The Paladin Caper (18 page)

“What’s that, my lord?”

“The scrying panels show Arikayurichi lying in wait for Loch by the processing center door, ready to cut her down as she came in. If that were his plan, why on earth would he sound the alarm beforehand? Why give Loch that warning instead of letting her walk into the room unprepared?”

“We may never know,” Westteich said with a sad shake of his head. “As I said, my lord, he was very emotional about her. I doubt he was thinking clearly, and with an enemy as skilled as Loch, a clear and objective mind is vital to the task.”

Lesaguris gave Westteich a long and searching look, and finally said, “That task is now yours, Westteich. I’ll have one of the boys give you the message crystals to find the trackers Arikayurichi was using.”

“Thank you, my lord.” Westteich bowed. “I’m honored to help, and I’ll use the trackers. I believe I have a few other avenues to explore, options Arikayurichi never considered.”

“Good.” Lesaguris nodded. “I have operations running in parallel that can assist.” He pressed a stud on his paladin band, and one more of the black-coated ancients came in, a handsome man with eyebrows that made him look permanently confused. “Mister Slant, coordinate our incoming and outgoing information on this Loch figure, would you?”

Mister Slant smiled. “Just give me a target, sir.”

Lesaguris didn’t smile this time. “Ghylspwr has talked about Loch’s team a great deal. They’re quite possibly the most powerful direct opposition we face in our return, and we must assume that every theft, every bit of petty vandalism and harassment, every action they take is a stroke in their plan to destroy us.”

“So it looks like the wind-daemon is breaking out,” Kail said from the control console of the sad and unnamed airship, “and while I’m not
positive
that Jyelle has possessed it as part of her quest for revenge against Loch—”

“LLLLLLLOKKKKKKK!” shouted something inside the balloon that had part, but not all, of a functioning mouth.

“It’s
probably
her,” Kail finished lamely.

“What? How?” Loch was still clearing her head. She’d blindly stumbled out to the dock with Kail towing her, almost down from Lesaguris’s parting shot.

“The paladins fired several energy blasts at the airship as we fled,” Icy said without looking up from the knots he was tying in the rigging. “The airship’s barriers were less than stable to begin with.”

Loch tried getting to her feet, leaning on her walking stick and ignoring how a lot of her body was burning with pins and needles. The airship was shuddering as the balloon flexed and distended, the wind-daemon inside trying to break free. “Is this Hessler’s ninety-one seconds thing?”

“That was only an example!”
Hessler yelled. “Also, yes.”

“LLLLOKKKK!” the wind-daemon shouted again.

Loch reached into the neck of her jacket and pulled out the warding charm Hessler had made for her. It was cracked and lifeless. “Think I found the problem.”

“I can help with the rigging,” Dairy said from where he was sitting.

“You can sit exactly where you are,” said Desidora, who still sounded pretty shaky herself. “You were badly hurt, and until we know for certain that you’re all right—”

“Badly hurt?” Irrethelathlialann shot Desidora a look. “That’s a bit of an understatement,
death priestess
.”

A mustard-yellow tentacle ripped through the side of the balloon.

“Maybe helping with the rigging would be fine,” Desidora amended.

Loch hadn’t really been watching the airship’s progress, focused as she was on getting her legs to work again. She looked now and saw the red glow of the canyon walls beside them. They were nearly to the top, getting there in perhaps a minute more.

Dairy was trying to shove the tentacle back into the rip in the balloon. Ululenia and Desidora were both still sitting. Hessler was watching over Tern, who was grimly loading her crossbow. The airship was shuddering and shaking, the balloon distending wildly now with the shape of something very angry visible inside it.

“Desidora, I need you to brighten my aura. Signal flare, if you can. Ululenia, get me to the top of the canyon.” Loch nodded to the tentacle. “I’m the carrot.”

Ululenia blinked and seemed to come back to herself.
Of course, Little One
. She shimmered, and a moment later, a great shining white eagle perched on the railing.

Loch felt whatever Desidora was doing to her aura as she leaped over the railing. It felt like being larger without changing size, filling the space she was in more strongly somehow. Then Ululenia’s talons closed gently around her shoulders, and she was rising past the canyon walls.

“LLOKKK!” came a roar from the balloon below her, and the airship staggered up after her.

The wind rushed around them, and the night stars looked almost impossibly silver-blue after the red of the canyon walls. “You all right, Ululenia?” Loch asked.

I am stronger than I was, Little One. I can carry you as long as is needed.

“Not what—”

I know
.

Loch let it lie. A few moments later, the airship dragged itself up past the canyon walls. Looking down, she saw the rest of her team leap out onto the safety of solid ground.

“Take us in,” Loch said, and Ululenia coasted down to the top of the canyon, a scrubby plain whose normal and unglowing dirt was an honest relief after all the magic from earlier.

She landed in a roll that turned into a tumble, given that her legs still weren’t working all the way, grunted, and pushed herself back to her feet.

“Time for the stick, Captain?” Kail called over.

“Please.”

Tern fired a bolt whose head Loch didn’t recognize, but it hit the balloon, and the wind-daemon inside it shrieked in pain. Hessler raised a hand and flung out a gray beam that made the daemon scream even more. Desidora gestured at Loch, and Loch felt normal again, as well as keenly aware of how much everything was hurting right then, and then she felt even less than normal, like she was wrapped in a cool blanket that muted everything around her.

