“And you’re Gentle Thunder!” Tern said, excited enough that Loch shot her a look. “Your doll was a lot more fun to play with. It was poseable, and if you bought the deluxe doll, it came with your ax, Arikayurichi, the Bringer of Order, and . . .” She trailed off as she caught Loch’s look. It mirrored the look Gentle Thunder was giving her. “I’m done. I’m stopping.”
“The order to hand me over to the Empire was illegal,” Loch said. “I’m not the one who turned Heaven’s Spire into a weapon.”
“And yet thousands will die in the coming war if you refuse to surrender,” Veiled Lightning said. “You were a baroness, but refer to yourself as a captain, Isafesira. Do you consider your own life more valuable than your fellow soldiers?”
“Kutesosh gajair’is!” said the ax that Loch assumed was Arikayurichi, Bringer of Order.
“If I surrender, your people torture me until I break, then find out I really wasn’t behind the attack and goes to war with the Republic anyway.” Loch took a step to the side, distancing herself from Tern a bit. In the corner of her eye, Kail was still climbing across the gap between the buildings on the white silken line.
“That is a possibility,” Veiled Lightning said. Her intricate braids bobbed as she nodded briefly, and Loch caught the flash of crystal at the tips again. “But placed against the certainty of the war that comes without your surrender—”
“What about the book?” Tern asked, and as Veiled Lightning looked at her, she flushed. “And sorry for interrupting, Your Highness.”
“Could you stop being polite to her?” Loch muttered.
“Look, I played with a doll house modeled after her summer home.”
“If the Republic wishes to return stolen relics to the Empire,” Gentle Thunder said, putting himself between Loch and Lightning, “it may do so after you have been tried and executed. For now, the Republic’s treachery demands a sacrifice.” He raised his ax. “Surrender or die.”
“Or escape,” Loch said, and spun her sword as she stepped forward. Gentle Thunder looked her way, and on cue, Tern shot him with her crossbow.
Or at least, that had been the plan. What actually happened was that Tern fired the crossbow, and the ax in Gentle Thunder’s hands moved like a silver blur, and Tern’s bolt glanced up harmlessly into the darkness with a sound like a hammer on a tuning fork.
“Son of a bitch,” Tern said, more impressed than disappointed.
“Kutesosh gajair’is!” shouted the ax.
“I really thought when Arikayurichi cut arrows from the air in the books, the writers were playing fast and loose with what magical axes could do. Loch, did you see that?”
“Tern, could you please stop praising them?” Loch shifted her blade from the showy spinning position into a grip she could actually use to hurt someone.
“Wait,” Veiled Lightning said to Gentle Thunder as he advanced on Loch. “We need her alive. Attendant Shenziencis, can you restrain her?”
A third figure slid out through the window, moving with liquid smoothness despite the ringmail. It was the movement that warned Loch what was about to happen, along with the cut of the ringmail—though the rings were a rich green rather than the shining gold she had seen last time. In one hand, the figure drew forth a short spear. The other hand held a net whose silver links crackled with pale-yellow energy. A golden helmet obscured the figure’s face.
“I can,” the figure said, and to Loch’s surprise, the voice beneath the golden helmet was female. The last time Loch had run into something wearing that ringmail and holding a weapon with that magic, the voice had been male.
It had been called a Hunter, and it had continued to fight even after taking blows that would have killed any mortal man.
Loch was drawing in a breath to call out a warning when the crossbow bolt Tern had fired landed on the museum rooftop across the street.
Icy, inside the building, was continuing to work on disabling the interior pressure plates, since he had assumed correctly that Kail would not want to hang upside-down from a wall while disabling a dwarven-crafted door lock. He had, in the interest of time, decided not to disable the pressure plates on the rooftop.
As a result, the moment the crossbow bolt hit the rooftop, the earth-daemons bound into the floorplates shrieked an alarm.
