The Prophecy Con (Rogues of the Republic)

by Weekes, Patrick

  “Sounds like a good plan,” Tern said. Hessler looked as though he were about to comment, and then looked as though Tern had stepped on his foot in the heavy steel-toed boots she wore.

  “Thank you,” the guildsman said to the dwarf. “See, that wasn’t so hard. I’ll be keeping my extra bags in the economy car as well—the last time I traveled, some people tried to steal my luggage from the back car. That isn’t going to be a problem, is it?”

  “I’ll mark yer car as baggage-exempt,” the dwarf said, stamping a piece of paper with a little more force than was necessary. “Yer ticket entitles ye to use the dining car at the rear of the train, and also gives ye a discount on any dwarven goods ye purchase in one of our—”

  “And when you do find my reservation, I’ll expect a refund on the privacy car.” He took the ticket and turned to go, and bumped into Loch, who had put herself directly in his personal space.

  “It isn’t all whores and laborers,” she said, forcing the eye contact. “And even if it was, their money spends just as well as yours.”

  He glared at her and moved to brush her aside, stumbling a little when Loch didn’t move. “Yes, fine, whatever, we’re all equal in the eyes of the gods.”

  “I think,” said Loch, catching his hand as he raised it to move her out of his way, “that a representative of the mason’s guild would try to avoid antagonizing the miners. You never know when one of their representatives might be listening.”

  “How do you know I’m—”

  “Signet ring.” Loch smiled. “And if the ticket vendor informed the supervisor at the local mine about what you just said, I’d expect there to be repercussions.”

  The guildsman yanked his hand back and looked from Loch to the dwarf, who was now ostentatiously pretending that the guildsman didn’t exist.

  “Tell me,” Loch added, “why would a merchant like you be so interested in keeping all your luggage with you, when all your important documents would fit in a single handbag? Is it because traveling by railway lets you dodge the inspectors at the airship docks?”

  “I don’t have to listen to this,” the guildsman finally muttered, and walked around Loch and off, most likely, to somewhere more expensive.

  “You have a good trip,” Loch said to the yellow-haired girl, who smiled again. As the yellow-haired girl went up to talk to the dwarf at the ticket counter, Loch turned to Tern and Hessler. “Come on. We’re done here.”

  “Wait,” said Hessler as they headed for a hotel Loch had spotted on their way in. “I thought you were going to see if we could just buy a ticket and get on that way.”

  “We’re good,” said Loch.

  “But without a ticket, we’ll have to . . . oh.”

  “Catching on?” Tern asked.

  “Loch stole the guildsman’s ticket when she bumped into him.”

  “Yes, she did,” Loch said, flashing the ticket and then returning it to the pocket of her riding jacket. “So now we have a private car to ourselves, and more time for the two of you to catch up with each other.”

  “Woo—wait.” Tern turned to Loch. “Can we stop someplace to wash out my mouth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, woo!”

  Princess Veiled Lightning sat in the passenger seat of the airship, glaring.

  “It was sloppy, Veil,” Gentle Thunder said. He stood at the railing, watching the forest pass by below them.

  “Kutesosh gajair’is!” Arikayurichi, Bringer of Order, apparently agreed.

  “You did not capture her, either, Thunder,” she pointed out.

  “You ordered me not to,” he said calmly, “and then the earth-daemons attacked. My first concern must be for your safety.”

  She glared. “How safe will I be if the Empire and the Republic go to war?”

  He turned and matched her look. “If that is what worries you, then you should avoid dying in battle inside the Republic’s borders. Your corpse could well start the war your living body seeks to prevent.”

  “Poetic as always, Thunder.”

  “Veil.” He did not return her smile. “We made our attempt to capture Isafesira de Lochenville. Regardless of the cause, we failed. Your parents gave you leave to investigate. I doubt they would explicitly permit what you have undertaken.”

  She stood now, moving with the easy grace Thunder himself had taught her. “Am I to slink back home in defeat?”

