From: hutch@ibeam.intel.com (Steve Hutchison) Date: 11 Jun 93 06:56:26 GMT Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn Subject: [MG] Waste of Space [ADMIN] Sorry - the first part of this came out almost a month ago... If you want it I'll mail it on request. -o- Scorpion pulled himself tight against the parapet. He silently cursed the shaggy black wig that concealed his bald head, disguising him, but also distracting him and muffling the sounds of the guards at the gate. He wondered why 'Raelf, or Orim, as he insisted on being called, was so sure that it had to be HIM doing this operation. The governor and his latest doxy would be in the room upstairs. Taxes were coming in, and the legions were clamoring for their pay, as usual. But this particular greedy pig wasn't as canny as his predecessor had been. Raoh had never tolerated graft or incompetence, and it hadn't taken more than three or four demonstrations early on to curb it. Scorpion swallowed, remembering the boneless form of the beggar he had found still on display in the cage in front of the city, blasted by Raoh for his greed and then _changed_ by the tyrant's pet wizard. Kept alive as an example, though his keepers hadn't been feeding him well lately. The current fellow seemed even stupider than that beggar had been when he was governor. Or maybe just too greedy to care. In any case, it wouldn't matter. The guards were moving now. Scorpion snuck along the wall silently, knowing that they couldn't see him. Orim had given him a camoflage cloak for the tricky parts, and he blended completely with the wall. Their patrol pattern would leave the doorway unseen for a tenth of a second out of every ten minutes, but it was enough. He froze, they looked away, he was inside, frozen up against the wall. The inner tower guards followed a different pattern, it took him almost an hour to figure it out, but it left him a much wider opening. He was inside, in the courtyard, but not in the house yet. He cursed silently. Blink could have done this in a second, except that the building had been warded against teleportation. Orim could have gotten in, but he refused to act directly, said it would "alert those whose attention he would rather avoid," and said it in a way that made Scorpion feel sure he didn't want their attention either. So he was doing covert-ops again. Fine. He was right up to the door, and he knew that it wouldn't be the way to go in. He needed a distraction. He put the long thin whistle to his lips, blew a hard inaudible note. Nolrimm would hear, and maybe small dogs and cats... There was some barking in the distance, but he heard nothing. After a few minutes, he heard the crashing of boxes down by the storage barn, and shouts and imprecations. Nolrimm and Blink, as planned, getting a good half of the guards out of his way. Up the wall. He jumped, catching the ledge fourteen feet above with his hands. When 'Raelf put him back together after that business with Seer's Mother, turned him back from being a bug, he'd been given a strength boost to bleed off the excess power from his energy sting. It was useful sometimes. A pull-kip-flip and he landed silently in the hallway above. The door to the room was there on the left. No sound came from inside, in the baking heat of the late afternoon. Anyone with sense was asleep. The governor was out cold, and his personal guard was drowsing by the door. Scorpion gently extended one hand to a point just inches away from the guard's head, let the power flow to his fingertips, and with a very quiet ZOTX the guard stiffened, then slumped. The headache when he woke might remind him to stay alert next time. The governor and his girlie were in the usual tangle on the bed, and Scorpion frowned in annoyance. They were too close together, the girl would wake up. He removed a small glass flask from a leather wallet inside the front of his vest. Holding his breath, he took the tiny cork out, letting the fumes from the flask drift across their sleeping faces. With a cough and a jerk, their eyes both flew open, but a blank sort of stupidity soon looked out - they just lay there, stunned by the drug. Scorpion replaced the cork, and waited a few seconds for the fumes to clear, before taking in a gasping breath. He turned the governor onto his back, looking for a good spot for what he had to do. There, under his left arm, the ribcage, there was some fairly hairless skin. He pulled a wax-wrapped pellet from the wallet, and placed it in the staring man's mouth, between his teeth, setting it in such a way that he could bite down on it easily. The potion inside was half of Orim's spell of control. He turned the henna-haired woman on her side, so she couldn't see what he was doing, and gently closed her eyelids so her eyes wouldn't dry out before the drug wore off. Another dip into the wallet and he produced another small glass flask, and a metal disk which he set onto the governor's skin on the bare patch. "This is gonna hurt," he said conversationally. The governor couldn't respond, though he could hear, and it was courtesy to warn him. One finger popped the cork off the flask while another rested on the metal disk. As the fumes from the flask counteracted the earlier drug, Scorpion allowed a surge of power to leak from his finger into the disk, heating it to a faint red. Smoke hissed up from the skin. The governor gasped and bit down, then swallowed convulsively as he crushed the wax pellet holding the potion. Something cold ran down his throat and met the heat from the metal disk, and formed a sound inside him that was full of some incomprehensible meaning. Scorpion picked the disk up off the freshly branded spot, wrapping it in a rag of leather. His fingers might be heatproof, but the rest of him wasn't especially fond of being burned. He returned the flasks to the wallet, along with the branding disk. The seared skin was flushed red, a complex symbol. Scorpion wiped a bit of salve from another bottle out of the wallet, onto the burned area, and it healed almost in an instant. The man's eyes grew wide but he could not move. "Good. Now, neither of you will remember any of this when you wake up. But you've got a new boss now. You think now that Raoh is dead, you got it made. You'll find out though. Now both of you, go back to sleep." The governor's eyes closed. Scorpion returned the wallets to its place along the small of his back and pulled the camoflage cloak around him, activating its magic again. The route back out was just as long and tedious as the way in had been. Of course, there were more guards in the outbuildings than before, trying to figure out why the stone arches of the main doors had