The Prophecy Con (Rogues of the Republic)

by Weekes, Patrick

“Oh, no, you do not.” He didn’t even look at Pyvic. “By now, you’ve found out that I represent the interests of the Dragon, and you’ve been troubled by your inability to find out anything else, but your superiors have told you in no uncertain terms that whatever happens to me unofficially, I am not to be touched.”

  Pyvic glared, then set himself between Irrethelathlialann and the ship. The raven fluttered back down and landed on the elf’s shoulders, glaring at Loch and cleaning glossy black feathers under one wing.

  “It has something to do with the ancients, doesn’t it?” Loch saw the elf raise an eyebrow. “You told me as much on the train. You don’t much care for them, do you?”

  “Urujar,” the elf said. “You know what it means in the language of the ancients?”

  “I’m guessing you’d love to tell me,” Loch said.

  “You guess wrong.” Irrethelathlialann turned away from her. “Farewell, Isafesira. This conversation has begun to bore me, so please trust that the manuscript will be better off with the Dragon than it will with you. Now, I believe I will be enjoying a morning breakfast at one of the finer local establishments, and then boarding that treeship and returning home. As you will under no condition receive a travel permit for the Elflands, I believe our business is concluded.”

  “Like hell it is,” Loch said. The raven cocked its head at her as she came forward. “Before you angry apricot, buttery blueberry, crunchy carrot . . .” She broke off as the world started spinning.

  Then Pyvic’s hand was on her shoulder, keeping her steady. “It stops, or I draw,” he said, “and your bird should know that I pocketed at least one silver dagger from last night’s fight with the Knights of Gedesar.”

  Loch’s vision cleared, and she saw, for the briefest moment, a pair of stag’s antlers shining in all the colors of the rainbow atop the raven’s head. Then it was gone, and the bird dipped its head and croaked a laugh.

  “Good day, Justicars,” Irrethelathlialann said without turning around. “I wish you luck in your war.”

  He strode off with his raven laughing on his shoulder.

  Pyvic waited until the elf was up the gangplank before he let go of Loch’s shoulder. “You all right?”

  “Still slow.” She grimaced and put a hand to her waist. “Probably good that nobody drew steel. Or silver.”

  Pyvic laughed. “Probably,” he said. “Now, let’s hope the rest of it goes as well.”

  Walking with the wide-legged gait of an airship sailor, Kail sauntered back into the alley as Loch finished her distraction with the elf.

  “It worked?” Desidora asked, though in truth, it was a foolish question. The elf would have turned on Kail immediately had he suspected that the sailor jostling him was anything out of the ordinary.

  “Like a charm.” Kail grinned as he tossed the sailor’s cap into a sack by the wall, along with a thin black scarf on which were sewn silver wings crossing a crescent moon—the symbol of Jairytnef as the patron those who traveled by magic. “Timed it just like you said. You saw all that in his aura?” In just a moment, he was just Kail again, no longer a sailor.

  “Love priestess, remember?” Desidora smiled back. Elves were enough like humans to have auras, which meant any priestess of Tasheveth with the proper training could look at Irrethelathlialann’s peculiar soul—in particular, looking at how it would react and where it would leave him unsuspecting. “I was planting love notes in people’s pockets long before you and Loch ever recruited me. Speaking of which . . .” She turned to a young man, a blacksmith’s apprentice judging by his sooty apron. “Go get a bun,” she said.

  The young man blinked. “Um . . .”

  “The stall in the square. Say that you like them with honey.” Desidora looked at his aura, and remembered the aura of the other young man back in the market stall. “If you could find a way to have your sleeves rolled up to show off your arms, it wouldn’t hurt.” As the blacksmith’s apprentice stared at her in confusion, she waved a little. “Off you go.”

  Kail chuckled. “Must be good to be back to hooking up young lovers again.”

  “Kutesosh gajair’is,” Ghylspwr said at her side, and Desidora tapped his handle to hush him.

