The Prophecy Con (Rogues of the Republic)

by Weekes, Patrick

  The reaction on the dock was immediate. The dockworkers, who had up until now been watching with interest but doing nothing to interfere, shouted in alarm, grabbed anything lying nearby, and charged. The first of them reached the knight who had stabbed their fellow dockworker and swung a crowbar hard.

  It went cleanly through the knight, although he seemed to reel from the impact, and then he fell back into the smoke and disappeared. Loch looked back at the edge of the hangar, and saw Hessler crouched by a stack of crates, concentrating.

  As the knights and the dockworkers brawled, their leader stood unmoving. One of the workers grabbed him, and the knight backhanded the man without looking.

  A moment later, a pallet full of crates slammed into him, sending him skidding across the dock with sparks flying from his armor.

  Lock looked at the crane that had swung the pallet, and then at the control station.

  Sitting at the controls, Pyvic met her gaze, nodded once, and smiled.

  “Got it, Captain!” Kail yelled. “Everyone hang on!”

  “I love you, too,” Loch murmured as the airship pulled away.

  With shouts and smoke and crossbow bolts trailing after them, they left Heaven’s Spire.

  Four

  AS ONE OF the port cities, Ros-Oanki saw enough trade and enough travelers to merit a standing justicar presence. Justicar Fendril had been stationed there for years.

  Justicars on Heaven’s Spire traveled everywhere in the Republic, pursuing threats that nobody else could handle. They went after enemies the town guard couldn’t (or wouldn’t) hunt and chased creatures into the forests where no laws held sway.

  And if that weren’t enough, sometimes there was politics to contend with.

  Here in Ros-Oanki, Fendril dealt with the guards in cases where the question of authority was tricky—a criminal who’d committed a crime in Ros-Sesuf, but fled here, for example. He kept tabs on the guards themselves as well, along with government trade officials who might not be above bribery.

  It was slow work, dull even, and as far as Fendril was concerned, it was just perfect.

  He opened the day’s mail in his office a block away from the guard center. There were three notes for wandering criminals to watch for, one of them politically tricky enough for him to keep for himself rather than pass to the guard. There were two more notes, requests for information from a justicar in another province. Finally, from Heaven’s Spire, there came a request to check airship travel logs for an Urujar woman, Isafesira de Lochenville.

  The name sounded familiar, though Fendril couldn’t quite place it. He made a note to check the logs on his next visit to the port registry.

  Finally, he checked his message crystal for anything that was a high enough priority to merit the expense of transmitting a message via magic rather than carrying paper down from Heaven’s Spire on an airship. According to regulations, he was supposed to do that first, but anything that came via message crystal was political, and Fendril had gotten himself exiled down to Ros-Oanki to avoid that.

  It looked like he had failed in that regard.

  With a sigh, he pressed his thumb to the crystal and opened the message waiting there.

  “This is Captain Pyvic,” came a voice from the crystal, and Fendril grimaced. That definitely meant politics. “All port cities, I need any available information on an elven ship that departed from Heaven’s Spire a few months back, during the malfunction up here. It would have listed a purchased book as its main, possibly only, cargo. Get me a destination or last sighting and respond by crystal. Pyvic out.”

  Fendril grunted, sipped his kahva, and headed out for the port registry. At least he could look for anything about the Lochenville woman while he was there.

  The city streets were safer than they had been in years, thanks to the death of Jyelle, the woman who had controlled most of the organized crime in the province. Fendril smiled as he strolled through a wealthy market square that hadn’t seen anything more than amateur pickpocketing in months. A pretty Urujar couple looked through pamphlets for land rights off near Woodsedge. An elderly woman whose billowy dress marked her as a merchant from the Old Kingdom across the sea bartered with a tavern owner for one of her expensive and brightly colored rugs. A group of fat merchants sat outside a kahva-house sipping and passing notes back and forth with the bored faces of master suf-gesuf players. An Imperial woman in a rich violet dress haggled for passage on an airship while her bodyguard glared at anyone who approached, one hand on his shining ax.

