She thought she had imagined it, until she glanced directly across the hall, to the other abandoned corner that no one was paying attention to.
Someone was there.
Nadya sucked in a breath. She stared, trying to pick features out of the semi-darkness. A man, tall with indeterminate skin color and fair hair. He turned and looked at her with black Nomori eyes.
Nadya fell back against the wall. The painting beside her shuddered. She swallowed. It was the same man she had seen in the fourth tier and again at the theater. She squinted, her face growing warm under his fierce gaze. Every instinct told her she was right.
He smiled once more, and Nadya’s hands went cold.
“Death to the Duke!” A feral shout ripped across the already noisy throne room. Silence reigned for one moment. Then the screaming began.
Chapter Seventeen
Nadya winced and clamped her hands over her ears as she surveyed the chaos. Guardsmen shouted to one another, drawing weapons as they directed the stampeding crowd back out the metal doors. Nadya’s heart nearly stopped. Five men, peaceable citizens a moment before, had drawn pistols out of the ornate vases and now approached the Duke with wild eyes. Somehow, they had been able to use trickery, or far worse, to get the weapons past security.
The men shot and reloaded, their first bullets going wide and ricocheting off the walls, nearly hitting Kesali.
Kesali.
Nadya let out a guttural roar of her own and leapt, cracking the fine marble tile as she left the ground. In midair, she ripped through the twine, letting the cloak billow out, and yanked the scarf across her face. She slammed into the ground, between the attackers and the royal family. Debris and dust flew, and she slowly rose from her crouch.
A bullet slammed into her shoulder. Red swam across her vision. Nadya staggered back, hitting the side of the throne. She clamped a hand over the injury but stayed upright. Pain raced up and down her arm, circling around her neck. Nadya spat and ignored it. She turned to face the men, putting herself between their pistols and the Duke, Marko, and Kesali.
Guardsmen struggled to reach them. Nadya heard her father’s shout, but everything faded behind the smoking barrels of the five pistols aimed at her heart. All held by men who were no longer men, but something wild, with solid black eyes.
One man shot again. He ran forward, shooting and quickly reloading, as he tried to get around her to the Duke.
Nadya slammed a fist into his temple, and he collapsed in an instant. Blood seeped out of his mouth.
She turned to the other four. They weren’t afraid at all, even after seeing their companion brought down so quickly. She dodged another bullet, her shoulder crying out. Nadya stepped back and shoved the Duke and his son down to the ground. Her hand connected with the signet the Duke wore, and she ripped it off as the Duke cried out. He fell to the ground, and she tossed the jeweled collar aside. Kesali was already lying there, her face white. Their eyes met for an instant, before Nadya roared again and charged the men.
She knocked their pistols out of broken fingers. She should have stopped there. She could have stopped there, but the frightened look in Kesali’s eyes as bullets whizzed by her, nearly killing her, fueled a fury deep within Nadya.
The smell of gunpowder and blood filled her nostrils. She grabbed one man around the neck, picking him up like a rag doll, and threw him across the hall. His limp body slammed into a group of guards running to the rescue of their Duke. Nadya whirled on the other two.
The darkness from their eyes faded. They backed away from her. “What…what’s happening?” one whispered.
She ignored him. Her boot flashed out, and the sound of dozens of bones snapping filled the quiet throne room. A blow from her fist dropped the final attacker, and then all was silent.
Nadya straightened. She slowly unclenched her fists, and then she felt the warmth. Raising her hand in front of her, she watched as the thick blood raced down her fingers and dripped onto the floor. A tightness gripped her throat, constricting her until she couldn’t breathe.
Were they dead? She swallowed, but that didn’t stop the bile from rising into her mouth.
The forms of the five men did not move. Nadya blinked and the rest of the throne room came back into focus. The citizens were gone, leaving several dozen of the Duke’s Guard converging upon the dais. Behind her, Nadya heard the scraping of boots as people rose from their seats. She slowly turned around. The Duke backed away from her, his collarbone a mass of purple bruises. Marko put himself between her and his father. Kesali’s face was pale, and her fingers shook at her side. She looked uninjured though, and for a moment, Nadya felt happy.
