Alector's Choice (9 page)

Dainyl settled into
one of the chairs at the table, gingerly.

Sturwart dropped into
the chair across from the alector. ‘Anyway, you probably know as much about the
mine as j

Donasyr does. He’s
never out there, just collects the coins, writes the reports, and leaves the
running to the overseers and the guards. Today, he’d tell you less than he
would most days because he’d already have been in Cyalt if he hadn’t had to
talk to you.“

“His family is
there?”

“Hardly! His wife
likes the big place on the hill here in Dramuria better. He’s got a girl in
Cyalt, more like his daughter’s age. Everyone knows it. Then, with a wife like
his—she’s a beauty all right, but got a tongue like a sabre— I’m not sure I
wouldn’t be tempted that way.”

“You say that the
overseers run the mine?”

“Every way that
counts, every way that counts… and most of them are good men. Do the best they
can. Sad business when people get sent there.”

“Some have said that
justicer sentences to the mine are more frequent when Donasyr needs more
miners,” suggested Dainyl.

“I’ve heard that for
years. Heard it about Haldynt—he was the one the guilds picked to run the mines
before Donasyr. I can’t say it might not happen now and again, but mostly it’s
the other way around. When there are too many young men without places to
go—apprenticeships, or the Cadmians, or family lands—they get in trouble, drink
too 1

much, fight too much,
and they get sent to the mine. The families complain that the justicer was told
to get more miners. The justicer denies it, and that just makes people think
that he’s lying.“

Dainyl got the
impression that Sturwart was telling the truth. “That’s always a problem.”

“Always been a
problem, and always will be. What else can I tell you?”

“Who gets the golds after
the merchanters in Southport or wherever pay for the guano?”

“They come to the
council, most of them. The mine belongs to Dramuria, the town itself, the
crafters and guilds and partly to a few of the big growers. They have a fifth.
Been that way forever. The council approves Donasyr’s requests for what he’s
spending. He has a good year, and he gets a bit extra. Not a lo,t extra,
though. Don’t want him holding back on food to the miners, or tools. That’d be
a bad business. We also pay for one of the Cadmian companies.”

Dainyl had not known
that. “What can you tell me about the troubles at the mine?”

Sturwart tilted his
head and paused for a time, the longest he’d been silent since Dainyl had been
in the council building. Finally, he spoke, more slowly. “You know… I wish I
knew. Production’s down, but the miners aren’t getting fed any less. Went up
there a bunch of times to check. Even went when no one knew I was coming. I’ve
been talking to the ones whose terms were over, too. They won’t talk. Scared-like,
but they’re not scared of the guards or the overseers. Something’s going on in
the mine, I’d say, and it’s happening when the overseers aren’t watching.”
Sturwart looked straight at Dainyl. “Couldn’t prove it any way that I know.”

“We received a report
about disgruntled miners starting a revolt…”

Sturwart laughed,
shaking his head. “Donasyr keeps track of that, and so do we. Always be folks
who won’t learn that life has rules. You work, or you go hungry. You don’t want
to work at what’s here, you join the Cadmians, or go someplace else, or you get
stuck in the dyeworks or the mine. Some won’t learn, and they end up in the
mines, and the rules there are tougher. Some can’t take it, and they try to
escape. There were fewer than twenty who weren’t accounted for in the last
year. Don’t know about this year.

Even if they all made
it, twenty of that kind wouldn’t begin to start a revolt.“

Dainyl nodded,
sensing once more that the council head believed his own words totally. “Why do
the growers own a fifth of the mine?”

“Years back, town
needed golds to finish the road paving and the buildings up there. The growers
around here put up the coin, and they get a fifth of the proceeds after
expenses. Or they can get more of the guano at a reduced price, or some combination.”

“Do any of them take
the guano?”

“Some, like Ubarjyr,
use it on their casaran plantations.”

“Where could I find
the heads of the guilds?” Dainyl had strong doubts he’d learn anything from the
guild directors, jut the Highest had suggested he talk to them.

“You won’t find
Bleamyr or Tulcuyt today or tomorrow. I ;an arrange for you to meet them here
on Londi, say around lie ninth glass, in the morning.”

“I’ll be here,”
replied Dainyl, rising.

“That’s for certain.
One can always count on the Myrmi-ions. Always can.” Sturwart rose and headed
toward the doorway and the corridor beyond. “Any other questions you lave, I’ll
be here, too, on Londi.”

“I’m sure there will
be some. I appreciate your patience md willingness to be here.”

“Glad to be of help.
Without you, we wouldn’t have a . whole lot, now, would we?”