collapsed. Teleporting keystones into the fishpond tended to make the arches less stable, but Scorpion wasn't about to tell them that. Blink was waiting with Nolrimm at the old cottonwood clump, and they returned to headquarters in less time than it took to exhale. "Report?" Orim was leaning back in his chair behind his desk, some complicated diagrams scattered across the top of it. His boots were resting on the edge of the desk as he balanced on two feet of the chair, a strange undecipherable expression on his face. "Success, of course. One pig of a governor branded with the control pattern, no unusual problems. We had to use the second plan for the distraction though." Scorpion tossed the leather wallet onto the table, and sat down on the edge of the couch that Orim had installed for visitors. He tore the stupid black disguise wig off, revealing a bald head and a black, red, and gold abstract tattoo on his head. "So where's Rook," he continued, "Off on another solo run?" "Oh, she's around. Somewhere. Today's her day off." "Well, that explains where Blink vanished off to. Hey, Nolrimm, get your hinder over here." Scorpion waited for the winged man to join him, and they stood. "We have some questions." "Ah. You remember that I did say no questions when we started this." "Well, I don't recall agreeing to that point. Up to you if you want to answer, right?" Scorpion stared down at the elf. "Very well. What do you want?" The elf narrowed his eyes to fiery green slits, and began toying conspicuously with a dagger. "I've learned a lot from you about covert work, the last few weeks. But I still don't know _why_ we're doing this? What's the profit?" Orim laughed. "You know, I had the same thoughts myself not too long ago. Lads, I'm going to let you in on a secret. I'm on the lam from myself. Remember the thing in the Shun?" Nolrimm grunted, fluffing his wing feathers. "Yeah. Seer's Mother. This got anything to do with her? Cause if it does I'm out a here." "No, no. Something much worse, in its own way. Something like god wars, only more subtle and far-reaching. Well, I, that is, the 'kan fellow you know from Generica, got caught up in it. Comes from being too quick to volunteer, I guess. So we got into it, and I, that is, the elf you've come to know and love, am one of the side-effects of the battle." In a smooth motion, he stood, and started juggling the daggers he was playing with before. The blue gemstone bound to his brow began to glow faintly. "I don't know if we really need to know this stuff," Scorpion began, nervously, but the elf continued speaking. "A long time ago in a world far away, before he became the fellow you know, the 'kan traveller you met in Generica was visiting my world. I thought he was just a wandering demon, of some unusual sort, and I conjured him into my compelling circle. I had this idea, you see, that I could use him against a political enemy. Well, he proved harder to control than I had thought, and we battled. He tore me apart in a thoroughly unpleasant and excruciating way, and spit my ghost out into the spirit world naked and maimed; I understand it was taken straight to one of our uglier hells. But there were little bits of me left, which he kept as a souvenir." Nolrimm and Scorpion exchanged glances but decided that trying to get away might not be effective right now. "Wise fellows," he said, nodding. "Now, the entity that was fighting with the traveller back in Generica found these bits of my spirit lodged in the soul of the traveller, and he re-grew me from them. Once I knew that was what happened, it was quite a shock, you must understand. But I'm accustomed to the idea now." "So what does this have to do with us," Scorpion asked, "going around and branding the assholes in government here?" "Ah. Well, I'm not completely myself alone. I'm also the fellow you knew. He's idealistic, as I am, but where I used to believe that the elven race should by nature rule over all others, he doesn't see the distinctions, and I'm afraid after I went through his memories that I quite agree. Oddly enough, we're quite compatible personalities, if only things had been different. It took me several weeks, you know, but I finally found out what was driving me to our subtle conquest. I'd been following the orders of that entity that was fighting the traveller. It twisted the fellow's concern for others into an utterly arrogant attitude that said HE knew best about how they should live." "Sounds like a typical mage to me," Nolrimm muttered. "Or maybe priest." "Be that as it may," the elf smiled, changing the three-over juggling pattern to a four-under, "I was not about to let anyone else decide for me how I would be thinking, so I removed the compulsion. Oh, there's still some vestigial bits of it about, but the elvish mind is not easily subject to compulsive magics and I _am_ an expert on the topic." He executed a difficult double-flip flourish, and continued. "Even tho the whole idea of our covert conquest came from someone else, I did get started on it, and I'm not one for sloppy work, and this power vacuum is much too much interesting an opportunity for me to ignore. So if you don't mind continuing to take my money, we're going to finish the job, although I've changed some of the general goals a little bit." "The pay's good," Nolrimm shrugged. "Keeps me fed and pays the bills at the cuddlecribs. I'm for it. How 'bout you, Scorp?" "I'd like to know what your long term goals are, but yes, count me in for the money. Besides, like I said, I'm learning a lot from you about how to do covert. You're sneaky." Scorpion made it into a compliment. Orim smiled a close-lipped smile and the daggers vanished from the pattern, one by one, into the secret pockets where he hid them. "Good. I'm glad you've both made the right choice. But don't tell Rook, just yet. She's a little too unpredictable, you see. She has this streak of lamentable honesty, her honor might require her to inform my other self, so to speak, and all this would be over." Scorpion grunted assent. "So tell me, boss, what's our next target?" Orim glanced at one of the arcane charts on his desk, and made a comparison against another smaller chart. "The lord mayor of Athelstan, Cedrik, seems to think that he can put his own army together now that Raoh's army is enjoying the standard internal chaos. We don't want to lessen that chaos, because we want our people in control eventually, but Cedrik can't be allowed to build a long term power base. So we're going to let him build the army, since they're needed right now anyway, but all the commanders are going to be our men." Nolrimm laughed and clapped Scorpion on the shoulder.