The Paladin Caper

by Patrick Weekes

  “The highest-security area had very little information, even on the maps we procured,” Icy said, “but the main processing center sits above it. It appears to be a mine that was abandoned due to magical buildup in the crystals, listed as deadly to any living creature who went inside.”

  “We bought drinks for a few miners who said they saw golems tromping around in that direction once or twice,” Tern added.

  “If a golem can survive the magical energy, I can survive it,” Desidora said confidently.

  Tern nodded. “Just don’t wear fuzzy socks.”

  Kail and Hessler came back up onto the deck, accompanied by a few surly men who shot the women the speculative weasel look every woman learns to take as a warning sign.

  “Control console’s over here,” Kail said brightly, as though men who made their living illegally outfitting airships might not know where the control console of a common airship model might be located.

  “You’re her? The one in charge?” one of them, a big man with a long wrench in one hand, said to Loch. At Loch’s nod, the man rubbed his neck, squinting. “Expensive, but we’ll have you back in the air soon enough. Boys bringing up the new ward-crystals now.”

  Loch nodded as several more men came up the gangplank, carrying large, blanket-wrapped bundles.

  “Glad to have you out here,” Loch said. “Surprised you get much business in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Given the relative location between port cities—” Hessler started, and then stopped when Kail elbowed him.

  “Like the quiet,” the airship leader said as his men filed onto the deck. “Just us and the whisper of the balloons.”

  “All those old balloons and nobody else?” Tern said brightly, gesturing with one hand and casually reaching into a concealed side pocket of her utility skirt with the other. “I can’t imagine what it’s like! I mean, after a while, I think I’d start talking with the wind-daemons inside those balloons!”

  “In fact, prolonged exposure to unwarded balloons can—” Hessler started, and then stopped when Kail elbowed him again.

  “You’re her,” the leader of the salvagers said to Loch. “The one the daemons talk about.”

  Loch leaned on her walking stick, hands low, clearly not starting a fight. “And what do the daemons say about me?”

  “Say you killed ’em,” said the leader, and he was gripping his wrench tightly now. “Say you’ve got some charm that makes it hard for ’em to find you, but they haven’t forgot.”

  Loch didn’t touch, look at, or think about the daemon-ward necklace Hessler and Desidora had made for her. “The daemons ought to get over what happened,” she said.

  “Can’t,” said the leader, and as he stepped forward, his men unwrapped the blankets and reached for the weapons concealed inside. “Just whisper and whisper until it’s all a man can hear—”

  The hook of Loch’s walking stick wrapped around the leader’s arm and snapped tight. Loch stepped in, locked his arm at the elbow as his wrench fell to the deck, and slammed him into the railing. As he grunted, she kicked the back of his leg, shifted her grip to punch him behind the ear, locked the hook behind his neck, and slammed him face-first to the deck.

  The other salvagers paused, partially because Loch had put their leader down. Tern’s crossbow had also come out, aimed toward the nearest salvager at crotch level. The crackling illusionary eldritch fire sprouting from Hessler’s hand was also a factor in their hesitation, along with Desidora’s skin turning bone white as she pointed at one of the men with darkness slithering between her fingers.

  “If you want to talk with daemons,” Loch said to the man face-first on the ground, held in place by the stick on the back of his neck and her knee on his spine, “you can pass on a message for me. Remind Jyelle that coming after me has gotten her arrested, killed, turned into a daemon, and smashed into a wall at high speed. She wants to come after me again, that’s on her. Now, are we doing business or not?”

  “Gonna kill you,” the leader said to the floorboards. “Gonna killllll you, Loch, for what you did. Can’t die, can’t do anything, all I can do is wait and hate and arrogant apple, babbling brook, creeping cat,” he finished suddenly, and then went limp.

  “It’s about time,” Kail said. “I’d rather the voices in people’s heads were voices from our team.”

