Loch stumbled backward, clutching at her eyes, as the real Jyelle stood up from where she had lain inside the fountain.
"It's expensive as hell to have your own pet illusionist," she said conversationally as Loch shook her head frantically, "but in my line of work, it's worth it." Like her illusory double, she had a quarterstaff. "Really kills the night vision if it sneaks up like that, doesn't it?" She lashed out and knocked the blade from Loch's hand. Loch groped for it, and Jyelle swept her legs out with another strike, sending Loch to the ground.
"You can't... my friends..." Loch rolled away as Jyelle brought the staff down where she had lain, then rolled back, clutching desperately at the staff. She got hold of it and used her leverage to wrench it from Jyelle's grasp.
Stumbling to her feet, Loch swung wildly, and Jyelle coolly stepped aside, kicked Loch in the ankle, and drove a fist into her gut.
"You probably can't hear it right now," Jyelle said, "but your friends are being ambushed as we speak." Loch stumbled back, still blinking, and Jyelle paused to retrieve Loch's sword. "You should feel honored, Captain. I'm spending a lot of money tonight. But nothing is too good for old friends like you."
She stabbed at Loch's knee, and Loch barely sidestepped it. Jyelle's follow-up slash just missed Loch's face and sent her red hat flying. "After all," Jyelle went on, "how else could I pay back the woman who made me what I am?"
"I didn't make you a murderer and a coward, Jyelle." Loch put her staff through a defensive spin. "Fight the enemy, not their people. It's the first thing we learn."
"Trying to catch me by the sound of my voice, Captain? Maybe keep me talking while your eyes recover?" Jyelle chuckled. "I've learned a few lessons of my own." She stepped in and slashed, and Loch stumbled back, tripping over the edge of the fountain and falling heavily inside.
"Loch, honey, I don't know if you can see me yet, but I'm putting on your hat." Jyelle cocked it at just the right angle as Loch pulled herself upright, using the rough edges of the rusted metal pipe in the center of the fountain for support. "You told everyone to look at you, and I want everyone to see me tomorrow, wearing that very same hat, carrying the very same sword, so that everyone knows exactly what happened."
From behind her, at the edge of the square, came the sound of crashing crates and ripping wood.
Loch hopped up onto the metal pipe that had once fed water into the fountain, one foot on either rusted edge. "Jyelle, honey," she said quietly, "that was more or less the plan."
And she stared right at Jyelle, her vision clean and unwavering, and smiled.
"Prisoner Loch!" came a shout from behind Jyelle.
As Jyelle gasped, Loch jumped lightly into the air, brought her feet and arms together, and dropped down into the pipe, vanishing into the darkness.
"Blinding flashes of light are covered in the first week of the illusion curriculum," came Hessler's voice, just loud enough for Loch and Jyelle to hear it. "Now, creating shields of darkness to protect someone's eyes, that you don't get until the advanced classes." Down in the darkness of the pipes, Loch shook her head as Jyelle swung her blade wildly. "Don't embarrass yourself. This is an illusion. I'm actually smirking at you from the roof."
"Prisoner Loch! Surrender yourself now!"
Jyelle could probably have explained herself to the guards, Loch mused. Despite the hat, despite the sword, if she'd had time to talk, she could have explained everything.
Which was why it was probably for the best that Hessler chose that moment to project an excellent impersonation of Jyelle's voice shouting, "I'm not going back, you Republic bastards! You'll never take me alive!"
It took took a lot of work from the guards Pyvic had pressed into service for the night's raid, but Prisoner Loch was, in fact, taken alive in the end.
She kept yelling even after she lost her sword, but one of the town guards, an Urujar fellow, showed some initiative and gagged her. Even after that, Pyvic had to knock her out cold to get the shackles on. She was going to be sore and unhappy when she woke up on Heaven's Spire.
"Report," he ordered as he came out of the alley to meet the rest of the town guards.
"We tried the trick with the flour and found a couple invisible people, but they ran before we could bring them down," said the Urujar guard. "We did catch the Imperial and one of the women. Haven't said anything, though. Shall we question them?"
