With an enormous roar, Mister Dragon flapped into view over the stadium, his red scales shining gold with each flap of his rainbow-glowing wings. The crowd screamed as he let loose a brilliant burst of fire that scorched the top rows of seats.
At this distance, it was almost impossible to be sure, but Loch thought she saw chains of silver about his throat.
“Mister Skinner is good with animals,” Lesaguris said. “Now, it’s coming for you, but it’s going to hurt a whole lot of innocent people on the way.”
The ground underneath Loch began to shake.
“Sir,” Naria said, smiling politely, “was the stadium field constructed using earth-daemons?” Her lenses seemed to have recovered.
Lesaguris turned to her as the shaking intensified. “It was, baroness. Why do you ask?”
“Isa, in her never-ending quest to make as many enemies as possible, has a daemon that wants to kill her. She was wearing a daemon-ward charm to hide herself from it,” Naria said, and then held up a small necklace, “but it seems to have come off when she tried to assault you.”
“Naria,” Loch said quietly, “you’re making a mistake.”
“I apologize if this is too forward,” Naria said to Lesaguris, “but is it possible that Loch’s vicious attack on the patriotic people of the Republic included a daemon as well as a dragon?”
A great rocky fist burst from the earth.
“You know,” Lesaguris said, “I believe it is.”
With a last bitter glance at the screens, Loch ran.
“Crap,” Tern muttered, and Icy first looked over to see if something was wrong with her rope, then looked up, and saw the scorpion and the troll a hundred feet above them atop the fence.
Ululenia dove in with a keening shriek, but before she struck, the troll lashed out with a great ropy arm and slapped Ululenia from the sky. “Crap!” Tern said again.
The troll looked different than she had the last time Icy had seen her. Her skin had a metallic sheen to it, and looked more like a bundle of ropes than anything trying to imitate a person.
Icy only spared her a passing glance, however, because the scorpion was sawing at the rope holding Tern up.
“Crap!” Tern yelled. With one hand, she snapped her belt lock into place, and then kicked off the glowing cliffside toward Icy’s rope.
She was still swinging when the rope snapped.
Icy lunged, threading one ankle through his line as he dove with both hands. He caught Tern’s wrist, and both of them swung back down and bounced jarringly off the wall.
“Crap, crap, crap . . .” Tern worked her free hand through Icy’s rope and hooked her legs around it as well. Icy let go of her other hand once she had herself secure, hooked his other leg through the rope, and did the equivalent of an upside-down sit-up to haul himself upright again.
The scorpion hopped over to the other rope, raised a claw, and then shrieked as Ululenia reappeared as a great white beast that snarled and dragged the creature back out of view. That left only the troll, who took hold of their rope and began to slither down it like a snake, far faster than Icy and Tern could manage.
“Crap.” Icy looked down and saw that Tern had her crossbow out and was trying to aim it up at the troll, but he was blocking her shot. He flung himself over to the side, holding on to the rope with one hand and leaving a foot hooked through to support him, and Tern fired a shot that zipped up, thunked into the troll, and bounced away with no evident effect. “Crap!”
The scorpion leaped over the wall. At first Icy thought Ululenia had flung it from the wall, but then he saw the trail of clear sticky fluid trailing from beneath its tail. The scorpion landed on the side of the cliff, supported like a spider on a line of webbing, and began to scuttle down toward them.
A moment later, Ululenia flapped back up into view, her wings fluttering weakly and with a pale-yellow-green mist coiling around her. For a moment it seemed as though she might recover, but then her wings faltered, and she lurched drunkenly through the air and sailed down past them.
Tern fired another bolt past Icy, and this one hit the slithering troll with a splash. A moment later, another bolt sank into the troll, who caught fire just as she had back in Lochenville.
This time, however, the flames did not seem to hurt her, and the troll paused, flinched, and then slowly began to slither down again.
“Craaaaaaaap,” Tern hissed, and Icy saw that the now-on-fire troll was setting the rope they were hanging from aflame.
