The Paladin Caper

by Patrick Weekes

  “Yes, and the supervisor will be more than happy to show us the processing center,” Loch said, her voice carrying across the dock, “and prove that the Elflands doesn’t need to demand reparations for damaging the river water with magical pollution.”

  “But we’re not cleared to let anyone see the processing center,” said the first worker again.

  “Do you want a diplomatic incident?” Kail asked, hopping down from the gangplank as Irrethelathlialann approached the dock worker. “Because you’re talking like a man who wants the news-puppets to be tossing out his name as the guy who started a diplomatic incident with the Elflands.”

  “Just contact the supervisor and get him here,” Loch said patiently. “The ambassador will be happy to wait.”

  “Briefly,” Irrethelathlialann added.

  Loch solved the issue for everyone by walking forward, clacking her walking stick and brushing past the workers. “We’re certainly not making him wait outside here.”

  The workers showed them into what was clearly a waiting room, nice enough for visiting technicians but with that hint of chemicals still in the air. A window looked out over the docking area, currently filled with concerned workers staring in at them, and a door on the other side of the room led further into the complex. A desk, currently unattended, had several crystal panels and a mug filled with an impressive number of pencils. A young man wearing ringmail and a helmet and carrying a truncheon looked at them with concern from his position by the door.

  “How long will it take the supervisor to get here?” Loch asked the nearest worker as Irrethelathlialann poked at a couch with an expression of active dislike.

  “Oh, it shouldn’t take long,” the worker said. “The mine supervisor is at home, but you want the processing center supervisor, and he’s still here.”

  “Ah,” said Irrethelathlialann, blinking, “good, yes.”

  “That is certainly better than the hour we were expecting to have to sit here and wait,” Kail added.

  “Please hurry,” Loch added, and the worker left, shutting the door behind him.

  Irrethelathlialann looked at the window. “Aural emanations necessitate sight-line impediment,” he said irritably to Kail. Kail sighed and pulled the curtain shut across the window, and Irrethelathlialann turned to the guard. “Security personnel?”

  “Yes, it’s all right,” Loch said. “We don’t need to worry about him. He’s just to make sure we’re safe until the supervisor shows up to escort you on your tour.”

  “Crown chakra blockage obfuscates observational ability,” Irrethelathlialann said, and waved at the guard. “Clarity is desired.”

  The guard blinked. “What’s the elf going on about?”

  “He wants you to take your helmet off so that he can see that you’re not a daemon,” Kail said with absolute disdain in his voice. “It’s apparently really important to their culture.”

  Loch cleared her throat. “He sort of sees you as the supervisor, since you’re here right now, and you’re an authority figure,” she said. “There’s a greeting ritual.”

  The guard glared. “I’m not doing a greeting ritual for some—”

  “I know!” Kail cut in. “I know, and I’m so sorry to be asking, believe me—do you think we wanted this assignment?—but since your supervisor apparently forgot that this tour was even happening . . .”

  “Cultural insensitivity deeply offensive,” Irrethelathlialann said. “Introduction salutations refused?”

  “No, no, no one is refusing to respect your customs and start an incident while we wait for the supervisor to get here and take care of this,” Kail said. “Ma’am, do the bow thing.”

  Loch swept back into a deep bow, her arms outflung. “May your leaves drink the sunlight.”

  Irrethelathlialann returned the bow, only more gracefully. “Roots cradled in the earth.”

  Loch gestured at the guard.

  After a long moment, he sighed and started to bow. “May your—”

  Kail coughed. “Helmet.”

  “Metallic alloy blocks crown chakra,” Irrethelathlialann said.

  The guard sighed, unbuckled his helmet, and dipped into a bow, at which point Loch rapped him on the back of the head with her walking stick. He went down bonelessly as Kail locked the door leading outside.

  “Well, that was racist,” Irrethelathlialann said, moving to the door that led into the processing center.

  “Don’t act like you’ve never played the crazy-elf card,” Loch said, moving the guard over behind the couch. “Door?”

