Chapter 3 - Part 6

Pienna paced in the sitting room, walking back and forth between three divans made from expensive soarwood. Her path took her past an ivory shelf displaying miniature working models of siege machinery, under a steam-driven clock that recited the time, wind direction, wind speed, and the coordinates of the next cosmological event to occur on Khorvaire when it’s dials were turned, and then back again.

Du’Bray was late. Worse, he was unaccounted for. Her cousin stood only three heartbeats away from total dominance of a mass of wealth and power that had no rival, only twelve parallels. Such men were never late of their own choosing. She swore at herself for ever having gotten involved. Du’Bray claimed to be fine with her knowing the workings of his House – my House, once – but the hostility of the others at the meeting to her investigations was clear. These were people who chafed under Du’Bray’s hand and no doubt were looking for any excuse to supplant him. She was convinced that his life was as much at stake as hers.

But do I tell him just how much I know of their maneuverings? There was no question that a warforged had killed the sparrow she was possessing, and not a warforged under her cousin’s guidance. The question was, had her spells been detected, and the sparrow killed purposefully? Or perhaps more ominously, was a warforged up on the side of the tower doing its own spying, hidden somehow from Cannith detection, and it had killed the sparrow out of boredom? She had already discovered that the programming schema for Iron Orphan had been tampered with. Who here had the access and skill to do it?

Du’Bray would be able to answer that last question. If she dared let him know just how much she had discovered. If she dared let him know that until fifteen minutes ago a mouse had brought word to her that he had left the reception hall, but had disappeared somewhere along the way.

Are you still alive, Bray? she wondered to herself. And if you are not, am I next?

The outer doors burst open and he strode in, shoving aside one of the divans like it was a child’s toy. Before she could react he was hugging her, holding her up in the air and choking back tears.

“I thought you were dead,” Du’Bray gasped. “I thought you were dead and it was my fault.”

She was stunned. He had not even cried when they were children. She pulled back from him, breaking his embrace. Staring into his shocked and hurt eyes she rested a hand on a handful of holly. “Tell me the name of my favorite book when we were eleven, the one no one knew that I read,” she demanded. The spirit of a panther roared within her, demanding that she use its skin and teeth against all prey.

He looked at her for a moment, and then began to laugh. “You think I’m a changeling!” he chortled. “It was ‘Confessions of a Bookbinder’s Mistress,’ and I hadn’t hit puberty yet, so I couldn’t figure out why you found it so fascinating!” He hugged her again once he saw her relax. “Pienna, we have so many detectors in the enclave for shapechangers and illusions, no changeling could sneak in. Industrial espionage is a major concern of ours.”

“Sorry,” she said, truly embarrassed. “And you can stop talking about it now.”

“Well,” he said. “If you had only told me that you had just started to get your menses then your fascination would have been more understandable!”

“I said we can stop talking about it,” she threatened. “I’ll turn you into a frog if you don’t.”

He gave her one last embrace. “We’ll catch whoever attacked you, Pienna, but for now, you have to go.”

“No one attacked me – what do you mean ‘go’?”

“Pienna, you don’t need to pretend to be brave –”

“I have no need to pretend, I was exhausted and unused to the climate –”

“You are being marked, as a message to me, possibly as a precursor to an attack on me – ”

“I can fend for myself, and I do not believe I have been marked –”

“Pienna, this is not a request! Now, I am ordering you to –”

“I don’t work for you, Du’Bray,” she told him calmly.

He was incredulous. “Yes you do! I paid a lot of money to House Orien to get you here, and now I am revoking the invitation, for your own good it so happens to be!”

“And now I am here representing the Gatekeepers, and Oalian,” she told him. He stared at her incredulously. “His personal representative,” she added. “You do know who Oalian is, don’t you?”

“Yes, and I am one of a handful outside of the Eldeen Reaches who do, or at least who believe it,” he told her carefully. “But one, I think you’re bluffing, and two, even if you were, he is not a power over me. I answer to only three people, and to the Code of Galifar. Not to a sentient tree.”

