Chapter Three

THE ADVISER

King Edward II had established the Office of Advisers a century before Alleria’s war with the Rowowan empire. His basic idea was to create a well-trained cadre of elite civil servants who could provide informed and objective counsel to high-ranking officials whose appointments to their posts were not necessarily based on their abilities. Most advisers started out as orphan boys entrusted to the state. If they demonstrated sufficient intellectual prowess, they were sent to the royal academy to learn history, politics, grammar, logic, mathematics, literature, and science. Most entered the Office of Advisers upon graduation and served the kingdom for their entire careers. Promotion and advancement were theoretically based on merit, so those who rose to the top were supposedly the most talented and capable men in the kingdom. In reality, the Office of Advisers was just as susceptible to self-selection, favoritism, and corruption as any other organization. Advisers did not marry – or, as people said, they married the kingdom. Their watchwords were loyalty, knowledge, and discretion. Their tight-knit, monastic, and elitist status set them apart from the rest of society and sometimes aroused jealousy among other government officials. To the public at large, however, advisers were strange, remote, intimidating, and mysterious men who whispered in the ears of their leaders.

The only thing that Michael Kargas knew about his infancy was that he was born somewhere in the southern wastelands about thirty years before the war began. His first memories were of the royal academy. There his intelligence, loyalty, and circumspection marked him even before he entered the Office of Advisers. Kargas’s subsequent ascent up the organization’s hierarchy was so effortless that it sometimes generated resentment among those not blessed with his sharp intellect and placid interpersonal skills. Kargas attributed his success to his knack for persuading his clients to embrace his ideas as their own. Moreover, his ability to ruthlessly implement those ideas made him indispensable. And indispensable men, Kargas soon realized, were powerful men. Kargas’s ambition, though, was tied to his devotion to the kingdom, not to his ego. As he saw it, the kingdom had raised him, educated him, and given his life purpose. Without its fortuitous intervention, he might have ended up as a goat herder or dockworker. His single-minded commitment to the kingdom blotted out all else. He had no hobbies and cared little about money or sex. Indeed, his aestheticism and work ethic led people to compare him to a secular monk. So did his simple plain clothing, thin frame, and bald head. He possessed the sereneness, understatement, and self-confidence of a man who took for granted his intellectual superiority and the success that flowed from it.

Kargas started his career first as an assistant adviser, then as senior adviser, to the Ladle Archipelago’s governor. From there he moved to Aurora to work successively for the foreign ministry, the treasury department, and the personnel office before crossing the Valgor Strait to serve as adviser to the ambassador to the Valgor Confederation. In each job he more than met the expectations of his clients and his Office of Adviser superiors. He came home to become assistant adviser to the royal family shortly before the conflict with Rowowa began. From there he headed to the front for a long stint with army intelligence. In that capacity he saw enough of war to detest its messiness, unpredictability, and inhumanity. No one, however, doubted his effectiveness. Even army officers disinclined to trust advisers acknowledged his good judgment, collegiality, and decisiveness. Finally, three years ago, he returned to Aurora as the royal family’s senior adviser. It was therefore his responsibility to protect Rael and Iona from danger. He owed his appointment not only to his previous posting with the royal family, but also for his proven ability to retrieve something out of even the worst disasters. Alleria’s imminent demise meant an end to the Office of Advisers, but its executive council had already empowered Kargas to do whatever was necessary to safeguard the royal family through the difficult times ahead. It was, as one council member explained to Kargas, the ultimate salvage mission.

As he stood ramrod straight in the cramped and stuffy crypt, Kargas dispassionately contemplated the end of Bartholomew’s reign. His relationship with the old man had been more professional than personal. Indeed, by the time Kargas became senior royal adviser, the king was already shutting out the rest of the world. He rarely conversed directly with Kargas, but instead communicated with him through increasingly cryptic and brief memos that Kargas found hard to decipher and even harder to respond to in any meaningful way. Although Kargas interpreted the king’s declining health as a kind of dereliction of duty, he still respected him for foreseeing the war’s tragic consequences before anyone else. Moreover, he appreciated the king’s incorruptible nature in a position hardly conducive to such inclinations. Kargas believed that Bartholomew had possessed a selflessness and humility rare among the powerful, and was saddened by his mean and grubby death.

