The Paladin Caper (45 page)

Icy reached out and put a hand on Tern’s shoulder. “I am sorry.”

As am I.
Ululenia’s mental voice was quiet.
I will
. . .
yes.

“Good. Yeah. Good.” Tern marched forward to the hangar door. “Gods willing, we have nothing to worry about.”

She pulled it open, revealing the hangar inside, full of crystals of all shapes and sizes spread out in organized patterns on the ground.

All the elves and dwarves in the entire world looked up from the work they were doing, saw Tern and Icy and Ululenia, and drew their weapons.

“Well, son of a bitch,” said Tern.

Twenty

L
OCH PLOWED INTO
a group of running people, knocked them aside, and got away from them as quickly as she could. All around her was screaming and smoke and fire.

“LLLOKKK!” came forth in a roar, and Jyelle the earth-daemon stomped after her former captain, smashing aside anyone luckless enough to be in her way.

Loch cut across the field, where there were fewer people, and then pivoted and dove as a blast of fire scored across the green grass in front of her. Up in the sky, Mister Dragon roared.

“Now look at this!” the manticore said up on the glamour-screens. “There’s a woman down there, an Urujar woman, and it looks like she’s directing the dragon and the earth-daemon as they continue their rampage!”

Loch hit a sand court with a pair of narrowly spaced bars where acrobats had competed moments ago. She leaped onto the sand as flame ripped across the grass behind her, saw a young woman hiding by the post holding up one of the bars, and changed direction, stumbling in the sand.

Jyelle stood in front of her on the grass. “LLOKK.” She had already pulled herself into a humanoid shape, and even had a definable feminine form, albeit one made of dirt and grass. “YOOUU CANNNNOTT RUNN.”

“Yes, this woman is clearly commanding the daemon, as we can see from this angle,” the griffon said on the glamour-screens. “At this point, taking down this woman may be the only hope of stopping these deadly attacks.”

“You ever get tired of killing people, Jyelle?” Loch saw that the young woman by the post had gotten clear of the immediate danger.

“DOO YOOUU?”

Jyelle came in swinging, and Loch stepped in and caught the great earthen arm in the hook of her walking stick. She pivoted, twisted, hurled Jyelle into the sand where she’d been standing, and then dove to the side as the sound of the flapping wings overhead turned into the quick
whip-whomp
she’d learned to expect.

A gout of flame ripped down where Loch had been standing, sizzling into Jyelle, who roared in pain and crashed back into the sand.

Loch hoped the young woman was far away by now. She hoped everyone was far away by now. And except for occasionally getting the two things chasing her to trip each other up, there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.

She was poison, and anything near her was going to get killed.

Glaring up at the dragon and down at the scorched but still-moving Jyelle, Loch turned and began running.

Right now, that was what she could do.

The elves in the mine’s docking bay had knives. The dwarves had hammers or picks. All of them had blank looks of mindless obedience as they held up their weapons and came at Tern, Icy, and Ululenia.

As the queen who eats her mate when she has finished with him,
Ululenia’s voice rang in Tern’s mind,
I am sex and death, desire and destruction. They will die in ecstasy, knowing that I was their fulfillment, my pleasure their end.

Tern turned to Ululenia and slapped her sharply across the face. “You are a
nice unicorn
and a
pretty unicorn
, damn it! Now knock them out with your mind thing and get to the damn processing center!”

Ululenia was silent for a moment, and Tern wondered if this was the moment when it all finally ended.

Then she said,
You are brave, little human. It amuses me.

Ululenia’s horn flared, and the elves and dwarves all stopped, swaying in place. Their jaws hung slack, but their weapons were still raised.

“I suspect even she cannot confuse the minds of so many for long,” Icy said. “We must hurry.”

He took Tern’s hand and pulled her through the crowd. There were too many of them to completely avoid, and Icy moved the workers aside gently. They stumbled when he did, but did not fall, nor did any of the benumbed react from bumping into each other.

I can feel them all,
Ululenia said, and Tern thought optimistically that she sounded a little more like herself.
They are enthralled, dominated by old magic. It has coiled around them as the serpent takes the hare, tighter and tighter, not to kill, but to break the breath of their minds until only servitude remains.
And, damn it, now she sounded sexy again.

Icy gently pushed a dwarf aside. “Can you sense the source of that control?”

I could,
Ululenia said,
if I crawled into their minds, just a little more, and caressed their cravings, pushed their pain, drank of their dreams, just a little.

Every dwarf and elf in the room let out a long, slow breath.

Then as one, they said,
“Arching
. . .
”

“That is not necessary,” Icy said quickly. “You are doing well, and as your
friends
, we appreciate your help, Ululenia.”

“Just hold them still,” Tern added.

Hold them
. . .
still.

“. . . ardor,”
every elf and dwarf in the room said.

