by A. C. Cobble
“The Citadel,” said Rhys, confirming Ben’s guess. He bent over the miniature. “This appears to be the throne room, here are the clerks quarters...”
“What is this thing?” wondered Ben, circling the table, looking at the models. “Why would someone have a tiny replica of the Citadel?”
“Plans,” said Rhys. “They’re doing detailed planning for an attack. This level of preparation is only necessary to coordinate multiple prongs or to strike multiple targets. This is serious.”
Ben continued to study the miniatures while the rest of the group moved around the large room. At the corner of the table, Ben found a wooden mug. He glanced inside and wrinkled his nose. The thing was one third full of a lumpy green liquid.
“Rhys, come look at this,” he said. “I think it might be poison.”
The rogue glanced into the mug and bent to sniff it. Standing, he met Ben’s gaze and declared, “It’s worse.”
“Worse than poison?” wondered Ben.
“It’s vegetable juice,” replied Rhys.
“I was being serious—”
Rhys held up a hand to stop Ben. “There is an assassin named Humboldt who only consumes raw vegetables and fruits. He drinks foul stuff like this. We never got along, as you can imagine.”
“Humboldt?” asked Towaal from the far side of the room. “I thought he was dead.”
Rhys nodded grimly. “I thought so as well. He hasn’t been seen in fifty years. In our business, that usually means you’re out of the business, permanently. It was a boon for me, as there are only a few blades willing to take the types of contracts we do. If Humboldt has been here a month, he easily could have killed Brinn in that time.”
“There’s no one back there,” said Amelie, returning from the hallway that led to the bedrooms, “but I counted two dozen beds that have been slept in.”
“Two dozen!” exclaimed Ben. “Do you think they are all assassins?”
Amelie could only shrug.
Rhys had a worried look on his face.
“Humboldt and two dozen others,” he murmured. “Only one at a time was attempting Saala and Brinn. We were right. Avril was feinting a threat against the Alliance to draw out the Veil.”
“And now she’s here,” said Amelie, her face sour like she’d tasted a rotten egg.
“Lady Coatney came to stabilize things,” said Ben. “She’s here to protect the Alliance and ensure war breaks out between them and the Coalition. A stream of assassins, political instability, plans she’s spent decades building all on the verge of collapse...”
“Coatney played right into Avril’s hands.”
“Avril and her assassins are not in the room,” said Prem. “Where are they?”
“If they’re not here, it’s because they’re already getting into position,” responded Amelie.
“Should we—Should we let it happen?” asked Ben. “I cannot believe I am saying that, but if we want to take down the Veil, Avril may do it for us. Instead of being pawns in their plans…”
The friends clustered together, looking over the models. For a moment, no one answered.
“This is what the Veil was talking about when she came to us outside of Kirksbane,” said Amelie. “She knew we were coming here and that Avril was already in Whitehall. She knew a situation like this might happen. She posed the question of stability or chaos.”
“What would happen if the Veil was murdered here?” asked Prem.
“Nothing like that has ever occurred,” answered Towaal. “The transition between Veils has always been bloody but quiet. Outside of the Sanctuary grounds, it has always appeared as a peaceful turnover of power. With such a public attack by a former Veil who everyone thought was dead, there is no telling how the lords of the powerful cities might react.”
“Months after King Argren was also assassinated in these halls, maybe in the very same room,” added Rhys.
“Chaos,” concluded Amelie. “I do not know how many more moves Avril has thought ahead, but there would be chaos. We can assume the Alliance would collapse, and the Sanctuary would be off balance. The Coalition may rise, finding easy targets with Whitehall, Northport, and the City all weakened. Avril will have other plans...”
“The Veil’s death would not mean an end to the fighting, would it?” surmised Ben. “The wars would continue, and if anything, they would become worse. I know Avril would not be a gentle ruler if she is able to retake the Sanctuary.”
“With hundreds of years of bitterness under her belt?” replied Rhys. “She’d be a terror. Trust me. I know the dark places she went even before she was deposed.”
“We have to stop this,” declared Amelie.
