by Mark Albany
“There are rooms in the Palace with few entrances that can be sealed with magical spells, made out in case of attack,” I said, not looking up from my sword. “One of which is the Throne Room, which will be the first place that the Emperor will be heading toward in a ceremonial reclaiming of his throne. That, I think, would be the best place to ambush him. We should move quickly, though, as I doubt that we will be given the opportunity to infiltrate the palace once the Emperor has taken up residence.”
“That… is actually a good idea,” Aliana said with a small grin.
“No need to sound so surprised,” I grumbled good-naturedly. She blew me a kiss by way of a response.
Faye chuckled. “I have other news as well. They have been rounding up the elves on the streets, paying the human citizens who turned those who weren’t caught in.”
That sounded distinctly like bad news to me, and I looked up at her, narrowing my eyes. “How is that not bad news?”
“They aren’t killing the elves,” Faye said, her shoulders drooping. “They want them for something specific and have been locking them into the dungeons below the Lancers’ quarters. So it’s not good news, obviously, but there is a hint of a silver lining to it.”
I nodded. Silver linings. That was all that we had been settling for lately, and I didn’t like it. Still, the fact that the elves weren’t being killed outright went against the usual result of prejudice-based pogroms. I assumed that Abarat had something to do with that, as it had been what Faye had been ordered to do back on the western border. It spoke of some plans by the elf himself, but nothing had been shared regarding what those plans were. We had been on step behind Abarat ever since he had broken from Cyron’s control, and even before then, it seemed, if Faye’s testimony could be believed.
Which I did. The woman had done more than prove herself up to this point.
“So,” Norel said, breaking the silence, “how do you all suggest that we get into the palace proper? There will be wards in place to try and keep us from trying any of our usual tricks. Opening a portal in there could prove deadly. Any perception filters will be dissipated the moment that we stroll through the gates.”
“You all seem to have trouble remembering who you are travelling with,” Faye chuckled, shaking her head. “I could get into the Palace without any trouble. I am still well-known among the Lancers there.”
“Well, that would be you,” I said, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “The question remains how would we be getting into the Palace with you? With no way to mask our presence?”
“Who said anything about masking your presence?” Faye asked, tilting her head, showing off the sword in her hand. Well, it wasn’t a sword anymore, I realized, watching the steel turn and twist around on itself, extending and dropping away from her hand as the blade turned into chains and manacles, all connected together.
“We need to come up with a bet,” I started to say, stumbling a bit as my right foot caught onto one of the chain links. “Something that will be able to compensate for should we be discovered or not. Coin? Something like that?”
“What use would we have for coin in this situation?” Norel asked, looking back to me in the line that I was bringing up the rear of.
“Silence, prisoners!” Faye snapped. She had gone back to her human blond, having her long curls tied up rigidly behind her head. She had her hand on the tail end of the chain that had been formed from her sword. I needed to learn that trick from her and maybe find if the same could be done to my sword. I doubted it, but surprises were the norm in my life these days.
She had taken to her role as our captor rather well. A little too well, I thought. Calling on her past time as our captor had to help, even if she hadn’t been herself at the time. She had been there, seen how it was done and knew what was expected from someone in her position.
I noted that not all the people who passed us by looked at us in the same way. A handful eyed us, and the elves more specifically, with disgust and righteous anger, noting that we were all bound up and seeing a hint of justification. They were happy to see us bound and being dragged away to what they assumed was a short and painful remainder to their lives.
More of them looked differently, though. There was a hint of horror and annoyance over seeing elves that had been fighting at their side not that long ago being carted off for no other reason than they were different. There was something else, though, following quickly after. Their eyes drifted over to where Faye was standing, and a hint of fear crossed their faces before they quickly looked away. They knew what was probably in our future, and they did not want to join us in it.
I couldn’t blame them. From what I remembered from the dungeons, they weren’t a pleasant place to spend any amount of time in, much less whole days, months, or however long it was that Abarat planned on keeping the elves trapped in there.
Faye guided us toward the palace, and instead of the dungeons, guiding us directly to the palace. This area of the city had more traffic than the rest, mostly the nobility of the city, lancers, and those that were concerned more with the day-to-day running of the city than the arrival of its ruler.
Pulling us toward the palace wasn’t met with anything like resistance as the people that were in our way seemed to want only to get out of it as quickly as possible. Faye was holding herself with her shoulders high, meeting any eyes that came up to her with enough of a glare to push them back and drive them away.
And it worked on all that stood in front of her until a man stepped in front. He was tall, with long, red hair flowing all the way to the middle of his back, done up in an elegant braid. There were enough touches of color on his skin that I had to wonder if the freckles on his cheek were colored on, or if they were naturally occurring. His jawline and cheekbones told of a very handsome man, intimidatingly so, and yet also a man that put a lot of work into keeping himself that way.
But the colors that he was wearing told me that there were enough people that would be intimidated regardless of his good looks. Another Official.
