At the Queen_s command

The journal entries began almost normally, and would have appeared to be nothing more than a travelogue, save that the author gave no sense of his impressions or feelings. He described hills and valleys in the sort of language a civilian might think would please a surveyor. He did make an attempt, at first, to write down the paces it took to cross a stream, but precise measurements soon vanished. In fact, save for the lunar observations that prefaced every entry, any semblance of order or science evaporated halfway through.

Toward the end, then, things became utter gibberish, the handwriting indecipherable. In two places the pencil's point had snapped off, but whole lines had been written before the author found a new pencil and continued on.

All in all, the journal entries were useless. They conveyed neither direction nor elevation. Vlad supposed that if one were familiar with the area being traveled, one might be able to correlate location to description. But if one were that familiar with the area, he'd not need the journal's information.

That fact, coupled with the idea that the ring could be tracked, started the Prince thinking. If one could track the ring and know where the person wearing it was at any given moment, then the person's travel would become a survey in and of itself. Moreover, if the ring could communicate more than just location, but conditions, even in the most rudimentary sense, then the journal would be used to confirm the observations made through the link.

The whole thing had the stink of Ryngian Thaumaturgy about it. Norillian magick built on long tradition, and Norillian mages were among some of the best in the world. Norillian magick was what made the Queen's armies so effective-her line troops were second to none in combat.

In the aftermath of the Tharyngian revolution, which elevated Science to the highest place in the Universe, magick had become yet one more area of study. While they had started with the same traditions as Norisle, the Ryngians had performed a systematic survey of magick to establish its underlying principles. This seemed a waste of time to many Norillians, and the newly published Tharyngian principles drew ridicule since it was well known that they just couldn't be true.

The necessity of touch in magick, for example, was indisputable. Folklore abounded with stories of mages laid low at the end of a spear, or of oracles able to read bones and identify who they had once belonged to. No one, until the Tharyngians, had bothered to ask how knowledge could be contained in those bones. They postulated the Laws of Similarity and Contagion to offer an explanation. In short, those things that looked similar had a link with each other, and those which had spent time in proximity to one another were similarly linked.

That would suggest, then, that the ring and the sliver taken from it would have a link. While the tradition that the Prince had studied suggested that the link would be too weak to be of use, he wasn't certain he accepted that anymore. The Shedashee appeared to be able to read links and, if Captain Strake's letter was to be believed, they could read them with no great difficulty. And if Strake had learned this, could not a Tharyngian have done so, too, and started his fellows studying the possibilities?

And worse yet, the letter hinted at necromancy. No Laureates endorsed it, and many decried it, but that didn't mean it did not exist.

The Prince sat back. If du Malphias had come to Mystria to study or employ magicks so foul his compatriots did not want him in their homeland, things had become dire indeed, and would become much worse.

Chapter Thirty

July 7, 1763

Anvil Lake, New Tharyngia

O wen awoke naked and cold in a dark stone room, stretched out on a wooden slab. Thick leather straps secured his wrists, ankles, chest, and waist to the slab. Dull echoes of pain pulsed from his left thigh. A square of reddened cloth covered the hole. A glass vessel hung from the ceiling and dripped a greenish liquid on the cloth with maddening regularity.

Something shuffled through the shadows at his feet. He couldn't see what. He sensed the presence of at least one person, but whoever was there remained invisible. "Hello?" His voice came hoarse and ended in a cough. It shook his body and the pain increased marginally.

The sharp click of boots on stone filtered into the chamber. The shuffling chased it, then paused. A match scratched on the wall, bursting into flame. A slender-fingered hand applied it to one hanging lamp and then to another. The man raised the match to his lips and blew it out.

Du Malphias!