“Bray –”

“No! I will not have you get hurt because of me!” he thundered.

Her body twisted and shimmered and stretched, suddenly towering over him, growing a muzzle with long fangs, and a heavy pelt coat. Her cousin stepped backwards, nearly losing his footing as he sent the ivory shelf crashing to the ground. The brown bear towering above him roared and snarled, but even as he drew two wands and prepared to do battle, the bear began to shrink, twisting and folding in, until it was Pienna once more.

“I am hardly defenseless,” she said wryly. “And I can take one step through one of you’re the trees in your arbor and be outside of this enclave in the blink of an eye.”

He stared at her, but his adrenaline finally ebbed and he replaced the wands in their sleeve sheaths. “The enclave is shielded against teleportation, Pienna.”

“It’s not teleportation,” she told him. “It is a network of common roots, common nourishment from the same earth, the same Soul of Eberron. Your magic is in things, Bray. Mine is in the very planet. I will be safe. I am staying. I can be very useful to you if I stay with your support.”

He considered that, then nodded. “Alright then,” he said. “But you tell me why you collapsed, and don’t lie to me, I’ve been a businessman for too long not to sniff out a deceit.”

“I know,” she smiled. “You got your position in Cannith despite your dragonmark, not because of it. I’ve heard the same thing from officers in Vadalis.” He stared at her, waiting. “Very well. I was spying on your meeting via a symbiosis with a sparrow that was lurking near the air vents.”

He blinked. “That’s…clever. We don’t have as many counter-measures for that as we do other intrusions.”

“You don’t have any. I thought we weren’t bluffing, or was I wrong?”

“Fine, continue.”

“Someone killed the sparrow,” she told him. “I was locked into its nervous system, and the feedback was too much. My mind shut down as a self-defense mechanism.”

“Well, some spell set to repel vermin must have –”

“It was a three-fingered hand crushing my body,” she told him. “I felt every excruciating bit of it. A three-fingered hand, not soft and organic. Hard. Metal or stone or both.”

His eyes flashed darkly. “There were no warforged units anywhere near that tower.”

“That you approved of. Someone is operating them independently,” she told him. She could tell by the set of his jaw that he didn’t want to hear it, but she plowed on anyway. “And someone is tampering with the schema, the programming that you give the warforged.”

“You have proof?”

“I do if my conjectures are correct, do you care to confirm some of them?”

He folded his arms and stared at her. “If I can.”

“You programmed the first warforged with extensive knowledge and skills, ready to go right out of the forge, but that didn’t take.”

“It didn’t always work,” he confirmed. “Sometimes they couldn’t retain it, and they became babbling, feebleminded idiots. Sometimes they simply forgot it. And sometimes they went psychotic and attacked people as soon as they stepped out of the forge. The success rate was only about fifteen percent, and the lost investment was enormous. Information that complex could not be mass-produced, it had to be specifically calibrated for each warforged brain.”

“The hours of manpower, the losses involved, led the program to be canceled,” she theorized. “But not totally canceled. Sometimes it is still done.”

“I can’t comment on that,” his said, his stare growing hard.

“The warforged all receive some basic programming,” she said.

“Basic, yes. How to walk and talk. Simple language skills and body movement. We train them and teach them everything else.”

“Yes, praise and shame techniques, primitive brainwashing, wargames and whatnot.”

“What’s your point?”

“When you do attempt to cast a model with more complicated programming, it happens on an individual run.”

“I told you I can’t –”

“But the one who calls himself Iron Orphan was cast in a general run.”

He stared even harder. “What are you saying?”

“The Iron Orphan was a specific model, made with deeper programming, some of which he has banished from his own mind, interestingly, He has a strong will.”

“He is unit 4311XD,” he told her flatly. “We do not give them names.”

“I have heard of warforged with names.”

