Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 515 of 619

The ship carried Ajax home with four house marks read from the woman's red thread. Now he had to send each house a lie in its rival's hand. But he had no letter from any of them, no scrap of their writing. A false letter in the wrong hand would prove nothing. A merchant house would spot a clumsy forgery and know someone worked against them. Ajax laid the problem before Chalam and Marco in the hall. "I need letters that sound like each house," Ajax said. "Their words. Their hand. I have neither." Chalam set the red thread on the table. "The thread carries the mark. Not the hand. A seal I can copy. Words I cannot invent." He touched chalk to the thread and studied it. "Send a false seal on a stranger's hand and any clerk sees the seam." Marco leaned against the wall, arms crossed. His gold bracelet caught the firelight. He had read four houses' minds through the woman an hour before she forgot them. "You don't need their hand," he said. "You need their voice." Ajax turned. "Same thing." "No." Marco pushed off the wall. "I sat inside her thoughts. She quoted them. Word for word. How each house writes. The lean house is short and cold. The fat house begs and flatters. I heard all four talk through her." He tapped his temple. "It's still here." Chalam looked up. "You can speak their words. He can't. His hand is his own." "Then I speak, Aldric writes," Marco said. "He copies script for a trade. Four hands, four styles. I feed him the words. Chalam sets the seal." Ajax weighed it. He had wanted to forge the letters himself and failed for lack of any sample. Marco carried the samples in his head, whole. "Do it," Ajax said. "Bring Aldric." They worked through the night. Marco spoke slow, and the scholar's pen moved to match. The lean house's letter ran four cold lines: a rival moves on the fur road, act or lose it. The fat house's ran long and pleading. Marco corrected a word, then another, hearing the woman's memory play again. Chalam pressed each seal from the thread's mark, then charmed the wax so it would not read false to any clerk. By dawn four letters lay on the table, each in a different hand, each sealed. Chalam checked them one last time. "No seam," he said. "A house reads its rival and believes it." Marco read the fat house's letter and almost smiled. "That's her voice. She'd swear she wrote it." Ajax gathered the four. He had no way to forge these words a day ago. Now he held them, clean, each ready to turn one house against another. He would send them north with Marcus's next run. The head above the five still had no name. But the four hands beneath would soon be too busy fighting to look south.