The Paladin Caper (6 page)

“We knew you’d be okay,” Desidora said, and her face darkened ever so slightly. On most people, it would have been a blush. On Desidora, it meant that her death priestess aura was slipping back into the shadows where it belonged, lowering the chances of anything nearby spontaneously taking on a silver-skulls-and-gargoyles decorative theme or getting the life sucked out of it. She stepped forward gracefully and didn’t
quite
kiss Kail, but did put herself beside him with their arms touching.

“How’d it go?” Loch asked, moving into the space between the kahva-house and the bakery next door. It didn’t have enough garbage lying in it to be a proper alley, so by Hillview standards, it was likely a road.

“Good news and bad.” Kail looked over his shoulder.

“The bad news involves pursuit,” Icy guessed.

“Boy, does it, and you’re all drinking those on the go,” Kail said. Loch took a sip of her kahva, inhaling the heat of the dark roast. “Good news is I got the tracking crystal onto their fancy-ass airship. Assuming it works, we’ll know where they’re going.”

Desidora went slightly pale, her hair darkening from auburn to black. “It works. I can sense it now.”

“Good. Now, running,” Kail said. “Trackers, professionals, an ogre and two things I couldn’t place. I
think
they were going by scent, but it could be by aura, or it could be both. I don’t know what two of them are, so until we learn how to lose them, we’re going to want some distance. Arikayurichi and Ghylspwr were both there too. Bertram was carrying them. They’ve got him enslaved.”

“You’re certain?” Hessler asked. “If Bertram believed that—”

“He’s certain,” Desidora cut in, giving Hessler a look, and Hessler blinked and nodded.

“Nice work.” Loch took one more sip of her kahva, then sighed and tossed it into a garbage bin near the back of the alley. “Waste of damn good kahva.”

“And ethically traded,” Hessler added.

Then they were running for the sad little field where they’d left the airship, ready to flee yet another town just ahead of whomever was after them.

But this time, Loch thought with a tiny little grin, they had a target.

Fangs into the hamstring, Little One,
Ululenia said in her mind, and Loch laughed.

Things were actually looking up for once.

A year ago, Dairy had been working on the farm, cared for—if not precisely loved—by good, honest people, with no further thought than next year’s harvest and a little annoyance at the silly birthmark on his arm that the farm’s old woman said was special and he should never show anyone. Ever since the night blood-gargoyles had come stalking around the farm, life had been one educational experience after another.

Now, with a prophecy, some morally ambiguous military service, and several major robberies behind him, Dairy was finally happy, living with a man who loved him for who he was.

But of course, the Champion of Dawn wouldn’t get a normal life. The Champion of Dawn had to do
heroic
things.

At the moment, those things involved leaving the man he loved and running off to the Empire.

Dairy knew that Mister Dragon wouldn’t have asked if it weren’t important. Mister Dragon hadn’t seemed any happier than Dairy himself. Princess Veiled Lightning could keep him safe, Mister Dragon insisted, and far enough away that nobody with any ideas could hurt Dairy.

Dairy had asked whether that meant Mister Dragon’s own estate in the middle of the Elflands wasn’t safe enough, and had then felt sorry for doing so, because Mister Dragon had sighed and hung his head, which he knew from when Mister Kail and Mister Hessler did it meant that the answer was that Mister Dragon
wanted
it to be safe enough, but it
wasn’t
, and Mister Dragon was feeling sad about how life had turned out to make that the answer.

Now, under the moonlight, Dairy looked down from the great treeship he had just boarded and waved down at Mister Dragon, who watched from the ground below. Mister Dragon waved back. He was smiling, but his face was still sad.

The elven captain was named Thelenea. She had been the captain on the massive treeship Loch and Dairy had boarded back when Loch had been trying to steal the elven book from Mister Dragon. She clapped Dairy on the shoulder. “This is the fastest ship in the Elflands. You will be safe in the Empire in less than a day, Lord Rybindaris.”

Dairy almost said, “Please, just call me Dairy,” but then remembered that elves hated it when you told them to do anything, so instead, he just said, “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

Captain Thelenea looked a little like Captain Loch, especially when she smiled, even though her skin was green instead of brown. Dairy wondered if it was something about being a captain. “He is trying to keep you safe.”

“I would rather be with him,” Dairy said, and then looked away, because the words had come out bitter.

“I believe he knows that as well,” Captain Thelenea said, and stepped back. “This ship only has one floor and a few cabins, unlike the last treeship you traveled upon. Whenever you are ready, someone will be happy to show you to your room.”

“Thank you,” Dairy said again, and the captain headed off to the bridge.

Dairy watched the great golden radiance of Mister Dragon’s estate fade in the night as the treeship slowly ascended. In what seemed like moments, the great thick trees that covered most of the Elflands had obscured the estate from view, and then the night was lit only by the silver-white moon and by the purple-and-blue glows of moss on the trees.

The railing of the treeship was rough, the bark gripping his fingers. Overhead and behind him, branches rustled and creaked as countless intertwining leaves caught the wind, while the main hull beneath his feet was strong but faintly springy. It reminded Dairy of when he had climbed the young trees back on the farms, feeling the green wood flex beneath him.