Dainyl smiled again
as he left the building, glad to be out n the warmth of the white sun, under
the cloudless silver-»reen sky. He mounted, then nodded to Sturwart, before
ooking at Rhasyr. “Back to the compound.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dainyl could tell
that the stalwart Rhasyr was relieved to )e heading back to the compound, both
from his feelings md from the fact that he and the others kept blotting their
wows. Dainyl was enjoying the day, one of the most com-fortable he’d
experienced in almost a season, but it was unseasonably hot, even for the local
Cadmians.

After they crossed
the bridge and headed up the wide and curving incline toward the compound,
ahead to his left, Dainyl sensed someone radiating fear. He could not quite
locate the source, and as the bay carried him onto the flat of the bluff, with
the compound little more than two vingts ahead, his eyes and Talent scanned the
area to his left, amid the nut trees.

Crack, crack.

He was rocked back in
the saddle, his right shoulder twisted violently. He hadn’t even been able to
locate the sniper. Even so, the light-cutter was in his left hand almost
instantly, and his eyes jerked to his right, his Talent probing for the source.
He could sense a single man on the low rise in the middle of the trees less
than a hundred yards away, and another sprinting away.

Drawing on the
lifeweb, he raised a deflection shield around his head and neck as he turned
the bay off the road.

“Sir!” called Rhasyr
from behind him.

The man remaining
raised his rifle once more, but this time the shot went wide, as did the third
and fourth shots.

Dainyl was less than
thirty yards away when, abruptly, the man dropped the rifle, next to another
weapon lying on the clay. One hand went to his belt, then to his mouth. He
swallowed and smiled as Dainyl reined up. He was not wearing anything like a
uniform, just a shapeless gray short-sleeved shirt, and gray trousers—and
sandals, rather than boots. His beard was unkempt and his brown hair greasy and
long.

Dainyl glanced to the
north, but trying to find the other shooter would have been difficult, and he
needed to find out what he could from the one at hand. “Why did you fire at
me?” Dainyl kept the light-cutter aimed at the man, even as he tried to sense
if there were others around besides the man who had fled. He found no one.
Behind him, he could hear the three Cadmians.

“To kill you. You are
a monster. All of you are monsters.”

“All of who?”

“You alectors. You do
not belong here.”

“Who told you that?”
probed Dainyl.

“Those who know, even
better than you.” The man swallowed convulsively, again. “You… will… see.”

Dainyl could see his
lifeforce fading. Then the man pitched forward, dead.

“Sir?” called Rhasyr.
“What happened?”

“He shot at me,”
explained Dainyl. “He swallowed something—poison.”

A look of surprise
and horror passed between the Cadmi-ans.

Dainyl did not show
the surprise he felt. It had been years since anyone had fired at him. The
bullet had flattened against the lifeforce-reinforced uniform tunic. While it
had not penetrated the tunic, the fabric had spread the impact across the front
of his upper chest and shoulder, and he would have an enormous bruise across
his chest and shoulder in the days to come, even after drawing on the lifeforce
web.

“Get his body and
carry it back to the compound. His rifle, and the other one there, too.”

“Ah… sir… ?”

“Whatever he
swallowed won’t hurt you.” Dainyl waited as one of the junior Cadmians
dismounted, recovered the rifles and handed them to Rhasyr, then hoisted the
body of the man across the front of his own saddle.

When the Cadmian had
remounted, Dainyl turned his mount back toward the road… and the compound.
While he hated to draw lifeforce, he left the physical shield in place.

Lystrana had warned
him, and he never underestimated her abilities. He just hadn’t expected an
attack from such a quarter and so soon.

The most puzzling
aspect of the day had been the man who had shot at him, then killed himself.
There were always some who disliked alectors. That was to be expected. What had
been so unusual had been the man’s words. He clearly had been indoctrinated
somehow, and whoever had done the indoctrination had told him only part of the
truth. Alectors certainly were not native to Acorus, but neither were the
indigens nor the landers. So who was behind the attempt? Did they really think
that they could kill more than a handful of alectors? What good would that
do—for anyone?

Dainyl couldn’t say
he understood, but he knew he needed to, and quickly.

Immediately after
breakfast on Decdi,

Quelyt and Dainyl
were airborne under high and hazy white clouds, soaring northwest from the
Cadmian compound toward the jagged peaks and spires of the MurianMountains,
where lush greenery alternated with black and red rock.

Dainyl leaned
slightly left to get a better view of the road to the mine. His right shoulder
sent a jolt all the way across his body. He could only hope that the soreness
and stiffness would subside within a few days. Majer Herryf and the Cadmians
were trying to identify the dead man, and to see if the rifle—which was clearly
Cadmian issue—had come from the garrison at Dramuria. Dainyl doubted that it
could have come from anywhere else, but if it had, he was facing a much bigger
problem.

