The Prophecy Con (Rogues of the Republic) (25 page)

Loch watched Gentle Thunder raise Arikayurichi, his magical ax, yet again, knowing that there wasn’t much she could do to stop it this time.

She was on her feet, and that was something, but it wasn’t enough, not against an ax enchanted by the ancients or, like Desidora’s Ghylspwr, actually containing the
soul
of an ancient.

“Could you at least tell me what these rings are for?” she asked, spinning the blade of her stolen sword.

Gentle Thunder didn’t take the bait, and as he swung, Loch dove to the side. The rattling car jolted as she moved, and she fell instead of landing on her feet, but Gentle Thunder’s blow went wide as well, crashing through the roof again.

This time, the whole roof collapsed, and when Loch tried to stand, she slid instead, and then held her side tight and tried to roll with it . . . and it still ended up hurting like hell anyway.

She lay in the rubble, coughing. Dust from the shattered stone choking her lungs and gumming up her eyes.

When she forced them open, Gentle Thunder stood over her, Arikayurichi coming up again.

As she met his stare, a ruby-red wooden blade glanced off his dragon-faced helmet, causing the warrior to stumble to the side, crashing into an already-collapsing wall.

“Intelligent artifact significantly too powerful to overcome,” Irrethelathlialann said as he landed beside Loch, “hence targeting wielder as point of vulnerability.” He rubbed his hands together and shook his head. “Don’t mind me. Just here for my book.”

“
Your
book?” She blocked his grab and slammed the pommel of her blade into his wrist.

He snatched his hand back and glared at her. “Yes, it’s hardly called the
Urujar
manuscript, now, is it?”

“
Kutesosh gajair’is!”
Gentle Thunder’s ax yelled as he roared back toward them.

“Probably too much to hope he was out,” she muttered. “Come on.”

Loch swung high, the elf went low, and both of them moved out of the way of Gentle Thunder, sidestepping his charge.

Arikayurichi caught Loch’s blow, while the elf’s blow glanced off armor. Irrethelathlialann spun away from a counterattack, nearly running into Loch as he slipped in the rubble.

Yet he grinned as he danced away, and Loch saw that he was holding the damn book again.

Gentle Thunder turned back toward Loch. “You cannot stand against me. I wield the Bringer of Order, the weapon whose strength has defended the Empire for dynasties.”

The other wall of the car crumbled and fell away as he spoke, leaving them standing in the ruins of the economy car with a clear night sky overhead. With a few swings of his ax, Gentle Thunder had destroyed the entire structure.

Loch thought about that for a moment. Then she glanced over at Irrethelathlialann.

“Oh, my, yes,” the elf murmured. Then he glanced down at the book, looking puzzled for some reason, and then back at Loch.

She ignored him, keeping her eyes on the Imperial bodyguard. “You keep saying I can’t stand against you, Gentle Thunder,” Loch said, “but I’ve gone up against you a few times now, and each time, I’ve accomplished what I intended to do, and you have not.” Deliberately, she pulled her hand away from her wounded side and held her sword in a two-handed grip. “Now, are you going to test Arikayurichi against the blade I took off your little princess or not?”

Gentle Thunder came at her fast, and she spun her blade. The red silk scarf flared out at eye level, and Gentle Thunder chopped down.

There was no way Loch could have blocked that blow, even with a two-handed grip.

Fortunately for her, she had stepped past Gentle Thunder as he swung, hiding the move behind a flair of red silk.

She dove for the front of the car as Gentle Thunder’s blow crashed into the floor, and then through it. She heard the crack of stone, the shriek of metal, and the keen of crystal all breaking beneath the blow, and then the impact flung her to the stone floor. She scrambled forward, the elf landing beside her. Stone crumbled behind her, glowlamps popping like glass bubbles and magical energy flaring wildly, and both of them lunged to the little platform separating what had once been her car from the car in front of it.

Behind them, the remains of the economy car came apart in a jagged spray of stone and metal and crystal, and Gentle Thunder fell away into the night as the back half of the train shrieked slowly to a halt on the railway.

Loch lay there for a moment, just clinging to the platform. Apparently that was all her body was going to let her do, because she tried to move and found that whatever surge of strength had gotten her back on her feet was gone. She bounced freely on the platform with each jostling movement of the little bit of the car that was still connected.