The friends all turned to Ben.
“I think we know where they are,” said Ben, stabbing his finger down into the small model of the throne room. “Brinn wouldn’t meet the Veil anywhere other than here.”
Ben and his friends raced through the hallways and up the stairs of the Citadel. As they moved closer to the throne room, Ben drew his sword, and his friends followed suit.
“Hold!” cried a voice from down a richly carpeted hall.
They ignored the man, and Ben heard the clatter of armored guards starting to run. He knew there’d be more of them as they approached the throne room, but there was nothing they could do about it. There wasn’t time to come up with a plan or figure out a way to sneak unnoticed into the most secure room in Whitehall.
The throne room was still several hundred paces away when they skidded to a halt. In front of them, a squad of twenty armed men were loitering in an intersection. At the sound of Ben and his friends running approach, they looked up. At the sight of five armed individuals, they drew steel.
“Betrayal!” cried Ben. “There’s an attack on the Veil and the general!”
Ben and his friends paused, waiting. The guards eyed them suspiciously. Behind the men, all was quiet. A moment passed.
“I don’t hear nothin’,” barked one of the guards, a sergeant, by the knots of rank on his shoulder.
“Sergeant, any time now, the Veil will be attacked,” insisted Ben.
The sergeant glanced at his fellows and then looked to the stream of guards that were coming up behind Ben’s party. The armored men were finally catching up, gasping and wheezing from running in heavy steel.
“It looks like you are the one who is causing trouble,” remarked the sergeant.
Behind them, a breathless voice shouted, “We’ve been following them for three floors. They’re running through the Citadel with blades drawn!”
“We’re trying to stop an assassination attempt,” growled Ben. “We’re on your side.”
“I’ll give you a moment,” said Prem, spinning her knives slowly in her hands and stepping forward.
“What do you—”
The girl darted ahead, long knives held menacingly.
She was rushing straight at the assembled men in front of them. Then, to Ben and the guard’s amazement, she lunged to the side and leapt into the air. One booted foot hit the wall then another. Ben’s eyes opened wide as she sprinted along the wall, her momentum holding her high above the floor. Her steps led her a pace over the squadron’s heads. As she passed them, gravity reasserted control, and she shoved off the wall, flipping, and landed lightly a dozen paces past the score of guards that were blocking the route to the throne room.
She winked at the leader of the soldiers then sprinted toward the throne room. Cursing, all twenty of the men spun and chased after her, yelling to protect the general. She darted down a hallway that led to the right, the guards clanging and shouting after her.
“Damn!” exclaimed Rhys.
Ben didn’t speak. Instead, he charged, running down the open lane Prem had cleared for them. Another chorus of startled shouts rose up behind as the soldiers who had been following realized the way to the throne room was now unguarded, and the chase began again.
Ben and his friends were unencumbered by armor, and they were in shape
from constant travel and sword practice. The guards drilled a bell a day and spent the rest of their time patrolling or drinking. It was no real race.
They passed two more turns then saw the entrance to the throne room. Directly in front of the giant double doors, there were another dozen men holding tall halberds.
“Keep running!” barked Towaal.
Ben grinned fiercely as he saw the mage raise her hands.
The guards lowered their polearms and then were thrown back, crashing against the stone wall and wooden door with the clatter of overturned kitchenware. The force of the blow rocked the door to the throne room, and another targeted blast from Towaal burst it open.
Ben ran through the entrance in the aftermath of the wind, ignoring the ranks of Whitehall’s soldiers within the throne room that rushed into protective positions around the general. A few even moved hesitantly toward the Veil.
Standing on the dais beside the throne, General Brinn shouted, “Ben, what is the meaning of this!”
In front of him, half a dozen mages parted ranks, and a red-haired woman turned. Ben slid to a stop, halfway to her, knowing any closer and he wouldn’t be given time to call his warning.
“Benjamin Ashwood,” said Lady Coatney. “So good to see you again. Oh, look, you brought your friends.”
