The Prophecy Con (Rogues of the Republic) (17 page)

“What about Pyvic?”

“He, ah, he said to tell you that he misses you.”

“No, he didn’t,” Loch said without breaking stride.

“Well, he might have.”

“You’re a very good boyfriend, Hessler,” Loch said, glancing back to where Tern was now leaning on her wizard, “but you’re a terrible liar.”

“I’m sure he
does
miss you, though,” Tern said.

“Yep.” Loch turned back to look ahead again. “But scouts don’t say, ‘I miss you.’”

The ticket office was set a ways off from the railway itself. Most of the railway’s business in the town seemed to come from cargo transport, and the ticket office itself was a small dwarven-angled building with a shiny roof and a lot of signs and schedules tacked to the wall. There were two other people ahead of Loch. One of them was a pretty yellow-haired girl in a commoner’s dress that had been trimmed with little gold and silver ribbons and cut to show her figure, with a complex hairstyle that had probably looked better a couple of days ago. The other was a tall man a few years older than Loch in an immaculately tailored suit, wearing a guild signet ring and a few other bits of conspicuously expensive jewelry.

“Afternoon,” Loch said to the yellow-haired girl. “Heading back home?”

The girl blushed and smiled. “My boy can get tickets for himself with scrip from the dwarves, but it takes long enough that he can only make the trip once a month, so I come up when I can, too.”

“Hope you made the most of your time,” Loch said, and the yellow-haired girl blushed again.

At the front of the line, the guildsman let out an impatient breath. “I asked for a luxury suite. I booked this trip months ago.”

“I understand, and I’m frightful sorry that yer reservation be not in my files,” said the dwarf behind the ticket counter. “All of tomorrow’s suites are reserved. I can put you in an economy car—”

“That won’t work,” said the guildsman. “I can’t have every scruffy miner with a bit of scrip looking over my shoulder while I handle sensitive information. Now, I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to book me a full car—one of the economy cars, since that’s all of you’ve got—and you’re going to give it to me for the price of a single ticket.”

“Well, sir,” said the dwarf, “I’ll certainly see what I can do, but many of the economy cars have passengers booked already—”

“Then you’re going to move them,” said the guildsman, “because you know who else is going to be in those cars? Nobody important.
I
wouldn’t be in these cars if I didn’t have travel needs more suited to the railway than the airships. You can call them economy cars if you like, but they’re mostly filled with miners who bought their tickets with scrip, or whores coming out to the mining towns on payday.” He glanced over at the yellow-haired girl. “If I have to sit next to those people, then the only piece of business I accomplish on that trip will be writing a letter to your superiors informing them of the poor service I received.”

“How long is he up here?” Loch asked the yellow-haired girl, who was now staring at her shoes.

“Last year of a three-year contract,” she mumbled, and wiped her eyes. “It’s a lot better up here than in the rest of the Republic. There haven’t been any accidents, and none of them even have the cough.”

“The dwarves run really safe mines,” Tern said, and the girl turned to them gratefully while the guildsman kept ranting. “Plus, if your boy gets a letter of recommendation from his supervisor, he’ll be able to work anywhere.”

“He wants to work in the freight yard,” said the girl, as though it were an embarrassing secret. “Our hometown has a freight yard he could work in, and his supervisor is letting him do the trainings in his off hours.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” Tern said. Hessler looked as though he were about to comment, and
then
looked as though Tern had stepped on his foot in the heavy steel-toed boots she wore.

“
Thank
you,” the guildsman said to the dwarf. “See, that wasn’t so hard. I’ll be keeping my extra bags in the economy car as well—the last time I traveled, some
people
tried to steal my luggage from the back car. That isn’t going to be a problem, is it?”

“I’ll mark yer car as baggage-exempt,” the dwarf said, stamping a piece of paper with a little more force than was necessary. “Yer ticket entitles ye to use the dining car at the rear of the train, and also gives ye a discount on any dwarven goods ye purchase in one of our—”

“And when you
do
find my reservation, I’ll expect a refund on the privacy car.” He took the ticket and turned to go, and bumped into Loch, who had put herself directly in his personal space.

“It isn’t all whores and laborers,” she said, forcing the eye contact. “And even if it was, their money spends just as well as yours.”

He glared at her and moved to brush her aside, stumbling a little when Loch didn’t move. “Yes, fine, whatever, we’re all equal in the eyes of the gods.”

“I think,” said Loch, catching his hand as he raised it to move her out of his way, “that a representative of the mason’s guild would try to avoid antagonizing the miners. You never know when one of their representatives might be listening.”

“How do you know I’m—”

“Signet ring.” Loch smiled. “And if the ticket vendor informed the supervisor at the local mine about what you just said, I’d expect there to be repercussions.”

The guildsman yanked his hand back and looked from Loch to the dwarf, who was now ostentatiously pretending that the guildsman didn’t exist.

“Tell me,” Loch added, “why would a
merchant
like you be so interested in keeping all your luggage with you, when all your important documents would fit in a single handbag? Is it because traveling by railway lets you dodge the inspectors at the airship docks?”

“I don’t have to listen to this,” the guildsman finally muttered, and walked around Loch and off, most likely, to somewhere more expensive.

“You have a good trip,” Loch said to the yellow-haired girl, who smiled again. As the yellow-haired girl went up to talk to the dwarf at the ticket counter, Loch turned to Tern and Hessler. “Come on. We’re done here.”

