by James Beamon
Druze's eyes drifted to the staggered tower. "I swallowed the megrym's bait, a ruse for fools. We all make mistakes, apparently even after half a millennium. The megrym’s mistake was injuring my pride. He must die. And no one will come between that, not even Majora.”
“Yeah, she wouldn’t kill him for a bump on the head,” Samedi said. “She kinda has that good girl aesthetic.”
Rew’s sense of truth, justice and fairness were the biggest reasons the Hierophane was regarded as a beacon of hope. She was known for making hard choices, some which had been disadvantageous to the Hierophane, for the sake of fairness and equity. This was the reason he had ceded control in the first place.
“Well, that’s where you and I come in, Samedi. To do the things in the dark that Majora and the Hierophane can’t or won’t do in the light.”
“Always more fun with the lights off,” Samedi said.
“The Exquisite Promise,” Druze said. “You’ll likely find our new friends there, with a trader named Ruki Provos. Kill him too, for bringing them to our doorstep.”
Samedi nodded and retreated into the shadows. He never complained about tasks that allowed him bloodletting.
Meanwhile, Druze looked at the broken tower. He would make some good come of the desecration. Everyone already talked about the Hierophane’s lack of master robes and their dwindling influence. Seat Esotera was an overextended, crumbling relic, lacking manpower to do much outside their own demesne.
That would change. When sacred Maltep lay in ruins and the Hierophane had possession of their hex stores, no one would question the might of human mages.
Chapter 19
Risk Factor
Mike was grateful the city of Ardenspar was so big. Carved into several districts, separated in two by a river, it would take time to find any needle in this massive haystack. This alone gave them time to plan.
“You guys are the worst investment ever,” Ruki Provos said scowling.
He looked out the window at the mayhem loosed on Ardenspar. The distinctive chrome armor and white cloaks of peacekeepers were everywhere—running through the streets, riding the skyrails, storming businesses and buildings, grabbing cloaked individuals and checking their faces.
“Dude, not our fault,” Mike said, sharing the view out the window. “You can’t lock me up while you send my brother off to die. Not having it.”
“Fine, but did you have to blow up the Hierophane?” Ruki asked. He looked at Savashbahar, who now blended in perfectly with the wall thanks to her hex magic. Two different squads of peacekeepers had already stormed the Exquisite Promise looking for Hexenarii.
“Yes,” was her simple reply. Considering what she saw down there, Mike didn’t blame her. But her time to hide as a chameleon was limited; she had already burned two hexes concealing herself from peacekeepers. Unless she had some that weren’t on the belt, she only had two hexes left.
They had to get out of the city.
Ardenspar reminded Mike of old school London. Cobbled streets, tall stone and brick buildings, lots of steam boiling out of grates, gutters and vents. Only things missing was Oliver Twist and Jack the Ripper.
It wasn’t all Sherlock Holmesy. Giant iron bars crisscrossed the skies of Ardenspar, joined at massive cylindrical towers. Passenger cars shot out from these towers and traveled sideways along the giant bars. It was the equivalent of a skyrail, which was impressive considering it ran on steam and gears.
Ruki Provos grimaced. “Well, I’m not the type to inform on others. But I am a businessman, and harboring fugitives isn’t my business. You guys need to think of a way to get out of Ardenspar before I’m seen with you.”
“We got it, Ruki,” Mike said. “We just needed a place to lay low for a minute.”
“Well, that minute is getting stretched rather thin,” Ruki said, looking down onto the street. “We’ve got another round of peacekeepers heading inside, this time with a terrormancer.”
The blended blur of Savashbahar moved quickly. “We must flee,” she said, panic in her voice.
“Why?” Mike asked. “You still got some hexes, right? Just hide. They’ll come and go like the others.”
“No, this is different,” she said. “He is the Hollower.”
Crap. If the same Hollower from the Hierophane basement specifically came to the Exquisite Promise, then that meant the black robe Mike clubbed told him where to find Ruki Provos. It also meant the Hollower knew who to look for rather than any random nasran.
