The scorpion shuddered in Kail and Dairy’s grasp. “Lies!”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Kail muttered. “See how it works next time your boss sends you after somebody’s mother. Let him loose, Dairy.” He shoved the scorpion’s stinger away hard as Dairy backed away. “The kid and I are leaving. You come after us again, I will kill you with a clean conscience and sleep just fine that night.”
The scorpion scuttled backward, chittering wordlessly. Shadows closed around it as it left the alley, and then it was gone.
“Could it have gotten Mister Hessler back?” Dairy asked quietly.
“It never helps to ask yourself that, kid.”
As soon as Loch and Icy had cleared the doorway, Ululenia turned to the daemon. It was already pulling itself into a humanoid shape. Its legs had taken on the texture of the carpet, its body was the same stone as the wall, and its arms were the wood of the bookshelves.
“You will not have her,” Ululenia said, and her horn blazed with the strength of her words.
“LLOKK ISS MMIINE,” the daemon roared, and strode toward Ululenia. “NNO UUNICORRNN CANN SSTOP MEE.”
Then it paused in surprise as vines coiled around its legs.
“I feel pity,” Ululenia said, “as the wolf who sees the dog with its leg in a trap.”
The vines twisted and coiled, and the daemon slammed into the wall.
“Jyelle hated Loch, and when the wind-daemon devoured her, that hatred was still fresh enough for you to catch it,” Ululenia went on as the daemon ripped free from the vines, only to catch itself in the tangle of branches that had sprouted from the bookshelf. “The seed of that hatred blossomed inside you, and you were perverted into this.”
“I WILL KILL HER.” The daemon tore through the branches. It had a human shape now, not merely humanoid, and it had added the vines and branches to its appearance. “SHE DID THIS TO ME.”
“No.” Ululenia pulled at water and earth, shaped them to her will, and sent the ceiling crashing down upon the daemon. “You have no one to blame but yourself. Whatever regret you hold, whatever blame you might place, this is the seed you have planted, and only you may decide how it grows.” She shook her head as she spoke to the pile of rubble that crumbled and cracked before her. “I have pranced in woods the humans think enchanted, where daemons who found freedom joined the earth until they became it. Turn from this hatred, and you could be the same. That is the good news.”
The rubble exploded, and the daemon stood in what was left. It had a woman’s form now, and its body was stone. “NO MORE TRICKS,” it said as it leaped at Ululenia.
The air around Ululenia shimmered, and what met the daemon’s charge was snowy white, and it had a rainbow horn upon its brow, but it had a lot more claws and fangs than anything that called itself a unicorn should ever have.
“No more tricks,” Ululenia snarled through the saber teeth that jutted from her face, and she slashed with claws that tore through stone and ripped chunks from the daemon’s hide. “For the bad news is that I know exactly how you feel.”
Ten minutes, several unconscious guards, and one small office fire later, Tern and Desidora came back to the entry room with the data crystal in hand.
“Hold on,” said the Urujar guard as Tern approached, frowning. “We’re getting reports of possible trouble near the Lapisavantum. Would you know anything about that?”
“Well,” said Tern, opening her mouth, “that’s a really good question, and the thing is, when you think about it—”
“That has absolutely nothing to do with us,” Desidora said from behind Tern. “We don’t know anything about it. We weren’t even on that floor.”
Tern looked at Desidora, specifically in the over-her-head-where-flaring-purple-light-should-be area. Nothing.
The guard did the same thing, frowning again. “So where are you headed now?”
“We’re off to do a good day’s work going over the data for our report,” Desidora said. Purple light flared over her head, and she sighed. “Oh, for Tasheveth’s sake. We’re off to get kahva and see if we can meet anybody cute.”
The guard nodded slowly. “All right. Have a good day.”
Tern and Desidora left the white-marbled building and walked off into the safety of Rossle-Nesef.
“So,” Tern said when they were out of earshot, “you can pretty much do your death-priestess aura-manipulation thing on the verifier ward, and all the awesome not-quite-lies I told were totally unnecessary.”
