Agents of the Crown- The Complete Series

by Lindsay Buroker

  Oh, he didn’t catch so much as a glimpse of them as the inquisitor and her monk assistant led him along the waterfront, around a corner, and onto one of the boulevards that headed toward the ridge where the Temple of the Blue Dragon stood. But he knew his comrades as well as the men in his company. They wouldn’t amble into a bar for a beer while he was in trouble.

  Jev did not yet know if he was in trouble—since he hadn’t stolen anything, he shouldn’t be—but they didn’t know that.

  He stole a few glances at his escort. Even though he planned to accompany them peaceably, he couldn’t help but size them up as potential enemies. He had gotten in the habit of assessing the threat level of everyone he encountered, and he couldn’t dismiss these two because they were women. The sea-blue gi that the monk wore meant she had completed at least six years of intense training and was a full-fledged member of the Order’s elite fighting unit. And the inquisitor—neither she nor the monk had offered their names—would carry a weapon or two under that robe. A firearm, most likely. Inquisitors didn’t typically receive a great deal of combat training, but the ones he’d known had always gone to the ranges to practice shooting.

  “What’s your name, Inquisitor?” Jev asked, alternating between watching the street and pedestrian traffic and her. The streets were largely as he’d remembered, especially in this older part of the city, but he spotted steam wagons and carriages with frames and engines that hadn’t existed the last time he’d walked the city. They were almost as numerous as the horse-drawn conveyances clattering along the cobblestones. “You know mine, and if we’re to spend time together with you pulling off my fingernails, it would be nice to know yours.”

  She gave him a flat, unfriendly look. It seemed to be her typical facial expression. Normally, he would have considered her attractive—of course, it had been so long since he’d experienced feminine company that he was starting to consider boulders attractive—but her frosty eyes would have kept him at arm’s length even if she hadn’t been arresting him.

  “Zenia Cham,” she said, her chin lifting. It did that a lot.

  She watched him. Expectantly? She seemed to be waiting for a reaction. It wasn’t a noble name—he knew all the zyndar surnames in the kingdom—and he didn’t recognize it. But it wasn’t as if he’d seen an issue of the Korvann Chronicle recently.

  “And your sarcastic friend?” Jev waved toward the monk, who kept glancing behind them, watching the rooftops as well as the streets.

  “Her name is hers to share if she wishes,” Zenia said.

  “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me more about this artifact I supposedly stole when I was… I guess I was twenty-three the last time I was here.”

  It seemed an eternity ago. Back when his father had ordered him to go off and fight for the king, as it was the family’s duty to supply a son for the war effort, Jev hadn’t guessed he would be gone for more than a year or two. So much of his life lost for something he’d never believed in. The cost for the kingdom had been ridiculous. And the cost for him? He’d lost countless friends over the years, but, as much as he hated to admit it, it was Naysha’s loss that still stung most.

  She had been attractive without being frosty. And far superior to a boulder.

  “Archmage Sazshen will tell you more. I’ve only been ordered to retrieve it. Your fingernails need not be in danger if you’ll tell me its location.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Jev had been captured and tortured four years earlier, after being appointed the leader of Gryphon Company. It had been by a human scout from another kingdom, one happy to fawn at those elves’ feet. The man had enjoyed cutting on him, on his own kind. Whatever it took to please his pointy-eared employer. A cold snake of an elf who’d watched the whole thing with his face utterly impassive. Jev had been lucky to escape and survive the ordeal. Even though the elf had healed him at the end of each session, so he would last longer, Jev still had a lot of scars. Sometimes, he wondered if Naysha would even recognize him, should their paths cross again one day.

  “Would you do it yourself?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “My fingernail removal.” Jev wouldn’t normally think a woman would have a stomach for torturing a man—physically, anyway, as they seemed to prefer emotional torment if they had a vindictive streak—but this Zenia had those frosty edges. She might like it. He definitely sensed that she was one of those people who held some bitterness toward the nobility, though she’d risen to a respected rank in society, so he didn’t know why.

  “I have no need to employ such crude methods.” Zenia sounded offended. “You will answer my questions and tell me what you know.”