  He sighed. “We do not even know where she is going now.”

  “I may be able to help with that.”

  Veiled Lightning turned to Attendant Shenziencis, who stood near the pilot who was flying the airship. She had put aside her helmet, though she still wore the exotic green ringmail. She had not appeared without it during their journey.

  Shenziencis bowed and continued. “Your Highness, I tracked Isafesira de Lochenville before. I see a village up ahead, small but with some enough natural life-force that I may use my own arts to track her again.”

  Veiled Lightning looked over at Gentle Thunder. He grimaced.

  “Besyn larveth’is!” Arikayurichi, Bringer of Order, declared happily.

  “I believe your ax believes that it is worth a try,” Veiled Lightning said, and turned back to Shenziencis. “Find her.”

  Shenziencis bowed again. “As you command, your highness.”

  Desidora ended up getting another drink, and gave the beautiful kahvarista a gentle nudge in the direction of the trader woman as long as she was there. It felt silly to do so when they might all be dead or dying in war a few months from now, but she was a priestess of Tasheveth, after all, and Tasheveth was all about seizing the time you had while you had it.

  “Anything useful?” she asked as she sat back down by Ululenia, who had been working through the book for more than an hour now. Desidora had sat quietly—a talent cultivated by priests of all faiths—and occasionally coughed politely to let Ululenia know that her horn was sparkling again.

  Her mind is coiled and clouded, a deep sea scuttler that has built itself a prison for protection, Ululenia said.

  Desidora nodded. “I’m not sure that’s useful, but I will hold onto it, just in case.”

  Ululenia smiled. My apologies, daughter of the gods. To pull meaning from this strange work requires twisting my mind into a shape similar to hers.

  “Understood.” Desidora sipped her tea, which she had gotten because kahva would just make her more jittery.

  The queen of the cold river spoke in such a manner deliberately, Ululenia added. As a hunter may mark the tracks of running prey separately from quarry that walks or limps, so do I see how she twists her words even further away from the gentle places of human thought.

  “She hates people?” Desidora guessed.

  She is the mother bird, feigning a wounded wing as she flutters far from her nest.

  “She wanted to hide what she wrote from humans?”

  Such is the shape of her tracks.

  “All right. Why?” Desidora gnawed on a fingernail. “She had this book made, so she clearly wanted someone to know what she thought, but she didn’t want . . . humans. She wants elves and fairy creatures to be able to understand it, but not humans. And . . . what else? Nobody cares this much about criticizing a book. Well, maybe Hessler.”

  Ululenia laughed and switched to speaking aloud. “His mind still leaps from thought to thought like a startled rabbit, but he and Tern have brought each other peace.”

  “Yes, I’ve gone out with them a few times up here,” Desidora said. “It’s good to see them happy.”

  A few tables over, the pretty kahvarista offered the trader woman a free refill and asked if she needed anything. The trader responded with a joke, and the kahvarista laughed and worked in a reference to a band that would be playing in one of the performing squares that evening. As it happened, the trader liked the same band and wasn’
t doing anything that night.

  Desidora sighed.

  “The lynx and the caterpillar,” Ululenia said.

  Desidora blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  “You saw the defeat of the Champion of Dusk, fulfilling the will of the gods, and the mantle of the death priestess fell from your shoulders.” Ululenia reached out and took Desidora’s hand in a gesture that was more gentle than flirtatious. “You thought yourself the lynx, your claws gladly sheathed, but always, should you need them, they would extend from the tufted fur and velvet-soft paws to slash at any foe. But you are not the lynx. You are the caterpillar, transformed into a beautiful butterfly whose wings glitter with promise and whose touch helps the flowers grow.” Ululenia closed Desidora’s hand. “But you have lost your jaws.”

