Game of Towers and Treachery (The Shadow's Apprentice Book 2)

by Harper Alexander

  Asborea fishtailed, the alley churning into a sickening blur as they went down. On impact, Despiris was thrown from her perch, her grip wrenching the creature’s wing hard before she spun violently away across the cobbles.

  She came to rest with a bruising pressure keeping the air out of her lungs, struggling to regain her wind as she lifted her head from the pavement to take stock of Asborea’s landing. The angel was pushing herself up off the ground, one wing sagging as if injured.

  But Despiris wasn’t taking any chances.

  Not yet able to breathe, she pushed her discomforts aside and dragged herself up, charging at Asborea before the she-beast could regain her composure. Tackling the angel head-on, she came out on top of the resulting tumble and plastered her target to the alley floor.

  Despiris was under no false pretenses that she could overpower the angel for long, however. And it was one thing taking the life of a rabid, beastly gargoyle – quite another imagining herself killing the human-like woman beneath her.

  In a surprise maneuver, Despiris rolled sideways off her quarry and unsheathed a knife in the process, rising to kneel across the ends of the angel’s primary feathers. With the plumage braced under her weight, she slashed quickly with her knife, severing the majority of those vital feathers from their roots.

  The angel wouldn’t be flying any time soon.

  Breath rushing once again into Despiris’s lungs, she rose and backed away from Asborea, keeping her knife at the ready. The crippled angel climbed slowly to her feet, murder in her eyes. But it would seem she wasn’t eager to risk further maiming of her precious appendages, for she did not advance.

  Now that the heat of the moment was past, a certain discomfort set in standing there before what Despiris knew to be Lady Verrikose’s judging gaze. There was no taking back what she’d done, and she couldn’t predict the consequences, but she wasn’t going to wait around stuttering and stammering, trying to justify her actions.

  She held the angel’s gaze as she sheathed her knife. And then, unapologetically, she turned on her heel and walked away down the alley, relieved to find no sign of the Shadowmaster.

  24

  Premonitions

  “We don’t cower like prey in the nooks and crannies of the world. We are the predators,” Clevwrith had said when the beasts of legend joined the hunt. Yet the beasts remained a predominant presence, the nooks and crannies gaining allure by the day.

  *

  It did not take long for the vultures to converge on Despiris’s vulnerability, revealing the nature of her consequences. She was on her way to bed, having avoided all palace residents since she returned, when Lady Verrikose glided too-casually out of an adjoining corridor to intercept her.

  “Lady Despiris,” she greeted as if pleasantly surprised to have encountered her. “Don’t tell me you are off to bed at this early hour. Won’t you join us in the lounge tonight?”

  It immediately felt like a set-up. A pleasantly-disguised invitation to what would surely become her interrogation. Her trial.

  The noblewoman’s dark gaze pressed her for a response, practically daring her to refuse. “I was so looking forward to a rematch on the chess field.”

  Despiris attempted a tight-lipped smile. “Perhaps another night.”

  “Please.” Lady Verrikose stopped her with a silk-fingered grip around her wrist. Despiris glanced tensely downward, and then warningly back up. Lady Verrikose did not seem perturbed, clearly under the impression she currently possessed the upper hand. “Times have been so bleak of late, what with the plague and then this nasty blizzard cancelling all festivities. We must be vigilant in keeping our spirits up. Morale is key to sanity. You do yourself a service dedicating time to leisure. Please. Join us.”

  While it took everything in her not to pry the noblewoman’s fingers from her wrist and not-so-politely refuse again, Despiris realized there was little point putting off her reckoning, if it was to come.

  Let’s just get this over with.

  “Very well,” she caved stiffly. “One game of chess.”

  As it turned out, ‘a game of chess’ was exactly that. The two women sat across from one another and traded moves, the tattletale episode Despiris feared never playing out. But the noblewoman’s relentlessly taunting air made it clear she wasn’t innocent of ulterior motives. She’d brought Despiris there just to make her sweat – to make it clear she could drag Despiris through the mud at any given moment, if she so desired.

