Call of the Colossus: An epic fantasy novel (The Mindstream Chronicles Book 2) (33 page)

“Good,” she said. “Stand behind the desk. Say everything I whisper.”

The sergeant burst into Kyear’s office and stopped short.

Jora turned, putting an expression of surprise on her face. “Sergeant?” she whispered as quietly as she could.

“Sergeant?” the false Kyear asked.

Jora scrubbed a finger under her nose to hide the movement of her lips. “Don’t you know how to knock?” she mouthed.

“Don’t you know how to knock?” the ally asked in Kyear’s voice. Jora couldn’t control his facial expressions, and so he stood there looking mildly curious rather than annoyed.

“Oh.” The sergeant blinked a few times. “Uh…” He looked at Jora then back to Sonnis. “Sorry, sir. I thought–”

“You have something for me?”

“Yes, sir.” The sergeant offered the bag of coins.

Sonnis made no move to take them, and Jora didn’t know how to instruct him to do so without speaking the command aloud. If she whispered
take the bag
, he would simply repeat the words. “Put it on my desk,” she whispered, and Sonnis repeated the words.

“Yes, sir.” The sergeant glanced apologetically at Jora as he set the bag of coins on the desk. “Sorry to interrupt. I should’ve knocked. I don’t know what came over me.”

Jora turned her head away so he wouldn’t see her mouth the words.

“Dismissed, Sergeant,” Sonnis said. “Shut the door on your way out.”

“Yes, sir.” The sergeant headed to the door but paused when he reached it. “Oh, sir? Did you know one of the Colossus statues is missing?”

“Of course I know, Sergeant,” Sonnis said. “It’s being repaired. Now get out.”

When the door was closed, Jora let out a breath.
That was too close.

She took the money and put it into one of Kyear’s desk drawers, hiding it under some papers. If someone came to look for it, they’d find it fairly easily, and any suspicion about her involvement in Kyear’s failure to deliver it to the barbery would be allayed. And with Arc’s help, she could hide Captain Kyear until she figured out what to do with him.

Once Jora got out of the Legion building unseen, she headed to Arc’s shop. Though she knew Elder Devarla and Justice Captain Milad were probably in a near panic by then, not knowing where she was, she had to get this matter with Captain Kyear taken care of before she could relax. She put one hand atop her head to keep the hat in place as she alternated running and walking up to the market district and to Tipping Street. Except that when she knocked and pounded on the door, Arc didn’t answer. She didn’t hear him moving around inside.

Challenger
’
s fists.
She set off toward the next street to the south and scanned the shop signs for the barbery. The door had no window in it, and no window in the front of the shop. She took a breath and opened the door.

Arc was sitting in one of the chairs, his face half lathered. A barber was bent over him, shaving his face and chatting like they were old friends. Without a customer, the other barber was sitting in his own chair, watching the exchange.

“…little Noossmor boy was a mischievous little devil, let me tell you. His sister, on the other hand–”

“There she is,” Arc said, catching Jora’s eye.

The barber straightened and turned around. “Ah, you must be Nora. Mark was telling me about your most recent trip to Noossmor to meet your new in-laws. Congratulations, by the way. Let’s hope for a boy.”

She gave Arc a look of disbelief.
What on Aerta has he told them?

“She doth not favor the long hair,” Arc said. “’Tis the popular style for men in Noossmor.”

The barber laughed and smiled at her before bending back to continue his work. “I’m sure she’ll get used to it in time, but if you decide to cut it, we could make it into a wig.”

“A wig, eh?” Arc said. He winked at Jora, no doubt entertaining the notion of her wearing his hair.

“We’re expected at Cacie’s house soon,” Jora said. Her sister’s name was the first to pop into her mind. “Are you going to be much longer?”

“Five more minutes,” the barber said.

She sat down to wait, tapping her foot anxiously, while Arc spun some tale about his fictitious wife, Nora, and his non-existent parents. He did a decent job disguising his normal speech pattern, though he slipped in a few -eths on the verbs. She stopped listening to the exchange to turn her thoughts back to the smuggling. Captain Kyear would have brought the coins by now, and Behrendt would be there any minute to collect them. She and Arc shouldn’t be there when he arrived, or King Yaphet would find out she wasn’t being as secretive as he’d needed her to be.

She stood. “I’ll wait outside. There’s a boutique on Tipping I wanted to visit.”

“All right, my darling,” Arc said. His eyes twinkled with amusement.

She slipped out of the barbery, checking the street in both directions before hurrying off in the direction of Arc’s empty shop. If Behrendt walked in while Arc was having a shave, he might be surprised but not alarmed. Only her presence, she realized, would worry him.

She hid out of sight, peeking around the corner now and then for a sign of either the carriage Behrendt took to the barbery, or Arc. When she saw him, tall and cleanly shaven, she waved him over.

“Mark and Nora?” she asked.

Arc shrugged his massive shoulders. “What hast you accomplished whilst I was shaven’d?” He unlocked the shop’s door, and the two went inside. Despite the room having a table and two chairs, it was depressingly stark. She couldn’t imagine him living here permanently. At some point, she was going to have to come up with an alternative—a real home for him.

“I went to the Legion headquarters to talk to the captain,” she said. “He’s the one who receives the money from the smugglers by way of a sergeant under his command. Usually, he delivers it to the barbery.”

He sat in one of the two chairs at the table and gestured to the other. “None entered erewhile.”