“Maybe a little,” Desidora said, smiling, as they stopped at a corner, “but why waste energy, if you can handle it?” She raised her hand to hail a carriage.
“You could’ve told me,” Tern muttered. A carriage came to a halt, and Tern grumped her way inside while Desidora spoke with the driver.
Desidora slid into the carriage beside her. “If I’d told you, you’d have stammered out the first one and then looked to me from then on out,” she said as she sat down. The carriage slid into motion with the sound of hooves clopping on stone.
“Why the hell did I even come in the first place?” Looking out the carriage window, Tern glared at the buildings. “I hate Rossle-Nesef.”
“I could have bypassed the verifier wards,” Desidora said, smiling serenely, “and perhaps I could even have altered the aura on your old badge from Heaven’s Spire to make it function here—”
“Oh, now I feel better!” The sound of the horses’ hooves changed as the carriage turned onto the Coin Bridge that separated the wealthy mansions of East Bank from the warehouses, guildhouses, and kahva-houses of West Bank.
“But I could not have found the information you did in the Lapisavantum,” Desidora finished. “You located data that by all rights should not have even existed, data the ancients went to trouble to remove from all records. You also picked the lock that got us into the Lapisavantum, and you located the room itself faster than I would have been able to.”
“Hooray,” Tern muttered. The small hexagonal stones that had given the Coin Bridge its name rattled beneath their seats. She remembered too many nights of coming back home across that bridge, feeling herself getting smaller and dumber as the clever girl who hung out with dwarves and alchemists became the disappointing daughter who talked too much at the dances.
At that, another thought struck her.
“Why are we crossing the Coin Bridge?” she asked. “The treeship is waiting outside West Bank.”
The carriage left the bridge as it came onto Poyer Avenue, then made the left turn onto Slowridge, the tight turn that forced the horse on the left to either stop or walk in place for a moment. You could tell which nobles had the most money, because they took the time to train their horses to walk in place rather than just stopping while the other horse made the turn, which was showy and pointless and the kind of thing rich guild families took pride in. Tern knew that the same way that she knew that the Coin Bridge led to Poyer, and then Slowridge, and then Watchcomb, and then . . .
“We are crossing the Coin Bridge,” Desidora said, “because I am a love priestess, and not all love is romantic.”
“Desidora,” Tern said. “Diz, no.”
“You agreed that we should warn them,” Desidora pointed out.
“By letter,” Tern said. The carriage swung right onto Watchcomb. “You don’t know what this is like, Diz. You don’t know what they’re like.”
“If something happened,” Desidora said, “and you did not try, you would regret it.”
“Would I?” Tern asked with some venom, and the carriage rolled to a stop.
Tern got out of the carriage, glaring at Desidora’s winsome smile, and looked at the stately manor that rose tastefully behind a low iron fence that was more ornamental than practical.
She had hopped that fence to sneak in dozens of times growing up, and hopped it to sneak out dozens of times plus one.
Her steel-toed work boots clopped on the stones of the road. The lapitect robes slid clumsily as she pulled them ove
r her head, revealing the many-pocketed brown work dress she wore underneath.
She tugged at her hair as she walked toward the front gate, like that was going to do something.
“Your business, miss?” said one of the guards at the gate. He was polite and young. Tern had never met him.
“I’d like to see Master or Mistress Silkworth.” It came out scratchy at the end, and Tern wished she’d cleared her throat first.
“Ah.” The guard smiled. “And who shall I say is calling?”
“Tell them . . .” She swallowed. “Tell them Laridae is here.”
The guard nodded, smiled again, and strolled off toward the back entrance of the manor.
Tern stood and waited. After a minute, she realized that she was fidgeting with the cufflink that fired sleep darts and stopped herself with an effort. The other guard watched her impassively. He was older, and she thought that maybe she remembered him.