  And when the game resulted in a checkmate, she murmured with coy poignance: “Well, isn’t that quaint. Appropriate, wouldn’t you say?”

  Which sounded to Despiris an awful lot like using the board’s arrangement as a euphemism for a real-life impasse.

  At Des’s silence, Lady Verrikose followed up the question with a cryptic but pointed, “No, I don’t suppose you would say anything, would you?”

  If Despiris had become any kind of expert deciphering unspoken words, she would hazard a translation of: “We both have dirt on one another now, don’t we? So perhaps it’s time we forfeited this futile rivalry and stayed out of each other’s way.”

  The woman was calling Despiris’s bluff. Declaring that she didn’t believe Despiris held the upper hand anymore, because Despiris wouldn’t take the beastress’s transgressions to the king if Lady Verrikose could turn right back around and give him an ear-full of Despiris’s own treachery.

  She wasn’t wrong. For the time being, Despiris preferred to keep a low profile. And so she offered a polite nod. “Well met, Lady Verrikose. I do believe my spirits find themselves elevated enough for one day.” Pushing her chair back, she rose to take her leave, offering a brief, “Good evening, gentlemen,” to Isavor and Mosscrow on her way out.

  Relief spilled through her the instant she was free of the lounge, tension oozing out of her shoulders. You live to keep up the charade another day, she congratulated herself, shaking off the day’s scandal as she headed to her chambers.

  But how much longer could it last?

  *

  The thinly-veiled threats didn’t stop there.

  “The blizzard is over!” declared Po the following morning, pushing himself away from the window to dash out the door and down the hall. Barely keeping up, Despiris followed him out onto the terrace where the king and his usual early-bird entourage had already sat down to breakfast. Po didn’t even pause to acknowledge the monarch and company, jubilantly flying down the veranda steps to the gardens.

  Despiris paused at the top of the steps, smiling after him. He’d been cooped up too long, the poor thing.

  “I dare say the boy speaks for us all,” Isavor remarked with amusement, not offended in the least by rating below the fresh, pre-spring air.

  Despiris ignored the twinge of guilt that surfaced at the reference to the good weather, sighing contentedly in the morning sunlight as if she hadn’t been the one holding the whole palace hostage.

  She’d let the blizzard go in the middle of the night, seeing no reason to keep it in place if Lady Verrikose had discovered its shortcomings. Additionally, the gales had already begun diminishing on their own. Despiris would have been hard-pressed to maintain an opaque concentration of snow, given the thinning of moisture throughout the Cerf Dainean sky.

  As if on cue, the noblewoman made her appearance, wandering out onto the veranda beside Des. She gazed after Po with an air of affection – manufactured or otherwise, Despiris couldn’t say. “He does so love it here, doesn’t he?” she asked.

  An innocent enough question by itself, but it was the way that she said it, enunciated with tedious eloquence as if too-carefully crafted.

  The silken serpent was at it again. Another warning tucked inside a charitably-offered handkerchief.

  If Despiris did anything to compromise her position at the palace, Po would lose the charmed life she’d secured for him here. And he was just getting back to his usual self, settling in and healing from his tragic loss. How could she do anything to jeopard
ize that? She would be cruel to deny him this, to plunge him back into uncertainty and turmoil.

  She could not, however, leave the hornet’s nest entirely un-mussed. “What’s not to love?” she asked with clear sarcasm, and then turned to help herself to breakfast.

  *

  Her dreams were plagued by nightmares. Two nights in a row, she woke with a start, slashing claws and snake-tongued noblewomen whispering in kings’ ears receding from her awareness. She sat up under her canopy, nightgown plastered to her body with sweat, and fought to calm herself.

  She’d become paranoid.

  But try as she might to temper her frantic feelings, she kept coming around to a frightening truth: they were not unfounded.

