your presence seems to provoke rashness.”
As always, she found a way to make it his fault.
“A week? That doesn’t seem to leave room for decades-spanning prophecy.”
“Prophecy is a different matter. The gods can make promises about the future because they have the power to make them come true regardless of what anyone else does.”
He hadn’t thought of it that way.
“Have you been exposed to a prophecy?” she asked. She aimed for coy, but her naked hunger for secrets pushed it into lustful territory. Not a good place to be with her dressed like that.
“I don’t think so.” Marcius had offered him hopes, not prophecies.
“Then count yourself blessed.”
He harrumphed. That was not a description anyone would assign to his place, wedged between dragons, elves, evil squidlings, and inscrutable gods.
“But I trust you did not summon me here to discuss spell-craft. We could do that at court.” With an artful shrug, she managed to make her dress even more revealing. “Surely you have other topics in mind.”
“Not really,” he said. He looked away from her to stare into the fire, unable to insult her to her face. Especially because it would become a lie if he kept staring at her.
“If not me, then let me summon one of my girls. Or all of them. It would mean much to them. To any woman.”
“I’m not—” he started, but she interrupted him.
“You are reasonably strong, acceptably handsome, and incredibly wealthy. Your meteoric rise is a beacon of virtue, the gods own stamp on the quality of your character. You are kind to the point of bewilderment and lethal beyond imagination. You are the stuff of dreams of every fresh-blooded girl on this plane.”
The heat of the fireplace beat at his face. He blurted out the only thing he could say, the simplest truth. “I don’t want to be. I just want to be me.”
She stared at him, much as she had stared at the mysterious and powerful ring he had once asked her to destroy.
“Nothing you have ever done or said is as mystifying as that.”
At this point it was pretty mystifying to him, too. He feared it might just be habit.
“And yet,” she said, every word dragged out of her grudgingly, “there can be no greater defense against divination. Whatever wellspring drives you resists the analysis of the sane and sober. It stinks of divine providence. Only one force can hide secrets from the gods.”
Tired of walking into her rhetorical traps, he simply waited.
She smiled at him. “Another god, of course. Your Patron works through you.”
I am not your plaything. The memory of the words echoed in his mind. How much he had in common with his human enemies; how little he shared with his nonhuman allies.
Fae stood up, wrapping the fluffy robe about herself. “I presume you wish my discreetness to discreetly fail. This is a service I can render, although it pains me that any would be foolish enough to think my secrets can be plundered against my will. You need not worry; I will play my part as instructed. I fear you too much to do otherwise. As do all who serve you. Only your foes are protected from the terror of your mysteries.”
She turned to Cannan and acknowledged him for the first time. “If you would be so kind as to see to the door, Ser.”
Cannan glared at her much as he had at the Wizard of Carrhill, back in Lalania’s tent years ago. When he turned away long enough to open the door, she vanished.
After a moment Cannan spoke. “How long am I supposed to hold this door open?”
Christopher held up his hand in a pause. There was no reply. After a moment he said, “I guess that’s good enough.”
Cannan closed the door. “Just to be clear. I’m not taking this one off your hands. You don’t pay me enough for that.”