Kargas was less sure about the recently-arrived Prince Rael. The prince certainly looked the part – tall, muscular, and square-jawed. He carried himself with the dignity of someone accustomed to authority, but combined this self-assuredness with an unbecoming coarseness. Kargas had interacted with Rael at the war’s start while serving as assistant royal adviser, but that was ten years ago and of course much had changed since then. Rael had spent much of the conflict as a staff officer and had risen to the rank of colonel. However, he owed his advancement more to his longevity, seniority, and especially royalty than to true merit. To be sure, Rael had dutifully fulfilled his military responsibilities, but rarely went much beyond that. Because he took his privileges for granted, he seldom exerted himself any more than necessary. There was, Kargas concluded, rather less to him than initially met the eye. This fecklessness applied to his personal life as well. He gathered and discarded friends without much rhyme or reason. Moreover, over the years he had left a long trail of brief, shallow, and purely physical relationships with women of all classes who were attracted to his rank. Kargas knew that these characteristics were hardly unusual among royalty, and anyway he believed in taking people as they were. If the prince was not Alleria’s ideal standard bearer, history was replete with kings with greater flaws. Besides, working with the material at hand was part of Kargas’s job.

Kargas had similar reservations about Princess Iona. She had her good points. Kargas appreciated her earnestness and intelligence. She had remained devoted to her father long after others had abandoned the old man. Her observations about people and events were often incisive and spot on. Kargas knew that she had been deeply frustrated and ashamed of her inability to find an appropriate role for herself during the war. Her beauty – long blonde hair, elfin facial features, dark eyes, and enchanting figure – spoke for itself and was undoubtedly part of her allure. On the other hand, she was as autocratic as her brother and relied entirely too much on her royal prerogatives to get what she wanted. Worse yet, her selfishness, willfulness, and self-centeredness made it impossible for her to commit to anyone or anything for any length of time. Her drama-filled romantic relationships seemed designed more to prove a point – what it was, Kargas did not know – than to find happiness and fulfillment. Small wonder her romantic victims often preferred to return to the front and its accompanying horrors than continue in the manipulative and bewitching world into which Iona had drawn them. One disgusted officer told Kargas that at least the Rowowans made a pretense toward fairness. Except for keeping track of her amours and dispatching a nurse to make sure she took the proper sexual precautions, Kargas refrained from interfering with her relationships because he knew that her insecurities and unreasonable demands would more effectively sabotage them than anything he did. Kargas concluded that Iona’s basic problem was that she wanted to carve her own path without surrendering the protection her royalty provided her.

Whatever their virtues and vices, Kargas saw Rael and Iona as the keys to Alleria’s resurrection. He believed that the royal family served as symbols of the Allerian people. As long as they remained free and extant, Alleria would maintain its national identity and distinctiveness. Kargas’s mission, therefore, was to keep the twins out of Rowowan hands until the time was ripe for Alleria to reclaim its independence. As Kargas saw it, that time was not far off. Although the Rowowans had won the war through brute force and materiel superiority, the conflict had pushed their dysfunctional empire to the breaking point. Its corrupt and cumbersome imperial council consisted of members who hated one another even more than they hated the Allerians. Its bloated and venial bureaucracy was renowned for overlapping and unclear lines of authority, massive redtape, and an inability to get things done. The empire’s dozen squabbling nationalities were united only in their unhappiness with the imperial council and its authority over them. The war had spawned inflation, shortages, and dislocation. Hundreds of thousands of demobilized Rowowan soldiers would soon return home to limited opportunities and reduced standards of living. Kargas’s intelligence briefings contained reports of riots in Rowowan cities and brigandage in the countryside. It was clear to Kargas that the empire was already showing the first cracks of its imminent disintegration. Such a collapse would provide subjugated minorities such as the Allerians with the opportunity to squirm free. When this happened, the royal family could emerge from hiding to rally and unite the Allerian people. Until then, Kargas had to conceal Rael and Iona and protect them from Rowowans determined to find, capture, and imprison them.

As soon as the royal undertaker pushed the king’s remains into his vault, Kargas quietly exited the crypt and walked down a long, dimly-lit tunnel that led to a dugout that served as the headquarters for the Allerian army defending Aurora. There its commander, General Theodore Millwright, and his staff oversaw efforts to resist the constricting coils of the besieging Rowowans. Despite his plebian surname, the stout Millwright came from old Allerian aristocratic stock. Indeed, he and Kargas had attended the royal academy together. Millwright was commissioned into the army after graduation and was leading a battalion when the war began. He rose steadily through the ranks in both staff and command positions to secure his current post. He was by any measure a skilled commander, but his generalship had failed to overcome Rowowan advantages in men and materiel.