“Once they are bought and paid for, our customers can do whatever they –”

“One of them is your personal secretary and bodyguard,”

He rolled his eyes and threw his hands up in the air. “So I have a conceit! Some men name their swords!”

“Few warforged are strong of will, fewer still are intuitive. The Iron Orphan is both.”

“So he passes his personality test,” Du’Bray snapped. “Therefore?”

“He is also highly intelligent,” Pienna pressed. “And I suspect that the warforged whose highly specific programming took were highly intelligent.”

He hesitated, but took the plunge. “Alright, yes. We call them deep-forge-programs. There are some still produced, and yes one common denominator to the fifteen-percent success rate was a high intelligence. Another was the constellation of Aasterinian, oddly enough. There’s a reason why I put up with doddering old fools who speak of planar occurrences and why I seek the advice of the Gatekeeper sect. And theoretically one such warforged could have been produced in a general run, but one wasn’t. The manpower was not assigned to it. You cannot hide that large a diversion of resources. It’s impossible. There are too many artificers and planners that need to calibrate the entire thing.”

“I’ve seen the schema that was used on the Iron Orphan,” she said.

“You are far from an expert in such matters, Pienna,” he chided her. “How did you even know which one to look at?”

“Minister De’Breeves was most accommodating,” she told him. “He showed me both schema that were used. I assume he had no reservations about doing it because what do I know about schema?”

“Precisely.”

“But I know that the warforged are created knowing how to move about.”

He was puzzled. “So?”

“Two different schema. One for the balance required for the standard stone and metal composite plating, and one for a composite plating of mithril. Different schemas are required because of the different distribution of weight, I imagine.”

“You imagine correctly. We also have schema for models with adamantine or ironwood plating, and a fifth schema for –” He suddenly stopped, realizing what she was getting at.

“For unarmored models,” she said. “For the very rare warforged made without any composite plating whatsoever. Like the Iron Orphan.”

“If he had either the standard or mithril based schema programming he would have fallen over,” Du’Bray said. “It would have taken him a week or two just to learn how to walk. His balance would have been off.”

“And he’s only been alive for what – seven days?”

“De’Breeves,” her cousin said, making a connection to something else.

“What is it?” she asked.

“He would be in a position to – well it’s complicated, but he has access to another thing that I’ve just become aware of.”

“Could someone else have switched the schema?”

“If he was plant manager it would have been very difficult to do it under his nose without him knowing,” Du’Bray muttered darkly. He opened the door and barked some orders to some Cannith soldiers. She caught the words ‘immediate custody.’ He slammed the door shut as he turned back to her. “I’m having the plant records sent up as well, the identity of the forge operator –”

“Is Hugh Piet d’Cannith,” she told him. “A young man who I was going to interview two days ago at his home. Sadly he died in a mysterious fire in his kitchen. I understand a Master Inquisitive was called in to examine a fracture in the back of the corpse’s skull.”

He turned from her, his hands beginning to shake. “No,” he said. “No, not this, this is too – no!”

“Bray, as serious as thing have been during intrahouse politics, they are about to get even worse,” she warned him. “The Iron Orphan is the key. He has a keen mind, an uncanny intuition, as I said, he may be able to figure out –”

Du’Bray roared with a savage fury as he picked up one of the divans and hurled it at the wall. It smashed against the clock and steam burst from a busted pipe. Du’Bray pulled out a wand and blasted apart a part of the wall, obscenities pouring from his lips as he vented his rage.

Pienna watched him cautiously, casting a string of defensive spells upon herself. It took him several minutes to calm down, and he nearly blew apart a guard who dared open the door to ask if anything was wrong.

Finally the dust subsided, along with Du’Bray’s rage. He took a deep breath and examined his wrecked surroundings. “Hm,” he said, in a strangely detached tone. “I feel better.” He flung the door to the hallway open again. “Where is Minister De’Breeves?”

