The Sword of Retribution

The Spies - Part 2

     Back on Pargonn, the council of war was being hastily reconvened following the murder of Pronias, and glowbottles were brought in to illuminate the conference room as the two suns sank into the west. The priest’s body had been borne in honour out of the room and was now lying in state in the Grand Hall's Assembly Chamber, where people were already turning up to pay their respects. Some time later, he would be cremated on a large funeral pyre on Heroes Hill amidst a proper ceremonial service to be attended by every priest of Samnos on the island. In contrast, the corpse of the clay man was treated with rather less honour and had been carried off to the laboratory of the Fellowship’s most senior wizard, who would dissect and examine it.

     Resalintas was the first to speak. “The creature that just committed suicide in this room was no ordinary clay man,” he said. “Every officer in the Beltharan army is trained to detect ordinary clay men, and had it been such, I would have spotted it at once, no matter how good its disguise, no matter how well it imitated the actions and behaviour of its victim. This is something new, something we haven’t seen before.”

     The others nodded in agreement. If those words had come from anyone else, they might have suspected him of trying to cover up his failure by making excuses, but everyone knew better than to think that of a priest of Samnos. If they made a mistake, they would simply admit it, strive to learn from it so that it would never be repeated, and perform some form of penance, usually severe and occasionally fatal. They never made excuses and never, absolutely never, tried to cover it up or pretend it hadn't happened. When Resalintas said that the clay man had been no ordinary one, therefore, had been different in some way from the kind he’d been trained to detect, everyone knew that he was simply stating the truth.

     “The question we have to ask ourselves,” said Lanaris gravely, “is how many more creatures like this are there? How common are they? It’s quite possible that there’s at least one, and possibly several, in every fortress city currently under siege by the enemy, giving away our military secrets to their true masters and carrying out covert acts of sabotage. How many ‘accidents’ have there been lately that have led to the collapse of seemingly impregnable positions and the capture of strategically important areas that were thought secure?”

     The delegates nodded in agreement, and Resalintas felt a cold chill go through him as he thought of the Orb of Proofing, brought to Fort Battleaxe against great odds by a team of young but resourceful adventurers and now protecting the fortress city against enemy magical attacks. It was hollow and filled with a special alchemical gas, and so fragile that a single blow from a hard object would shatter it. It was surrounded and protected by dozens of soldiers and all kinds of clever traps to catch intruders, and only the wizard who actually operated it was allowed into the same room with it, but even so, a clay man immune to conventional detection techniques could easily get through and destroy it. They must be warned, he thought anxiously. We must take additional security precautions. The Orb must be protected at all costs.

     “What’s the problem?” asked Tuska’s aide, who hadn’t had much experience with clay men. “The one that died had pink blood, so all we’ve got to do is prick someone’s finger to see if he’s real or not.”

     “It’s not as simple as that,” replied Lanaris, however. “They can change the colour of their blood and make it indistinguishable from that of a real person. They don’t like doing it, it makes them rather uncomfortable for some reason, which is why they leave it their natural pink if they think they’re not under suspicion, as the one masquerading as Sergeant Keller did, but they can do it. A good way to detect one, though, might be to catch him by surprise and jab him with a pin to draw blood before he has a chance to react. If you do it fast enough, you might be able to see pink blood before he has a chance to turn it red. That doesn’t help us much here, though. Any other clay men among us have had plenty of time to turn their blood red by now.”