by Logan Jacobs
He had obviously gone to great lengths to construct this place and organize this heist. Was it to get revenge on the nobles who had accused him of theft in the first place? Or was he guilty of that, too?
Either way, I didn’t think he had stolen this statue. I suspected Adler had given it to him as a token of their alliance. I thought back to the conversation I had with the councilor. Despite his promise that he’d try to get the city guard to help us, and despite the overwhelming evidence we’d been able to provide that there was cause for the extra security, nothing had come out of it. It was hard to believe that putting a few extra guards on the street for one night could require so much red tape. But if Adler knew his old friend was still alive, and if he was secretly in on the heist, our inability to get any help from the council made more sense.
“I told Adler about the heist at your party,” I explained to Yvaine. “He said he’d try to do something, but even when we came back with all the proof we’d found on those bandits at the gorgon’s lair, no one was willing to help us. You have to admit that’s strange. Wouldn’t you want to increase security if you even suspected that you were going to be robbed?”
“I suppose you have a point,” the noblewoman replied with a frown. “I don’t want to believe that Adler could be involved in something like this, but his response does raise questions.”
“We need to find Cygne,” I said as I set the statue back on the desk.
“Hey!” came a startled voice from the door. “You can’t be in here!”
Yvaine and I turned to face one of the red-robed guards. I moved my hand beneath my cloak to the hilt of my dagger, but Yvaine swept past me with a smile.
“Oh, we’re so sorry, do excuse us,” she said sweetly. “We were just, well, looking for a bit of privacy, you know.”
The guard looked from Yvaine to me and frowned, but then he stepped out of the doorway to allow us to pass.
“You’ll have to find it somewhere else,” he said gruffly. “This is a restricted area.”
“Of course,” Yvaine said as we slipped back out into the hall. “We’ll just head back to the ballroom, then.”
The guard snorted and stood before the door with his arms crossed. I could feel his eyes on our backs as we walked quickly back the way we’d come.
When we entered the antechamber at the top of the stairs, Lavinia and Maruk were there as well. They were in the middle of a heated debate.
“Could you have been any more obvious?” Lavinia hissed. “What kind of bandit asks for candied ginger? We’re lucky if he’s not running to tell the guards about us right now!”
“I panicked!” Maruk insisted. “At least I said something, instead of just staring like a trout! How is that not suspicious?”
“I wasn’t staring, I was looking for something sharp.”
“Oh, right, because killing the cook wouldn’t raise an alarm,” Maruk snorted.
“What’s going on?” I interrupted quickly.
“We ran into someone in the kitchen,” Lavinia explained, “and this one’s excuse was that we were looking for snacks.” She jutted her head toward Maruk, who glared back at her.
“Did you see any sign of Cygne?” Yvaine asked.
“No,” Lavinia answered. “We found some stationary with that swan symbol, though.” She presented me with a small slip of paper that she’d folded up and tucked into the silver cuff around her wrist.
I unfolded it, but it was blank.
“It was from a notepad on a desk,” the ranger explained. “We didn’t find anything else.”
“We found something, too,” I said. I told Lavinia and Maruk about the hound statue and my conversation with Adler, and my theory that he was involved and that Cygne’s true identity was Lucius Previn.
“Isn’t that what I said?” Lavinia remarked. “I said if I were him, I’d fake my death and go somewhere nice to retire.”
“I wouldn’t call this retirement,” Maruk pointed out.
“Was there anything else through there?” Lavinia asked with a nod toward the staircase.
“A guard,” I muttered. “He sent us back here.”
“Just the one?” The ladona woman raised an eyebrow and cracked her knuckles. “The four of us can handle one guard.”
“It’s always violence with you,” Maruk complained. “Besides, what do you think is going to happen when his friends find his body?”
“We could stash him somewhere,” Lavinia answered with a wink. “There’s got to be a broom closet or something in this place.”
