Pyvic clung to the edge of the shelf. His body was still on it, but his legs were scrabbling for purchase. He could feel the sudden tug of weight and the tiny slicing slashes of pain, which told him that the crabs had gotten hold of his boots.
That was a problem to be dealt with later, however, since the hooded figure was standing over him, hooks raised to finish him.
“Kutesosh gajair’is!”
Ghylspwr was a silver streak of light as he whistled over Pyvic’s head and then blasted the hooded figure from the shelf.
Pyvic hauled himself back up, kicking the crabs free, and saw Desidora and Hessler a few shelves over, safe again. “Thanks.”
“Thank you for buying us time with your distraction,” Desidora said. Ghylspwr had already returned to her hand. She looked down and smiled. “I see the book. Let us end this.”
Without another word, she dropped down from the shelf, landing nimbly in between the shelves below.
“Desidora?” Hessler looked down. “Do you have a plan?”
“Hessler, buy her some room!” Pyvic pointed, and without hesitation Hessler flung out his hands, sending sheets of fire into the crabs as they skittered away from Pyvic and back toward Desidora.
“Really?” Pyvic shouted to him. “More fire? Really?” Not waiting for a response, Pyvic leaped to the next shelf—the actual shelf the damned book was supposed to be on, assuming Desidora’s information was correct. He’d lost his sword, and the only thing he’d been able to do thus far was cause distractions until the people with magical abilities made their moves, but a justicar didn’t let things like that stop him.
Desidora was rifling through the shelves with one hand and swinging Ghylspwr in broad sweeping strikes with the other to keep the crabs back. “Found it!” she shouted, yanking a thin volume bound in blue leather from the shelf.
“You will not read it.” The hooded figure stepped out from around the aisle, its hooks raised.
“I will,” said Desidora, and her voice was cold.
She swung Ghylspwr, and the creature leaped, snared the warhammer with its hooks, and tore it from Desidora’s grasp.
“No,” said the creature, as it flung Ghylspwr away.
“Did you think I could not see the magic that held you together?” Desidora asked. “That a death priestess would not see what would have to be done to tear you apart?”
She raised one hand and curled her fingers slowly into a fist.
Nothing happened.
“You are no longer a death priestess,” the hooded figure said, stepping forward. “You have no power here.”
“I, however, do,” muttered Hessler from atop the shelf, and he traced a glowing sigil in the air.
The hooded creature collapsed to the ground, hundreds of shimmering crystals tinkling on the stone floor as they scattered out from under a now-empty robe.
Pyvic looked over at Hessler, who was pale and drawn. “Nice.”
“Daemon-banishing abjuration. I hoped the magic that held that thing together was similar enough . . .” Hessler took a breath. “Fairly draining to cast, and there’s a good chance it’s actually just suppressing the magic, not banishing it, so . . .”
The crabs had drawn back when their master attacked Desidora, but they were skittering closer again. Pyvic hopped down, grabbed Ghylspwr from the ground, raised him over the robe, and brought the hammer down several times until he heard the sound of metal on stone instead of shattering crystals. “That should buy us some time. Shall we?” He turned to Desidora and tossed Ghylspwr her way.
Desidora caught her hammer. She looked pale, but not pale like a death priestess caught in the thrall of Byn-Kodar’s power. She was just pale.
“Let’s go,” she said, and swallowed.
They ran from the library with crabs skittering after them and flames and smoke billowing in their wake. Pyvic only hoped that the damned book was worth it.
The earth-daemons were fast. By the time Loch cut the rope, half a dozen were already scampering across it, and when the rope fell away, carrying an indignantly yelling Kail down to what Loch hoped was safety below, the earth-daemons leaped the rest of the way, landing on the rooftop where Loch, Tern, and the Imperials were about to start fighting.
The daemons crashed down, stone claws grinding furrows into the rooftop, snarling and hissing. They were humanoid in shape, but seemed made entirely of planes and angles, their rocky gray hides broken by bone spurs at the joints.