“Wait,” said Hessler as they headed for a hotel Loch had spotted on their way in. “I thought you were going to see if we could just buy a ticket and get on that way.”

“We’re good,” said Loch.

“But without a ticket, we’ll have to . . . oh.”

“Catching on?” Tern asked.

“Loch stole the guildsman’s ticket when she bumped into him.”

“Yes, she did,” Loch said, flashing the ticket and then returning it to the pocket of her riding jacket. “So now we have a private car to ourselves, and more time for the two of you to catch up with each other.”

“Woo—wait.” Tern turned to Loch. “Can we stop someplace to wash out my mouth?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, woo!”

Princess Veiled Lightning sat in the passenger seat of the airship, glaring.

“It was sloppy, Veil,” Gentle Thunder said. He stood at the railing, watching the forest pass by below them.

“Kutesosh gajair’is!”
Arikayurichi, Bringer of Order, apparently agreed.

“You did not capture her, either, Thunder,” she pointed out.

“You ordered me not to,” he said calmly, “and then the earth-daemons attacked. My first concern must be for your safety.”

She glared. “How safe will I be if the Empire and the Republic go to war?”

He turned and matched her look. “If that is what worries you, then you should avoid dying in battle inside the Republic’s borders. Your corpse could well start the war your living body seeks to prevent.”

“Poetic as always, Thunder.”

“Veil.” He did not return her smile. “We made our attempt to capture Isafesira de Lochenville. Regardless of the cause, we failed. Your parents gave you leave to investigate. I doubt they would explicitly permit what you have undertaken.”

She stood now, moving with the easy grace Thunder
himself had taught her. “Am I to slink back home in
defeat?”

He sighed. “We do not even know where she is going now.”

“I may be able to help with that.”

Veiled Lightning turned to Attendant Shenziencis, who stood near the pilot who was flying the airship. She had put aside her helmet, though she still wore the exotic green ringmail. She had not appeared without it during their journey.

Shenziencis bowed and continued. “Your Highness, I tracked Isafesira de Lochenville before. I see a village up ahead, small but with some enough natural life-force that I may use my own arts to track her again.”

Veiled Lightning looked over at Gentle Thunder. He grimaced.

“Besyn larveth’is!”
Arikayurichi, Bringer of Order, declared happily.

“I believe your ax believes that it is worth a try,” Veiled Lightning said, and turned back to Shenziencis. “Find her.”

Shenziencis bowed again. “As you command, your highness.”

Desidora ended up getting another drink, and gave the beautiful kahvarista a gentle nudge in the direction of the trader woman as long as she was there. It felt silly to do so when they might all be dead or dying in war a few months from now, but she was a priestess of Tasheveth, after all, and Tasheveth was all about seizing the time you had while you had it.

“Anything useful?” she asked as she sat back down by Ululenia, who had been working through the book for more than an hour now. Desidora had sat quietly—a talent cultivated by priests of all faiths—and occasionally coughed politely to let Ululenia know that her horn was sparkling again.

Her mind is coiled and clouded, a deep sea scuttler that has built itself a prison for protection
, Ululenia said.

Desidora nodded. “I’m not sure that’s useful, but I will hold onto it, just in case.”

Ululenia smiled.
My apologies, daughter of the gods. To pull meaning from this strange work requires twisting my mind into a shape similar to hers.

“Understood.” Desidora sipped her tea, which she had gotten because kahva would just make her more jittery.

The queen of the cold river spoke in such a manner deliberately,
Ululenia added.
As a hunter may mark the tracks of running prey separately from quarry that walks or limps, so do I see how she twists her words even further away from the gentle places of human thought.

“She hates people?” Desidora guessed.

She is the mother bird, feigning a wounded wing as she flutters far from her nest.

“She wanted to hide what she wrote from humans?”

Such is the shape of her tracks.

“All right. Why?” Desidora gnawed on a fingernail. “She had this book made, so she clearly wanted
someone
to know what she thought, but she didn’t want . . . humans. She wants elves and fairy creatures to be able to understand it, but not humans. And . . . what else? Nobody cares this much about criticizing a book. Well, maybe Hessler.”

Ululenia laughed and switched to speaking aloud. “His mind still leaps from thought to thought like a startled rabbit, but he and Tern have brought each other peace.”

“Yes, I’ve gone out with them a few times up here,” Desidora said. “It’s good to see them happy.”

A few tables over, the pretty kahvarista offered the trader woman a free refill and asked if she needed anything. The trader responded with a joke, and the kahvarista laughed and worked in a reference to a band that would be playing in one of the performing squares that evening. As it happened, the trader liked the same band and wasn’t doing anything that night.

Desidora sighed.

“The lynx and the caterpillar,” Ululenia said.

Desidora blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“You saw the defeat of the Champion of Dusk, fulfilling the will of the gods, and the mantle of the death priestess fell from your shoulders.” Ululenia reached out and took Desidora’s hand in a gesture that was more gentle than flirtatious. “You thought yourself the lynx, your claws gladly sheathed, but always, should you need them, they would extend from the tufted fur and velvet-soft paws to slash at any foe. But you are not the lynx. You are the caterpillar, transformed into a beautiful butterfly whose wings glitter with promise and whose touch helps the flowers grow.” Ululenia closed Desidora’s hand. “But you have lost your jaws.”