“Where are you taking these prisoners?” he asked, almost ignoring us as he turned to look at Faye, crossing his arms in front of his chest. I only caught a glimpse, but I thought I’d caught sight of his nails painted with magical runes. Or maybe they had been branded on, as all I could see was black.
“All elves are to be captured, yes?” Faye asked, smiling coolly in the face of this new challenge.
“Yes, and taken to the dungeons, to await the Emperor’s orders,” the man said with a chuckle. “But you appear to be taking them into the palace, Faye. Why on earth would you do that?”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you, Bren,” she replied with a shrug. “But if you must know, these three, are the Sisters Three, if you don’t recognize the difference between a djinn and an elf by now. This one is the human that they had for a pet… for the life of me, I can’t remember his name. And this one is just an elf that I found with them. The Emperor had special orders for them, or… were you not made aware?”
Bren, as she called him, narrowed his eyes. The Sisters Three was obviously a name that was well known to him, and the orders seemed to make sense to his mind, but there was a hint of annoyance in his gaze that said that he didn’t like the fact that she had been given orders that he wasn’t aware of.
“What orders?” he finally asked, taking an instinctive step backward.
Faye took a step forward, wanting to keep him off guard. She was nervous. I could feel that much, but not a hint of it was showing on her face. She looked like she was having fun, pushing the buttons of one of the few in the Empire who could be considered her equal.
“Orders to have them and all those associated with them questioned,” Faye said with a sigh, shaking her head. “If you would rather take them for yourself, I have much better things to do than try to extract information from these five. Take a proper bath, for instance. You wouldn’t know the horrors to be expected from riding for days out to the borders
without access to a proper bath. Or food.”
Bren took another step back, and Faye another step forward as she offered the man the tail end of the chains that we were manacled to.
Bren shook his head. “Your orders are your orders. Far be it from me to take them over for you.”
“Well, at least get someone to carry their weapons for me,” Faye growled, shaking her head as she held the sack up that was carrying our weapons, which constituted my sword, Lyth’s bow and sword. Aliana, Braire, and Norel weren’t known to carry weapons, and could access them from wherever it was that Aliana’s daggers went.
Bren snapped his fingers and a Lancer that was in a hurry to get anywhere else stopped in his tracks.
“Help the Official, you idiot,” he snapped, spinning away, giving his cloak a flourish as he pulled himself back around to head toward the palace. This wasn’t going to be the end of this, I realized. Not by a long shot, but it didn’t need to be either. It only needed to last until tomorrow, one way or another.
The Lancer snapped to, dutifully ignoring us as he took the weapons from Faye.
“Follow me to my quarters,” Faye said, starting to walk and tugging us forward as the Lancer was forced to come in quickly behind. Faye marched us through the palace like she owned the place, expecting any and all that came in front of her to step aside or be walked over. She was still nervous to the point of spreading the sentiment between us, but she still showed no sign of it.
We reached the quarters that I recognized as claimed by her from my last visit here, when she had invited me to a dinner that had an annoying lack of food consumed and more fighting than I generally liked in my meals, though I knew that I would need to start rethinking my expectations on that topic.
We reached what looked like her sleeping quarters, and they were rather expansive, even according to the standards set by the palace. Tall, arching ceilings, decorated heavily in black marble and gold, spreading across the whole of the room. Everything was opulent but never breaking from the tasteful nature of it. A massive bed could be found on the far side of the room. Bear skins covered up most of the ground, with the windows halfway covered by red silk drapes.
I wondered how people could live like this on a daily basis. Even Vis would have considered this luxury beyond his wildest dreams.
“Leave the weapons,” Faye ordered calmly, dropped the chains to the ground, and I could feel them heating up as power rushed through them, dragging all five of us to the ground with them, locking us in place as Faye strolled through the room, releasing her cloak smoothly and laying it over a nearby chair. “And have the kitchens send up some food and wine. Tell those servants that are to deliver to it to leave the food in the antechamber. I will be interrogating these prisoners and any who interrupt me will join them, do you understand?”
“Yes, Madam Official,” the man said with a firm nod, quickly spinning away and making his way back through the door. Faye reached out and locked it with a quick spell before reaching down to pick the chains up again, releasing us from them as they started to recoil back into the form of a sword again.
“I’m so sorry,” Faye said quickly, moving over to us, dropping down close as we started to pull ourselves up from the ground.
“You had to make it look authentic,” I said with a grin, rubbing some feeling back into my wrists. “And damned if you didn’t pull it off. Well done.”
She smiled as I moved in and wrapped her up in a warm hug, squeezing her gently to me before taking a step back to inspect our current surroundings.
“I still have no idea how people can build places like this,” I said softly, looking around and running my fingers over one of the marble pillars. “Not the ability, mind, but the imagination. Do you have people that just sit around and imagine up ways to make rooms looks more impressive and luxurious?”
“They’re called architects, Grant,” Norel said with a chuckle.