The rings on Loch’s sword rattled as she whipped it up, then across, chopping through the throat of the nearest one. It stumbled back, and then collapsed into a loose pile of rock and sand, and Loch felt an absurd moment of happiness—first because the damn things weren’t immune to blades, and second because finally, for the first time since the Temple of Butterflies, she could hit something without worrying about it just being a good person in the wrong place.
Another daemon reached for her, and she spun the sword as she stepped out of reach. The little red scarf on the hilt of the blade twirled before the daemon’s eyes, and it blinked, automatically tracking the motion, and Loch chopped through its throat as well a moment later.
“Think I figured out what the ribbon is for!” she called out, knocking away another daemon’s arm as it clawed at her.
“You fight like a graceless thug,” Princess Veiled Lightning declared. She stalked forward, lightning still crackling between her fingers.
“A graceless thug with your sword.” Another daemon lunged at Loch, and Loch stepped in instead of out. She slashed across its arms, elbowed it in the face, grabbed hold of one rocky arm, and threw it headlong into Veiled Lightning.
The daemon and the princess went down in an ugly tangle of silk and bone spurs. Gentle Thunder, who had been advancing on Tern, stopped, gave Loch a glare that promised death, and ran for Veiled Lightning, chopping a daemon in half with a single swipe as he went.
As the daemons leaped at the Imperials, Loch shot Tern a look. “Smoke.”
“Done.” Tern whipped a vial from a dress pocket and smashed it on the ground, and vivid green smoke billowed out to fill the entire rooftop.
“Hand.” Loch darted toward Tern before the smoke obscured her completely.
“Done.” Tern’s hand closed over Loch’s.
Veiled Lightning and Gentle Thunder were silhouettes a few yards away. The third Imperial, Attendant Shenziencis, was already hidden in the smoke, but Loch heard a squeal of pain and saw a daemon fall to the ground, tangled in a silver net whose links crackled with amber light.
“Window,” said Loch, and pulled Tern along with her through the smoke.
She slashed a daemon from her path, saw the flash of a magical blade and yanked Tern to the side, and then she saw the window ahead and dove forward, letting go of Tern’s hand as she came into the room they’d rented, blade-first.
It was empty. Tern crawled through the window after Loch, coughing. “That had to be another malfunction. Dwarves set alarms. They don’t have earth-daemons attack people.”
Loch shrugged. “Hell of a malfunction, then. Come on.” She left the room at a jog, tucking her sword into her belt.
“We going back to the airship? The . . . whatever Kail named it?” Catching Loch’s movement with the sword, Tern slipped her crossbow back down to its hook between the folds of her skirt.
“Not yet.” Loch started down the stairs. “The Imperials are right behind us. We need some room, and the others might need help over at the museum.”
“Got it.” As they reached the lobby, Tern stepped past Loch toward the reception desk, where a dwarven woman in a very clean uniform smiled expectantly. “Excuse me, I think some hooligans are trying to break into our room!”
“There’s smoke, and one of them has an ax,” Loch added.
“This is very distressing,” said Tern, “especially given I
thought Ajeveth prided itself on order and security.”
The dwarven woman’s face went steely, and Loch heard the tiny squeak of fingers clenching on the stained wood of the reception desk. “We do, mistress,” she said politely. “If you’ll just wait here, I’ll have our security people attend to the matter immediately.”
“I need to freshen up,” Loch said, fanning herself with her hand. “I just didn’t expect this in such a nice city.”
Muscles in the dwarven woman’s jaw clenched as she walked away, boots clacking on the hardwood floor. Once she was gone, Loch and Tern walked out of the hotel and into the well-lit nighttime streets of Ajeveth.
The museum across the street was still blaring alarms, and Loch saw lights in the windows. She crossed the street—not running, but not sneaking, either.
“Do we have a plan?” Tern asked beside her.