Until she glanced down at the ruined bodies of the attackers.
Nadya didn’t move for a long moment as a horrible realization curdled in her gut. She had fought. She had used her abilities to hurt, perhaps even to kill. It was a line she’d sworn she would never cross again, and now she had. For Kesali. For Kesali’s safety, she had not even considered how she might accidentally kill someone.
The throne room blurred and vanished. She was fifteen, running from a larger, older Erevan boy through the back streets of the Nomori tier. Damp stung her cheeks, mixing with tears as she put on an extra burst of speed. Her pursuer had legs that were twice as long as hers and he caught up to her as she turned down a tight culvert alley. “You’re mine,” he whispered in his horrible courtier accent, his heavy breaths clogging her nose. Nadya opened her mouth to scream, but he clamped a hand over her mouth and started fumbling with her vest. Something tightened in her chest, and Nadya grabbed his arm, and he was the one to scream as bone cracked under her grip and blood bubbled up over her hands. Nadya raised him up with a trembling grip, and she pushed him away, desperate to get his touch off her. He flew down the culvert, hitting a solid stone wall with a thunk, and lay still. Blood trickled out of his mouth, running with water down the culvert and mingling around her boots. She was frozen, staring at his body, then at her hands, and wondering what sort of monstrous creature she had become.
Nadya blinked, and her first encounter with her unnatural abilities and their deadly consequences vanished into the warm glow of the throne room. She swallowed again, but her throat was dry. She could not go near Kesali anymore, not if it meant doing something like this again.
Guardsmen had circled her. Behind her, Marko yelled, “Try not to hurt him.”
A burning filled her chest. Nadya crouched. She wanted to, needed to wipe the blood from her hands until they glistened like it had never happened. But the ring of crimson uniforms and shining rapiers and pistols stood between her and that delusion. Her father was there, his expression hard.
She leapt, shouts following her, and grabbed hold of a marble pillar halfway down the throne room. Using her momentum, she launched herself up again and through the rapidly closing doors. Guardsmen yelled. She hit the ground running, nearly tripped on the shining floor, then barreled through the group of uniforms blocking her exit.
She propelled herself in the air with the first step she took on the cobblestones and landed on the roof of a storehouse. From there, she kept running, blinded by tears and weighed down by the scent of blood.
She did not go straight home. Instead, her pounding boots took her over the roof of her house and toward the wall. Nadya landed in one of the deep culverts used to hold the runoff rainwater during storms. Above her on street level, steam pumps worked to pump the remaining water over the wall. In this stone culvert, as large as the public bathhouse, the water was knee-deep. She collapsed into it, and the water soaked her to the bone and brought sharp pains to her shoulder. Nadya did not care as long as it washed the red stains off her hands.
An hour passed, perhaps more, before Nadya climbed, sopping wet, out of the culvert. She removed the cloak and rolled it up. Tucking it under her arm, she trudged off toward her house.
She was halfway there when she realized she could not go home, not yet.
Maybe I did not kill them,
she tried to tell herself. Maybe they are just injured, in the prison infirmary by now. I could go there and see.
The chance was slim, so slim as to be nonexistent, but Nadya grabbed ahold of it like it was a lifeline and she was drowning in blood.
To reach the city’s prison, nestled next to the mines on the other side of the Nomori tier, she did have to pass her house, or waste valuable time winding through side streets. She did not go in. Stashing her cloak in the alley, she then ripped off a part of the bottom of her shirt and stuffed it up the vest to stanch the slow bleeding. Every movement hurt, sending more blood through her injured shoulder. The injury wasn’t fatal, though.
For anyone else, it would have been.