  “And the gods don’t care,” Desidora said. “They shine on the Empire and the Republic together, and the Old Kingdom, and, hell, almost every race except the Glimmering Folk or the daemons. They could give me back my powers, so that I could do something instead of just standing there like an idiot as that creature of the ancients bore down on me, but instead, I play matchmaker and sit here while you read a book.”

  Ululenia’s horn flared, a sudden flash of prismatic light. She doused it, blushing prettily as everyone looked their way, but her eyes shone with a hunter’s satisfaction as she looked at Desidora.

  The ancients, daughter of the gods! That is our key.

  “How?” Desidora murmured. The young nobleman who had been working on his poem for the past hour was coming their way.

  The path is not yet clear. But the queen of the cold river hides her path most when she speaks of the ancients.

  “And that magical attack in the library twisted the magic of the ancients to send those creatures against us.” Desidora nodded slowly. “It’s a start.”

  “Excuse me, I am sorry to trouble you both, but I thought I saw something, and . . .” The young nobleman blushed. “I’m acting the fool.”

  He was technically a virgin, Desidora remembered. She glanced over, and saw Ululenia smiling, eyes wide, lips just barely parted as though waiting to ask a question. Despite the lack of aura, Desidora had an idea of what was going on.

  “My friend has had a long journey, and is tired,” Desidora said, “and I fear I have been a poor host, and am about to be even poorer. I must go speak to my friend Pyvic about a personal matter, leaving her to dine alone tonight.”

  “You must go,” Ululenia said, smiling sadly and giving Desidora a tiny wink when the nobleman looked away to adjust his jacket, “but perhaps you could tell me where I might find a restaurant where I might also hear poetry performed?” She tucked Ruminations upon the Unutterable by the Queen of the Cold River into a pocket in her snowy white dress.

  “Well, actually, um, now that you mention it, I know a place,” the nobleman said, “and in fact I even do a little myself from time to time,” and Desidora smiled, said her goodbyes, and left Ululenia to finish playing with her prey on her own.

  Tern and Hessler were happy. So was Ululenia, though she had lost Dairy. Thinking back, something in the boy’s aura had told Desidora that it wasn’t going to work, but the aura had also burned too brightly for Desidora to get a good look, and anyway, it had been all she could do to avoid summoning skeletal warriors and turning the carpets black around her at the time.

  More important, though, Desidora—now nothing but a love priestess—was walking off alone.

  It was late afternoon, but Pyvic would likely still be at his office. Desidora wasn’t sure how knowing that the book had something to do with the ancients would help, but it was more than they had known this morning. The queen of the cold river cared about the ancients, and ancient magic had tried to stop them, and . . .

  She sensed nothing until the bag came down over her head.

  Idrienesae flitted from one branch to the next on wings made of shimmering rainbows. The woods were dark around her, silent but for the steady fall of footsteps behind her. The bear had finally stopped screaming a few seconds ago, and none of Idrienesae’s other woodland friends would be coming to help after seeing what had happened to it.

  Things had been good for Idrienesae. Too good. That was it. She’d gotten used to the milk on the doorstep, the whispered gratitude for a few little chores done during the night from the mother raising her daughter alone, the laughter of a fat toddler as she led him back out of the woods when he’d wandered off. Little things.

  Idrienesae reached one of her trees and darted into it, letting the bark close over her safely. For a moment, the sound outside was muffled, as it always was until her body adapted and she could listen through the branches.

  Then she heard her tree scream as a blade pierced it, and she screamed with her tree, for the pain was hers, too. She felt herself down, down, into the roots, into the earth, through the chain that bound all life and to the next tree that was hers, and when she reached it, she flung herself free, shuddering. Her wings were ragged, flickering in and out of existence, and would not hold her weight. The tree behind her, the first one, was still screaming as energy crackled through it, and even without being inside her, Idrienesae felt the connection enough to feel the pain.