  “Locked. What happened to us having an hour to case the area and come up with a distraction under the guise of waiting for the supervisor, so that by the time your unicorn arrives with the key, we have a plan in place to move in?”

  “We’re staying flexible,” Loch said. “Kail, watch the doors. Irrethelathlialann, I’m guessing those crystal panes are tied to scrying crystals throughout the complex.”

  “You don’t say,” the elf replied, sitting down and thumbing the control panel. It chimed at him, and he held up a hand. The ring on his finger, lined with magic that stopped him from actually having the reaction most elves did to crystalline artifacts unless he wanted to have it, glittered, and he glared at the control panel with distaste. He pressed a few crystals in rapid succession, and the control panel chimed again, more happily this time. “I’m in. Scrying crystals through most of the mines—shielded heavily, so that the magic necessary to power them doesn’t cause an explosion. I also have access to what they’re doing in the processing center.”

  “Any chance you can shut down the golems?” Kail asked from his spot by the door. “Even if they’re not built for combat, there’s always some command that ends up with them crawling all over us.”

  “Not from here.” Irrethelathlialann frowned. “The golems run independently except for short-range control-wand overrides, in order to avoid magical contamination from the mine.”

  Kail shrugged. “It was worth a shot.”

  “How about opening up the processing center?” Loch asked, shoving the couch in front of the door leading farther into the back area, on the off chance anyone wanted to come in that way.

  “No. We’ll have to hope your unicorn and death priestess come through. The processing center is”—the elf broke off—“strange. They’ve stopped production on most of the standard crystals your Republic uses. Instead, the processing center is producing either golems or . . . something called Project Paladin.”

  “Not ominous at all,” Kail said, “in case you were wondering, Ethel. What about Dairy? We find him, all of their evil plans fall flat, right?”

  “He’s not in the processing center, unless he’s being held somewhere without scrying ports.” Irrethelathlialann’s fingers flicked faster than Loch’s eye could follow. “No, no, nonono, trying the mines, and—” He broke off. “I may have found a flaw in your plan.”

  Loch went behind the desk and looked over his shoulder.

  The scrying panel Irrethelathlialann had activated showed an enormous stone chamber whose walls were, from what Loch could see in the fuzzy scrying screen, solid crystal. An altar, also formed from a single block of solid crystal, sat at the center of the chamber, with some sort of staff planted in the ground in front of it.

  Chained to the altar was Dairy, wearing only a loincloth.

  “Look at those shoulders. Kid’s been swimming,” Kail observed.

  “That’s one of the mines?” Loch asked.

  Irrethelathlialann glared. “Specifically, the locked mine directly beneath the processing center, listed as being filled with deadly levels of magical energy.”

  “Might not actually be filled with deadly magical energy,” Kail said. “Dairy’s fine, after all.”

  “Dairy is immune to all magic,” Irrethelathlialann said, stabbing at a little bar on the side of the crystal pane. “And according to these readings, the ambient magic in that room would kill you or Isafesira in seconds, and me faster
than that.”

  Kail clicked his tongue. “Well, Diz can get through it.”

  “Diz being the death priestess who is down at the bottom of the canyon getting the key?” Irrethelathlialann asked acidly.

  “There’s no need to be snotty, Ethel.”

  “We have no key to enter the processing center and no means of rescuing the boy from the magic-flooded chamber even if we do access the processing center.” The elf glared at Loch. “We also lack the hour we should have had to plan our entry while awaiting the supervisor, since he is apparently here.”

  “Keeping late hours, whoever he is,” Kail said.

  “I suspect the new supervisor has little need for sleep,” Irrethelathlialann said, and pointed at the scrying panel. Loch looked back.

  Standing before Dairy was a golem, and in one hand, it held Ghylspwr.

  Five

  I STILL HOLD concerns about key parts of this plan,” Icy said, as though Tern hadn’t heard it the first two or three times.