  Ululenia landed on the deck, shifting from falcon into human shape, her horn blazing. “His mind was rotten, trunk chewed by insects until only the husk remained.” She looked at the other salvagers. “Their minds are not broken yet. We might not have to strip them and peel their skin off while reciting the names of everyone they have ever had sex with and telling them what that person was really thinking about at the time until the death priestess snuffs out their souls like a cheap tallow candle.”

  “Hypothetically,” Tern added.

  “So,” Loch said, standing up and gesturing at the nearest salvager with her walking stick, “about those ward-crystals . . .”

  They were back in the air an hour later.

  “So,” Loch said to the team while Kail put them on course, “we need a plan for the mine at Sunrise Canyon.”

  “Are we not discussing what just occurred?” Icy asked from where he was helping Kail with the rigging.

  “Jyelle holding a grudge isn’t new information.” Loch pulled out the necklace. “Hessler and Desidora have got it handled for now. I can deal with it once we’ve hit the mine.”

  “And Ululenia suddenly getting really good at scaring people?” Kail added.

  “As the wolf bares its fangs so that it need not draw blood, so we convinced the fools to deal with us once Little One defeated their master.” Ululenia shrugged. “I did nothing.”

  “And as long as it stays that way,” Loch said, “then we concentrate on the mine.”

  “I was thinking about that,” Desidora said. “Tern, you said the aura-coded key never leaves the mine. Does the supervisor keep it on him? If he has held it for long enough, its aura would have mingled with his own, and we could find him outside the mine and copy that.”

  “How long is long enough?” Tern asked.

  “The current supervisor has had this position for less than a year,” Icy added. “His predecessor had held the job for many years before dying to some sort of fairy creature that lived in the canyon.”

  “It was a big scandal in the guild,” Tern said. “Looked like he was smuggling crystals out of the mine to sell, and the deal went sour and he got ripped up.” She coughed. “It was actually what gave us the idea to break in.”

  “Less than a year, and there will be no imprint on his soul,” Desidora said, frowning.

  “Face time, then,” Kail said, still adjusting the controls. “I’ll get a job at the mine, work my way in. I’m still not loving the idea of getting through however many levels of security they’ve got, though. Any other entrance to the mine?”

  “Not that we found,” Icy said, “and we considered the same solution.”

  “Icy really didn’t like my idea of a small, controlled explosion opening up a mine to the surface and giving us an alternate way in,” Tern added.

  “I did not, no.”

  “So this is a long job,” Loch said, frowning. “Some of us get hired at the processing center, some of us get hired as miners. We look for gaps and figure out a nonmagical solution that gets us into the high-security area and shuts down whatever the ancients are trying to do . . . ideally before they come back.”

  “Or we wait for Ghylspwr to show himself,” Desidora said, “and we take him.” The deck around her went black again.

  “None of us can handle Ghylspwr in a fight, Diz,” Kail said from the control console.

  “He is a soul in a weapon.” Desidora smiled thinly, her lips a black slash across chalk-white skin. “Perhaps I can pull it out.”

  “He betrayed all of us,” Loch said firmly, “and if we need to stop him for our plan to work, we do it. That said, we’re not blowing the p
lan because anyone is angry about getting played by a magic hammer.”

  Desidora glared, then nodded. Her skin regained its healthy blush before she turned away.

  “Captain,” Kail said suddenly, “I’ve got a ship incoming. Fast. Right at us.”

  Everyone stood up and got their weapons ready again, which turned out to be entirely necessary, as the ship that was just a dot in the sky and then a vague nonairship shape quite rapidly grew into a slim wooden wand from which long narrow leaves grew like great living sailwings. It was a treeship, small and built for speed, and if Loch were any judge, there were only a few people with the wealth and access to a ship like that who would have any business contacting her.

  Her guess proved right when the treeship came to a relative stop, matching their speed, and a familiar elven shape climbed up from belowdecks.

  “Hey, Ethel,” Kail called over. “Always a pleasure.”

  Irrethelathlialann did not smile. “There are messages waiting for you at every major city, but the Dragon believed that the urgency necessitated my coming directly.”

  “He found something about the ancients,” Loch said, at the same time that Ululenia said, “Dairy.”