Ruki opened his room door. “Flee to the roof; I’ll try to stall them.”
Mike looked at him. “Dude, you need to come with us. They’re coming for you too.”
Ruki dismissed Mike with a hand. “Nonsense. I wasn’t even with you guys. Once they see I’m not harboring you, I’ll be fine.” He pointed up. “Now get going, quick.”
Mike, Runt and a well-disguised Savashbahar ran up five flights of stairs and emerged on a flat roof overlooking the city. The sun lay at the horizon, changing the sky into shades of oranges and reds as dusk came to Ardenspar. Soon nightfall would arrive, making it easier to move around undetected in the city.
Sooner than that, though, peacekeepers would burst out onto the roof. Runt blocked the door with rain barrels. Mike ran around the perimeter of the roof, looking down.
They were twenty stories up, the tallest building in the neighborhood. The second tallest was right next to the Exquisite Promise but only ten stories high. Jumping ten stories with nothing to break the fall but four barrels was a hard, hard crunch.
Bambambam! Hard, violent pounding hit the door, shaking the barrels. A frantic, muffled voice came from behind it.
“It’s Ruki! Open the door, open the door, open the door!”
Runt pulled the door open a crack, Ruki quickly squeezing through the thin crevice like he was covered in butter. He looked like he had seen his own ghost.
“Those bastards tried to kill me!”
Runt closed the door as peacekeepers arrived. Mike and Ruki wedged the water-laden barrels back into place as the door started jumping from the peacekeepers. Their pounding was even more violent and insistent than Ruki’s had been.
“They may get another try at it,” Runt said. “Few options this high up.”
“Gather to me,” Savashbahar said. She was waving a half rotted plank of wood, which seemed to be dancing in the air because she was still invisible.
“Follow the wood,” she said. “Aim for the water.”
In front of him, Mike saw the plank go dancing off the roof, plunging toward a roof ten stories below and a hard, hard crunch.
Behind him, the barricaded door exploded into toothpicks, shooting the barrels in random directions. A squad of six peacekeepers shot out from the darkness, followed by a mage in purple robes.
Mike turned back around. Savashbahar’s track record for escaping without a scratch wasn’t exactly stellar. She’d probably risk two shattered ankles for a shot at crawling away from capture.
He saw the wood ten stories below, waving. Next to the dancing plank, a geyser was shooting out from the rooftop like a Christmas miracle.
Mike didn’t have to turn to feel the peacekeepers bearing down on them.
Aim for the wood.
He dived toward the geyser. Time seemed to crawl, giving him plenty of opportunity to feel his heart beat in his throat and think about the circumstances that led him to the point in his life that he was freefalling above a fairytale city in a little purple body.
His little purple body had little short legs with very short jumping power. He almost fell completely shy of the geyser. But his head came into contact and the rushing torrent of water slowed his fall by blasting his face. He landed on his back, safe and stinging.
As he lay sputtering next to the geyser, Ruki hit the stream on his butt and bounced out onto the roof. Runt came last, belly flopping onto the water. His mass plus gravity was a bit more than the geyser could keep buoyant and he landed with a dull thud as water spraye
d in all directions at everyone already on the roof. But it cushioned his fall, and he rolled off the shooting water unharmed.
On the roof of the Exquisite Promise, the peacekeepers looked down at them as if they were unsure how to proceed. The purple robe didn’t seem to have that problem; he turned and said something to one of the peacekeepers.
The peacekeeper jumped.
Runt pushed a nearby rain barrel into the geyser stream. Unable to lift the full barrel’s mass, the water stream sprayed everywhere but up.
The peacekeeper’s scream was cut off abruptly as his face hit the barrel. The impact put the peacekeeper out of the chase. But it also broke the barrel and now the stream was back to blasting upwards.
Everyone lent Runt a hand carrying the remaining three barrels. With the three of them over the geyser, the water flowing out looked like it was a harmless leak from the barrels, no shooting spray. Now there was no way the peacekeepers could follow.
