“So this is a checkpoint,” Bershad said.
“Yup,” Felgor said. “Remember, Silas goes last.”
They lined up on the right side of the street behind three nobles who were all wearing extravagant attire that practically matched what Felgor had stolen for them. Finally, Bershad understood. Each noble gave his seal to the sentry as he approached the gate. The sentry then placed the metal disk in the strange machine and turned a crank on the side, which caused the machine to whir, release a puff of steam that smelled of dragon oil, and click in a quick series before spitting the seal back out. The sentry then took the seal, read the description, eyes darting between the metal plate and the man’s face, and returned the seal to the noble, who was allowed to move on.
Felgor approached confidently, handing his seal over.
“Lovely show, must say.” He burped. “Just capital really! Just…” He swayed a little, but collected himself.
The sentry eyed Felgor for a moment, read the description one more time, then handed back the seal. Felgor took it and lingered on the other side of the checkpoint. Gave a reassuring nod to Vera and Bershad.
Vera passed through without incident, and it was Bershad’s turn. He eyed the guards, deciding he’d kill the one on the left first if things went sour because he kept his hand near his sword at all times. Usually that was the sign of a capable fighter. Bershad’s seal passed whatever test the machine performed and spat it back out. The sentry raised it to his face to begin reading the description.
And Felgor vomited all over his shoulder and cheek—red wine and cranberry tart spraying everywhere.
“Fucking hell!” the sentry shouted. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Apologies,” Felgor muttered. “Had a bit too much of the wine I—”
Felgor vomited again, splashing the sentry’s boots.
“A bit too much?” the sentry asked, wiping at his face and neck. “My shift’s not over for another six hours.” He handed Bershad his seal. “Take your drunk friend and move along.”
The sentry turned to the next person in line and waved him forward. “Fucking nobles,” he muttered under his breath when he thought Bershad was out of earshot.
“You see?” Felgor said after they’d turned a corner. “Every law is either breakable or avoidable.”
* * *
After the checkpoint, the city became quiet and calm. The massive buildings gave way to sprawling estates hidden by low walls.
“These neighborhoods don’t come cheap,” Felgor said. “Only the richest of the rich can afford to live in a place like that.” He motioned to the high white courtyard walls and ornate roofs that bordered the small road they walked on. “I pulled some good scores in these houses when I was a kid. You would not believe the amount of silver and gold plates rich people keep in their houses. How many fucking plates does one family need?”
They walked for a long time. Bershad figured it was an hour after midnight. Maybe later.
They had to get themselves inside the palace and hidden before the sun came up.
“Felgor, how much longer till—” Bershad’s voice caught in his throat. They’d turned a corner, and just like that, the palace was in front of them. The massive dome was so large it could have been dropped over most cities and snuffed them out. There was a ring of towers encircling the dome that seemed small in comparison, but still loomed over everything else. An immense, steel-plated wall divided the palace from the rest of the city.
“It’s still farther away than you think,” Felgor said. “Another league, almost. Bitch is so big she screws with your head.”
Bershad squinted—something was moving along the middle of the dome.
“Is that…”
“A massive gear?” Felgor said. “Yeah.”
“That drunk river captain told me it powers the city,” Vera said.
“Yeah.”
“How?” Bershad asked.
“No idea.”
For a few moments, all three of them just looked at it.
“How are we going to get over those walls?” Vera asked.
“We’re not,” Felgor said. “Follow me.”
They wound their way through the streets. A few times, the orange light of a sentry’s dragon-oil lantern lit up the walls from around the corner, but Felgor was watching closely and they ducked into a side alley or behind some bushes to avoid the possibility of getting their seals checked again. The one time they seemed truly cornered, he sprung the lock on a garden gate with a few snaps of a metal pick and pulled them inside.
“You’ve got your dragons,” he whispered to Bershad as they waited for the sentry to move on. “I’ve got my locks.”
