The Paladin Caper (30 page)

“Elf charm. Interferes with most crystal-based magic.” Pyvic pulled himself from Derenky’s grasp. The man sat back, looking around in confusion. “Expensive as hell and illegal on Heaven’s Spire, but I got one anyway after those golems we fought a few months back.”

“I . . .” Derenky looked at Pyvic, and then at the paladin band he held in his hand, and then at his own band. “Mind control, sir?”

“Looks like.”

Derenky lurched back, dropped the band he was holding, and tore the other from his wrist. “I haven’t taken it off since I got it.” He put it on the table and backed away slowly. “I almost took it off when I bathed, but then I just . . . decided not to.” He looked over at Pyvic. “I could still be compromised. Protocol suggests I should be imprisoned and examined.”

“Protocol suggests I shouldn’t have had a damned elf charm on Heaven’s Spire,” Pyvic said. “You want to sit in a cell, or do you want to stop the bastards who did this from doing it to everyone else?”

Derenky swallowed. His fists clenched and unclenched a few times.

Then he tore his blade from its sheath and brought the pommel down hard on the paladin band that sat on Pyvic’s desk. “Oh damn, sir,” he called out as the band cracked. “I hope they have a good return policy!”

Pyvic smiled. “What a shame. Now, there’s someone I think might appreciate everything we can tell her about the Festival of Excellence.”

They gathered in the main dining room of Captain Thelenea’s treeship. Hessler sat on a low moss-covered couch with a somewhat-clingy and two-fruity-drinks-in-on-an-empty-stomach Tern. Dairy was distributing drinks as Kail poured them at the bar, with Desidora at the bar sipping a white wine with ice. Ululenia, surprisingly in human form tonight, sat at a table nearby and nursed what looked like expensive liquor, her dress still clingy and her hair still tumbling down in sultry blond curls like the hopes of a good girl in a bad city. Icy, still drinking his customary tea, sat across from her.

“All right,” Loch said, and held up her wineglass. “We can—” She broke off and looked at the wineglass. “This is red.”

A polite cough from the doorway made Loch look over. Captain Thelenea gave Loch a dry smile. “As we are not currently in the Elflands, I opted to pick up drinks you uncultured heathens like, including a decent red.”

“My respect for your dedication as a host,” Loch said, raising the glass in a toast, “outweighs even my disapproval of your taste in wine.”

“The tannins make our crystals itch,” Thelenea said.

“And now I just feel like an asshole,” Loch said. “Thank you for the drinks.”

“Irrethelathlialann’s last message before he went silent indicated that the Elflands is strongly considering retreat if the ancients reestablish themselves in force.” The elven captain grimaced. “I would prefer to avoid that. Unless I am invited to help elsewhere in the Elflands, I would be honored to fly you anywhere that might help.”

“Appreciate it.” As Thelenea nodded and left, Loch turned to Kail. “First off, your mother.”

“Fine and out of the public eye,” Kail said, nodding.

“Nicely done, and you were right.”

“I wasn’t gonna make you say it in front of everyone, Captain.”

“We also stumbled into some surprising additional information when the scorpion banished me to the realm of the Glimmering Folk,” Hessler added. “Apparently the ancients opened the gate to the Shadowlands—the home of the Glimmering Folk. Given the Glimmering Folk’s inability to touch the ground—also confirmed—I believe that whatever gate they created must have been at Heaven’s Spire. I’m not certain that helps us, of course . . .”

“You got back alive,” Tern said firmly, holding his arm. “That’s what matters. We’ve got each other.”

“I’m sorry about your parents,” Hessler added.

“Damn it, Diz, stop telling him what to say! You’re not even supposed to be a love priestess right now!” Tern finished the rest of her drink, withdrew a small wooden cocktail sword, and pointed at Kail. “Hit me.”