“He’s not here yet, sir,” came the timorous reply.

“He’d better be here soon!” bellowed Du’Bray. He came back in, not closing the door after him, stepping near the wrecked clockworks that was loudly whistling steam. “I always hated this thing,” he said, brushing a hand against it. His dragonmark flickered and the metal smoothed out, the pipes sealing. The annoying whistle stopped. “So a warforged is going to protect me from my own House, eh?” he asked her.

“No more than your assistant does,” she replied, maintaining her composure. “Are you ready to listen, or should I leave?”

He looked around. “I’ll listen,” he said. “Sorry, I’m under stress. Tell me more about unit 4311XD.”

“He was forged with knowledge of House Cannith’s management structure and etiquette. He has an exceptional ability to differentiate sounds, and he intuitively moves quite stealthily. He has an incredible ability to wrestle and grasp opponents, even ones stronger than himself. He is very flexible, I found him practicing somersaults and handstands once. He has a near-perfect memory, and he seems to understand the rudiments of magic without being taught any of it.”

“An intrahouse assassin,” Du’Bray said. “Dress him in livery and let him snap a neck before pushing a body down the stairs. Oh poor fellow, he fell, and such a man in his prime, tsk, tsk. Yes, a perfectly placed killer.”

“Your House seems to enjoy quarreling amongst itself,” she said. “If you did not have knowledge of the Orphan’s programming, who would?”

He rubbed his eyes. “I love your diplomacy. ‘Quarreling’ is it? You saw me blast a man across a room today for merely giving the appearance of having ordered me about. You were born from us, Pienna. Don’t pretend that you are shocked.”

She walked over to him and took his hand. She removed his glove and kissed his fingers, a gesture of reassurance from their past. “It was never like this, Bray. Never this intense. I left Cannith because the machines had taken over the soul of the family, and I wanted to embrace life in its most natural, basic state.”

“Heh, you could have joined those Ashbound fanatics then,” he joked. His face grew grave again and he gave her a pat on the shoulder. “Things have changed, Pienna. You left – what was it, twenty-eight years ago?” She nodded. “You didn’t see how the warforged changed things. The money we made. You don’t know of the friction with House Deneith over the fact we were manufacturing mercenaries and undercutting their prices. You don’t know of the secret wars of the Houses.

“We have changed very much, dear cousin,” he continued. He sighed. “Pienna, Galifar is dead, my lip service to it notwithstanding. Dead and long buried. No one will ever win this stupid war. The old order of empire is gone, new nations are in its place, scrabbling at each other’s throats. Only one constant remains. The Dragonmarked Houses. We have not only maintained our power, our monopolies, we have expanded. We have grown rich and fat on this war, and we make decisions that move wealth in numbers even the dwarves of Mror can scarcely comprehend. Already that power pulls at us. The House of Shadow has split in civil war. Lyrandar makes airships, stepping on Orien’s activities. Cannith make warriors, stealing business from Deneith, who as I have said have made their opinions known in blood. Medani tries to pretend it doesn’t favor Breland while Kundarak openly backs the Mror chieftains and Sivis is often as not the power behind the throne in Zilargo. Out of all the Houses the only ones not caught up in the game are Vadalis. Well, and Tharashk, but that’s only because the Gatekeepers have them involved in your war against those silly cultists.”

“Those ‘silly cultists’ seek to awaken ancient evils that shattered the Dhakaani Empire,” she informed him. “The places under the earth where they hide still spit forth monstrosities.”

“Let’s not get sidetracked,” he said dismissively. “The point is – there is nothing that is unthinkable anymore. The spilling of blood will only continue. The war cannot stop, too many people are determined to wage it.” He sighed. “I would have unit 4311XD destroyed, except whoever has readied him to be used against me will only make another. For that matter whoever programmed him probably wants –” He cut off and spun around. “Guards! Send a detachment of men to the holding dungeon and retrieve unit 4311XD immediately!”