The Great Restoration (A Tale of the Verin Empire Book 2)

by William Ray

  He sprang backwards, the blade grazing a shallow cut across his belly that would have eviscerated him had he not pulled away. Without thinking, he swung a right cross that caught Emily on the side of the head, and she fell limp from the blow. He was immediately sorry for it, and lunged forward to catch her, fighting a sharp stab of pain in his leg.

  Hooded green heads turned towards Dorna, who shouted at Emily, “No, not yet!” Then, turning to the other Wardens, she said, “Well … go! Get him! Get him!” and the Wardens all drew their knives.

  Gus tried to shift his weight to his uninjured leg, leaning Emily against his shoulder while he reached for the only weapon he had. A burr on the jagged end of the pipe caught on the waist of his jacket as he pulled the pipe from his pocket, and it tangled in the fabric as he tried to wrest it free with one hand.

  Seeing the blunt end of it emerge, half-covered in cloth, one of the Wardens recoiled and shouted, “He’s got a gun!”

  That shout brought the others to a wary halt, and quick to take advantage, Gus stopped trying to pull it free and instead pointed the blunt end of pipe at them from under the tangle of his jacket. “Get back! All of you, stay back!”

  They eagerly obliged, and one towards the back even fled between crates. Dorna shouted at one of her hooded allies, “You said they took his gun!”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Dorna’s gang of Wardens took to their heels, scattering amid the boxes, fleeing towards some back corner of the warehouse. Dorna cursed and yelled at them to grab the gun instead, but they ignored her, and one even tossed aside his knife as he scrambled to escape. A heartbeat later, Dorna turned to join them in flight.

  Gus laid Emily gently to the floor as he watched them. They hardly seemed the sort of expert criminals one would expect to find associated with Phand’s carefully planned kidnapping. Dorna Michts had essentially confirmed Phand was still alive when she said he had to stay with them, but Gus still had no idea where they were holding Doctor Phand, so he needed to pursue them and find out more.

  Reluctantly leaving Emily unconscious on the floor, Gus carefully followed their flight towards the back corner of the warehouse. There was no door to the street back there, and since he didn’t hear anything going on there as he approached, Gus worried this might be a more elaborate trap. By the time he crept around the last stack of boxes to peer into that back corner, they were gone.

  The tightly stacked crates afforded no hiding place the Wardens could have slipped into, and the only oddity was the column of white stone that had been used by the builder as a plinth to support that corner of the warehouse. There, the concave side of the Elven monument faced inward, creating a shadowed alcove of ancient runes.

  Gus stepped forward to pushed at the column and found it every bit as immobile as the other he had tried. The walls around it felt firm, and none of the nearby boxes moved easily. He looked over the column again and felt the answer must be there somehow, but he was too worried over Emily to figure it out now.

  He returned to where she lay quietly on the cold clay floor and saw her face was still relaxed in unconsciousness. Gus tried to wrap his mind around what could have driven her to attack him like that. Had she met these people at temple and been won over to their cause?

  It would have taken one hell of a speech to turn her on him, and the more he thought about it, the harder it was to understand. After all these years, he liked to think they meant more to each other than that. If these really were Wardens, they didn’t just hate him; they hated all of human civilization, and that certainly didn’t sound like her. And why gag her if she was on their side?

  The possibility that she had been convinced to turn on him like that tapped a deep well of emotion that felt like ice in his chest. He pushed that down and slipped his arms under her, unwilling to abandon her, even after she tried to kill him.

  ~

  “Royal Birthday”

  The fourteenth anniversary of the birthday of the Princess of Whitby, His Imperial Majesty’s eldest, was honoured by festivities throughout eastern Aelfua yesterday. The mounting of the Royal Guard by the 1st Regiment took place, and the band of the Grenadier Guards played in the newly constructed Calwright Theater in Jinnai.

  By the Princess’s desire, Marshal Kilgrave gave his drawing-room entertainment at the mayor’s home in the afternoon; and a pair of Rakhasin goblin minstrels, entertainers trained by Khanom’s own resident of the breed, provided song and merriment through the evening.