  The port registry was a sturdy building not far from the airship docks, large enough to store a lot of files and even more money. The registrar, Maera, was a middle-aged woman Fendril had flirted with a bit before realizing that she really liked trade-and-travel regulations more than Fendril would ever like her. She ran her office with ruthless efficiency, which Fendril supposed he could appreciate, even if it meant having to grit his teeth and sign more paperwork than he’d had to deal with in the old days.

  Fendril stepped into the front office, a bell on the door ringing as he came inside. “Afternoon,” he called to the clerk at the desk.

  “Justicar.” The clerk was a young Urujar man with straight light hair that he wore long in the back. He gave Fendril a friendly nod. “Help you with something?”

  “If you’ve got time.” The office was empty, which was fortunate this time in the afternoon. “One urgent, one standard.” Fendril reached for the information request form.

  “Of course.” The clerk grinned. “It’s always something. Don’t worry about the papers today. It’s quiet, and Maera’s off for her afternoon kahva.”

  “I’d appreciate it.” That was also fortunate. Perhaps Maera was getting friendlier. Fendril passed over his notes, and the clerk went into the back room to pull the travel records.

  There was a new rug on the floor, he noted as he waited. It was bright orange, and didn’t match the rest of the room.

  “Found it.” The clerk stepped back into the main office, his hands raised to show that they were empty. “Without the forms I can’t write anything out, you understand, but I found what you needed. Nobody by the name of Isafesira de Lochenville has docked here, and that elven ship listed its destination as Ajeveth. Hope that helps.”

  “Immensely.” Fendril passed the young man a coin for his trouble. “Have a good afternoon.”

  He left the office, the strange new rug squishing under his boots. The bell rang as he pulled the door open, then again as it closed behind him, and Fendril stepped out into the afternoon sun, looked at the smiling people, and remembered right then that Maera didn’t drink kahva.

  The rug vendor from the Old Kingdom had empty slots in her shop-wagon. Her other rugs were gold and green and . . . yes, there was another that was the same shade of orange.

  Maera didn’t drink kahva. She would never have bought that garish rug for her office . . . and she wouldn’t have let her clerks give out information without Fendril filling out the proper request forms.

  Fendril sighed. He was getting close to retirement, and it would have been so damnably easy to just keep walking.

  He looked around. The market square was largely the same as when he’d gone into the registry office. The Imperial woman’s bodyguard with the big ax caught him staring and shot him a glare. Fendril looked away and walked as casually as he could around the corner.

  In the alley next to the registry office, the shadows were cool. It was clean, with a recently emptied trash bin and a side door that servants could use to come in.

  Before he forgot, he activated the message crystal. “Justicar Fendril, reporting on urgent request for information on whereabouts of elven ship bearing a book. Last known destination was Ajeveth.”

  With that done, Fendril pocketed the crystal and looked around. He squinted at the door and caught the slight irregularity in how it hung in place. He glan
ced back out into the street, and then crept closer to the door.

  When he got close, the freshly scarred wood on the frame was obvious.

  Quietly, very quietly, Fendril pushed the door open.

  In the back room, Maera lay dead, her head nearly severed from the rest of her body. The bodies of two men in sailor’s clothes lay next to her, one with his chest caved in and the other with a broken back. Chopping weapon, and a heavy one at that, the justicar in the back of Fendril’s mind noted. Not enough blood in the room. Whoever did this would have kicked in the side door and come in, then cut Maera down elsewhere. Probably the main office. A pair of sailors waiting to fill out forms, so they had to go, too. Big pool of blood, but the rug covers it up neatly.

  “I feared you were too wise to miss it,” came a woman’s voice from the doorway to the main office. Fendril felt muscles in the back of his neck tighten as he looked up.

