Banebringer

by Carol A Park

  Her performance, mimicking the crazy woman, was magnificent, and Vaughn found himself admiring her once again.

  When she leapt toward one of the priests, attempting to get her hands on one, they scattered. Citalli just stood and laughed, as if she found the whole scene terribly funny.

  The head priest whirled, panic on his face. “Stop them! Stop them!”

  Anyone left who might have been able to comply seemed confused by who the priest was referring to, and so no one moved to do anything.

  The head priest turned on Vaughn’s father, rage on his face. “You! Your son!”

  Vaughn’s father, who had already been backing down the dais, fled.

  Well, that was easy. Vaughn had anticipated that they would have to incapacitate his father.

  “The doors are locked, Holiness,” one of the other priests called.

  “All of them,” called another, from the other side of the room.

  Now a wave of terror swept the ballroom. A raving prophet was one thing, and a maniacal woman with a swarm of insects had already infected the room with fear, but no one liked being told they were locked in. Vaughn sensed the panic growing, and he saw Ivana slipping unnoticed toward the side of the room.

  “Your reign of deceit is over!” Vaughn declared, while Citalli continued to laugh and make insects fly all over the room.

  “I gave you a gift,” Citalli screamed. “My very own Banebringer, for your use! Yet you lost her!” She raised her hand slowly and pointed at the two priests Vaughn had overheard talking. “And you blaspheme my name, the name of Danathalt, your god!”

  With no guards left to order around, the priests finally did what Vaughn had hoped they would. Panicked, and with no other recourse, they had to stop Vaughn and Citalli themselves.

  They had no time for chanting or incense. Citalli was already spouting off too much knowledge.

  At the raised hand of one of the priests, fire leapt from the candles in one of the chandeliers and toward Vaughn, while another two priests hurled the ice sculpture toward Citalli, fashioning it into ice needles as it flew.

  Fortunately, they were prepared. The lance of fire dissolved into a wash of sparks as a gust of wind hit it, and the ice needles hit a wall of ice before reaching Citalli and shattered.

  Still, Vaughn’s heart skittered at the near miss. Trusting others to shield him, impromptu, from whatever the priests might throw out was terrifying. But he went on with the plan.

  “Hypocrites! Liars!” he shouted again. “You,” he said, pointing into the crowd. “You! Search them. Find evidence of their betrayal!”

  Out of the crowd, the familiar faces he had pointed to approached the dais. The priests huddled together, obviously frightened as a half dozen of Vaughn’s men and women forced them into a circle, searched them, and started divesting them of the bags of aether Vaughn knew they had to have hidden on them. One of them tossed a bag to Vaughn. He hurled the bag into the room, and the profane substance scattered across the marble floor. “Aether!” he proclaimed to the crowd, which had compressed back against the walls of the room, as far from the dais as possible, and then turned to the priests. “I defy you to try your magic now!”

  None of the priests tried. One spat. “We don’t need tests of faith to prove—”

  “Silence!” Vaughn roared. With a raise of his hand, the priest suddenly stopped speaking. The crowd also fell quiet, though whether that was due to Vaughn’s command or because he knew he had started glowing, he didn’t know. But the priest’s eyes bulged, and he clawed at his throat. “I ask you,” Vaughn said, pitching his voice loudly. “Who are the true demonspawn? Those who have no choice, or those who profane everything they preach to gain power through the blood of their enemies?” He gestured with his free hand to the aether on the floor. Those nearest to where it had fallen had backed away, eyeing it with fear, as though the aether itself would spawn monsters.

  The priest’s face was turning blue, and another priest who was nearby was frantically pressing on his throat, trying to figure out what the problem was. Vaughn finally let go, and the man fell to the ground, gasping.

  A handy trick. A terrifying trick. Vaughn still couldn’t believe he had been able to do this all along. The body is mostly water, indeed. Leave it to Ivana to come to a conclusion that should have been so obvious to them.

