The Palace Job (33 page)

Loch was looking at earrings at a small outdoor stall when Kail came running over. "Trouble?"

Kail nodded and gave the merchant, a leathery old white woman, a look. She returned it, and Kail sighed and gestured for Loch to come with him.

"What have you got?" Loch asked quietly when they had a little room. Kail was breathing hard. He'd been looking at swords at a shop down the block when they'd split up.

"Two old guys sitting outside one of the shops." Kail gestured, and Loch squinted and saw them.

"I think we can take them, Kail."

"They saw Justicar Pyvic and twenty of his men heading through town."

Loch swore. "How long ago?"

"Quarter of an hour. It gets worse. A few minutes later, they saw some very large gentlemen in armor, along with Ambassador Bi'ul, heading in the same direction."

"Come on." Loch turned, one hand on her sword hilt from years of training.

"And do what? Loch..." Kail leaned in and lowered his voice. "If we go, all we can do now is—"

"Help. Come on." She took off at a run.

Kail swore, spat into the dirt, and took off after her.

"Hold," the little man said casually, holding up a glowing crystal wand of his own. The security golems froze in midstep, and their eyes went dark.

"You son of a bitch!" Pyvic shouted, ripping his sword free from its sheath. The justicars were already moving to surround the others.

"Okay," said Hessler, peeking around the sitting room corner at the chaos, "the important thing is not to do anything hasty."

"Hasty in what sense?" Tern asked, and cocked her crossbow.

"If they fight each other," said Hessler, "we may be able to sneak out undetec..." Tern stepped around the corner, leveled her crossbow, and fired a bolt that exploded out into several coils of what Hessler suspected was
yvkefer-lined
chain. It snared the black-armored man as justicars lunged in at him. "...ted. Like that!
Hasty like that!"

"Well, you could have been less ambiguous," Tern muttered as the justicars' swords glanced harmlessly off the spiked armor. With a roar, the black-armored man snapped the
yvkefer
bonds. "I was really banking on that slowing him down."

Meanwhile, as the justicars swarmed around the golden-armored man, he readied an enormous spear. He deftly parried a justicar's thrust, took another sword in a glancing blow across a shoulder plate, floored one man with the butt of his spear, and ran another through. With nobody between him and the doorway, he took a running leap, vaulted twenty feet up into the air to come down on the balcony overlooking the main entry hall, and disappeared into the palace.

Tern paled as the black-armored man reached out, grabbed a justicar, and snapped his neck. A second justicar fell a moment later, blood fountaining from a slash across the throat, and the black-armored man turned toward Tern. "Loch! I'll kill everyone in here if that's what it takes!"

"I'll bear that in mind."

Tern and Hessler turned to see Loch standing in the ground floor doorway. Her blade was drawn.

"Aitha!"
Cevirt called from the floor. "Get out of here! In Gedesar's name, run!"

The black-armored man roared and clanked toward her, his spiked fists flinging blood in all directions, and Loch turned and ran the other way.

"Your warriors are gone, Elkinsair," Pyvic grated. He had the little man at swordpoint, while a ring of justicars surrounded the Glimmering Man. "You'll want to surrender
right now
before—"

"Defend," Elkinsair said with a smile, holding up the glowing crystal again, and the security golems returned to life. Pyvic dove back as a glowing crystal sword sheared through the floor where he'd been standing.

"Unless you'd like to attract more attention," Hessler muttered, "perhaps this would be an appropriate time to
leave."

"You learn that at the universi... crap." Tern turned to the doorway where Loch and the black-armored man had gone.

A pair of justicars were pulling themselves to their feet between Tern and Hessler and the door. "I suggest simply running," Hessler said. "Given the violence that brute subjected them to, I doubt..."

The justicars turned to face them. One of them clearly had a broken neck, and the other had a massive throat wound that no longer pumped blood. Their eyes glowed green as they raised their weapons.

"I just wish Desidora were here." Tern cranked her crossbow again. "I'd have a hell of a zinger for her."

"Loch, you can't run forever! I'm coming for you!"

The armored man was behind her, and there were twenty or so justicars between Tern and Hessler and the real threats. Everyone knew the fallback point.

Loch had done everything she could to help.

"When I'm done with you," snarled the armored man behind her, "you'll be nothing but a dirty
Uru
smear on the floor!"

Loch turned a corner and saw Ululenia and the kid down the hall.

Or perhaps she could play decoy for a bit longer. "Get out of here,
now!"
she shouted down the hall, then turned and ran back toward the armored man.