“Any piece of the puzzle is a good piece,” Loch said to Hessler. Desidora had hinted strongly that Tern should get a pass on most of this meeting. “And it fits with what we found here,” she added, holding up the book she’d stolen from Westteich’s estate. “These are notes from the Westteich family, passed down for centuries. Hessler has been reading it for anything that could tell us how to destroy their gate. What have you found?”

“The brief version,” Hessler said, “is that the ancients came to this realm from their own, and, well, the Westteich family says that they led humanity to a noble golden age—”

“Enslaved ’em,” Tern said, still holding Hessler’s arm.

Hessler nodded. “That is the most likely conclusion, yes. The Westteichs were apparently high-ranking servants in the Old Kingdom, and after the fall of the ancients, the Westteich family was one of the first to press for exploration of what would eventually become the Republic. They established themselves here specifically to prepare for and assist with the ancients’ return—hence maintaining the Forge of the Ancients, to recapture magical energy that had gone astray.”

“Charming,” Ululenia muttered.

“Oh, sorry, that was their phrase, not mine.” Hessler coughed. “In any event—”

“This was the short version?” Kail asked.

“In any event,”
Hessler repeated, glaring at Kail, “even the Westteichs don’t have complete information on what happened, but they believe the ancients came here to expand their power and hunt for more resources. Most conquests boil down to resource distribution, with ideology a simple shorthand used to impress upon the lower class the—ow, sorry, yes, short version,” he added, nursing his shin and glaring at Tern. “They brought or created dwarves to mine the crystals, elves to work with the crystals, and Urujar for agricultural labor. They created Heaven’s Spire as a mobile capital city, and at some point on the Spire, probably looking for more worlds to conquer, they created the gate through which the Glimmering Folk entered. The resulting war destabilized the Republic and introduced hostile creatures, and the ancients appear to have decided that the danger of the Glimmering Folk was too great to remain in this world. Thus their retreat, after doing all that they could to limit the Glimmering Folk’s access to this plane.”

“And when they left,” Desidora added, “they used their magic to create someone who could fight the remaining agents of the Glimmering Folk and, if successful, reopen the gate at Sunrise Canyon and allow them back into this world.”

Dairy lifted a glass of milk in silent salute.

“Wow, is anyone here
not
a direct or indirect creation of the ancients?” Kail asked. “I mean, they brought us over, Ululenia came from their leftover energy, Dairy’s their kid, sort of . . . I guess Hessler and his illusion magic are from the Glimmering Folk more than the ancients?”

“Hey, Dairy, both our parents are assholes,” Tern said, and clinked glasses with him.

“All right,” Loch said. “That gets us some of the why. It doesn’t tell us how to shut down the ancients’ gate, though, and that’s what we care about.”

“Actually, it does,” Hessler said brightly. “In the Westteich book, they counted their fortune in how the Glimmering Folk were largely driven from the world and the gate closed. The main problem was that as long as any one Glimmering Folk . . . thing . . . was present, it could draw others through. If the gate that first let the Glimmering Folk through had remained open, they would have overrun the . . . well, not the world, but the sky, at least. The ancients could only close the gate because it had been created on their side.”

Desidora grimaced. “
That’s
why I couldn’t hurt the gate the ancients came through.”

Hessler nodded. “Exactly. It was created on their side, so even though it
appears
to exist in our reality, you are always looking at an illusion of it, a sort of mirror image from
their
world. It can only truly be closed or destroyed on their end.”

Loch nodded. “That brings us to what Pyvic sent me about the Festival of Excellence. The ancients are using the celebration to cover up the fact that they’re doing major modifications on the mine and building massive structures right on top of it.”

Tern nodded and held up her drink. “That works with what we’ve got. They’ve built a giant amphitheater, and going by the
Lapitemperum
information, it’s covering a transmitter from the processing chamber. Right now, any energy they beam out of there would just fly up into the sky, which I suspect is
not
the end goal.”

“Heaven’s Spire will be floating right over Sunrise Canyon for the Festival of Excellence,” Loch said.