The first guard finally came back, smiling apologetically. “I’m terribly sorry, miss,” he said through the bars, “but the Silkworths do not know anyone by that name.”
Tern looked at the manor. The second window from the left on the upper floor had been Mother’s reading room. The pale-gray curtain twitched as it closed.
“I see.” Tern forced a smile and a nod to the guard, who was just the poor guy who had to deliver the message. The other guard, the older one, was trying not to smirk, and Tern realized that she did remember him after all.
“They did ask me to give you this,” the nice guard added, and passed a pouch through the bars, “for any trouble you might encounter in the future.”
Tern took the pouch of coins and smiled and started to walk away, her back straight and her head high.
Then she stopped and turned. “Hey,” she called back to the gate. The young guard looked surprised and a bit shocked that she had raised her voice. “The Plumfisher acquisition. You tell them it’s the Plumfisher acquisition all over again, and they should ride tight and count twice.”
The young guard looked offended and confused simultaneously. The old guard frowned and put a hand on his blade.
Tern stepped into the carriage and put the coin purse on the seat beside her. “It was a time when the guild politics turned ugly,” she said to Desidora, “and the nobles tried to play us against each other.”
“Tern.”
“They’ll know what it means. They’ll check security and increase the guard, and—”
“Tern.” Desidora reached out gently and pulled Tern into a hug. “I’m sorry,” and that was when something in Tern’s chest broke and her breath caught and her eyes burned.
“Just get me the hell out of Rossle-Nesef,” Tern said, wiping her eyes, “and buy me a damn good drink later.”
Loch and Icy were climbing over the Westteich estate’s wall when a snowy-white dove flapped past them, settled on a tree branch outside, and shifted into human form.
Ululenia’s dress was still white, but it was cut lower and clung to her more tightly. She rested on the branch with one leg stretched and the other bent, sliding out from a high slit in the hem. Her ash-blond hair was no longer simple and straight but tumbled over one shoulder, covering one eye before falling into lazy, sinuous curls.
“Trouble?” Loch asked, hopping down from the wall and rolling as she landed.
“Nothing I couldn’t handle, Little One.” Ululenia smiled. Her lips were darker than Loch remembered, a rich red that made her bright-white teeth seem sharper.
“Glad to hear it.” Loch looked over as Icy landed beside her. He held up the book as confirmation, and Loch nodded. “Let’s go, before Jyelle catches up.”
“It may take her some time to pull herself together,” Ululenia said, still smiling, and slid down from the tree.
“We want in,” said the Glimmering Man, or the incomprehensible titanic creature working the Glimmering Man like a puppet. “It’s more interesting where you are. Things taste better. We’ve eaten most of the good-tasting things here.”
Hessler coughed. “I’m afraid that the path to my world is blocked,” he said, trying to push aside the way that the thing’s words reverberated in his head, as if for a moment he had thought them himself.
“It is very difficult,” agreed the Glimmering Man. The great mass of shimmering rainbows over pink . . . skin, Hessler decided . . . coiled, then stretched, not like a living creature with muscle and tendons but like oil sliding across a hot pan, and all it once it was around Hessler, as he turned to try to follow the movement. Instead of the strange alien starscape, there were rainbows all around him, shining and shimmering in a great sphere, perhaps twenty or thirty yards across, with just him and the Glimmering Man inside. “The things that make up your world are too heavy. When we touched the core of it, we could not stay ourselves, and we collapsed into nothing.”
“Yes, as I recall, the Glimmering Folk could not come to the ground,” Hessler said, his voice going up in pitch ever so slightly despite himself. “I assume that was one of the reasons you created creatures to fight for you on the ground against the ancients.”
“Yes. The things we made called this place the Shadowlands. And the ancients, the others? Are they still there?” the Glimmering Man asked as the coils around Hessler tightened into a featureless sphere offering no escape. “They tasted different. They came from below, and we came from above.” The words twisted around in Hessler’s head, steadily tightening in his skull. “They made the door for us, and they were very angry when we came through.” As Hessler’s eyes began to pound in time with his own pulse, the Glimmering Man said, “If I made a door, I would be happy with whatever came through. Daemons or ancients or you.”
