‘By eavesdropping on us?’ Hero said.
‘By volunteering for garden duty and using the opportunity to investigate Rowan’s cottage for clues. Not that I found anything.’
‘Not that you knew what you were looking for,’ Hero noted.
‘I could say the same of you and this plan of yours,’ Zeke shot back.
‘If we want your advice, we’ll ask for it. Which we won’t.’
‘All right,’ he said, hands raised in surrender. ‘I know when I’m not wanted. Shame, though. You’ll never make it up that tower undetected. Though maybe …’
‘Maybe what?’ asked Joss.
‘I don’t know. It’s a pretty outlandish idea. Brazen. Stupid, even.’
‘Just spit it out already,’ Hero told him.
Zeke offered her his most cunning smile. ‘You won’t be able to climb the tower from the bottom. But maybe you could storm it from above.’
‘You’re talking about flying to the top on our pterosaurs? Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that?’ Hero said with mock enthusiasm. ‘Oh. That’s right. Because every surface on the Lord’s Keep that’s large enough to land on is covered in spikes.’ She unfurled the plans again to point out every thorned rooftop and serrated turret. ‘And has been for hundreds of years!’
‘Who said anything about pterosaurs?’ Zeke asked, totally unfazed. ‘If you had an airship then you could just abseil down, one by one.’
‘And where exactly would we get an airship?’ asked Drake.
‘It just so happens –’ Zeke began, his cunning smile broadening into a salesman’s grin that immediately gave him away.
‘Oh no,’ Joss cut him off. ‘You’re not talking about that old rust bucket you’ve been tinkering with, are you?’
‘The Fat Lot of Good is not a rust bucket,’ Zeke replied, nose high in the air. ‘I mean, all right, it currently has an exhaust issue that makes it sound like a dying brachiosaur …’
‘Exactly what you want for a covert mission,’ Hero said.
‘Have you tried installing an ion stabiliser?’ Drake asked. ‘It’d help smooth out any drag and give you an overall better –’
The death stares he received from both Joss and Hero were enough to make him pause. ‘Maybe now’s not the time. But I can fix it, is all I’m saying.’
Zeke’s salesman grin grew again, this time into a triumphant beam. It made him all the more punchable. ‘See? We’re halfway there already.’
There was a crash as someone came charging through the garden thicket, forcing the prentices into defensive postures.
‘Miss Hero! Mister Drake! Joss! I think I heard voices coming from –’ it was Edgar, stumbling into the clearing to come face-to-face with Zeke. ‘Oh. Hello.’
‘I thought you were meant to be keeping watch,’ Hero said to him, and his pink face turned a dark shade of red. ‘So how is it that we have an unexpected interloper encroaching on our secret meeting?’
‘I was keeping watch! Nobody ever came through the front gate …’
‘That’s because I was already here,’ Zeke said, and offered his hand. ‘Ezekiel Zadkille. Though you can call me Zeke.’
‘Oh, I know who you are. I heard all about what you did in Vaal. And if you’ll excuse my language,’ Edgar pulled himself up to his full height, ‘you are a duplicitous and dastardly scoundrel who isn’t worth two squirts of –’
‘Edgar,’ Joss interrupted him. ‘Zeke has offered to help us in our mission.’
Edgar blinked. ‘Oh.’
Slackening, he looked at Zeke from under his brow. At the very least, he had succeeded in wiping the smile from Zeke’s face. ‘And have we accepted that offer?’ he asked.
Joss turned to Drake and Hero in silent enquiry. The two shared a look of begrudging acceptance, then nodded.
‘Outstanding!’ Zeke clapped his hands together, his grin surging back to life. ‘That just leaves us in need of those hexbreakers you mentioned. We may not require as many as we would if we were attempting a frontal assault, but I imagine it’d be helpful to have at least one. Where we can get our hands on that, however, I have no idea …’
‘Funny you should say that,’ Hero told him. ‘Because I know the exact place.’
The Kingsday morning service was finishing up by the time Joss and the others arrived at the High Chamber. Hero stopped inside long enough to see her uncle leading the congregation in a hummed, wordless hymn.