  It was a simple plan. All they needed was a public space to accuse the priests, accompanied by evidence the priests themselves supplied. Not everyone would believe, but everyone would talk, and the priests couldn’t control hundreds of people. They would have a terrible time handling this scandal. There would be questions, and an investigation—not least because the Anti-Sedationists would, of course, demand it. All without bloodshed.

  Now, Vaughn and his people just needed to slip out, disappear, lay low for a while and wait for politics to take its course, with help from Gan Barton and others—

  Someone in the crowd shrieked, and Vaughn whirled.

  Just in time to see Citalli collapse onto the floor, a knife in her back. The blood puddling on the floor started shimmering and turned to aether.

  Vaughn cursed. That wasn’t supposed to happen!

  The priest who had stabbed her backed away. He obviously hadn’t thought through the consequences of his actions, and his mouth worked silently as the inevitable tear started in the air above their heads.

  No! No, no, no!

  Perth, who stared at his fallen lover with horror, echoed Vaughn’s thoughts out loud.

  Now the room did panic. The guests stampeded to the doors, though they had just been told they were locked, and those closest started banging on them, demanding to be let out.

  Chaos ensued, and in the midst of it, a snarling bloodwolf leapt through the tear, laying into a guest before anyone could even do anything.

  And Vaughn had no weapons. Not yet. He spun to the circle of Banebringers. Some of them were supposed to have weapons. One of them—

  Someone tossed Vaughn his bow, already strung, and a quiver, and he sprang into action.

  There weren’t supposed to be any deaths. No one was supposed to get hurt.

  He fastened his quiver to his belt, drew his bow—

  And incredibly, one of the other priests jumped on his back, causing the arrow to go wild.

  Vaughn rolled to the ground with the priest, and came up fuming. “You idiot!” he shouted.

  “You’re no prophet, demonspawn!” the priest yelled, a wild fervor in his eyes. His declaration spurred the other priests to action.

  Vaughn’s eyes widened as—in the midst of a bloodbane attack—several of the priests took advantage of the fact that he was distracted going after the monster to attack him instead.

  Vaughn hadn’t counted on the fact that the priests could have religious fervor. He had simply thought them all corrupt frauds.

  But they believed—at least some of them, despite their hypocrisy—that the Banebringers were really the enemy. He loosed an arrow at one priest who had hurled himself in his direction, and hit him in the knee, while Thrax struggled with another, trying to fend him off Vaughn without hurting him. Their orders still stood. They couldn’t kill people, and they weren’t supposed to use their magic. The only Banebringer in that room any onlooker should have known about was Citalli—who was now dead.

  But Perth and the group he led started shouting from a corner of the room. The bloodwolf had finished the grisly task of tearing apart a few more people, and Perth and a handful of other guests had been backed into a corner by the bloodwolf. Perth’s eyes blazed, and he started hurling ice daggers at the monster. A fireblood with him followed suit, and soon, the ballroom was on fire, smoke gathering near the ceiling.

  Damn.

  The bloodwolf was dead, but the guests around them frothed with fear, and in their panic, attacked Perth and anyone else using magic. Another Banebringer fell, and another bloodbane was summoned—this time, one of the hideous creatures they had no name for.

  Th
e Banebringers on the outside had finally unlocked the doors—no one was going to keep people in here with that horror stalking around—but there were hundreds of people trying to squirm through the doors, trampling, falling—

  This was turning into a disaster.

  The real guards had finally made it back into the room.

  Vaughn gestured to his group of Banebringers, and they split. Thrax threw a few fireballs at a window low to the ballroom floor, creating a gaping hole in the bricks, and Perth’s group fled, guards on their heels. Vaughn sincerely hoped none of them were caught. Except maybe Perth.

  Another group pushed through the panicked people still left at the main doors, helped along by the guards swinging weapons in their wake.

  That left Vaughn, Danton, and Tharqan. They stood, Danton glowing, Tharqan holding a spinning whirlwind of debris above his hand.

