The Necromancer's Gambit: Shadow Gambit
Nicolas Wilson
People are happier after Vergara leaves with Han. It’s a win, and we haven’t been winning much lately. But I can’t sleep; I can’t share their enthusiasm, because I think I understand the larger game we’ve been playing.
Bishop’s in the lab area of the Centre, where I asked her to meet me. “I gave Rook her wake up call, so she should be down in a few. Everything prepped here, Bish?”
“Totally ready. It’s been exciting, you know? Bouncing from urgent thing to urgent thing. Not that I want to do this much field work, generally, but I think I was getting into a research funk. I miss my lab, and everything, but the facilities here are way better than they were when I started.”
“Yeah, this was all still under construction, then.”
Rook stumbles in. Her hair’s a little mussed, and her eyes are barely open. “We got any coffee?” she mumbles.
“On the counter,” I tell her. “Wait. The one on the left is the coffee, right?”
Bishop shakes her head. “No. The left is the breast-shrinking kimia I’ve been experimenting with; coffee’s on the right.” Rook’s still too asleep for this. “We’re kidding, obviously, that’s just my cup,” Bishop says, and takes a sip from it.
“So this won’t do anything bad to me? I’d like my breasts to stay how they are.” Rook says as she raises the mug to her lips.
“It’ll increase your heart rate and blood pressure, dehydrate you and make you both angry and alert- but nothing normal coffee doesn’t do. A lethal dose of caffeine
is around 200 milligrams per kilogram, so about 14.8 grams. So you’d have to drink roughly a hundred cups of the stuff to die.”
“I don’t know kilograms well enough to be insulted or flattered.”
“Average woman in the US weighs 162.9 pounds, about 74 kilograms. I don’t do magical weight estimates, because I’m not a carnie.”
Bishop’s in a bad mood, but I need them focused, so I try to deflect. “I trust your room was okay?” I ask Rook.
“Much better than your couch- and far fewer questionable stains.”
“It came that way.”
“Where, from the caramel and semen stained furniture store?”
“That is an upsetting combination,” Bishop says.
“I know, right? Either or, on a single man’s couch, and I’d just say whatever; but what do you do in your spare time?”
I smile a little. “You really want to know the answer to that question?”
“Withdrawn.”
I put the smile away. “I asked the both of you here because I need the training wheels to come off.” I focus on Rook. “I’m throwing you into the deep end. But Bishop’s the smartest tutor you could find on the seaboard, probably the continent. Listen to her. She’s made me a better mage, and she’ll do the same for you.”
“Anything in particular you want us to focus on?” Bishop asks.
“We need a castle.”
“Castle’s tough stuff;” Bishop says, thoughtful. “It might be easier to give her a pawn crash course and let Pawn be the damage sink- he is used to soaking up abuse.”
“That’d double the amount of training- and we’d never get Pawn to go back to his old post after the fact”.
“Are the politics really worth”
“Pawn would be a terrible Castle, and that could end up as big a problem as what we’re dealing with now. And Rook can handle it.”
Bishop winces, and looks at Rook. “I sincerely mean no offense, but are you sure?”
Rook shrugs. “None taken; I’m with you on the skepticism train.”
“She can hack it. Just get it done. We don’t know how much time we have.”
“Then I assume we’re foregoing the warden aspects, going right for protection and defense.” Bishop says, walking towards a shelf containing the greatest hits from her lab.
Bishop splays the book on the island countertop in front of Rook. “Yeah,” I say. “We’ll have to make do in the meantime, hope the antimages in the Penn can handle themselves.”
She looks back at me. “Then you need to go. This isn’t going to learn itself- only the Living Word series can do that- and they have trouble with Latin roots, which kind of defeats the purpose.”
I head up the stairs towards the Lobby. I run into Queen at the top of the stairs. “Harry’s back, and he’s waiting in the throne room.”
“That a bathroom joke?” I ask him.
“I thought we could call the King’s study that… but apparently the search for a name goes on- lest we have members of the public, and Pawn, trying to piss on his chair.”
“You coming?”
“I’ve got a call waiting in my office.” I shoot him a confused look, and he shows me his cell. “Forwards from the front desk to here, but I don’t do business over the cell, so I forwarded it there.”
“Ah. Well, I’ll save you a seat, anyway.”
King’s hovering over his collection of liquors and glasses when I come into the room. I make my way to a chair, closer to Harry than Pawn. “Does anyone else need liquor?” King asks. “Because I think I’m going to need some.”
Pawn and I both look at Harry. “None for me,” he says. “But what I’ve got is probably on the bubble of really needing a drink and really wanting to stay sober and alert.”
“I’ll pass,” I say.
“Shocker. Give me five fingers,” Pawn calls to the King, “and not those dainty, desiccated old guy digits you beat your equally dainty meat with, I mean thick, plump man sausages like mine.”