‘She’s not here,’ she whispered to her brethren as she led them back outside – though not without stopping at the array of lit candles to blow one out and make a wish upon the smoke. Scraping their scalps through the tunnel on the way out, they emerged to a day full of grey clouds and dim hopes.
‘If she’s not here, where else could she be?’ asked Joss.
Hero stared first at the High Chamber, then at the humble lodge stooped behind it, with the sacrosanct garden in between. ‘Follow me,’ she said.
Constructed of black logs with a thatched roof, the Attendants’ quarters drew as little attention to themselves as possible, just as the Holy Somnium commanded. The interior was equally modest, plastered white with a floor of packed earth, much like Touchshriek’s Tavern had been. These floors, however, were softened by a flowing blue rug that led to a room where Hero’s mother was in the middle of packing a small trunk, its meagre possessions enough to make Joss’s look like a treasure trove. She didn’t notice their presence until Hero cleared her throat to speak.
‘Going somewhere?’
Her mother jumped, startled. ‘Henrietta – what are you doing here?’
Hero took a few measured steps into the room. ‘I need a hexbreaker.’
Her mother regarded her with something between uncertainty and suspicion. ‘I wish I could help,’ she said, hand hovering on the trunk. ‘But I haven’t owned one of those in years.’
Hero took another step, this one landing with a decisive thud. ‘Peddle your half-grade muck elsewhere,’ she told her mother. ‘You really think I believe this act of yours? Just tell me what you want for the hexbreaker and I’ll be on my way.’
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. ‘There was a key …’ she said. ‘Your father gave it to you.’
‘The only key my father ever gave me was the one that unlocked my journal.’
‘That’s the one,’ her mother replied. ‘It doubled as the key to a safe deposit box back in Covora.’
‘Where he built up a nice stash of his ill-gotten gains, I assume.’
‘More of a nest egg,’ Hero’s mother said with a twitch. ‘In case of emergency.’
‘And living a quiet life of faith and servitude would certainly count as an emergency, wouldn’t it?’ Hero sneered.
Her mother pursed her lips. ‘You could come with me, you know. We could start over. Together. Just the two of us.’
But Hero wouldn’t hear it. ‘You were starting over, remember?’ she said. ‘But that was never really going to happen, was it? The way you lamented your lost empire the other day, then vanished when the wardens showed up. It’s true what they say; a sabretooth never forgets its fangs.’
Hero’s mother shook her head. ‘I can’t live like this, Henrietta. I tried. I can’t.’
‘And I can’t live like you.’ Hero reached into her coat and removed a small, ornate key. Her mother was quick to reach for it, but Hero was even quicker to pull it away. ‘The hexbreaker first,’ she said.
Eyeing both Joss and Drake with uncertainty, Hero’s mother retreated to her trunk. Pulling out what few items of clothing she had, she lifted up the base to reveal a secret compartment full of nefarious equipment: lock picks, grappling hooks, retractable daggers, and an iron disc with a spike on one side and a leather loop on the back, which would enable the item to be strapped across a person’s palm. She snatched up the disc and quickly pushed the base of the trunk back into position.
‘Here,’ she said, offering what Joss could only assume was the hexbreaker. But, just as Hero had done, s
he retracted the item right as her daughter reached to take it. ‘The key.’
Hero exhaled sharply, then thrust the key into her mother’s waiting hand. ‘Take it and go,’ she told her.
Inspecting the key and finding it satisfactory, Hero’s mother closed her trunk, picked it up, and walked to the door. She stopped long enough to take one last look at her daughter. Hero stared her down, and kept staring as her mother left.
She’d been gone only a moment when the prentices heard someone rushing down the hallway. Bursting into the chamber, High Attendant Ravenhelm stared wildly at everyone, his cheeks flushed and his chest heaving. Seeing Hero, he came to the obvious conclusion.
‘She’s gone,’ he said. ‘Isn’t she?’
‘She was never really here in the first place,’ Hero said to him, and he slumped against the wall as if he’d suddenly found himself empty at the core, his robe rustling on the rough plasterwork.