I considered Lavinia’s plan. I’d been ready to fight the guard when he’d found Yvaine and me in the study, and I knew it’d be easy enough to kill him quietly. We probably could hide the body somewhere nearby, since I doubted anyone else would be snooping around like we were.
Just then, however, Aerin and Emeline came into the antechamber, followed by Lena and Dehn.
“We found something!” Aerin said breathlessly. “Cygne’s room, I think, come on!”
We jumped into action and followed Aerin through the door she, Emeline, Lena, and Dehn had just come through, up a flight of stairs, and down a long hall hung with paintings in gilded frames on every side. It crossed my mind that we looked suspicious running through the halls like that, and we weren’t being exactly quiet, but if we were able to get to Cygne, that wouldn’t matter. He was our target.
When we reached a set of double doors at the end of the hall, Aerin and Emeline stopped.
“It’s through here,” Emeline said. “It looked like it was a suite of rooms or something. We saw one of the guards go in, so Cygne’s probably still inside.”
“Take these, just in case,” Aerin said as she opened the pouch with everyone’s weapons and passed them out. I could tell Lavinia and Dehn felt much better once they were armed again, though Maruk frowned as he affixed the straps of his shields over his forearms.
“I hope it doesn’t crease the fabric,” he said as he clasped the final strap.
“If we get into a fight, you’re going to have a lot more to worry about than wrinkles,” Lavinia pointed out.
When everyone was in fighting shape, Aerin gave us a nod and quietly opened the door into the suite. Inside, the shining marble floors were covered in so many rugs that they overlapped, and a set of white couches and chairs were organized around a glass coffee table. Marble pillars stood along the walls, and between them were, of all things, faux windows with gauzy curtains pulled over them. The ceiling featured elaborate crown molding and yet more gilding, and a crystal chandelier hung over the sitting area.
I could see the doorway to the adjacent room, but the door itself was closed. I crept forward silently with my guild behind me, and that was when I heard the voices. I froze.
“...Saw an elf and a panthera slinking around,” a male voice said. “I think they might have been up to something.”
“Do you?” someone asked sarcastically. Cygne, no doubt. His voice was high-pitched and dripping with contempt. “They are all thieves, for gods’ sakes. Didn’t I say not to let anyone upstairs? Who was supposed to be on post at the door?”
I had taken another step forward when I heard Cygne’s voice, prepared to take out him and the guard with him, if necessary, but when another man spoke up, I stopped again.
“Osghen was there, but he had to stop a fight in the ballroom,” reported a second guard. “They’re getting restless down there, my lord.”
My lord? So Cygne was a man of rank, or at least, he had been. He was Lucius Previn, I was certain of it.
“Ugh, isn’t that just the trouble with working with commoners,” Cygne said. I could hear the sneer in his voice. “No patience, no sense of propriety. This has the potential to be the greatest crime in centuries if those flea-bitten petty thieves would just follow my instructions. Gods, I tried, didn’t I? I took care of the hard part, I laid everything out for them in simple terms that even their small minds could comprehend, but they can’t wait a few minutes? When
I turn the whole lot of them over to the city guard after they’ve brought me my treasures, they’ll have earned their fates.” He sighed. “Just get back out there, keep them calm. I’ll be along in a moment.”
Before I could move, the door opened, and I came face to face with not two, but ten guards in red costumes and skull masks.
Woops.
For a moment, the guards just stared at us in shock. In that frozen heartbeat, I sized them up. Each of them wore the same blood red armor and skull masks that covered the top portions of their faces, but I could see that most of them were human, and armed with swords or axes. None were mages.
Then I caught a flash of white, and my attention was immediately drawn from the guards to Cygne behind them, dressed in black and white robes and a black birdlike mask. The man’s mouth fell open in an expression of purest surprise and horror, and he stumbled out of his chair as he caught sight of our weapons and realized that we weren’t simply lost. It was he who broke the silence as he shouted to his guards.
