The soldiers broke off to grab their gear, and Nystin tightened a few straps on his armor.
Hex alone stayed in the room. The old soldier leaned against a wall, his stance casual, to hide the limp.
“Hexmongers,” he rasped.
“That’s right.” Nystin came closer. “Concerns?”
“Every hexmonger I’ve tracked . . .”—Hex gave Nystin a steely stare—“. . . and it’s been a few . . . every one went with a simple airship. Just did drops down to the port cities when Heaven’s Spire was overhead. Never seen any hexmonger pull in enough money to buy one of the fastest airships in the Republic. Those usually go to some kid with a rich family.”
Nystin smiled. “Times change, old friend.”
Hex didn’t smile. “We going to find crystals on the ship?”
“My intel says we are.” The bag containing those crystals was currently sitting in Nystin’s locker.
Hex nodded, thinking it over. Nystin didn’t change his posture from its attitude of relaxed confidence.
“I’ll bring flashpowder,” Hex finally growled. “My men can make a little bang, point out the traps. Grid will know, but she won’t say anything.” He met Nystin’s stare. “I’d keep Scale and the recruits back, if it were up to me. They might see what looked like us beating some rich noble’s son to death. Might hear us yelling that he was innocent, screaming about his rights.”
“It’ll need to be a small boarding team,” Nystin agreed, “to avoid tipping off their guards. Scale and the recruits will be searching the cargo bay.”
“Understood, sir.” Hex gave Nystin a salute, then left to go collect his things.
The airship’s owner was the oldest son of a minor noble. As far as Nystin knew, the worst illegal magic the young man had ever used was passion-charms to make himself a stallion in the sack.
In forty minutes’ time, the poor young man would die for the crime of having a very fast airship and not enough political connections to be dangerous.
Nystin closed his eyes and said a quick prayer to Io-fergajar, god of warriors who needed no magic to win their battles.
He would make the young man’s death worth it.
Nine
DESIDORA SAT IN the kahva-house with Ruminations upon the Unutterable by the Queen of the Cold River resting on the table next to a cup of cold kahva and, because she was feeling sorry for herself, a fattening pastry.
Hessler had left to join Loch and the others on what Desidora understood was going to be a robbery operation on the dwarven railway. Desidora had been left to glean what she could from the impenetrable book.
Whoever the queen of the cold river was, she cared very little for making herself understandable to humans. She seemed to possess senses that Desidora did not, and her descriptions of The Love Song of Eillenfiniel would regularly veer off into run-on sentences where the adjectives seemed to be used as verbs and the tenses changed every few words.
Desidora would really have been fine with going to rob the elf on the railway.
Not that a love priestess would be all that useful on a train robbery . . .
She looked over at a young woman sipping kahva by the window. She was unattached, working as an assistant trader or something else that was financially secure but artistically empty, and she hadn’t had much time to think about courting since finishing school and finding work with the trading guild. She was unhappy, though she wouldn’t have phrased it that way herself, and without someone to ground her, she would find herself a bitter middle-aged woman fighting for money with nothing to spend it on.
The young nobleman a few tables over was working on a poem. He would fall hard for the trader, hard enough to anger his family by marrying outside the nobility . . . but he didn’t actually have much to offer the trader beyond hypothetically really liking her a lot. On the other hand, the ebony-skinned woman making the kahva would push the trader from her comfortable life, and the two of them would have absolutely scorching sex. The relationship might even last, provided they were both willing to be flexible.
Her divinely bestowed senses didn’t tell her whether either of the young women or the noble would survive the coming war with the Empire. Personalities and possibilities, that was all she got.
And, of course, no ability to change anyone’s aura except with her own words and actions, like any other person. Altering the energy of life itself was a power reserved for the gods.
Or death priestesses.
Ghylspwr had been quiet the past few days, which she appreciated. She had actually left him at the temple of Tasheveth for a good oiling.
Tasheveth, goddess of the heart, I prayed that you might spare me the duty of a death priestess. When you told me that it was necessary, I prayed for a way to complete my task and return to the life I knew. Now, you have given me everything I asked for . . . and I miss what I had before.
Now that Desidora thought of it, that fit pretty well with Tasheveth, actually.
With a sigh, she stood to go buy a refill on her kahva—and share a few words with the lovely kahvarista about how the young trader over by the window looked tired and could maybe use a kind word. Instead, though, she found her path blocked by a pale young woman with ash-blond hair and a friendly smile.
It is a gift to see you again, daughter of the gods, Ululenia said, and hugged her. She had really been the team’s only other hugger, which Desidora appreciated, even while trying not to spill her cold kahva.
“I’m glad to see you as well.” Desidora gestured at the table. “Hopefully you will be able to make more sense out of this than I have.”
Ululenia slid into a seat at Desidora’s table, giving the nobleman—who was technically still a virgin—a speculative look. “Were you getting another drink?”
Desidora looked at the trader in her stylish but stiff shirt and breeches, then at the kahvarista, who was laughing at something one of the servers had said. “No, I’m fine for now,” she said, and sat back down. “So, what can you tell me about this book?”