There’s a twinkle in the old man’s eye. “To be clear, by sausage do you mean your unfortunate bratwurst fingers or your poor, self-abused member, because I don’t think my glasses can accommodate the former, but if it’s five of the latter I think I have a shot glass that should more than suffice.” He doesn’t wait for a response, but pours Crown Royal into a shot for him.
“That was circuitous,” Harry says, “but elegant.”
“Thank you,” King says, and raises his glass towards Harry, then takes a drink.
“You mock what you fear,” Pawn mutters, taking the shot glass the King offers and downing it, then immediately heading back to the bar for more.
Harry’s glad not to have Pawn crowding him, and glances from me to the King before he says, “The guy we’re looking for has been all over town. He’s been busy. Buying in pretty large bulk. And predictably, people didn’t really want to confirm any of that. But thanks to what you’ve told me about Castle, and what I saw had been done to Elise, there’s obviously some supplies he’s using a lot of. And the usual suppliers were out of stock on those items. But one guy actually talked quite a lot about it. He deals in the less… regulated items.”
“Smuggler,” I say, before thinking about it.
“I wouldn’t know, and didn’t ask,” Harry says, eyeballing me; I forget, as much as he helps us out, how much he really hates most of what we do. “But he’s very particular about who he does business with. And how. A necromancer put in a big order with him, the kind of big you have to fill from out of town. But when it came time to pick it up, the necromancer was a no show. Instead, a blonde guy and a vamp showed up. Kept bickering, the entire time. The blonde guy was a big-time bigot, with an accent.”
“The vamp and that Order prick,” Pawn says.
“My thinking exactly,” Harry says. “I mean, I’m glad you said it; I tend towards the conspiratorial, and I was a little worried I was being paranoid.”
“I think we all should be paranoid at this point,” I say. “He know anything else about them?”
“Unfortunately the name’s a lazy alias- Harold Potter- paid in bills, and it was a don’t call us, we’ll call you from a pay phone deal.”
“So as dead ends go, this one’s DNR. But that’s what worries me. It’s all so intricately orchestrated, so thoroughly planned. This can’t be Baldur; he’s a racist, and maybe an anarchist, but this is organized, centrally. We’re witnessing a second power center forming.”
“I don’t like having the distraction,” King says. “The Kindred are a dire enough threat without all this intrigue.”
“The Kindred are the distraction,” I tell him. “Besides Baldur, they’ve been in the area for a few years now. In the past they’ve been little more than low-rent smugglers, mostly weapons and not even magical paraphernalia; given time they might set up something similar to what they had before the Boise Gambit cracked down on them, but that takes time. For the moment, we know how they operate, and where from.”
“That moment’s passed,” the King says. “The second Baldur was back they scuttled their base up on Larch. It’s been emptied out, in a hurry. So we don’t know where they’re working from, and with their leader returned, it’s likely their MO will shift, as well. They mostly stay outside of the city, but there’s a bar, Valhalla, serves mostly imported Nordic microbrews, the Kindred have been known to frequent. Baldur’s been spotted there. I want Pawn there. With even a little luck, he can track Baldur back to their new compound.”
“Fine. But he should keep his distance. Last thing we need is to poke the beehive- or worse, lose Pawn to those hill people.”
“Rednecks with delusions of Norse godhood,” Pawn says.
“I just realized something,” I say. “The Kindred give Pawn someone he can deservedly look down on. That gives him motive.”
“Fuck you,” Pawn says.
“Children, please,” King put up his hands.
“That mercenary,” I start, but can’t quite put my finger on where to go from there. “Something about the way he was throwing his weight around, I get the feeling he wasn’t just playing pretend. Someone promised him a slot in a new Gambit, specifically Knight. I don’t think these events are isolated; I think we have competition.”
“A challenge to the Gambit? Hasn’t been one of those in fifteen years.”
“Well it’s now fifteen years ago, and we’ve got bastards pissing on our lawn. But why am I even arguing this with you? Time was you’d be pulling strings to streamline my investigation. You haven’t been the same since last August.”
King all but slams his drink onto his desk. “My heart stopped. I was clinically dead. Frozen for over a day. Some of my perceptions changed.”
“Just because you have to eat like a lamb now doesn’t mean you can’t remember how to think like a lion. We’re surrounded by predators, and we need your head in this; we can’t do it without you. These are crises, plural, or if we’re real unlucky, a single, massive, unifying crisis. Badness on the dogs and cats living together scale.”
“I don’t disagree on the seriousness, but you want to chase this shadow Gambit while the very real and present threat of Baldur and his Kindred stalk through our city.”
“You’re not getting it. What if Baldur is a part of the dark Gambit? They were the ones who let him out of The Keep.” I’ve never seen shock spread over someone so quickly. He drops into his chair, limp. For whatever reason, he had never contemplated that possibility. “You need to martial our forces. When it goes badly, it’s likely to happen fast; we’re going to be hit hard, and we won’t have the time or luxury for logistics. Our endgame needs to be in place. And we’ll need to coordinate with the regional and national Gambits.”
“Yeah,” Queen says from the doorway, “about that. They’re already here- and you’re not going to like the news.”