Shaylar and her husband crossed the room. The closer they came to the windows, the louder that sound grew, until they reached it and Shaylar blanched. The street was jammed with people. Thousands of people. Angry people. Waving signs and shouting. The low roar was the sound of fury and hatred. She could read some of the signs, while others had been written in languages other than Andaran. The ones she could read chilled her to the bone.
These people wanted to kill her.
“They can’t see us,” the duchess murmured when Shaylar flinched back from the tall window. “We’ve set the defensive spells to block the view of the windows. All the windows. The people out there see the windows as they ordinarily look. They can’t see us standing here.”
“Why did that newspaper tell such horrible lies?” Shaylar demanded. Why does someone want them,” she pointed at the screaming mob, “to kill us? We’re helpless!”
“They’re being manipulated.” Jasak Olderhan’s jaw muscles were bunched and fury crackled in his eyes. “The Herald Times is bad enough on its own-I don’t doubt for one minute they’d love to embarrass the Government and Father any way they could-but they wouldn’t go this far from the truth unless someone had fed them carefully doctored information. Unfortunately, we don’t know who’s doing it…but we intend to find out.”
“But why? From everything you’ve said we would have frightened them, anyway! Why paint us as such monsters?”
“I don’t know,” the duke answered in a voice ribbed with iron, “but as Jasak says, I damned well mean to find out! I started digging into this the moment I saw that journal. It arrived shortly after dinner, which means that collection of crap hit the streets three hours ago. And that,” he nodded toward the mob outside in the street, bathed in the double glow of arcane streetlamps and moonlight, “is too big and too organized to be entirely spontaneous. Someone organized the kernel of it; then started spreading the word. Three hours later, we end up with a riot on my doorstep.
“My people have dug out a few facts, already. This so-called story was leaked by someone in the civil government, not the Commandery. Someone very highly placed wants the story told this way, and I suspect whoever that someone is, he’s been sitting on dispatches from the front that have not been shared-officially, at least-with anyone in the Army or with the Cabinet. I intend to find out who that person is, but I already know-or suspect-his reasons.”
“For lying?” Jathmar demanded. “For deliberately misleading the public? Inciting them to murderous demonstrations? When my wife rang for a servant to ask for something for her headache, the damned maid who answered was on a hair-trigger edge of killing her!”
The duchess blanched, and the duke scowled even more furiously than before.
“That will be dealt with at once,” he said in a growl that Shaylar trusted implicitly. Then he sighed. “As for the rest…As Jasak says, the Herald Times is anti-Government and anti-Army at the best of times. This was exactly the sort of raw meat anyone could predict its editorial staff would pounce on. And once their version of the ‘truth’ hit the street, every other news outlet picked up on it. Some started reporting it and-of course-speculating wildly in the process, but even the more restrained papers had to at least acknowledge it. Partly, it’s just the news industry’s tendency to exaggerate things, to whip up interest amongst their readers and capture new readers. The more details they can offer-even when they don’t have details-the more likely people are to buy their newspaper, not their competitor’s.”
“You said the story came from someone in government,” Jathmar bit out.
“Yes. It did. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it came from someone engaged in politics at the highest level. Someone with contacts and allies-tools-in the government, whether or not he’s actually in government service himself. And that, I’m afraid, leads to several possible scenarios. What better way to unite public opinion than to paint the other side as entirely evil? And the fact that Halathyn vos Dulainah was killed offered a perfect mechanism for implementing that strategy. He is dead, after all; none of us can dispute that. If whoever this is can convince the public he was murdered out of hand, it’ll be like applying a flame spell to a haystack! My question is one of motive. Was this done purely to unite factions that will be jockeying for control? Or for some more sinister reason?”
“What sort of reason could justify this?” Jathmar demanded. The duke’s jaw tightened, but when he responded, his reply seemed curiously oblique…at first.
“Andara’s controlled the Union of Arcana’s military for two centuries,” he said. “That’s not because we’ve snatched the reins of power, either. Primarily it’s because nobody else wanted the job.” He shrugged. “We Andarans enjoy the military lifestyle. Neither the Mythlans nor the Ransarans do. In fact, most of them despise and disdain it. Some individuals from Mythal and Ransar enlist, whether from patriotic commitment or-more commonly-as a way to better their stations in life. But nobody else has wanted control of the military.
“The fact that you exist, however, and that we’ve met violently, has changed everything, rather abruptly. Quite suddenly, Mythal and Ransar must face the reality that their survival lies in someone else’s hands. Andaran hands. I know Mythlans and Ransarans,” he glanced apologetically at Gadrial, “well enough to know certain factions of those societies will suddenly discover, despite lifetimes of disdain for the military, that they want control over the means of defense. Some of that’s inevitable-when someone feels threatened, of course he wants to be sure he and the ones he cares for are protected the way he wants them protected, and Shartahk take anyone who gets in his way.
“But I suspect what’s really driving this-what the manipulators want-goes far beyond that natural reaction. Some people have never been comfortable with the extent of Andaran influence on the military, not because they wanted to control it, but because the military’s been a huge factor in stabilizing the Union from the very beginning. Some of them want to rock that stability because the collapse of existing power relationships may let them build new ones more…beneficial to their own interests. Others see the military as the primary support for Andara’s influence within the Union-its power base-and want to break that power base in order to improve their own. And now those manipulators finally see a chance to accomplish their goals.
“There’s just one problem. How does someone take charge of a military whose control is so entrenched in Andaran hands? The easiest-and the one I fear most-is by discrediting Andara. By making Andaran officers appear incompetent. By vilifying the enemy in the worst possible terms, exaggerating the threat, and then howling that the Andarans can’t protect Arcana from that kind of threat. Not when they bungled the first contact so badly that they allowed themselves to be wiped out virtually to the last soldier and couldn’t even protect an inter-universal hero like Magister Halathyn!”
“But that isn’t what happened,” Jathmar protested. “Your son lost only a third of his men and that included the wounded, not just the dead. The rest of his men weren’t taken prisoner until the second confrontation. And they certainly didn’t mention that we were civilians-that we were the ones brutally slaughtered! They didn’t mention the little detail that your own soldiers killed Magister Halathyn or that Jasak’s replacement tried to kill an unarmed man asking for civilian survivors, either. What kind of government do you have, that would lie so hideously to its own people?”