“It’s in the formative stages.” Loch took the marble steps two at a stride. The museum door was already open ahead, and she glanced in either direction before walking inside.
As she crossed the threshold, a brilliant flash of blue light flared from the cuff of her leather jacket, and yet another alarm shrieked from the walls of the museum entry hall.
“Hey, smooth move, there, master thief,” Tern said from behind her. As she walked in, though, the same blinding blue light flared from the hem of her skirt.
“You were saying?” Loch said without pausing.
“How in Byn-Kodar’s hell did . . . I didn’t touch anything!”
Ignoring the side rooms, Loch started up the stairs to the second floor. “You see the Imperials behind us?”
Tern glanced over her shoulder through the front door. “Not yet. Think they’ll come?”
“They followed us across the Republic to Ajeveth, Tern. I think they’ll cross a street.”
No new alarms blared as Loch stepped into the main hexagonal room on the second floor, the one with the Imperial throne sitting in the middle. She took that as a good sign, given that the alarms from the roof, the ground floor, and another one somewhere above her were combining in a teeth-rattling harmony that was going to give her a massive headache in a few minutes.
Loch glanced at the open door to the Urujar side room. A dwarf was lying on the ground next to a lot of broken crystal. “Good. Kail’s here.” She headed up the stairs to the third floor.
She opened the door to see another dwarf—this one wearing uniform leathers reinforced with thin strips of metal—falling to the ground, unconscious, but definitely still breathing. Two more dwarves flanked Kail, Icy, and Ululenia.
Kail flexed his hand, wincing, then nodded to Loch. “So Icy still refuses to fight . . .”
“I did swear an oath,” Icy said mildly, dropping into a crouch as one of the two remaining dwarven security officers swung a truncheon at him.
“. . . and the dwarves are apparently immune to that thing Ululenia does.” Kail had gotten a truncheon of his own, likely after saying something in dwarven about someone’s mother. He blocked a swipe at his head, kicked the back of the attacking dwarf’s knee, and cracked a hard left hook across the dwarf’s chin.
The dwarf stumbled back, shot Kail a glare, and drove an elbow into Kail’s gut.
“So it’s going well, then.” Loch drew her sword and spun it as she ran at the other dwarf. The rings on the back of the blade rattled, the red scarf flared, and the dwarf—his attention caught—swung at her instead of Kail.
She caught the blow on the back of the blade, which rattled the rings on the sword some more, before flicking the scarf at the dwarf’s face as she spun her sword back into a guard.
“Really well, thanks,” Kail gasped. His dwarf came in with an overhead blow, and Kail sidestepped it, brought his own truncheon down on the dwarf’s arm to collapse the elbow, and put the dwarf’s arm into a joint lock, using the truncheon as leverage.
The dwarf grunted and punched Kail in the face with his other hand.
“Dwarven pressure points are offset a bit from where you’d find them on a human,” Tern said helpfully, and shot Kail’s dwarf in the shoulder with her crossbow. It was a dart, not a bolt, and the dwarf turned to her, pulling it from his shoulder with a sneer as Kail staggered back.
Then he fell over limply.
“They’re vulnerable to a few specific sleep drugs, though.”
Loch’s dwarf swung at her again. Loch sidestepped it, spun her sword so that the scarf billowed out at about eye level between her and the dwarf, and then punched through the scarf with her left, blindsiding the dwarf and putting him down.
“Oh, fine, he drops when you punch him,” Kail muttered.
“Punching, and reminding you not to fall to your death.” Loch grinned. “These are the reasons you need me. Did you at least get the book?”
“Captain, please.” He had a hand on his now-bleeding nose. With his other hand, he jerked a thumb at Icy. Icy held up the elven manuscript.
Tern looked back down at the floor below, where the sound of booted feet was coming their way. “We’re not fighting our way back out, are we?”
“Not if you’ve got another rope line for your crossbow.” Loch gestured at the Urujar side room as the sound of metal on metal came from the floor below. “We get out through the hole Kail made.”