  – Khanom Daily Converser, 16 Tal. 389

  ~

  - CHAPTER 29 -

  Errol helped Gus unload Emily from the cab outside Rondel’s, and despite his tight finances, Gus gave him as healthy a gratuity as he dared. The crooked clerk was back on duty at the front desk, and his eyes lit up with dozens of questions on seeing Gus returning with an unconscious woman in his arms. Hoping to get a closer look, the clerk even went so far as to help them into the elevator, but a stern look sent the man back to his station without further inquiry.

  Staggering down the hall with Emily in his arms, Gus made it to his room and dumped her onto the bed. After checking to make sure she was still breathing, he removed his jacket, and it stuck briefly to the ruined shirt beneath. The jacket had been open when Emily lunged for him with the knife, so it was only slightly torn, but the shirt beneath it was clearly ruined.

  He peeled the shirt off to look at the cut beneath, which was an ugly mess but didn’t seem too deep despite how much it hurt. Ripping the ruined shirt apart, he used the remains of it to wrap around his belly, drawing it tight to stop the bleeding.

  Feeling an unusual surge of modesty, he pulled out his spare shirt and buttoned himself back up. While certain that Emily had seen him naked when they first met, that had been years ago now, Gus had been quite drunk at the time, and his memories of it were hazy. There was a mirror in the room, and looking over at his reflection, he wondered if he should wear a girdle; the little bit of slimming from his bandage made him look a little more fit and maybe even a little younger.

  Staring down at Emily, still tangled in the green robe, he had a hard time trying to piece together why she would have turned against him like that. It was so unreal that, between breaths, he could almost imagine he dreamed it; the slice across his belly gave sharp confirmation of her attack with each inhale.

  He felt a cauldron of rage rising to a boil inside him. Gus knew he probably wasn’t the best boss—he seldom paid on time, he mocked her religion, and he always underestimated her connections—but he had thought they were still close enough that she wouldn’t just set him up as a patsy for some elf cult. He might even have imagined something more romantic could grow between them if he weren’t a cripple and a former soldier.

  He had no idea what other weapons she might be carrying in that green robe, so he rolled her out of it to check. Beneath the Warden’s robe she still wore the same sort of blouse and skirt she wore to work, which surprised him since she seldom dressed that way anywhere other than his office.

  Stranger still, he discovered thick wool socks had been slid over each of her shoes. The oddity of it made him clamp down on his emotional turmoil. He needed answers, and those were easier to get with a cool head or, at the very least, the appearance of a cool head.

  She groaned softly, and Gus hurriedly bound her hands to the headboard with a remaining strip of his ruined shirt. Out of an abundance of caution, he took the belt from her robe and used that to tie her ankles together as well. She mumbled something, and he leaned over her, trying to make out the words. It sounded like something foreign and familiar, although he couldn’t yet place the language.

  Emily’s eyes fluttered open, she stared up at him a moment in obvious confusion and then let out a bestial shriek. She thrashed atop the bed, trying to strike at him with her hands, and when that didn’t quite work, she swung her feet, flopping atop the sheets like a fish out of water and snarling in frustration.

  She gnashed
her teeth and lost any last vestige of order to her hair as her bucking about finally made her usually careful bun spill free of its moorings. Staring up at him, she chanted aggressively in the same foreign tongue she’d mumbled with when coming to, and Gus suddenly realized what it sounded like.

  “Since when do you speak Gedlunder?”

  She spat at him and then rasped out, “You will not stop the Great Restoration!”

  Composed. He needed to look composed and in control. Taking a deep breath, Gus forced a confident smile and replied, “That’s alright. I hadn’t been planning to. What’s the Great Restoration?”

  Emily thrashed about again, then scowled at him as if searching for the right curse to scream out. He actually looked forward to hearing it—in all the time he had known her, he had never heard Emily use a swear word. Even when she worked the bawdy house, she had always seemed too composed for any verbal vulgarity. If she had ever looked ready to say something truly severe, this was that moment.

