Chapter XX: Preparing for the Worst

I read the letter over a couple of times later that day. Obviously it was written by someone who was afraid that the letter might be intercepted, which was a reasonable precaution considering that it absolutely had been. The odd vagueness about it couldn’t mean anything else. But still, I felt that if I read and re-read it enough times, I could figure out who it was that Burnardor had been talking to. From what little information there was, it sounded like someone who was an equal, and that they weren’t quite on the same team yet. It could have been Ironseed, or it could have been one of the Durkahni Chanters. It could even have been Halflance; I was smart enough to know that being on opposite sides of a political debate doesn’t matter much when wealth and empire are on the line. 

But in the end I concluded that it wasn’t the time for that. That it was evidence was what mattered, and when the time came to start throwing allegations around, having evidence would stop it from turning into a complete clusterfuck. Burnardor was a subtle threat, a political one that I wasn’t sure how to face. What I really needed to focus on, I concluded, was the immediate and lethal threat: the Musician. 

I thanked Anna and Unity profusely every single time I was in the same room, because I could barely even conceive of how they were able to do everything I’d asked of them in so little time. Unity had an entire spool of copper wire that she had procured, assuring me that nobody had needed it, and Anna had taken one of my longer coats and basically deconstructed it, using a set of wire cutters that Unity also assured me nobody else would need to cut the wire into segments and thread them through the fabric in such a way that I probably would still be able to move. Anna tried to explain the technique to me, but all I got out of it was that it had something to do with making corsets. 

I promised that I would ask Lady Halflance to give both of them a pay raise, and then turned my mind to the next part of the plan. That was figuring out how to catch the Musician unawares, catch her in an ambush. The next morning, I returned to the same hill where I’d fought her the first time, and spent at least half an hour staring out over the treaty grounds from her perspective, figuring out what her plan of attack had been. 

The thing that stood out to me immediately was that the hill had a great view of the treaty grounds, which was also why Halflance had chosen it for her night-time sightseeing. It was unusually prominent in the terrain, and situated downriver from the treaty grounds, meaning that the ground sloped upward from the perspective of someone on the hill, like a natural amphitheater. The sound of the Musician’s violin would have a relatively easy time extending out over the entire area from there.

The obvious option, then, would be to prepare right there, and ambush her when she appeared by that hill once again. But I had this feeling, based on my short time interacting with her, that she was more clever than that. She wouldn’t choose the same angle of attack twice, not when she was relying on surprise.

The area around the eastern edge of the treaty grounds was already fairly uneven, a patch of high rolling hills in a huge flat plain. There were other places where she could go to get almost the same acoustics as on the tallest of the hills. I spent at least an hour trying to get inside her thought processes. I had my pistol with me, and quickly realized that the best way to test the acoustics was to fire off a shot into the dirt at my feet. I had to explain to a squad of concerned guards what I was doing, but after that was dealt with I had free rein to move from spot to spot and testing where the Musician would be able to do the most damage. 

Eventually I found it. It was an odd place, like a smaller hill had partially fused into the mass of the larger hill next to it, producing a perfectly flat area halfway up the side of a larger hill. It was difficult to spot from the treaty grounds, relatively speaking, but the larger hillside around it meant that sounds really echoed. My gut told me that this was the place. Considering my gut was all I had to go on, I decided to trust it. 

I remembered watching a documentary or something, about how snipers and nature photographers would hide themselves in wild terrain to kill and/or take pictures of things, and decided to copy them. Not wanting to put any more of a burden on Anna and Unity, and fairly sure that they didn’t know how to do this any better than I did, I worked alone. 

Step one was to find a blanket big enough to totally cover my body. That was easy, I stole it from the Halflances. Step two was to paint it the same pale green shade as the dry grasses and bush of the hills. This was difficult because I didn’t know how to paint, and also because I had no idea if there was any paint to be found. I ended up asking Unity if she could get any, which she did, easily, along with some birch tree tar that I offhandedly mentioned needing for later. How she managed to find all these things, I’ll never know.

The next morning, I wandered out into the fields and started gathering clippings, bits of long grass and tufts of brush, which I tied up with string and stowed in a bag. This, at least, I knew how to do. During undergrad, before I properly decided on Physics as my major, I’d flirted with biology, and even gone on a research trip that had, indeed, involved a lot of snipping off bits of plant life and tying them up. Admittedly, I hadn’t been using a sword when I was in undergrad.

With that all done, I took all my materials and dragged them into a corner of the mess hall, the only building large enough to do everything without me getting bothered too much. The paint went on first, a fairly even layer of pale green, made mottled and blobby by the fact that I don’t have a clue how to paint. It was almost relaxing, something simple that my brain could quickly latch on to, until I was interrupted about a third of the way through. 

“Emma? What are you doing there? I suppose I should have had you pinned for a craftswoman.”

I looked up from my work, and was immediately dismayed to see that it was none other than Dr. Meredith Ironseed. “Let me guess, Burnardor wants to know? Tell her that it’s none of her business, and I know what she’s up to.”

“Hmm?” she said, crouching down across the blanket. “I was just curious to see what you were doing. What does Burnardor have to do with this?”