“What are you doing, Ben?” growled Brinn. “Lady, ah, Lady Veil, I assure you—"
“Avril,” gasped Ben, interrupting the general. “Lady Avril is here along with two dozen assassins.”
Lady Coatney’s lips pressed together in a thin line and her eyes flashed with anger. She turned to her associates. “Defensive positions! Form a wall, swordsmen in front, mages behind.”
Three men, draped in the white tabards of the Sanctuary, stepped smoothly to form a triangle around the Sanctuary’s mages. Flashing silver longswords, emblazoned with the blademaster’s sigil, were held steadily in their hands.
The mages and swordsmen didn’t blink at their leader’s instructions. Ben’s heart soared and then sank. They’d been right. The woman had anticipated this outcome. She’d steered them toward it, and without them realizing it, she had recruited Ben and his friends to protect her.
“Call more men, General Brinn,” demanded the Veil. “As many as you can find.”
Her voice sent a shiver down Ben’s spine, and he realized in that moment, despite anticipating the ambush from her old nemesis, the Veil wasn’t certain she would prevail. This woman had held the most powerful seat in Alcott for hundreds of years. She ruled the continent’s most prosperous city. She commanded an army. She had pulled the strings of hundreds of lords and kings in her lifetime, and she was in charge of the largest group of mages that had ever existed.
And she was scared.
Her demeanor was calm but her eyes blazed with intensity, the Veil instructed, “General Brinn, after the reinforcements arrive, you should begin to evacuate the Citadel. Clear it first and then the rest of the city. Evacuation on the water would be safest, but back into the mountains will be quicker for those near the top of Whitehall. I suspect we have little time.”
“I-I can’t do that,” spluttered the general. “We’ve never—"
“Then prepare for your people to die,” interjected Lady Coatney. She unfastened her belt pouch and drew out a small wooden figurine. A repository of energy, Ben guessed.
Brinn scrambled to the side of the room and started barking orders at captains, dispatching them to find more men and start the evacuation. Coatney’s eyes remained fixed on Ben’s party, but she did not speak. In moments, alarm bells began to sound, the sonorous hums filling the building with urgency.
Raising her voice above the clamor, Coatney addressed Ben and his friends, “Thank you for the warning.”
Ben nodded and looked around the throne room nervously.
“Ben,” asked Brinn, striding closer, but taking care to circle widely around Lady Coatney’s mages and blademasters, “are you sure there will be an attack?”
“He believes he is telling the truth,” asserted the Veil, not waiting for Ben to answer. She turned to one of her companions. “Quest. See if you can detect anyone. If she’s brought other mages, we need to know.”
One of the mages closed her eyes. Amelie and Towaal shivered as Ben imaged a magical sense brushing across them.
To another of her mages, Lady Coatney said, “In my rooms, there are three man-sized trunks—”
A cry interrupted her. On the other end of the room, a soldier stumbled back, and a wall of death poured out of dark doorways and across the galleries the highborn occupied when the king held court. Figures cloaked in shadow swept around plush chairs and sprang over the polished railing. Blades, seemingly made of swirling black smoke, sheared through the Citadel’s guards with ease.
“Mage-wrought swords!” warned one of Coatney’s blademasters.
Two of the swordsmen advanced side by side. The third remained near Coatney.
“Avril will kill everyone in this building if she must,” shouted Coatney. “Fight her, or die.”
Ben grunted and then glanced at Rhys.
“She’s not wrong,” confirmed the rogue.
He and Ben jogged forward to join the Sanctuary’s blademasters.
“Do not allow their weapons to touch you,” warned one of white-cloaked men.
“Oh, really?” asked Ben, unable to keep the sarcasm from his voice.
The blademaster didn’t have time to respond. Whitehall’s men were dead, dying, or about to be, and Brinn’s reinforcements hadn’t arrived yet. In moments, the assassins would be done with Whitehall’s men, and Ben, Rhys, and the pair of blademasters were all that stood between them and the Veil.
“Now’s the time,” suggested Rhys.
Struggling to believe he was going to do it, Ben charged, rushing forward to protect the Veil from Avril’s assassins.