Loch, Tern, and the three Imperials turned as man-sized creatures of stone clawed their way free from the rooftop across the street, howling like a gale-force wind through a cave tunnel. They pounced on the bolt, still screaming, and tore it to shreds.
Then, as one, they looked across the rooftop at Loch. Dropping to all fours, they sprinted across the rooftop and onto the rope, running on it like a squirrel on a clothesline.
“Kail, new plan!” Loch called out . . .
And chopped down through the rope with a single clean cut.
Security Enforcer Gart Utt’Krenner could have delegated his nightly patrol duties to other members of his staff. He did not lack for resources—especially given the reallocations after the recent human display of military aggression with Heaven’s Spire—and his work kept him busy enough even without making patrols himself. His wife had been supportive about the late hours he had worked leading up to the opening of the new magical display at Irke’desar, but her comments during their nightly face-washing and mouth-cleansing suggested that she carried some irritation with her at the amount of work Gart had placed upon his own shoulders.
It was a fair concern, and Gart agreed with it. At a certain point, his insistence upon continuing patrols himself might even impact the morale of his staff, suggesting that Gart did not trust his men and women to perform their duties themselves.
Nothing could be further from the truth, and once the new magical display had been up for a few weeks—perhaps after the next civic holiday—Gart Utt’Krenner would hang his armored jacket over a chair and ease back to one night a week.
For now, though, he felt this current display was too important to sit out the patrols. Besides the value of the artifacts on display, there was the potential for mischief. Given the political climate, it was easy to believe that a member of one of the rival human nations might decide vandalizing the other nation’s display would be a good idea.
As such, Gart took it upon himself to go room to room, entering his all-clear for each display in a crystal fob attached to his belt. He glared as he finished assessing the Urujar display, a room that always made him sick to his stomach, mostly due to the fact that dwarves had made the slave collars so prominently shown in the cases. “Urujar sub-hex: clear.” Gart Utt’Krenner sighed deeply and shook his head at the collars. “Poor folk. Centuries of pain, and I suspect ye still be feelin’ it deep today.”
Gart’s sentimental moment was shattered by the shrieking of pressure-plate alarms up on the rooftop.
“Byn-Kodar’s knuckles!” Gart muttered. If this was the birds again, the runesmen behind the faulty avian aversion systems would have a lot of explaining to do.
He turned to head back to the central security room when an Urujar man hanging from a rope burst through the crystal window and slammed into Gart’s mailed chest like a hammer blow.
“Rrrf,” Gart heard the man say. At least, that’s what he thought the man said. It was as though the words were coming from a great distance, and his head rang and darkness swam across his vision. The man continued, “Sorry about that. Was trying to break into the elven room . . .”
Security Enforcer Gart Utt’Krenner had time to remember that he had insisted on performing these perimeter checks himself before he blacked out.
Kail got back to his feet, wincing. Crystal didn’t break nearly as easily as glass when you slammed into it, and glass broke a lot less easily than people thought it did. Still, considering that swinging down on a rope had in no way been part of the plan in the first place, Kail was willing to take what he could get.
Wh
at he could get, apparently, was the security dwarf from earlier that day lying unconscious with what looked a lot like a master key on the ground next to his hand.
“Well, all right, then,” Kail said, and picked up the key. He had to bend over to do it, which made everything go wobbly at the edges of his vision again. Some of that was probably from crashing through the glass, and a lot of the rest was Kail not liking heights a whole hell of a lot—and liking falling from them by surprise because his captain had just cut the rope he’d been hanging from even less than that.
He looked around the room, blinking. “Oh, yeah: Urujar room. Captain said this one was bad.” Back before he’d joined up with Loch and saved the Republic, a room filled with shackles and chains might have thrown him off.
Then he’d had magic clamp down on his very soul and turn him against his friends, and, well, that kind of experience put things into perspective. He tossed the shackles a dirty gesture and left the room without a backward look.