An officer ushered Kargas into a curtained-off corner of the dugout that served as Millwright’s office. Kargas took a seat on a rickety stool and waited for Millwright to finish writing out orders at his field desk. After a minute, Millwright looked up.

“Is it done?”

“Yes,” replied Kargas. “They put him in his vault about ten minutes ago.”

Millwright opened a drawer, took out a bottle and a couple glasses, poured two drinks, and handed one to Kargas.

“To the king,” he intoned.

“To the king,” Kargas responded, clinking his glass with Millwright’s and downing the contents. Kargas studied the glass for a moment. “Where did you get the liquor?”

“Oh, rank has its privileges.”

Millwright looked longingly at the bottle before reluctantly putting it back in the drawer. “He was a good king,” he said. “Not perfect, of course, but a good king. At least up until the end. And a fine man.”

“Yes he was.”

“Well,” Millwright said, “shall we begin?”

“No,” Kargas responded. “Not yet. Let’s wait until the top of the hour so it will be easier for everyone to stay on the same page.”

The two men sat in silence for several minutes. “What do you think you’ll do after the war?” Kargas asked abruptly.

Millwright thought for a moment. “The Rowowans may put me in a prison camp, but I doubt it. Not worth the effort. I’ve been a soldier my whole career. I don’t know how to do anything else. I hear that the Rowowans recruit officers from defeated armies to serve in the northern tundra against the natives. Maybe I’ll go there. Or I could enlist in the Valgoran foreign legion. Maybe I’ll become a police officer.” Millwright chewed on his options for a few seconds. “There aren’t a lot of career opportunities for defeated generals, are there?”

Kargas chuckled, then turned serious. “I hope you realize that we lost this campaign despite your generalship, not because of it.”

Millwright smiled. “Thanks. And I want you to know that although I don’t like advisers as a group, you were one of the good ones.”

“Alright,” said Kargas, glancing at his watch. “It is time. Let’s get started.”

After standing up, Millwright extended his hand and said, “It’s been an honor serving with you, Kargas.”

“And you too. Good luck.”

As Kargas left the dugout and walked back down the long tunnel, he heard Millwright barking orders to his staff. Kargas ignored the rumbling of artillery and mentally rehearsed the complicated plan he had formulated months earlier to spirit the royal twins out of Aurora to safety when the city finally fell to the Rowowans. Although it contained plenty of moving parts, Kargas had simplified its execution by dividing it into three discrete sections. The first was Aurora’s formal surrender. He left that unpleasant chore in Millwright’s capable hands, with the sole proviso that the general delay the formal handover of the city for at least twelve hours. The second called for shepherding Rael, Iona, and several others to a remote and isolated wharf that he had selected weeks earlier for this purpose. He had already assigned one of his assistants with that task.

Kargas took it upon himself to take care of the third, and to his mind the most important, part of his plan: ensuring that the Rowowans could not locate the royal twins. In fact, he had already begun its implementation months earlier by ordering several of his assistants to gather and destroy every existing photograph of Rael and Iona they could locate. Because the king had kept the twins out of the public eye, it was a more manageable task than Kargas expected. At the same time, the assistants seeded public and private records with hundreds of photographs of dozens of different people encaptioned with Rael’s and Iona’s names. Kargas also spread disinformation about the twins’ whereabouts, hobbies, tastes, health, and so forth. He hoped these deceptions would make it impossible for the Rowowans to develop an accurate and usable profile of the twins.

It was a clever ploy, but Kargas knew that it would not fool for long the experienced men who populated the various Rowowan intelligence services. After bidding Millwright goodbye, Kargas made his way through the maze of tunnels under the palace to a cellar that overlooked the blasted remnants of the various government buildings south of city’s center. When Kargas arrived, a young lieutenant was busy inspecting a tangle of wires that stretched from a detonator in the cellar to the royal archives building, a hundred yards away. Kargas watched the lieutenant go about his work for several minutes before announcing his intention to catch a few hours of sleep. With that, he plopped down on a cot, removed his boots, and was soon out like a light.