  The remaining guards noticed them. Time for Plan B.

  They fled into the bowels of the palace.

  Chapter Forty

  Rescue

  “I still can’t get over the fact that we’re invisible,” Aleena whispered to Ivana as they crept along the empty halls. “Do you know how often this would have come in handy?”

  “Don’t get used to it,” Ivana said. She was glad to be reunited with Aleena, but she was also reminded of how much the woman liked to talk. “We’re not likely to keep a moonblood around for our aether-harvesting pleasure.”

  Aleena cast her a sly glance. “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “I didn’t think he was that bad.”

  Burning skies. What had Vaughn said to Aleena?

  “We could lock him up.” She grinned. “I bet he wouldn’t mind.”

  Ivana had interrogated Vaughn on his meetings with Aleena, and while he had hedged regarding the initial meeting, she had let it go. He had convinced her, somehow, and she knew it wasn’t by seducing her, so that was good enough for Ivana. Now she wished she would have pressed.

  Aleena had obviously taken even more of a liking to Vaughn in the process.

  “Do you talk, as a matter of course, while sneaking?” Ivana asked Aleena.

  “No, but usually I’m alone. This is a rare occurrence.”

  Ivana heaved a heavy sigh. “Hush,” she said. “I hear something ahead.”

  Aleena fell silent, attentive.

  It was shouting. Ivana pressed back against the wall, and Aleena did the same. She hoped fervently that the aether didn’t choose that moment to be finicky.

  A moment later, a few guards ran around the corner, passed by them in a gust of wind, and then disappeared.

  Nice of those above to draw so many of the guards away. They had passed more than one guard post left unattended. That was part of the point, of course, as far as their aid to Ivana went, but they were doing an exceptional job of it.

  “Nice dress, by the way,” Aleena whispered when the guards were gone.

  Ivana shot her a withering look. Aleena was supposed to have more practical clothes for her, but as of yet, they hadn’t found time to stop and change.

  So she was slinking about the hallways with hair as high as a tower in a hip-hugging dress.

  “Wish I looked so good,” Aleena continued, ignoring Ivana’s look.

  “It’s exploitation and exemplary of everything that’s wrong with our society,” Ivana snapped. “And women fall into the trap as much as the men who encourage it.”

  “You should have been a priest,” Aleena said.

  Ivana snorted, and Aleena smiled. They both understood the irony of that statement.

  “It’s just here,” Aleena said at last, turning a corner that ended in a door. “Is your friend here?”

  “No idea,” Ivana said. “I wouldn’t be able to see him, would I?”

  An older man materialized out of thin air. Yasril, another moonblood. He was going to keep the girls invisible while they escaped. “I’m here,” he said. “Are we ready?”

  Ivana let go of her own aether. “One hopes.”

  Yasril smiled. He was a genuinely nice person, one you couldn’t help but like. Had a bit of a tremor in one arm—no doubt from some injury long ago—but was fairly adept at sneaking around, all the same. He had made it down here without detection, anyway, though she supposed being invisible helped…

  Aleena pulled a key out of her pocket and unlocked the door. They slipped through, passed the whores’ rooms, and reached a secondary door. That led through a darker corridor, closer to the priests’ area of the complex, and where they kept Ivana’s girls as well as, Aleena said, other non-Banebringers.

  Aleena hadn’t known what they had done with them before Vaughn’s expedition, but they all knew now that there was some sort of experimenting going on.

  Ivana hoped they had at least left the children alone.

  Aleena unlocked another door, and they slipped through.

  Ivana drew up short. The children were there, but no women. She turned to her second. “Aleena?”

  “You sure you know where you’re going?” Tharqan said to Vaughn as they darted down the halls, guards hot on their heels.

  “Pretty sure,” Vaughn said. In fact, he recognized the area now. There was the last guard door—

  The door was unguarded, but locked. Tharqan blew it to bits—literally—with a forceful gust of wind.

