Page 80 of Elvenbred

Haldeen held onto his temper. Variman’s tone slid towards whining. Time to end the Farspeaker exchange. “There. Is. No. Connection. Simple coincidence. I didn’t let anything out, and neither did you. So, put it out of your mind. Good day, Lord Researcher Variman.”

Variman still looked like a terrified prey animal. “Good day, Lord Gatekeeper Haldeen.” He looked as if he was about to say something else. More bleating. Haldeen waved his hand over the Farspeaker, and Variman’s worried image froze and faded.

Haldeen slumped back into his chair. He rubbed his hand across his chin and felt the stubble. Those lovely, long, leisurely days and nights in the second world had been wrested away from him along with his little Gate, and he was back to next-to-no sleep. All the recovery he had made was gone, and then some.

He had expected they would pull Triana’s corpse out of the beast-pen within a few days, consumed by breakbone’s fiery fever. She hadn’t even made it to the disease’s second stage; the point where the alternating fevers and chills caused the muscles to cramp and shiver … much less its final progression to the high temperatures cooked the victim’s brain. Adults that survived frequently did so without much left that could think, and often died of complications later.

“Three adults get breakbone for the first time, and two die,” he said to his reflection in the Farspeaker’s glass. “But not this bitch. She sails right through. Damn her. Damn her!”

Deep breath. Deep breath. You won. She lost. You are a lord, on the cusp of Greatness. And she is shoveling Beast shit, at least until it squashes her.

He stopped to consider that a moment. In fact, she’s proving to be the best Beast-tender you’ve ever had. Maybe there is some disease in her world that confers a partial immunity to breakbone. Maybe they took breakbone with them, and over the centuries it changed enough that it became a childhood nuisance, like the head-stuff she caught, and she just doesn’t remember catching it. Or she lied about never being sick. She lies without thinking twice about it anyway.

Still, the records he’d kept on the blanket had gone from an asset to liability. Good to have them for when his program had shown progress … bad the moment the sickness had gotten out into the city. Once the evidence went away, the song he’d sung Variman would become true. He finished his shaving, and very carefully cleaned and sharpened the bronze razor.

The disease had seemed such an elegant solution to solving the problem of defeating the locals’ home-ground advantage in magic. They can’t cast if they are dead. Triana had been felled by a minor child’s disease. Exposure to the virulent and frequently fatal breakbone should have taken her out like an ax through a sapling. What had the difference been? Why would she be prostrated by a children’s disease, and only down for a day with a fatal disease? It made no sense.

Never mind. Move on. The experiment failed, no point in pursuing a dead-end. Burn the notes before they burn you.

He replaced the razor in its stand and closed the door to the small washing alcove. He crossed his inner office, where his breakbone notes lay on his desk. He shuffled through the documents, sorting them to make sure all the numbered pages remained in order. He took the papers over to the small fireplace, and used the bellows to puff the banked coals into flame, then fed the sheets one by one, making certain that each had burned completely to ash before he fed the next.

He let his mind drift as he worked. He thought Lord Variman would keep quiet. Variman held the lowest possible rank, and had nothing to fall back on. Even a whisper that the Lord Researcher had violated his duty would finish him.

Would Variman report him? Haldeen pushed the burning paper with the poker while he thought about it. Doubtful. There is no point in this where he has less to lose than I do. No matter what happens if he reports, he is done, and he’ll be lucky if he doesn’t wind up shoveling Beast shit next to Triana. An accusation won’t do me any favors, but it’ll be nothing without proof.

He waited until all the sheets had burned completely, then used the fireplace poker to stir the ash, which he then mixed it with cold remains of last night’s fire. Good luck with that, you bastards. Magic could possibly reconstitute the documents, reversing his efforts to destroy them, but that would be predicated on someone knowing to look there, and having a very good idea that the expenditure would yield tangible results. There would be much easier ways to bring him down. The simplest being his failure to complete his task … canceling the locals’ expected superiority in magic. Disease had been such an elegant solution.

He stood up and went into the outer office once the last of the documents had burned. He rang for the servant, then rang again when the fellow didn’t appear in a timely fashion. Haldeen let the chime ring for a couple dozen heartbeats before he remembered that he’d sent the door servant away when they’d culled the household staff for conscription. His decision had kept the staff out of his papers and other places where they might learn things they oughtn’t, but the decision came with certain inconveniences, such as hot tea when he wanted it.

His mind went back to Triana. She was sick. She didn’t fake that. But had she been as ill as reported when she first took to her bed with that childish fever? He went to his desk, and rooted through the journals and papers until he found the physician’s report. He ran through the symptoms. Fever. Heachache. Cough. Sore throat. A special notation. Extreme whininess. Patient claims to never have been ill in her life. He’d not really paid attention to that before … read it and marked it up to an exaggeration, but perhaps it wasn’t. What if her first bout had been a fluke? He put the report down, and shook his head. It just doesn’t make any sense. Why the one, and not the other?