He assumed Loch was fighting bad guys on her rooftop, and that that had something to do with the screaming monsters on the museum rooftop that Kail had been climbing toward. Kail hadn’t caught all the details, focused as he had been on trying not to plunge a hundred feet to his death. He was sure Loch and Tern had it handled.
He nodded to the big golden throne in the Imperial room, and headed up the stairs to the next floor. The dwarf’s master key opened the door, and Icy and Ululenia turned to look at him in surprise as the lights flickered on over their heads. Ululenia was currently a small white hummingbird, and Icy was hanging from the wall.
“I’m pretty sure this disabled the room’s security,” Icy said, and held up the master key.
We were expecting you to come through the window, Ululenia said in his head, although the number of shrieking earth-daemons outside led us to not expect you very soon.
“Well, I like to surprise people.” Kail gestured at the door that led to the elven sub-room. “In there? Probably good to hurry.” Outside, the daemons were still shrieking, and it sounded like people were fighting.
This is extremely unnatural, Ululenia said, and shifted back into human shape as Kail walked across the room without triggering the floor plates. “I was certain that the earth-daemons were employed only to raise an alarm. Allowing the daemons to manifest and directly confront intruders is a harsh and unforgiving decision from the dwarves.”
“And messy.” Icy hopped down to the ground as well, testing his weight and then flexing his fingers, since he’d apparently been clinging to the underside of an antique wand display for quite some time while trying to disable the security systems. “Dwarves do not usually employ messy solutions.”
“I get the sense this is going all kinds of wrong for everyone,” Kail said, and slid the master key into the lock on the elven sub-room door. As he’d hoped, the lock clicked open. “Didn’t even get to break out Iofecyl to try her out on these fancy dwarven locks.”
The elven room’s lights flickered on as the door opened, and Kail stepped inside. Off in the distance, the earth-daemons were still doing their thing. The elven manuscript sat in its display case, safe behind a squared-off section marked with red velvet rope.
“Any ideas how we get out of here once we’ve got the thing?” Kail asked. “I mean, if we’ve got earth-daemons on the roof, I’m guessing we shouldn’t leave that way.” A few months back, while Loch was off saving the world and avenging her family’s honor, Kail had—after recovering from the mind control bit that the Urujar room with the shackles hadn’t reminded him of very much at all—gotten to fight daemons. He’d picked up some new scars for his trouble, and wasn’t eager to live that experience again.
“I may be able to carry you both out from the window through which you entered the building,” Ululenia said, “or at least make your fall more gentle.”
“Less gentle would be difficult.” Kail approached the manuscript. “Now, what did Loch say?” Aside from Kail, new plan, which was strikingly different from, Kail, I’m about to send you plunging toward the street, maybe consider hanging on extra tight, sorry about that. “Equal weight, one quick movement, right?”
“Quick and smooth,” Icy confirmed, and took from a pocket in his robes a pouch of sand that, to the best of Loch’s knowledge, weighed exactly the same as the elven manuscript. He passed it to Kail, then took a very small pot and brush from another pocket in his robes, unscrewed the pot, and whisked around the contents, which looked like either thick slime or thin paste of a milky brown hue. “Tern promised that her reagent would work quickly.”
“Reagent being the goop?”
“Well-reasoned as always, Kail.” Icy dipped the brush into the pot and then dabbed it on the crystal of the manuscript display case, describing a good-sized circle in one side.
Tern hadn’t lied: the effect was immediate. The crystal sizzled and bubbled at contact with the paste, and Kail and Icy both stepped back as oily purple smoke hissed out. The crystal clouded, then drooped, and then dripped away entirely, leaving a good hole for Kail to work with.
Kail waited until the crystal stopped smoking. “She say when it’d be safe?”
“She did not.”
“Well, I’m reassured.” Kail hefted the pouch. “All right. Give me a bit of room here.” He reached forward gingerly. “I’m going to have to—”
As his hand passed the plane of the velvet rope, a brilliant flash of blue light exploded in his face, and an entirely new shrieking alarm went off.
