“No!” Desidora threw Ghylspwr, and he slammed into one of the support walls, which creaked ominously, but the bird was already gone. A moment later, a snowy white bird flapped after it.
Desidora raised a hand, and Ghylspwr sprang back into her grasp. She looked towards the golems on the ground. Both were gone, leaving only a pile of shattered rubble behind them.
“I’m sorry,” Pyvic croaked, pulling himself back to his feet. “Not much of a rescue.”
“No.” Desidora reached out and helped him up. “You did fine. All of you.” She looked at the golems again, then at the hammer in her hand. “This is on me.”
“So,” said Tern as the Knights of Gedesar raised crystal-tipped maces. “Baby. Help?”
A brilliant light blazed behind her, casting an enormous shadow of Tern down the length of the car to where the black-armored warriors were standing. The knights staggered, shielding their eyes, and Tern raised her crossbow and fired. Her bolt burst open in midair, splitting into a mesh of thin weighted ropes that snared her target, tangling his arms and legs and sending him crashing to the roof of the train.
“Do you really think non-lethal force is still absolutely necessary?” Hessler yelled behind her.
“They’re people!” Tern shouted back, winching her crossbow. “I try not to kill people if I can help it!”
The other knight raised a crossbow of his own and fired.
His bolt did not split into a mesh of thin weighted ropes to snare targets. It did, however, rip a hole in Tern’s sleeve as she dove to the floor.
“I believe we’re past that point,” Hessler shouted.
Tern looked up to see the knight running at her. “Okay! Got another illusion?”
“More than just an illusion!” As Hessler finished, Tern felt energy crackle around her, building in the air.
The knight reached her, and his mace came up.
A blast of raw magical power slammed into his armor and sent him crashing to the roof of the car as well.
Tern blinked. “Wow.” Impossibly, the Knight of Gedesar pushed himself back to his feet, his armor glowing dimly where he’d been blasted. “I’m thinking yvkefer-alloy armor.”
“That was my assumption, yes!” Hessler yelled. The knight readied his mace, and another blast of energy slammed into his armor, and then another. “Speaking of assumptions, I assume you were told I only did illusions, sir knight!” The knight staggered under the blasts, but didn’t fall. “This must be very disappointing for you!” The stone roof of the car began to vibrate beneath Tern’s fingers.
“Hessler, wait!” Tern’s crossbow was only half-winched, and the knight was closing in on her. She lifted her hands. “Wait, wait, I surrender!”
The knight kept coming. “No prisoners!” he growled, even as another blast of energy knocked him back a half-step. His armor crackled with energy now, and the roof of the car thrummed with latent power.
“Your loss!” Tern touched a button on the cuff of her dress, and a dart spat out and caught the knight in the thin leather joint at his shoulder.
The knight winced, paused, and pulled the dart free. “Sorry, girl! We’ve built up an immunity to—”
Tern lashed out with a steel-toed boot and kicked the knight hard in the ankle, and he crashed to the roof, bounced, and rolled off the side of the car.
“I did offer to surrender!” she shouted, rising to her feet to make sure that he was actually off the train and not hanging from the edge, waiting to come back and club her to death with his mace.
The car heaved beneath her feet as an explosion on the ground below rocked the train.
Tern hit the roof again, slid, and felt the stone give way to empty air beneath her. She flailed desperately, clipped a handrail with her boots, spun, slipped free, and went headfirst over the side of the car.
It was angled, and for one bright moment she thought that maybe she could slow her fall, but though it had seemed like a wide angle from inside the car, it was nowhere near flat enough to do that, and she fell helplessly down the side of the car, stone rough on her dress and skin as she slid.
Light flashed in front of her, and her hands hit something, and she clung desperately, blinked, and realized that she was looking through a window, upside down, and had caught hold of the top of the seam on the bottom of the window with her fingers.
It looked like a nice suite inside. A wealthy merchant and a woman who was either a young wife or a mature mistress were sharing drinks, looking around as the train jostled and rocked. The woman wore an expensive gold necklace that didn’t match her silver gown, but they probably cost enough that matching wasn’t the point. Looking at them was a lot better than looking down at the moonlit silver tracks humming along a few feet from Tern’s head.
For one wonderful moment, Tern hung there upside down, precariously balanced, fingers straining, heart hammering hard enough to make little gasping noises pop up from her throat even though she didn’t think she was breathing, and thought that she might actually be all right.
Then she felt herself sliding to the left, tried to lean, overcorrected like she always did when Icy tried to teach her how to do a headstand, and felt her sweat-slicked right thumb slip on the seam. Sliding down, Tern looked down at the tracks humming by so fast that they blurred, glowing blue with little red sparks shooting out, and opened her mouth to scream.
Then she choked out a cough instead as something grabbed her boot. Something also brushed her braided ponytail as it hung down, and Tern realized that it was the ground. She immediately brought her eyes to look at anything but that, and found herself staring at the underside of the dwarven railcar, where rainbow crystals hummed and sparked as they held the car aloft. She held very still.
“Hang on!” Hessler shouted, entirely unnecessarily.