  Irrethelathlialann nodded grimly. “You’re both right. It seems the boy, erstwhile Champion of Dawn and my employer’s current lover, is tied to the ancients even more directly than his little prophecy would have suggested. In order to return to this world, the ancients need a very specific sacrifice . . . one which they captured en route to the relative safety of the Empire.”

  “No.” Leaves suddenly sprouted from the railings, then went golden and fell dead to the deck. Ululenia didn’t even seem to notice. “No.”

  “Yes, little virgin-bane.” Now Irrethelathlialann did smile. “It’s not just the world being threatened with destruction and enslavement and my people being reduced to soulless husks. Now you might lose the young man who refused to sleep with you.”

  “Do you know where he’s being held?” Loch asked.

  Irrethelathlialann nodded. “A large mining facility in the Sunrise Canyon. It seems that’s where the gate from our world to theirs is located.”

  Loch gripped her walking stick and turned to the others.

  “All right. New plan.”

  Four

  HERLIT WOKE UP a few hours later with the other salvagers looking down at him anxiously.

  The voice was there as well, at the back of his mind, completing his sentences for him but not always with the right words.

  He’d been a real shipbuilder once, back before a tight-ass supervisor and a few bad deals with spare parts saw him kicked out of the port cities. He knew the safety rules, and the dangers of being around wind-daemons for too long with shoddy wards. Hell, he’d drilled the men out here on the same damn safety rules.

  It couldn’t have messed up his head. He’d been smarter than that, always smarter. He’d been careful, had to be, given the crappy ships he worked on most days with tools the folks in the port cities would have thrown out as no longer useful. This had to be something else, something special.

  It could be his big chance, the voice whispered. Take down Loch, and the whole Republic would know Herlit was serious business. He’d get real clients, not smugglers with scrapyard parts and scrapyard money.

  “Sir,” one of the men said, “we were worried.”

  “Still are,” said another one.

  But how to get Loch? How to do it, how to find her and kill her for what she did?

  “It’s fine,” Herlit said.

  “S’not fine,” a third man said. “You’ve got the fog, Herlit. You need to see a healer.”

  The reaction was like a kick in the gut. “It’s fine,” Herlit repeated. “Not the damn fog.”

  If he dropped the wards on one of the airships, a wind-daemon would escape. No, no, that was a terrible idea, damn, maybe he did have the fog . . . unless the wind-daemon would definitely go after Loch, and it would, it would, it absolutely would, all Herlit had to do was drop the wards and rip open the canvas, that was all. The freight hauler, the daemon was still summoned from when they’d flown it earlier today, it was perfect, that was the one to use!

  “Need to clear my head,” Herlit said. “You go over the old ferry again, see if there’s anything to strip. Going to tune that freight hauler. Something off on the morning run.”

  The salvagers looked at him in silence. They’d never questioned him before. He’d taught them everything they knew.

  He opened his mouth to speak again, and that was when three strange people came out of the nearby woods and headed toward Herlit and his men.

  One of them was tall, too tall to be human, and when she pushed the hood of her fur-lined cloak back, the tusks gave her away as an ogre. The other woman was bony and barefoot and wore a peasant dress, but her smile was twitchy, and the grass behind her looked muddy, like she was trailing dirt.

  The third was a dwarf in a cloak, and he or she or it was the least strange of them.

  “We seek a woman,” said the bony woman, her voice flat. “Tall, Urujar. Her name is Loch. We want her.”

  They would take her, hurt her, kill her, and that was good, but bad, because it would be them doing it, and it needed to be a daemon, needed to be her.

  Herlit looked at the ogre. She had a staff, but a staff wasn’t a sword. She was the one to worry about, still, big as she was.

  “Haven’t seen her,” Herlit said.

  “Her aura was here,” said the bony woman.

  “Lies,” said the dwarf. His voice was hollow, like it was being piped through a tube.

  “Take them!” Herlit snarled, and swung at the ogre with his wrench.