I sighed, putting down the brush I was using and carefully stepping off the blanket. “Don’t… don’t insult my intelligence, Ironseed. I heard the whole conversation.”

“Ah. So this is what that’s about,” she said. “I think you’re misunderstanding the nature of our arrangement…”

“Oh come on, you think I’m going to fall for that? I know what Burnardor is doing. I know how you’re helping her do it. I know what kind of damage people like you can do.”

Ironseed’s expression went totally blank, her lips parting slightly. “Emma… I’m sorry. I had no choice…”

“No choice?” I said, my voice starting to raise. “You’re Burnardor’s forward guard! She’s asking you to suss out the Durkahn’s secrets in the name of ‘science’ so that she can rob them for all they have and turn them into a client state of Bluerose.”

“That’s completely ridiculous. Burnardor can’t order me to—“

I blew right through Ironseed’s objection, stepping around the blanket so I could look right up into her eyes. “She wants to know about the Council of One. It’s the one thing the Durkahns want to keep secret from the world, and she wants it, so she can… take its power? Replace it with Vesselism? I don’t know but whatever it is, I heard her telling you to use me to get to it. And in case you were wondering: no! I’m not asking about it, I’m not helping either of you to rob and cheat and…”

“I wasn’t going to do it!” Ironseed shouted. The dozen or so pairs of eyes still in the mess hall all turned to us. “Burnardor is a very powerful woman,” she whispered, “and I could not simply refuse her to her face.”

“Then why did she even go to you? Why were you two even talking?”

“Because Burnardor is the one who sponsored me to be allowed to accompany this expedition, and now she believes that I owe her service in kind,” said Ironseed. “And she is… not entirely wrong, is the thing. The amount of good work that I have been able to do, cataloguing and photographing and interviewing the Durkahns… I can show the people of Bluerose that the Durkahns are a vibrant, civilized folk, worthy of respect!”

“You’re still using that word. ‘Civilized.’ That really proves the problem, doesn’t it? That some arbitrary definition of civilization is where you draw the line for who does and does not deserve respect.”

“Would you rather I abandon my work, then?” said Burnardor, almost more baffled than affronted, “and let the people go on thinking that the Durkahni are monsters who crucify people as offerings to their pagan gods, and eat human flesh for breakfast?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Ugh, for a second I’d almost forgotten… I’d almost forgotten that Selene was right out of the 19th century in more ways than one. Please, if you really want your work to help anyone, stop talking to Burnardor.”

“I already told you why I can’t do that,” she said. 

“You aren’t going to save the Durkahns by breaking into their most important sacred sites, or whatever it is you’re planning,” I said. “You aren’t going to make anything better by being a toady to that… evil bastard, if I’m being honest. Burnardor is bad news, worse than you know.”

“I have no choice,” she said.

“Everybody says that, and I don’t buy it,” I said. “Now get the fuck out of here. I’m doing something actually helpful.”

She stepped back once, then twice. “I’m sorry to have been such a disappointment,” she said, then turned around and walked away.

I bit my tongue, regretting about half of what I’d said, and being thankful I’d had the courage for the other half. The anger had been building up for days at that point, and I’d just let it flow out. Even after giving myself a few minutes of a breather, I wasn’t sure if I believed Ironseed. On the one hand, there was the fact that she didn’t actually seem to be on board with Burnardor’s “steal everything and loot their civilization” plan, assuming she wasn’t lying, but on the other, I wasn’t sure that being regretful about it made it any less terrible who she was working with. I set the matter aside for later, when I was less busy. There was a job to finish.

I covered the blanket with paint, and glued on enough grass and twigs to make it convincingly look like a lumpy segment of ground. It helped that I’d probably be using it at night. And it was completed just in time, too: that night, I got nightmares again. There was nothing as bad as that first nightmare, nothing quite so realistic or horrible, but I woke up at least four times that night, shivering from the cold and wishing that I could stop thinking about Abby and Ethan for just a few hours. I knew that the Musician was close.

That next day was tense, and it was at least twenty-nine hours long, measuring by my internal clock. Everyone had had the nightmares, or at least most people had, and after what had happened last time, they were wary. I considered telling someone what I was planning, only to realize that I had no idea who I could trust. If even one person heard about it who was secretly an enemy spy, the plan was doomed. So I told nobody, and wasted the day as best as I could.

That evening, before the sun fully set, I took my gun, and my sword, and my camouflage blanket, and I set up shop on the hill where I could tell the Musician was going to make her encore appearance. The plan was relatively simple. With my entire body covered under the blanket, I would be effectively invisible. I would wait, as long as necessary, until the Musician showed up, then I would jump out from under the blanket and shoot her six times in the chest. Simple, effective.

It was a bit past midnight, when I’d almost run out of willpower and almost fallen asleep entirely, when I heard a noise.

SaffronDragon

Ouch. Emma's going to have to go back and apologize to Ironseed later, isn't she? Of course, first she has a mysterious Musician to try for a round 2 with... And if you want to see either of those two things, without having to deal with my perpetually forgetting to release chapters on time, you can click the link below and join my Patreon, where you can read the next two chapters right away for only $3 a month. If not, I'll see you in (slightly less than, so very sorry) two weeks for Chapter XXI: The Blackbird