He studied the road
that led to the guano mine, empty except for two wagons rumbling downhill
toward Dramuria. Once below the switchbacks just southeast of the mine, the
road traveled straight along a ridgeline leading southeast to

Dramuria, through the
town, and to the high-walled covered bins at the southeastern section of the
docks, where the guano was stored waiting for shipment to Southgate or the
river ports of the Vedra.

Even from the air,
the mining compound looked secure. The compound was set on a triangular bluff
with the Mu-raltoRiver below. The western end of the bluff was blocked by a
stone wall with a single gate. A second wall with another gate crossed the
bluff about a third of a vingt to the west of the first. The space between the
two was bare red clay. There were no walls on the top of the bluff, just the
cliffs to the river below.

The cliffs that
dropped to the river from the bluff were sheer, and at their base was a rocky
shingle that sloped into j the river. The stone at the base was wide enough
that diving into the water from the bluff would have been impossible, and the
height of the bluff, a good hundred yards, would have made climbing down
extraordinarily difficult.

‘Toward the mine,
now!“

The pteridon’s wings
lifted it into a climb as it headed to the northwest.

The mine was even
less to look at—a single cavelike opening, around which was a circular area of
flattened rock and clay. From that apron a narrow road wound down from a single
guarded gate through four switchbacks. Carts were pulled out of the mine by
teams of miners in harnesses, then dumped from a ramp into the guano wagons.

Three wooden guard
towers ringed the apron, and a stockade fence joined the towers and ran from
the innermost towers to clifflike sections of the mountain. The only exit was
through the gate to the road beside the southern guard tower. If the guards
were distracted, an extremely agile miner might get over the fence, but the
sides of the rock apron were totally exposed, and it seemed highly improbable
that large numbers of miners could have escaped.

The colonel looked
back and studied the road. Between the mine itself and the miners’ compound
below, the road was enclosed by a stone wall on both sides, and beyond the wall
were steep slopes and open rock faces. As the Cadmian captain had told Dainyl,
there was one bridge, over the gorge to the northwest of the compound.

“Quelyt? Can you
circle up around some of the lower peaks here?”

“Yes, sir.”

The pteridon climbed
once more, circling up and toward a rocky spire several vingts due west of the
guano mine. Dainyl could see another cave, higher and to the west, and could
sense a concentration of lifeforce—more bats, and another source of guano in
the future.

The MurianMountains
were not that high, rising between two and three thousand yards above the sea.
Flying above the higher summits, with several hundred yards to spare, was close
to the highest point a pteridon could fly. Above four thousand yards, and less
over desert areas or ice and snow, the pteridons could not draw enough
lifeforce to hold altitude—or sometimes, as the earliest Myrmidons had
unfortunately discovered, to exist at all.

Dainyl tried to
gather in a sense of the lifeforces. There was certainly life there, but, with
the exceptions of another two bat caves and several bird rookeries, not the
concentrations that would have marked small settlements or a rebel camp.

Then… after several
circles of the rocky spire, for an instant, just an instant, Dainyl sensed two
flashes of lifeforce—traces he had never sensed before. One was a faint
red-violet, and the other, nearly a mist somewhere beneath him, was golden
green.

“Can you come down a
little?” he called to Quelyt.

“Not much, sir. Could
hit a downdraft here.”

“As much as you can,
then.”

Quelyt was being more
cautious than Dainyl would have been, but then, the pteridon was carrying
double, and Quelyt wasn’t that familiar with the terrain.

After another lower
circle, during which Dainyl could sense nothing, he called to the ranker, “You
can head back to the compound now.”

“Yes, sir.”

As the blue-winged
flyer soared down and to the southeast, Dainyl wondered what creature—or
creatures—could have a red-violet and golden green lifeforce. Red-violet wasn’t
that different from pteridons, but it had not been the same. Dainyl knew
pteridons. And he’d never sensed anything golden green. Ifryns all were
purplish, if in different shades, and landers and indigens ran from black to
yellowish brown. Yet the contact had been so brief that he wasn’t certain what
he had sensed. He couldn’t report that to the marshal, not when he’d been so
careful to hide the extent to which Lystrana had been able to help him develop
his Talent.

By the time the
pteridon settled onto the stones of the Cadmian courtyard, it was close to
midday, and pleasantly warm despite the high hazy clouds.

Dainyl dismounted,
then turned to Quelyt. “Thank you. I may need your help later.”

“Any time, sir. Not
as though we’re doing dispatch flying here.”

“One of you may have
to do that, when I have to send a I report to the marshal.”

“We figured that,
Colonel.” Quelyt grinned. “The marshal always wants reports.”