  His wrench sank into the ogre’s chest, and for a moment Herlit felt the fierce joy of striking her down, and in the back of his mind he wondered if maybe he did have the fog, because he’d never felt like that about hitting someone.

  And then the wrench passed out the other side of the ogre, and Herlit was stumbling through her, and it was like walking through a gust of rain during a storm, and then he was behind her, and the whole world was a little too sharp and bright and hurt his eyes.

  Two of his men were on the ground, coughing and clutching at their faces, and there was mustard-yellow mist swirling around them and trailing out from the dwarf’s hood. Another stumbled and twitched, something wrapped around him, and Herlit saw that it was the bony woman, only she wasn’t bony anymore. She was coiled like a rope, and the man tangled up in her was glowing and shrinking somehow, bits of him going away.

  Herlit took all this in as the ogre turned to him. Her hand reached into his chest, and, again, it felt like walking into a heavy rain.

  “Do we need him?” the ogre asked, and Herlit looked down at the hand embedded to the wrist in his chest, and he held very still, even though some part of him thought that he should leap away, because it wasn’t a very large part, and it wasn’t sure, and all he could think was that yes, yes, they needed him, please, they needed him, the fog was lifting and everything was sharp, and the ogre’s hand was this strange cold softness all through him.

  “No,” said the bony woman.

  And then, with an impossible crushing pain, it wasn’t.

  Sunrise Canyon was a great crimson ribbon that cut through the rolling hills of the countryside around it. The grass, a pale green that faded to gold in autumn, gave way sharply to the vivid red of stone walls, slick and shining as though carved by a master and not worn away over countless generations by the river that ran along the canyon floor. During the day, the canyon got enough direct sunlight for light foliage to grow near the river, and the bright canyon walls were like buildings that blocked the sun. At night, the trace crystals that gave the walls their color lit the entire canyon in red, giving more glow than starlight and less than the moon, casting strange shadows on either side.

  It was well after sunset as Desidora descended into the canyon, carried in the talons of a great snowy-white eagle whose win
gs were vast and silent and pink in the light of the walls.

  Desidora looked over and saw the mining facility as they passed by it, a great wooden dock attached to a well-braced archway in the wall. The dock and archway were the only black parts of the glowing wall, save for a narrow trail that led down the wall itself, switching back and forth several times before it finally reached the dock. It looked to Desidora like a giant mouth with its tongue sticking out.

  The mining facility was not their destination this night, however.

  “Can you sense the fairy creature?” she asked, looking down at the sparkling river that snaked through the bushes and low trees below and gripping Ululenia’s talons a bit more tightly. She did not hate heights, but a few months ago, she had fallen to her death (priestesshood), and it had left her a little nervous.

  Not yet, Ululenia said, and to Desidora, her friend’s mental voice sounded strained. The crystals in the canyon walls are the rushing waters that hide the wolf’s quiet steps.

  “And it is the wolf, in this metaphor?” Desidora asked, looking up to the underside of Ululenia’s wings. Near the leg on one wing was a patch of black, in a shape that looked almost like antlers.

  Ululenia had been pure white once, but while Desidora had been falling to her death those few months ago, Ululenia had been helping Loch win a gambling tournament. In the process, she’d fought another fairy creature, an experience that had marked her. Literally, in this case.

  It is. Ululenia sighed in Desidora’s mind. I hear your words, spoken and unspoken, and you need not fear. I am no danger to you or the others.

  “Shall I just nod uncomfortably and let it be until something absolutely terrible happens and then get the full story,” Desidora asked, “or could you save time and fill me in right now?”

  Ululenia’s wings flapped once, tightly, as they slid between the branches of the tallest trees in the canyon. A moment later, they were coming up on the ground. Ululenia flapped again, slowing their descent, and Desidora let go as Ululenia’s talons loosened, landing in a crouch with no more impact than if she’d jumped from a table. Ululenia herself landed in her natural form, a snowy-white unicorn whose horn shone in all the colors of the rainbow. The black mark still rode her flank, a black mask from which rose a pair of antlers.