Jora was too excited to sit, so she paced the floor, clomping across the bare wood. “Good.” That meant Behrendt hadn’t seen him either.

“Wherefore–”

“Say why, not wherefore.”

“
Why
then didst thou—you go thither?”

She sighed. “I confronted him about his role in the smuggling. He’s indisposed at the moment, but he’s going to be discovered soon.”

“Didst you slay him?”

“No! He’s a statue. I want to hide him for a while. We need to sneak into the building and up to his office, and then I need you to carry him out the same way.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “To what end?”

“As long as he’s a statue, he can’t tell anyone I was there. If he tells anyone about our conversation, it’ll get back to the king.”

“And why dost the king care anent what ye two spake?”

Jora took the time to give Arc a short summary of the events that had led up to her meeting with Captain Kyear. He listened with raised brows, but he didn’t interrupt, not even to ask questions. When she finished, he nodded slowly.

“Most important, you want nie that the captain should speak anent thy conversation. The better way to ensure that he keep silent is to kill him.” Arc drew his forefinger across his throat.

“I don’t want to kill him.”

“Then ’twas an ill-advised visit.”

“You’re probably right, but I needed answers.”

“You must slay him.”

“No,” she asked, aghast.

“Dead men talk nie.”

“They talk to Truth Sayers,” she said, remembering how she Observed her friend Gilon after Elder Sonnis had sent a disciple to murder him. “The elders could find out who he talked to and who killed him. The only way to hide that conversation is to statuize him and keep him that way until we’re ready. That way, he can’t be Observed.”

“Nor his yesterdays?”

“Right. Being a statue is somewhat like having that tattoo on your forearm. It keeps you—and him—out of their eye, as if you don’t exist.”

He made an impatient face. “’Twas ill-advised even so.”

“There’s nothing to be done about it now but to make sure the statue isn’t discovered. I’m the only one who can statuize people, and if anyone sees it, they’ll know I was there.” She briefly considered the sergeant. Once he returned to his post near the Isle, it would be a week before the question arose again. The only issue in the meantime was accounting for Kyear’s absence.

They debated bringing the statue to the shop versus hiding it somewhere in the Legion building. Being too heavy to carry meant Kyear would have to be returned to the flesh and slept for the short time it would take to remove him from the building and get him to the shop. If anyone had reason to Observe Kyear during that time, she could be discovered.

Arc wanted to delay the decision until he got a sense of how heavy the statue was. He seemed to think he was strong enough to carry a six-foot-tall statue of solid stone. Jora simply shrugged. He would see when they arrived, and she could sleep Kyear in order to transport him.

“The only way to enter the building unseen,” she said, “is to leave the realm of perception. It means you won’t be able to perceive anything at all, not even your own body. You’ll be blind and deaf. You won’t feel the floor under your feet or my hand grasping your wrist.”

“How then will we move aboute?”

“I watch myself in the Mindstream. I can see where my body is and guide myself. It’s hard to explain, but as long as you keep walking, we’ll be fine.”

For a few minutes, they practiced walking through the ’twixt, back and forth through the shop. Arc’s longer strides made keeping up with him difficult, especially when she had to turn him around or get through the doorway between the shop’s main room and the storage room. Stopping him before he hit the wall meant turning him at the last second, which set him off in a new direction.

“Nay,” Arc said, pulling his wrist out of her grasp. He dropped out of the ’twixt, returning to the realm of perception. “I can nie abide this. I can nie climb stairs wythout feeling my legs. We must find another way. Why are we nie traveling the Meanders?”

“What are Meanders?” Jora asked.

“The tunnels under the city. You wist—knowed nie?”

She shook her head. “Knew. No, I didn’t.” She’d never heard of such a thing. “If there is an underground tunnel leading to the Legion headquarters, it’s surely blocked off.”

“Then I propound you use thy tree-freond,” he said. “After we do walk into the structure, thine ally shall run ahead to put to sleep e’ryone ere they see us. He shall wake them after we have safely passed.”

Jora smiled. “That’s a grand idea. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“You are nie a warrior.”

Until then, she’d thought of warriors as men who used their weapons more than their brains, whose primary task was killing and not planning. She studied him, seeing intelligence in his sea-green eyes that she’d initially mistaken for bloodlust and fervor. Her concept of a warrior was evolving, thanks to Archesilaus.

He scrunched his brow as he gazed upward. “A better idea strikes me. When is the building locked for the night?”

“Give me a minute to find out.” Jora used the Mindstream to find the desk clerk’s thread and explored it backward to the previous evening. “At about sunset, the desk clerk checks the upper floor for anyone still in their office, then he locks the main door behind him.”

“Then shall we wait for the sun to set.”

Jora put her robe back on and removed the hat when she neared the Justice Bureau, thinking the wisest course would be to fetch her book and go read in the library where she would be seen by her peers in the event someone inquired about Captain Kyear’s disappearance. When she opened the door to her room, Korlan’s presence there surprised her until she remembered leaving him behind. Had he waited there the entire time?

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked. “You know I caught hell for your disappearance, don’t you? Milad jumped all over my ass.”

“I’m sorry, Kor,” she said. “I was trying to keep you from getting into trouble.”

“You made things worse. Milad knows about Arc.”

“You told him?”

“He asked about the missing Colossus statue. I couldn’t lie and pretend I knew nothing about it.”