  She shouldn’t have soured Old Widow Kinnet’s milk. It had been petty, cruel, even, but Kinnet had come back from a trip to the big city with little charms for all of the girls of the village to wear, and the charms had been silver, and you couldn’t let these things go, you had to remind people of the rules of simple politeness. Clearly Idrienesae had gone too far with the milk, though, and attracted the attention of something far bigger than she was.

  She ran now, her soft feet scraping on the ground from the unaccustomed exertion, and tears fell freely as the footsteps closed in behind her. She would be good from now on, she promised whatever gods cared to listen to the fairy folk. She would help even the people who didn’t leave out the milk, and she would just avoid Old Widow Kinnet, and that would be fine, if she could just get away right now—

  She burst through a wall of bushes, scraping her arms, and came out at the pond with the pretty hill, where most of the young villagers who didn’t have barns with haylofts came when they lay with another for the first time. With her wings, she could have flitted up easily, but her wings were gone now, stolen by the pain, and the hill was so steep.

  Idrienesae turned, and with a little keening hum in her throat, she spun a dagger out of bits of nothing. It was small, since she was small, but she turned to the figure in the green ringmail anyway, the helmeted figure with the spear and the net.

  “You are a Hunter, a thing of the ancients, come to kill me for my magic,” she said, and raised her dagger. “I did not steal it. I do not steal. It was left behind when nobody wanted it anymore, and it became me, and that is who I am, and you will kill me now, but I am alive, and you are not, Hunter.”

  The Hunter put a hand to its helmet and lifted the visor. Underneath, Idrienesae expected to see blank metal, or crystals humming with magic, for that was what the stories had said. That was what her friend had told her was inside the Hunters, and her friend had survived an attack by one of them.

  Instead, she saw a human woman’s face, with Imperial features and glittering golden makeup curling around her eyes.

  “Wrong,” said the woman. “But you know more about the Hunters than most, little pixie. Tell me, how did you hear such stories?”

  Idrienesae considered running. She considered the dagger. She considered many things, because she was fast, but then she saw that the woman was watching her, and so she told the truth instead. “I heard from a friend who met one.”

  “Was this friend a unicorn, perchance?” asked the woman, and lifted a net of silver links that crackled with golden magic. “Was her name Ululenia, and does she travel with a human named Loch?” At Idrienesae’s silence, the woman smiled gently. “The villagers leave out a sauce
r of milk for you, do they not, and wake up to find that you have helped with their work? Perhaps if you leave out a saucer of your friend’s location, you might wake up to find that I have left you alive.”

  Idrienesae talked very quickly.

  Ten

  THROUGH THE MOONLIT Republic countryside, a train of an even dozen cars—one for each pair of gods, which the dwarves characterized as good politics more than superstition—blazed along the dwarven railway.

  The railway was a bright line of silver in the darkness. It caught the light of the moon, glittering brilliantly and curving to match the rise and fall of the hillside. Near the train, the tracks glowed a flickering blue tinged with red as the silver repelled the rainbow-flickering crystals set into the underside of each of the cars.

  Lapitects claimed that the glittering rainbow crystals were imperfect forms of the lapiscaela that held Heaven’s Spire aloft, and as such, pushed only against silver and a few other metals, rather than pushing against the ground itself. Fairy creatures pointed to the color and the repulsion of silver and claimed that the crystals contained the energy from which the fairies themselves had been born.

  Dwarves claimed that the crystals could pull a dozen cars across the countryside faster than a galloping horse for a full day or more, and prices for freight or commercial travel were quite reasonable if booked in advance.

  Inside the economy car, Loch sat in one of several comfortable benches and looked out the window. The glowing panels in the ceiling had been dimmed for the evening, and Loch could see the scrubby grass, pale gray against the black of the sky.

  The car itself was metal, with walls that angled in a little near the top, like the dwarven buildings. The walls and ceiling were tiled with intricate stone patterns, and the paving stones on the floor felt more real than whatever they used for the streets up on Heaven’s Spire. The whole car thrummed steadily as the crystals beneath the floor kept it aloft and moving.