  Tern, Icy, and Hessler stood on the canyon floor, well below the mining facility entrance and on the far side of the canyon from where Ululenia and Desidora were presumably violating the integrity of the corpse to create a copy of the aura-locked key crystal. The walls were red and spooky, the trees were creepy, and the overall feeling was a lot less “in a friendly city with a lot of good kahva shops” than Tern liked.

  “It will be fine, Icy,” she said, again, and it looked for a moment like Icy was going to stop, but then Hessler, normally the best boyfriend in the world, had to chime in with, “What aspects of the plan concern you?”

  “The use of an uncontrolled magical explosion remains foremost in my mind,” Icy said.

  They stood near a pile of loose rubble that marred the otherwise glassy perfection of the canyon wall. The rubble started about forty feet overhead, and Tern could see the original man-made marks where a tunnel had once been opened in the wall, along with scars in the ground where old scaffolding had once stood. According to the miner she and Icy had bought drinks for the last time they had considered robbing the processing center, the second mine entrance—an attempt to increase productivity and vent the magical buildup in some of the older tunnels—had failed miserably in a collapse that nearly cost good men their lives.

  “I think uncontrolled is a really unfair way of putting it,” Tern said, looking up through the arms of her crossbow at a small spur of stone a few feet above the tunnel. “And now everyone hush.”

  Everyone hushed. Tern aimed for another moment, let out a long slow breath, and then fired.

  The bolt, tipped with a dwarven rocksplitter head, sank half its length into the glowing red rock, with a thin line dangling from it down to the ground.

  “We’re eliminating any chance of deaths of innocent miners by creating the explosion at night,” Hessler said, “so if any moral concerns can be—”

  “My concerns are that we are making an explosion,” Icy said with a tiny little sigh only Tern could hear, and pulled himself up the line with an easy hand-over-hand rhythm that looked simple until you thought about it or tried to do it yourself in an inn room once or twice.

  “To be fair to Icy,” Hessler said, “we’re not sure exactly how large an explosion this is going to cause. There’s a reason the miners close these tunnels when the ambient magic builds up past a certain point.”

  “Baby, as long as we’re not in the tunnel, we’re fine,” Tern said.

  “See, you sound very confident, but I’m not sure how you’ve arrived at—”

  “Shh, Icy needs to concentrate.”

  “I don’t believe he’s still within earshot.”

  “Shhhh.”

  Icy had in fact just reached the old tunnel entrance about fifty feet overhead, holding on to the line with one hand and carefully working his other hand into the rubble that marked the collapsed tunnel. Tern heard him grunt slightly, and a little plume of red-glowing dust puffed out around him, along with a few small rocks that skipped down and clattered to the ground below.

  “There is a small passage,” Icy called down softly. “I believe I can maneuver through it.” He uncoiled a length of fine leather tubing from his waist and tossed it down to Hessler, leaving the end attached to his waist. “Remember, one sharp tug means that you must feed me more tubing and shake the line, as it may have gotten caught, while two tugs means that I am stuck and need you to pull me back.”

  “How many tugs means that we should trigger the explosion?” Tern asked.

  Icy raised an eyebrow. “Me standing next to you, having extricated myself from the tunnel safely, and explicitly telling you to trigger the explosion is the only agreed-upon signal for you to trigger the explosion.”

  “Or maybe three tugs?” Tern grinned.

  Icy’s eyebrow communicated what most people communicated only by swearing loudly, which was impressive, given that it was the middle of the night and said eyebrow was lit only by evil red rocks. Icy grunted, let go of the line holding him up, and eased himself into the tiny gap in the rocks that Tern was only half sure actually existed.

  “Do you wish I exercised more?” Hessler said after a moment, feeding the coil of tubing up into the tunnel overhead.

  Tern punched him gently on the shoulder. “You are perfect just the way you are, boyfriend.”

  “Ever since you got shot—”

  “Which I recovered from completely,” Tern said immediately, ignoring the way the bones in her shoulder ached whenever the weather changed.

  “I just . . .” Hessler sighed. “I don’t want to let you down again.”