When he had ridden on the great treeship with Captain Loch, it had seemed almost like a normal airship, but with moss and leaves and no crystals. Dairy hadn’t realized at the time how much of that had been for the comfort of the humans visiting the Elflands. This was a
real
elven ship, though, as alive as the elves themselves, and as different.

Dairy decided that he liked it. He was getting used to being different. He would find some way to help, even from the Empire. He hadn’t been able to help Mister Dragon with the reading, and he hadn’t been able to help Loch and the others with stealing things, but he would find something he could do.

Whether he liked it or not, he was a child of prophecy, he noted with a little smile. He was bound to be important somehow.

He turned to find someone to take him to his room, and that was when the bag came down over his head.

Three

J
USTICAR
C
APTAIN
P
YVIC
sipped his morning kahva, which always made him think about the woman he loved, and then sighed and pushed himself up from his desk.

“Something keeping you from the cabinet meeting, sir?” Justicar Derenky asked, poking his head around the corner of Pyvic’s door.

Derenky was a freckled man who seemed to think that he could be in charge if he said everything like a question and smiled a lot. Once, Pyvic would have found that politically minded avarice off-putting. After seeing the man take a knife to the gut in defense of the Republic, however, Pyvic had been forced to accept, begrudgingly, that Derenky was a very good justicar, his desire for Pyvic’s job notwithstanding, and so he gave Derenky a comfortable smile and said, “I was deeply concerned about you not having asked me about it yet, justicar.”

“Just a reminder that I’d be happy to attend these meetings if you are too busy with other matters, sir.”

“Tomlin!” Pyvic called as he walked past Derenky into the main office. “Derenky said it again! Everyone has to take a drink!”

“Right, sir!” The big man squinted, pinning a thumbtack to a map on the wall.

“I expect a report about the fairy-creature disappearances when I get back,” Pyvic added with a look at both Tomlin and Derenky. “Something’s going on, and even if that something is in the woods, it could spill into the villages next week, and then the towns, and then I’ll be busy enough that Derenky has to go to my cabinet meetings.”

“Wouldn’t want that, sir,” Derenky tossed back, and Pyvic grinned and headed off to the archvoyant’s palace.

The floating city of Heaven’s Spire was quieter now than it had been a few months back. Businesses were open again, and the damage had been repaired, but the people who lived up in the sky had learned in no uncertain terms that night that their city was a weapon, and that weapons sometimes got sent into battle. The airborne metropolis had never been friendly for families—a floating city by its very nature restricted the amount of sprawl required to add new residential areas, and as the capital of the Republic, it catered to wealthy cosmopolitan tastes—and in the wake of Heaven’s Spire’s near-destruction, the city was almost entirely devoid of children. Pyvic wondered how many schools had closed.

There were more flags hanging from the doorways, though, and that was something.

The guards at the archvoyant’s palace knew Pyvic on sight, and, after a quick and perfunctory check with a glamour ward, he was allowed inside. He made his way through the gardens and into the palace, where the archvoyant’s steward directed him to the meeting already in progress in what Pyvic remembered as the breakfast room.

“Captain Pyvic,” Archvoyant Cevirt said as Pyvic came in. “Didn’t quite dodge this one, I see.”

“My apologies, sir.” Pyvic ducked his head to the dark-skinned man in the archvoyant’s robes, and to the other members of Cevirt’s cabinet. “Caught up in a case.”

Cevirt raised an eyebrow. “There’s a fresh pot of
case
on the table. Pour yourself a cup and join us. We’re going to shove a few more schools into this Republic, and you’re going to use those justicar skills to help me find the money for it.”

Pyvic sighed and settled in with the other men and women at the large table. The room itself was lovely, open to the fresh air on one wall with a beautiful view of the morning sun, and the kahva was significantly better than it was at the justicar station. The other men and women were experts in their own field, merchants and bankers and guildsmen, and all of them were at least as busy as Pyvic was.

It was several hours of work that Pyvic would rather have spent tracking down the enemies of the Republic, but, on some level, it was also like solving a puzzle, and while Pyvic didn’t understand how all the money moved, he had a good eye and could point out things the guildsmen occasionally missed. The servants brought more kahva and expensive pastries, and, around midday, Cevirt sat back, stretched his lower back until something cracked audibly, and gave a long wincing sigh.

“Ladies, gentlemen, I believe we have something to take to the Voyancy.”

“Learned aren’t going to like cutting the flamecannon upgrades on the port-city walls,” Lady Heflin said, shaking her head.

“And in the days when Archvoyant Silestin could stroll into the Voyancy chambers in his colonel’s uniform and nobody could say no, that would carry more weight.” Cevirt smiled. “Today, though, I have generals who will argue that fortifying the walls is just waiting for an attack, and the airship I’m throwing their way will be sweet enough to cover the taste of approving a few
damned useless schools
. Thank you, all.”

“I’d watch out for the road concerns,” Heflin added. “Apparently roads off in the outer provinces are falling right into the earth.”

Pyvic blinked. “Really?”

“Some old tower near the Westteich estate collapsed.” Heflin shook her head. “Traders passing by said it looked like there’d been old crystals down in a cavern. Must have caved in.” She knocked on the table. “Here’s hoping the rest of the ancients’ crystal marvels stay functional.”

“Gods willing,” Cevirt said with a small smile.

The cabinet members filed out, and Cevirt gestured for Pyvic to stay after they had gone.