The purple robe pointed to four of the peacekeepers. They backed up. A chain shot out from the mage’s sleeve and wrapped around the fifth peacekeeper. The mage hoisted him up into the air.
“Time to go!” Mike yelled.
As they beat a path toward the roof exit, Mike heard the telltale crash behind them. Another peacekeeper was out of commission, but now there would be four extremely motivated peacekeepers with a cleared landing pad in hot pursuit.
The stairs down ended abruptly on the sixth floor. Apparently, these people built with total disregard for fire safety. Runt, in the lead, burst through a door at the base of the stairs and the gang kept going.
People screamed and darted into rooms as the half-weagr barreled down hallways. The halls opened out into what looked like a factory. A giant steam-powered device occupied two floors. It looked like its only job was to press ink onto sheets of paper.
“Great,” Ruki said as he ran. “We busted into the Ardent Parse. Nothing keeps a lower profile than running through a news agency with peacekeepers in pursuit.”
“Just keep running,” Mike said. “Better to make headlines than the obituaries.”
Runt continued charging through the factory, plowing down anyone not fast enough to get out of his way. Ruki, bringing up the rear, kept knocking over anything within reaching distance as he passed. Amidst a symphony of screams, protests and an ever-present whine of press engine, they found the remaining stairs down.
The stairs led them to an alleyway. It was great to be on the ground again.
“Wait,” Savashbahar said. She was still invisible, so it looked like the wooden door they had come out of closed by itself.
“Bulwark,” she said and placed a hex on the door. The door turned from brown to gray and expanded in width until it was several times thicker. Now, instead of a door, it was an immovable stone block.
Ruki Provos looked at the general area of where she should have been. “Why didn’t you just do that when we were on the roof?!” he asked, pointing to the sky in exasperation.
“What suicidal trait drives you people to ask questions in the most dangerous places?” she asked in return.
Ruki gritted his teeth. “Right. Let’s get out of here so I can keep living to hate you. Follow me.”
Ruki took them through a mazeway of back alleys and side streets. Night darkened the city, and gas street lamps cut through the gloom and rising steam. All around them, the sounds of heavy footfalls on cobblestone reminded them that peacekeeper patrols could be around any blind corner.
After an hour of navigating alleys, peeking around corners and ducking from the roving eyes aboard the skyrail, they emerged onto a wide avenue. A bit on the beat-up side, the buildings on the street were nevertheless lit up with orange, yellow and red lights. Music and laughter emanated from any given building and the occasional drunk wandered down the street.
“This is your solution?” Savashbahar asked, a scowl visible on her face now that her hex had worn off. “You take us to flesh dens?”
Mike looked at a building laced in red lights before his own light bulb went off. This was the red light district.
“Worse places than this to make a last stand,” Runt said with a smirk.
“This is our ticket out, guys,” Ruki said. “Before my uncle let me handle some of the business, I had to prove myself. That meant an aspiring businessman had to make a few risky deals. I’m taking you all to the king of risky deals.”
Ruki led them all into a three story, orange-lit building named Fracas Catawampus. The orange lights continued inside, subdued to create a soft glow. Scantily clad human and aian girls danced or ran playfully from eager male pursuers. Smoke curled from censers to fill the air with a scent of musk and sandalwood. The only furniture was pillows, large and small, thrown about or gathered together to support the weight of couples making out on top of them. In some places there were more people than a couple.
Moving with purpose, Ruki waded through the smoke, prone bodies, and giggling women into another room full of gaming tables. He made his way to the back table, to a card game between two aians, a human and a megrym smoking a cigar.
“Any room at this table for a real player?” Ruki asked.
The megrym, more greenish and less purple than Mike, scrunched his face up and talked around the cigar. “Unless you’ve learned a new talent of shitting out real players, I don’t see where you’re going to get one. But you’re in luck, Provos. Who needs real players when we can fleece a greedy son of a bitch like you?”
Ruki held his hands up defensively. “I’m stung, Grandlevoss. Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”
Grandlevoss took a pull on his cigar. “No. I kiss your mother with this mouth.”