Kargas was thoroughly accustomed to people interrupting his sleep, so he was neither surprised nor angry when one of his assistants awakened him in the middle of the night with word that Millwright and his Rowowan counterpart had hammered out surrender terms. The capitulation agreement called for the encircling Rowowan troops to take official possession of the capital at six o’clock the following evening. Kargas grunted his acknowledgment of the news, inwardly pleased that Millwright had successfully fulfilled his part of the plan. When Kargas rose early next morning, the young lieutenant was still there. He introduced himself as Allen Oterio and offered Kargas a cup of coffee from a rusted pot in the corner of the room.

As Kargas warmed his stiff hands with the coffee mug, he realized that the Rowowans had stopped shelling the city. It was therefore eerily calm and quiet. Thankful that he need not worry about enemy artillery fire, Kargas looked out of the exposed cellar window at the long, partially-covered wire stretching across and under the rubble to the royal archives. “Are you sure it will work?”

“Adviser,” replied Oterio, “when you give the word, I won’t just destroy what’s left of that building, I’ll obliterate it.”

Kargas snorted at the lieutenant’s confidence. “Okay, but are you sure no one will discover the explosives before you set them off?”

“Absolutely. I placed them in this cavern beneath the foundation, then walled it up. No one will find them anytime soon unless they know exactly where to look.”

Kargas sipped his coffee while contemplating the blasted out shell of the royal archives. Although Rowowan artillery had demolished its exterior, he knew that its records remained safely stored in the underground levels. He remembered the first time he visited the building, back when he was a student. He had marveled that any one place could contain so much information.

Lieutenant Oterio interrupted his thoughts. “If you don’t mind me asking, sir, but what’s the point of blowing up a building that’s already mostly rubble? I’m sure the explosion will scatter all the documents there in a million directions, but it won’t destroy them all. Besides, aren’t there duplicate copies elsewhere?”

Kargas nodded. “Oh, you are right. But I do not really care about the records one way or another. They are just bait.”

“Bait, sir?”

“Yes,” continued Kargas, suddenly alert. “Do you see that dust cloud to the south?”

Oterio craned his neck to look in that direction. “Yes. So?”

“I am sure it is a convoy of vehicles carrying Rowowan rangers on their way to occupy the royal archives.”

“Rowowan rangers?” asked Oterio. “But I heard that the handover isn’t supposed to occur until tonight. What are they doing in the city now?”

Kargas smiled grimly and turned to Oterio. “Whenever the Rowowans accept the surrender of a city, they send their rangers in before the official handover to secure the important buildings so the defenders cannot destroy the records. It is a violation of the surrender terms, but you can do that when you are the winner.”

For fifteen minutes they watched the column of trucks thread its way through the debris that littered the city’s streets. “Where are you from?” Kargas asked, mostly to fill the time and diffuse the rising tension.

“Barbod,” Oterio replied. “It’s in the southern wastelands.”

"Beautiful country,” Kargas said. “Harsh, though.”

“It is.”

“What did you do before the war?”

“I was a goat herder,” said Oterio.

Kargas laughed. “Are you looking forward to resuming your career?”

“No,” said Oterio. “The army taught me all about explosives. I want to work for a mining company. Better pay, better life.”

“Well,” said Kargas, “wars do generate social mobility.”

“Maybe,” said Oterio. “But if it was a choice between missing the war and spending the rest of my life as a goat herder or going through what I’ve been through these last few years, I would rather be a goat herder.”

Finally, the convoy of vehicles stopped in front of the royal archives and disgorged a platoon of rangers, fit and lean, who swarmed the building. Oterio fussed with the detonator and muttered to Kargas, “I hate those guys. Just give me that word.”

“No,” responded Kargas. “Wait. They are not the target.”

For another half hour they watched the building in silence. Finally, a ranger officer emerged from what had once been its entrance to give the all clear. Shortly afterwards, another column of trucks appeared containing dozens of men. They were not rangers; they were older, fatter, and balder. They tumbled out of the truckbeds without any of the athletic grace the rangers had displayed earlier.

Kargas smirked. “Do you see those men?” he asked Oterio, gesturing toward the middle-aged soldiers now stretching their legs next to the trucks.

Oterio nodded.

“They are analysts. They are part of a Rowowan interagency intelligence group called the Inquiry. They are the best and brightest intelligence officers in the Rowowan army. They know everything there is to know about Alleria. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of our politics, culture, military, economics. They knew what time the king shit every day.” He paused, then said almost to himself, “They are good at what they do. Very good.”