They reached the base of the wall surrounding the palace. These houses were larger than the ones they’d passed earlier—practically palaces themselves by most cities’ standards. They rose out of red, perfectly laid brick or pale marble.
“These are for the really big dicks,” Felgor said. “Generals, senior ministers. Like that. They spend their days in the palace, so they get the nice houses nearby. Saves them a carriage ride, I guess. And it’s going to save us quite a bit more than that.” He led them down a narrow pathway between two houses. It was so thin that Bershad had to turn sideways and scrape through.
In the back, there was a small yard with a white tree. Felgor made his way to the base of the tree, took three measured paces to his right, and then began poking at the ground with a finger.
Jab, jab, jab.
On the third strike, he left his finger in the ground and smiled.
“Still there,” he whispered. Then he pulled up and a rectangular patch of grass peeled away from the earth as if it was on a hinge. It took Bershad a moment to realize it was on a hinge. Felgor had opened a trapdoor that led into a dark tunnel.
Felgor grinned at Vera and Bershad. “The people who live here don’t even lock the thing,” he said. “My guess, it was forgotten generations ago. Only reason I know about it is ’cause of a spot of luck. Right place, right time, if you know what I mean.”
“Where does it lead?” Bershad asked.
Felgor grinned even wider. “My friends, every scrap of royal shit and noble piss flows through this sewer pipe. All we need to do now is backtrack.”
* * *
The sewer was cramped and hot and smelled like shit had been baked into the walls. Felgor continued to lead the way—carrying the lantern and shuffling along a narrow track of decaying brick that ran next to the trickling shit river. There were also dozens of copper pipes running along the ceiling that would twitch and shudder occasionally.
A turd floated by them. “Some noble performing the late-night deed,” Felgor observed. “Think he had chicken or lamb?”
“Quiet,” Vera hissed.
Felgor ignored her.
“This is nothing, though. First time I came in, it was just a few hours after a wedding. Some cousin to the emperor, I think. You should have seen the crap. River was damn near overflowing. I must have thrown up four, five times.”
Bershad thought about the rows and rows of dragon-oil torches on the avenues—the roasting candy and treats that filled the theater district. Beauty and comfort above, crap below. Every three hundred strides they’d reach a cistern room that branched off in two or three or sometimes five directions. Felgor never hesitated at the crossroads—just guided them along with instinctual confidence. It was hard not to be impressed.
“Right place, right time, you said?” Bershad asked after he’d led them through the seventh cistern. “What’s the right place, exactly, to learn your way through all this?”
“Oh, people in my line of work love sewers. You head back into the city”—he waved behind them—“you’ll find tiny towns built inside the larger cisterns, all full of people who refused to live by the law of the seals. Rebels and reprobates can make a fine life down here. Some of ’em don’t come to the surface for weeks or months at a time. Easy to move about underground back there. But he
re”—he tapped on the stone wall—“there’s only a handful of ways into the sewers below the royal palace. The main tunnels are barricaded with mortar and steel. No way through without a score of men pounding night and day. Or a wizard, I guess. I don’t believe in shit like that, but I didn’t believe you’d ever walk again, either.” He glanced at Bershad. “So maybe my perspective’s been updated a bit.”
“Who told you about this sewer?”
“Nobody,” he said. “At least not on purpose. I was casing the house—hanging upside down above a bedroom window trying to see if it was worth breaking into. Eavesdropping in the literal sense, you could say. I overheard the minister who lives there—at least the one who used to live there—ripping into his servant about how the air near his favorite tree always smells like shit. His tone was quite nasty.”
“And you put two and two together, just like that?”
Felgor scoffed. “Fuck no. I robbed the place a few days later and then spent a month in whiskey. Nearly forgot the whole damn thing till a barmaid I fancied took me back to her spot in a cistern-town. She found the entrance by sniffing for shit in that haze of dragon oil this city’s filled with. Old Felgor put it together after that. Lucky, but luck only got me part of the way, same as anything else. Took three nights of plodding around in that yard to find the grate and get it open. And once I got down here, it was months before I got all this figured out. Months.”