  He grimaced, remembering the magical compulsion she’d laid on him earlier. Even now, she might be using a tendril of power on him to keep him toddling along like an obedient retriever.

  “Well, that won’t take long. I don’t know much.”

  “Clearly, the rumors that zyndar children receive an excellent education from private tutors are false.”

  “Clearly.” Jev decided it wasn’t worth getting upset over insults. After all he’d endured, they were a petty annoyance at most. Maybe if he didn’t respond in kind, she would thaw a few degrees. He had never been questioned by an inquisitor and didn’t know how much of their interrogation magic was rumor and how much was truth, but he hated having any of the dark arts plied on him. “We mostly just got lessons on how to be appropriately haughty in the presence of commoners.”

  She gave him another frosty look. So much for a thaw.

  They turned down a narrow street framed by millennia-old whitewashed stone buildings.

  “Look out,” the monk barked.

  She lunged forward, grabbed Zenia’s arm, and pulled her to one side of the street. But not quickly enough. Few humans could match the speed of a full-blooded elf.

  “No,” Jev barked, trying to step forward and stop Lornysh before he hurt either of the women—where had he come from? A rooftop?—but the end of a bo slammed into his chest before he reached the fight.

  The monk.

  Jev stumbled back. His chainmail blunted the attack, but he would still have a bruise tomorrow. The monk reared back to thrust the weapon again—trying to drive him away from Zenia so she could jump in to help against Lornysh.

  Jev whipped his forearm across in time to block the second blow. His instincts cried out for him to follow the block with an attack, to leap in before she could bring the bo to bear again, but he made himself lift his arms, a gesture of surrender. He didn’t want to fight an inquisitor of one of the Orders, damn it. Even his title wouldn’t protect him from retribution if he hurt one of them.

  A sickening crunch sounded as the monk whirled from Jev and sprang toward her comrade’s side. Once again, she was a hair too late. Lornysh slammed the inquisitor against the wall with strength one expected from dwarves—and steam hammers—instead of slender-armed elves. The woman’s head struck stone, and she crumpled to the cobblestones.

  “Stop, Lorn,” Jev ordered, waving to get his attention. He also issued the order in the elven language, in case it would more likely get through to him.

  Neither worked. The monk roared and sprang at Lornysh, and he defended himself with that deadly agility his kind were known for. He hadn’t drawn a weapon. He didn’t need to. With arms and legs that blurred with the speed of his movements, he knocked the bo out of the hands of the monk, then gripped her arm and slammed her into the wall, the same as he had Zenia. Bone crunched audibly, and she cried out.

  When Lornysh drew back a fist to rain more blows down upon them, Jev jumped in and grabbed his arm. Lornysh’s gaze jerked toward him, his pale eyes wild instead of their usual icy calm, as if he were living in some other moment, in some past battle.

  Lornysh tried to jerk away, and Jev felt his strength, but Jev had strength of his own. He gripped that arm, using his wide stance for leverage, and didn’t let go, afraid Lornysh might continue if he did. For a moment, Jev thoug
ht Lornysh might turn on him—might not see him as a friend in whatever past hell he was reliving—but those eyes slowly calmed, awareness returning to them.

  Jev, who rarely dared touch Lornysh outside of sparring practice, released him and stepped back. He looked down at the women, both of them crumpled on the street against the wall, neither moving.

  “Founders,” he whispered with distress and rubbed the back of his neck. What now?

  “This might be why your people lost the war,” Cutter drawled, walking in from whatever doorway he’d been hiding in farther up the street, waiting to spring the second half of the ambush. Unnecessarily. He waved dismissively at the two women, at how easily they had fallen to Lornysh.

  Jev knelt beside the women to make sure they were still breathing. They were, but both were unconscious, and an alarming amount of blood streamed from Zenia’s temple.

  “By the founders, Lorn,” Jev said, “these are officers from the Water Order. Law enforcers, if religious law instead of city law. There’s not much of a difference around here. You can’t just knock them out. There’ll be repercussions.”

  “Your laws mean nothing to me.”