“Well! What in the nine hells are you all waiting for? Kill them!”
I whipped out my dagger and summoned the mana blade to it just as the first of the guards charged forward with his sword drawn. I aimed for the spark of mana in his chest and drove my blade forward, but, I had to give him credit, he was agile, and he managed to dodge my stab at the last second and shoved me back against one of the armchairs.
I glimpsed a flash of black and white as Cygne fled from the room, but by then the rest of his guards had descended over my guild and there was no one to stop him.
I gritted my teeth as I rounded on the guard who’d attacked me again and made a swipe for his throat, but he blocked my arm and made a grab for my wrist. I cried out as he twisted my wrist and forced me to drop the dagger, but even as I lost my weapon, I kicked out as the guard’s shin, and he stepped back with a grunt of pain.
I dove for my knife but the guard was quick and brought his boot down over the blade to prevent me from taking it again. Unfortunately for him, the mana of the blade burned through the sole of his boot almost as soon as it made contact, and he jerked back with a scream.
I grabbed the handle and lunged again just as the guard threw up his hands in front of himself, and instead of plunging into his chest where the reaction of his mana and that of my blade would kill him instantly, my knife cut across his arms. Still, I was gratified by the fact that the cut was deep, and that the guard was now on the defensive. He stumbled back almost into the next room as he tried to put some distance between us, and there was a new fear in his eyes behind that skull mask now that he realized that mine was no ordinary dagger.
As he scrambled back and began to edge along the wall in an attempt to put the others between us, I saw him reach for something on his belt and tear it away. Before I could make out what the thing was, the guard threw it at me, and it exploded at my feet like a firework.
I leapt back as sparks flew up around my legs and a plume of dense, dark smoke poured out of the bomb and clouded my vision. I staggered back and beat at my legs where the sparks had caught on my pants, and a split second before I stood up again, a fireball crashed into the wall over my head.
The rest of the room was in utter chaos. The couch had been tipped over and nearly cleaved in half, which I suspected was Dehn’s work. Bits of stuffing floated through the air as the halfling chased after another skull-masked guard with axe and sword. The guard’s uniform was darker red in some areas where Dehn had managed to cut him, and he was barely able to keep the battle-crazed halfling at bay with his own sword.
The glass coffee table had been smashed, and the plush rugs glittered with broken glass as Maruk fended off a particularly large guard who, unlike the others with their swords, wielded a massive morningstar. From the glimpses I got of purple-gray skin beneath the guard’s mask I realized that he must be a hobgoblin.
The hobgoblin swung his morningstar down with both of his hands, but Maruk was fast, and he brought up his larger shield to block it in time, though the orc was forced down onto one knee by the strength of the blow. I saw his face contorted in pain as the broken glass sliced through his skin, but apparently, so did Aerin.
I heard the familiar chime of bells as the healer reached a hand out to Maruk, and I saw her lips move in a quiet prayer as healing magic flowed through her fingertips towards the orc.
Just behind Aerin, Lavinia grappled with an elven guard. The ranger had managed to knock the guard’s mask free, and she stood behind him with her bow around his neck as she tried to strangle him. The guard staggered back and slammed Lavinia into the wall, but she held tight.
I was about to move to help her when I heard a sharp whistle, and a fireball the size of a basketball soared across the room and hit the guard squarely in the abdomen. He shrieked in panic and pain as Lavinia whipped her bow off from around his neck, placed her hands on either side of his head, and twisted his neck. The guard fell forward onto the rug and Lavinia nocked an arrow to her bowstring as she searched for another target.
Another fireball whistled through the room and smashed one of the faux windows. The gauzy curtains caught fire immediately and were all but vaporized before I could even blink, and as the flames jumped up, the guards nearest to the wall who were fighting Yvaine and Dehn, respectively, were distracted long enough for my guildmates to strike.
Yvaine drove her sword through the abdomen of the guard she was facing like a lightning strike and the man slumped to his knees before the noblewoman had even withdrawn her blade.