Desidora frowned. “So whatever magic they’re gathering goes from the processing center to Heaven’s Spire, and then . . . what? Is it charging Heaven’s Spire to be used as a weapon again? Or opening their gate wider?”

“Or something worse we haven’t even considered,” Kail added, and poured another drink.

“But we don’t need to worry about that,” Loch said, smiling, “because they aren’t going to do it. Instead, we’re going to use Heaven’s Spire to close the ancients’ gate.”

“I thought it could only be closed from their side,” Tern said, blinking.

“Correct.” Loch raised a finger. “What convinced the ancients to leave our world and close the gate last time?”

Hessler coughed. “The Glimmering Folk? Your plan is to allow the Glimmering Folk to return to this world? Perhaps I was not sufficiently clear when I described their intention to
eat all of us
.”

“Actually, I kind of assumed that was one of your metaphors,” Kail said, “like the ninety-one seconds thing.”

“Not the
actual
Glimmering Folk,” Loch said, pointing at Hessler. “But if we can find the gate, which we know
has
to be on Heaven’s Spire . . .”

“Since the Glimmering Folk can’t make contact with the ground, and Ambassador Bi’ul only ever appeared on Heaven’s Spire, yes, that was assumed,” Hessler said.

“. . . and
if
a very talented death priestess could make the ancients
think
it had been opened,” Loch went on, grinning, “while a very talented illusionist did whatever he could to reinforce that opinion . . .”

“So we’re running the Phantom Pox,” Kail said. Loch and Tern nodded. Most of the rest of the room looked confused. “We can’t get rid of the ancients ourselves, so we fake something bad enough that they run like hell and slam the door behind them.”

“The magical energy necessary to mimic the Glimmering Folk will be
staggering
.” Hessler frowned. “And that assumes Desidora and I can actually get to Heaven’s Spire in the first place.”

“And while you’re doing that,” Loch said, “the rest of us will be at the festival, making sure that the ancients don’t
actually
do whatever it is they’re trying to do.”

“With the crowds, we may slip in as the small fish in the white water,” Ululenia said.

“Except that the white water is full of bears.” Kail jerked his chin at Loch. “Whole thing is going to be locked down even tighter than it was when we were there before. When we hit the place, we flew an airship in there and knocked out a wall. The canyon is crawling with guards and wards now, if what Pyvic sent down is accurate, plus all the additional security they’ve got for the delegates from the Empire. No way we talk our way in now.”

“Kail is right.” Desidora sipped her wine, set it down, and smiled. “Except that thanks to our lovely Tern—”

“Yes, I’m a valuable special person, thank you.
It doesn’t work when I know it’s pity praise
.”

“—we have information from the
Lapitemperum
on how their security is set up, what wards are in place, and also how the ancients used transport runes in the middle of ambient magical energy without causing an explosion.” Desidora smiled.

“Nicely done. Can you crack the wards?” Loch asked.

Tern shook her head. “Nope. Rotating aural signature, stronger than anything I’ve ever seen and layered with redundancies so that if anyone goes all death priestessy to suck all that magical energy away and turn it into bolts of lightning, the grid sounds an alarm and also blasts the hell out of Diz.”

“Most of the recent changes were authorized by a Mister Lively, who has no activity listed in the
Lapitemperum
until a week or so ago. They appear to have learned from my first visit to Sunrise Canyon,” Desidora said with a little glare. “However, the wards themselves are limited to the perimeter. If we transport in via runes, using the same aural frequency the ancients used, we can bypass them entirely.”

“And Heaven’s Spire has transport runes,” Tern said, “which I know, since I was fixing them myself a few months ago.”

“Once we’re in,” Loch said, “the easiest way to the gate is through the new amphitheater and into the competitor’s wing, where all the people competing for glory and a free paladin band are housed. What’s the security there?”

“Identification badges,” Desidora said, “using an extremely friable crystal matrix and an implanted image of the owner. Again, almost impossible to fake, and any modification will most likely destroy them. We’ll need to get real badges and have Hessler modify whoever goes in to match the badge picture.”