Ululenia picked it up, running a slim finger down the leather and squinting in a way that somehow did not give her frown lines (a trick that only shapeshifters and love priestesses usually picked up). “The queen of the cold river,” she said, testing the words for their weight. “She is a . . . difficult creature.”
Desidora could not read Ululenia’s aura—this wasn’t a matter of love, and beyond that, fairy creatures had no auras to speak of—but the concern in her voice was obvious. “Evil difficult?”
“At times,” Ululenia said, “though my kind is loath to apply such terms to ourselves. Is the wolf evil for killing the stag? The mother bear for mauling that wolf, when its hunt brought it to close to the mother’s cub?”
“The satyr for tying me to a table and trying to make me kill Tern?”
“Oh, Elkinsair was evil, definitely,” Ululenia said, tapping the book with her finger. “No, the queen of the cold river is not so petty, though at times she is as cruel. I have never encountered her, for which I am grateful, but those of my kind who have say that she is terrifying, one of the most powerful of the fairy folk. For her to dictate her words to a mortal to capture for eternity, they must have been important to her indeed.”
Desidora sipped her kahva, then sighed. She’d forgotten it was cold. “Wait: you don’t think she wrote it herself?”
“No hands,” Ululenia said, wiggling her fingers, “and though her magic is considerable, it does not include the shifting of form.” She flipped open the book and started skimming. “She does not like the elven ballad.”
Desidora thought she had gotten that from the text, but given that she had been trying to read something that at times was written as though the page had an additional dimension, she had also sometimes felt that she was not capable of reading up or in or through enough. “You can understand it? Is that how your mind wor
ks?”
“The swan walks on the summer bank, flies in the autumn sky, and paddles across the spring water,” Ululenia said, and for a moment, the horn on her brow sparkled into visibility. “We are creatures of the very magic that the elves once worked with in their duties for the ancients, and so we may think as such when the need arises. But as our natures pass time with mortals, our minds mimic theirs.” Ululenia looked down at the book. “The queen composed this critique of the elven book after drinking deeply of their minds.”
Desidora frowned. “Is she a mind reader, like you?”
“I was not speaking in metaphors, daughter of the gods.”
“So she drank of their minds literally?” Desidora winced.
“I did say that she was difficult,” Ululenia said with a little smile, and went back to the book.
Kail put the airship he had just about gotten named Iofegemet down a few miles outside Ironroad, so that nobody would ask why travelers who had their own airship would want to book passage on the dwarven railway.
When they walked into the town a few hours later, Hessler was waiting for them by the gates.
He had changed from his robe into nondescript traveling leathers, though his gangly frame and semi-permanent squint still marked him as a wizard in Loch’s opinion. Tern rushed into his arms as soon as she saw him, nearly bowling him over as she pulled him into a hug.
“I missed you. Loch said you got attacked by crabs? You look good in normal clothes.”
“Thank you, I haven’t been eating entirely healthily while you were gone, but I . . .” He saw Loch’s look. “I just got in an hour ago, so I haven’t had much time to check out the town.”
“That’s our first order of business, then,” Loch said. “Kail, Icy: case the railway. Security measures, guard patrols on the cars, everything.”
“Not my first robbery, Captain,” Kail said, producing his lockpick with a flick of his wrist.
“If we’re lucky, it’ll be the last.” Loch turned to Tern and Hessler. “The lovebirds are with me.”
Hessler flushed. Tern didn’t. “What are we doing? If they’ve got complicated locks at the railway, I’m better than Kail is—”
“Hey!”
“You know more about dwarves than I do,” Loch said. “I’m going to go see if we can just buy a ticket.”
Kail and Icy split off as soon as they were through the gates, heading off to where the telltale gleam of metal spires marked the dwarven railway. Loch took her time walking through Ironroad, hiding her grin at how Tern and Hessler held hands and matched each other’s strides.
“Pyvic gave me a basic report on what happened on the Spire,” Loch said as they walked. “Anything you want to fill in?”
“Many of the books survived,” Hessler said, “and given the threat to our lives, I still believe that using fire was within the realm of appropriate—”
“You burned down the library?” Tern cut in. “I love that library!”
“Yes, Desidora said something about that,” Hessler said, and blushed a little, “but really, it was only the basement that burned down—”
“This is why I worry about you using magic that isn’t illusions,” Tern said.
“Well, an illusion of fire wouldn’t have stopped the crabs from killing us,” Hessler pointed out, “and I do not intend to run into another situation where the enemy has more magical power at its disposal than we do.”
Loch sighed. “I wasn’t actually asking about the library, Hessler. I wanted to know if you’d found anything more on the attack.”
“Oh.” Hessler coughed. “Then . . . no. No sign of magical runes that triggered upon us searching for the book, and no hint of scrying magic on us, either. However the crabs and the golem knew to come after us, it wasn’t through magic.”
“Or the evidence burned down in the basement,” Tern added, “when you set it on fire.”
