The Prophecy Con (Rogues of the Republic) (11 page)

Looking down, he saw hundreds of little pincers clacking up at him. He tried to ignore them as best he could, but the image—not to mention the sound—was fairly disconcerting. Grimacing, he looked back at Desidora and Hessler instead. “Who’s next?”

Desidora hitched up her skirts, took a few steps, and leaped. Her jump didn’t have a lot of muscle behind it, but at the midpoint of her leap, Ghylspwr jerked in her hands, shouting, “
Besyn larveth’is!”
and pulling her forward.

She landed next to Pyvic, breathing lightly, and smiled down at Ghylspwr. “Thank you.”

Hessler leaped as well. Like Desidora, his jump wasn’t a terribly good one. Unlike Desidora, he didn’t have a magical warhammer to help pull him the rest of the way. The wizard hit the shelf at about chest height, knocking the wind from his lungs and scrabbling for purchase on the smooth shelf.

Pyvic lunged, grabbed Hessler before he slipped—only to find him slipping himself until hands gripped his ankles. He looked over his shoulder to see Desidora putting all her weight down on his legs, anchoring them in place. Grunting a thanks, he hauled Hessler up onto the shelf. From the knees down, the wizard was already covered with the giant crabs. They clung to his boots and his robes, claws clicking as they dug in for purchase.

“Hang on!” Desidora stepped over Pyvic and came down with great sweeping strikes of her hammer that sent the crystalline creatures flying away with shards scattered everywhere. Three times Ghylspwr whooshed down and away with extremely careful blows, and then once more, with an overhead swing that came down between Hessler’s legs hard enough to make the metal of the shelves creak.

Hessler stared at the hammer that had smashed down between his robed legs, still wheezing and trying to catch his breath. “Um.”

“We were
very
careful,” Desidora said.

“Um.”

Shattered splinters of crystal rolled out from beneath Hessler’s now-torn robes, pulling him out of his stupor. A pincer the size of Pyvic’s hand still twitched. Hessler swallowed. “So I see.”

“Kun kabynalti osu fuir’is.”

“How much farther?” Pyvic asked. Looking down, he could see some blood among the tears on Hessler’s robes. Unless Hessler got a lot better at jumping very soon, this was going to be a problem. The fire on the bookshelf also appeared to be spreading, which honestly seemed unfair, given that the shelves were made of metal.

“It should be the next shelf after this one.” Desidora turned. “We will have it in a moment.”

“No,” came a voice from Pyvic’s right. “You will not.”

The lights over to the right flickered, then dimmed as a robed figure pulled itself up onto the top of a nearby shelf. It crouched before them, arms flung out wide, each hand holding something curved and made of crystal. They were either hooks or sickles—Pyvic couldn’t be certain which.

“The hour must not be known,” said the figure, and leaped at them.

“That little golden forehead-necklace thing with the ruby in the middle marks her as part of the Imperial family,” Tern said, eyes wide, pointing at the gold-filigree chain that sat on the Imperial woman’s brow. “Oh my gods, that really
is
Princess Veiled Lightning. I used to have a tea set like the kind she had!”

Loch looked at the Imperial woman. Her lavender-and-violet dress was cut to allow easy movement while still concealing her legs. The lightning that crackled between her fingers left little sparkling trails in the air when she moved her hands. It was hard to tell in the moonlight, but the two braids of hair that dangled beside the curve of her breasts might have ended in little crystal clips.

“I find it hard to believe a princess could stay on her feet after a head-butt to the face,” Loch said, drawing her sword.

“A head-butt
and
a crystal wine glass,” Veiled Lightning said.

“Do you have any idea how many stories my mother told me about her?” Tern asked, sounding more excited than Loch had ever heard Tern sound about anything that was not made of crystals or alchemical reagents. “There was a book on posture, and dance classes, and everything! She really wanted Veiled Lightning to be my role model for how young women should act.”

“Your mother is a woman of grace and discernment,” said the princess’s bodyguard as he too stepped out through the window onto the roof. He held his magical ax in both hands, and his heavy armor caught the moonlight and glittered. “A pity you did not heed her.”

“And you’re Gentle Thunder!” Tern said, excited enough that Loch shot her a look. “Your doll was a lot more fun to play with. It was poseable, and if you bought the deluxe doll, it came with your ax, Arikayurichi, the Bringer of Order, and . . .” She trailed off as she caught Loch’s look. It mirrored the look Gentle Thunder was giving her. “I’m done. I’m stopping.”

“The order to hand me over to the Empire was illegal,” Loch said. “I’m not the one who turned Heaven’s Spire into a weapon.”

“And yet thousands will die in the coming war if you refuse to surrender,” Veiled Lightning said. “You were a baroness, but refer to yourself as a captain, Isafesira. Do you consider your own life more valuable than your fellow soldiers?”

“Kutesosh gajair’is!”
said the ax that Loch assumed was Arikayurichi, Bringer of Order.

“If I surrender, your people torture me until I break, then find out I really wasn’t behind the attack and goes to war with the Republic anyway.” Loch took a step to the side, distancing herself from Tern a bit. In the corner of her eye, Kail was still climbing across the gap between the buildings on the white silken line.