‘All I ever wanted her to know was how much I – how much –’ he swallowed the thought, staring at his niece and her brethren with confounded sorrow.
‘Trust me, she knew,’ Hero said, pushing past him. ‘Even better than you realise.’
The prentices found Edgar waiting patiently for them outside, with their mounts tied to a hitching post beneath a nearby fir tree. Pietro was laid out like a bearskin rug, while Azof chittered away in his ear. Callie – as if sensing her owner’s mood – was sitting bolt upright with her tail wrapped around her paws, and purred as Hero approached her.
‘There’s my girl,’ Hero whispered to her, ruffling her fur.
‘I can’t imagine how difficult that was,’ Drake said.
‘Just as I can’t imagine how upset she’s going to be when she gets all the way to Covora only to discover that was the key to Rowan’s lock-up,’ Joss added.
A sly grin crept across Hero’s face. ‘I wish I could be there to see that for myself,’ she said.
‘Did I miss something?’ Edgar asked. Going off the looks he received, he grumbled to himself, ‘I always miss out on everything.’
They rode alongside each other on the way back to Blade’s Edge Acres, the four of them taking up the road while the fortress arose before them like a bad omen.
‘So, we’ve got the hexbreaker,’ Edgar said from the back of the junky old jet-cycle he’d borrowed for the journey. ‘Now what?’
Joss knew the answer, as did his brethren, though not one of them wanted to say. Because there was only one thing left to do now. And that was to steal their way into the Lord’s Keep and expose Rayner as the monster they knew him to be.
And somehow survive the attempt.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
A HUNTING EXPEDITION
THE night sky was as black as the pit of a beast’s belly, with thick storm clouds swallowing the moon and the stars. Joss and his brethren couldn’t have asked for better coverage in which to mount their raid, though it made it harder for them to see. Not that Zeke seemed all that worried. He was piloting the Fat Lot of Good with expert ability, navigating around the Backbone Ranges and through the towers of Blade’s Edge Acres as if he had the whole route tattooed on the insides of his eyelids. Still, it didn’t hurt to have Joss standing on the prow of the craft, using his shadowscope to watch for any imminent dangers.
‘Coming up on the Keep now,’ he radioed to the others.
‘Understood,’ Zeke’s voice floated back through a rush of static. Joss still wasn’t sure what he made of these headset microphones that Drake had been tinkering away with, and which had now come to be of timely use. Though there was no argument that it made communicating in the dark much easier, where all the hand signals they’d learnt during their training would do them no good.
Just as helpful were the repairs Zeke and Drake had made to the Fat Lot of Good, ensuring it ran as smoothly and quietly as promised. The noisiest it had been was during take-off, when it had rumbled and heaved with all the commotion of a titanosaur doing a jig.
‘Pump the oscillator!’ Drake had called out to Zeke while Hero’s many muttered curses clogged up the communications line. Following Drake’s advice, Zeke soon had the noise under control and they were on their way, with the airship’s new moniker emblazoned on its hull in big, hand-painted purple letters.
Rather than fly directly to the Lord’s Keep, they took off in the opposite direction, soaring out past the cliff edge in a big loop to circle back around towards the fortress. This way they could gain the altitude they needed to drop down on the keep from above, while drawing as little attention as possible from the ground.
The plan seemed to be working as they assumed a holding pattern high over the keep’s pointed roof and assembled on the main deck to prepare themselves for the jump. Joss’s hands were shaking as he looped the rope through his harness, his eyes set on their target below.
The tower was darker than usual, with few lights filling the windows. That was because Lord Rayner was away on what the fieldservs who’d prepared his carriage had said was a hunting expedition, and he’d taken Captain Kardos and most of the fortress guards with him. Whether or not he had any intent of actually hunting was irrelevant. He was gone, and in that absence Joss and his brethren were ready to strike.
‘Ready?’ Zeke’s voice broke in over the headset. Joss looked through the airship’s windshield to see him cranking the stabilizer ratchet, fighting to keep the Fat Lot of Good steady as the wind picked up. It was now or never.
