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___“Excuse me…um…Commander?”
___“Hi! Jian’ll be fine!” The fair man waved at the puzzled soldier who stood at the door of the upper room. “Glad to see you! I guess this means that Dagon and Gaekwar also are back…oh, but I knew that already,” he murmured half to himself, looking to the papers he held, as he lay on the bed. “Please come in,” he absently added. “You’ll be the first relief-watcher. There’s the map,” Jian pointed up, ignoring the awestruck stare of the soldier. “Those dots, we think are demimen, but we aren’t sure yet. No word either about the other two sets. The southern dots are us, of course—I mean the brigade. It doesn’t show dots in the Tower. Probably isn’t important. Your job,” he continued, “will be to keep a record of movements.” He flapped the sheets on the writing slate. “So far it’s been fairly quiet this afternoon: a couple of dots—scouts I mean—from the western brigade, tried to circle round north to the eastern side, but then were intercepted. I think that one survived to be taken prisoner. This other scout,” he pointed, “was following them, until they got caught. Apparently he’s a lot better, though, even in daylight—he’s managed to get pretty close to each of the eastern pickets without them ever seeing him.”
___“What about those other four?”
___“Definitely from the western brigade as well. They’ve been acting awfully weird.” He furrowed his brow in thought. “They meandered around the northern quarter all afternoon, just south of the northern group; generally heading east, but sometimes reversing their course.” He squinted. “It looks like they’re on their way to the eastern brigade for sure, this time. Whoever they are, they easily handled a couple of interceptions from the northern group. So keep your eye on them. I mean if you can: I expect you’ll be seeing a lot of activity once the sun goes down, and it may get kind of confusing…” Even more than this?! the soldier thought. “Whatever else you do, keep track of Seifas and Pooralay when they go scouting later tonight. And let us know if any significant group makes some kind of move from their camp, especially toward our brigade or the Tower. You won’t have to tell us what enemy scouts are doing, like the ones relieving their pickets now along the northern and eastern rims of the dell. Just be sure to keep good notes. Oh, and speaking of which, you’ll be relieved around midnight I guess.”
___Jian spun round on the bed to sit, and then stood up. “The bed is great for watching, without your neck being cricked! Though writing’s a little hard like that,” he allowed as he left the room.
___Lying on the bed of Commander Portunista, wasn’t entirely unattractive to the soldier; but he also considered it tantamount to suicide. The pale-skinned man had never seemed to be an idiot; decidedly odd, but more of a wit than a fool…Did Jian perhaps have permission to lie on her bed??
___The soldier added this to the word of how often Portunista had been observed near Jian while on the march to the Tower; and then he reevaluated some of the speculation he had been recently hearing…
___Outside, night was falling. Inside, soldiers bustled, settling themselves into places and routines, under freshly refurbished sconces. As he trotted downstairs to the garrison-floor, the fair man greeted the troops; they mostly returned the greeting with equal cheer.
___“How’re things goin’, Jian?” One grizzled veteran stood on cooking duty, over a bubbling stew.
___“Quiet, so far. Everyone else has had some, right?” He ladled out two dishes. “One is for the Commander,” Jian explained.
___“Don’t forget th’ most important thing,” the captain grinned, saluting Jian with the stirring spoon.
___“Ah! Ouch! That stew is hot! Um, good job!” He gingerly set the bowls to the side, before tapping a keg to fill two mugs with mead. The veteran had a good laugh.
___“Here, use this.” The older man rigged a contraption around the bowls of stew.
___“Oh! I had been wondering what those pegs in the top of the bowls were for!” Jian held up a stick of wood; from each end dropped a knotted string to cinch around an angled peg. “Now it’s like a balancing scale!” the curly-bearded man decided; and smiled a secret smile.
