The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Elarion, the war room

Malen made his report standing, and he made it short. There was no long version that came out better.

"The machines are home. Both, whole, in the rings — not a bolt missing. The four scholars are alive and on the road here under guard. The garrison’s gone. Five hundred and more, twenty knights, a caster and two apprentices. We lost no one." He stopped. "And we failed."

Lucien waited.

"The drawings. The Warhound’s master set went east a month before we ever crossed the border. Gone as you know. And the gun set—" Malen shook his head, once. "We were an hour behind it. Arven ran the courier down on the moor, Aurethar found him first — dead. Killed clean, the roll gone. The Church had a second hand waiting past the fighting. The moment we went loud, they closed on their own man and rode east with the paper." He met Lucien’s eyes. "They have it. Both sets. Everything those scholars measured. We took back the steel and lost the knowledge."

He braced for it. The anger. The cost said out loud. The silence he felt he’d earned.

"Alright," Lucien said. "No matter."

"My lord—"

"I mean it. Sit down." Lucien pushed a chair out with his foot. "You’ve carried that up from the border expecting me to take your head off. I won’t. You’ve brought me exactly what I needed to know — it just isn’t the thing you think you failed at."

"They have our drawings."

"They have our drawings, and in a year maybe they’ll build one Warhound from them. It’ll be nearly right. The second one will be nearly right in different places, and neither will fit the other, and they’ll stand around the pair of them very pleased and completely unable to make a third." Lucien sat. "You read Halvic’s report from the barn. I know you did — you underlined it. The machine is evidence of the weapon. The weapon is a way of organising ten thousand men. He’s right. The drawings are the least of what we have and the most of what anyone can steal. So they’ve stolen it. It will do them a fraction of the good they think." He shrugged. "I’d rather they didn’t have it. But if the choice was ever the paper or the men, I take the men. Every time. You brought home twenty-five knights and four scholars and left five hundred of theirs on a moor. Call that failure if it comforts you. I’m calling it a Tuesday."

Malen sat down slowly. Some of the weight came off him whether he gave it leave or not.

"The scholars, then. Four defrocked Aetheris men who’ve spent a month inside our whole method. They know it better than anyone we didn’t train. What do you want done with them? They were Church-hired. I can’t vouch for one of them."

"What did they do when Arven took the building?"

"Halvic — the old one — agreed to come before Arven had finished the sentence. No bargaining. Said he’d worked out weeks ago that the Church meant to cut their throats when the job was done." A pause. "He was right. They did. The other three followed him out like men who’d been waiting to be rescued and had stopped believing anyone would come."

"Then they’re not loyal to Nocthar. They’re loyal to not being murdered. That’s a perfectly sound loyalty to build on." Lucien turned it over for a moment. "Have gandalf run them. A real check, all four. If they come back clean, put them to work. A man who can take a Warhound apart and tell you exactly why it can’t be copied is a man I want at a bench on the side that built it — paid well, and never again made to keep a secret at knifepoint."

"And if one comes back dirty?"

"Then we deal with that one and keep the other three. We don’t hang four men for a sin we haven’t found yet." Lucien stood. "Tell Halvic the knifepoint part to his face. He’ll trust it more than any oath. A man kept by fear leaks the moment someone frightens him worse. A man kept by good wages and honest work doesn’t. I expect him at a bench in Ironhold inside a month, complaining our tolerances are too loose."

The door opened and lucas came in just silent with a dark expression on his face.

Lucas had a hundred ways of coming through a door — exasperated, aggrieved, waving a ledger, forecasting ruin — and Lucien had learned to ignore all of them, because that was simply the noise Lucas made while doing his job. This was none of them. This was Lucas quiet, holding a single sheet of paper, looking like a man who would rather be holding anything else in the world.

"You found the leak," Lucien said.

"We found the leak."

"Sit and tell me."

"I’ll stand for this one." He set the sheet on the table but didn’t look at it. "It came from inside. Our shipping office. A senior clerk —five years in the house. Good man. Dull man. The kind you never think about because he’s never once given you a reason to. He had access to everything. Routes, pairings, night halts." Lucas paused. "He copied nothing. Sold nothing. Took no coin — Cedric’s been through his accounts to the last penny. He didn’t sell us."

"Then how?"

"His wife."

The words sat there.

"She drew it out of him. Over months. A little at a time — a question over supper, a wife taking an interest in her husband’s day. He never knew he was giving anything away. He’d have died before handing a page to the Church. He never had to. He handed it to the woman he trusts most in the world, one careless evening at a time, and she carried it out of the house." Lucas finally looked up, and his voice had gone flat. "Cedric had her watched before he moved on the office. My lord — she’s corrupted.He’s been sleeping beside it for the better part of a year and he has no idea."

Lucien looked at the sheet on the table and did not pick it up.

"He doesn’t know," he said.

"He knows nothing. He’s the only honest man in the whole story — and he’s the one who leaked us. When he learns what she is, it will break him in half." Lucas exhaled. "I didn’t know how to bring this to you lightly. So I didn’t try."

"You were right not to." Lucien sat back down, slowly. The lost drawings, the border, the whole weight of Bridgefall — all of it had just become the smaller thing on the table. "I’ve spent a year preparing this territory for people who come at us with knives and armies. I built walls for that. Guns for it." He looked at the folded sheet, at the name he hadn’t read yet. "Nobody builds a wall against a man’s own wife."

"What do we do?" Lucas asked.

"We get Cedric. Tonight." Lucien’s voice stayed level, which was somehow worse than if it hadn’t. "No one touches the clerk. No one touches the wife — not yet. Every thread we’ve found in this whole business has ended in a corpse before we could pull it. The drover’s partner. The cleaner at the ford. The courier on the moor. Dead men, all of them, rather than let us hold one live end." He looked up. "We have a live one now. In a house in my city. I want to know what she is before she becomes the next body that tells us nothing."

"And after Cedric’s had her?"

Lucien was quiet for a moment.

"Then find a reason for her to die," he said. "A good one. She takes a fever, or a fall, or her heart gives out in her sleep — I don’t care which, and I don’t want to be told. What I want is a physician who signs a paper without frowning, and neighbours who say it was very sudden and very sad, and nothing anywhere that a clever man could pull on later." He looked at the folded sheet with the name he still hadn’t read. "The Church has to believe it lost a source to bad luck. Not to us. The moment they suspect we found her, every other one of these they’ve placed goes quiet or goes to ground, and we lose them all."

Lucas swallowed. "And the clerk?"

"The clerk is told nothing. Not now, not in ten years, not ever." Lucien turned from the window. "He’s a good man who did nothing wrong, and he loved his wife, and he’s going to bury her and grieve her honestly and carry that for the rest of his life. That’s what he gets from me. He does not get the truth, because the truth would take the twenty years he had with her and unmake every day of it — and he’d spend whatever’s left wondering how long she’d been someone else, and whether the woman he married was ever there at all."

He crossed to the table and picked up the sheet at last, and read the name on it, and set it down.

"Let him keep her," he said. "Whatever she became, he never knew her as anything but his wife. That’s a mercy and it costs us nothing, and the only kind I can afford this week." He looked at Malen. "Get Cedric and also prepare for a review of progress of all our ongoing projects."