The Assassin Princess (Lamb & Castle Book 2) (4 page)

Bessie turned to Greyfell, half-wild with fear and frustration. “How can we elude them now?” she hissed at him.

But before the blond gentleman could set foot on the gangplank,
Sharvesh’
s Argean captain appeared to bar the way, all gleaming fangs and round amber eyes. Bryn, with his enormous sensitive ears now folded back tight against his skull, must have heard every word of the gentlemen's conversation, and he had no intention of submitting his beloved skyship to a search. Spitting and snarling, the Argean leapt down onto the dock with a thud that shook the timbers, bearing down on the startled blond gentleman. Crouched on all fours and bristling fiercely, Bryn could have been mistaken for a lion. “You will
not
'get rid of the Argean'
!” he roared. “And you will
not
lie in wait for my dear friends!”

The blond gentleman took a step back – he hadn't quite been prepared for such a sight. What's more, an Argean against an unarmed man would by no means be a fair fight, and though Bryn had likely only meant to frighten the would-be hijacker away (both from his own skyship and every other Argean vessel in the future) the other gentleman had heard the commotion and came running to his twin's aid, sword drawn. This was a fairer match: a man's short reach and long blade against an Argean's long reach and wicked hooked claws. Tail lashing, Bryn whirled to meet the swordsman. He caught the twin behind him off balance quite by accident, sending the gentleman tumbling into the gap between dock and skyship with a cry of dismay.

The swordsman stopped dead, a look of terrible anguish coming over his bland features at the loss of his twin. Without a word, he sheathed his sword, stepped over the edge of the dock and fell earthwards.

All was silent, every eye on Bryn, the unwitting victor of the fight. He sat down, baffled and horrified by this strange turn of events, shivering despite the mildness of the day.

Bessie was one of the first to pull herself together after the shock. “Captain,” she called, striding out from her hiding place, “were you injured by those pirates? No? Good.” As she spoke, she marvelled at the steadiness of her own voice. Falls happened from time to time, but all her life she’d dreaded the thought of actually
seeing
one… She strode up the gangplank, beckoning sharply for Bryn and Greyfell to follow. “Let us be on our way, then.” There was no time to waste in any attempt to soothe Bryn's nerves or her own, not with the possibility of more servants of the dragon prince lurking nearby. She only hoped that her words would be enough to satisfy gossip and salvage Bryn's reputation, should they ever return to Iletia.

Amelia Lamb had travelled further in less than a year than she had in her whole life leading up to that momentous journey: over the land, through the sky and along the seabed. She'd travelled by mobile castle and skyship, and even ridden on the back of a giant snail. Now her journey had led her and her companions to the crowded streets of a Flying City – not the first of its kind that Amelia had ever seen, but the overwhelming novelty of it had yet to wear off. The original builders had obviously deliberated over the use of each square foot in their efforts to squeeze in as much city as they could, and subsequent builders had reconsidered and managed to squeeze in a little more, so that the streets were really too narrow for the mass of people. To make matters worse, Amelia's mother Meg had insisted on bringing along one of her giant snails, Tallulah. Seven feet tall and with her shell covered in fierce spikes, Tallulah towered over many of the people they encountered. Intimidating despite her gentle nature, the colossal mollusc's great bulk cleared a path easily, so that Meg, Amelia and her Paladin Harold kept close in the giant snail's rather slippery wake. In the light misty drizzle, Tallulah was in good spirits, gliding easily but unhurriedly along the wet streets, giving Amelia the chance to look around a bit, sighing to herself now and then that she would have liked a chance to shop at her leisure.

“Chin up,” said Meg. “You were asking the other day how the Flying Cities move. You'll find out soon.”

“What?” Amelia's stomach flipped. “You don't mean we're going to… Oh no!” Fearing that the City might lurch into motion at any minute, she clutched at Harold’s arm, too panicked to really notice that her bodyguard still blushed at any contact with her.

“It's nothing to worry about, dear,” said Meg, exasperated and making no effort to hide it. “Come along now – we don't want to be late.” She wasn't enjoying the weather quite as much as her snail: the fine rain had turned her fair curls into a mass of straw-coloured frizz, and settled in tiny beads on her spectacles.

“Why can't we go by skyship, like we did before?” Harold grumbled. He missed the romance and adventure of what little he'd seen of a skysailor's life, and he was a country boy who didn't like people crowding in on him any more than Amelia did. Like Meg, he was too short to see over the crowd.

Meg shook her head. “Another jaunt in a skyship? Do you think money grows on trees, boy?” She gave Amelia a sharp look too, as they’d already had to pay out of their own pockets for a replacement soul for one skyship, and that had been entirely Amelia’s fault. “Better to be able to blend into the crowd, anyway.”