His forward motion didn’t last long. A masked figure decapitated one of the remaining guards and spun toward Ben, a dark blade sweeping out. Ben parried the attack and almost lost his sword in the process. Bitter cold flashed down his weapon the moment it touched his attacker’s. He stumbled, the tip of his longsword dropping toward the floor.
“Harden your will!” he cried. He pushed the chill from his blade, swiveling his hips and swinging his weapon up.
The assassin, evidently trusting Ben would lose the sword due to the magical effect, wasn’t prepared. The upward blow caught the figure in the chin, cleaving its face in two beneath a black, silk mask. A shower of crimson blood, gray viscera, and white bone burst from the wound, flying across the marble tiled floor.
Beside Ben, Rhys rammed his longsword into the chest of another assassin, skewering the black-clad shape with his own mage-wrought blade. The figure flopped down dead, and its sword shattered into smoke-filled shards, which melted before Ben’s eyes.
More assassins, freed from Whitehall’s dying guards, pressed against Ben and Rhys. They were fast, and Ben’s attention was diverted, trying to keep the chill of their enchanted blades from passing through his.
“There are too many of these bastards,” grunted Rhys, stepping back from where he’d just killed another.
Ben saw a deep lacerations on the rogue’s upper arm. He couldn’t help his friend, though, as two of the masked men charged him at once. He threw himself toward one of them, hoping to limit the effectiveness of his blade. He then spun, swinging his longsword at the second assailant. Ben felt his longsword catch flesh, but then a forearm wrapped around his neck, yanking him tight and crushing his throat.
The assassin, pulling Ben close, tried to bring his sword in and slice it across Ben’s face, but Ben got a hand up and slapped it against the assassin’s arm, stopping the weapon and saving his life. The man’s arm was still wrapped around his neck, though, pressing tight and choking him.
One hand holding off the assassin’s blade, the other holding his own longsword, Ben saw spots clouding his vision. He tried to swing his head back, but the
pressure on his neck only increased. He raised his boot and brought it down hard, eliciting a grunt of pain in his ear. He tried it again, but the foot moved, and he felt only hard marble underneath his heel.
Ben’s grip on the assassin’s arm wavered as his body struggled for air. The smoky blade drew closer. He couldn’t rip his eyes away from the sword. It was like looking at a cloudy sky at night, watching the stars blink in and out from behind a black curtain, except this sliver of night was razor sharp, and it was a hand away from his face.
In front of Ben, another assassin approached, his shadowy blade held low.
Ben felt the blood pounding in his head. He knew within moments he would black out. When he did, he’d lose his grip on the assassin’s sword arm. Not that the killer needed the blade to end him. The loss of blood to his head and air to his body would do the job just as well. Ben thrashed helplessly, unable to dislodge the arm from his throat.
The man in front of him didn’t look content to wait. The assassin drew back, poised to plunge his weapon into Ben’s torso.
The world slowed down, and Ben could feel each beat of his heart, counting down until the last one. Like he was watching a cube of ice melt in a drink on a hot day, the assassin’s weapon started toward him, aimed at his ribcage where it would slide in and find his heart.
Pulling on a reserve he didn’t know he had, Ben found clarity in an instant, and he knew what he had to do. He shoved back and then let his legs fall, twisting as he dropped, pulling the assassin behind him off balance, and spinning both of their bodies.
The man behind him grunted in Ben’s ear as the second assassin’s weapon plunged into him. The arm around his neck loosened, and Ben drew a ragged gasp of air, shrugging his assailant off and stumbling away. He fought off a wave of dizziness and struggled to raise his sword.
The second assassin yanked his shadowy blade clear of the first, muttering a string of curses. He stalked closer to Ben. Out of the corner of his eye, Ben saw a streak of motion and ducked. A new attacker’s sword whistled a finger-length above his shoulder.
Falling back, Ben was joined on one side by Rhys, who had picked up several more bloody cuts, and one of the Sanctuary’s blademasters. The other blademaster was lying face down in a growing pool of crimson.