  “Baby, I don’t see how you having rippling abs is going to make the difference between life and death,” Tern said. “If you want to have rippling abs, go for it. I will absolutely support that. But do it for yourself, not for me.”

  After a moment, Hessler said, “Thank you.”

  “Unless you want rippling abs so that you look better naked and can do that one position we saw in the book.”

  Hessler coughed. “I notice a fixation upon abdominal—” He broke off at a tug on the tubing, and shook the line with careful concentration.

  “You don’t need to save me,” Tern said.

  “Nor can he,” came a voice from behind them, and Tern and Hessler turned to see the trackers Kail had talked about coming out of the trees toward them.

  Desidora turned around slowly.

  The chimera loomed over her, a few steps away. It was not as big as she had expected. Curled up, it was probably no larger than a pony. But it spread itself wide enough to blot out the nighttime sky, the translucent skin between its wings catching the crimson light from the walls so that the wings themselves seemed to glow.

  Heads watched her. Wolf-eagle, jaguar, snake. Every eye burned with glowing embers of anger. Rainbow sparks hissed at joints, dripping bits of magic on the canyon floor.

  “I do not wish to fight,” Desidora said, completely honestly.

  “Death priestess,” the chimera said, and it was a they, not an it. The beaked wolf spat one word, and the snake hissed the other. “Chosen by the gods to bring death. Do you bring ours?”

  “No,” Desidora said, taking a slow step backward.

  “Pity. We were many, once. Pixie and satyr and peryton and sylph. There was fighting. Our fault but not ours. We did not want it, except those of us who did.” The voices whined and growled through the words as if biting through each syllable. “And now we are us.” They took a step forward to match Desidora’s step back, a wolf paw spurred with porcupine spines. “We hurt. We never stop hurting. The feeding does not let us become one again . . . but you might. Your gift of death . . . the power might let us become one. Or die. Either would be good.”

  The air around Desidora went cold, and the grass darkened to twisting black thorns around her. “I have said twice that I wish no conflict with you, but if death is your wish, attack me, and I will grant it.” Her dress slid to a glossy black trimmed with silver glyphs at the
hem, which, honestly, Desidora thought was a really nice touch.

  “Stupid woman.” The chimera twitched, and then they were on top of Desidora, pinning her to the ground so quickly that she had not even seen them move. “You hold no power over us! We have no soul for you to touch with your death powers! We are unliving, pollution of the ancients’ magic, and now that they return, we will be hunted and killed.” The beaked wolf head loomed in close to Desidora’s face, close enough for her to feel its breath. “But we will die last.”

  “Surprise,” Desidora muttered, and stabbed the chimera with the silver knife she had slipped from her pocket.

  The silver caught fire as it touched the fairy creature’s skin, and the chimera reared back, every one of their heads shrieking. The chimera flashed, rainbow sparks flaring wildly, and Desidora felt a tremendous impact, rolled and slid, and then slammed into the canyon wall with another tremendous impact that left the stone around her cracked.

  It would have killed a normal woman, but Desidora was not a normal woman at the moment. She struggled to her feet as the chimera howled and thrashed, one of their legs trailing limp on the ground with prismatic energy sparking from it.

  “Too many,” the chimera rasped, “too many to die so easily.”

  “Your loss,” Desidora said. One hand slapped the wall, which glowed red with the latent energy of the crystals deep within it.

  The red glow suddenly went dark around her hand, fading to normal stone and leaving a dead and dull section of canyon wall twenty feet across, and Desidora raised her other hand and flung her stolen fire at the chimera.

  This time, they staggered, eagle and bat wings flailing madly, a dozen malformed claws lashing at the air, but Desidora saw that while the force of the fire had flung the chimera back, the creature was largely unburnt, with just a little smoke curling away at the edges of the body where fur met feathers. Whatever twisted magic held the chimera together protected the creature as well.

  As her attacker stumbled, she lunged for the silver dagger where it lay on the ground.