Forced to walk more slowly than usual to minimize her blood loss, Nadya kept her eyes down. Few Nomori wandered about. News of the palace attack had already begun to trickle down, and everyone knew that a storm of a far different kind was coming. More dangerous than the Great Storm, likely to leave Storm’s Quarry a crumbled husk of what it once was. Nadya paused when she reached the great marble stairs. She looked up, her eyesight allowing her to see all the way to the top of the city. For the first time since she could remember, the gates to the fifth tier were closed. A regiment of the Duke’s Guard stood on the top five steps. No one was allowed through.
She broke her gaze away and continued on. Miners’ Tunnel was open once more, though poorly lit and just as suffocating. She gasped when she reached the other side, trying to breathe in the pale sunlight and rid herself of the darkness.
It was too reminiscent of the eyes of the murderers.
Most of the Duke’s Guard was deployed throughout the city, concentrated on the palace, its storehouses, and key places of defense. Only a handful of guardsmen patrolled the thin wire fence that separated the prison from the sealed mining tunnels across the roughly hewn street. It was a matter of little difficulty for Nadya to judge their pattern, wait for an opening, and hop over.
It was a risk going as just herself, but if anyone found her, she could lie and say she was looking for her father.
She broke into the prison building through a window. Intending to go down to the lower cellblock that housed the infirmary, Nadya stopped when she heard familiar voices. Her throat turned dry. She crept along the hall, keeping her ears open for the sounds of guardsmen.
The voice came from the other side of a stone wall. Nadya glanced around. There, near the top, a crawl space meant to filter out the damp air. With a leap, she scrambled into it, and suddenly she was looking down at a meeting room below through a thin vent.
In the chair at the head of the table sat a tired-looking Duke with a hastily bandaged collarbone. Beside him, the magistrate dutifully copied down the notes of the meeting. Nadya began to sweat.
On one side of the Duke, the deputy Guardmaster, a small, lithe Erevan who looked like he could take on a Nomori man in a fight and last, drummed his fingers on the table. On the Duke’s other side, Marko sat with tight lips, clutching Kesali’s hand.
Nadya barely looked at her except to note that she was all right.
The final figure at the table shocked her most of all. Drina Gabori sat right across from the Duke. She did not pay him the deference due his station with lowered eyelashes and humble looks. Instead, her piercing gaze did not leave his face. Nadya’s back twitched nervously. What could be so bad as to bring her grandmother together with the Duke?
Shadar entered the room, closing the door behind him, and bowed to his Duke, before sliding into the seat. “I posted six guards in the hall and two outside this door. No one is getting in here, Your Grace.”
The Duke looked around at everyone at the table, then said in a raspy voice, “I would like an explanation as to what just happened in the palace.”
The deputy Guardmaster cleared his throat. “For those of you who weren’t present, during the Duke’s open session, His Grace was attacked with the intent to kill by several of the city’s citizens. We do not yet know why they attacked, or what propelled them. Our first focus was getting him and his family to safety. This prison was built to be impregnable, from both sides. A—”
“Short-term solution,” the Duke said. “I will not hide down here. Tomorrow, we return to the palace once the proper security has been put in place.”
“Of course.” The deputy Guardmaster sounded like it was an argument he had tried and failed to win. “Two of the attackers are dead. The other three are in critical condition. They will not be able to be questioned for days.”
Nadya swallowed, but the throbbing in her shoulder increased until she swayed with dizziness. She had killed them. She had now killed three people. She was a murderer equal to Levka, to whoever was behind the killings in the city.
“The one called the Iron Phoenix killed the two men, injured the other three and also His Grace, the Duke. We did not yet know what his purpose there was, but I would guess he was somehow involved with the attack.” The deputy Guardmaster crossed his fingers.
“Involved? He clearly saved the lives of the royal family,” Shadar said.
“And you would give him a medal?”
The captain shook his head. “Of course not. I believe he is dangerous, but I will not let my personal prejudices get in the way of my reasoning.”
The deputy Guardmaster stood up. “You go too far. I am your superior—”
“Who will condemn a man and instigate a citywide hunt for him because he does not conform to your ideas of normalcy. You have no proof beyond that. Well,” Shadar said, his voice calm, but carrying an undercurrent of poison, “he is Nomori. Perhaps that’s all you require.”