  An Imperial woman stood there, smiling sweetly with lips that had been painted green. It wasn’t the woman he’d seen before, in the violet dress. This Imperial woman wore green-painted ringmail, and a pendant with a great golden butterfly hung from her neck, matching the makeup that trailed in a curving pattern from her eyes. “Tell me, Justicar, do you wish to know how they died?” she asked.

  Fendril knew two things for certain right then.

  He knew that the woman would not have asked that question if she didn’t stand to gain something from it, because people who went around killing port officials didn’t just make idle conversation. With that in mind, he was absolutely certain that he did not want to answer her.

  And second, he knew that the woman was not carrying a very large chopping weapon, which meant that she had either extremely powerful magic or someone else who did have a very large chopping weapon, and both of those options meant that Fendril should run like Byn-kodar himself was after him.

  He darted back, and the Imperial woman hissed and grabbed for him. He stumbled, knocked the door open with his backside, leaped back as she launched a circling kick at his head, and came out into the alley.

  Fendril turned to run . . . and a crushing pain slammed him to the ground.

  “You were sloppy, Shenziencis,” came a quiet, polite voice.

  He realized distantly that the voice wasn’t talking to him when the Imperial woman said, “He did not speak, Thunder. We have limits.”

  Fendril fought to roll back to his feet, and instead managed to groan and flop. A great armored hand closed upon his shoulder and dragged him across the ground. A moment later, the door closed.

  “Did you get the information?” the big male voice asked as a great pressure pinned Fendril to the floor. It was the man’s booted foot. He was wearing a great deal of armor. “The princess grows impatient.”

  “Ajeveth,” the woman, Shenziencis, said, “city of the dwarves. That is where we will find her.”

  “Good. Then let us leave.”

  Fendril’s vision was clearing, and he groaned again. When he opened his eyes, blinking through the tears, he saw the big Imperial bodyguard standing over him with his enormous ax rising up over his head. His foot crushed down on Fendril’s chest, making any real struggle impossible.

  “Wait,” said Shenziencis, and had he been younger and more optimistic, Fendril would have thought he had a chance. But he had seen the woman’s smile as she stood over three dead bodies looking at him, and that wasn’t the smile of someone who would spare Fendril’s life just because he was already helpless.

  “You and the weapon of the ancients had the others,” said Shenziencis, and smiled her emerald smile. “Leave this one and the clerk to me.”

  Fendril couldn’t fight. He couldn’t escape. He could barely move.

  His hand was tucked under him, near his pocket. He fumbled weakly. The Imperial bodyguard’s blow had left his whole body feeling the pins-and-needles sensation of a limb that had fallen asleep.

  His fingers closed around his message crystal, and he tapped out a signal every justicar knew.

  He kept tapping it as Shenziencis bent over him, the curling golden makeup around her eyes drawing to points like fangs. She leaned in, and her emerald-painted lips mouth opened far wider than should have been possible, her jaw swinging free as she closed down upon him . . .

  “The real problem,” said the young man passionately, “is that females just don’t appreciate nice guys like me.”

  Desidora, priestess of Tasheveth the love goddess, sighed very quietly on her side of the divider that blocked her view of the gemcutter’s son on the other side of the consulting booth.

  “So,” she said, “just as a tip, before we get to the actual advice: I think you’re going to have more luck if you avoid using that word to describe women.”

  Desidora wore pale green robes emblazoned with the silver smiling lips of her goddess. The smiling lips were regulation. The robe she had chosen to suit her tan skin and auburn hair—priests of Tasheveth were expected to look good while fulfilling sacred duties like mentoring the lovelorn.

  “Oh, I don’t call them that,” the young man said. “I would never be cruel to any woman. I just want to love them and show them how beautiful they are, but they’d rather go out with jerks instead.”

  “Kutesosh gajair’is?” the magical warhammer resting by her chair asked quietly.

  “No,” she muttered. “Shh.”

  “Is someone in there with you?” asked the young man.

  “Sometimes the goddess speaks to us,” Desidora said through the divider, and then glared down at Ghylspwr.