She was tired from running, but she was still faster than a man in full armor, and she reached the doorway she'd passed before and ducked inside with the armored man close behind her. It was a display room full of statues on pedestals, and the far wall opened to a courtyard that overlooked the rim itself.

"Die!" the armored man shouted, lunging at her without hesitation. He didn't even have a sword. Loch sidestepped his overhand blow and lunged in to stab him just under the arm, where he was protected by mail and not plates.

The sword hit cleanly... and stopped.

His backhanded swipe sent Loch crashing into the wall.

Ululenia danced briefly through Loch's mind, saw the distraction Loch was providing, and ran with her virgin clinging to her back.

She galloped for perhaps twenty heartbeats before the hunter, his armor shining gold and his cloak green, stepped out into the hallway ahead of her. His mind was closed, but he raised his spear as he saw her and called, "Run if you will, creature of magic! I am Hunter Mirrkir, and I sense your foul scent, wherever you flee," and his voice was metal and stone, and she knew that he was no mortal man.

She ran, as the deer ran when the wolf howled, and her virgin clung desperately to her mane. The hunter pursued, relentless, as Ululenia darted down hallways, her hooves clicking on the marble floors or making muffled clumps on the carpet.

She should have lost him, if not by the speed of her sparkling white hooves than by the number of times she had left the hunter's sight, but still he came.

"You cannot escape me!" he called, and the voice was calm. "I have slain hundreds of your kind!" Hunter Mirrkir raised his spear; angry blue magic crackled along its length.

She knew then that she must flee, for her virgin as well as herself.
We must part, my lovely one,
she told him.
Around the next corner, I shall leave you. Remember what Loch told us, and find me again in the garden.

"But—" her virgin said, and then they were around a corner and a doorway presented itself, and she lunged inside and shifted, and then she was a bird, and her virgin fell behind her.

For twenty blessed heartbeats, she flew, horn flaring. And then an angry hiss split the air, and she sensed the spear. She darted to one side, then felt pain sear her soul as jagged tendrils of crackling blue light leapt from the spear as it missed her.

They coiled around her, cold and hateful, and she fell, four-legged and wingless, her horn fading as the jagged blue light tightened.

The dead dead justicars came forward, and with a quick backward glance, Hessler saw Bi'ul, the Glimmering Man, staring at them with a bemused smile. His hands were raised, and they glowed with the same crackling green light in the dead men's eyes.

"You summon zombies?" Hessler cried. "Contend with a daemon of Byn-kodar's own hell!" And then he threw out the tendril-monster illusion that had gotten him the second highest grade on last semester's midterm.

"That isn't a daemon," Bi'ul called casually. He raised one hand, clenched the fingers into a fist, and twisted sharply.
"Now it's
a daemon."

Hessler turned and saw his creation looming over him, and then the tendril blasted him across the room.

As the daemon turned to the justicars who
weren't
dead, the dead men continued toward Tern, who had just gotten the abjuration bolt into her crossbow when Kail tackled the two men from behind. "We got made!" he called, punching one of them in the kidney.

"You think?" Tern shot back. A lot of the justicars were down, but Pyvic was doing something to the body of his dead commander as a golem advanced upon him. He drew a crystal from the man's pocket, and a moment later the security golems froze in place. "By the way, those guys are dead."

"Oh." Kail grabbed a sword from one of them, punched the dead men a few more times, and then ran the blade through both of them, pinning them together. "Good to know. Uh..."

Tern looked. The daemon was turning their way.

"Protect Hessler! I've got an idea!" She ran into the sitting room, her brown dress sloshing with every step, as Kail swore mightily.

She came out a moment later to see Kail diving under a massive cloud of black tentacles whose claws cracked the marble of the entry chamber floor. She ignored that as best she could, hefting her lighter in one hand and an incredibly expensive bottle of dwarven whiskey in the other.

"Hey, Glimmering Man!" she shouted at Bi'ul, and threw the whiskey. "This should make you glimmer a bit brighter!"

The bottle shattered at Bi'ul's feet, sending whiskey everywhere, and Tern flicked her lighter and prepared to throw it.

Nothing happened.

"Son of a bitch." Tern looked at her dead lighter while the Glimmering Man turned her way.

"Besyn larveth'is!"

It turned out that even a
magical
crystal chandelier couldn't withstand a thrown warhammer.

It
also
turned out that whatever magic the chandelier used actually had a little fire in it.