___“Yep. Y’learn a few things, portin’ food for more’n one person. Carry the mugs in the crook of your arm.”
___“Thanks, gaffer!” Jian stepped carefully back through the lounging soldiers. “Hot stew comin’ through—gangway!”
___The soldiers shook their heads, smiling for the clownish man, as they oiled and sharpened steel.
___“I’m sayin’ that he’ll be back in under a minute,” the gaffer winked, as Jian climbed up the stairs again. “Any takers?” Some betting commenced—for less than a minute.
___Jian came down again: minus the mugs and bowls of stew, but wearing a lopsided smile. Laughter followed him down the hall.
___He paused at the firepit, and opened his mouth; but, “Spoons!” the gaffer said.
___“‘The most important thing,’” repeated Jian, and joined in the swelling laughter. He bowed to the cook, saluting the older man with the spoons he received. “It’s been a long day,” Jian sheepishly shrugged, and smiled as he walked back up the hall again. “Pay up, m’boys, pay up,” the gaffer announced behind him.
___The only good cheer in the lab, however, arrived with Jian.
___“Hello, Portunista!” he called across the room. “I brought your dinner!”
___“Mm, thanks,” she vacantly answered; she was studying some of Qarfax’s notes, after hours of sorting and cleaning the room. Jian put the bowls on a nearby table, safely away from any writings, but brought her a mug.
___“Mm, thanks.” She took a sip, without looking up, and set the mug aside.
___Jian looked around at the tidied laboratory, now well-lit by lamps and sigiled wisps.
___“Don’t forget to eat the stew before it gels that gummy stuff on top.”
___“Mm.”
___Jian walked over to one far end of the room; then paced across it, in deliberation.
___“Things’ll be awfully crowded downstairs for a while, looks like,” he said.
___“Mm.” She turned a page, and scribbled a note on a nearby pad.
___Next, he walked to the blast-pitted stone between the original door and the gap in the wall. “I wonder, where will they put their supplies?” he murmured, carefully pacing across the floor again. “I guess it’ll be in the basement.”
___“Mm.”
___Jian surveyed the lab once more.
___“I wonder,” he mused, “where Qarfax put his supplies…”
___“Mm.” Portunista drank another sip of mead.
___Jian reflectively scratched his beard, then walked to a side of the room. “No lights over here,” he mumbled; and spent a minute tracing the curve of the wall. Then he nodded in satisfaction.
___“Hm!” he announced.
___“Mm,” she replied, and turned another page. He smiled a smile of progress being made, and eyed some nearby equipment.
___Jian’s attention eventually landed on a square table. Sigils were etched into parts of its surface-frame. The stone within that frame, however, was glassy smooth. Jian walked over to it and reached a finger—but then he paused before he touched the surface.
___“Hey, ‘ista! What does this table-thing over here do?”
___She sighed, looked up from her work, and took a longer drink of mead. “It’s another map. The straight-line sigil turns it on; the circle turns it off. I have no clue what makes it work, or what he used it for,” she added vexedly, returning to her studies.
___Jian shrugged and pressed the activation button. With a nearly inaudible hum, minuscule fractions of polished surface raised to varying heights, contouring the land around the Tower.
___“Keen!” Jian said. Portunista kept to her books. She had been impressed already, hours ago.
___Jian now spied a globe, small but finely sigiled, resting in a niche within the table-frame. He spun it. Nothing seemed to happen.
___Next he pondered two small sigil-wedges; one pointed left, the other right. He pressed the left.
___The map shuffled, and when it resolved, the scope had widened to show more land.
___“Very keen,” murmured Jian in satisfaction. Pressing that sigil over and over, brought the map to a span of thousands of kilopaces.
___Two blue knobs now jutted up, widely separated on the map. Jian tapped these with his finger. Nothing happened. He wiggled them gently. Nothing happened.
___On further examination of the frame, he found four other sigils, shaped like arrows instead of wedges. These redrew the map, in the direction pressed; thus ‘moving’ the map around.