As the best boyfriend in the world pulled her back up, Tern used her hands to walk herself up the side of the train. The rich merchant and his wife were looking at her open-mouthed, and Tern gave them an upside-down smile as she slid back up.
Then Tern was back on top of the train again, rolling onto her side and coughing. Hessler, sitting beside her, was breathing hard.
“You jumped over,” she said after a moment. She didn’t get up. Her legs weren’t working yet.
“You slipped,” Hessler said.
“I’m really proud of you,” Tern said. It was hard to talk over the wind whipping in her ears. The whole “top of the train” thing was feeling a lot less fun than it had a few minutes ago.
“I have some unfortunate news,” Hessler said, and Tern looked up to see several more Knights of Gedesar rappelling down onto the roof of the train. Hessler followed her look. “Not them.”
“Seriously?” Tern wasn’t sure where her crossbow was. She’d never finished winching it after last time, either. The knights were still unclipping themselves from the line.
“Remember that explosion? I think the armor of that guy I hit with the magic blasts built up a thaumaturgic charge, and when it hit the tracks, it may have arced over into the power grid for the railcar crystals, which are powered by—”
Something behind them roared loudly enough to get Tern rolling back to her feet. She looked at what was, as far as she could tell, a large humanoid cloud of living fire.
“Fire-daemons?” Tern asked.
“Fire-daemons, yes,” Hessler said, “and the energy discharge may have freed one of them.”
“You think?” Tern looked back at the Knights of Gedesar. “Hey, guys, truce?”
A silver-tipped crossbow bolt whizzed past her face and struck sparks as it plinked off the roof of the car behind her.
“Just checking!” Three knights ahead of them, one fire-daemon behind them. “Hessler, just in case I don’t get to tell you later, I really appreciate you rescuing me.”
The other two knights raised their crossbows,
and Tern, with no weapon of her own and nowhere to run, winced.
Something sailed out of the nighttime sky and slammed into one of the knights, blasting him cleanly off the roof.
It was, Tern saw, another grappling line. The hook trailed for a moment, then caught on one of the handgrips.
“What in Byn-Kodar’s hell?” The other two knights turned in shock.
“Sorry I’m late!” came a voice from the night, along with what Tern recognized as the sound of someone coming sliding down a zipline. “Your mother always wants to cuddle after!”
Kail hit a second knight full-on, and another armored figure went flying off into the night. The third swung at Kail with his mace, and Kail ducked and unclipped something from his armor. “Any time you two want to help!”
“Oh, sorry!” Hessler said, and gestured. A flare of light flashed in the knight’s face, and he stumbled back, momentarily blinded. “I thought you had things under control!”
“You did just kind of take out two of them!” Tern added, risking a glance back. “Fire-daemon’s probably a priority, Hessler!”
“I took out two of them with surprise and a really great line!” Kail knocked the crossbow out of blinded knight’s other hand as it swung up, then ducked another swing of the mace, unhooked the grappling line from the handrail, and hooked it to the knight. “Icy, we’re good!”
He dodged back as the knight lashed out with an armored backhand, and then the Knight of Gedesar was sailing up into the night sky, yelling and flailing.
Sweat beaded on Hessler’s brow in the moonlight, and he frowned, gathered his energy, and then made a series of passes with his hands. Finally, he flung them out at the fire-daemon with a muttered phrase.
The fire-daemon flinched back, roaring. It was on the rooftop of the car behind them, and the stone was starting to melt from the heat. It looked at them balefully—at least, Tern thought it did; it didn’t have a whole lot of face to speak of—and then darted back to the back of the car and slid like liquid fire through the gap in the ringmail that Tern had left open when she’d led Hessler up onto the roof in the first place.
“Nice work.” Kail was grinning widely. “Man, I’ve always wanted to do a job on the back of one of these things!”
“Yeah, I used to think that,” Tern said. “Hey, can we undo the grappling cable for the bad guys before more of them rappel in?”
A roaring ball of fire sailed past them in the night sky as the Knights of Gedesar opened up with their flamecannon.
Security Enforcer Gart Utt’Krenner had boarded the train leaving Ironroad after finding three unusual instances.
On a human or elven transport, unusual instances might be more common. Humans often thought of themselves as having special needs that justified special treatment, and the elves tended to be flighty and odd at the best of times. In Gart’s opinion, human airships ought to include extra cargo room to store all the exceptions the humans carried with them.
But the Silver Line was dwarven, and dwarves did not, as a general rule, make problems that required exceptional solutions. Dwarves with special needs booked passage on cars that were fitted specifically to those needs—ramp cars for elderly or ill dwarves traveling alone, sunlit cars with clear-paned ceilings for dwarves who had gone too long underground and become uncomfortable in confined dark spaces, and even insulated stone cars for dwarves who had contracted the jeweled shakes and could not risk exposure to the magical auras of the crystals that ran the engines and kept the cars aloft.
These were not unusual instances. These were expected conditions, and any reputable transportation system was prepared to accommodate the realities of travel in modern dwarven life.
Since many of the passengers on the line were humans, the cars accommodated their needs as well. There was more legroom, of course, along with human-tailored meal services and more space in the aisles, since humans did not like being close to each other unless they were intimate. These were not unusual instances either.