  “Yes,” she said instead. “The powers of Byn-Kodar were dangerous. I don’t regret being myself again.”

  Kail headed back through the alley to a side street, and Desidora followed, the hem of her pale-green skirt kicking up leaves as she swished behind him. Even the smaller streets were clean in Jershel’s Nest. It was likely because of the elves, just like Ajeveth was kept neat by the dwarves. It seemed it was only humans who let their streets get filthy.

  Jershel’s Nest had more elves and fairy creatures than anywhere else in the Republic, and its architecture had taken on some of their nature. The buildings were largely wooden, and half the city was in a state of repair of growth, with old structures torn down and new ones already raised in intricate scaffolding. There were more parks than in a normal city, some with intricate fountains at their center, others with stages for musicians.

  This was still the Republic, though, so of course there was a puppeteer performing in the park they passed through now.

  “. . . continued losses to the undead army the Empire has sent across the border,” the dragon called out somberly, “including a squad of Republic military artificiers whose mission to reinforce the walls of the town of Kinsmark turned into a heroic sacrifice to buy townsfolk the chance to escape.”

  “Now, there’s still some confusion,” the griffon said haltingly, its wings drooping low, “as the Empire continues to deny responsibility for these attacks, a stance that quite frankly defies understanding at this point.”

  “I think we’re past the point where we should be worrying about what the Empire thinks,” the manticore said, flapping its own wings angrily and swishing its scorpion’s tail. “Now is the time to send airships across the border and show the Imperial forces what happens to those who attack and kill innocent civilians.”

  “That would mean a declaration of all-out war upon the Empire,” the dragon said, snorting fire at the manticore, but the griffon tugged on the dragon’s tail.

  “With respect, my colleague and I don’t agree on much, but I think we can agree that declaration or no, we are already at war,” the griffon said, raising its claws in warning as the dragon turned on it. “The question now is whether we are prepared to win it.”

  The dragon stepped back from the manticore and the griffon, both now turned against it, and then turned to the crowd. “Strong words,” it called out. “What do you think, listeners? Come and make your voices heard! Tell the voyants on Heaven’s Spire how the Republic should respond to these attacks by the Imperial undead. Remember, it’s your republic!”

  “Stay informed!” the crowd called back.

  “Don’t regret losing those powers at all?” Kail said, not looking over, as some of the people in the crowd left and others came forward to sign slips of paper urging the voyants to declare war.

  “They weren’t who I was,” Desidora said, tightening her grip on Ghylspwr a little. “I did awful things. I almost did even more.”

  “Yeah, and you could stop that army of undead in its tracks like that.” Kail snapped his fingers. “Yeah, your dress would go black, and you’d sprout skulls and crap everywhere, but still, better than a town full of dead artificiers.”

  “Byn-Kodar’s powers are only for works that demand a united response by the gods.” Desidora looked at the crowd clustered around the puppeteer’s stage. “Like it or not, this is the work of people. I can only meet that with the power of Tasheveth.”

  “You and Icy.” Kail shook his head. “That’s a great restriction, provided we all have magical warhammers to bail us out when crap gets real.”

  “Besyn larveth’is!” Ghylspwr said angrily from Desidora’s hip.

  “You thin
k I don’t wish I could just stop all this?” Desidora snapped. “You think this is a choice on my part? I’m not holding back because I swore an oath. I don’t have those powers anymore!”

  “You ask your goddess to give them back?” Kail turned to her, his voice low, hands fisted at his sides.

  “She’s not a moneylender, Kail,” Desidora said, turning and glaring at his little head-cocked challenge.

  Kail shook his head again. “I’ll take that as a no, then.”

  “When I first received the mantle of Byn-Kodar, I wept and fasted and prayed for the gods to pick someone else, and it didn’t do me any damned good. Why should she listen to me now?”

  This time, he blinked. “That came out a little less devout than I’d expected from a priestess. Little crisis of faith, there?”

  The man had always been a little more insightful than she gave him credit for. Desidora turned away, raking hair from her face. “I can still help the team. I read Irrethelathlialann’s aura.”

