The Prophecy Con (Rogues of the Republic) (13 page)

“Got it.” As they reached the lobby, Tern stepped past Loch toward the reception desk, where a dwarven woman in a very clean uniform smiled expectantly. “Excuse me, I think some hooligans are trying to break into our room!”

“There’s smoke, and one of them has an ax,” Loch added.

“This is very distressing,” said Tern, “especially given I thought Ajeveth prided itself on order and security.”

The dwarven woman’s face went steely, and Loch heard the tiny squeak of fingers clenching on the stained wood of the reception desk. “We do, mistress,” she said politely.
“If you’ll
just wait here, I’ll have our security people attend to the matter immediately.”

“I need to freshen up,” Loch said, fanning herself with her hand. “I just didn’t expect this in such a nice city.”

Muscles in the dwarven woman’s jaw clenched as she walked away, boots clacking on the hardwood floor. Once she was gone, Loch and Tern walked out of the hotel and into the well-lit nighttime streets of Ajeveth.

The museum across the street was still blaring alarms, and Loch saw lights in the windows. She crossed the street—not running, but not sneaking, either.

“Do we have a plan?” Tern asked beside her.

“It’s in the formative stages.” Loch took the marble steps two at a stride. The museum door was already open ahead, and she glanced in either direction before walking inside.

As she crossed the threshold, a brilliant flash of blue light flared from the cuff of her leather jacket, and yet another alarm shrieked from the walls of the museum entry hall.

“Hey, smooth move, there, master thief,” Tern said from behind her. As she walked in, though, the same blinding blue light flared from the hem of her skirt.

“You were saying?” Loch said without pausing.

“How in Byn-Kodar’s hell did . . . I didn’t touch
anything
!”

Ignoring the side rooms, Loch started up the stairs to the second floor. “You see the Imperials behind us?”

Tern glanced over her shoulder through the front door. “Not yet. Think they’ll come?”

“They followed us across the Republic to Ajeveth, Tern. I think they’ll cross a street.”

No new alarms blared as Loch stepped into the main hexagonal room on the second floor, the one with the Imperial throne sitting in the middle. She took that as a good sign, given that the alarms from the roof, the ground floor, and another one somewhere above her were combining in a teeth-rattling harmony that was going to give her a massive headache in a few minutes.

Loch glanced at the open door to the Urujar side room. A dwarf was lying on the ground next to a lot of broken crystal. “Good. Kail’s here.” She headed up the stairs to the third floor.

She opened the door to see another dwarf—this one wearing uniform leathers reinforced with thin strips of metal—falling to the ground, unconscious, but definitely still breathing. Two more dwarves flanked Kail, Icy, and Ululenia.

Kail flexed his hand, wincing, then nodded to Loch. “So Icy still refuses to fight . . .”

“I did swear an oath,” Icy said mildly, dropping into a crouch as one of the two remaining dwarven security officers swung a truncheon at him.

“. . . and the dwarves are apparently immune to that thing Ululenia does.” Kail had gotten a truncheon of his own, likely after saying something in dwarven about someone’s mother. He blocked a swipe at his head, kicked the back of the attacking dwarf’s knee, and cracked a hard left hook across the dwarf’s chin.

The dwarf stumbled back, shot Kail a glare, and drove an elbow into Kail’s gut.

“So it’s going well, then.” Loch drew her sword and spun it as she ran at the other dwarf. The rings on the back of the blade rattled, the red scarf flared, and the dwarf—his attention caught—swung at her instead of Kail.

She caught the blow on the back of the blade, which rattled the rings on the sword some more, before flicking the scarf at the dwarf’s face as she spun her sword back into a guard.

“Really well, thanks,” Kail gasped. His dwarf came in with an overhead blow, and Kail sidestepped it, brought his own truncheon down on the dwarf’s arm to collapse the elbow, and put the dwarf’s arm into a joint lock, using the truncheon as leverage.

The dwarf grunted and punched Kail in the face with his other hand.

“Dwarven pressure points are offset a bit from where you’d find them on a human,” Tern said helpfully, and shot Kail’s dwarf in the shoulder with her crossbow. It was a dart, not a bolt, and the dwarf turned to her, pulling it from his shoulder with a sneer as Kail staggered back.

Then he fell over limply.

“They’re vulnerable to a few specific sleep drugs, though.”

Loch’s dwarf swung at her again. Loch sidestepped it, spun her sword so that the scarf billowed out at about eye level between her and the dwarf, and then punched
through
the scarf with her left, blindsiding the dwarf and putting him down.

“Oh, fine, he drops when
you
punch him,” Kail muttered.

“Punching, and reminding you not to fall to your death.” Loch grinned. “These are the reasons you need me. Did you at least get the book?”

“Captain, please.” He had a hand on his now-bleeding nose. With his other hand, he jerked a thumb at Icy. Icy held up the elven manuscript.

Tern looked back down at the floor below, where the sound of booted feet was coming their way. “We’re not fighting our way back out, are we?”

“Not if you’ve got another rope line for your crossbow.” Loch gestured at the Urujar side room as the sound of metal on metal came from the floor below. “We get out through the hole Kail made.”

Gart Utt’Krenner came back to his senses in the Urujar sub-hex, groaning. His chest protested in pain as he rolled from his side to his stomach, then protested again as he pushed himself to his feet.