"No." Pyvic gestured at the three local guards who held the two prisoners in their shackles. "You're still attached to me. We'll bring them all back up to the Spire and make them someone else's problem."
"Captain doesn't wish to give up custody, Justicar," said one of the other guards, a lean fellow with a warhammer. "Doesn't want it said he let them out of his sight if they get away."
"You can personally hand them over to the Archvoyant," Pyvic promised. "I don't care whose name the puppets shout in the news, as long as they're in custody. Come on. Think of it as a holiday." He grinned. "How many of you have ever gotten to see Heaven's Spire close up?"
It was late, and Pyvic was tired and giddy from finally catching one of the escapees, which was likely why the voice of the guard with the warhammer seemed slightly wrong—a bit high, almost musical, for the aura of professional combat power it definitely exuded. That was probably also why he kept catching flickers at the edge of his vision, tiny flashes of movement that revealed themselves to be shadows dancing in the torchlight when he turned to look.
It probably even accounted for the dove Pyvic would have sworn was following them as they marched through the city. Or the sense that the prisoners (the two conscious ones, anyway), despite their downtrodden stares and helpless eyes, somehow seemed just a bit too smug, considering the circumstances.
He would kick himself about that later.
Eight
The airship that carried them up to the Spire was a small passenger model, not one of the massive cargo lifters onto which Loch and Kail had smuggled themselves last time. Instead of huddled in a crate, Loch stood serenely on the deck, watching the pre-dawn world recede below. Invisible, of course, and under strict orders to move slowly if she had to move at all.
The ship's crew was... wrong. Loch couldn't place it, but they all moved with downcast eyes and didn't speak as they went about their tasks. She suspected that they were Silestin's personal men, along to ensure a smooth ride.
Loch hadn't seen many airships, except for the battleships during the war, and her experience then had mostly involved looking at the flag, diving for cover, and hoping that the ship had exhausted its magical flamecannons and could only drop grapeshot on them as it flew overhead. The passenger carrier had no guns that Loch could see.
It wasn't shaped like a real ship. Overhead, an enormous elliptical balloon contained a trapped wind-daemon. The deck was a big wooden oval with railings all around and a single control station with levers and multicolored crystals. There were a few chairs, but most people simply clung to handrails. There was complicated-looking rigging knotted all over the place.
Off to either side of the main ship's body, six great sailwings were tucked in close at the moment, ready to be extended to make a tight turn. Below the deck, instead of crew quarters and cargo holds, there was only a great ridge of wood hanging down to stabilize the deck.
Tern and Icy were seated, as their shackles made it hard for them to hold the handrails. They were being diligently guarded by Dairy, Kail, and Desidora, the last of whom wasn't even wearing a guard's uniform. No one had given the aura-manipulating death priestess a second glance, despite her alabaster skin or her pitch-black robes.
Ululenia was a dove perched on the rigging. Hessler could be anywhere, but he was definitely near enough to keep watch on Loch. He'd gone on at length about how difficult it was to keep someone else invisible when they were moving around.
She'd gotten all of them together, and all nine of them were on their way up to the Spire. And the woman who'd blown her cover last time was shackled and gagged in the seat ne
xt to Tern and Icy.
"I had no idea how dangerous these things were," Hessler's voice hissed in her ear.
Loch smiled and stared out over the edge some more. With his little whisper trick, the illusionist could make his voice appear right inside Loch's ear.
"Do you have any idea how much energy this ship has devoted to warding the wind-daemon inside that balloon? And how much more is devoted to making sure the balloon doesn't tear open on a passing tree branch?"
Loch sighed quietly.
"Ancients be damned, this thing is a deathtrap. I don't understand how they can—careful, careful, when you fidget like that, it's hard to keep the invisibility field on you. If you could hold still, that would be perfect."
He kept talking. Loch stopped listening. Overhead, the tiny sliver of sky not filled by the balloon began to be filled with the underside of Heaven's Spire. The violet lapiscaela had already begun to glow as the sunrise hit them high overhead.