  Instead, after bleary-eyed hesitation, she defiantly announced, “You cannot stop it!”

  “If that’s true, why try to kill me?”

  That seemed to offend her further, and she began to chant again. He listened carefully, but of the few words from Gedlund he still remembered, none were part of her recitation, but that only ruled out ‘fish’, ‘roof’ and ‘give’. Still, something else about it tickled at his memory.

  Emily seemed to grow a little uncertain about whatever she was saying, stumbling over parts of it and frowning in concentration as she tried to get it right. He’d seen men who never quite recovered their wits after a blow to the head, and for a moment, Gus worried he had done something similar to her when he hit her in the warehouse. He shook his head, trying to chase that worry away—she had been trying to kill him.

  There was something familiar in the rhythm of her chant though. Emily stubbornly pushed her way through it a couple of times, and on the third he asked, “What’s this thing you keep saying?”

  She seemed to forget her anger a moment and with a distracted frown answered, “It’s the Elven prayer the Master taught me, for when things seem confusing. He said he would help me learn it, but there wasn’t much time. I need to remember it, but I can’t quite get it right.”

  Emily took a deep breath and tried again, carefully sounding out the unfamiliar syllables and trying to match that eerily familiar rhythm as best she could remember. Seeing her weird struggle brought a pang of pity, and in a gentle tone he said, “He’s the one who told you about the Great Restoration?”

  She nodded, still trying to focus on the prayer. Her rabid anger was fading, and she wore a childlike expression of single-minded intensity. In that moment, she didn’t seem herself at all, and suddenly Gus realized where he had heard that same rhythm before. It followed the same beat as the wyrd tune he had heard in Aelfua a decade ago, in a haunted village on the coast.

  The eerie sound of the mesmerized villagers humming it as they limped along to the fiddler’s tune still haunted his dreams. He had witnessed people maiming themselves in their desperation to obey whatever strange mission the music gave them, then crawl eagerly onward to their next task. Some nights, the image of that desperate obedience was more terrifying than Lady Paasil descending from the sky.

  On a hunch, Gus began to whistle bits of that fiddler’s tune; Emily’s eyes turned sharply to him at the sound, but she just pouted at the distraction and kept trying to focus on her own words. It was difficult, and the song’s strange nature kept lulling his own thoughts away, but Gus stubbornly continued to whistle as much of it as he could and picked up at the beginning again whenever the song made the task slip from his mind.

  Looking dazed, Emily blinked and wrinkled her nose as if there were a foul odor in the room. Finally, she gave up trying to finish her chant and petulantly demanded, “What are you whistling?”

  She still didn’t seem all there, but her tone certainly sounded more like the Emily he knew. Thinking back to Claude’s attempted lyrics, Gus grinned and replied, “Ogria Girls.”

  She shook her head at the unfamiliar name, so Gus sang to her, “Love knows no nation’s borders, though war may be the norm, and often patriots grow hateful. Our Verin girls are lovely, the Tuls will keep you warm, but the Ogria girls are grateful.”

  With a look of shock, Emily exclaimed, “What? That’s horrible!”

  That idiot’s intensity had faded from her eyes, and while she still looked worse for wear, Gus felt a swell of both relief and triumph. He chuckled at her reaction and said, “Oh, it’s a soldier’s song—the kind of thing men off fighting goblins find amusing. It’s a catchy tune though, right?”

  He hummed a few more bars of it, and she nodded, the fiddler’s infectious music caught in her thoughts and perhaps disrupting the rhythm of whatever prayer she’d been given by this ‘Master’. Over the years, he had tried hard to forget as much as he could about his last trip through Aelfua, but for once, he was glad couldn’t.

  Emily nodded but then frowned and glanced down as if trying to remember something, so Gus quickly added, “Here, I’ll teach it to you.”

