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"According to my most recent dispatches from Two Thousand Harshu, Rithmar Skirvon has disappeared. Either he was killed in the otherwise successful Special Operations mission which clearly managed to kill the Sharonians' Voice at Fallen Timbers, or else he was captured and is currently the prisoner of the handful of Sharonians who appear to have so far evaded capture themselves. I have little doubt that he will have told them anything he knows by now. Fortunately, his actual knowledge is strictly limited, and the possibility that his captors will be in any position to utilize what he may have told them is slight. Nonetheless, it would be prudent, in my judgment, to make arrangements for his elimination as soon as possible after his recovery by our own forces. Indeed, the best resolution would be for him to be killed in the crossfire when our troops attempt to rescue him, and I am cautiously exploring possible avenues for arranging that outcome.
"Thousand Carthos, on the other hand, has now been placed in command of an independent advance up a second line of universes. While this deprives him of further opportunity to shape the main thrust to our liking, it also means he no longer has Harshu or Toralk looking over his shoulder, and his natural attitude towards these Sharonians is much closer to our own than either Harshu's or Toralk's. I feel confident that we could have relied upon him to generate a significant number of 'atrocities' in his own command area even without my ... instructions to him.
"Thousand Harshu is proving rather more ... problematical than I'd originally hoped," mul Gurthak admitted. "Unfortunately, his seniority made him the only choice, other than myself, to command the expeditionary force. The good news is that he's reacted very much as I anticipated to the 'discretionary instructions' I sent him. I believe you will have discovered by now, from the copy of my instructions to him which I appended to my last report, that it must be crystal clear to any impartial reading that I never ordered him to launch this attack. Indeed, I intend in the next few days to send him dispatches admonishing him for having taken too much upon himself in launching any offensive beyond the Hell's Gate universe itself. I will also be sending copies of those dispatches up the official communications pipeline to the High Commandery. Of course, now that he's committed us to actual operations, I have no option but to support him to the very best of my ability in order to ensure that those operations succeed."
Mul Gurthak paused the recording and leaned back in his chair, interlacing his fingers across his chest while he considered what he'd already recorded. He thought about it for several seconds, then straightened and resumed.
"The bad news is that Harshu is clearly up to something. At this time, I'm not certain exactly what, but I suspect he's more of a throwback to the old Andaran honor code than I'd believed. If my suspicions are accurate, he's deliberately engineering a situation in which any blame for atrocities and excesses committed in the course of this expedition will be seen as his, and only his, personal responsibility.
Should he succeed in doing so, it will almost certainly result in at least some mitigation of the consequences of those excesses upon public opinion.
"Despite that, I believe the basic objectives will still be attained. Five Hundred Neshok, in particular, is working out very well. His personality is just as sociopathic as our evaluating spellware suggested, and his violations of the Kerellian Accords continue to mount steadily. No matter what Harshu may want, Neshok's actions are going to have a huge impact on public opinion in the home universe. The Ransarans' repugnance will be impossible to overstate, and the more traditional elements of Andara will be equally horrified. The fact that Neshok, Carthos, and Harshu are all Andarans themselves will, of course, fasten responsibility for this entire fiasco upon Andara and the Andaran officer corps. It was an Andaran—Harshu—who launched the attack in an excess of militarism and personal ambition which far exceeded my instructions to him. And it was two other Andarans—Neshok and Carthos—who proved themselves to be merciless butchers and sadists.
"I was unable to be too explicit in my suggestions to Neshok about the best way to use the traitor vos Dulainah's death to further our objectives. It's become clear, though, that he understood the concept quite well. He's also been rather more subtle than I anticipated by insisting that his briefings on vos Dulainah's death are a 'best guess reconstruction of events' based on 'reports which ca
He paused once more, his face carefully expressionless despite the malicious glee that bubbled deep inside at the thought of using the traitor Halathyn vos Dulainah's death to finally smash Andara's grip upon the High Commandery. The fact that the atrocities his supposed murder at Sharonian hands was spawning among the Andarans and fugitive garthan who had idolized the senile old lunatic would hammer a wedge between the components of the Andaran-Ransaran political alliance which had always frustrated Mythal's objectives, as well, only made it even sweeter to contemplate.