  Two premonitions sent her heart pounding. One: Clevwrith was a fraying rope in a game of tug-of-war, and it was only a matter of time before he unraveled between the preternatural forces gnashing their teeth at either end. The beasts were closing in, cutting too close. The slash on his chest from the dragon, the close-call with the archangel…

  Two: she did not believe for a second that Lady Verrikose was above ratting her out, and imagined that hammer would fall just as soon as Despiris interfered with her agenda again. This stalemate of blackmail between them was a temporary entanglement, nothing more. Sooner or later they would encounter each other out in the field again, and were just as likely to cross swords as they were to cross paths.

  Despiris’s credibility among the Shadowhunters was teetering on a dangerous precipice, her position at the palace on thin ice.

  Ice even she couldn’t hold together.

  She glanced through her doorway to the sitting area of her chambers, where Po slept peacefully on the chaise lounge, blissfully unplagued by the nightmares she suffered. And she knew… She was courting imminent destruction for the two souls she loved most in this world. Clevwrith was one incident away from getting truly hurt. And Po’s sense of security here was in jeopardy, dependent on her quickly-deteriorating dedication to the cause she led at the palace.

  She had to end this.

  She had to catch Clevwrith…for his own safety as much as anything now, and for the boy whose future meant more to her now than her own.

  25

  Ruthless

  “He is the element of surprise incarnate. Which means, naturally, the only way in which to turn the tables and surprise him is to turn him against himself.” – A theory regarding the Shadowmaster’s capture.

  *

  The solution, when it came down to it, was simple. She had always possessed the tools to take down the Shadowmaster. She simply hadn’t been willing to resort to extremes, or ‘play dirty’, or muddy the equal playing field with deviant forces. More than once, she’d said she wouldn’t cheat – that she wanted to best him at his own game, become the master Shadhi – not trounce him as a sorceress and pretend she had bragging rights.

  But it wasn’t a game anymore.

  And the truth was…she could best Clevwrith by thinking like him. It just wouldn’t be by predicting his moves and trying to cut him off, or trying to improve upon those moves. It would be by using her intimate knowledge of his heart and mind, and exploiting that.

  In the end, it wasn’t about besting him – it was about manipulating him.

  Because in order to do the unexpected, she had to do the unthinkable.

  Same as when she betrayed him in the first place.

  *

  A grim chill ensconced her at the balustrade of the rooftop observatory. She needed this quiet place above the rest of the world, this fateful pedestal where she had found her center, to think. Everything had become so clear, before, atop this ledge – so clear, and calm, and effortless. She sought that surety now, that feeling of rightness.

  Because the decision she’d come to, in spite of its necessity, filled her with turmoil.

  For a long hour she searched for that peace, that amelioration. That certainty that would relieve her of guilt, of regret, of responsibility.

  But in the end she found only a difficult truth.

  Doing what was right sometimes meant doing the hardest thing of all.

  *

  In the week that followed, snow turned to rain. She’d known spring was encroaching, but the timeliness of water falling like an offering from the sky was fortuitous, an omen that she chose to take as the sign she’d been looking for. It was fate providing the tools she needed, paving the way for a plan that had been forming in her mind since she’d decided to end the game.

  She wandered the streets at night, directing the rainfall into gutters and stormdrains.

  And, when she was ready, she went out hunting one last time.

  *

  Despiris slid to a halt to catch her breath, doubling over with hands on knees and panting in premature exhaustion. Herding Clevwrith toward her trap had been harder than she thought; rather than merely keeping pace, she was constantly laboring to surpass him via adjoining alleys so she could cut him off.

  But it was working. Slowly but surely, she was driving the Master of the Shadows toward the nasty surprise she had waiting for him.

  With a determined huff, she picked up the pace again, dashing after her quarry marginally refreshed. Zigging and zagging through alleyways, she diverted Clevwrith toward Hellebore Street, which, to the average traveler appeared to dead-end, but as far as the Shdowmaster would be concerned, it was really just an opportunity to escape to the underworld.