“Well, I mean the decorations and the intricate stone carvings, not the buildings themselves,” I said, shaking my head.
Norel stepped in, grabbing my hand and pulling me back to where the rest of the group was standing. “Well, the short answer is that yes, they do, and no we don’t have time to engage in the long version. We need to start planning our attack on the Emperor. We were lucky, and skilled –“ she added the second part after a quick pause to look over at Faye, “— to come this far. We can’t be distracted now.”
I nodded in agreement. “So… do we have a plan?”
“I thought our plan was to trap the man in the throne room and beat Abarat’s influence off of him like a regular curse,” Braire said, plucking a couple of grapes from a nearby fruit platter and popping them into her mouth. “Well, not like a regular curse, since we need a royal elf wielding a magical sword, but the concept remains the same.”
“Sure,” Norel said with a chuckle. “But I think it will be more engaged than that. For instance, we need to start with finding a way to the Throne room that will allow us to reach it without being discovered in the process.”
“That can wait until our food gets here, I think,” Faye said with a small smile, dropping down into one of the seats and crossing her legs as she flipped her hair around again. “Besides, people are expecting us to be in here a while longer, with interrogations being the aim. I think we have time for a bit of rest.”
16
Finding our way to the throne room was put off in favor of eating. We waited until the food was provided by what sounded like a horde of servants laving them all in the antechamber. From the sound of their haste, I had to assume that Faye’s warning had been passed on in vivid detail by the Lancer that had ordered the food for her.
Once they were gone, Faye was quick to retrieve the food for us. The warning that an Official was going to want food after interrogating a batch of prisoners had apparently meant that they thought that she was going to be working up quite the appetite as they brought along quite the feast for us to work with. A full side of pork, sliced cheeses, cold meats, breads, a couple of quail and other assorted sweetmeats that could have fed a full farming family for a month, along with enough wine and mead to keep them well drunk for the same amount of time.
“Should we be planning right now?” Aliana asked, looking around as we started to dig into the feast. She didn’t seem all that hungry herself, but she was toying with a cream and honey infused pastry with a hint of interest.
“I thought that we had done all the planning that we planned to do,” I said around a quail leg. “Meet the Emperor in the throne room, seal the room up, break the hold.”
“As well thought out as that plan might be, it can’t hurt us to determine here and now how we’re going to be breaking that hold,” Aliana said, tossing the pastry over to me, which I caught deftly with a cheeky grin.
“She’s right,” Lyth said softly as she paused in her devouring of a cut of ham with some bread, still warm from the palace’s bakery. “For instance, we know that I’ll have to be the one wielding the sword, but what will the rest of you be doing?”
“I assume, dealing with the veritable army that we’ll be trapping inside the throne room with the emperor and ourselves,” Braire grumbled, strewn over one of the chairs and chewing on a pork rib. “The man won’t be coming in all on his own, right? He will have a horde of lancers and possible even a few mages coming in with him.”
“Not to mention that I probably won’t be able to handle the Emperor on my own,” Lyth interjected. “Grant, you remember what it was like to break Faye’s bond to Abarat, right? You needed to be there every step of the way, holding her down and keeping her from fighting back during the process. And that was only Faye. No offense.”
“None taken,” Faye grinned over at the elf woman. “Though it should be noted that I was in a considerably weaker state than I am currently, as I was stuck as a human at the time and, more importantly, I was fighting over the hold myself for the whole of the time.”
I nodded. “How
much help do you think you’ll need?”
Lyth looked over to Faye. “Since you’ve met the man, albeit in an altered state, how powerful would you say that the emperor is?”
The woman tilted her head, looking like she was making a couple of judgements based on memory. I took a sip from the wine – which was a fantastic red, I had to say – already starting to feel a few doubts creep in over the validity of our chances of actually walking out of this palace alive.
“Very powerful,” Faye finally said. “I can’t narrow it down, since, as you said, I was in an altered state at the time, but from what I do remember of my time with the man… his power is substantial. Far more than I had at the time, and maybe more than I have now.”
“Fantastic,” Braire grumbled, shaking her head.
“Which again begs the question, how much of our man—” I stopped in the middle of my question, remembering the company that I was in. “How much of our womanpower do you think you’ll need to subdue the emperor, Lyth?”
She shrugged. “As much as can be spared.”
“I say Norel, Faye, and Aliana are tasked with keeping the Emperor calm enough for Lyth to perform her spell,” Braire said, pushing herself up from her sprawled position on her chair. “Grant and I – with a little help from my furry friends – should be able to hold off any Lancers and mages that he might bring in with him.”
“And if you can’t?” Aliana asked.
“Well, then you lot will have to help out,” Braire shrugged, standing up and stretching. “Let’s not over plan this fight of ours. Staying loose and ready for surprises is the only reason that we’ve survived this long. And I intend on surviving a good deal longer too, so we should probably be ready for just about anything. In the meantime, I’m done eating. Does anyone else feel like tracking out path to the throne room down now?”