For almost an entire day, I sit still and watch nothing happening. I’m bored senseless to the point of almost volunteering to help Almerean clean the mess I made when arriving in his archive. Almost, but not quite. In any event, the cranky hermit wouldn’t have let me anywhere near his precious records.
Yesterday, the Scourge broke the discussions early and retired to their assigned living quarters, where the two lords engaged in long sparing sessions with their bodyguards. Other than this, they didn’t seem interested in much except eating and drinking, running their verlan crazy all over the palace in search of various fares. As I was munching my processed travel ratios, I couldn’t help notice the profound injustice that unlike humans, the enemy was able to ingest Haillar delicacies without restraint.
Except when in the privacy of their quarters, all Scourge, be them warlords or servants, were permanently escorted by at least two Spirit guards. At least in this respect Faun, or most likely Cannora Sen’ Diessa, didn’t seem to take any risks.
The only break in the monotony of my watch is a call from Randig, informing me that the kreussa courier ship that brought the Scourge on Tao Bellona is expected to dock overnight and that I should be alert for any unusual activity. Randig and mine’s is a strange relationship, as on the one hand he owes me respect for being one of the queens, while on the other he’s the person in charge of this entire operation and needs to stay in control. In a way, it’s no different than being in a space battle and having to align my actions with those of the admiral nominally in charge of whatever Haillar fleet I’m attached to.
“Are you still there, alien girl?”
Apparently, my host decided to check my wellbeing, or maybe make sure I didn’t die of boredom.
“I am, and everything is fine, master archivist.”
“I very much doubt, but who am I to question the whim of the queens. Rumour on the corridors is that we should expect a complete communication blackout later today, required by Cannora to calibrate her eka survey. Apparently, that snotty woman hadn’t made as much progress as she expected in reading our dear guests. Make sure you contact your mistress while you still can, or else you are disturbing my peace for no gain whatsoever.”
I consider myself contacted and informed.
I feel it in my gut that this hunt is about to come to an end, for the arrival of the kreussa ship and the blackout were too much of a coincidence to be completely unrelated events.
CHAPTER 24 (PETER)
Against my expectations, the next twenty-four hours were far from boring.
We were gathered out of the way watching the spies coming and going on various tasks, their unimposing building a hub of activity masquerading as an off-world trade agency. The five people we initially met were just the tip of the iceberg, the central team supported by at least a dozen field operatives and contacts.
It was one of these contacts who set the entire network on fire almost one day later.
“Handsig from the Spaceport Watch notified us that the Rogue Falcon is finally about to land” announced Lazurien. “It took the kreussa three days to move from Bellona to Merdun, the Scourge’s transport must be the most sluggish courier ship in existence.”
“Did they give any reason for the delay?” asked her father.
“Nothing serious, only flimsy excuses.”
“Ask Handsig if he noticed anything unusual in their routine.”
The Haillar girl spent a few more minutes back and forth with the Watch agent, then raised her hand notifying the others she had come across something.
“The entire kreussa crew asked permission for shore leave. All twenty of them. Apparently, the Diessa guards saw nothing suspicious with this, and the permission was granted.”
The spymaster let loose a string of words we couldn’t understand, sounding suspiciously like a curse.
“Any chance the Falcon is rigged to blow itself and our spaceport together with it.”
“That was Handsig initial concern. He and his crew run every possible scan, and they are convinced there is no explosive device left on board. The lizards are leaving as we speak in groups of two or three.”
“It’s either the ship or the wayward crew. Ask Handsig to keep a permanent watch on the ship. Tell him to employ people reporting to him, not the usual Diessa guards. Meanwhile we need to take care of the lizards on leave.”
“We’ll need all agents for this. Handsig has put a tracer on each group, but all are moving in different directions. If they split further, we risk losing them.”
“Call everybody and assign a group to each of our agents. We’ll join as well, give me the most suspicious-looking two groups, and we’ll split them between the four of us.”