Hessler’s vision was going dark at the edges. “This is going to make for a fascinating paper,” he said, and flung out a hand, “but I cannot write it if my brain explodes.”
He conjured an illusion of flame, a ball of fire between him and the Glimmering Man.
At least, that had been the intent. What actually happened was that the Glimmering Man’s skin melted, and then went scorched black as the Glimmering Man opened a toothless mouth in a wordless scream. The great massive coils that had formed the sphere around him darted back far faster than something so large should have been able to move, and in a flash, it was over him, or across from him, still vast but not all around anymore.
It roared, shaking the tiny little cord from which the Glimmering Man hung like a man shaking a finger that had been burned on a stove, and its great expanse of skin or scales or slime shifted from pink to gray, and from the great mass of tentacles—Hessler had still not placed any anatomy that he would properly call a face, and he wasn’t even entirely sure about a torso—arose long barbed blades.
“If illusions are reality here,” Hessler said, wiping cold sweat from his brow, “then you should strongly consider leaving me in peace.”
He flung his hands out again, and—
—collapsed upon the street in the middle of Ros-Oanki.
The crowd looked at him in confusion as he got back to his feet, and he heard people murmuring to themselves as he patted himself down and checked to ensure that he was all back. He saw wagons with tarps hung out to sell fruit, crates holding bolts of cloth and weapons, and people, people everywhere, talking and laughing and arguing as they bartered and walked.
There was no question of it being a trick. The great form had barely been able to imitate a human form. A marketplace was out of the question, much less one with dynamic lighting textures, which as an illusionist Hessler understood to be hideously difficult.
A chittering hiss sounded off to his right, out of place in the market, and Hessler turned to see the scorpion he had fought while rescuing Kail’s mother. It stared at him, the bulbous pouches on its carapace glowing and pulsing.
“Not murderer,” it said, and then shadows closed around it, and it was gone.
Hessler shook his head and, for want of any other idea, headed off toward the treeship.
Fourteen
WHERE ARE WE at on the Festival of Excellence?” Pyvic asked Derenky in the main office of the Justicars.
“Construction is actually ahead of schedule, for once,” Derenky said, consulting notes that flickered in the air above his paladin band. “The amphitheater will be done on time, and the fairground is close enough that the guildsmen can throw money at it and make it work.”
“How many are they expecting?” Pyvic asked, keeping his voice casual while he looked at the red band of crystal on Derenky’s arm. It seemed like his old justicar, the polite and political young man with the ready smile and the keen interest in eventually getting Pyvic’s job.
“They expect twenty thousand or more at the opening ceremonies.” Derenky smiled. “That’s spectators only, not counting the athletes, scholars, performers, and visiting dignitaries from the Empire. Most of the spectators will be upper-class merchants and nobles, given the necessity of travel and the cost of tickets, but they plan for a healthy number of working-class attendees as well.”
“Twenty-plus,” Tomlin muttered, shaking his head. “And no local guard, since they’re basically building this over that mine.”
“Cevirt has a Mister Skinner handling security for the event,” Pyvic said, “but I’ll be pushing for a strong justicar presence. If anything goes wrong here, it’ll endanger most of the Republic’s best and brightest.”
Derenky pressed a few buttons on his band. “I’d be happy to lead the security detachment, sir. I’ve cleared my own cases and am only assisting on others at the moment.”
“You cleared your cases?” Pyvic asked in surprise.
“Benefits both mental and physical,” Derenky said, holding up his band. “With this thing, I don’t need nearly as much sleep, and it seems to aid in concentration as well. I really think you should consider getting one, if you can afford it.”
“I’m still used to my calendar being on paper,” Pyvic said wryly, “and in any event, if you’re free, I’ll need you holding things in place up here while I supervise the festival.”
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