“Wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait,” Draven said, holding up a finger. “Go back. You’re saying they all died the same way? The Guardians have some sort of serial murderer after them? Guardians?”
“Yes.”
“We’re talking about the same all-powerful guild of gods and goddesses, right?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Staatvelter said. “Unless you know about some other all-powerful guild of gods and goddesses. If you do, by all means feel free to introduce us. The point is, we have no clue how this is being done. Who’s doing it. The Council said—” He paused, looking unsure now. “They said they didn’t know what was happening. But your grandmother’s scroll, the fact they’ve been hiding all of this from Sae— The answers have to be where your grandmother wants us to go. They have to be in this Realm.” He blew out a sudden sigh. “But that means Sae’s going to want to go. She’ll sneak out of the castle the second she finds about all of this, and she will find out. It’s how she is.”
At that, Draven’s mind came to a screeching halt.
Artysaedra was going to go with Staatvelter? To the apocalyptic battleground Draven had seen in that dying crystal, where mountains had fissured and collapsed, where innocent blood had run like rivers, where fire had eaten away every last stone and tree?
Nope, Draven thought. Not going to happen.
Draven had looked out for his sister before she’d even been born. Afterward, he’d done the same, but with more vigor. It had worried him how his little sister had thrown her own life to the wind as a child. He’d seen her dangle between the balcony balusters at Athirae’s age because the sight of the ground four thousand feet below had dazzled her. He’d watched her lug swords longer than she was down the halls. He’d watched her train, too. He’d seen all the cuts and bruises she’d littered herself with before they’d healed. He’d seen how unsteady she’d been on her legs after her sessions or how there had been days she’d barely been able hold her spoon to her mouth at dinner because her arm had been shaking so badly. She’d been reckless. She still was. Draven still followed her to pubs and chased off men who got her drunk in the hopes of bedding a princess for a nice story to tell. He’d paid off some of the fighters down at the docks not to take matches with her anymore, not after the day she’d come home grinning with blood in her teeth. He’d even tried to reason with Staatvelter, back when they’d been friends—Staatvelter who flirted with his sister incessantly like he couldn’t see the small spark of hope fed and then banked in her eyes every time he did.
“I’m going with you,” Draven blurted out before he could stop himself, surprised by his own decision even as he made it.
It was Kinrae that said, “What?”
“What?” Draven got defensive. “There’s some murderer out there hunting Guardians. I’m not just going to sit here. If that Realm has anything to do with these murders, Saedra’s not storming in there alone. She needs all the protection she can get.”
“I’ll be with her,” Staatvelter said.
“Another person with a target on his back,” Draven said. “Don’t you think in a situation like this it’s better to stay in a pack? Watch out for one another?”
“You aren’t trained for this,” Staatvelter argued. “No offense, Your Highness, but this might be a warzone we walk into and you don’t know anything about fighting. Besides, your grandmother warned us that anyone involved in this would be—”
“Draven is correct, though, Guardian Staatvelter,” Kinrae interrupted. “It is a wise proposal to journey together, is it not? We would be much safer as a unit.”
“We?” Draven and Staatvelter said in unison, but Draven was the one who vigorously shook his head and held up a hand. “Oh, no. What do you mean we? You aren’t coming with us—”
“I didn’t say you could come with me,” Staatvelter said with a flap of his arms. “You two read the scroll. You know that anyone involved in this automatically becomes an enemy of—”
Draven turned away from Staatvelter’s loony rambling to round on his brother fully, straightening his back and lifting his chin. His horns were now on display. “You aren’t marching into an active battlefield where some murderer could be lurking about, Kinrae,” Draven said. “I’ve never even seen you kill so much as a spider. You won’t be safe, and I don’t want you getting hurt—”
“I do not want you grievously injured, either, Brother,” Kinrae said, “but as you are leaving, so must I. This is not debatable. We stay together, always.”
“Neither of you should be coming!” Staatvelter erupted. “Neither of you will be safe! Did no one listen to that scroll at all? Vachkass! Menungakagleich!”