  A few more streets, and she was there, screeching into the alley behind Clevwrith. Right on cue, he slithered down that fateful Cobble and Burrow portal, blissfully unaware of what awaited him.

  Despiris’s heart clenched, but she couldn’t let emotion rule her impulses.

  It had to be this way.

  Dropping in after him, she splashed down the shaft, following the only route until it connected to a wider tunnel. She glanced both ways at the crossroads, evening light that trickled in through stormdrains providing faint illumination.

  Ripples fanning left determined her direction.

  She continued slowly, the lack of commotion down the shaft telling her Clevwrith had resorted to stealth or concealment. But she’d mapped this tunnel ahead of time. There was no place to hide.

  No place except the darkness.

  Narrowing her eyes, she analyzed every shadow, looking for any deformation.

  “Going somewhere, Des?”

  The voice came from behind her. Past the shaft from whence she came.

  He’d gone right?

  Hiding her annoyance, she turned, seeking him in the dim recesses of the tunnel. The contrast of deep shadow along the edges and splaying, hashed sunlight from stormdrain grates played tricks on her eyes.

  “You are either chasing your own shadow now, Des, or you are running from it. But I believe you are convinced it’s me. It is a dangerous game, mixing the shadows with the light. A dazzling disarray that will end in delirium. Oil in water creates a striking entanglement, but the two will never mix.”

  She endured his lecture with droll reception. Soon enough, he would no longer suffer the delusion that he could school her on anything.

  For the moment, however, he milked the chance to enlighten her. To correct her. “But therein lies redemption from this ill-advised interlude, should you wish to grasp it; what doesn’t mix can be separated. It doesn’t have to be this way. Just say the word, Des, and things can go back to the way they were. You can come back to the shadows, where you belong. They will embrace you. I will embrace you.”

  Despite hardening herself for the task ahead, his words stirred something in her. It was inevitable, really; Clevwrith would always hold a place in her heart that meant he had the ability to get to her. To reach inside and tug that thread that connected them.

  Goosebumps whispered down her arms, but she kept a hand on her fool, romantic heart, letting the feeling burn itself out. She kept her focus, finally distinguishing his form against the side of the tunnel.

  Once spot
ted, he stepped into the light, jostling the bag of effects tied to his belt to indicate he’d made use of his old tricks to fool her. “A rock skipped over water creates a delightful illusion of passage. A single, silent step in the other direction is then all you need to hide effectively.”

  Of course, it would be something that simple. She couldn’t bring herself to congratulate him, however, or even appear properly annoyed. Because she knew what was coming. And it made little difference if Clevwrith fooled her up and down Main Street with his clever little tricks.

  That was child’s play compared to what she now wielded.

  She tried not to pity him as he sauntered so carefree into the line of fire. He had to know, somewhere deep down, that there had always been a chance she would win. That his reign might end.

  Every time he faced her, he risked his freedom. He knew the stakes.

  She didn’t reply, knowing her resolve would weaken if she engaged him. Today was not a day for banter, for sentimentality. She tuned him out, turning her focus inward.

  Then outward.

  In a progressive scope, she became aware of the vast network of sewer shafts as if they were her own veins, the water that ran through them her own blood. She’d nourished these shafts like her own body, these past days, feeding them rainwater to bolster their supply.

  Now, she called that water to her.

  It gathered from the north, the south, the east, the west, rushing suddenly from caches she’d held dammed with her mind, a multiplying force encroaching from her mental periphery. The rush filled her mind long before it became audible in the surrounding shafts. But then a whisper rose. A breathy murmur of foreboding.

  It tickled the ears, drawing Clevwrith’s eyes over his shoulder with a flicker of uncertainty. The murmur grew quickly, becoming a distant rumble.

  The rumble became a rush, what started as a hair-raising omen evolving to a full-on effusion of dread. In seconds, the sound was deafening.