Felgor squinted and smelled the foul air again.
“Best keep our voices down from here on out. We’re underneath the living quarters,” he whispered.
“You’re the only one talking,” Vera hissed.
After a few more turns, Felgor began stopping at the chutes they passed on the wall. Each one had a small metal plate with a few markings scraped into it. The thief held his lantern inches from the metal and puzzled out the writing on each one. On the fifth panel, he passed the lantern back to Bershad. “Aye, this is it.” He produced a metal rod and a wooden carving from inside of his coat. The rod was about three feet long, and Felgor attached the wooden carving to the tip.
Bershad looked up at the metal chute. Most of them had been narrow—no wider than a child’s shoulders across—and full of corrosion. But this chute was newer and larger. Almost the size of a man’s shoulders.
“This one is different,” Bershad said.
“I checked every one of these chutes back when I was first exploring. None of ’em are as big as this one.”
“Why?”
Felgor shrugged. “Can’t say for sure, but my guess is that the person frequenting the toilet above was prone to taking massive shits and clogging the thing up.”
“They’d widen an entire shit-pipe just for one person?”
“When you see where this leads, it’ll make more sense. Hold the lantern up higher. Yeah, just like that.”
Felgor raised his odd spear and wedged the carving into a hole beside the chute. About half of it disappeared into the hole right away. Then, Felgor moved the rod back and forth. Every few seconds, something would slip and the rod would push forward another inch.
“How long did this take to figure out?” Bershad asked after Felgor had been working for about five minutes.
“Don’t ask. Just be thankful they don’t use seal locks on sewer chutes.”
The last tumbler released, and the chute sprang open with a metallic clang. A few turds dropped down to the sewer, nearly catching Bershad in the face. He looked up the narrow tunnel and only saw darkness.
“Right, then. Biggest man goes first,” Felgor said, looking at Bershad. “If you get stuck in there, I don’t want to be ahead of you.”
Bershad yanked off his cloak, took another look at the narrow hole, and removed his armor, too. Left it in a heap. He swung his sword around his waist so that it sat against the small of his back. Then he pulled himself into the chute. His fingers slipped a little on the sides.
“Breathe as little as possible, and try not to fall,” Felgor called to him.
“Fuck yourself,” Bershad grunted.
The shit-pipe was so narrow Bershad barely needed to hold himself up—his shoulders were wedged tight against the stones. The climb became an exhausting series of agonizing leg presses that inched him up one putrid stone at a time.
Getting Kira out of the palace was going to be interesting. The notion of running through the halls—covered in shit and piss—snatching the princess, and then cramming her down a toilet didn’t seem realistic. But that was Vera’s problem.
After what seemed like the better part of an hour, Bershad squeezed himself around a slight curve in the chute and saw some light above. The sides of the wall near the top were completely caked in shit. Bershad had to stifle his urge to vomit several times. But finally, when he reached up with his tired, aching arm, he found cool air above instead of another warm stone.
He pulled himself up and clambered out of the toilet as quietly as he could. Looked around.
It was the biggest privy he’d ever seen. At least fifteen strides across. The toilet he’d come out of was made of ivory, the edges painted with gold leaves. One entire half of the room was a massive tub. Cedar wood on the sides and mother-of-pearl at the bottom. Moonlight poured in from a skylight in the ceiling.
Felgor’s grubby hand popped out of the bowl, and the rest of him soon followed. Vera was right behind him. Felgor crossed the room and started to fiddle with an unlit sconce on the wall. He released some hidden latch and a panel of the wall popped out.
“Secret passage?” Bershad whispered.
“Linen closet,” Felgor whispered back. “Although, might be we want to wash some of this shit off before we spend the night crammed in there.”