  She was resistant at first, and Claude’s incomplete lyrics only grew more offensive as the song went on, but the wyrd tune made it difficult to resist. Over the next hour, he kept pushing her, teaching her the lyrics line by line and pestering her until she repeated them back.

  By the end, she looked exhausted, but then they sang the first few bits of the song together, and she even laughed as they both tapered off into the muddled uncertainty the fiddler’s music instilled in mortal minds. Shaking her head and looking bemused, she said, “That’s a terrible song.”

  Gus grinned and replied, “Well, that’s why they don’t allow women in the army.”

  Emily nodded, then looked wounded. After a pensive moment, she said, “I’m sorry about the knife.”

  The cringing look on her face was as unfamiliar to him as the bloodthirsty attacks that had come earlier, but it brought a surge of such profound relief that it made him shiver. If this chant really were some sort of wyrding, like the fiddler’s music, it might not yet be safe to set her loose, but mesmerism could be beaten more easily than a poisoned heart.

  Back in Gemmen, Emily had suggested these Wardens were real, and he had scoffed at the idea because there would be no point to Wardens unless an elf was still around and somehow involved in the modern world. Now that seemed disturbingly plausible.

  Gus rose to his feet, fetched a cup by the room’s basin, and filled it with water. “Yeah. What was that about? Who’s this master you mentioned?” He lifted the cup to her lips and helped her take a few sips before giving her answer.

  She looked away, her eyes refusing to meet his as she stared off into the corner, deep in thought as he set the water aside. When she finally answered, she murmured, “I’m not sure. He was all … pointy.” A look of alarm crossed her face, and she added, “Maybe he was Elven? That doesn’t make sense. It’s hard to think. He taught me a prayer, though, that’s supposed to help ….”

  “No, it won’t help, just forget that.” He watched her carefully, trying to decide if she was truly as addled as she seemed or merely taking her time to construct believable lies. He wanted to believe, but she had always been a canny liar. “When did you get to Khanom?”

  The look of shock on her face was better acting than he expected. “Khanom? Is that where we are?” She sat up straighter and glanced around the room as if somehow that might contradict him, then sighed and said, “I had just left our office and was going home. I was cutting through the alley, and no one was there, but then someone grabbed me! And … and then this cold, cold wind. It was so cold, I couldn’t breathe, and I must have blacked out. When I came to, there was a woman there. I think it was Missus Phand—the false one who hired us!”

  Gus nodded and offered her another sip of water, which she eagerly drank down as she worked to order her story in her own head. It f
elt true. “I couldn’t see, but she was talking to the Master. It’s like a dream now; it just keeps fading. I’m not sure how much of it really happened.”

  “It’s alright. Just tell me what you think happened.”

  “Then he came in to see me, and we spoke, and at the time it seemed to make so much sense. The world is in danger from … something, but we can help him save it. Something inappropriate on the queen’s palace? Does that make sense?”

  Gus nodded, even though it didn’t make a lot of sense. Everything suggested this was about Phand’s tower, which wouldn’t be on top of Palace Park. According to the Exposition office’s map, nothing was happening in Palace Park. Her choice of words reminded him of Ulm’s odd repetitions though, and he doubted that was a coincidence.

  Emily shrugged in confusion and looked frustrated. “That’s most of it, I think. He told me a prayer to say and made me practice it a few times and then he left. The false Alice Phand came back in, and we must have talked some, but I don’t remember it.”

  He nodded again and waited for her to continue, and after a moment, she did. “We got all dressed up and went somewhere strange. I remember we walked in total darkness for such a long time, it felt like hours, but then suddenly we were at that warehouse. When they said you were an enemy, I suddenly … I wanted ….”

  She started to sob. With a swell of pity, Gus wanted to embrace her, but that seemed odd with her arms tied up, so instead he just leaned down, resting his forehead against hers. After a bit, she gathered herself again and then coughed softly to let him know. He leaned back again, and in a quiet voice, she asked, “Does any of it make sense to you?”