Icy gave Tern a worried look.

The double doors were open, and Icy and Tern stepped through, into the upper level of the mine itself. To the right, mine carts filled with red-glowing crystals sat next to the mine leading down to the tunnels. Over to the left, the giant
yvkefer
door to the processing center had been repaired and a massive new lock held it shut.

“Guess I’m on.” Tern pulled out her safecracking tools, plugged her stethoscope into her ears, and held it to the great lock.

“Bejeweled
. . .
”
said every elf and dwarf. Tern looked back over her shoulder. They were not coming after Tern and Icy, but they had all turned around to look.

“How quickly do you believe you can bypass the lock?” Icy asked.

“. . . bosom.”

“Working on it.” Tern wedged a pry bar into a seam and popped the panel off, revealing a lot of crystals and metal plating. “Dwarven, basically, but with more enchantments than they’d use. Fail-safes too. I trip anything wrong, the entire deal slams shut, and we spend a week burning through the door.”

They want to be free,
Ululenia said in Tern’s mind. Tern heard the clopping of hooves as the unicorn, or whatever she was now, came through the docking bay.
They would prefer death. I would be doing them a kindness to oblige
. . .
and I would be very kind
. . .

“Consider haste,” Icy murmured.

Tern tapped a crystal-tipped pick against the door itself, brought another crystal pick toward one of the plates, and listened carefully. “Haste isn’t happening, Icy.” She started at a metal clank behind her, but it was only the mining lift heading down, presumably to pick up another load.

You cannot fight your nature forever,
Ululenia said, her hooves clopping as she left the crowd and came to Icy and Tern.
You could not, could you, Laridae? The girl who wished for a life different from that of a guildsman’s daughter?

“Curling
. . .
”
said the elves and dwarves. Tern glanced over and saw that their arms hung slack. All of them were sweating. She went back to testing the harmonics on the crystals and tried to go a little bit faster, which was
always
a good idea when safecracking.

“This is not you, Ululenia,” Icy said. “I know who you are. You do not kill for pleasure.”

You did, Unstoppable Deferential Fist.
Ululenia’s voice seemed honestly sad.
Now you try to live a different life, but when you watch your friends fight, your mind walks through how you could have done better. Is it not exhausting? Do you not wonder how much
more
you could you be if you did not spend every waking moment fighting who you are?

“. . . caress.”
The elves and dwarves moaned a little after they said it.

“This is the magic of the dark fey,” Icy said, “and not a choice you made. I will accept exhaustion if it stops me from being corrupted by something I do not wish to be.”

Tern tapped a crystal panel gingerly, heard it chime, and slid a pick into the lock.

Do you not see? I wish to kill you,
Ululenia said,
and I can fight that, because as the salmon knows her spawning grounds, I sense the friendship that was once pure and simple between us. But these creatures would kill me. They are prey.

“Nice unicorn,” Tern muttered as a crystal panel shifted from red to green under her touch. “Pretty unicorn.”

“Decadent
. . .
”
There was definitely moaning among the elves and dwarves now.

“Do not,” Icy said, “please.”

They will die knowing pleasure most only dream of, and their deaths will sate me. It is a good bargain, Unstoppable Deferential Fist.

“. . . desire.”

Icy stepped away from Tern and put himself between Ululenia and the crowd.

“My name,” he said, “is Icy.”

The mining lift clanked again behind Tern as it came back up.

“Your beast has been corrupted,” said a rough voice by the lift. “It will be tamed.”

Tern looked back from the door she was working on with a tiny sigh.

Four Hunter golems rose up in the mining lift, their fairy-killing spears and magical nets ready for battle.

Growing up, Kail had liked chatting with the puppeteers after the show. They were genial men who liked entertaining crowds and saw a lot of the Republic in their travels. Kail had loved the griffon puppet because it was nicer, on balance, to Urujar, and the dragon puppet because it breathed fire, and breathing fire was cool.

Kail had always known that the puppeteers worked from a script sent down from the heads of the puppeteer’s guild on Heaven’s Spire, but he suspected that actually capturing the words of one central puppeteer and transmitting the message across the entire Republic was new.

None of that was good, and, more importantly, none of it changed the fact that Kail’s actual job was to disable the part of the font that directed the flow of energy up to Heaven’s Spire, and that job had not accounted for there being five people wearing paladin bands that Kail had to get through to do that.

The room had no overhead lamps. All the light came from the dozen giant crystal panes the five paladins were looking at. Six of the panes showed views of the stadium, where a dragon and a daemon, presumably Jyelle, were chasing Loch and generally wreaking havoc. Other panes displayed what the puppet show looked like to everyone in the Republic, along with a bunch of charts and graphs with colored bars on them that Kail recognized from his airship-piloting experience as a general “Hey, how are things going, is anything going to explode?” readout.