“You are
insane
,” Irrethelathlialann gasped, crawling past her to back of the next car. “And clearly done for the evening. Well, then. Pleasant to see you again.” He got back to his feet, climbed nimbly back onto the roof, and was lost from view.

Loch rolled over.

The book she’d lifted from Irrethelathlialann—for what seemed the twentieth time—during their mad scramble lay on the floor beneath her.

She lay there, unmoving, ignoring the cold and the pain for the simple pleasure of not moving.

A few moments later, a grappling line clanked off the platform, then caught on a handgrip. Loch hadn’t realized that her eyes had been shut. She opened them and saw her airship hovering beside the car. Distant figures waved to her in the night.

She hooked herself in, grabbed the book, belted her sword, and signaled.

As they lifted her from the platform, she saw Irrethelathlialann fighting the Imperial Hunter atop the car. The elf wasn’t dead yet, but he was parrying desperately, his blade no match for the glowing spear.

Loch fumbled at her waist and drew out the nice dagger she’d gotten from the elf’s room earlier. She squinted, adjusting her aim as she swayed, and then threw.

She was good, but not
that
good, which was a shame, because throwing a knife accurately while dangling from a line with some blood loss thrown in for good measure would have been good for bragging rights. The knife spun through the air, sailed past the Hunter, and clattered on the rooftop near Irrethelathlialann’s feet.

The Hunter looked back over her shoulder, as was only natural given that a knife had just sailed past her, and
that
at least gave the elf the moment he needed. He rolled away, coming up with the knife in his free hand, and then spun past the Hunter, tossing Loch a lazy salute as he sprinted away.

“It was pretty close,” Loch mumbled, and then the grappling line turned, and she lost sight of the elf fleeing into the night.

She focused on just holding on as the grappling line winched her up, staring at the passing countryside. Behind her on the track, the back half of the train had finally come to a halt, train cars all askew along the tracks like a child’s scattered blocks.

Sometime later—time blurred along with her vision—they hauled her up to the ship. The glowlamps hurt her eyes after so long in the dark, but they were welcome nevertheless.

Tern lay on the deck, unmoving, her shoulder wrapped in a red-soaked bandage. Hessler, his head bandaged as well, sat beside her, barely looking in Loch’s direction. Icy and Kail’s hands were warm and gentle as they lowered her to the deck.

“Captain?” Kail’s voice was strained. “Captain, you don’t look so good.”

“S’okay,” Loch said, and her voice sounded distant even to her. “I got the book.” She held it up, and Kail took it away and tossed it aside.

“Wait,” said Hessler, squinting over at her. “Oh, dear.”

Loch stared at him.

“Before I was knocked out,” Hessler said, “I cast a transmutation spell. I thought it would help me get the book off the train more easily.”

She blinked.

Hessler gestured at the book, and with a crackle of magic, it shimmered and shifted.

A moment later, a very nice elven dagger lay on the deck instead.

“I don’t suppose,” Hessler said, “that you picked up something that looks like this? Because that’s how I disguised the book, and you can see how . . .”

Loch let him keep talking as she passed out.

Thirteen

T
HE SUN ROSE
at the border between the Republic and the Empire, and the dead rose with it.

Uribin was a tall, broad-shouldered Urujar man who’d been eating way too much of his restaurant’s fine cooking in the years since the last war. He had served as a scout under Captain Loch, who would’ve been a colonel if she hadn’t been Urujar, and when they’d made it back into Republic territory, he had happily washed his hands of the military and retired to a life with a good woman and good food. A few weeks back, his biggest concern had been whether an influx of water sprites would affect the local fishing and force him to raise the price on his prized catfish entrees.

When the Republic soldiers had asked him to join, he’d slapped his gut and laughed.

They hadn’t laughed back.

They had told him three things, and after the third thing, he had signed back on.

Now Uribin hunched in thick bushes with a squad of boys and girls barely old enough to shave and watched water drip off the zombies pulling themselves from the Iceford.

“They have death priests,” a girl in his squad said, her voice cracking on the end.

“It’s not a death priest.” Uribin kept watching. Some of the dead were bare skeletons. Others were mostly whole. They all shambled out of the water with blades in their hands. “Look at the bodies.”

“The old man’s right,” said another of the kids. “Death priests usually raise a few very powerful undead, or enhance themselves. There are wizard’s spells that can animate a zombie, though.”

