The Prophecy Con (Rogues of the Republic) (24 page)

The train was still moving, though, rattling toward a tunnel into a great mountain whose slopes glowed silver-blue in the distance. Loch looked at the tunnel, then at the train, and then at the hole in the side of the train where she’d just climbed up.

Then she ran back past the hole, even as a craggy molten hand snagged the roof, and took a running jump across the gap onto the next car back.

She reached the next car and kept going, hearing the roar of the daemon behind her and the dull crack of crumbling stone. She reached another gap, took another jump.

It was the depowered car, and it was shaking hard enough to mess up Loch’s landing. She hit hard, skidded, nearly sliding off the angled rooftop. The stone roof was cold, and her fingers were going numb.

She tried to sit up, but it was getting hard to catch her breath, so instead she just rolled onto her side and watched as the daemon pulled itself up onto the roof, shredding more of the train car in the process.

“YOUUUUUU CANNNNN’T SCAAAAAAAAPE MEEEE!” it roared. It raised its arms. It had grown claws again. They were only stone, but they would likely get the job done.

Loch got to her knees and cough-swallowed the instinct to vomit as pain lanced her side. Her hand was tucked in over the wound on instinct. When she looked at it in the moonlight, it still came away bloody.

“I’m doing just fine escaping you so far, Jyelle!” she called back. The wind stole some of the words, and she was still having trouble catching her breath, but it felt right to say something.

The daemon growled and lumbered forward. It jumped, ungainly but fiercely strong, and its landing sent the car smashing against the rails, jolting like a bucking horse.

It was enough to make the daemon stumble, and Loch, still on her knees, chopped out hard at its knee, felt the unexpected jolt of metal on metal from where it had copied the blow from the
last
time she’d slashed at its leg, and watched as the daemon pitched over the side of the train.

Its great stone claws dug furrows into the rooftop as it stopped itself from falling.

Loch hacked at the hand and saw a few splinters of rock fly free. Before she could swing again, though, the daemon was pulling itself back up, and Loch scrambled back as claws slashed at her face.

“YOUUU CANNN’T ESCAAAPE MEEE,” the daemon said, coming back to its feet. With the same self-consciousness Jyelle herself had shown, it flung its shoulders back and flexed its claws. “YOUU CANN’T BEEAT MEE.”

“I wasn’t trying to.” Loch was half-seated, half lying on her back. She kept scooting backward as the daemon stepped forward. The dizziness was significantly worse now.

But she smiled at the daemon, damned the pain from her eyes and let the little bit of Jyelle inside the monster see her confidence.

It paused, just for a moment.

But that was as long as Loch had needed.

“I was trying to
stall
you,” Loch said as the train reached the tunnel.

She rolled to her side and shut her eyes as the daemon slammed into the tunnel wall, and she felt a wave of heat as fire washed over her, along with a spray of stone and gravel. Even with her eyes closed, she could sense the close darkness of the tunnel, and the dizzying echo of the hum of the crystals bouncing off the walls and the ceiling just over her head.

She opened her eyes when things stopped falling on her, and for a moment just lay there in darkness lit only by the railway below her, the red light shading the stone walls.

Dimly, she saw that the daemon’s feet and ankles still lay on the rooftop. The rest of it was either smashed apart or lying on the tracks back at the tunnel’s entrance. Either way worked for Loch.

She didn’t move—the ceiling was whizzing by closely enough for her to feel it passing like a near-miss from a crossbow, and she wasn’t sure how much she
could
move at this point. Eventually, the train came out of the tunnel and back into the moonlit night.

And then from behind her, she heard Princess Veiled Lightning’s voice cut through the wind. “You’re a difficult woman to find, Isafesira de Lochenville.”

Gart Utt’Krenner heard the Urujar woman bait the daemon out of the hallway into the elf’s car. A moment later, he heard the daemon tearing stone and crystal apart as it clambered out onto the roof.

Gart pushed himself up to his knees, shaking his head. The daemon had been stronger than he had expected. It was sloppy on his part. He had never faced a daemon in combat. Had it been a troll, he would have been far more comfortable.

“Book,” someone mumbled, and Gart looked up to see the elf, Irrethelathlialann, getting to his knees as well, groping on the ground blindly. “Where’s the book?”

“Ye and the Urujar woman have caused a great deal of damage,” Gart said severely, grabbing his truncheon and getting back to his feet. “I intend to see that charges be brought against ye for both theft and damage to th’railway.”

“That’s wonderful.” The elf showed no sign of the strange speech pattern he had demonstrated back in the museum. “We didn’t summon the daemon, though.”

On the roof overhead, the stomping of footsteps marked the daemon heading back down toward the damaged and depowered car behind it.

“Does Loch have the book?” the elf asked.

“I not be knowing,” Gart said.

The elf looked around. “She probably has the book.” He sighed, then picked up his rapier, wincing a little as he moved.

Gart considered arresting the elf. Then he considered the daemon.

Holding his truncheon ready, he gestured to the elf’s car. “Let us be going, then, Mister Irrethelathlialann.”

The elf shot him an amused look. “Possessed of an indomitable need to fight daemons, are you?”

Gart didn’t smile. “Ye both be under arrest, so I’m not letting ye out of my sight. And that daemon be needin’ banishin’.”

He stalked into the elf’s room, which was little more than a platform with more than half the roof ripped away by this point. He gripped the crumbling rock to climb out and up onto the roof, then flinched back as the walls of the Stonebridge Tunnel whooshed past him. Out on the train, Gart believed he heard the crack of stone shattering, but he couldn’t be certain where.

The elf chuckled. “Little close, there.”