“LOCH!” the wind-daemon yelled. “I WILL FIND YOU! YOU CANNOT HIDE FOREVER!”

Loch wanted badly to shout something back, but she stayed quiet, and the airship shuddered and shook, and then Tern and Hessler fired again, and the wind-daemon roared in pain and sank back, and the airship began to fall.

In a moment, it was lost behind the canyon walls. A few moments after that, she heard the sound of a lot of wood and crystal crashing on the canyon floor far below.

“So, Ethel, about your treeship . . .” Kail said.

Irrethelathlialann sighed. “I sent the request shortly after the daemon began acting strangely. Captain Thelenea will be here in an hour.”

“All according to plan, then,” Kail said, and clapped Dairy on the shoulder. “Good to see you again, kid.”

Things had been exciting at the mine last night, Hendris gathered. The door to the processing center had a giant scar in the frame, and an airship full of alchemists and lapitects was sitting at the dock unloading when Hendris and the rest of the miners arrived in the little hopper that brought them from the facilities up top. Golems trundled around cleaning up debris, and judging by the scorch marks on the lift, nobody would be getting any work done until the safety inspectors had cleared everything.

“Got a flare?” he asked the supervisor, who was talking with Jerval, an Urujar kid who’d drawn night work.

“Something like it.” The supervisor glared at Jerval, who looked shamefaced and confused at the same time. “Cleanup duty up here, and whatever set off the magic caused a slide at the Idiot Tunnel. Need someone to check it out.”

“I’ll go.” Hendris had almost as much experience as the supervisor, and no particular love of cleanup duty. The supervisor nodded, and Hendris grabbed the hopper and took it down to the ground.

The canyon walls glowed less brightly in the daytime, although Hendris had gotten used to the red light years ago and actually found normal glowlamps disconcertingly yellow-blue by comparison now. He watched the dock as the hopper descended. It had always seemed strange to him that the mine had been built halfway up the canyon rather than on the ground. It wasn’t as though the walls glowed
less
at the ground, but Hendris figured that there was some kind of politics around it. Most things boiled down to people in expensive clothes arguing with each other and pissing it down onto everyone else.

He reached the ground, set the hopper to idle—most new squinters accidentally spent a night on the canyon floor after the hopper had headed back up to the dock without them—and hiked over toward the Idiot Tunnel.

Hendris saw the wreckage of the collapse and the resulting slide from a ways away. The scale was massive. The old Idiot Tunnel had crumbled at the bottom, leaving a broken hillside of smashed boulders and dirt-crystal fifty feet high.

Hendris didn’t consider himself a sentimental man, but the miners took Sunrise Canyon seriously. There was a kind of beauty in the glowing, glossy rock, and he actually found the wreckage offensive.

“What the hell did this?” he asked, scratching his head and glaring at the mess. The kobolds did little tricks now and then, when someone scared them or came into the mine wearing silver, but they hardly ever hurt anybody, and they had never done anything on this scale. Something this big would take a damn-fool wizard actually flinging magic into the mine
on purpose
.

Someone was going to ask if the collapse actually made the tunnel more stable, though, some idiot in fancy clothes. And Hendris needed to have his answer ready, which meant climbing up the damned rockslide and checking the tunnel itself.

He was making his way up through the rubble when a rock shifted beneath his foot and something grabbed his leg.

Hendris yelped, jumped, and pulled away, and then, as he landed, thought that he was being an idiot, that he’d caught his leg between two rocks, which was what it had actually felt like more than anything else. He convinced himself that he was being foolish as he turned.

But something was scrabbling out from under the rocks, something with too many legs, and Hendris stumbled backward, and then it was out and free, and somehow it was actually a short person, a dwarf, maybe, in a cloak. Hendris saw that the cloak was miraculously free of dust and grime, and thought
magic
, and then thought about how he’d thought he’d seen too many legs and felt claws on his foot, and he kept moving backward.

“Now listen,” he began, “I don’t want any trouble.”

“Witness,” said the thing in the cloak, with a voice that sounded like it was coming from down a long tunnel. “Witness, trouble.”

“No, no, I haven’t seen anything,” said Hendris, who could see which way the wind was blowing. “Just looking at the rocks, that’s all I’m here to do.”

Then something
else
came up out of the rocks, not out from between them but
through
them somehow. It was a great woman, rising up from the stones, and while every miner had that dream once in a while, Hendris had
never
dreamed about that woman being an ogre. She came out as though climbing through the air, and then she settled upon the rocks and set down what looked like a tangled mass of rope and cloth, until the rope and cloth twisted and moved into the shape of a bony woman in a tattered and dust-covered dress.

“Witness,” said the thing in the cloak again.

“We are not murderers,” said the ogre woman.

“We were ordered to preserve secrecy,” said the bony woman, who was still twisting herself into the shape of a person. “He has seen you, at least.”

“I haven’t really seen anything,” said Hendris quickly. “Please, please don’t kill me.”

And then, from out of nowhere, a man’s voice said, “Good morning, trackers. Did you actually manage to capture anyone, or was this your idea of an evening’s entertainment?”

Hendris looked up, as did the ogre, the bony woman, and whatever the thing in the cloak was, and saw a nobleman looking down from one of the mine’s airships. Hendris had seen the man before, some self-important noble who had come with the black-coated fellows to work in the processing center. At the time, he wouldn’t have minded punching the noble in the face a few times. Now he would gladly shine the man’s boots if it got him out of here alive.