Slipping and stumbling, the dead clawed up the bank of the river. They were coming toward the border. Since Uribin and the kids were on the Imperial side of that border, that meant that the zombies would be coming right past them. They were well out of hearing range for the time being, but the newly risen were getting closer.

“Damn it, they didn’t pay me enough for this,” another boy muttered. He was technically the commanding officer of the squad.

The first thing the Republic soldiers had told Uribin was how much he’d be paid for his services as an expert consultant in scouting behind Imperial lines. It was an absurd amount, more than his restaurant would make in a year, and when he heard that they were serious, that they wanted him back that badly, he had stopped laughing and told them
to leave.

He shook his head now. “Look at the bodies, sir,” Uribin said again. “Some of them whole, some old and worn to nothing. What’s that tell you?”

Uribin’s commanding officer looked at him blankly, but the one whose voice had cracked a moment ago piped up. “Any river has fish,” she said. “If those bodies were down there for a long time, they’d have been picked to the bone.”

“So what?” Uribin’s commanding officer said, glaring at both of them. “If I was a fish, I wouldn’t eat any damn zombie, either.” He was half-Urujar, his nose narrow and planed from the Old Kingdom blood, his skin dark but also freckled, making him look like one of the baked potatoes Uribin wished he were preparing right now. He was shaking with fear as he spoke. “Now, listen, if we fall back, we can be in the woods before they get close. Their path—”

“Their path takes them into the Republic,” Uribin said. “and if some of them are whole, that means they weren’t in that river the whole time. They marched or crawled or swam down that river. Now, the Iceford comes out of the mountains that mark the border and goes clean into the Republic. The zombies are out now, because we’re near white water, which would bang them up, but as soon as it gets calm again, they can wade back in.”

“They’re going to come in by the river and hit the Republic by surprise,” said the girl who’d figured out the bit with the fish. Her voice no longer cracked. She had some Imperial in her, by the tilt of her eyes, and some Urujar as well, and a bit of everything, really. She reminded him a little of Captain Loch, the woman who’d gotten Uribin, Kail, and the rest through a mission that had left them deep inside the Empire with no one but themselves to depend on. A
young
Captain Loch, anyway.

That was the second thing the Republic soldiers had told him—the average age of a soldier in the Republic these days, and the percentage who’d served in the war, much less seen any time behind enemy lines. They’d told him that instead of leaving, and Uribin had poured them a drink and pretended that it was a long day mashing the potatoes that was making his hands shake.

Now, Uribin said, “Captain, they give you one of those new message crystals?”

The boy looked at Uribin, swallowed, and glared. “We can try the message crystal once we’re safe, Consultant. We won’t be any help to the Republic if we get ourselves killed.”

One of the others gestured frantically, and they lowered their voices. The dead were closer now, their steps uneven and halting, some of them dragging blades behind them instead of holding them up. They formed a single, mindless crowd. There were more of them still coming out of the river, like an eel that kept getting longer as you pulled it from its hole.

“We fall back, we’re falling back into Imperial territory,” Uribin said quietly. “That crystal got enough range to send a message from in there?”

“We can find out
later
,” the boy said, fixing Uribin with a steady authoritative look he had learned in some school somewhere. “For now, my orders are—”

Uribin’s fist cracked across the boy’s jaw. He lowered the boy gently to the ground, then fished the message crystal from the boy’s pocket. It blinked red.

“Too far,” he muttered, and looked at the others. They stared at him wide-eyed. “We can’t send a message to warn anybody from here.”

In the distance, but not enough of a distance, he heard footsteps crashing now. He held up a hand across his mouth, then switched to the hand-signs the scouts used.
Need to get message out. No message, our people die.

Get up onto hill,
the girl signed back.
Need clear target line to signal.

You confirm?
Uribin signed. Scouts hadn’t had message crystals when he’d been in service, and he wished he’d had more time to learn how they worked.

I confirm
. Her fingers were trembling, but her stare was sharp.
We get up on hill, we send signal.

Uribin looked up at the hillside ahead of them. The dead were following its slope, making their way steadily toward the Republic border. There were bushes and trees, and an expert scout might possibly be able to make it past dead eyes and rotting ears to the hilltop without being seen.

Uribin hadn’t been an expert scout for several years and several pounds, and nobody on this squad of raw recruits had the skill. Byn-Kodar’s hell, they were children.