The train leaving Ironroad that day, however, had been different.
First, it had included a private suite for an elven passenger. Elves almost never traveled on the railway. Gart was not sure why that was so, but he himself had never traveled on one of the living elven treeships, so it was not for him to judge. On its own, that would have been odd, but not worth investigating.
Second, a human guildsman had berated one of the ticket sellers until she had given him an entire economy car to himself, along with a baggage exemption. It was clear that his reservation had not truly been lost—the railway lost fewer than ten reservations every year—and while it had been decades since Gart had served in that remote keep up in the mountains, he still remembered how humans tried to smuggle goods on the railway. The ticket seller, to her credit, had filed a report suggesting that the guildsman’s activity be tracked so that if he attempted it again, charges could be brought against him.
And third, Gart had seen that same guildsman yelling about having misplaced the selfsame ticket just minutes before departure. It had been that last item that had convinced Gart to show the guards his badge and board the train.
The stolen item from the museum was elven. An elf was on the train. An entire car was exempt from normal baggage procedures. The human who had paid for that car had lost his ticket.
Gart waited, riding patiently in a dwarven car near the back of the train. The dwarves—mostly miners, though a few had the longer brow and almond eyes of the crafters—watched him curiously, but did not comment. He sat in a spare seat on the benches and made polite conversation with a pair of miners who had become intimate while on their last assignment.
When the night was deep and most of the dwarves had nodded off to sleep in their benches, leaning against a neighbor or, failing that, a wall, Gart felt it appropriate to act.
He left the car and passed through two dwarven cars, moving freely and checking for trouble as he went. In the sealed platform between the last of the dwarven cars and the first of the economy-class human cars, a guard was waiting.
Gart approached with clear movements and produced his badge as the guard eyed him curiously. “Security Enforcer Gart Utt’Krenner, special assignment,” he said.
The guard checked the veracity of the badge while Gart waited politely. “Anything we should be concerned about, Chief?” he asked.
“I must ascertain that before I worry ye needlessly,” Gart said. “If there be trouble, I would appreciate assistance in dealin’ with it, but I would not wish t’ interrupt yer duties.”
“It would be our honor to assist, Chief,” the guard said, as expected, though it was not polite to make assumptions. “Please accept this paging crystal for the duration of your travel.” He passed Gart a standard crystal that would, if broken, raise an alarm on sympathetic crystals carried by the other guards.
“Thank ye.” Gart nodded his appreciation, and the guard unlocked the door and let him through.
The next few cars went quickly. Gart showed his badge and his paging crystal to the guards he encountered, and nothing seemed out of place in the cars themselves. Like the dwarves, the humans slept, played cards, read books, or stared out the window as the train sped along.
Finally, he reached the last of the human economy cars, the one booked privately for the guildsman. Since the guildsman had misplaced his ticket, it should by all rights be empty. Stepping into the sealed area before the car, Gart readied his truncheon in one hand and his paging crystal in the other.
Technically, his right to apprehend Justicar Loch relied upon the delinquent payment of docking fees, which would ordinarily involve a polite but firm conversation and an explanation about loss of transport rights or seizure of goods in the future. After what had happened at his museum, however, Gart believed it likely the encounter would turn to violence.
He shouldered open the door and stepped in, quickly enoug
h to surprise anyone inside but not so quickly that it was obviously an attack. “Yer pardon!” he called, truncheon held by his side. “I need to be checkin’ a few security matters! Yer understandin’ is apprecia . . . hm.”
The car was empty. It was also conspicuously devoid of any kind of luggage.
Perhaps Gart had gotten on the wrong train.
A loud bang shattered the steady hum of the train, and a massive jolt sent Gart stumbling into an empty bench.
No, he decided, this was the correct train after all.
Gart had been on trains when trolls or scorpion-folk had attacked. That bang and jolt came from something big getting under the car and doing some damage to the railway crystals. Broken crystals could cause a train to rattle unevenly or drag on the track, but that was fortunately as bad as it got—unless whatever got under the wheels had enough latent magical energy to cause an energy backlash.
The lights in the car flickered and went out. A moment later, an enormous roar split the air on the roof overhead, indicating that the fire-daemon used to power the car had gotten loose.
Backlash.
Muttering a very polite oath to himself, Gart Utt’Krenner ran the length of the darkened economy car by memory, crashed into the door, and wrenched it open.
A guard lay unconscious in the platform between this car and the next one, which would have been the first of the luxury cars. The ringmail tubing that sealed the platform had been undone, and Gart saw flames on the other side.
He grabbed the unconscious guard by the ankles and hauled him back into the darkened economy car. It was rattling already. Without power, the car was being held up by the cars on either side of it, which would eventually damage the couplers. Gart nevertheless believed it to be safer for the unconscious guard than underneath an uncontrolled fire-daemon.
He heard another roar as he turned, and then watched as liquid fire poured down through the hole in the ringmail tubing and melt its way through the door. The fire-daemon was red-hot, though touching the stone of the railway car had already caused it to manifest jagged stone claws and bone spurs at what were slowly becoming defined as elbows and knees.
The Prophecy Con (Rogues of the Republic) Page 18