by Joseph Fink
“You have nowhere to go,” I heard a man shout.
But he had never met Lora. “Oh, fuck this,” she said.
She put one hand around André, pulled me up into her body with the other so that my nose was somewhere near her knees, and let herself topple from the ledge. “Lora, no!” I shouted but by then gravity had us. There was a horrible suspended moment and then we crashed into the neighbor’s roof, Lora using her enormous body to cushion us. Even then the landing hurt. I couldn’t imagine how it felt for her. She knew her own body though, and the limits of it, and hauled herself up, limping after the two of us as we fled across the roofs until we could find our way down to meet Rebekah at a café across town.
From Paris, the four of us went south to Éze, a village high in the hills above Nice. André’s family kept a small home in the village under a different name. It was a family secret, a place that spoke to their humble beginnings, but it would hopefully be difficult for the Lady’s soldiers to find. Reports we had gathered from fellow members of The Duke’s Own had been fragmented but the general picture was clear. André’s family was alive, but badly beaten. The house had been destroyed. Their fragile reputation was ruined. A lifetime of careful social climbing undone by their son and his friends. None of us talked much during the two-week journey south.
It was chilly in Éze, even as we looked down upon the sunny expanse of the Mediterranean below. When we were quiet, as we usually were, the faint fizzy slap of the waves below could be heard, one after another after another. Lora bought up half the village’s market and made us a feast to distract us from the shame of what our actions had brought upon an innocent family, but the food mostly went to waste. André didn’t eat a bite. He sat out on the cliff, staring down at the water. I realized it was the first time I had ever seen him without his easy, charming smile. Rebekah sat next to him, not talking to him, not touching him, only providing comfort by proximity. And for myself, I was too caught up in my own plans to think about food.
My life was for only one purpose, to get revenge against the Order of the Labyrinth. For that, I needed access to the Order. For that, I needed to get the attention of the watchers from the Order of the Labyrinth. These watchers were rumored to be everywhere in the criminal underworld, keeping an eye out for likely new recruits. To draw their attention, I needed to do a crime of truly grandiose proportions, which meant in turn that I needed a high-profile victim for this crime.
And here was the Lady Nora of Luftnarp, a walking monument to brutality and the misuse of power. She had hurt many people, but I believed she did not yet understand pain. I was eager to teach her.
So in front of an uneaten feast, in the cool sea air blowing up from the beaches below, I made the decision to destroy the Lady Nora of Luftnarp. To destroy her so thoroughly in such a visible way that the Order of the Labyrinth would have no choice but to take notice of my presence.
Having decided, I picked up a piece of bread, scooped it into a plate that Lora had given me, and began to ravenously eat.
5
First we came for Lady Nora’s wealth.
Luftnarp, a tiny nation high in the Alps, is cold any time of the year, and even that summer night was chilly. But the fires that marked the road to the castle were blazing, and each individual carriage was festooned with lanterns. All of that flame served to dissipate the cold a bit. And then of course there were all the people. This was one of the social events of the season, and the rich and noble (one, contrary to popular belief, did not automatically mean the other) had traveled from all over the warring continent to arrive at the annual feast of Lady Nora of Luftnarp. Amongst them was our humble cart.
A canvas was pulled over the piled goods on the cart, and I sat cross legged atop the pile. Lora, impossible to hide, drove the horses.
Rebekah had gotten herself recruited as a guard in the castle some weeks ago, the commander of the guards being desperate for the extra help.
“Keep me safe, she says,” the commander had muttered to himself. “Then invite every rich empty-head to come get drunk behind your open gates. Yes, keep the easiest target any thief has ever seen safe.” Then realizing that Rebekah was still in the room, he had said tersely that she was hired, and marched abruptly out.
Meanwhile André had chatted up some prince or another in order to be invited as the prince’s guest. “Tedious man,” he said. “But not fundamentally bad. Let’s hope he doesn’t suffer any consequences from our actions.” André had been in a gloom since his final break with his family, but I hoped he could muster some charm for tonight. We would need everything we had.