Icy pulled himself back in and hauled himself up, hand over hand, as quickly as he could. The troll was coming toward him, and the scorpion was doing the same, and it was going to be a matter of very careful timing.
The scorpion was now lower than the troll, and its claws clicked against the smooth surface of the cliff as it made its way closer to their rope. With the troll above, the scorpion would be free to cut the rope without endangering its comrade, and Icy pulled himself up, braced himself on the wall, and then leaped at the scorpion.
He caught it by the claws, heard it chitter in surprise, felt its web line bounce and flex with the sudden additional weight, and then pulled himself up quickly as the web line rebounded, bringing his body high enough to kick his feet off the claws, lunge up past the stinger, and catch hold of the line of webbing, which was moist but not sticky beneath his hands.
With a shriek of anger, the troll leaped over onto the scorpion’s web line as well. She was still on fire, and whatever the webbing was made from was more flammable than rope, because flames immediately spread up and down the web line.
Icy leaped free as the flames reached the scorpion, and the shriek was cut off by a muffled explosion that Icy didn’t really pay attention to because he was trying very hard to catch the rope Tern was hanging from, and he hadn’t had a lot of power behind the leap.
He made it, caught the rope with one hand, slammed into the wall, and felt his hand, still slick from the scorpion’s web line, slip free. He heard Tern’s gasp as he fell past her, saw the flutter of the rope she had originally been hanging from and which was still threaded through her belt, and hoped she had a tight grip as he grabbed it.
“Crap!” she yelled overhead, and Icy felt her slide, then catch herself, but the slide had thrown off his own grab due to his still-slick fingers, and he threaded one leg through the rope as he fell, felt it catch, and felt Tern catch. Then Icy was hanging upside down, suspended by one leg from Tern’s belt, while she in turn clutched desperately at the rope that was still aflame over their heads.
Looking up—and now slightly dizzy, which was a sensation Icy had thought trained out of him decades ago—he saw the troll clinging to the remains of the scorpion’s flaming web line. The scorpion was gone, and the line itself ended in black charred fragments. Up above, Tern was trying to reach into a pocket and get one of her flasks without losing the grip that was holding both her and Icy up. She got a pocket open, worked the flask out, and then banged off the wall with enough force to jolt the flask from her fingers. “Crap!”
It tumbled lazily past Icy, and he kicked his free leg off the wall, loosened his leg grip on the rope, and caught it between two fingertips. A twist of the leg tightened the rope with a sudden yank that would have pulled a weaker man’s hip from his socket, and Icy flung the flask back to Tern as he swung back down. He saw her catch it and douse the contents over a bolt, after which he hit the wall, almost losing his leg grip. Icy then hooked an elbow through the rope and stabilized himself.
As he looked back up, the troll coiled herself like a spring and then leaped from the flaming web line back to their rope.
Tern’s shot caught the troll square in the torso, splashing inky-black liquid across her body. The troll reached the line, slipped past it with her slippery arms, and screamed as she slid down the wall, leaving behind a trail of black oil. She whooshed past Icy, tumbled free from the wall, and began a long, trailing drop to the ground below.
The troll’s impact on the rope had been min
imal, but apparently minimal had been what the rope had left to give, as one of the burning cords snapped.
Icy bounced back against the wall, still upside down, focused his mind to its utmost emptiness, embraced the rope from which he hung and the stone of the wall and Tern yelling “Crap!” above him, found his center, and struck.
His hand punched a chunk out of the smooth surface of the cliff.
He recoiled, focused, and struck again, as another cord snapped.
The third and final cord snapped free, and Icy crossed his arms, plunged his hands into the two handholds he had made, and allowed his body to do what it did best.
Very few people can consciously catch one handhold upside down, then turn right side up while falling, much less two handholds, much less while maintaining a leg grip on a rope from which a good friend is hanging by a belt loop while falling by, banging into the wall, yelling “Crap!” and subsequently bouncing back and forth below.
