The Warden

Chapter 5

Curse you Manu! Mistress Charlan screamed in her mind, her eyes fixed upward on the dark stone ceiling high above. Curse you for condemning me to centuries with these nit wits, these twits, these insufferable back-stabbers!

She sniffed in the musty air accented with the rusty odor of her six companions, a fact that also etched her scowl a little deeper. Centuries had all but dis-acquainted her with sun fresh air, but lingering memories so faint, so gossamer, they might have only been subconscious fabrications, still misted into being from her mind's depths from time to time. The very intangibility, their ungraspable nature, exacerbated the frustration. Charlan gripped the arms of her chair, a chair she could have just thought into existence centuries ago, as if to hold more tightly to the decision that had changed that fact.

I am queen of the night! The human rabble might have given her that title but she still took it as it held truth. She ruled the night. She was the night.

"They haven't responded as we hoped they would," said Andsek, her son, pulling Charlan from her thoughts just as the wood in her grip began to groan and protest.

She loosened her grip while tightening her face. "'They haven't responded as we had hoped'? Tell me Andsek, how did you manage to discern that fascinating insight? Was it their attempts to capture or kill a number of the raiding parties? Or was it the increased closeness and cooperation between the sovereigns and Master Elwith, the High Mage of all Haimlant? No, no, it must have been my personal favorite, the house arrest of all our agents."

She stood, slamming her small, delicate fist into the oaken desk before her. It split clean in two, screeching out in agony as splinters erupted upward as the two halves struck the ground.

Gazing down at the wreckage, Charlan sniffed again. That particular piece had belonged to her father once long, long ago. Worked from a single piece of wood—the ridiculous mages now would say magicked—it had sat in his study for all his life. She could have fixed it with a thought long ago. But not now. Not now.

Shaking her head, she turned her attention back to the he and she-wights before her, nudging one half the desk off the hem of her dark gown to move toward the now tense group.

Lord Markham Dornstam, a baron in his former life, dressed as ever in the latest fashions—leather doublet, fitted, linen breeches and shirt, also fitted, knee high boots, of course fitted, and a loose cloak worn over a single shoulder—stood, nonchalantly fingering the gloves tucked over his belt, while rocking nearly imperceptibly onto the balls of his feet.

Next to the silver streaked baron, stood her son, Andsek, arms slack at his side. He had been frozen in a state of striplinghood, supposedly only physically, but the centuries had proven to Charlan that his mental acumen would not improve with time. Standing next to Lord Markham, tall, broad, beautifully seasoned, he seemed quite a disappointing specimen.

Then came Mistress Vertisk Umbla, a perpetually sour pucker squeezing her lips, but her eyes showed an ongoing tabulation of words spoken, gestures made, and looks exchanged. This calculating spinster of a woman, appearing only to be in her late thirties, had produced some of the finest Works Haimlant had ever seen.

To Mistress Umbla's left stood the rotund Master Ombath Broin, whose jiggly jowls and protruding gut very nearly eclipsed his long dead fame for having resurrected and championed the Imposition movement amongst Workers—imposing human's superior order for the improvement of nature's inherent chaos. He had urged his mass toward the edge of his seat, the only other piece of furniture in the open space.