And that had been the third thing the Republic soldiers had told Uribin. They’d pointed at the two little bracelets Uribin wore and said the names of Uribin’s two little girls. They’d asked if Uribin wanted to stop a war from spilling over the Republic again.

Uribin had cursed them long and loud, and then he had taken the offer.

Now, Uribin handed the message crystal to the girl.
You are the package,
he signed, and then, to the rest of the squad.
She is the package. She gets up hill. We make noise and distract. Then retreat to where we camped last night.

And then, because they were standing there looking at him wide-eyed, Uribin swallowed, said the names of his wife and his little girls like a prayer, and drew his sword.

Then he burst from the bushes with a shout and plunged into the line of the dead.

Captain Pyvic sat in the kahva-house with Ululenia, Desidora, and Ghylspwr. After rescuing Desidora and losing the fairy book that might have explained what everyone wanted with the damned elven manuscript, none of them had gotten a lot of good sleep the night before.

“All right,” he said, cradling a warm cup between his hands, “what do we know?”

“We know that someone unknown to us has access to the magic of the ancients,” Desidora said, cradling her hammer, “and they don’t want the knowledge contained in
Ruminations upon the Unutterable
to surface.”

Which also touches upon the ancients in some manner whose light has not yet opened the petals of our minds.
Ululenia normally stuck with spring water, but this morning, she had put a teabag in it. Her dress was still lightly scorched in places from their battle with the golems.

Pyvic grimaced. “What I know about the ancients couldn’t fill this cup.” He glanced at Desidora. “Does your hammer know anything that could help us?”

“
Kun-kabynalti osu fuir’is
,” Ghylspwr rumbled.

“I’m sorry.” Desidora looked down at her hammer, then back at Pyvic with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I don’t think Ghylspwr’s knowledge extends to magical safeguards left behind after the ancients departed.”

Pyvic let the thought bounce around in his mind a little. “Why would the ancients care about what happened to the world once they were gone?”

“Besyn larveth’is,”
Ghylspwr said, sounding a little hurt.

“Of course you do,” Desidora murmured, then said to the rest of the group, “They fled the world to stop the Glimmering Folk from gaining a foothold. Perhaps there is still some danger that the Glimmering Folk could return.”

Were that true,
Ululenia said,
you would be a lynx and not a butterfly
.

That made even less sense to Pyvic than what Ululenia normally said, but Desidora ducked her head, and quietly said, “Point taken.”

“So the Glimmering Folk are no longer a threat,” Pyvic said. That meant something, clearly. But what?

The door to the kahva-house banged open, and Justicar Derenky stepped in. His freckled face was flushed, and his blond hair was disheveled, as though he’d been running. He saw Pyvic and smiled, still breathing hard. “Captain.”

“Derenky.” Whatever Pyvic had been thinking about vanished. “Something couldn’t wait until I came in?”

“We weren’t certain when you’d come in, sir, given how much time you’ve been spending outside the office lately.” Derenky smiled at Ululenia and Desidora.

Pyvic smiled, clenching his teeth ever so slightly. “They’re helping with a case, Derenky.”

“Right, sir.” Derenky held up a file. “And to that end, we got back the information request you made on this Irreth . . . ethel . . .”

“The elf.” Pyvic took the file.

“I took the liberty of looking through it,” Derenky said as Pyvic flipped it open. “He is one of the few that regularly leaves the Elflands, which is why we have anything at all. He seems to be an agent of an important figure known only as the Dragon.”

Ululenia spit out her tea.

“Something you want to tell us?” Desidora asked.

“He
rules
the Elflands,” Ululenia said. “He is
very
powerful, and
very
dangerous, and . . .” She massaged her head. “And we are nipping at his heels.”

“He’s not an
actual
dragon, though, is he?” Pyvic asked.

“Most of the time, the elf purchases old art on behalf of this Dragon,” Derenky added, “though he’s proven deadly when crossed with would-be thieves.” He smiled thinly.

“I’ll read the file,” Pyvic said. “Thank you. Any reason this couldn’t wait until I was in?”

“The elf was last seen on the train involved in last night’s incident.” Derenky coughed, looking at Ululenia and Desidora a bit nervously. “Given the possible concerns with our own problems in that area, it seemed best to get you this information as quickly as possible. The last thing we need is trouble with the dwarves while the Empire is still marching.”

Pyvic fixed Derenky with a steady look that lasted until the man flinched. “What train?” he asked. “And what do you mean ‘marching’?”