  “And you’re also one of, like, two people who can say his name,” Kail said from behind her. “That’s gotta be good for something.”

  A small smile touched her lips at that. Occasionally insightful and occasionally witty. “I told you how he’d move, how he’d react. I gave you everything you needed to make your move.”

  “A move I’ve been doing since before I shaved.” Kail’s voice was gentle. It would have been so much easier if he’d been angry.

  She turned, her eyes hot with tears she wasn’t going to let fall. “I have to believe that love will find a way, here, Kail. I have to. I can help us. I can see the hearts of everyone on this team, save Ululenia and Dairy. I can see what they need, the holes in their lives that need a partner to fill them.”

  Kail smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes. “I hope that helps, Diz. I really do. Still, it’s a good thing you’ve got that and the hammer.”

  She shut her eyes. “You were supposed to ask me what I saw when I looked at you.”

  “Besides a guy you almost killed?” He laughed to himself, and she heard the sound of his footsteps receding.

  When she opened her eyes, he was gone.

  Tern glared at the diamond-shaped leaf pinned to the table in front of her. She had a magnifying-glass attachment on her spectacles, which made her glare a lot more impressive. She was pretty sure she could light the leaf on fire if she scowled hard enough.

  “Serifs,” she muttered, holding up a griffon-feather pen stained with golden ink. “Always with the gods-damned serifs.”

  The border had been easy. The watermark in the background had taken most of the morning, since it was done in a style meant to look like it was carefully hand-inked with a bunch of tiny cross-hatches but was actually done with a stamp, but Tern had gotten it done with just the right level of slightly blurry efficiency and then moved over to the illuminated crap in the margins while waiting for it to dry. She’d done the lion, the dragon, and the tiny little thing she thought might be a pixie but was at least a naked lady lounging on a leaf.

  She had a passable ticket now, with the exception of the actual text.

  “Serifs,” she said again. “Screw me sideways. Serifs. All right, ink me.”

  She held out her pen with her good arm. Icy very carefully dabbed it with the golden ink she’d whipped up last night and then modified this morning once she’d gotten a look at the ticket, since apparently the people in Jershel’s Nest had never heard of color coordination and put in way too much red, turning the ink into more of a bronze than a proper gold.

  She adjusted her magnifying glass, looked at the ticket Hessler had stolen for her, then looked at her own blank leaf page and made the tiniest mark.

  “Do you need assistance?” Icy asked.

  “If you could not talk, move, or breathe for the next hour, that would be fantastic.”

  “The treeship leaves in a little more than two hours,” Icy said.

  “Thank you, Icy.” Tern made another mark, squinted, and added the tiniest little flourish, since some genius had opted to use a printing press whose font included serifs, as though that was going to fool anyone into thinking the tickets were hand-printed. All it really did was make it a hell of a lot harder for her to fake them, which, yes, was probably the point, but still.

  She made another line, waited, and then blew cautiously on the paper. “Okay, yeah, we can do this.”

  “In less than two hours?” Icy asked.

  “Thank you, Icy.”

  The door to the room slid open, and Tern looked up, ready to glare death at whomever was bothering her right now.

  “I’m sorry,” said Dairy, blinking and trying hard to only look at the eye that didn’t have the magnifying glass attachment on the spectacles. “I didn’t realize—”

  “No, no, fine, come in.” Tern jabbed her pen in Icy’s direction. “Ink me.”

  “I wanted to apologize,” Dairy said, “for your arm, and . . . wait, if we have a real ticket, why do you need to make a . . . copy?”