Gart Utt’Krenner came back to his senses in the Urujar sub-hex, groaning. His chest protested in pain as he rolled from his side to his stomach, then protested again as he pushed himself to his feet.
Gart noted the pain, because it would be necessary to inform the physicians of the nature of his injuries in order to ensure the most effective treatment, but he did not allow it to interfere with his duties. His reinforced patroller’s jacket had protected him from the shards of crystal of the shattered window, and his fine ringmail—which, unlike human armors, had been fashioned in an ablative to distribute force across a wider area—had blunted the impact of the human who had come through.
The moon shone through the window. Gauging its position, Gart judged that a quarter of an hour had passed at most. That was good. He would have been disappointed in himself had he been felled for longer by one treacherous blow.
A rope dangled from the window, likely the means by which the thief had entered. Walking to the window, however, Gart saw another rope anchored to the window frame and leading down to the street.
The thief was gone. Unless his fellow security enforcers had driven him off, Gart Utt’Krenner’s museum had been robbed.
Gart heard a crash, and turned to see a dwarf hit the ground in the main human hex outside the Urujar sub-hex. The dwarf’s armor was torn, but the dwarf herself was still moving. She would live.
Gart Utt’Krenner rolled out his shoulders—muscle pain from the impact, but only bruises, no pulled tendons or broken bones—and walked out into the main human hex to see who was hitting his people.
Two Imperial humans and one unknown assailant wearing green ringmail, a golden helmet, and butterfly pendant were fighting the other dwarven security enforcers. One of the Imperials was male, heavily armored, and holding an ax that was clearly magical. The other was female, wearing a purple dress and a thin golden chain across her forehead marked with an impressive ruby. She was unarmed, and the man with the ax was clearly guarding her, going by his body language.
“Right, then,” Gart said.
He charged.
The unknown figure in the green ringmail saw Gart coming and lashed out with a spear that crackled with magical energy. Gart blocked it on the forearm, wincing as the energy shot waves of pain through his side, and then stepped in and body-checked the figure out of the way.
“By the authority of the Security Enforcement Guild of Ajeveth,” he called to the woman in the robes, “ye all be under arrest.”
“Laughable,” growled the armored man, stepping to put himself between Gart and his mist
ress.
Gart drew his truncheon. “If ye’ll not stand down peacefully, we have no choice but to use force.”
The armored man swung his ax, a confident, casual warning swing more than anything else.
Gart stepped aside and pressed a button on his truncheon. The head of the weapon split into a forked prong, and Gart slammed the prongs down, catching the magical ax just behind the head and trapping it. He pressed another button on his truncheon, and spikes snapped out from each forked prong, pinning his truncheon, and the magical ax, to the ground.
“Contained!”
The damage to the museum floor was unfortunate, of course, but Gart was prepared to justify the necessity of the action in his report he would file later.
He head-butted the Imperial man in the chin for added measure, and the man staggered back, knees wobbly.
“Now, ma’am,” he said to the unarmed Imperial woman, “let’s all just settle down afore someone gets hurt.”
The Imperial woman clenched her fists. “Yes. Let us do that.” Slowly, hesitantly, she extended her arms for Gart to put on the manacles.
Gart Utt’Krenner reached forward to secure the prisoner.
He didn’t register his enforcers’ shouts of warning until it was too late.
As Gart’s hands closed in, the Imperial woman stepped forward, fingers splayed, and pressed her hand to Gart’s mailed chest.
He felt a hum through his entire body as though every inch of him had fallen asleep and was now waking up with pins and needles. The Imperial woman was flying backward, and then Gart realized that she was standing still and that he was actually the one flying backward. He finally hit something hard enough that, for the second time that day, Gart Utt’Krenner watched the world go black.
His last thought was that he was going to have a great deal to write in the report.
Loch and her team left the dwarven city of Ajeveth at a run.
The Prophecy Con (Rogues of the Republic) Page 11