Just a few minutes more, Loch thought, and they'd be there. Everything was going perfectly.
"Not long now!" Archvoyant Silestin declared to the crowd at the airdock as the passenger ship approached. "You can run, and you can hide, but eventually the law catches up with you!"
The open-air dock was connected to an enormous hangar where the ships were stowed, their wind-daemons banished when not in use. It was a cold, bright morning. Silestin wore his military uniform. The crowd included several other Voyants, a few news writers, and a number of general hangers-on.
Beside him, Warden Orris made as though to say something, but Silestin quieted him with a casual gesture.
"What do you plan to say to them, Archvoyant?" one of the writers asked.
Silestin chuckled. "I thought I'd just tell them, 'Nice try.'" The crowd laughed.
"Odd," said Ambassador Bi'ul, staring down at the ship. "What's that, Ambassador?" Silestin asked, glancing at the crowd of onlookers and giving an amused shrug.
The ambassador kept looking at the approaching ship. "As I examined the supple threads that knit your world into the fabric in which your souls exist, I sensed an... unusual... pattern. Something very old, but unfamiliar to me, though—"
"Loch's got a death priestess," Orris chimed in. "I bet that's it.
"I'm sure," Silestin said firmly, "that it's nothing our boys on the ship can't handle."
Just a little longer, Pyvic thought, and it would be over. Everything was going perfectly, except for the nagging feeling in his gut whenever he looked at the crew.
He'd taken the trip up to the Spire dozens of times, and something with the crew wasn't right. He'd worked a case once involving a crazed alchemist. When he finally caught the bastard, Pyvic had had the feeling that the man wasn't really there—that when he stared at the man, there was something he wasn't seeing, something pulling the strings. The alchemist had died rather than surrender, and Pyvic never worked up the energy to regret it.
The airship crew, to a man, reminded him of that alchemist.
He watched the Spire draw closer. They were almost directly under the great disc of glowing violet that formed the underbelly of the city. Pyvic didn't know why the helmsmen always took them up that way—he'd heard the ship had to come up inside the magical field that protected the city from storms, but a magical field with a great big hole in the bottom didn't make much sense.
And then one of the guards, the young one who hadn't talked much, cleared his throat nervously and asked, "Are we going to hit the glowing things on the city?"
Pyvic would've sworn he saw one of the other guards drop his head and sigh, would have sworn that he heard another sigh coming from off to his left, though there was no one over there.
"Of course not," one of the crewmen said in a low rusty voice with a coiled snarl lurking at the edges.
The other crewmen stopped what they were doing and turned to the guards in unison. "A trooper from Ros-Oanki would know that," another one added.
The first crewman poked the young guard hard in the chest. "Who are you?"
Pyvic looked at the other two guards, blinking as he saw them by daylight. The Urujar's armor didn't fit right, and the... the third one was somehow hard to focus on, but it was almost like he wasn't even wearing armor... and that warhammer certainly wasn't standard issue.
"Hell, how could you not know who I am?" the Urujar guard demanded indignantly. "Your mother was shouting my name all night long!" Then he cold-cocked the man with a right cross to the jaw. "Loch! Plan B!"
The nineteen crewmen had their swords out before the twentieth had hit the deck, and they drew with the same motion and snarled with the same voice. The helmsman was trying very hard to ignore everyone, the guards themselves were leaping into motion, and the prisoners...
The Imperial slid out of his shackles and leaped into the rigging as blades crashed down on the chair where he'd been sitting. Pyvic shouted, "Wait, we need them alive!" while drawing his blade, and then the mousy woman in the brown dress with all the pockets lifted her shackled arms, smiled at Pyvic, and touched one of the metal studs on the shackle chains.
A dart hissed against Pyvic's neck, and he had time to swear before the world went dark.
"Something is happening," Bi'ul said, his dry voice cutting through the murmurs of the crowd.
"I don't see how you could tell," Orris huffed. "All we can see is the balloon."