“What about me?” asked the teen.
“You’re the hub, our network Control. You’ll keep in touch with each us and with the Chaos Queen. Feel free to enrol the humans, if willing to help.”
Of course, we were willing to help, though not quite sure what our role could be other than keeping company to the Haillar girl in the hours to come.
✽✽✽
“Who’s that, one of your friends?”
Lazurien was momentarily confused, then followed Hank’s eyes to the portrait of the black-haired girl.
“I wish! That’s Queen Yallona Verdid Sen’Aesir, my suzerain.”
“Let me get this right”, chimed in Charles. “Your suzerain is a girl your age?”
Lazurien honoured the biologist with a scathing glare.
“You jest! Verdid is older than the Dominion, older than your Sen’Dorien queen. Though not by much,” she conceded after a moment of reflection.
So, the woman leading the entire Sen’Haillar spy network and ultimately responsible for us being here had the looks of a precocious preteen. It only made sense, since our esteemed warden was also a precocious teen. ‘Spymistress in training’, indeed.
“How about you?” continued the spy. “How did you end up in the Chaos Queen’s company?”
“We met her on Aldeea, stumbled across her to be fair, without entirely understanding the overall situation.”
Christine interrupted with a snort:
“Misreading entirely the situation, you meant saying.”
“That’s a fair description, too” admitted Hank genially.
“I wished I’d been there. I’ve heard the battle was epic, and the Sen’Dorien queen blasted three Scourge stations out of the sky. Nothing like this happens on Tao Bellona and even less on Merdun.”
Like any teen, the Haillar girl was at the age when adventure meant glamour, when all battles were undiluted glory, and victories had no costs. I couldn’t blame her. Liz and I were the same not so long ago, back in college. And then we went to Aldeea, and she died, and nothing was ever the same for me.
“The Chaos Queen,” asked Christine. “is she well-liked by your people?”
“Oh yes, she’s one of the funniest ones. When Sen’Haillar children play, all girls like to be the Queen of Chaos. The rogue, the maverick, the restless one. Ashar, Favriel of Frost, Turin of Fire, Oriel the Warrior. Few, if any, want to be Verdid. No glamour, no fun, always reserved, always acting from the shadow. We only come to appreciate the Lady of Dreams later in life, when we come to understand that the Shadows keep the Dominion alive as much as the other’s heroics.”
This sage introspection coming from an eighteen-year-old girl was interrupted by a flurry of chirps from Lazurien’s panels.
“That’s odd. Some kreussa returned to the Falcon. Only they have no tags and looks they aren’t part of the original crew.”
“What about the Watch?” I can’t refrain from asking, seeing that our ward was more than happy to share the excitement and keep us in the loop.
“They have the right passes, so there is nothing the Watch can do. Except of course notify us, since we are the fixers.”
“Excuse me?”
“The fixers. We are the one fixing things when all the others fail.”
&nb
sp; Modest much?
“So how do you plan to ‘fix’ this?”
“First of all, we need to see what they’re up to,” responded Lazurien merrily. “Nothing good, I bet, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure.”
Much to our surprise, what appeared to be an empty frame lit suddenly with a clear image of Falcon’s hold.
“I can’t believe it!” exclaimed Charles. “You’ve set up bugs into their cargo hold.”
“Not sure what insects have to do with our mission, but here we have some fascinating lizards engaged in highly suspicious activities.”
The kreussa were upright saurians with strong limbs corded with muscles. Even so, four of the reptiles barley managed to dislodge what appeared to be a chest, loading it with great effort on a levitating contraption.
“Oh no, you won’t get away with it!” mumbled the girl, nimbly keying a set of controls. “Here it is, Handsig tagged the treasure chest, and I have the code. We now can track our thieving friends no matter where they go.”
Calling the kreussa thieves was technically incorrect since the four burly lizards had boarded the ship lawfully. This didn’t seem to bother Lazurien, who proceeded to flip panes on her console while whistling happily.