“We’ll see.” After a
smile and a nod, Dainyl turned and walked swiftly across the sun-warmed stones
of the courtyard to the headquarters building. The compound remained almost
empty, except for the end-day duty squads and officer. He doubted that he would
find Majer Herryf in his study, even though he had asked the majer to make sure
that the dead man and the rifle were investigated immediately.

Before Dainyl had
gotten three steps into the building, the duty squad leader rose from his desk
in the foyer. “Colonel, sir, Captain Meryst is standing by for you, sir. His
study is the second one on the left.”

“Thank you.” Dainyl
wasn’t at all surprised. Herryf was the type to delegate anything that
infringed on his time.

Even before the
colonel reached the study door, the captain was on his feet, half-bowing in
respect. “Colonel, sir.” Captain Meryst was not the one Dainyl had met before.
Unlike Herryf and the other young captain, Meryst was fair-skinned, if not
white like an alector, with small freckles across his face. He was tall for a
lander, close to two yards, and painfully thin.

“Captain. You had the
duty today?”

“No, sir. That’s
Captain Benjyr. He’s at the mine. Majer Herryf said you wanted anything we
could find about the man who shot at you as soon as we could.”

Dainyl gestured to
the desk. “You can sit down.” He took the single chair across from the captain.
It was low, and his knees felt cramped enough that he wished he’d remained
standing. “What have you found out?”

“The man had been a
miner. That was easy. The miners are tattooed. There’s a number on their left
ankle. The man who shot at you escaped over a year ago. Devoryn was his name.”

“Was there any record
of how he escaped?”

“Yes, sir.” Meryst
frowned. “Most of them jump or dive off the bridge. Devoryn didn’t. Somehow he
was one of the handful that no one saw escape. He just wasn’t there when they
mustered them to go back. I did check the records for the last two years. Until
this year, there were only four like that. About eighteen, if I counted right,
that went off the bridge that we never found any traces of.”

“How many went off
the bridge and didn’t make it?”

“Thirty-three, sir.”

That surprised
Dainyl. “How many miners are there? Some two hundred?”

“Right now, the
roster lists two hundred and seventeen.”

“How many have died
while serving in the mine?”

“Not that many, sir.
Eight over the past year, and most were in accidents.”

“But a fifth of them
have tried to escape in ways that kill more than half of them?”

“More like a tenth,
sir. You see, maybe half the miners in a year are there for five to seven
months—for the minor offenses.”

“Do you know if this…
the one who shot at me… if he had been there more than once?”

“I’d have to check
more for sure, sir, but I don’t think so. The number on his ankle is one of
those used about a year ago, and he escaped in the late winter.”

“What about the
rifles?”

“They were from here,
sir.”

Dainyl looked at the
captain, raising his eyebrows.

“Ah… it looks like… I
mean…”

“Are you trying to
say that one of the rankers either lost or gave his rifle away, then took one
from the armory? And that the one that the escaped miner had was that ranker’s
rifle?”

“Ah, not exactly,
sir. The missing rifle belonged to a squad leader named Hirosyt. He finished
his term a month ago, and no one knows where he went.”

“So… he lost or gave
the rifle to one of the rebels, and used his position as a squad leader to lift
another rifle from the armory?”

“It looks that way,
sir.”

“I would strongly
suggest, Captain, that every rifle in both companies be checked against the
records.”

“We’ve already
started, sir. We’ll know by tomorrow.”

“What about the other
one?”

“It’s a standard
Cadmian rifle, and it was never issued to anyone. Someone took it directly from
the armory.”

Dainyl asked another
round of questions, and a full glass passed before he stood to leave. “Thank
you, Captain. I look forward to hearing what you have to tell me tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir.”

As he walked back
toward the mess, Dainyl considered what he’d learned. First, there was a way to
escape the mines that wasn’t suicidal. Second, conditions had to be > even
worse in the mines than anyone believed. When that many miners tried escapes
with such a high fatality rate, something was driving them. His thin lips
curled. Ifryn was dying, and even Talented alectors were hesitating in trying
translations to Acorus and Efra—and death was certain in time if they didn’t.
Yet death was far from certain as a miner, but people were dying to get away.

Dainyl had already
suspected that the so-called rebellion had to have been helped by someone in
the Cadmian compound. The question was just how many rifles the rebels had.
There weren’t any other sources of weapons, not in any large numbers. While
smuggling was possible, he would have thought it highly unlikely, if not
impossible, given that rifles were only produced in Faitel and Alustre, and
only for Cadmian units.

The other troubling
thing had been the escaped miner’s words. Dainyl had no idea who would have
known what the man had said—except another alector—and that was a frightening
thought indeed. It just wasn’t something that an alector would do, and Dainyl
doubted that there had even been any alectors in Dramur during the time the
prisoner had been in the compound or afterward. The more he learned, though,
the less he liked what he was finding out.