Blend into the crowd?
Amelia kept quiet, although she’d have liked to remind Meg that they were shepherding a seven-foot high snail through the streets of a Flying City. Diverse as the City's population might be, Tallulah turned more than a few heads. Amelia herself wore a plain brown hooded cloak, less to keep the spit of rain off, and more to hide her striking long blonde braids from anybody who might recognise her. Meg had tried to talk her into cutting her hair off, saying that pretty young women attracted enough trouble as it was, but Amelia was having none of it.

“What about Mimi, then?” Amelia asked. They'd left the giant snail's sister hibernating under a tree, half a world away. “Don't you want to get back to her?”

“'Course I do, but she'll be all right for a long while yet.”

Just off the Keystone Square, they came to a private house: a tall grand building, albeit narrow, like so many of the houses in Flying Cities. Meg knocked at the door, and a quiet young man ushered them into a parlour. He scarcely batted an eyelash as Tallulah oozed over the threshold behind Meg.

“The Archmage will be with you shortly,” he said, and disappeared.

Amelia looked around anxiously, trying to decide whether the seating was decorative or functional, while Meg kept the giant snail off the expensive rug. A window stretching from floor to ceiling afforded a breath-taking view of storm clouds sailing implacably across the sky, and Harold went to it eagerly – he took his duties as Amelia's Paladin seriously, and throughout their journey, he'd done his best to make himself as fearless of heights as any skysailor. Since their victory at the jade temple, where they’d won the White Queen’s crown, along with armour and swords for her companions, he'd taken to wearing his new armour proudly at all times. Amelia thought he looked quite handsome in it, although she hadn’t quite worked up the nerve to try on the crown, even at Harold’s urging. It just didn’t seem right, somehow. Not yet.

Somewhere in the City a bell tolled, soon joined by others until the dolorous music of them drowned the chatter and noise of the busy streets. The boards beneath their feet began to hum loudly.

“There we go,” said Meg. “We'll be on our way in a minute or two. Don't cling onto the furniture like that, dear: there's really no need for it.”

Amelia, having grabbed hold of the arm of the couch at the first shiver of the floorboards, didn't want to let go. She certainly didn't see the harm in steadying herself in case of any sudden jolts. “Will the journey take long?” she asked, remembering the early days of her voyage in Meg’s peculiar snailcastletank, and the first rapid ascent of the skyship
Storm Chaser
. She didn't hold out much hope, when the world was clearly such a big place that traversing it took days, weeks, months.

“Hours,” said Meg. “Don't look so frightened, Amelia!” The bells ceased, and she smiled reassuringly. “Listen close and you might hear the machinery that runs this place.”

Amelia didn't want to do that, either. By this stage she understood that Flying Cities only stopped at what Meg called ‘nodes’ of magic, where they hovered for days or weeks while merchants swapped goods and gold. She'd hoped that the Flying Cities, being so grand and impossible, would be powered by some unimaginably high magic, so that they might just blink out of existence at one node, reappearing instantaneously at the next. She'd prayed that it would be something she could close her eyes and grit her teeth for, knowing that it would all be over soon enough. “Machinery? I had a horrible feeling it would be more soul magic.” A sickening thought: she’d seen first-hand how enormously taxing the power requirements for a skyship could be on the soul that powered it. While they’d been travelling on the
Storm Chaser
, she’d been sentimentally foolish enough to free the skyship’s soul, and Captain Dunnager had been forced to take its place in a hurry. Their escape from the jade temple had half killed him. Here in one of the Flying Cities,
what would be worse: one gargantuan inhuman soul chained in the depths of the City, or an army of damned souls striving in unison to shift the countless tons of earth and masonry and people?

“No soul magic here,” said Meg, her expression mild. “I'll confess I don't know a lot about how a Flying City works, just that the Keystone keeps the City up in the air, and some other gubbins in the basements shunts it from one node to another.”

“And it's safe to practice magic while the City's moving, is it?” Amelia asked. Meg had been right, she couldn't feel the City moving at all, and the view out the window gave no indication of their speed. The dark clouds moved steadily on their own course, with Harold peering after them.

“Of course it is. You don't think the little scrap of magic you have is going to make any difference to something so big, do you?” Meg teased.

Amelia ignored that. “I meant this Archmage.” They'd only come to an Archmage at all because the magic they needed was beyond Meg's own abilities. Meg might be a powerful witch under the unassuming guise of a small middle-aged woman, but she had something of a tendency to wield her power in a slapdash way, whereas this spell would require sensitivity and absolute precision.

“It'll be no trouble at all,” said Meg. “A drop in the ocean. Ah, this looks like him now.”