A line of guards stood along the road as our cart clattered along. One of them held up his hand and called “Ho!,” drawing us to a stop. Behind him, I could see a second guard, a dangerous looking man with a scarred face, likely a veteran of a number of wars. Just the kind of person a member of The Duke’s Own generally looked to avoid. I gave a nearly imperceptible nod to the scarred guard, and she winked back. Rebekah truly was a miracle worker.
“No sudden movements,” called the gruff and dangerous guard. Even Rebekah’s voice was unrecognizable.
Rebekah Barzani was born in the Pale of Settlement, a stretch of Eastern Europe which was one of the few places Jews were allowed to openly live. You could say that the attitude of the outside world to the culture she grew up in left her with a mindset well suited to making herself as invisible as possible. She was raised by a mother, a troublemaker and a saint, who believed that women should be educated just as much as the boys in the Yeshiva. Her mother strong-armed her husband into spending his evenings teaching their daughter the Torah, and also history and mathematics and the bits and bobs he knew from many other subjects.
Then, one night, as was frequent even in this scrap of land into which the Jewish people had been driven, a pogrom came. Their house was destroyed, and both of Rebekah’s parents were killed. Running from the house, she had happened upon one of the perpetrators of the massacre, who was so drunk he had fallen face down in the street. She stripped him, and dressed as best she could to disguise herself as anything but what she was, a scared Jewish orphan, alone now in the Pale of Settlement.
Having survived that night, she fled to another community, and managed by cutting her hair short and adopting the right kind of posture and voice, to convince her adoptive town that she was a boy. She attended Yeshiva. As the years went on, her skill at disguise grew in order to allow her continued access to education. Out of this necessity she became an expert at hiding herself in plain sight. She was so good at it she began assisting the head rabbi at the town’s synagogue. But eventually there was an incident at the mikvah and she was discovered. Her shocked community cast her out. This might seem cruel, and it was, but the constant harassment and persecution and pogroms had traumatized the Jews of that region, and they had responded by tightening the fist of tradition. Poor Rebekah sat squarely in the palm of that fist.
For the first time in her life, she left the Pale of Settlement, and began to wander Europe, seeking some kind of life worth living. It was easier to travel as a man, and so she kept up her disguise, improving and changing it as she moved from region to region. She learned new languages, new dialects and accents in order to survive. Of course, she also stole. How else was she to survive? As these stories often go, she eventually stole from the wrong folks, members of The Duke’s Own. They were so impressed by how she had taken them, how completely she had seemed to be someone else, that they gave her a choice. Join The Duke’s Own or die. She had joined, and like André, soon found her place in the organization. She was one of the first people I met when Edmond and I left that dark office years before in Amsterdam, both of us newly provisional members of The Duke’s Own. She had been disguised as a harried clerk. I met her again as a stone-faced bodyguard, and then again as a graceful and cunning noblewoman. I hadn’t known I was meeting her until the fourth time, at which point I noticed the drunk sailor I was meeting had the same freckle on his
left hand as the noblewoman from the week before. It was the first time anyone had been able to see through one of her disguises, and our mutual admiration turned to friendship, two young women who had lost our families but found a new family, one that could be yours forever as long as you didn’t mind stealing some gold and cutting some throats.
“You don’t look like guests,” the guard who had stopped us in front of Lady Nora’s castle said.
“Good eye,” growled Lora. The guard narrowed his eyes and put a hand to his sword. Behind him, I saw Rebekah tense slightly.
“We’re a delivery,” I said. “Take a look.”
I lifted the canvas off our cargo to reveal cases full of wine. The guard pulled a few bottles out, inspecting them. The labels on them belonged to some of the more rare and excellent wines on the continent, although this particular guard likely couldn’t even read them, let alone appreciate the estates they were grown on.