Icy kicked a foothold into the wall with his free foot, looked down to see Tern dangling alive and unharmed from the rope below him, and took a deep, refreshing breath to relax for a moment before figuring out how they were going to get the rest of the way down the cliff.
In the sudden silence, a strange slapping noise was audible, and Icy looked over, careful not to make any motion quick enough to dislodge his handholds.
A shining white lizard slightly larger than a person was climbing up the side of the cliff, the cups on its wide and padded feet giving it purchase on the sheer surface. A blazing rainbow horn shone on its forehead.
It also had a great distended belly, and a pair of scorpion legs, still twitching, protruded from its mouth.
Ululenia padded up the wall, looked over at Icy with one strangely rotating eye, and said, Next time, may I suggest we use the giant eagle?
Kail was ambling toward the big gold cup with the fountain of fire coming out of it when Mister Dragon roared in over the stadium. As the crowd in the stands began yelling and everyone on the field stopped whatever sporting event they were in the middle of and started running, Kail nodded to himself and rolled out his shoulders.
There were guards at the font, which was bigger than it had looked from a distance, and was indeed set into the ground instead of resting on top of it. The guards were big men, but they weren’t paladins, which was something.
“Stay back!” one of them called as Kail got closer. “This area is off-limits for safety!”
“There’s a dragon, man!” Kail yelled, looking back over his shoulder as Mister Dragon began torching the seats and ripping things up. “There’s a dragon, I can’t go that way!”
“Sir, please, this is a sensitive area!” One of the guards looked nervous, and also didn’t have a hand on the blade at his waist yet.
“Get back or we will use force!” the other one shouted, and he looked more angry than nervous.
“But it’s a dragon!” Kail yelled at the angry one as he moved those last few crucial steps. “And they eat virgins, man, and I haven’t ever told anyone this, but your mother never let me go all the way!”
The big angry one blinked, got it, went for his blade, and Kail punched him in the throat, kicked him in the groin, kneed him in the head, and drew the man’s blade as he fell, bringing it up level with the other guard as his blade was half out.
“Let me be real clear, buddy,” Kail said. “I am not the bad guy here. There’s a dragon attacking, and that ain’t on me. That crowd could use a guard to get people to safety and help the injured right now. That’s a place you could do some good. Right here, all you get to be is the unlucky asshole I took down on my way to stop the bad guy.”
The guard was silent for a moment.
Then he looked at the picture on the badge clipped to Kail’s chest. “That doesn’t even look like you.”
“I’ve lost weight.”
The guard stepped back slowly, slid his blade back into his sheath, and ran off, yelling for people to bring water to put out the fire.
Kail tucked the sword under his uniform and headed the rest of the way to the font.
His job was simple. They still didn’t have the faintest damn idea what the big bunch of energy was going to do when it hit Heaven’s Spire, but the bad guys required three things. They needed Heaven’s Spire in place, which they had; they needed the systems in the processing center down below to send the right energy up, which Tern was going to stop; and they needed the font to focus the energy properly, and wrecking that was Kail’s job.
Many people would be offended when their commander gave them a job that boiled down to “Break this thing,” but Kail was not many people.
“All right, how hard could this be?” he said upon reaching the font. The exterior was taller than he was, and when he hopped up and pulled his head up, he saw that the crimson fire spewing out of the font flowed right along its interior wall. “All right, nothing over there.”
Kail dropped back down and started circling, rapping his knuckles against the golden wall of the font as he went. It was covered with a faint glowing eldritch pattern that looked a little like something you’d find on an old lady’s couch but was probably really dangerous runes.
Kail’s knuckles made a different noise on the wall, and he stopped, looked at the runes, and figured out where in the pattern there was no glowing, because if there was one thing you learned from dating a death priestess, it was that nobody builds a secret panel so that it cuts through the eldritch runes. His fingers ran lightly over the wall, and there was the seam, just barely there.
