“I doubt she’ll mind, since she’s getting to sleep late,” Delia pointed out. “Give her the rest of the day off or something. It’s not as if both of us are incapable of taking care of ourselves for a few candlemarks.”
“True,” Isla said, and patted her hand. “Well, this will be the first time you see scrying, won’t it?”
Delia nodded. Since most of her sister’s education as a mage had come at Kordas’s instruction, and her father had not had so much as a hedge-wizard of his own, she really hadn’t seen much magic except the antics of performers at the Midsummer and Midwinter festivities back home.
“Normally I would be doing a sort of scrying that only I can see and hear, but since you’re with me, I’ll make it so that you can see it too,” said her sister. “Kordas will probably do the same for Beltran.” She smiled a little. “I must say, I am very grateful that with this sort of spell, distance is irrelevant; it’s the link between the two parties that matters, or the link between the scryer and the destination.”
She picked up what might have been a mirror, except that it was made of opaque black glass, and propped it on a holder so they could both see it.
She tapped the surface of the table, and glowing lines forming a pair of circles with unfamiliar characters written between them appeared. She whispered a few sentences of words Delia could not make out, and the surface of the glass misted, as if fog was condensing on it.
Then the mist cleared away.
And there, as if they were looking through a window, was Kordas. He was seated at a table. A similar mirror was propped up before him; there was a strange, humanoid canvas thing like a dressmaker’s dummy standing to his right; and Beltran was standing to his left.
Delia’s eyes were immediately drawn to that strange—thing. It was almost faceless, nothing more than indentations in the canvas forming its bare head suggesting features. It appeared to be wearing nothing more than a tabard of scarlet with a purple wolf-head on it. There was a tiny five-pointed star inked on its forehead, between where its eyebrows would have been, if it had had eyebrows.
“Don’t be alarmed.” Kordas’s voice emerged from the mirror, thin and attenuated but perfectly understandable. “This is Star, a vrondi trapped by Imperial mages in a giant doll body. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them have replaced servants around here. It knows when we’re being scryed and can warn us if the mage assigned to keep track of us turns his attention to us.”
“He will not.” The whisper of a voice appeared to come out of that faceless doll. “He sleeps. Most of the mages sleep now, and the ones that are active are all over-watching the army in the south. This is the best time to communicate.”
Some of the tension eased out of Isla’s body. “I’d hoped as much. So you got the note Delia sent?”
“I have a bruise,” said Beltran, making a face. “She’s . . . very forceful. Just as well that I was loitering around the apartment they gave us, instead of out in public. I looked inside my coat to try and figure out what had hit me, took out the notecase, and saw it.”
Delia opened her mouth to apologize, but Kordas was already speaking. “I have a lot to tell you, and we need to be fast about it. So, let me begin.”
Delia quickly discovered that her brother-in-law was very good at summing things up in as few sentences as possible. Then again, he might well have spent many hours trying to condense everything down last night. He told them what he had discovered about the Dolls, how all the Palace servants had been sent away to the war, how the Imperial mages had turned to Elemental magic rather than Abyssal for the most part, and how he thought he was giving a good impression of a man and his realm that were too inconsequential to matter.
And how he had promised the vrondi that he would add them to the escape.
And how he wanted to get the vrondi to bring the Imperial hostages as well.
Isla had frowned at the first, but she scowled at the second. “Kordas!” she exclaimed. “What are you thinking? You have no right to ‘save’ them by kidnapping them! They aren’t your children! I understand why you’d feel like this, but—!”
“I was thinking that they are children,” he said simply. “I was thinking that they are there through no fault of their own. I was thinking that even vipers can be tamed. And I was thinking about your brother.”
Isla pressed her lips tightly together and said nothing.
“I’m doing this, Isla,” he said, in tones that suggested that arguing with him was going to be like hitting one’s head against a rock. It would do no good, and the rock wouldn’t notice.
She sighed. “All right. How do you propose to do this?”
“If a Doll stands at a Gate and holds a talisman for our Gate to it, that will keep it open for as long as the Doll is there—” he began, but Star interrupted him with a hand on his shoulder.
“We are charged with replicating the Gate talismans,” it whispered. “You merely need to give this one a single talisman, and we can, in secret, replicate as many as are needed. We will not need separate talismans for the hostages. We will render them immobile and carry them across ourselves.”
Kordas looked taken aback for a moment, as if he was revising his plans.
“And before you leave us, Great Lord, this one will slip you a talisman for one of the Gates only Dolls use here in the Palace,” it continued. “Then you may return at your will, and pass your talisman to us.”
“Well!” Kordas said. “That’s sorted, then.”
“Provided nothing else happens between now and the Regatta,” Isla said with gritted teeth. “I don’t like this, Kordas, but you’ve made up your mind, so I shan’t bother giving you a piece of mine. So I’ll tell you how far we’ve gotten here. We got the Portal open. We can soon have the Foothold established. Ivar has crossed, and found a suitable place so quickly, that is so perfect, it seems the gods arranged it for us. There are ruins there, Ivar says—remains of a tower, and docks going into the water. He thinks it was at least a town, maybe bigger, once, but it’s all overgrown, now. The water isn’t salten, and it’s deep.” Even through the scrying, Kordas looked amazed. “Today we’ll send our mob of mages across to actually build the Gates, one for foot traffic and then one for boats. Then Jonaton will cross with Ivar, and that Healer-cousin of Endicrag’s and some support to attune them. Woodsmen crews will clear land and I think maybe some of those ruins could be reclaimed. Then we’ll start the Plan transfers proper.” She shook her head. “There’s a lot that can go wrong, Kordas. There is still a lot that can go wrong.”
“I know that,” he said steadily.
“We still don’t know why the Emperor wanted you at the Palace,” she reminded him.