He looked through the cases and whistled.
“Has to be five hundred bottles in here.”
“Six hundred, actually,” I said. “A gift from a very generous guest.”
“Well, certainly the Lady Nora will take well to this gesture. Go around the side to see the Warden of the Wine, and don’t bother any of the guests. I expect to see you back within the hour or I’ll come looking for you.”
“Understood. Thank you,” I said with my most winning and sincere smile.
Lora gave him a long look and then got the horses moving again.
“Please don’t provoke anyone tonight,” I said. “At least not until it’s useful.”
“I didn’t like his face,” she said. “I thought I could rearrange it into something better.”
As we rode toward the castle, I heard footsteps off in the darkness. I looked, and in the moonlight I saw someone walking along a ridge, away from the party. It was impossible to see any details, but there was something familiar about the figure’s strange lurching movements, stiff and clumsy. I shuddered, and turned away from that figure in the darkness, toward the music and the fires and the crowds of the feast.
6
Lady Nora of Luftnarp loved nothing more than wine. She was famous for one of the most extensive wine cellars in Europe, a fortress under a fortress, with a ventilation system hidden throughout the hills around the castle. The cellar had its own unit of guards, the captain of which was the Warden of the Wine. He had been a vintner until Lady Nora recruited him, having him trained in the basics of combat but primarily valuing him for his expertise in wine. He personally inspected every bottle before it left the cellar. Edmond’s spies estimated that her collection was worth more than many kingdoms’ fortunes, and no one was able to remove so much as a bottle without it being noticed. Fortunately, we weren’t interested in taking any bottles out. Instead we had a few hundred bottles to bring in, which would be looked at far less closely.
The Warden of the Wine, an elderly but eminently sturdy man that I had no interest in annoying, stood in front of our cart, backed by a small army of guards.
“Gift for the Lady,” I said, pulling the canvas off and showing him the cases.
He eyed the bottles and made a series of humming noises that were meant to sound thoughtful but instead betrayed greed. The exquisite labels promising rare and expensive vintages were a trap set for this one specific man. As I expected, security wasn’t much interested with what was going in, only what someone might try to pilfer out, and so he quickly waved us through and Lora had the cases unloaded down the steps in a few minutes.
As she worked, I looked over the party. Parties like these always orbited their most powerful guest, which tonight was the King of Luftnarp, Torrid IV, a direct descendent of the Luft royal line, and the man whose decision in favor of his rich friend had sparked the Green and White revolution. Most of these royals were a scrawny, gangly bunch, victims of genetic homogeneity, but King Torrid IV was a mountain of a man. He had been born with the look of a leader, and mostly had the bearing to back that up. His reputation had been good until the Green and White rose up against him. Now he was seen as a tyrant by some. For the kind of people who attended a party like this, he was a hero, standing up for the order of society against the rabble trying to tear it down. Next to Torrid IV was Lord Fullbright, closest advisor to the King, and perhaps the key to his successful leadership. It was said that Fullbright was not only extremely shrewd, but also truly caring and empathetic. He genuinely wanted the best for his country and his fellow people, and guided the King toward choices that would benefit even the lowest rungs of society. Still he had stood with the King through his harsh reaction to the Green and White uprising, and so his mercy only tempered justice so far.
But I could take no sides between the peasants and their rulers. I was seeking a different kind of justice against a different kind of adversary, and so I left the party behind and followed Lora down the steps.
We were met at the bottom by a pair of wine cellar guards, who were happy to show us where to put this new trove of wine. They were less happy when Lora knocked their heads together and placed them safely behind a sturdy stone column where they wouldn’t get hurt. She had moved quickly enough that neither of them had made a sound that the Warden and his other guards up the long stairs to the surface might have heard. Without speaking, we first carefully placed half of our cases with the two unconscious guards, and then searched along the corridors, past countless priceless bottles, until we found a long stretch of wall that Rebekah had let us know was suspiciously free of wine. Here we made a pile of the other half of the bottles. I placed one last bottle on the top of our pile and lit the fuse. The two of us sprinted back to the entrance and threw ourselves on top of the guards in the safety of the thick column’s shadow.