“—set off an alarm,” Kail finished, “because that’s how it’s going tonight.”
Seven
PYVIC STOOD ON the top of the metal bookshelf, looking at the hooded figure in the dim and flickering light. “Desidora?”
“It’s aura is shielded,” she said, squinting.
“If it has one,” Pyvic said. “Remember the golem that the ancients left to hunt fairy creatures?”
“I imagine she remembers it,” Hessler said, clutching at his still-bleeding legs, “given that it killed her.”
“Yes.” Desidora blinked, then cocked her head. “Yes, this is similar. It’s like the crab-creatures. It’s not fully formed, like a golem. It’s being held together by magic.”
“As fascinating as this is,” Hessler said, “what I’d really like to know is why it hasn’t attacked us yet,” Hessler said. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”
The hooded creature had not spoken or moved since its first proclamation. It stood between them and the book. Below them, the crabs were now barely visible in the darkness, but Pyvic could still hear their scuttling on the bare stone floor, along with the licking flames of the fire Hessler had accidentally started. Going by the sound of burning paper, the crabs had knocked books from the shelves, causing the fire to spread.
And under that, another noise, an irregular hiss like a sword being drawn, or a ringmail shirt taking a glancing blow from a blade, or . . .
“They’re destroying the shelf,” Pyvic snapped, cursing himself for ten kinds of an idiot. Even as the words left his mouth, the metal shelf creaked and began to tip. “Everyone jump!”
The shelf was tilting to the right. Pyvic couldn’t make the jump ahead, especially not with the hooded figure waiting for him on the next shelf. He jumped left instead, pushing off the falling shelf to make the much shorter jump to the bookshelf that had been behind him a moment ago.
Below him, hundreds of priceless manuscripts fell into the slashing crystal pincers. From his new vantage, Pyvic could now see the shelf itself had been shredded with countless tiny cuts to one side.
Hessler and Desidora had jumped with the shelf instead of against it, which had probably seemed like a good idea at the time, since it let them use the falling shelf to add momentum to their jump. As soon as they landed, however, the shelf they’d just been on slammed into the shelf they were now on, and with a great
, slow creak, their new shelf started to tip over .
“Keep going!” Pyvic shouted. Desidora nodded, wide-eyed, and dragged Hessler up to leap onto the next next shelf.
They weren’t going to be up there for long, and when they hit the ground, it was only a question of whether the flames or the crabs got them first. Pyvic looked down at the crabs swarming through the fire, cracked and charred but still scuttling along, and then looked at the hooded figure—who had turned to watch Hessler and Desidora.
Then Pyvic made a gut check.
“I’m going for the book!” he shouted, and took a running jump across the aisle.
He landed on the next shelf, slipped again on the dust, and came back to his feet in time to see the hooded figure leap over from the next row and land before him. Below, a mass of crabs was swirling around his shelf now as well.
“The book is forbidden,” the hooded creature said, its voice a dry crackling hiss. “The hour must not be known.” It lashed out with its crystal hooks.
Pyvic parried, slapping the hooks away. They were definitely crystal, definitely sharp, and probably part of the creature, not just weapons. He slashed, grimaced as the creature caught his blade with its hooks, and then lunged forward and drove the thing back off the shelf.
It fell back, then pivoted with inhuman grace, kicked off the shelf behind it, and sprang back at Pyvic with its hooks raised. Its hood fell off as it did, allowing Pyvic to clearly see the jagged crystals that clung together in a field of magic to make a crude facsimile of a head.
Seeing that would have changed his next move had he not already been acting on instinct. As it was, his blade chopped cleanly into the hooded creature’s neck.
For most opponents, that would have been a good strategic move. For a creature held together by magic, though, it was merely an inconvenience. Pyvic jerked his blade back, but not quickly enough. The hook caught his wrist, trapped his blade, and wrenched it from his grip even as it yanked Pyvic off his feet.
The Prophecy Con (Rogues of the Republic) Page 10