“That is a possibility,” Veiled Lightning said. Her intricate braids bobbed as she nodded briefly, and Loch caught the flash of crystal at the tips again. “But placed against the certainty of the war that comes without your surrender—”

“What about the book?” Tern asked, and as Veiled Lightning looked at her, she flushed. “And sorry for interrupting, Your Highness.”

“Could you stop being
polite
to her?” Loch muttered.

“Look, I played with a doll house modeled after her summer home.”

“If the Republic wishes to return stolen relics to the Empire,” Gentle Thunder said, putting himself between Loch and Lightning, “it may do so after you have been tried and executed. For now, the Republic’s treachery demands a sacrifice.” He raised his ax. “Surrender or die.”

“Or escape,” Loch said, and spun her sword as she stepped forward. Gentle Thunder looked her way, and on cue, Tern shot him with her crossbow.

Or at least, that had been the plan. What actually happened was that Tern fired the crossbow, and the ax in Gentle Thunder’s hands moved like a silver blur, and Tern’s bolt glanced up harmlessly into the darkness with a sound like a hammer on a tuning fork.

“Son of a
bitch,
” Tern said, more impressed than disappointed.

“Kutesosh gajair’is!”
shouted the ax.

“I really thought when Arikayurichi cut arrows from the air in the books, the writers were playing fast and loose with what magical axes could do. Loch, did you see that?”

“Tern, could you
please
stop praising them?” Loch shifted her blade from the showy spinning position into a grip she could actually use to hurt someone.

“Wait,” Veiled Lightning said to Gentle Thunder as he advanced on Loch. “We need her alive. Attendant Shenziencis, can you restrain her?”

A
third
figure slid out through the window, moving with liquid smoothness despite the ringmail. It was the movement that warned Loch what was about to happen, along with the cut of the ringmail—though the rings were a rich green rather than the shining gold she had seen last time. In one hand, the figure drew forth a short spear. The other hand held a net whose silver links crackled with pale-yellow energy. A golden helmet obscured the figure’s face.

“I can,” the figure said, and to Loch’s surprise, the voice beneath the golden helmet was female. The last time Loch had run into something wearing that ringmail and holding a weapon with that magic, the voice had been male.

It had been called a Hunter, and it had continued to fight even after taking blows that would have killed any mortal man.

Loch was drawing in a breath to call out a warning when the crossbow bolt Tern had fired landed on the museum rooftop across the street.

Icy, inside the building, was continuing to work on disabling the
interior
pressure plates, since he had assumed correctly that Kail would not want to hang upside-down from a wall while disabling a dwarven-crafted door lock. He had, in the interest of time, decided not to disable the pressure plates on the rooftop.

As a result, the moment the crossbow bolt hit the rooftop, the earth-daemons bound into the floorplates shrieked an alarm.

Loch, Tern, and the three Imperials turned as man-sized creatures of stone clawed their way free from the rooftop across the street, howling like a gale-force wind through a cave tunnel. They pounced on the bolt, still screaming, and tore it to shreds.

Then, as one, they looked across the rooftop at Loch. Dropping to all fours, they sprinted across the rooftop and onto the rope, running on it like a squirrel on a clothesline.

“Kail, new plan!” Loch called out . . .

And chopped down through the rope with a single clean cut.

Security Enforcer Gart Utt’Krenner could have delegated his nightly patrol duties to other members of his staff. He did not lack for resources—especially given the reallocations after the recent human display of military aggression with Heaven’s Spire—and his work kept him busy enough even without making patrols himself. His wife had been supportive about the late hours he had worked leading up to the opening of the new magical display at
Irke’desar
, but her comments during their nightly face-washing and mouth-cleansing suggested that she carried some irritation with her at the amount of work Gart had placed upon his own shoulders.

It was a fair concern, and Gart agreed with it. At a certain point, his insistence upon continuing patrols himself might even impact the morale of his staff, suggesting that Gart did not trust his men and women to perform their duties themselves.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and once the new magical display had been up for a few weeks—perhaps after the next civic holiday—Gart Utt’Krenner would hang his armored jacket over a chair and ease back to one night a week.

For now, though, he felt this current display was too important to sit out the patrols. Besides the value of the artifacts on display, there was the potential for mischief. Given the political climate, it was easy to believe that a member of one of the rival human nations might decide vandalizing the other nation’s display would be a good idea.

As such, Gart took it upon himself to go room to room, entering his all-clear for each display in a crystal fob attached to his belt. He glared as he finished assessing the Urujar display, a room that always made him sick to his stomach, mostly due to the fact that dwarves had made the slave collars so prominently shown in the cases. “Urujar sub-hex: clear.” Gart Utt’Krenner sighed deeply and shook his head at the collars. “Poor folk. Centuries of pain, and I suspect ye still be feelin’ it deep today.”

Gart’s sentimental moment was shattered by the shrieking of pressure-plate alarms up on the rooftop.

“Byn-Kodar’s knuckles!” Gart muttered. If this was the birds again, the runesmen behind the faulty avian aversion systems would have a lot of explaining to do.

He turned to head back to the central security room when an Urujar man hanging from a rope burst through the crystal window and slammed into Gart’s mailed chest like a hammer blow.

“Rrrf,” Gart heard the man say. At least, that’s what he thought the man said. It was as though the words were coming from a great distance, and his head rang and darkness swam across his vision. The man continued, “Sorry about that. Was trying to break into the elven room . . .”