"Do you make a habit out of proclaiming things in ignorance?" Bi'ul asked. He sounded genuinely curious. "Is misplaced confidence sufficient to advance an otherwise unskilled mortal into a position of comfort, or is it simply a behavioral flaw on your part?"
"I'm sure everything is fine," Orris declared. "You may not know Archvoyant Silestin like I do, but he runs a pretty tight ship!"
"Be quiet, Orris," Silestin said, glancing at the crowd. The other Voyants were giving him speculative looks. "Let's all move back a bit. Don't want to crowd the ship when it lands."
As the smooth ride went all to hell, Loch darted out of the safety of her invisibility field, grabbed a crewman from behind as he cocked his arm back to hurl a knife at Dairy, looped her other arm between her legs, and unceremoniously heaved him over the railing.
Tern had unsnapped her false shackles and had darted behind Desidora, who was holding four men at bay with great sweeps of Ghylspwr. Dairy whipped out a truncheon, but Kail had thankfully gotten between the boy and any real harm, and was parrying like a madman.
Most airship crews had little combat training, but everyone except the helmsman was slashing and stabbing with skill. Every man had his teeth pulled back in the same vicious snarl, and every man's eyes were dead and cold. It was as if they were wearing masks.
As Loch grabbed her sword from Pyvic's unconscious body, one of the men darted in too close, and Ghylspwr smashed the blade down, arced around in a complete circle that sent Desidora leaping into the air with its sheer momentum, and then crashed down on the thug's head with a cry of "Kutesosh gajair'is!" The thug went down—straight down, through the deck into the open air below, tearing a good-size hole in the planks in the process.
"Over the side, not through the damn hull!" Loch shouted. A half-dozen of the crew caught sight of her and moved her way, and she knocked aside one slash, kicked one of them in the shins, leaped aside, and brought her saber down on a line attached to the sailwings. With a horrific creak and tear of metal, the wing snapped out. A coil of rope whipped out taut in one swift motion, clotheslining two of the men and sending them overboard. On the other end of the ship, the helmsman screamed.
A flash of movement caught Loch's eye as the ship heaved to the side and everyone stumbled. Off the starboard bow, four crewmen flew majestically over the railing like ocean spray. Glancing back, Loch saw Desidora with Ghylspwr held in a truly impressive follow-through pose. In the rigging overhead, Icy leaped from rope to rope while crewmen hurled knives at him. One missed him by a handbreadth and continued on its upward path to strike the balloon, only to bounce off harmlessly.
"Loch."
And looking at his face again, past the rictus snarl and the dead eyes, Loch saw Jeridan, the gambler who'd fixed Kail up with supplies in the Cleaners.
"Help me." It was barely a whisper. His face was still snarling, but something warred behind his eyes. Jeridan had never been a fighter. He'd barely known one end of a sword from the other.
Loch hesitated, and Jeridan broke her grip and grabbed for her sword. She punched him in the face and swept his legs out from under him, sending him crashing to the deck. "What the hell happened?"
Jeridan, the man with a glass jaw and a tendency to cry when hit, pushed himself back to his feet. "Loch, help me. I can't... I can't..." He was looking at her sword. "Please."
He lunged, as much at the blade as her, and she spun aside and hilt-punched him behind the ear. "No. Tell me what happened, and we'll—"
Behind Kail, Dairy drew back his truncheon and hurled it. It arced past Kail, threaded a maze of rigging without touching a single rope, and slammed into the helmsman's forehead. He reeled drunkenly and then collapsed across the control panel, pushing countless levers and crystals as he slid to the ground.
The ship gave a terrible wrenching, creaking, cracking, tearing noise that started in the deck and worked its way through Loch's body like the bellow of an ox suddenly realizing that it outweighed the angry farmer by at least half a ton.
The balloon flickered with blue light, and several of the sailwings leapt into motion. Two wings sprang out, one began to extend and retract repeatedly, and one wrenched backward and tore itself from the ship in a crashing explosion of splinters, to sweep across the deck in an enormous arc of wood and canvas.
The Palace Job Page 11