Bershad frowned. “We’ve got no time to fetch water.”
Felgor smiled. “You mud slingers and your old ways. Observe.” Felgor moved over to the tub and fiddled with a copper handle Bershad hadn’t noticed before. There was a distant thumping noise, and then a stream of water began flowing from a faucet.
Felgor cupped his hands to collect some water and then splashed it on his face and arms.
Bershad had never seen anything like this before.
“If your shamans would cut back a bit on the mud statues and orgies, I’m sure they could figure it out as well,” Felgor said. “Might even learn how to properly pave a road while they were at it,” he mumbled under his breath.
Bershad frowned, and then pushed Felgor out of the way so he could wash the shit out of his hair.
When they’d all cleaned up as best they could, Felgor returned to the linen closet and shifted a few fresh towels out of the way, revealing a compartment about two strides across and six strides deep. He disappeared inside it.
Vera and Bershad looked at each other.
“After you,” Bershad said. She scowled and went inside. He squeezed in after her, then stacked the towels back in front of the door so they were more or less hidden.
“Get comfortable,” Felgor said. “Morning shifts for the servants are starting soon, so we’re stuck here till nightfall.”
Bershad leaned back and tried to rest, but clutched his sword tight. He wondered if Emperor Mercer ever used this bathroom. In a way, it would be a fitting end for Bershad to have walked all these miles, struggled against so many obstacles, just to jump out of a linen closet and stab an emperor on the toilet.
But the emperor never came. Bershad was glad for the extra time to let the moss in his wounds do its work. Eventually, he fell asleep. But Vera woke him up.
“Your nightmares are too loud.”
34
BERSHAD
Balaria, Burz-al-dun, Imperial Palace
The room outside the linen closet stayed empty most of the day. Once, a wheezing man came in and performed what sounded like a deeply painful bowel movement. A servant entered a few minutes later to light a dragon-fat candle. She didn’t go for extra linens.
Felgor passed around a few morsels of cranberry tart he’d been k
eeping in his pocket. He must have stolen extras. Once night fell, the sounds of movement and activity in the adjoining chambers faded away.
“Where the fuck are we?” Bershad whispered.
“One of Emperor Agriont’s old chambers,” Felgor whispered back. “He kept his favorite mistress here, apparently. He was a large man. Hence the big shit-chute, I think.”
“How far are we from Kira?”
Felgor shrugged in the darkness. “Depends on where she is.” He paused, scratching his dirty beard. “But, if I was gonna stash an Almiran princess, most likely I’d put her in the eastern wing. There are some nice, private tower apartments on that side, as I recall.”
“Fine. Let’s go there first.”
Felgor found a small latch in the darkness and released it. The panel popped open with a soft click.
They left the privy in their familiar line: Felgor at the front, Bershad in the middle, and Vera in the rear. The chambers outside were lavish, even compared to the best rooms in Castle Malgrave. Plush carpet covered the floor. Detailed tapestries hung from each wall. There was an array of wooden furniture covered with soft cushions scattered throughout the room—long couches and oddly shaped chairs. And there was none of the customary gloom that came with Almiran castles. The entire southern wall was two massive windows—glass from floor to ceiling. Moonlight poured in.
Outside the windows, the dome of the palace still rose above them. That meant they were inside the ring of towers that bordered the dome, looking in. They had a better view of the Kor Cog now, which was churning at a steady pace. Bershad and Vera both watched it—enthralled by such a large piece of machinery. Felgor snapped them out of the trance.
“Right, so that’s where we’re headed,” Felgor said, pointing to a group of three towers on the far side of the ring. They looked almost dainty compared to the massive dome. “If we stick to the servants’ passages, there shouldn’t be any guards. They generally stay in the rooms and hallways that have valuables—trying to prevent ’em from being nicked in the night.” He paused. Seemed to think that statement over. “All the same, best be ready to kill anyone we see.”
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