Chapter 3 - Part 1

CHAPTER THREE – THE ORPHAN GROWS UP QUICKLY
11th of Olarune, 993 Y.K., in the Cyran city of Eston

Pienna stood to the side, watching the meeting. There was a chair available for her, but she preferred to watch the participants. They had not wanted her present, these people of House Cannith. They had protested it. They had protested even more when they heard that she was reading their most secret manuals. Du’Bray had overruled them with force and fury, and now they seethed with resentment as they discussed their accounting. She had already decided to prepare several detect poison spells every day, and one had already warned her not to drink a cup of wine that a seneschal’s aide had offered her.

“Is there a point to this?” growled one man who wore a simple workman’s smock despite his great wealth. He was the only one there beside Pienna who did not wear gloves, disdaining the Cyran style. “Destroy the units that malfunction and show their parts to the others to keep them in line. We’re talking spilled resources and wasted time for what, a handful of malfunctions?”

“If word of malfunctions get out, or if malfunctions show up later on the battlefield, it will hurt us,” said a stiff woman in a tight dress that was buttoned to her collar. She had a pinched face and nearly bloodless lips. If not for the sunshine in the room Pienna would have suspected her of being undead. “And hurt us badly. Deneith is already seeking to undermine our warforged with their own mercenaries, to say nothing of those monsters that Tharashk is recruiting.”

“Deneith are the ones who had the brilliant idea to hire goblins, if I recall,” said someone near the back. “That worked out splendidly for all concerned, didn’t it?”

“Tharashk are half-monster themselves,” came another voice. “Who’s going to trust them enough to cut into our profits?”

“Then how about if the Zil start binding elementals to serve as warriors, or the Karnnathi habit of using their dead gets more popular?” snapped the woman in the tight dress again. “No, we need to get to the bottom of this!”

“Yes, we do, not some outsider!” snapped another Cannith officer, this one in full plate armor decorated with Cannith insignia.

“Pienna is of our blood,” Du’Bray said simply. “And I authorized it.”

“Patriarch Starrin would never –” began the armored man.

“I authorized it!” Du’Bray said, slamming a hand on the table.

Quiet descended abruptly to the room. Everyone stared at Pienna, who stared back calmly. Inwardly she was ready with every defensive spell she had.

“Daanvi begins to wax strongly,” said an old man in a corner, breaking the sudden silence. All eyes turned towards him. Apparently doddering, he was assisted by an animated frame of wood, and he wore thick spectacles. He had on a robe of wrinkled silk, and a ring with a ruby that could buy a small town. Pienna did not know him, but she could tell the others didn’t really want him there.

“Do you have a point with your cosmology?” someone called out.

“Daanvi begins to wax, but Garyx is ascendant,” the old man said.

“He’s right,” Pienna said. Du’Bray looked at her curiously, knowing her order’s obsession with other planes of existence. “Daanvi is the plane of order, and Garyx is the constellation of chaos. It is a very rare conjunction that they both are growing strong at the same time.”

“And even rarer that Aasterinian is caught between them,” the old man said, smiling appreciatively. “The constellation of invention and trade, our constellation, is caught between two opposed forces. This has not occurred for thousands of years.”

Du’Bray looked at Pienna and she nodded. “Well?” Du’Bray asked everyone.

“Hogwash!” snorted one man.

“Superstition,” said the woman in the tight dress.

“We build things, we do not follow signs and portents like gullible savages,” snorted the man in armor.

“Then you ignore the world at your peril,” Pienna said simply.

“Heh,” said the man in the simple workman’s smock. “I do ignore all that bunk. I once met the most renowned seer in Sharn, and she told me I would die from mist but my body wouldn’t rot for years. I take this as seriously as I took her.”

“Lord Viceroy Du’Bray, you may trust this woman here with documents, but I do not wish to speak freely in front of her,” said another man who had been quiet until this point. “We have heard how she has been talking to the warforged, the one unit in particular, and answering questions and giving him books. She’s told us all we need to know, she can go!”

Du’Bray did not answer, but his face grew very hard. Everyone got very quiet. The man who had spoken blinked, and then realized that perhaps he had been to brash. “Ah, Lord Viceroy, I ask forgiveness if I –”

A wand appeared in Du’Bray’s hand and a bolt of power erupted from it. The man was tossed backwards, clothes igniting and flesh charring, his terrible scream cut off quickly when his head impacted with the wall. Pienna gasped and ran over to the man, checking his injuries. He was oozing blood from cracked skin, and barely breathing.

“You forget yourselves,” Du’Bray told them, still holding the wand. His eyes were devoid of emotion and his knuckles were white on the wand. “You truly do forget yourselves. I am very well aware of the unorthodox nature of my actions. But they are my actions to take. If you dare threaten to go over my head and debate them you had best be prepared to deal with the consequences. My cousin is here to tell us what she has found, not what you think she ought to do. She is an expert on living things,” Pienna was casting healing magic into the nearly dead man as Du’Bray was saying this. “And whether you like it or not the warforged are living constructs. They are different, unique, and they must be studied from all angles. We have had them for almost three decades, and we still don’t know what we need to know. So it’s time to get another approach. Is that understood?” There was a murmur of assent. The man Pienna healed sat up gingerly, and then opened his eyes wide with terror as he saw Du’Bray still holding the wand.

Pienna stood and came over to her cousin, carefully staying between him and the man he had just healed. “Bray,” she said softly. He looked at her. “Why don’t I go. Let them talk freely to you. I’ll be downstairs at the tower’s base admiring the garden, all right? If they have more questions for me you can call me back up.”

Du’Bray looked at her, then finally nodded and put his wand away. A collective sigh of relief went around the table. Pienna gave her cousin a final pat on the arm and left.