The Paladin Caper (56 page)

Overhead, the last of the Glimmering Folk disappeared down into the font, their great forms tightening to fit into the tunnel like a spilled inkwell somehow reversed. The paladins still ran for the font as well, dozens of the wealthiest citizens in the Republic all pelting across the grassy turf.

In front of Loch, however, the great snarling form of Mister Dragon occupied most of her attention.

“All right,” she said, holding Ghylspwr ready. “He’s ordered to come after me. The rest of you run. The ancients will be gone soon, and this will be over.”

“Kutesosh gajair’is!”
Ghylspwr yelled.

“We’re not killing him. He’s under their control.”

“No.” Veiled Lightning readied her blade, and beside her, General Jade Blossom had drawn a sturdy broadsword. “It’s not that. I can remember bits of when the paladin band had me. Lesaguris said that he would burn it from the other side.”

Mister Dragon roared, and fire flared out at them. Loch dove away, and Ghylswpr jerked in her hand, swatting at the flames with his own magic and driving them aside. She landed and rolled back to her feet, her leather coat smoking but the rest of her unburned.

“What does it mean?” Loch yelled.

“One last magical signal,” Veiled Lightning called back. “A self-destruct order to bring Heaven’s Spire crashing down on top of us. The explosion will—”

“Got it. Go!” Loch waved Ghylspwr at Mister Dragon. “I’ll draw him away. You stop Lesaguris!”

“NNNO.”

Loch turned to see what was left of Jyelle. The paladins had torn her rocky body apart, and she was only vaguely humanoid now. The shattered parts weren’t healing either. They were dead and dark from the blasts of the paladin bands.

Jyelle pounded past Loch. “SSSSSSTOPPP THEMMM, CAAAAAPTAAAIN.”

With the last of her strength, the daemon threw herself at Mister Dragon.

Loch ran.

Tern looked at the crystal lattice, checked the readings and colors. Then she looked again, because her eyes and her brain weren’t working right, and everything she saw seemed to fall away a moment later.

“The gate’s closed up at Heaven’s Spire,” she said.

“
I know,
” said Hessler.

He hung in the air, his body a muscular silhouette enshrouded in a glowing rainbow of magic.

Tern looked at him. The glow made a little glare across the lenses of her spectacles, and she pulled them off. “The gate’s closed, and you’re still here. You’re not just an illusion.”

“I am,”
Hessler said, unmoving in the air.

“No.” Tern blinked away tears, felt them slide down her cheeks, but didn’t take her eyes off the shape hovering in front of her. “No, if you were an illusion, closing the gate would have cut you off.”

“
I am an illusion of myself, Tern,”
Hessler said gently. “
The troll transformed the matter of my body into the energy from which illusions are created, the matter of the Shadowlands. I was able to hold myself together the way I maintain a glamour.”

“And you did.” Tern took a step forward. “You held yourself together, and you came back. You came back to me.”

“
To say good-bye,
” Hessler said.

Tern swallowed. “No.”

“
I watched from the other side,”
Hessler said.
“I saw that you needed me. I saw Dairy in pain. I helped bring him back, and I came back to help you. But I cannot stay.”

“You can.” Tern took another step toward him. She couldn’t see his face. He was still just a silhouette backlit by way too many rainbows.

“
If I touch the ground, I will be destroyed, just like the Glimmering Folk. I can only keep this idea of myself in my mind for so long. I stayed long enough to save you—”

“Stop!” Tern shouted, and the glowing figure flinched. “I don’t need you to save me. I need you
here
.”

She reached out and took Hessler’s hand. It was wrong, too large and thick, the hand of a warrior.

“If you need someone to focus to keep you whole,” she said softly, “let me.” She thought of Hessler’s hands, bony, long-fingered, always twitching as he thought. The hand holding hers shifted, the fingers thinning. “Because you are never out of my mind.” She took his other hand, and it felt right, it felt like him. “You are the smartest man I know.”

She closed her eyes and put a hand to his chest. No, too muscular. Thinner, softer, there, and she inhaled and smelled the scent of the soap he liked.

“You are a great wizard.” Eyes still closed, she stood up on tiptoe and ran her hands up to his shoulders. Thinner again, yes, always a little hunched, either because he’d just been reading or because he didn’t want the world to see how tall he was.

“You are the man I love,” she said, and pulled him down to the ground.

She felt the jolt when he touched, a crackle of energy, and she put her arms around him as he shuddered, and he fell into her, his long bony arms encircling her as well, and his face pressed to her cheek with his stubbly beard.

Tern pulled back a little and opened her eyes.

The glimmering rainbow light was still there, leaving only a silhouette. But it was
his
silhouette, and looking through the radiance, she could see his thoughtful, always-squinting eyes.

“I thought it would kill me,”
he said, and his voice changed, and it was a normal voice again, “but my inherently terrestrial nature must allow me to survive. But . . .” He looked down at himself, still shining in all the colors of the rainbow.