Gart waited in silence until they left the tunnel. Then he started climbing once more.

And once more he froze, this time when he heard the Imperial woman speak.

They were at the end of the car he was climbing out of, and as he watched, they leaped nimbly across the gap onto the car with the bar. There were three of them, just like at the museum—the figure in the green ringmail, the bodyguard with the ax, and the unarmed woman who had blasted Gart across the room.

“We have crossed the Republic to find you,” the Imperial woman said.

“I’ve got the book.” Loch, who was lying on the depowered car, held up the elven manuscript in the hand not holding the Imperial sword. She had not yet risen to her feet, and while the moonlit night made it difficult to tell, Gart believed that she was bleeding heavily.

“The book is nothing,” the bodyguard said. “We came for you, Urujar scum.”

“The book can stop this war!” Loch called back.

The bodyguard laughed. “Then we will pry it from your—”

“Wait.” The Imperial woman raised a hand. “You will hand the book over voluntarily?”

“Will you turn yourselves in for the murder of the justicar, the clerk, and the sailors in Ros-Oanki?” Loch asked. “He died right after pointing my team at Ajeveth.”

“Irrelevant,” the bodyguard said.

“What?” The Imperial woman said at the same time. “We killed no one. Thunder—”

“All that matters right now is taking her down, Veil,” the bodyguard cut in.

“What matters is the book,” she replied with anger in her voice.

“I don’t know why it’s so damn important,” Loch said, and her voice was shaky. “Everyone seems to want it—you, the elves, the golems of the ancients up on Heaven’s Spire—”

“
Kutesosh gajair’is!”
the bodyguard’s ax called out, and the bodyguard lunged forward, vaulting across the gap and coming down ax-first.

Loch had not been as helpless as she had seemed. She rolled to the side, and the ax clove through the stone roof as though it were cheap pine.

Gart had decided to move, but to his surprise, Irrethelathlialann was even faster. The elf darted past Gart onto the rooftop, his wood-bladed rapier out and ready. “Stop them!”

The Imperial woman and the figure in the ringmail turned at his hissed order, and the figure in the ringmail raised a spear that crackled with energy, but Irrethelathlialann never stopped moving. He stabbed at the armored figure, forcing a parry, then leaped up, kicking off the raised spear and flipping over the figure to come down yards away on the other side.

Gart lumbered forward as well. “All of ye, weapons down!” he yelled. Even the most unruly of dwarves would have at least acknowledged the order, if not followed it. He did not wish to sound racist, but non-dwarves were often very uncivilized.

The Imperial woman turned, surprised, and her hands crackled with lightning as she turned to him.

“Nae this time,” Gart said, twisting a lever on his truncheon. As the woman moved his way, water sprayed out from the base of the truncheon, a short blast that soaked the Imperial woman.

She stumbled back, cursing in pain as lightning crackled back across her body, then fell from the roof out into the night.

Gart ignored her and kept moving. The figure in the ringmail was chasing Irrethelathlialann, who was somehow managing to fence with the armored figure while
still
running back toward the depowered car where Loch and the bodyguard fought.

That fight was going to be short, though. Loch swung her blade, and the ax swept up to knock it aside with contemptuous ease. Loch herself was barely on her feet, the arm holding the book tucked in at her side to press against her wound.

The depowered car banged freely on the rails now. It had taken too much damage, and each jolt rattled through the entire train. The car half torn apart by the daemon wasn’t much better.

The elf took a shuffle-step to ready himself for the jump across the gap to Loch’s car, then sidestepped, blindly dodging the spear that would have punched through his back. “Stop,” the ringmailed figure said in a woman’s voice, and the elf stumbled back, blinking.

“Ye help Loch,” Gart muttered, slamming into the ringmailed woman from behind and sending her stumbling. “I’ll deal wi’ this.”

Irrethelathlialann clutched both hands to his blade, and seemed to come back to himself. “Momentary distraction is sufficient,” he said, apparently to himself, and leaped across the gap between the cars.

Gart had no time to see how the elf fared. He flicked a switch on his truncheon, and waded in against the armored woman. “Yer magic be no good to ye here,” he growled, and swung. The head of his weapon glowed, and it struck sparks from the woman’s spear when she blocked it. She was stronger than she looked, though, and her counterattack had him parrying and giving ground.

“Fine weapon,” he muttered, trying to place it. He had seen it in the museums, or one like it. Magical spears carried by the golems that served the ancients. “Did ye steal that, too?”

She didn’t answer, but thrust at him again, and he blocked it, stepped in, and struck a blow that sent her reeling. “Weapon or no, ye still be no match for dwarven strength!” His next blow caught her on the side, and his next one after that brought her to her knees.

Gart raised his truncheon, and the woman looked up at him, and somehow, even through the helmet, he could feel the weight of her gaze.

“
No weapon
,” she said, and the words reached into Gart’s head and twisted something loose, and his truncheon slipped from his grasp and clattered to the roof. Magic, he realized, even as he lunged forward, slammed a knee into the woman’s helmet, and then followed with a punch.

She fell back, and he moved in, trying to keep blows raining on that helmet, and the face beneath it.

“
Be still
,” she said, and Gart froze as the words twisted around his spirit.

It was as though his muscles were locked in place, and he yanked on his own bones, trying to move.

“Yer dwarven strength be no good,”
she said, and he slithered to the ground bonelessly as his muscles went limp.

She got back to her feet, adjusted her helmet, and raised her spear.

Gart stared up at her. He couldn’t speak.

“You’re fortunate I don’t have time to make this interesting,” the woman said.

As her spear stabbed down, Gart’s last thought was for his wife and children.