It looked like Hero had drawn the same conclusion. She was dressed like Joss and Drake in the black riding gear Sur Blaek had given them, her hair tied back as if they were setting out on any other training session. It had been agreed that, with her experience of the rooftops of Blade’s Edge Acres, she would lead them in the jump. If she was nervous about it, it wasn’t showing as she stepped to the edge of the ship and threw open the gate. A blast of wind tried to suck her away from the safety of the deck but she held firm, staring down at the Lord’s Keep and its spiked parapets, which had been built to withstand any invasion.
‘Sleeping King favour me,’ she whispered, the words bleeding through her microphone. Gripping her abseiling cord tight, she steeled herself and then leapt forward. She fell in a controlled tumble, the cord hissing in her grip, and with a decisive thump she landed on the tower’s tiled roof. There was a pause as she gathered herself, which lasted long enough to make Joss wonder if she’d been injured. But then she hopped clear of the landing zone, nimble and sure-footed, absorbed almost entirely by shadow but still clearly beckoning her brethren to follow her.
‘No time like the present,’ Drake said over the headset, drawing a shaky breath before propelling himself off the ship’s deck. His fall was far less graceful than Hero’s, but he still landed in one piece. That left only Joss.
Nothing is impossible, nothing is impossible, nothing is impossible, he told himself as he wavered at the edge, struggling to take the leap.
‘Good luck,’ Zeke radioed to him, and Joss looked through the windshield to see a reassuring face staring back. ‘Remember; you’re the Blade Keeper. If you can knock a tyrannosaur out cold with nothing but a single bola, you can easily do this.’
Joss blinked, and found himself saying two words he’d never thought he’d utter. ‘Thanks, Zeke.’
The pair exchanged a nod of respect, and with one last gulp of air Joss threw himself over the ship’s threshold. He was halfway down before he’d fully realised what he’d done, and thought to try controlling his descent. He landed with a smack against the tiles, fireworks of pain bursting in his ankles and shooting up his legs. Hissing at the sensation, he bent down to nurse the injury.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Hero, the sound of her voice split between her headset and the clear air. Pressing his lips together, Joss nodded. ‘Then let’s go.’
Hero turned to lead the way around the curve of the roof, while Joss took a moment to gaze back up at the Fat Lot of Good. It was barely visible against the black of the sky, for
cing him to squint to see it. He gave a single wave as it pulled away into the clouds, then moved to follow the others, limping slightly.
The roof was bigger than it looked from above; a peaked cone set atop a big ashen barrel, devoid of guards but spiked everywhere with metal barbs that had been put in place centuries ago to keep skyborne paladeros from rival orders landing their mounts during an attack. It had been hundreds of years since any paladero order had declared open war on another, but still the spikes remained. The prentices had to pick their way past them as carefully as they could, which only grew more difficult the closer they came to the balcony on the opposite end of the roof.
‘Watch the glass.’
Hero’s advice arrived in another rush of static, and just in time. Joss looked down to see his foot hovering over a row of glass shards, barely visible in the darkness. They ran all the way along the roof, zigzagging between the larger metal spikes to catch anyone paying ill-attention. Joss could only give thanks that he had Hero looking out for him.
Creeping around the jagged shards, they came to the parapet that hovered over Lord Rayner’s private balcony, right at the edge of the roof. It was spikier here than the tip of a stegosaur’s tail, but Hero managed to guide Joss and Drake through. They gathered together atop the parapet, stealing a glimpse over the side. The balcony below lay in darkness.
‘Joss?’ Hero said, prompting him to remove the rope he had bundled up in his pack, unfurl it, and knot one end around the largest of the nearby spikes. The other end he tossed over the side, before tugging on it to make sure it held tight.
‘Last chance to turn back,’ Drake said as they huddled together at the edge, forcing Joss to consider what they were about to do. He had risked his future before, but this time was different. This time he and Drake and Hero might not just be drummed out of their respective orders. This time, if they were caught, they could be imprisoned for treason. Possibly even executed. And for what? They had no real idea of what they were hoping to find. Lord Rayner, an inarguably devious man, could have hidden away any evidence so deeply that it may never be found.
The Edge of the World Page 21