Should I try again? Find something even more virulent? He certainly couldn’t ask Variman for something worse than breakbone. There was no way the Lord Researcher would agree, and there weren’t many natural diseases worse than breakbone. There had been one long ago, something nasty that had gotten loose. Wiped out one of the smaller cities. Haldeen tried to remember the city, A-something, it was called. Four eight-days from onset to quarantine? And then death, as it came to being severed from all contact with the other cities. He remembered his tutor’s comment on its fall …. “T’weren’t the sick that killed it. T’was when all of the other cities severed ties for fear of contagion, and it starved.” He remembered the reading that followed. Their food workers had been felled in the first wave, then once cut off, when the other cities closed their Gates to it, no one in that city had had a chance. What was its name? A-something ….

And there had been that moment when one of the cities had changed a disease and turned it against another … with the same effect, when it got out of control.

He flirted with the idea of trying to get ahold of whatever had killed either city … and feeding it to Triana. He wasn’t sure how one went about finding old diseases, and bringing them back to infect others … but only those he wanted to infect. He gave that a long, long, hard think. Perhaps old mass graves? Open them up and look for something that remained contagious, where its effluvia remained intact. Then what? Bring it back here? And then do what with it, exactly?

He had an adult’s usual protection from breakbone … if he caught that, it would make him sick as hell, but wouldn’t kill him. Introducing something as exotic as whatever killed an entire city would likely just wind up with his corpse being burned.

He hunched in his chair and drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk. Damn her.

Still, Triana hadn’t been immune to breakbone. She had gotten sick … just not sick enough to die. Maybe he could work with that. Maybe breakbone would be good enough. Maybe head-stuff would be! That had made her sick enough she couldn’t leave her bed. Perhaps he might still be able to deploy a communicable disease to smooth their way. Fewer deaths in Triana’s world than in his, if all her people shared her resistance, but still, breakbone was breakbone, and virulent as hell. Perhaps it would be good enough to have lots of sick people all at once; each sick person would tie up at least one healthy person to care for them, who then might get sick themselves. Even if all the sick were gathered into large rooms, that would still tie up a considerable number of others as care-givers. And those carers would have to be able-bodied, which took them out of fighting or support pools. The king would want more than that, of course, but it was a start.

How to frame this, so that he could own the moment, show he’d solved the king’s problem … perhaps not the way the king had intended, but effective nonetheless? He thought through several scenarios, framing opening lines, before settling on the idea that the simplest story would serve best.

He tried out his summation. “My king, after further perusal of my notes, due consideration of the options, and given our limited time, I recommend we disable their spell-casting by introducing a communicable disease as part of our invasion. The goal of this admittedly unorthodox tactic will be to reduce the number of enemy wizards through illness, and ideally, death. This may achieve benevolent secondary effects of reducing their conventional fighting forces and forcing them to divert resources to care for their sick as we begin our attack. A useful third order effect may be to reduce the population that they would otherwise need to assimilate once the assault forces completed the invasion. The disease should not be something particularly deadly, but certainly should be contagious, and the more inconvenient or debilitating it is, the better.” He thought for a second. It needed a better ending. “Few might be killed outright, but those sickened would draw resources and attention away from the fight.” He felt rather proud of that. Turning a problem into a perk.

Still King Alliard was no fool. He’s going to ask where I got the idea …. Triana is supposed to be dead.

He sat down in his chair and leaned back, staring up at the ceiling while he worked through that bit. I can use the breakbone that showed up here, of course … a run of breakbone here is making people sick and creating patients that others have to care for. Who’s to say what breakbone might do over there, to an unprotected population. He started to smile. In the speech he’d started composing, he’d downplay the disease … lots of people sick, many resources needed to treat, but few outright dead. He paused, and laughed to himself. It might even be true. The elves there … correction, elven lords there, have human beasts to do all of their work. They live in fortified manors, most of the elven population all in a single structure, their manor, in each domain. What would happen if breakbone got amongst them? Well at best, it would infect their humans they depend on too. At worst, their humans would desert them the moment they began falling too sick to enforce the slavery; a collar does nothing if there is no one there to trigger the punishments. The manors would immediately isolate each other. Vulnerable populations packed in tightly and malnourished … it would be Amber … that was its name! It would be Amber all over again!

He sifted through the stack of transcripts that the translator had left … Nora … that was her name. Attractive, in a thin sort of way. He found the document he was looking for and reread it. The rebellion by these hooman slaves. Human slaves. It’s happening “now.” He reread Nora’s summary. Triana’s derision and disdain for the rebels came through clearly. Still, for as much as Triana despised these hu-mans as weak and pathetic, the elven lords had failed to close the books on them. Hooman. However it was pronounced.

So, either the rebels were more skilled than Triana’s contempt warranted, or the elven lords were that inept. Possibly both things could be true …. Triana could not acknowledge the humans as a threat, so perhaps the elven lords wouldn’t take them seriously, and the rebellion flourished.

Still, for this rebellion and these human slaves—there was no telling what a solid round of breakbone might do to them. They were already in revolt. If it didn’t touch them, they’d see weakness in their overlords and strike. If it did sicken or even kill them, the elven lords, accustomed to having their every need tended by them—accustomed to using them as their fighting forces—would be rendered even more helpless.

In his mind’s eye, he saw herds of shaggy, two-legged beasts piled like windrows as breakbone cut them down dead where they stood. Many of their elven lord masters lying sick, if not dying. The soldiers of his own good king thrusting swords into the infirm and mopping up those not slain by the disease. A simple solution, and elegant as hell. He let the fantasy spin out, enjoying the moment.