Before Draven could tell Staatvelter to shut up, he heard a noise: the scrape of feet over stone. It was a ways back, beyond the bridge, deep inside the narrow crevices that led to the torch-lit cavern. Draven would have recognized those footsteps anywhere, though—the weight of them, the heavy drag of the heels.
Artysaedra.
By the time his sister made it into the crystal cavern, everyone was already expecting her arrival. Even Beaker, who had materialized again, was waiting obediently with a wagging tail as Artysaedra made her way into the room. She gave Beaker a pat.
Artysaedra had changed out of her Guardian asa and into the enchanted uniform of a castle guard. The lower half of her face was covered by a tight black cloth, nearly eclipsed by the bevor that scooped up and out from her collar-like gorget to protect her throat and chin. Her torso was bound by a gleaming steel cuirass that was pressed with their house sigil. The buff coat she wore underneath it ended at her knees. Her legs were covered in lambskin leggings that disappeared into a set of heavy leather boots, and her arms were made bulky and sharp by pauldrons, rerebraces, and vambraces. Her gauntleted hand was settled over the wolf-headed pommel of the longsword at her side. In her other hand was her scythe with its two curved blades that met in the shape of two crescent moons, back to back.
“I dare you to wear that on your next date with Hallien,” Staatvelter said, and Artysaedra snorted and chuckled through the cloth over her face.
“I just might,” she said. “But it’s going to have to wait. Father gave me permission to leave the Realm. The Council’s hiding a lot of shit apparently, and we need to get to the bottom of it.”
“You’re a little behind. We already know,” Draven drawled, and Artysaedra’s pitch-black eyes snapped to him. He could see her frown through the folds of cloth over her face. Her wolfish ears flattened.
“And how the hell would you know?”
At that, Kinrae held out their grandmother’s note. Artysaedra took off one of her gauntlets, hooked it to her vambrace so that it hung there, and grabbed the paper. Quickly, she read. Draven imagined his face had looked exactly like hers when he’d read the letter himself—twisted against itself in confusion. When she was finished, they each explained to her in turn what they’d seen in the dying crystal.
“What the actual fuck?” Artysaedra said, voice muffled by the cloth. “M’esh. A whole Realm? And it’s all connected to the murders? The assholes really are up to something.” In her hand, a flame sprung up and ate away at the note until only ashes were left in her palm. “So we follow this lead and figure out what the Council’s hiding and why, then hopefully figure out more about these murders.”
“If being an enemy to the Council is your life’s dream, Sae, I’m not going to stop you,” Staatvelter said with a sigh. “I can’t stop anyone, it seems.”
“Enemies are like bottles of whiskey, Staatvelter. You can never have too many,” Artysaedra said. Then as an afterthought: “Well, I suppose you could. Both’ll fuck you up something awful. Go filch some armour off the Guard, would you? I’ll gather provisions. Meet me at the castle gates in ten.”
“About that,” Staatvelter said when Artysaedra began to turn away, and suddenly, he looked very sheepish. He ran a hand over his mustache and mouth. “Befor
e you yell at me, I did try to argue with them, but I think your brothers are coming, too.”
Part Three
A Letter and Footprints
A DAGGER & A STRAY
_______________________________
Our findings have clocked the average demon’s sprint at 26.6 meters per second, a speed maintainable between 30 minutes and 3.4 hours. We postulate their enhanced strength combined with the boosted regeneration of their cells are the main contributing factors for this ability.
excerpt from the abstract of Study into the Advanced Bipedality of the Species Dæmonia, penned by Drs. Faust, Grenheim, and Gonzalez, published in the Realm of Cold Noon
THE GUARDIAN REALM OF STORMS
FLEET STREET, THE BHAKH DISTRICT,
LOWER AGRAPALL, CAPITAL OF THE FIRST KINGDOM
“Do you want to hear a wheezy?” Nori-Rin asked through the leather mask tied over the bottom half of her face. She pressed her dagger to Bo-Yei’s neck harder, blood beading along the polished blade’s length. Behind her, five low-level, nameless thugs were going cold on the ground. It hadn’t taken much effort for her to snap their necks. “What do you get when you cross an animalus, a corn cob, and a bit of string?”