My plan centered on a simple fact. I didn’t buy that the Lady needed that much security for a wine cellar, no matter how extensive. I believed she had hidden something else down here. It would be a smart place to stash the bulk of her fortune, because she had an excuse to put up a heavy guard without calling attention to what they were actually guarding. I wanted my hands on that fortune. So every bottle we brought contained not wine, but a powerful explosive created for us by a morally flexible chemist in Dubrovnik.
This was right around when André was supposed to be doing something quite loud and noticeable at the party. Setting off the feast’s climactic fireworks several hours too early for instance. He hadn’t entirely decided, and would scope it out when he got there, but I hoped, as I scrunched myself behind the pillar, that it was really loud and really noticeable. And just as I was thinking this, the explosive in the bottles went.
The explosion sounded like a mountain collapsing, like every animal alive crying out at once, like a thunderclap sounding the end of the world. The noise obliterated all of my other senses. It was literally too loud for me to see. Somewhere in that din I heard the once-in-a-lifetime sound of thousands of wine bottles all shattering at once. The best collection of wine the continent had ever known turned to vapor and, mixing with the acrid smoke, rose up the vent shafts, creating miniature smokestacks in the hills around the castle, giving away the secret location of their hidden outlets.
Two facts were immediately apparent: 1) We had used way too much explosive; and 2) Distraction or no distraction, every soldier for ten miles would be closing in on this cellar.
Before the rest of the castle could figure out where the explosion had come from, both Rebekah and André came stumbling down the stairs. André waved at the smoke as he coughed.
“I’m extremely eye catching, but there’s only so much I can do,” he said.
“What the hell happened here?” Rebekah said, still in the low, gruff voice of the guard.
“Our friend in Dubrovnik made his brew a little strong,” I said, and ran past them toward the source of the smoke, keeping low to try to find any air to breathe.
Meanwhile Lora swung shut the heavy door and barred it. The guards above got over their initial shock
and were pouring down, piling up against the door and pounding to be let in. Thanks to the massive ventilation shafts, the smoke was starting to clear, and so when I came to the demolished wall I could see enough to know that I had been right. There it was. Piles and piles of gold, bars mostly, but also sacks of coins from every empire that Europe had contact with. The source of the Lady’s power. Her fortune.
“Holy shit,” said André from behind me. Rebekah said nothing, only looked back nervously at Lora who was barely holding the door while as many guards as could fit on the narrow stairs attempted to ram it down. “How are we supposed to carry this much gold out of here?” said André. “Is there another exit I wasn’t told about?”
I hadn’t told them the rest of the plan, only letting them know that everything was in place and that they needed to trust me, which each one of them did, but Rebekah had spotted my intentions. I was smart, but she was smarter.
“We don’t carry any of it out,” she said, and I nodded.
“That’s right, we’re not here to steal from the Lady,” I said. “We’re here to destroy her. Help me with these.” I ran back past the straining Lora, mentally giving myself only a couple minutes at most before the door gave way and started dragging the rest of the bottles we had brought. The shattered glass all around me was proof enough that the amount would be sufficient.
“Oh, this is a tragedy,” said André. “I can’t look.”
Once the remaining cases of explosives were placed where they needed to be (I certainly didn’t have time to figure out the mathematically most efficient way to do this, with Lora hollering at us for god’s sake to move), I cut a length of fuse, making a hasty calculation of how much time it would take us to escape versus leaving any chance of some brave soldier stamping out the fuse at the last second. I hoped I had guessed right and supposed that I probably wouldn’t be around to see it if I hadn’t, and then lit the thing and ran like hell for Lora.