“It’s close enough,” Tern said, and her voice caught and cracked. “We can make it close enough. Right? We can do that. We love magic and crystals, and
we can make it work
.”

“All right,” said Hessler, the Glimmering Man, and kissed her.

Around the golden wall of the font, battle raged.

While General Jade Blossom guarded her flank, Princess Veiled Lightning spun, her skirt billowing as she sidestepped a blow, and then she chopped down with the Nine-Ringed Dragon and sliced the paladin band from the arm of her attacker.

The person wearing the band, a heavyset man in his midfifties wearing guild robes and a signet ring, stumbled back and looked around in confusion, and Veiled Lightning moved on, with one more saved and one less to worry about.

A few yards over, grass twined up into sudden curling vines to trap an older woman in an airman’s uniform, and as the woman struggled, Ululenia stepped forward, one hand raised, her horn shining upon her brow.

The woman went limp, and vines coiled around her arm and snapped the paladin band free.

Veiled Lightning whirled toward the next paladin, a young man in a noble’s robes, but not one of the black coats. He blocked her slash with his own blade, and moved to counter, but as he did, strong lean fingers struck three rapid blows to his forearm, and the paladin band fell free.

Unstoppable Deferential Fist, the greatest warrior-monk the Empire had seen, nodded to Veiled Lightning as he rolled away from another strike. He was shirtless, and despite the welts and bruises he had received, his lean body gleamed with sweat and muscle.

They could not stop all of the ancients. Even as Veiled Lightning moved to another, she saw a black-coated paladin leap up onto the wall of the golden font and then dive in, apparently confident that the fall would not kill him. According to Ululenia, the black-coated ones had chosen to bring back the ancients. Veiled Lightning mourned the loss of an idiot and focused on saving the person she was currently fighting, a young woman in a military uniform.

A great roar sounded from over near the podium, and Veiled Lightning saw the Dragon breathe a great gout of fire onto the daemon, destroying it utterly. It turned to the font, where Loch and her magical hammer had leaped down, and began to charge.

Then the air in front of Veiled Lightning flashed with sudden light, and three figures appeared in the grass, knocking aside surprised paladins.

Veiled Lightning focused on blocking the soldier’s attack, but from the corner of her eye, she saw one of the figures run toward the Dragon.

Veiled Lightning spun, tore the blade from the soldier’s hand, and chopped down on the paladin band, slicing it free, and as the soldier fell to her knees, the princess looked up.

The Dragon roared, and a great wave of flame washed over the figure running at him.

When it faded, the figure was still there, impossibly unharmed.

Then Veiled Lightning recognized who he was.

As the Dragon inhaled to unleash another gout of flame, Dairy rushed in, leaped up, and tore the silver chains free from the Dragon’s head and throat.

Sister Desidora smiled as the Dragon shimmered into the shape of a man and fell into Dairy’s arms. Then she snatched the arm of a passing noble, and her face went pale as she took hold of the band on his arm. She wrenched it free with a crackle of magic and turned to Veiled Lightning.

“What have we missed?” Desidora asked.

“Loch and Ghylspwr went after the leader,” Veiled Lightning said, neatly ducking under an attacker’s swing while Unstoppable Deferential Fist came in from one side and disabled the paladin band with his pressure-point strikes.

“Loch and who?” Justicar Pyvic asked, parrying a blow from his own attacker.

“The hammer!” Jade Blossom said, still guarding Veiled Lightning’s flank. “He and Loch were working together!”

Desidora’s skin lost its pallor, and Pyvic stepped in to block a blow that would have taken her head off.

“Ghyl,” the death priestess whispered. And without another word, she turned and leaped, pulled herself up onto the golden wall of the font, and then dove in.

As far as Veiled Lightning was concerned, Loch’s plans always relied upon a lot of luck and goodwill at the end.

Loch fell, Ghylspwr pulling her down the glowing red walls of the tube, and looking at the ground, she saw the golden hoop that Desidora and Ululenia had talked about, a tiny thing that she could not possibly fit through. But then Ghylspwr jerked in her hand, correcting their course in some tiny way, and either Loch got smaller or the hoop got larger, and she fell into it.

And came out in another world.

She landed feetfirst on the ground, and it crunched under her boots. It was not dirt, but old crystal, broken and worn down to rough sand, and she looked up into a dark sky filled not with stars but great globes of rock, studded with crystal that shone and glittered in every imaginable color. And upon each of the great globes, palaces of stone gleamed, and figures of living crystal walked the streets.

Only they were not walking now. They were running and yelling.

The Glimmering Folk, impossibly huge, coiled around the globes, their rainbow-shining tentacles winding a trap around their prey. Blasts of light slammed into them from the little stone cities, and they roared in pain but did not let go.

A thousand floating cities, a thousand Heaven’s Spires, all of them wondrous and impossible and burning in battle.

Loch realized that what she had taken to be the ground was just another of the globes, differentiated only by the great golden hoop, huge on this side, that led back to her world.