“How dare you!”
“Enough!” the Duke said firmly. Both men stopped. Nadya held her breath. She had never heard her father talk that way to a superior officer, and his words brought a measure of steadiness to her otherwise collapsing world.
“I brought you all here for answers,” the Duke continued. “Here is what I have to say on the matter. If possible, bring the Iron Phoenix in. I would have him questioned. Our city is fragile, and we need certainties, not masked men running about.”
Marko frowned. “No offense, Father, but do you think the Guard would even be capable of bringing him in? He took on five armed men and defeated them.”
“Five armed civilians who weren’t in their right minds. Not five trained guardsmen,” the deputy said.
“Perhaps,” Levka said, speaking for the first time, “we need to be harsher in our judgments.”
A cold sweat broke out on Nadya’s forehead. Was he going to reveal her identity?
The magistrate continued, “I know it’s not a popular opinion here, but we simply cannot take the risks we might if it wasn’t the time of floodwaters. Yes, I want to believe the Iron Phoenix is a hero. But we do not have the luxury of doing so. I think the Duke’s Guard should focus on getting this man off the streets. After the solstice”—he inclined his head toward Kesali—“we can look into whether or not it is good for the city to have a masked vigilante running about.”
“We have limited resources, Magistrate,” Shadar said. “I would tend to agree with you, but I don’t think any of our men can be spared.”
“Surely a dozen of the Guard can be pulled from the ration lines, or the lower city,” Levka replied.
Nadya knew what he was doing and why he did not reveal who she was. If he did, there would be nothing stopping her from focusing entirely on bringing him down. But by keeping it a secret, he insured she still had much to lose, and by setting the Guard on her, she would be too busy to interrupt whatever he had in store for the city.
Simple. Brilliant. She realized with a sour feeling that solving the mystery behind the murders and taking down such a man as Levka might be beyond her abilities. It did not mean, however, that she wouldn’t try.
The Duke raised a hand to halt any further debate. “We will look into the man who calls himself the Iron Phoenix, but that will not be at the expense of peace. We will n
ot let anyone, let alone a zealot with rioters at his back, threaten my future daughter-in-law.”
Kesali gave a small smile, but she remained silent. Nadya wondered what she was thinking. Was she scared at the ever-nearing deadline of the summer solstice, now only days away? Or were her thoughts back down in the servants’ hall, lingering on their kiss?
“Fools,” Drina muttered under her breath. Nadya was surprised she had stayed quiet this long.
Shadar went red, but before he could make excuses for his mother-in-law, the Duke turned his gaze to her. “Madame Gabori? Do you have something you wish us to know?”
Drina sniffed. “You have no idea what you are dealing with.” She spoke in Nomori, and the deputy Guardmaster glared at her.
The Duke, however, nodded. “Please, I would know what you do. I was not far from the Iron Phoenix during the fight in the throne room, and I saw a bullet pierce his shoulder, fired from close range.”
A bullet meant for you, Nadya thought bitterly, and her shoulder throbbed.
“The Phoenix stumbled back but didn’t even falter. That should have killed him. How did he not only survive but fight with a strength that is supernatural?”
“Simple,” Drina said. “He is…one of the nivasi.”
All the warmth leeched out of Nadya’s hands. They trembled as her grandmother’s words from the night of Jastima’s murder came back to her: the work of one of the nivasi.
“Nivasi?” Marko asked.
“It is not something we share with Erevans,” Drina said sharply. Shadar leaned over and whispered to her in rapid Nomori that Nadya could not pick up from where she perched. Drina sighed. “But, as I am reminded, these are not ordinary times. You know of Nomori gifts, what our men are born with, and what our women are. Very rarely, there is a third kind.”
Nadya held her breath.
“Some Nomori, one in ten thousand, is born with an unpredictable gift. It does not fall in with the psychic gifts of our women or the fighting prowess of our men. It is something altogether different.”
The Iron Phoenix Page 16