“Crazy— You a crazy woman,” he stammered out. “Adma appo—”
“I’m afraid that’s not the answer, Bo-Yei, my friend. But you’re probably right in any case. Which is why you should give me the address of your supplier, yeah?” Nori-Rin said. “You can trust me when I say I’ll shik your throat right now and leave you in the streets for the night-tigers to find like I’m going to do with your friends. That’s what a crazy person would do, right?”
“You would not,” Bo-Yei said, stilted. His chestnut eyes were wide, glinting with the light that was spilling over into the shadowed alley-tunnel they were in. Along the street visible just up the stairs, people were milling about, oblivious. If they’d tried, the passersby could have smelled the voided bowels of the dead thugs, but the smell of shit and death was common enough on this side of town that it was readily ignored. The people were likely caught up in getting home anyway, or at least getting to the bars. Shops were closing down for the day, and restaurants were deep into preparing for dinner crowds, the air perfumed with seared fish and honeyed glazes. Prostitutes were already standing in the streets soliciting for their bordellos. They’d resorted to some very colourful rhymes in the last few weeks, Nori-Rin thought, trying to beat out the criers for the hay plays performed at the edge of the district.
Bo-Yei shrank back against the wall and held up his hands. His macaque tail curled around his pot-bellied waist. His breath was potent enough it could have caught fire at the smallest spark—polluted with the cheap swill they served in The Desert Rose, a small gambling den that was notorious for dealing in everything but coin. Bo-Yei stopped by after his shifts at the docks, Nori-Rin had seen through her tailing of him, and this was the route he took home every day. It was unfortunate that he’d had company today, because her orders had been very strict: kill the unnecessaries.
Nori-Rin had killed them, of course, and she didn’t care if anyone had seen it. If King Diyagida wanted to force her hands to play in blood, she was always going to make sure that it came back to stain him, too.
The information she’d tracked down for her king over the last few months had led her here, to Bo-Yei Sangramoon. He was one of her last leads on the demonic drug called adregaa, which had sprung up in the First Kingdom early last year, its manufacturers and suppliers suspiciously silent, its dealers hard to find. Tracking it to the Black Rats had been difficult, but enough loose-lipped footmen had confirmed it for Nori-Rin while bleeding out on her dagger that she knew it was true. It also meant she knew that gangster Yera-Ji Uguandeen and his family, heads of the Black Rats, were in charge of the operations. She wouldn’t be able to prove it until she could track the drug shipments back to them personally, though, and honestly, she didn’t feel like it. This wasn’t her job. This was a matter for the King’s Guard, not a Guardian.
Diyagida still thinks I’m his little bloodhound, Nori-Rin thought jauntily. Oh, he’ll regret it someday.
“If you tell me what I want to know,” Nori-Rin said singsong, “I’ll let you go home to your pregnant padpadrii. If not, we both figure out how many fingers of yours I can cut off before you lose consciousness.”
“What matter?” Bo-Yei spat, his Common Tongue clumsy and staccatoed. “I quiet, you kill. I talk, they kill. What matter? I dead. This job money. I need feed family. You no care.”
“If you need to feed your family, why are you gambling away your food tickets from the docks?” Nori-Rin asked with a smile. Bo-Yei’s dark skin paled. “Now. I’ll ask again: do you want to hear a wheezy?”
Nori-Rin whistled her way down the crowded dirt streets, a flea-bitten stray calico purring away in her arms. He’d been trembling underneath an overturned milk crate a few turns back, too tattered and scabbed to ignore. She’d already decided to call him Admiral Anderson, and once he was healed and fed, he would make a fine addition to the palace.
Golden sunlight slanted down tin roofs and pooled in the gaps between the ramshackle, towering buildings of the loud city. The slivers of Nori-Rin’s Realm’s two moons hung high in the cloudless, evening sky, a sky almost hidden behind the electrical wires webbing over the tops of the streets in a haphazard mess. Neon signs buzzed to life in reds and pinks. A motorbike roared and tore off somewhere in the distance. Laughter welled up like blood from every crevice of the city. Agrapall was alive with the night.