  “Forgery.” Tern made a few careful lines. She was still working on the normal writing that appeared on every ticket. Things would get harder when she had to start making up numbers on her own. “It’s called a forgery.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And we have to make one because the one you all stole isn’t encoded with the aural signature that marks it as official,” Tern said, still writing very, very carefully, “which means that when it’s fed into the little reader at the top of the gangplank, it won’t make the happy little chime that tells them to hit Loch with the guest aura that makes the ship like her. And to answer your next question,” she added, pausing momentarily to blow on the leaf, “we can’t just fake the aura on the real ticket, because they’re deliberately constructed to be fragile with respect to magical tampering. Try to mess with one, and the leaf withers. Ululenia made this one for us, though, so she can slap the aura on it safely, assuming that she’s neither still injured from the Knights of Gedesar slashing her with silver nor exhausted from you finally taking out your virginity on her.”

  “Um . . .” He stammered and blushed while Tern kept working, and then finally said, “No. She’s fine. And we’re not . . . I’m not . . . um.”

  “Got it. Ink me.” Tern waited while Icy hit the tip again. “Hessler already yell at you about joining the Knights of Gedesar?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, then, I don’t see what I need to—son of a bitch, is that beveled?” Tern ran her fingers along the real ticket. “Damn it. Okay. Fine. Assholes.” She looked up at Dairy. “Who the hell bevels a serifed font? I mean, seriously, it’s bad enough that they serifed the title, but now they’re just drawing attention to the whole—”

  “I’m sorry you got shot,” Dairy cut in. When Tern looked up, the kid had tears in his eyes. “I didn’t want it to happen, but I didn’t know how to stop it, and they seemed so sure, and I told myself . . .”

  “You told yourself I wasn’t really the woman you knew.” Tern held out her pen. Icy dabbed it. She went back to writing. “Told yourself I was somebody else, right? A bad person, someone who deserved it, because this was how the rules said it worked, so you had to be missing something.”

  “How did you know?”

  Tern finished the horrible, awful serifed title beveling. “I used to wear really pretty dresses. It was like a competition among the merchants’ daughters to see who had the best, the most fashionable. One year, this utter bitch named Enella had me beat. She had a maid who could work pearls into the lacing with this little trick nobody else could manage, so they stood out just perfectly. She said something cutting at a dance when she and her friends had the pretty pearled lacing and I didn’t, and, well, I didn’t even like the dances, because I was smarter than most of the merchants’ sons, but there was no way she was getting away with that, so I took st
eps.” She looked over at the real ticket. “Okay, drop the first and last number, those are filler, you can tell by the offset spacing. That there at the end is the date, month first . . . location, then . . . time? No.” She chewed her bottom lip, working at the numbers.

  “What did you do?” Dairy asked.

  “I spread a rumor that the pearls the maid used weren’t clean and carried a nasty disease, then slipped something into Enella’s drink to give her a rash. She and her friends were a laughingstock, and I got all the best dances for the rest of the season. Batch, purchase location, ticket number. All right.” She’d have done better with a larger sample, but it was the best guess time allowed for. “And Enella’s maid lost her job and went off to starve in the streets, and when my own maid told me, I went through everything you told yourself. She chose to play the game, she knew the consequences, she was probably a cruel person, since she served Enella, all of it.” Tern whipped through the numbers with a sure and steady hand. “And then I admitted the truth to myself, and I dropped out of society life. Ink me.”

  “Oh,” Dairy said as Icy wordlessly dabbed the pen.

  “The money from my first job went to the maid. She’s a seamstress in a shop now. Doing fine.” Tern looked up and smiled, her apple cheeks dimpling. “So, thank you for apologizing, thank you for not killing the girl at the top of the stairs after your captain shot her, and thank you for helping Loch when it mattered. Now figure out what happens next.”

  “Choosing to walk away from your culture’s values is difficult,” Icy added as Tern went back to work. “Once you realize that you cannot in good conscience follow the orders with which you were raised, you must find your own path.”

  “Sometimes that path has you siding with guys who turn out to be following bad orders.” Tern traced a carefully edged line. “Sometimes it involves you having sex with Loch’s sister, who turns out to be an assassin working for the bad guy.”

  “I do not believe it was absolutely necessary to bring up that example,” Icy said.

  “It made the kid feel better,” Tern said.