Ruki nodded. “Yeah, I’d rather kiss my mother too than that ancient lizard you call a mother. I imagine it’s like kissing a ball sack. But we don’t need me to imagine when you can tell us from experience, right?”
Grandlevoss slammed his cards on the table and got up, looking livid. He walked over to Ruki. Then out of nowhere both Grandlevoss and Ruki started cheesing big grins.
“Ay!” they said in unison and grabbed on another firmly at the forearm.
They talked about old times and caught up to new ones, asking a million questions about one thing or another, correcting each other on the false rumors they’d heard about the other. One rumor wasn’t too far from true.
“I heard you joined some rebellion and hatched a plot to blow up the Hierophane,” Grandlevoss said, half laughing about it.
Ruki laughed half-heartedly with him. In the quiet space after, Ruki spoke with a serious look in his eye. “I sort of need your help, Grand.”
Grandlevoss nodded. “Let’s go to my office.” Then the megrym shouted. “Hey, Delightful, come and finish my hand!”
From the front, an aian woman with kitty ears and a silk top that was virtually see-thru bounced over to the table. If nothing else, the competition was bound to be distracted.
Grandlevoss took them down some stairs. Mike was expecting a basement, but the stairs opened out into a cavernous underground chamber. Dozens of tank-trains like Ruki’s were lined around a station house. Six tunnels were cut into the walls, leading out to who knows where underneath the city.
Ruki moved with familiarity down the gangplank toward the station house as he spoke. “It’s probably best if you don’t know the details, Grand, but I really need to get a caravan out of town the discreet way.”
“So,” Grandlevoss said. “You need passage on one of my mules. Passage for three doesn’t come cheap, you know.”
“I know,” Ruki said. “Wait. There are four of us.” He looked around. Their most visible member had disappeared.
“I never saw but three of you guys,” Grandlevoss said and shrugged.
That’s when Runt entered from the back room. He trudged down the stairs, adjusting his belt.
“Where the hell were you?” Ruki asked.
“I’m half-weagr,” Runt said, his eyebrow raised. “Easy pu
zzle to piece.”
“Well, if we can’t afford the cost per ticket, I know who’s walking,” Ruki said.
“No worries,” Grandlevoss said, “I wouldn’t dream of charging my good friend Ruki Provos hard currency for this trip.”
“Really?” Ruki asked. “Well, that’s splendid! That’s incredibly generous of you.”
Ruki stopped and looked at the megrym. “On second thought, I’d rather pay the hard currency.”
Grandlevoss lit a cigar. “Anyone would rather pay. Unfortunately, you don’t have enough money in those short pockets to warrant me getting involved in your little tiff with the mages.”
The megrym blew smoke out, thick wafts that floated up into Ruki’s face, making him cough and sputter.
“What you have that warrants my involvement is your reputation, Provos,” Grandlevoss said. “You’re known for making deliveries at whatever cost. And I have something that needs delivering.”
Grandlevoss took another pull of his cigar, the smoke coming out of his nose and mouth like he was a little mini dragon as he spoke.
“There may be a little risk.”
Chapter 20
Invite
Melvin was coming to hate the travel part of this quest. Everything was too far from everything else. They had been traveling on these hava-chaises for hours after leaving Triptoe. So far they had passed grass and a stream and some more grass. There was also a pond where Melvin spent ten minutes convincing Jason not to shoot a deer because he wasn’t about to clean it. And after that, yet more grass.
Maybe the scenic countryside vistas would be more welcome if he had the city to go back to. He missed the suburbs, the concrete, street lamps with powerlines that fed lookalike houses with electricity. That was home.
Maybe he was just irritable because of last night. Before Rich melt-blasted Sentry Triptoe, the robot had worked Melvin over pretty decent. Then the townspeople had come out in droves and their relentless partying and plying him with liquor made for a slow morning start and a cloudy head. Hell, even his breasts were sore and heavy-feeling, probably from the rough night’s rest on that crappy bed.