___Jian played with these; as the final daylight faded out of the two narrow windows, leaving the laboratory lit by magic and natural light. Occasionally, he would roll the sigilball in its niche; but still this seemed to do nothing. Two more wedges pointed up and down; however, they did not have any sigiltracings. Jian attempted to use them anyway. Nothing happened.
___Portunista, meanwhile, had more practical problems.
___Her brigade most certainly lacked the power to defeat even two larger forces, much less three. So how could she possibly keep the Tower?
___Qarfax could have defended himself, of course; and yet, he had believed that he should hire some guards, as Seifas had said, against mere natural threats.
___And yet, not against large numbers of natural threats, she reminded herself: no juacuar, not even Seifas, not even backed by nine other soldiers, could defend the Tower against a brigade—and any one of the warring Cadrists at the time would likely have brought an army of brigades.
___Qarfax could have protected himself against a Cadrist, or against a Cadrist’s army; but probably not against them both. One would have overrun him while the other took his attention.
___And yet, Qarfax had only hired nine normal guards, and one juacuar.
___So: Qarfax had likely made other provisions for Tower defense—plans which did not include Seifas, nor Qarfax himself.
___Seifas, and Portunista’s other subcommanders, together with a couple of squads, might be enough to repel a sally from any brigade the size of hers; but surely they couldn’t defeat a brigade outright, thus nixing the risk of a siege.
___And she faced three brigades, larger than her own—from which she would soon be cut off.
___And she was not a Cadrist herself.
___She absolutely needed that extra defense.
___Therefore, she had spent the past two hours perusing scrolls and books for hints about such a defense. She was fairly certain her current stack contained the answers she needed.
___Unfortunately, Qarfax had written them mostly in code.
___Gemalfan’s disciplex had not been all that difficult to decode, because the magus had still considered such information to be potentially useful in a trade. His coding had only kept casual viewers from learning too much.
___This was different.
___She rested her head on her hand, and thought.
___A single word, as she was thinking, caught her eye:
___four-faces.
___It caught at her memory, too. Where had she heard of this, in reference to Qarfax? Not in the past few days…further back than that…Yes, that night near the end of Hazyslope, when she had announced her plans to her subcommanders. During Seifas’ story about what had happened at the tower, he had mentioned something…about…
___yes!—Qarfax had claimed four faces guarded him, so that he would never be caught by surprise.
___That sounded like something to do with the ceiling map. But its divisions were only natural, formed by the streams…
___…the four streams…
___diving below the four Tower faces…down to millwheels, constantly running machinery…including four spindles, engaging their sigils continuously…no: continuously engaging only one radial sigil, at four distinctly different points…!
___She rose to her feet, and carefully walked to the gap in the wall—the wrecked door being less than redundant now—trying to balance the weave of her reasoning.
___“Hey, ‘ista!” Jian called out. “Mind if I stay here and work with this table some more?”
___“Fine, whatever…” she absently waved her hand in his direction.
___She quietly paced, down the stairs, passing Gaekwar at the garrison landing.
___“Ready for my report?” he asked.
___“Later,” she said, not looking at him. She didn’t see his lopsided smile.
___“I brought your other change of clothes,” he added. “And also a shirt for Jian. Where should I put ‘em?”
___“Up in the lab,” she vaguely replied; and having passed him, forgot him completely, leaving him staring in curiosity.
___The subcommanders had claimed the ‘basement’ for themselves; but only for convenience, not for privacy. Soldiers were bringing in crates from a wagon outside, placing them so as to ease a defense of the open room. She stepped to one side, out of the way.
___She still could feel her intentive bind maintaining the Yrthescrution within Qarfax’s ceiling map. She would need to release that now, she supposed—even if two Yrthescrutions could be bound into place at once, they’d only provide conflicting information. She flagged an infantryman, and told him to run upstairs to alert the watchguard not to panic if he lost his dots for several minutes.
___She gave the soldier an eighty-count to deliver the message. Then she began.
___First she released the bind on the scrution three floors overhead. She hadn’t realized, before she released it, how relieved that part of her mind would be. But, she didn’t remain at rest. She knelt, and placed one palm on the floor, where she could focus with least distraction; and jotted a new Yrthescrution.