Behind him, the dragon was burning things, and based on some of the noise, Kail was pretty sure that a daemon was also involved. At some point, those would be his problems.
At the moment, though, eyes closed, he traced the seam and found the one rune that felt different under his fingers, with none of the magical buzz that made his hand tingle. He felt inside the rune until he found the tiny hole.
Then he drew out his trusted lockpick Iofecyl, slid her into the hidden lock, and went to work.
“There we go, baby,” he murmured as something exploded behind him. “No worries here, just me and you.” He raked the tumblers gently, felt a catch, twisted her ever so slightly. “You like that? Yeah, you like that.” He sighed. “Damn it, Tern and Icy are right about this sounding weird, and I’ve got Diz now, and I probably shouldn’t be talking to you like that.” He felt another catch. “I know, baby, I know, but we’ve got tonight, we’ve got this one last time, and no matter what happens, I will never forget what we had.”
The panel clicked open.
“That’s my girl.”
Kail slid Iofecyl back into his sleeve as the panel opened. He’d expected a small access panel like he’d find on an airship, and then some crystals he could pull out and then call it a day.
Instead, he faced a full-size door that opened upon a ladder leading down a narrow hatch lit dimly by tiny glowlamps.
He climbed down the ladder as quietly as only a small man with good boots could, and as he reached the bottom, which was some sort of large underground chamber lined with crystal panels, he heard voices talking.
“Cut to scrying pod four and bring it in,” said the first voice, which sounded quick and somehow distractedly thoughtful at the same time. “We’ve got a lady trying to protect her baby from the flames . . . that’s good, oh, that’s really good, yes, in on her.”
“More flames, Slant?” said the second voice, brusque and blunt. “I can have it—”
“No, I don’t want more flames,” snapped the first voice, presumably Slant. “If the lady and the baby die, everyone gets sick and looks away, and it’s over. I need the lady crying but determined and the baby screaming. Griffon, you’re on, sob story.”
“This is just awful,” came a voice that Kail recognized from every puppet show he had ever seen. “These people came here to see a celebration of the greatest virtues of the Republic, they spent their savings to bring their families, and what we’re
seeing here, the lives shattered—”
“Okay, wait, I’ve changed my mind, the baby looks really ugly when it cries,” the first voice said. “Let’s shut it up. Skinner, can you flap the wings or something to shut up the baby?”
“Big noise. Done,” said the second voice.
“Manticore, on the dragon, start spinning motive.”
“The dragon is roaring now,” came the manticore’s voice.
“Good, that shut the kid up. Oh, look at those eyes. That’s good, yes, get the face.”
“It’s unclear how this creature breached the wards,” the manticore added, “but clearly, someone intended to ruin today’s festival and cause as much destruction as they could.”
“I need to send it after Loch,” said Skinner.
“Fine, yes, cut to scrying pod five, stay wide, two, stay in close on the face. I want to see the dragon snarling and snapping.”
Kail watched from the dark little alcove, peering into a room lit only by a dozen giant crystal panes where two black-coated men and three puppeteers, all of them wearing paladin bands, worked seamlessly as they ran the tightest con he had ever seen.
Kail nodded, chewed thoughtfully on the inside of his cheek, and tried to figure out what the hell to do next.
Desidora, Dairy, and Pyvic looked up at the Forge of Pesyr in the temple quarter of Heaven’s Spire. It looked almost dwarven, an angular single-story building whose walls were made from hammered iron and decorated only with rivets. The other temples were all tall and beautiful, graceful structures against which the Forge’s ungainly functionality had always seemed jarring. As a love priestess, Desidora had seen it as a deliberate choice by the smith priests.
Now, she saw it as camouflage.
“You’re sure about this?” Pyvic asked. “Every other deep dark secret Heaven’s Spire has been hiding has been in the archvoyant’s palace.”
“Which is why this one is here,” Desidora said. They’d checked in the control room, and the readings had given her the direction on what she was looking for. Now, standing in front of the structure, she needed nothing but her own senses.
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