“Whom to call back, I wonder? Dad is the nearest, but his charges are suspiciously close to Oriel’s staging grounds. Etora Sen’Dorien would be ideal to follow these brutes, but she’s on the other side of Merdun by now, on a merry chase by the looks of it.”
“How about informing the queen?” asked Christine.
“Verdid? You must be joking. What am I going to tell her? That we have trouble following a bunch of thugs who haven’t done anything illegal yet?”
“No, not the Spy Mistress, Ashar the Queen of Chaos.”
“She’s in no position to help unless we call her back from the Spirit Palace, something I would rather avoid. Opening the portal through the Sen’Diessa defences was tricky the first time around and, as the wards shift, I’m not sure how many times we can pull that trick.”
“What else? Are you going to trace it remotely?”
“It’s the only option. Unless … Are you guys on for a field trip?”
I could see Lazurien was burning to take the matter in her own hands, but I doubted going out was a good idea. She had a job to do, while we were supposed to keep a low profile. Both Elizabeth and the Sen’Aesir spymaster were clear about this and to be fair none of us felt comfortable playing spy together with a teenager. It was one thing to act as escort for Elizabeth, a risk-free endeavour where the worst possible outcome would have been to be kicked out of Merdun. It was quite a different matter to recklessly follow a bunch of dangerous-looking aliens through the maze that was the Spirit Quarter.
“It won’t work”, responded Christine. “Remember the sievrin monks are always travelling in a quartet, the very reason our help was required in the first place. Without Elizabeth, one of our pairs is one member short.”
Suddenly we took a step back as a fearsome creature occurred all of a sudden in front of us. It looked like a giant cockroach standing on two legs, apparently enraged judging by its menacing mandibles clicks and agitated movements of the upper two pairs of appendages.
“Shit!” cursed Charles in a rather un-academic way. “Where did this monster come from?”
Lazurien was nowhere to be seen, and the three of us were frantically looking around, searching for anything that can be used as a weapon.
“Elizabeth’s tokens!” shouted Christine, reminding me we weren’t entirely defenceless.
Before either of us had a chance to search for the disks, the creature disappeared and was replaced by a grinning Lazurien.
“Slow down, humans! Did you even listen when both dad and the queen warned you that the chaos disks are weapons of last resort? So, what do you do? The first time you panic, you threaten to destroy our headquarters, not to mention vaporise my dear self.”
“What was that thing?” asked the biologist.
“That thing was a sievrin insect. I would expect that before you decided to impersonate a few of their holy monks, you would have had the curiosity to check their looks. ‘That thing’ was also a masterful illusion, an excellent example of my advanced eka skills.”
“We didn’t know you are an illusionist.”
“I’m a Sen’Aesir adept. Of course, I’m an illusionist. Altering the perception of reality is the very definition of the Dream affinity,” concluded the girl on a very didactic tone.
“So, your plan is to transform yourself into the fourth member of our squad.”
“Not only that, but I can alter your appearance too, to make all of you look sievrin at a casual inspection. I don’t master their language though,” Lazurien admitted regretfully. “Very few people do, and even those don’t sound quite right to the native speakers. Apparently, we don’t have what it takes to produce some of their sounds. But in any event, you’ll be much better disguised than the first time you walked the Spirit Quarter’s streets.”
“What about your Controller job? Not to mention our clear instructions to stay out of the way.”
“The spy’s real weapon is the ability to improvise”, responded the girl, clearly quoting some training motto. “The reason for this entire operation, the reason you and the Chaos Queen are here, is that we all expect the Scourge to play dirty. They are bound to try something foul, but we don’t know where, how or when. And while my people are chasing shadows and your queen is watching the palace, some highly suspicious transport was picked from the Scourge’s ship to be delivered Flame knows where. This is the very thing we were waiting for, and I have to make sure we don’t miss it.”