  Desidora had been a love priestess ever since the voice of the goddess had spoken in her dreams and marked her for sacred duty. It had sometimes been trying, but always satisfying.

  Then she’d been transformed into a death priestess for a time as part of a divine mandate to save the world. She’d gotten a magical talking warhammer and the ability to command the spirits of the dead in the bargain.

  “So,” said the young man, “you’re a love priestess. How do I get women to have sex with me?”

  “Kun-kabynalti osu fuir’is,” Ghylspwr said in a tiny sarcastic whisper. Desidora glared at him in warning. As a spirit of the ancients now possessing a warhammer, Ghylspwr had a vocabulary of only three phrases, but he managed to make himself understood far better than most people would have guessed.

  “The key to getting women to love you,” she said to the young man on the other side of the divider, “is to stop thinking of it as the end goal and start thinking of it as the enjoyable result of becoming a more interesting person.” Even though he couldn’t see her, Desidora put a smile on her face. That usually helped. “After all, the first step to gaining the love of others is to love yourself.”

  “Oh, I can’t do that,” said the young man. “My bed is really squeaky, and my parents get angry when they catch me.”

  Desidora was sincerely relieved to be a love priestess again, with no worries about draining the life out of someone in a fit of anger or projecting an aura that redecorated the room in a skulls-and-gargoyles theme.

  Still, some part of her missed having the power to destroy things that annoyed her.

  “What I’m saying,” she said, glaring again at Ghylspwr before he could say anything, “is that the reason the women you know go after jerks is because those jerks are confident and do interesting things. So one way to start would be to develop one of your hobbies or interests, like . . .” She squinted. The divider blocked her view of the young man—ostensibly to protect his privacy despite the fact that she recognized his voice from the jeweler’s shop three streets over—but with the eyes of a love priestess, she could see his aura. Athletics? No. Art? No. Music? No. Acting? No . . . but he at least enjoyed going to performances, so, “. . . theatre,” she finished. “You’re fortunate to live in Heaven’s Spire, which has a number of acting troupes, some of them even frien
dly to beginners. Maybe you could try out for a part. Or even volunteer to work on the sets as a way to meet people?”

  “What, like I’m supposed to paint stairs for some stupid show, and that’s going to get some woman to have sex with me?” The young man snorted. “They always go for the jerk in the lead, even though he’ll never treat them right, like I would.”

  Desidora picked up Ghylspwr, just for comfort. “You have to start somewhere.”

  “Nah, I’d have to go do work like every night, and what if nobody started liking me after all that work?” said the young man who lived off his parents’ money and spent most of his evenings sitting in the local kahva-house glaring at people or trying to find ways to love himself without waking up his parents. “Aren’t there tricks you can give me, like things I can say to get women to have sex with me? I heard that if you kind of insult a girl, but then turn it into asking her out for a date, her head gets confused?”

  A knock sounded on the door to Desidora’s side of the consulting booth, and it opened a moment later. A young priest poked his head in, looking apologetic and embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Sister. I have an urgent request from a justicar that—”

  “No, of course, absolutely.” Desidora was out of the booth before the priest had finished his sentence. “You can take over for me, I’m sure. Good luck.” The young priest blinked, and Desidora realized she was holding Ghylspwr in something that was just a little too close to a fighting position.

  She lowered Ghylspwr and gave warm smiles to the priests and visitors in the temple’s large central hall.

  Justicar Pyvic was pacing at the far end. “. . . confirm that it’s Ajeveth,” he was saying into a small blue crystal he held near his mouth. “I don’t have anything from the dwarves yet. I’ll be in contact once I do. Good luck.” He thumbed the crystal off, then started when he saw her.

  “You should have told her you loved her,” Desidora said, and gave Pyvic a hug. His aura was a little uncomfortable with that, either because he found her attractive and was a bit nervous or because he had once seen her smash a blood-gargoyle so hard it had actually popped.