Nori-Rin was certain the demons ambling around the crowded streets, who were talking and smoking, could smell the fresh piss on her bare feet and the blood crusted on her hands easily by the way they kept casting sidelong glances at her. It would take several scrubbings to get the scent of Bo-Yei’s blood off her hands, she knew, but her father had taught her a trick with industrial cleaners and crushed sweet pea flowers that would mask the smell from a demon’s nose. She tugged the hood of her cloak down lower to shadow her half-masked face from sight.
The people of Agrapall knew her as the King’s Watchdog by now, more than they knew her as the Guardian of Storms. She was a thug to them, not a saviour, and she’d made it that way on purpose. King Diyagida and the First Kingdom were ashamed of her—in the very same breath that they needed her kept on their leash to maintain power in the Realm. They could disapprove of her and her actions as much as they wanted to, but as long as the Council continued to support her, she wouldn’t be stripped of her rank and the king would be stuck needing her.
Luckily for her, the Council supported a lot. Their definitions of good and evil were circumstantial at best. It was the first lesson she’d learned as a Guardian: murder wasn’t murder if it invoked the right cause. And murder was something she’d been born knowing, birthed in the slums of Agrapall. Her father had taught her the ways of the street from a young age. It was her mother who had taught her the ways of the court, and Nori-Rin had still fought her way into it. Finding a femoral artery with a dagger was as second nature to her as slipping into a curtsy at the perfect angle, and she did both with practiced intent.
Streetlamps flicked on, cast in green.
There was a delicatessen ahead, next to a fishmonger’s that was boarded up for the evening with corrugated tin sheets. The deli itself was no more than a corner restaurant—the name Mama Li’s printed on its giant sun-bleached sign. The shop radiated a thick air of spiced bread, fresh tomatoes, and sweet meats that made Nori-Rin’s stomach gurgle. Surveilling Bo-Yei had taken two weeks, and Nori-Rin had walked by this restaurant more times than she could count during her stakeouts. She still felt a tug at her willpower to go in, but she had business to attend to. Patrons swarmed the rickety outdoor tables that crowded underneath the shop’s tattered red awnings. It seemed to dawn on several of them as she passed by exactly who she was, smelling like death the way she did. They gave deferential nods, which she returned.
A chill
crept into the muggy afternoon air that raised the skin on Nori-Rin’s sweaty, exposed stomach under her cloak. Her inner thigh burned, the holster that strapped her dagger to her opposite thigh rubbing a steady rash into it every time she took a step. She scraped off some of the dirt and hay stuck to her bare feet against her calves. Without any sort of urgency, she wended her way up the mountainous hill Agrapall was build on to the Darageshba District where a lonely little inn waited on Foubwa Street. It was squat with a gabled roof, a red bicycle rusting against its front stoop. Dara-Li Tayanooai was already waiting there for her, clicking a pocket watch open and shut, open and shut.
She was dressed in the typical high-necked qim of their Kingdom, her black stomach bare and her skirts long, like several tapestries of competing patterns sewn on top of each other in layers, split up each side. Her hair was braided in tight rows today, and her lips were rouged. When she grimaced, lipstick smeared across her gapped teeth.
“Pigeon,” Nori-Rin greeted cheerfully. She flicked up a ward around them with an idle thought at the multiverse. It settled into place without hesitation.
“Dog,” Dara-Li returned with a glare, her eyes like molten gold. “What new developments does the King’s pet deity bring today?”
“See for yourself, yeah?” Nori-Rin reached into the pocket of her cloak and tossed over a small velvet pouch. There was pleasure to be found in the way Dara-Li’s face twisted in disgust as she opened it. Nori-Rin chuckled and nuzzled her half-masked face into the calico nipping at her neck. Bo-Yei’s left eye would find a new home, probably in the belly of one of the purebred hounds that Dara-Li usually had with her like she was the alpha of the pack. Nori-Rin was surprised when ice crept over the bag instead. Dara-Li shattered it in her fist.
A Shard of Sea and Bone Page 18