Dehn, on the other hand, was decidedly less precise in his maneuvering, but he was still effective as he scored a devastating blow to his opponent’s leg just above the knee. The guard stumbled and fell, and the halfling was on top of him in a moment, looking like a maniacal leprechaun out of some kind of St. Patrick’s Day- themed horror movie in his green suit.
Yvaine quickly moved on to another foe, and I realized that the man she had engaged then was the guard I’d wounded at the beginning of the fight. He certainly wasn’t having any easier of a time facing off against the noblewoman, and his moves were sloppy and panicked compared to Yvaine’s fluid grace.
The remaining guards wisely tried to give Emeline a wide berth, as none of them were particularly keen about the idea of being set on fire by the panthera mage. Not that the rest of the guild made that easy for them. Lena, in particular, was excelling at crowd-control and used a variety of smoke bombs and flammable alchemical concoctions to herd the guards together at the center of the room. When I realized what she was doing, I admired the genius of it. If we could wrangle them all together and surround them, it wouldn’t matter that we were outnumbered. We could pick them off with ease, like fish in a barrel.
Still, Lena didn’t have the best vantage point to cover every angle, and she was obviously trying not to hit any of us. Her strategy gave me an idea, though, and I took a deep breath as I focused on my magic. Summoning clones was easy for me now, but I usually only created one, sometimes two at a time. What I wanted to do now was going to require a little more concentration.
I backed up to the wall and held my arms out with my palms facing the bloodbath before me, and I felt the hair on my arms rise as my mana surged down my arms and into my palms like an electric current. When I felt the magic pool in my hands, I turned my palms downward, then rotated them up to the ceiling.
As I did, eight clones made of bright blue mana appeared at the fringes of the room. The guard that had been grappling with Aerin froze as he caught sight of one of the clones, and the redheaded healer didn’t miss the opportunity to bury her axe in his head.
It didn’t take more than a second for the rest of the guards to realize that something was wrong, and even the hobgoblin faltered in his attack against Maruk when he caught sight of the illusory doubles.
I brought my hands together, and the clones began to move forward. I hadn’t given them weapons, but I didn’t need to. Nearly all of the guards except for the hobgobli
n abandoned their attacks in a frantic scramble to get away from the clones. One who had managed to keep his wits about him threw one of the firecracker smoke bombs that the first guard had used against me, but of course, it had no effect on the clones.
Exactly as I’d intended, the clones drove the remaining red-clad guards toward the center of the room, and their panic at the sight of the clones, however momentary, had given the rest of my guild the advantage they needed to get the upper hand.
Lavinia was the fastest, and she had three arrows nocked in a second. She released her bowstring and three of the guards dropped with dark arrows in their eye sockets in the next second.
By now, the guards realized what was happening, and several made lunges to try to get past the clones so as not to get caught. Lena, thankfully, hadn’t let up with her own attacks, and she tossed smoke bombs and flammable fluid into the gaps between the clones to prevent any of the guards from slipping to the other side of the ring I’d created. I was glad for that because I was already feeling the strain of keeping all eight clones active as an ache in my temples.
Only the hobgoblin guard didn’t seem to fear the clones. He’d resumed his attacks on Maruk, and the orc’s shields were heavily dented in several places where the morningstar had hit them. Maruk’s suit was torn, too, and blood stained the white fabric on his shoulder where he must have caught a scratch from one of the spikes.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Emeline’s mana flare up as she twisted her hands in a complicated series of motions. I wasn’t sure what she was about to do, but evidently, Aerin had an idea, because the healer yanked Maruk back toward the fringe of the circle a second before the floor beneath the guards’ feet exploded into flame.
All of the guards screamed as the magical fire leapt up around them, and even though I was backed up against the wall, I could feel the inferno’s unnatural heat, and I was reminded of the Magpie’s base and the fire that had destroyed it.