“Which, to be clear,” Loch said, “I don’t really care about, as long as Hessler doesn’t get anybody killed.”
Ironroad’s buildings had the squat, functional look common to mining towns that had been around long enough to merit building real homes instead of just leaning pieces of wood together. Some of the buildings had the angled look that Loch had seen in Ajeveth, and she guessed that was where the dwarves lived. The streets were a little cleaner around those buildings, but other than that, they were just a normal part of the town.
“We had fairy folk living out in the woods in Lochenville,” Loch said to break the silence, “but they always stayed there. People like Ululenia, who would come and mingle with the humans, were rare.” She jerked her chin at the dwarven buildings. “The dwarves have integrated.”
“It’s always more common around the borders,” Tern said, “especially with the not-too-poor and the not-too-rich. Hard to make someone into a scary dangerous thing when they make your shoes and you buy their apples.”
Loch nodded. “I saw it with Imperials during the war, but I didn’t realize it would be the same with the dwarves.”
“Far as I know, yeah. You get some of the same mix over near the Elflands, too. Elves living in human cities, that kind of thing. Not as much as with dwarves, though. The elves are weird.”
“I’ve only met a few. They usually acted the way Irrethelathlialann was acting.”
“Except for setting you up to get tagged by the guards while you’re casing the building,” Tern said.
“Yes, that was new. Hessler, what can you tell me about the book itself, beyond the fact that you burned down a library to get it?”
“It was just the basement,” Hessler said, probably involuntarily at this point, “and in any event, Desidora had been unable to get much from it as of when I left.” He still had one hand linked with Tern’s, but his free hand began twitching as he thought. “Whatever fairy creature wrote it seemed to have very little interest in making herself understood to humans, which begs the question of why she chose to write it in the first place . . .”
“What about Pyvic?”
“He, ah, he said to tell you that he misses you.”
“No, he didn’t,” Loch said without breaking stride.
“Well, he might have.”
“You’re a very good boyfriend, Hessler,” Loch said, glancing back to where Tern was now leaning on her wizard, “but you’re a terrible liar.”
“I’m sure he does miss you, though,” Tern said.
“Yep.” Loch turned back to look ahead again. “But scouts don’t say, ‘I miss you.’”
The ticket office was set a ways off from the railway itself. Most of the railway’s business in the town seemed to come from cargo transport, and the ticket office itself was a small dwarven-angled building with a shiny roof and a lot of signs and schedules tacked to the wall. There were two other people ahead of Loch. One of them was a pretty yellow-haired girl in a commoner’s dress that had been trimmed with little gold and silver ribbons and cut to show her figure, with a complex hairstyle that had probably looked better a couple of days ago. The other was a tall man a few years older than Loch in an immaculately tailored suit, wearing a guild signet ring and a few other bits of conspicuously expensive jewelry.
“Afternoon,” Loch said to the yellow-haired girl. “Heading back home?”
The girl blushed and smiled. “My boy can get tickets for himself with scrip from the dwarves, but it takes long enough that he can only make the trip once a month, so I come up when I can, too.”
“Hope you made the most of your time,” Loch said, and the yellow-haired girl blushed again.
At the front of the line, the guildsman let out an impatient breath. “I asked for a luxury suite. I booked this trip months ago.”
“I understand, and I’m frightful sorry that yer reservation be not in my files,” said the dwarf behind the ticket counter. “All of tomorrow’s suites a
re reserved. I can put you in an economy car—”
“That won’t work,” said the guildsman. “I can’t have every scruffy miner with a bit of scrip looking over my shoulder while I handle sensitive information. Now, I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to book me a full car—one of the economy cars, since that’s all of you’ve got—and you’re going to give it to me for the price of a single ticket.”
“Well, sir,” said the dwarf, “I’ll certainly see what I can do, but many of the economy cars have passengers booked already—”
“Then you’re going to move them,” said the guildsman, “because you know who else is going to be in those cars? Nobody important. I wouldn’t be in these cars if I didn’t have travel needs more suited to the railway than the airships. You can call them economy cars if you like, but they’re mostly filled with miners who bought their tickets with scrip, or whores coming out to the mining towns on payday.” He glanced over at the yellow-haired girl. “If I have to sit next to those people, then the only piece of business I accomplish on that trip will be writing a letter to your superiors informing them of the poor service I received.”
“How long is he up here?” Loch asked the yellow-haired girl, who was now staring at her shoes.
“Last year of a three-year contract,” she mumbled, and wiped her eyes. “It’s a lot better up here than in the rest of the Republic. There haven’t been any accidents, and none of them even have the cough.”
“The dwarves run really safe mines,” Tern said, and the girl turned to them gratefully while the guildsman kept ranting. “Plus, if your boy gets a letter of recommendation from his supervisor, he’ll be able to work anywhere.”
“He wants to work in the freight yard,” said the girl, as though it were an embarrassing secret. “Our hometown has a freight yard he could work in, and his supervisor is letting him do the trainings in his off hours.”
The Prophecy Con (Rogues of the Republic) Page 14