Oterio suddenly understood and smiled. “I see.”

Kargas elaborated anyway, more for his own reassurance than to enlighten Oterio. “If we kill these fellows, we eliminate much of Rowowa’s institutional understanding of Alleria. It will make it impossible for them to rule us effectively. For them it will be like entering into a marriage with a woman you do not know. Those kind of marriages invariably fail.”

Kargas refrained from explaining to Oterio that killing these men would also make it much more difficult for the Rowowans to locate the royal twins. Rowowa had a dozen quarreling intelligence agencies that jealously guarded their prerogatives and information. They had acquiesced to the Inquiry’s formation during one of the war’s lowpoints. Kargas hoped that once the conflict was over and the Inquiry’s members were dead, the Rowowans would be unwilling or unable to reconstitute it. Although each of the empire’s intelligence agencies might acquire pieces of information about the twins’ whereabouts, a lack of resources and cooperation would prevent any of them from assembling the entire puzzle.

When the Inquiry members shuffled into the royal archives, Kargas turned to Oterio. “Get ready on my signal.” Kargas imagined them spreading out though the basement, identifying filing cabinets and rifling through folders. After another half hour elapsed, a ranger stepped out into the street and lit a cigarette. As soon as he took his first long drag, Kargas said, “Now. Do it.”

Oterio pushed down on the detonator. After an anxious pause, a deafening explosion shook the area and the royal archives disappeared in a haze of smoke and debris. Kargas and Oterio fell to the ground and covered their heads. When the air cleared fifteen minutes later, demolished vehicles, overturned stones and bricks, and broken bodies littered the area. The sight would have once horrified Kargas and Oterio, but years of war had hardened their hearts to such destruction.

“Okay,” said Kargas. “That is that.”

After dismissing Oterio and wishing him Godspeed, Kargas plunged back into the maze of tunnels that riddled the ground beneath the capital. Months earlier one of his assistants worried that the Rowowans might acquire a diagram of the miles of catacombs, passageways, and sewers under Aurora. Karagas, however, had laughed that no one possessed such a map. It had been funny then, but not now. He pressed forward, aided by his flashlight, memory, and some orange chalk marks scratched on the damp walls. Despite his occasional disorientation, he was not inclined to fret much. As far as he was concerned, there was a solution to every problem, big or small. It did not matter whether it was finding his way through a tunnel system or restoring Allerian independence. All that he needed was persistence and intelligence, two traits he possessed in abundance. After an hour or so, he pushed open a storm drain grate at the base of a knoll in the middle of a swamp a quarter mile outside of the city limits, just beyond the constricting coils of the Rowowan army. He rested and let his eyes adjust to the sunlight before hiking another hour on a narrow path through the dense vegetation. Finally, sometime after noon, he reached an old shack by a jetty, alongside which was tied a ramshackle motorboat.

A big, burly, heavily-bearded man stood guard with a rifle in front of the shack. Kargas had met Karl Lattamore five years earlier at a Highrealm field hospital. Lattamore was recovering from a painful belly wound when Kargas interviewed him about a new machine gun that the Rowowans had developed. Kargas was so impressed with the young sergeant’s eye for detail and astuteness that he had him transferred to his office. In the ensuing years, Lattamore had become Kargas’s most capable and trusted assistant, successfully completing even the toughest assignments. His most recent one included procuring the boat bobbing alongside the jetty. The two men had not seen each other in months, so their greetings were warm and joyful.

“Please tell me that they are in there,” Kargas said, gesturing at the shack.

“Oh, yes,” Lattamore replied. “They’re tired and disoriented, but otherwise ready to go.”

Kargas sighed in relief. “Do they look like working class refugees fleeing the Rowowans?”

Lattamore laughed. “Well, one of them does. The rest look like rich people disguised as working class refugees fleeing the Rowowans.”

“Well,” said Kargas, “it will have to do for now.”

The shack’s occupants stumbled out into the sunlight while Kargas and Lattamore talked. There were four of them: Prince Rael, Princess Iona, Iona’s fifteen-year old servant girl Lana, and an old friend of Rael’s named Frederick Fitzpatrick. Although Kargas had several weeks ago forewarned them of their imminent exodus from Aurora, none of them appeared psychologically ready for the trip. As they boarded the boat, Rael asked, “Now can you tell us where we’re going?”

“Yes I can,” replied Kargas. “Kirkwell Island.”