"The fact that I was forced to improvise with so little warning has forced me to run certain risks," he continued after a moment. "The co
"Neshok will cease to be a problem as soon as I decide his usefulness is at an end. He's unaware that one of the troopers assigned to his intelligence section has very specific ... instructions where he's concerned."
Mul Gurthak allowed himself a thin smile. Of course Neshok was "unaware" of those "instructions," since Javelin Lisaro Porath was unaware of them himself. Nor was there any reason for Neshok to suspect anything of the sort was even possible. The technique mul Gurthak had used to implant them required someone with a Gift vastly stronger than the one anyone outside the Council of Twelve knew mul Gurthak possessed. It also happened to have been proscribed, along with all other mind-ripping spellware, at the time the Union of Arcana was formally ratified. Unfortunately for the demands of the pious Ransaran reformers, the Council of Twelve had already been in existence for centuries at that time, and the Councilors had taken steps to preserve the knowledge which so many others—including so many shakira, who ought to have known better—had been prepared to simply throw away.
When Porath received the activation signal from mul Gurthak, he would obey the commands the two thousand had imprinted. Alivar Neshok would die quickly, before Porath—in an obvious paroxysm of guilt over the hideous crimes he had committed under Neshok's orders—hanged himself. And the most amusing aspect of the entire thing, as far as mul Gurthak was concerned, was that the signal would be a routine dispatch from him promoting Porath from javelin to sword on the basis of Neshok's glowing reports.
"Carthos, however, is beyond my immediate reach, as is Harshu," the two thousand continued. "We can always hope that one or both of them might become casualties once Sharonian resistance finally begins to solidify. We obviously ca
"If not for Carthos' links to myself and the CBM, his court-martial—or disgrace, at least—would probably prove almost equally useful. In his case, however, any investigation by the Inspector General's Office would be entirely too likely to discover those links. For that matter, Carthos himself might well reveal them—and the 'suggestions' I gave him before sending him out to join Harshu's command—in return for being permitted to plead guilty to some lesser offense. As a consequence, I believe his removal to be imperative. Unless otherwise instructed, I intend to use the Gorhadyn Protocol to terminate him at the appropriate moment."
The beauty of the Gorhadyn Protocol—aside from the fact that no one outside the Council of Twelve even suspected its existence—was that its effects were virtually impossible to distinguish from a natural stroke. Only a powerfully Gifted magistron who already suspected what had happened could possibly detect it, and even then only if the autopsy were performed within no more than twelve to eighteen hours of the moment of death.
The drawback to using the Gorhadyn Protocol, of course, was that having too many people drop dead of convenient strokes at convenient moments was likely to raise a few eyebrows, at the very least.
"I've already reported my proposal for dealing with Hundred Olderhan and his family," mul Gurthak went on, "and if the Council approves my proposed strategy, it will be necessary for Five Hundred Klian to be removed, as well. Even if the Council rejects my proposal, however, Klian's death will hurt nothing and will further reduce the handful of people who know how vos Dulainah actually died. I therefore intend to deal with him at an appropriate moment. At this time, I'm looking for some means other than the Gorhadyn Protocol for accomplishing that portion of the operation. From the prospect of continuing to safeguard the Protocol's existence, I believe it would be wiser to find some other way to eliminate him. At the same time, it might well be that our agents in Arcana and New Arcana would be able to spin the similarity of his and Carthos' deaths into a suspicion that highly placed Andarans ordered their removal in an effort to shut their mouths about the 'truth' of Andaran mismanagement, arrogance, and atrocities, begi
Please advise me as to your feelings in this regard. Although the message turnaround time will probably preclude the arrival of any advice from you before I'm forced to act in Klian's case, I will, of course, obey your instructions to the very best of my ability, should it be possible for them to reach me before that time."