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Chapter Seventeen
Nith mul Gurthak closed his office door carefully, then crossed to his desk and seated himself behind it.
Outside his windows, a chill, moonless night wrapped itself about Fort Talon, and he smiled crookedly.
There was no reason he had to do this during the hours of darkness, yet it always felt curiously satisfying.
Conspiracies ought to be worked upon in darkness, however justified their objectives, he thought as he reached for the ornamental rankadi knife on his blotter.
He picked it up, closed his eyes, and reached out once more—not with his hands, this time, but with his Gift. His very powerful Gift, which no one outside the Council of Twelve and his own immediate line family suspected that he had.
It hadn't been easy, putting that Gift aside. Denying himself its use as he fitted himself into the narrow template of an officer in the Union of Arcana's Army. Nith mul Gurthak had been born Nith vos and mul Gurthak, of high shakira caste, as well as one of the traditional military families of Mythal. But he had systematically concealed the strength of his Gift, starting in early boyhood. Private tutors had trained him in its use with brutally, merciless rigor, begi
Now his shoulders relaxed, ever so slightly, as his questing Gift confirmed that the privacy spells about his office were all in place, up, and ru
No one else could have hoped to do that without alerting him to the security breach in ample time to deal with it.
Satisfied that no one could possibly observe him, he rolled up the left sleeve of his uniform blouse and drew the gleaming, razor-sharp rankadi blade. He held it under the light, before his eyes, clearing his mind of extraneous thoughts as he focused upon that glittering steel. The steel which had been used no less than eleven times to cleanse his bloodline of weakness and failure. The steel which was consecrated to the Great Task of the shakira by the blood it had shed, the honor it had preserved.
He felt his heart and mind fall into shared focus, settle into the perfect balance of thought and emotion appropriate to his sacred purpose, and a serene smile touched his mouth as he closed his eyes. He held the blade across his forehead with both hands while he murmured the words of the second verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Secrets, and then, without opening his eyes, pressed the blade's wickedly sharp edge against the inside of his left forearm. A line of blood sprang up against his dark skin, and he moved forearm and dagger carefully, with the smoothness of long practice, to gather that blood on the flat of the blade.
He opened his eyes once again and maneuvered the rankadi blade over the personal crystal sitting on the blotter of his desk. He spoke a single word in ancient Mythalan, then tilted his right wrist carefully and watched as a single drop of his blood fell from the dagger's tip to the fist-sized crystal. It glittered there, like a fallen ruby, for perhaps ten seconds. Then, without fuss, fanfare, or any spectacular glow and flash of arcane power, it simply disappeared ... and the PC flickered alight.
Mul Gurthak inhaled deeply as he saw the brief menu of commands. He'd done this any number of times, especially once he'd begun rising in rank within the Union Army, and yet there was always that moment of tension, that anticipation, almost as if somewhere deep inside he truly believed the carefully crafted spellware might have somehow failed since its last use. Which was ridiculous, of course. Spells researched and developed at the Mythal Falls Academy simply didn't fail.
He picked up his stylus and tapped the menu entry he needed. Then he sat back in his seat, raised both hands to cover his eyes, and bent his head in ritual submission and greeting.
"Mightiest Lords," he said in a dialect so ancient that no more than a handful of people in the entire multiverse would have understood it, "the least of your servants begs you to receive his report and consider his actions, that they may redound to the glory of the shakira and the high holiness of their purpose and the completion of the Great Task."
He waited, head still bent, for a full ninety seconds before he allowed his hands to fall to the blotter and his spine to straighten. Then he cleared his throat and began to speak once more, this time in modern Mythalan.
"Mightiest Lords, I trust that by now you have received my earlier messages. I will endeavor to be as brief as possible in updating you upon my progress in the service of the Great Task. As always, I await any instructions from you."
Should anyone outside the most trusted servants of the Council of Twelve ever gain access to the messages he had recorded over the years and decades of reports to the Council and its members, the consequences would have been disastrous. The damage to the Great Task would have been incalculable, and the consequences to mul Gurthak himself would have been far worse than merely fatal, but the commander of two thousand had never worried about the security of his messages.
The spellware which supported and protected them was the very finest in the entire multiverse ... and no one outside the Council even suspected that it existed. Without mentioning it to anyone else, the researchers at Mythal Falls Academy had perfected a technique which archived material at a compression rate of over five hundred thousand-to-one. A single second of crystal recording could contain the equivalent of no less than a hundred and forty hours of normally recorded data or imagery.
The messages which mul Gurthak routinely sent in would be less than a flicker in the stream of a normal crystal recording, imperceptible to anyone who lacked the special spellware required to strain them back out of the flow once more, and Mul Gurthak's reports had all been carefully hidden away in the long, chatty letters he routinely recorded and sent to his brother-in-law. His third sister's husband had no idea of mul Gurthak's actual duties, much less of the power of the two thousand's Gift. Nor did he have any idea that mul Gurthak's letters to him were routinely intercepted by the Mythalan postal service and routed very quietly to agents of the Council of Twelve to be sca
The transmission pipeline itself was as close to perfectly secure as fallible mortal beings could hope to come, yet the Council hadn't stopped there. Even if the message could have been detected and recovered by anyone else, it could not have been read. The encryption program, like the compression spellware itself, was the product of secret research at the Academy. It was unique in that there was no encryption key anyone could enter. The encryption was embedded in the sarkolis of the originating PC itself, and only two other PCs in the multiverse could decrypt it. All three of them had been enspelled simultaneously, and then one of them had then been issued to mul Gurthak, while the others had been placed in the care of two separate members of the Council of Twelve. Those three PCs, and only those three PCs, could read material generated from the secret spellware concealed behind the activating cantrip mul Gurthak had just used, and no one could activate—or even detect—that spellware without both the blood of the PC's proper owner and the proper ritual to control its shedding.
Should the existence of that elaborate encryption program ever come to the attention of mul Gurthak's non-Mythalan superiors, questions would undoubtedly be asked. Unfortunately for those superiors'
curiosity, mul Gurthak would have been under no legal obligation to answer their possible questions.
The two thousand found that deliciously ironic, since it was the Ransaran insistence on a citizen's right to privacy which had deprived military and law enforcement agencies of the police power to legally demand access to private encryption spellware or the personal messages it protected.
"As I've already reported," he continued, refocusing his thoughts and attention on the task in hand, "the sudden appearance of these 'Sharonians' and Olderhan's involvement in the first contact, not to mention the incredible ineptitude of Bok vos Hoven, left me with no option but to improvise."
He might, he reflected, be taking a not-insignificant risk in his characterization of vos Hoven. The incompetent idiot's family co
"I believe that, so far at least, events are transpiring much as I had hoped they might. It was fortunate the members of the Council had seen fit to arrange to provide me with significant assets in my area of responsibility, despite its distance from Arcana. This gave me far more influence at critical points than would have been the case without them. By the same token, however, I've been required to commit all of them, and I fear that few of them will survive. Indeed, it seems increasingly likely that their continued survival beyond the end of their immediate usefulness would, in itself, pose a considerable threat to the Great Task.