  Jev rose to his feet, glowering at the blood on his hand. “While you’re walking in our lands, they had better mean something. You can’t take on the whole kingdom army or Korvann police force.”

  “That one intended to imprison you.” Lornysh pointed to Zenia.

  “To question me about… something. Whatever it is, it’s nothing I had anything to do with, so I would have been released.”

  “That’s not what she believed,” Lornysh said with so much certainty that Jev suspected he had a magical way of knowing. “She believed you were guilty—she’d already made up her mind—and that she could wheedle some artifact’s location from you. And that you would spend the rest of your days moldering in their temple dungeon.”

  Jev wanted to say that what she believed didn’t matter because it wasn’t the truth, but he paused. As an Order inquisitor, she had the power to act as judge over him, to proclaim him guilty. Her mind magic should have allowed her to see the truth in his thoughts, especially if he cooperated, but… hadn’t he sensed that she had something against him from the start? Maybe her beliefs wouldn’t have allowed her to see the truth.

  “Better to be free,” Cutter said. “Leave them here, and you can go investigate on your own. Find out what’s going on, why you’re being blamed.”

  “Yes,” Lornysh said. “Find evidence to show that you are innocent. Or better yet, find their missing artifact, and return it to them if that is wise.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to do that if you were stuck in a dungeon, Jev, and we wouldn’t know where to start looking. This is your land. I’d be lucky if I could find my beard with my own hands here.”

  Jev rubbed the back of his neck again. It bolstered him that his comrades assumed he was innocent without truly having a way to know, but he wasn’t sure this was a wise course of action. Still, they were right that he wouldn’t be able to figure out what was going on if he ended up incarcerated in the bowels of a temple. He grimaced at the idea of being stuck there until his father heard and came to bail him out. Assuming the mages would even allow that. Would they? His father had power, but the sway of the zyndar wasn’t what it once had been. Even in his youth, that had been true. And who knew how much had changed back here in the last ten years?

  “Also,” Lornysh said, “you should take us somewhere where we can bathe. Especially Cutter.”

  “You don’t smell any better than I do, elf,” Cutter said.

  “I bathe in the ocean when I get a chance. I’m positive I’m less aromatic than you.”

  “You just smell like seaweed and fish piss instead of good wholesome dirt.”

  “Dirt is not what you smell like.”

  Cutter growled.

  Though he was more concerned about the injured women at their feet than anyone’s cleanliness, Jev bestirred himself to ask, “Will we find it easier to prove my innocence if we’re clean?”

  “Undoubtedly,” Lornysh said, sounding like he meant it.

  “All right,” Jev said, “but we’re not leaving a monk or inquisitor bleeding in an alley. Help me carry them to the hospital.”

  He gathered the inquisitor in his arms, leaving the stockier and more muscled monk to Lornysh. He deserved the heavier load. Cutter picked up the monk’s fallen bo.

  “This isn’t how I imagined my first encounter in years with a woman going,” Jev said, worried by the blood on the side of Zenia’s face.

  He thought about taking the women to the hospital run by the Water Order but foresaw all manner of problems if he showed up there when he was a wanted man. Especially with an unconscious inquisitor in his arms.

  Jev set a brisk pace toward a kingdom-run hospital he knew of that was only a half mile away.

  “Years?” Cutter asked, walking beside him, keeping up even with his shorter legs. “There were camp followers. And those human gypsy women who risk elven ire by strolling around and exploring their continent.”

  “Zyndar officers aren’t supposed to sleep with camp followers and random gypsies.”

  “Oh? Did anyone tell Captain Thash that? Or Lieutenant Herringbone? Or Captain—”

  “They weren’t heading Gryphon Company and in charge of gathering intelligence.” Jev glanced back to make sure Lornysh was following with the monk. He was. Good. “They wouldn’t have spewed crucial information to the enemy if they’d been drugged by some spy masquerading as a camp follower.”

  “In other words, you’re horny and would already be looking for a woman if we hadn’t been detained.”

  Jev felt his expression growing wistful, though not for the reasons Cutter suggested. The only woman he’d thought he would sleep with for the rest of his life had married someone else.