  They continued down the halls, which weren’t empty. The noise of the door being destroyed had drawn some attention, and a few priests poked their heads out of rooms. They wore confusion on their faces, no doubt wondering why three men dressed for a party were running pell-mell down the halls. Apparently word of the tumult above hadn’t reached these depths yet.

  But when the guards appeared behind them, their faces changed to shock, and then fear. Vaughn led their small group into the first room he had entered. The beds, as before, were mostly full with unconscious victims. Vaughn kept running, all the way to the back, despite the shouts of the priests, and the guards skidded to a stop behind them.

  They looked around, astonished, their quarry forgotten at the sight in front of them.

  “What in the abyss…?” one of them muttered.

  “Kill them!” a priest shouted from behind. The guards whirled, expecting it to be a command to take out Vaughn and his friends. Instead, they found themselves under attack from panicked priests.

  Exactly as Plan B was supposed to go.

  Except Vaughn couldn’t let those guards die; they were now a critical part of the rumor mill that needed to be turning furiously by the day’s end.

  He shot an arrow through the heart of one of the priests, while Tharqan took out another. The remaining priests fled.

  Vaughn looked down at the dead priest, bile rising in his throat. The second man he had ever killed.

  He swallowed and looked up at the guards, who were still stunned by the change of events.

  “Not what you expected?” Vaughn said.

  “Don’t talk, demonspawn,” one of them snarled, but the others didn’t look so sure.

  “We should go,” one whispered, tugging at his shirt.

  “He’s right,” another said. “I don’t want to be caught down here, accused of killing priests. Let’s leave the demonspawn to them.”

  They fled, though one glanced back at the horror hanging on the wall behind them, and took in the beds again as they left.

  He couldn’t guarantee the guards would talk—they might be too frightened. But with the rest of the city talking, they might step forward if it became convenient. Say, if a certain political party paid them.

  Danton and Tharqan were staring at the corpse-thing. “That thing is creepy,” Danton said, shivering.

  “Tell me about it,” Vaughn said. His pocket started glowing.

  He looked out into the main room again. No one was in sight. He shoved the door partially closed and pulled the qixli out, activating it. “What?” They couldn’t stay here long; they had to leave before reinforcements showed up—more guar
ds or worse, battle priests.

  It was Ivana. Yaotel had let her make her own qixli for this occasion. It was the only way she could get one to work. “The girls aren’t here, Vaughn.”

  He focused on the molded face pressed into the silvery substance. “What? Isn’t Aleena with you?”

  “Yes,” the tinny voice said. “I’m in the right place. The children are here. But no girls.” Vaughn opened the door to the room and peered back out, looking at some of the beds. They were mostly women, and he recognized one of them.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I think they’re here. I recognize, uh, you know, that one, that I, uh…” He didn’t even remember her name. He really was that bad, wasn’t he?

  “Ohtli?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Where is here?”

  “In the labs—I don’t know what they call them. But they’re unconscious.”

  Ivana cursed several times and then held an indecipherable conversation with someone else on her end.

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Ivana said. “Can you stay put?”

  He glanced at Danton and Tharqan, who were nervously peering out the main door to the lab. “I shouldn’t,” he said. “But I will.”

  “All right. Try to see if you can wake them, meanwhile.”

  The face disappeared.

  Vaughn left the room with the creepy corpse-thing, shutting the door firmly behind him. “Here’s the deal,” he said, and explained what was going on.

  Tharqan fidgeted. “Vaughn, if we don’t leave now…”

  “I can’t leave her girls here. She helped us because of this.”

  “I’ll stay,” Danton said quietly.

  Tharqan rolled his eyes. “Fine.”

  “Help me figure out if there’s a way to wake these women up. They’ll be hard to get out of here otherwise.”

  Danton kept watch at the door while Tharqan and Vaughn moved about the room, examining the women lying on the beds. He didn’t know what was causing their unconsciousness, but they all had needles stuck in their arms connected to bags of fluid, so he pulled the needles out, hoping it would help.