Chapter 13

“I had my boys go into town,” Lugar said. “No wanted posters, but that doesn’t mean much. The Crown doesn’t like bounty hunters. Could very well be a poster with your face on it in the watch office.”

“I appreciate the heads up,” I said, trading grips with the dwarf. “That was coin well spent.”

There’s no higher compliment for the mountain folk. He grinned and clapped me on the elbow.

“Next time you’re on the run from the law, I’ll give you a discount,” he promised.

The port city of Sawa sat on the mouth of a vast delta where three major rivers met the sea. It was the largest city for a thousand kilometers in any direction, and the third or fourth most prosperous on the continent.

Officially, Sawa was an independent principality, having declared its independence after the Schism. Unofficially, they shared an uncommonly incestuous alliance with the Crown. Whenever there was a spare Prince or Princess, they were usually married off to the ruling family of Sawa. After a few generations, the families were so closely related, the Magravine was expected to take lovers from the court just to keep the bloodline from going stagnant. Scandal anywhere else was business as usual in Sawa.

For all that, and despite being a port city, Sawa was remarkably peaceful. An uncommonly effective City Watch kept the peace well.

Not an ideal place for a pair of fugitives to lay low, but great for business.

Kaze and I checked into an inn by the docks. Sailors, by their very nature, tended to be scoundrels with a tail of warrants and debts that followed them from port to port. The Watch understood that there were some things they ought not inspect too closely, lest they paralyze the trade the city relied on. We were probably safe, but we didn’t relax our guard until we had the door locked, barred, and booby trapped.

“This has turned into a right mess,” I grumbled, setting the tripwire on the detonator.

Anyone who tried to break in was in for a nasty shock, in the form of ball bearings propelled by blasting powder. Not deadly, but they wouldn’t be chasing much of anything after that.

“Agreed. Even if we made for Galoch at first light, Lady Flir will be long gone. This business with the hero is proving troublesome.”

At best speed, it would take us the better part of a month to reach Galoch, now that the shortcut through the plains was off the table.

In theory, we could shave some time off by hiring another boat. The Wra River was so broad and deep, it barely counted as a river. Boats could just as easily sail upstream as down without fighting the current much. It would get us to within a hundred kilometers of Galoch, and we could cover the rest fairly quickly on horseback.

It was a shame the waterway was so tightly controlled. The Crown maintained strict controls the whole way down, for reasons they never felt the need to explain to the public.

Even if, by some miracle, Lady Flir was still lurking around Galoch now, she’d surely be gone by the time we arrived.

“Any idea where she’s heading next?”

“Lady Flir’s mind is her own. We rarely know her next move beforehand.”

“Hell of a way to run a war,” I mused.

“If her goal was to conquer, you would be correct. Her goal is more…esoteric in nature. I believe she means to undo the Taming.”

I wish I could say I was surprised.

“Of course she does. Why wouldn’t she?”

“Do I detect a note of sarcasm?”

“More than a note. Gods. I knew she was arrogant, but that’s beyond the pale,” I said. “It does explain some of her targets.”

“Oh?”

I pulled a map from my pack and unrolled it on the table. Kaze weighted the corners down with knives.

“The Taming is built on keystones,” I said. “Chunks of crystallized mana that anchor ley lines in place and prevent them from going wild. Without keystones, there’s no point in wellsprings. Springs become unpredictable and shift as the ley lines shift. That’s what the Taming sought to control.”

“Like damming a river to control flooding,” Kaze said.

“Exactly. The river becomes predictable and largely safer, at the expense of farmland depending on floods to refresh the soil. It’s the same sort of trade off.”

“Why build the wellsprings at all, then? Most predate the Taming by decades, if not centuries.”

“Keystones weren’t invented for the Taming. They’ve been in use for ages, just not at scale. A city or town could nail down its spring without hindering the rest of the ley line,” I said.

“Ah, I see. Before the Taming, they were more like…pinning a caterpillar to a cork board. The rest of the body is free to shift as it pleases, but it can’t escape the pin entirely.”

“Well that’s a gruesome analogy,” I said, frowning.

“A hobby of General Seze. He collects insects.”

“Lovely,” I said. “That’s the gist, though. Before the Taming, ley lines shifted as they damn well pleased, less the points where they were anchored. The Taming took that principle and applied it to the whole continent, ensuring consistent, predictable flow.”

“At the cost of regions that relied on shifting to irrigate them with mana,” Kaze said. “Poorer regions who didn’t rate a ley line in particular.”

“Which was the point, or one of them,” I said. “Lots of nomadic tribes making trouble back in the day. And why the Wilders enjoyed so much public support in the early days. If they didn’t go full extremist and declare war on all keystones, they might’ve won. Most folk were decent enough to agree the Taming did harm, but not so decent that they were willing to sacrifice their communities to right the wrong.”

“A bridge too far for most,” she agreed. “I’m beginning to think there were gaps in my education.”

“Flir is arrogant, not stupid. We can argue whether the Taming was good or bad all day, but undoing it now would kill millions. Starvation, plague, war, it would all spread like wildfire as the ley lines ran wild and folk fought over the pieces left behind. Of course she didn’t tell you the full story. No one with a conscience would sign up for that.”

“She made it sound as if we were righting some great wrong of the past.”

“To her point of view, you were. She fought against the Taming back in the day. She might’ve taken the Crown’s pardon when the Schism settled down, but she never forgot what was lost.”

“Inviting chaos wouldn’t return the world to the way it was,” she said.

“No, probably not,” I agreed. “It’d make her feel better, though.”

“A wrong righted in her mind. Very well. How would she go about undoing the Taming? Destroying keystones wouldn’t be enough, I assume.”

“Not by itself.” I placed a coin over the cities of Galoch, Besa, Sprield, Waler, and Chater, all places Flir had attacked since she started her rebellion some 13 years ago. Galoch, Sprield, and Waler got silvers. Everywhere else got coppers. “Silvers are the towns with keystones. Assuming she attacked the others to obfuscate her goals, we can assume she’s targeting the Ronig ley line.”

I traced a line with my finger from Sprield, at the northernmost end, to the Crown’s capital city of Markov. All the target cities lay within 20 kilometers of the line, well within the bounds of a major ley line.

“What good would that do? I’m assuming it’s anchored in Markov. She could never take the capital.”

“Maybe not, but she could blow it the hell up,” I said. “You can anchor a wellspring with a keystone the size of a small gold coin. A ley line keystone weighs a couple of kilograms, and the Ronig anchor in Markov is a hundred times that. That much crystallized mana is a nightmare to keep stable. If she can induce enough instability by weakening the secondary anchors-“

“She can destroy the primary anchor, and much of the city with it.”

“And probably take out the other primary anchors in the process,” I said grimly. “The resonant cascade that resulted would pop every other keystone like a horn of blasting powder. Millions dead in an instant, and millions more in the following months as the ley lines ran rampant.”

“Gods,” she breathed. “At least that gives us an idea of where to look next.”

“There’s that, at least. I just hate that it took this long to see it.”

“May I ask a question?”

“Shoot.”

“How do you know so much about ley lines and keystones?”

“I learned from the primary source,” I said. “Pesden invented the damn things.”