Gart noted the pain, because it would be necessary to inform the physicians of the nature of his injuries in order to ensure the most effective treatment, but he did not allow it to interfere with his duties. His reinforced patroller’s jacket had protected him from the shards of crystal of the shattered window, and his fine ringmail—which, unlike human armors, had been fashioned in an ablative to distribute force across a wider area—had blunted the impact of the human who had come through.

The moon shone through the window. Gauging its position, Gart judged that a quarter of an hour had passed at most. That was good. He would have been disappointed in himself had he been felled for longer by one treacherous blow.

A rope dangled from the window, likely the means by which the thief had entered. Walking to the window, however, Gart saw another rope anchored to the window frame and leading down to the street.

The thief was gone. Unless his fellow security enforcers had driven him off, Gart Utt’Krenner’s museum had been robbed.

Gart heard a crash, and turned to see a dwarf hit the ground in the main human hex outside the Urujar sub-hex. The dwarf’s armor was torn, but the dwarf herself was still moving. She would live.

Gart Utt’Krenner rolled out his shoulders—muscle pain from the impact, but only bruises, no pulled tendons or broken bones—and walked out into the main human hex to see who was hitting his people.

Two Imperial humans and one unknown assailant wearing green ringmail, a golden helmet, and butterfly pendant were fighting the other dwarven security enforcers. One of the Imperials was male, heavily armored, and holding an ax that was clearly magical. The other was female, wearing a purple dress and a thin golden chain across her forehead marked with an impressive ruby. She was unarmed, and the man with the ax was clearly guarding her, going by his body language.

“Right, then,” Gart said.

He charged.

The unknown figure in the green ringmail saw Gart coming and lashed out with a spear that crackled with magical energy. Gart blocked it on the forearm, wincing as the energy shot waves of pain through his side, and then stepped in and body-checked the figure out of the way.

“By the authority of the Security Enforcement Guild of Ajeveth,” he called to the woman in the robes, “ye all be under arrest.”

“Laughable,” growled the armored man, stepping to put himself between Gart and his mistress.

Gart drew his truncheon. “If ye’ll not stand down peacefully, we have no choice but to use force.”

The armored man swung his ax, a confident, casual warning swing more than anything else.

Gart stepped aside and pressed a button on his truncheon. The head of the weapon split into a forked prong, and Gart slammed the prongs down, catching the magical ax just behind the head and trapping it. He pressed another button on his truncheon, and spikes snapped out from each forked prong, pinning his truncheon, and the magical ax, to the ground.

“Contained!”

The damage to the museum floor was unfortunate, of course, but Gart was prepared to justify the necessity of the action in his report he would file later.

He head-butted the Imperial man in the chin for added measure, and the man staggered back, knees wobbly.

“Now, ma’am,” he said to the unarmed Imperial woman, “let’s all just settle down afore someone gets hurt.”

The Imperial woman clenched her fists. “Yes. Let us do that.” Slowly, hesitantly, she extended her arms for Gart to put on the manacles.

Gart Utt’Krenner reached forward to secure the prisoner.

He didn’t register his enforcers’ shouts of warning until it was too late.

As Gart’s hands closed in, the Imperial woman stepped forward, fingers splayed, and pressed her hand to Gart’s mailed chest.

He felt a hum through his entire body as though every inch of him had fallen asleep and was now waking up with pins and needles. The Imperial woman was flying backward, and then Gart realized that she was standing still and that
he
was actually the one flying backward. He finally hit something hard enough that, for the second time that day, Gart Utt’Krenner watched the world go black.

His last thought was that he was going to have a great deal to write in the report.

Loch and her team left the dwarven city of Ajeveth at a run.

“. . .
stupid
security measures anyway,” Kail was saying. “Who uses earth-daemons to attack people! Who does that?”

“Not the dwarves!” Tern said, panting as she tried to keep up. “They never do that! This had to be some kind of mistake!”

“A mistake like when
Iofegemet’s
wind-daemon went crazy?”

“Stop calling it that, Kail,” Tern added.

Loch looked up at Ululenia, who flapped overhead as a snowy white dove. “Anything strange going on with the daemons?”

They are as different from my kind as bees and fish
,
Little One. I know only that in both cases, I sensed something strange in the simple magic of their thoughts.
Ululenia paused.
It was the blood-anger of the mother badger, the swarming rage of the ants whose hill has been toppled.

Loch filed that away for now—the sentiment, anyway. The specifics of Ululenia’s metaphors were rarely helpful. As they cleared the gates, ignoring the startled yells from the city guards, Loch called over to Kail, “I’m thinking fast take-off.”

“I’ll have
Iofegemet
in the air in two minutes.”

“Nobody is calling it that,” Tern puffed as they reached the rows of airships that marked the docking field.

“Hey—
I’m
calling her that.”

“It’s not a
her
!”

“Kail has a tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects,” Icy said, keeping pace without evident effort. “Most often in the feminine.”

“Don’t make this into a weird thing about me and women, Icy,” Kail said as they all came to a stop by the guard station at the edge of the airships, where a pair of armored dwarves looked at them curiously. “I’m not the one who ended up falling for the honeypot with the bad guy’s personal assassin last time.”