___She sent her intent down into the well, searching its shape; finding the four turning spindles, and also the sigilband. Outside that band, within the rocky depths, the web that she had perceived the day before still lay, defying her understanding.
___So, she tried to simply perceive the shape of the field as a whole; pulling her focus back, keeping as much of the field in her view as possible.
___A smile crept onto her face; for now she could see:
___four fields, each one slightly overlapping the other.
___She sent her thoughts out further…whatever they did, the fields did end before reaching the edge of the dell—as Jian, she ironically grimaced, had helped to remind her. And yet, the detection radius of the ceiling map did stretch to the ridges around the valley.
___So. Four distinct ‘faces’, surrounding Qarfax Tower. And documents hinting otherwise at a special Tower defense, made use of that term sometimes: “four-faces.”
___Clearly, unlike the map above her, merely scruting the jointed field did not activate it. Probably just as well, she decided: she didn’t know how to control it. What did it even do?
___Control…the disparate fields were linked in a way, by that common band from which they sprang. Would the control be a similar single-source?
___Simplicity, she told herself. If this was a defense, what could she expect about it?—if she had designed it, what would have been her priorities?
___To hold large forces at bay, or even to neutralize them, until she defeated any rival magi. And fighting against such rivals would likely require an intense concentration, at least as much as Seifas would need when dueling master swordsmen.
___Too much concentration to guide the defense. She should be looking for something, then, with pre-scribed behavior instructions, like the pentadart generators.
___She narrowed her focus somewhat, and began to scan, forth and back in a slow rotation of radius; allowing her intention to wash across the ‘surface’ of the subterranean fields. The forest for the trees, she reminded herself…She couldn’t understand the details yet; so, she should look for a larger pattern—and she did detect a uniform repetition of insane complexity—and then, for some discrepancy…
___—like that! There, centered in one of the fields: a solid object, about two handwidths across; covered with sigils—sigils she couldn’t understand and hardly dared to probe.
___This must be the control device.
___The maga sighed, partly in satisfaction at her reasoning’s consummation, and partly in frustration. Qarfax would have known exactly where he placed his artifact, and would have been able to reach it intentively almost instantly, as he wished.
___But he would have known what to do with it, too…
___“Portunista!”
___She jerked, her concentration broken, the Yrthe falling from under her eyelids. She raised her head; Gaekwar was kneeling in front of her.
___“Finally,” Gaekwar smiled his ironic smile. A corner of Portunista’s mind was now reporting that he had been trying to get her attention for more than a minute.
___“Yes?” she replied in an icy tone—no reason to let him know that she’d been oblivious of his presence…
___“I think you should come upstairs. You won’t believe this, unless you see it yourself.”
___“Just tell me straight out. I’ve had a long day.”
___He shrugged. “Okay: Jian is feeding the bird.”
___“And…what does that mean?”
___“I told you you wouldn’t believe it.”
___“No,” she corrected, with straining patience. “I don’t understand it. There’s a difference. What do you mean, he’s feeding the bird? What bird?”
___“The bird that tried to kill you. He’s feeding it.”
___Now she began to wonder if maybe she’d fallen to sleep on the floor of the basement. This conversation seemed unreal…
___“The bird…from the forest, last night?” she prompted.
___“Yehhhhhp,” he drawled, grinning fit to burst. “He’s feeding it haunches of pork.”
___She opened her mouth to ask, what in the hells of the lords of perdition that bird was doing here…!—but closed it again. “Okay,” she relented. “I’ll come see.”
___She picked herself off the floor, and stomped to the narrow stairway, wondering what she would have to deal with now.
I don’t plan to spell everything out with him directly until the epilogue of the final book, but I expect some enterprising readers will be able to figure it all out before then. Not that I’ll confirm they’ve got it right of course. 