A tall man with white hair and piercingly blue eyes came down the hall and into the parlour, his long robes swishing, hands encrusted in jewels glittering at his sides. He raised an eyebrow at the giant snail, stepping neatly around it, keeping a careful distance. “Most intriguing…” he muttered to himself, appraising his visitors. He looked shrewdly at Harold's armour, but said nothing. When he turned to Amelia, he gave her a disarming smile. “Do my eyes deceive me, or am I in the presence of the White Queen?”

Amelia had spent most of her life in seclusion, and still wasn’t used to the way men stared at her. Lost for words under the Archmage’s intensely blue gaze, she looked to Meg.

“If you're asking that question, you already know the answer to it,” said Meg to the Archmage.

“And the White… Mage?” he said, with a sour twitch of a smile as he looked down at Meg. “Or is it a White Witch? Either way, the Paladin's armour is unmistakeable,” he added, referring to Harold's breastplate with its design of a white lamb. “Although the insignia is… not in keeping with the tradition as I understand it.”

“It is what it is,” said Meg, gruffly.

“So, you too seek the lost City of Ildorria?” asked the Archmage, with a sly look.

Meg seemed genuinely puzzled. “Ildorria? Why?”

“That's where you'll find the throne room, of course. I spoke to the candidate Black Queen about the matter very recently.”

Meg shook her head. “The throne room's not at Ildorria. It's…” she stopped, looking sharply up at the Archmage. “Black Queen, did you say?”

“So she claimed.”

“And you sent her chasing off after Ildorria? Well there's a piece of luck… for us, at least. Now, getting back to the point of this visit: we have a little problem with our Warship.” She indicated Tallulah.

The Archmage just failed at stifling laughter. “The snail? Madam, are you trying to make a fool of me? If not, I'd hardly call what you have a
little
problem.”

“You can't reduce her?” asked Meg, cutting to the chase and apparently prepared to walk out, although Amelia couldn't guess who else they might turn to. They'd won the White Queen's crown and armour with Tallulah as their Warship, binding the snail to them for the remainder of the quest, win or lose.

“What a singular cohort you have here, young lady,” said the Archmage to Amelia, clearly much amused. He contemplated the snail again. “I can reduce it considerably, and at a very reasonable price, too. Bring it through to my workroom, then.”

~

Despite the Archmage's quick recognition of the White Queen and her Paladin, Amelia and Harold had to wait in the parlour. The rainclouds had cleared and the sky turned a pinkish shade of violet before Meg reappeared by herself, a sour look on her face. “Men's magic,” she muttered, looking into her cupped palms. “I don't like it. Fancy educations and showing off with all their squiggly words and flashy Devices…” Then she looked up as if she'd quite forgotten about the two young people she'd left waiting in the parlour. “Amelia: come here and put your hand out.”

Amelia obeyed, reluctant. She'd grown accustomed to the pair of giant snails at their proper size, and still felt an odd squeamishness at the idea of the ordinary garden snails that Tallulah now closely resembled, apart from the spikes. Amelia had ridden atop the curve of Tallulah's shell before, but didn't really want to hold the reduced snail in her bare hands.

“Hold her properly, now,” said Meg, putting the tiny snail in Amelia's hand. The shell rocked slightly, its tiny spikes prickling her palm as the snail found her balance. “Don't worry, she won't bite.”

Amelia's eyes widened, her hand frozen stiff and flat. “Do snails bite?” she whispered, shivering as the soft wet foot of the snail oozed out onto her palm, one eye stalk venturing into the air to look around, followed presently by the second.

“Not so long as you're gentle with her, she won't. I can't speak for less well-behaved snails, mind.”

Amelia nodded, gently so as not to risk upsetting Tallulah in the slightest. She had no intention of getting so close to any other snails, well-behaved or not. Meanwhile, Tallulah seemed to be taking the sudden change in the scale of things with a certain calm grace. In miniature, she looked somehow rather lovely, her shell with that faint pearl sheen and its dark spirals now so dainty.

“You are a darling little thing now, aren't you?” said Amelia softly to the snail.

“She's a bit on the delicate side like this,” Meg warned. “Do you want me to keep her safe for the time being?”

There was only one possible answer to this question. “Oh, yes please.” Amelia knew she'd never be able to look Meg in the face again if the newly fragile and miniaturised snail came to any harm.

From the front of her dress Meg pulled out a pendant – an elegant silver filigree ball that opened up on the tiniest of hinges. She removed the sachet of herbs within, gently replacing it with the miniaturised snail. Then the quiet young man shepherded the three of them out onto the street, where Meg rounded on Harold the moment the Archmage's door closed.

“You!” she barked, making him flinch. “Take off that armour at once! You might as well be shouting our names and business all over the street.”

Amelia wondered why it bothered Meg so much all of a sudden, but then she remembered the look on the Archmage's face when he'd seen the armour: a look Amelia had seen on her stepmother's face from time to time. A high-ranking mage, with too little to occupy his quick mind, might easily become fond of gossip.