She could be right, but she could be wrong as well. And even if she was right, chances where we would be marching into a dangerous scenario, a scenario we were completely unequipped to cope with.
“How can you be so sure?” I say. “You want to abandon your duty, dragging us into this adventure, on the one-off chance your intuition is right, and the Scourge made their move. What if you are wrong and the move is yet to come?”
“Think about it! Seven or eight different groups of kreussa left their ship and went sightseeing on Merdun, all of them going in places they didn’t have any business to be, all of them doing precisely nothing when arriving there. Meanwhile, while our agents are spread all over the moon, another bunch of reptiles picks an unidentified chest from a hidden compartment and as far as I can see has no intention to deliver it to the Palace, where its owners reside. What do you make out of this, human?”
“That you were right to tag the chest and follow it to its destination. That you should inform your father and let him decide whom to send …”
We were interrupted by a keening wail coming from one of the crystals at the other end of the room. Lazurien dropped the argument and moved to checked then cursed softly.
“I think whatever they plan to do is about to start. You were right, human, I should have messaged Randig and let him decide. Now it’s too late, for all communications outside the Spirit Quarters are jammed. We are on our own.”
“We still have Elizabeth in the Palace. She’s within reach, isn’t she?”
“We do, but would you ask the Chaos Queen to come and track a chest for us, when the Scourge are in that Tower and whatever they try they’ll try from there? No, my human friends, this is my job to do, and you are free to come with me or wait here.”
We had the choice of following a teenage Haillar in danger or staying safe and let her go on her own. We had no choice at all…
CHAPTER 25 (PETER)
We moved together as a squad of sievrin, tracking the lizards’ crew.
Specifically, Lazurien was the one doing the tracking by whatever arcane means, while we followed her dutifully making sure we were never more than a step away. The streets of the Spirit Quarter were not yet crowded but twisted left and right like the corridors of a gigantic maze.
“Whoever designed this city must have bee
n raving mad”, muttered Charles after the fourteenth U-turn. Or maybe the fifteenth. I tried to keep an account of our meanders in case we somehow got separated, but I lost count after the first ten minutes.
The Haillar illusionist chuckled:
“That would have been Faun Sen’Diessa herself. She apparently has an aversion for straight lines, considering them the sign of a predictable mind. You should see the Matter Quarters. Neat, orderly, all the streets cutting at right angles. I always wondered how the Sen’Diessa queens get along with each other. Two days ago, my two best friends and I went to this store selling the coolest bracelets in all Merdun … ”
Gods! We are in luck, a chatterbox adept! Something was afoot, the Spirit Quarter was jammed, we were heading into danger and she has nothing better to do than recount a shopping trip. I supposed teenage girls would be teenage girls no matter their species but travelling four thousand light-years to get an expose on fashion accessories was so weird it was borderline surreal.
A couple of turns and shopping adventures later, Lazurien stopped suddenly, and we nearly bumped into her in a very un-sievrin-like manner.
“I think they reached their destination. The tracker stopped moving, midway through the next alley.”
With the ability of someone who grew up on the streets of this old city, the young spy led us through a maze of passageways to the upper level of the buildings bordering the road. To our surprise, we came across an array of neat terraces, bathed in a soft light that couldn’t possibly come from the distant Bellona star.
“How on Earth is this possible?” asked Charles.
“Not exactly on Earth, aren’t we?” responded the teenager smugly. “What you see is a fine application of Light eka, a permanent construct channelling heat and sunlight between Tao Bellona and Merdun.”
Two terraces later, we descended a flight of stairs and found ourselves in front of a narrow door.
“Locked!” Lazurien informed us, promptly passing her hand over the deadbolt like a magician priming her show. She tried the knob again, to no avail. With a sigh that didn’t quite fit with her sievrin persona, the girl promptly produced a device that looked suspiciously like a lockpick and fumbled with the stubborn mechanism for a few more moments.
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