The Heavenly Host

“The key is that we need someone to run interference with the Etonians to keep our priests alive while we get them established in communities. Our problem has been that just having an experienced priest, pretending to be of any profession, suddenly move into these communities gets suspicious. Etonian church officials notice and arrest our priests,” Usiris said, pausing to take a drink. “So we need to keep the Etonian hierarchy occupied and allow our priests to slip in more gradually during a period of confusion.”

“I assume you have a plan for distracting them?” Bess asked.

Usiris chuckled. “I am counting on a cloud to obscure the Etonians’ view of what’s happening.”

“A cloud?” Bess was completely puzzled.

“From the Grove.” Usiris grinned wickedly.

“Ahh,” Bess said. “But they turned down our priests’ request for help last time.”

“This time, we are not asking. Their own nosiness, this insanity in Freehold with the Rod being spanked by that demon, sprinkled with some visions I have been seeding to various parties for the last half a year or so, shall position them where we need them to be.”

Bess smiled, feeling good for the first time since the debacle at Freehold. The idea of using that to their advantage brought her a warm, satisfied feeling. She leaned back in her chair, gazing up to the beautiful planet of Astlan dominating the sky above her. New Nyjyr, now on Uropia, had a much better view than those stuffy old outer planes they had had to maintain at such cost. Yes, it was much smaller, and thus a bit crowded, but as they grew, they could expand to Anuropia easily enough. With control of the two moons, their oversight of Astlan would be solidified. Add in the power of the book, and the Etonian pestilence could be eliminated from at least one plane of the multiverse. From this secure base, they would eventually take back other worlds and return themselves to their rightful place in the scheme of things.

∼

^{DOF +5}

^{Dawn 16-02-440}

Tom woke suddenly, realizing he had dozed off. Boggy and the others were in the main room, talking rather animatedly; perhaps that was what had woken him. In any event, he was feeling better. That was the one indispensable thing about sleep; it gave one a break from consciousness. It made the world go away for a while and when you woke up, things often seemed better.

At least they did for a few minutes, until he heard the name Vaselle. He closed his eyes again. Today was supposed to be the day the wizard turned himself over to Tom. He had somehow forgotten about that in all the insanity of yesterday. Why was he doing this again? Why couldn’t he have just said no? It would be nice to blame Vaselle; the wizard seemed so needy, so desperate, as if he needed love and acceptance. Tom suspected that the wizard had what his stepdad called a codependent personality. It probably was not a good idea to be mixed up in a relationship with such a person.

Except that he could hear the guys talking; they were planning a shopping list of items for Vaselle to buy for the party. Seriously? The wizard was in a city under siege! Where was he going to find supplies for a party for two thousand plus D’Orcs!

Enough! Tom decided. He could not worry about everything; he needed to delegate. Maybe a warlock was not such a bad idea; Vaselle could be sort of like a personal delegate, or a personal assistant. He did not know. At the moment, he did not want to think about it.

Tom stood up and grabbed the mace by the ball. It poked him. That was weird; he looked at the amorphous metal ball head of the mace. Odd. It was not quite so amorphous anymore. It was still rather putty shaped, but it now had two sharp little points about twenty degrees down from the top of the sphere and about halfway from the center to the front on two sides. They were curvy points coming out from the side of the sphere and then pointing up. On each side of the sphere with a point, another point more towards the center and a bit down was also forming.

The sphere was also not that spherical anymore. If he rotated the sphere so that the big points were on opposite sides, the space between them had gotten bumpy and had some dimples and almost a little mesa or something. He rotated the sphere to look at it from different directions. It was starting to look like a head. In fact, if he did not know better, he’d think it was a very blurry version of a demon head! Horns, ears, muzzle, brow... was it supposed to be his head? It was too hard to tell yet, but it was changing.

Given that he was rather intimately connected with the rod, it would not be completely unreasonable that the top would shape itself to look like him. Just a bit weird. A little narcissistic perhaps, but not completely out of the realm of possibility. Tom shook his head and walked over to the doors to the parlor. Opening the doors, he found Boggy, Antefalken, Tizzy and Estrebrius sitting around a table scratching away at various papers with pencils or something.