  The narrow street opened up into a wide boulevard, and the hospital came into sight, and Jev’s shoulders loosened in relief. He just hoped the Water Order hadn’t also told the city watch that he was to be arrested.

  “Elf!”

  Jev tensed anew at the cry from across the street. He had expected it, but he’d vainly hoped they might drop off the women and escape the city before someone noticed Lornysh. Unfortunately, the bright afternoon sun didn’t leave many shadows for Lornysh—or his ears—to hide in.

  More cries arose as men and women pointed fingers in their direction. Jev glanced at Lornysh, but as usual, his face gave away little. He strode at Jev’s side toward the hospital.

  “Get the watch!” someone cried. “Hurry!”

  “Doesn’t look like they’re inclined to like you, Lorn,” Cutter remarked.

  “Dwarf!” someone else yelled, the alarmed cry holding the same fervor as the previous ones.

  “Huh?” Cutter asked. “They can’t object to my people, can they? We cut their gems.”

  Jev strode along the sidewalk opposite the yelling people, his focus on the hospital. If he could just make it inside…

  “Perhaps they agree that you smell worse than dirt,” Lornysh said.

  A crowd grew on the far sidewalk, people peering at them between the vendors’ wagons lining the street. Others trailed behind Jev’s little group, pointing and whispering. Weapons weren’t typical in the capital, since only zyndar, mages, watchmen, and soldiers were legally allowed to carry them within the city limits, and Jev suspected that was the only reason nobody had come forward to oppose them. His team was armed. Well-armed.

  A boy of ten or twelve sprinted down an alley, yelling for the watch.

  As Jev and Lornysh strode up the steps to the hospital, the doors opened, and a pair of nurses in white robes stepped out. The man and woman peered toward the increasingly loud commotion in the street. Someone grabbed an eggplant from a produce vendor and hurled it toward Lornysh.

  “It’s supposed to be tomatoes,” Jev said as Lornysh ducked, the purple produce sailing over his head.

  It thudded against an
other vendor’s wagon. The noise drew out the owner, who immediately started cursing at the crowd. Then he spotted the young man grabbing produce to hurl and turned his curses on him.

  “What?” Cutter asked.

  “In the children’s tales, it’s always rotten tomatoes that get thrown. Occasionally, an overly lumpy potato sprouting eyes.”

  “Charming,” Lornysh said.

  “We have patients for you,” Jev told the nurses, yelling over the crowd. He debated whether identifying himself would help, but he doubted the angry bystanders would quiet down enough for the nurses to hear him.

  “Servants of the Water Order go to their own hospital,” the male nurse said, though he came forward, frowning when Zenia groaned in Jev’s arms. “If they’re to be treated here, the director will demand payment up front.”

  “How much?” Jev pushed past them, not wanting to loiter on the landing when more vegetables were being hurled—despite the protesting vendor who was smacking the hands of anyone who grabbed something from his wagon without paying.

  “Someone in a uniform is running this way,” Cutter said.

  Jev stepped into the cool, dark hallway and tilted his head for the others to follow him. He also looked for somewhere to set down the women, preferably before they woke up and attempted to arrest him again. Could he simply lay them on the marble floor tiles? He didn’t see any stretchers.

  “Twenty-five krons each for an initial appraisal,” the man said, waving toward a lockbox on a stand where such deposits were made. “The final cost will be assessed after treatment. Or it’s possible doctors from the Water Order hospital will be brought over to treat them.”

  “I’ll cover it.” Jev thought about telling them to send the bill to his father, but he had been receiving pay as an officer in the king’s army, and it had been ages since he’d been anywhere he could spend it.

  “Good, sir. Uh—” The male nurse’s eyes caught on the wolf-head clasp. “Zyndar?”

  “Dharrow, yes. Where shall I put her?”

  Lornysh was already laying the monk on the floor as Cutter shut the doors behind them and dropped a thick wooden bar into place. A thump sounded a second later, followed by many more thumps. The female nurse stared at the door in concern. The stout olive wood ought to hold back the crowd, but Jev hoped for a back exit.