by Will Wight
It was those imperfections that satisfied Shera. Her information was correct, and the real Calder Marten would be deeper in the Imperial Palace.
Now it was her job to find him and remove him while his double stood onstage.
She slipped to the back of the roof and lifted a few tiles. They revealed a hole down into the roof just big enough to slide into.
The space beneath was a cramped attic about four feet high, and it was filled with cobwebs, mouse droppings, and unused candlesticks. She pulled the tiles back into place behind her before the hole was spotted by airborne enemies, then crept over to the ladder.
One of the Palace maids, a Mason in Shera’s employ, had left the ladder down. Shera peeked around before crawling down, one hand on her needles.
This time, the poison on her needles would render the target unconscious. Sometimes she carried lethal poison or a paralytic, but there were situations in which a sleeping body would draw less attention than a dead or paralyzed one.
No one was in sight except one girl in the red-and-black dress of an Imperial Palace servant. The girl was perhaps nineteen, and she bowed as she saw Shera, her hands folded primly in front of her.
A Mason.
Without a word, the Mason led the way through the hallway and down a flight of stairs, Shera trailing behind so the girl would have time to signal her in the event of an emergency.
The maid picked up a snack tray, piled with sweet pastries, from a table as she turned the corner. Before she started down the side hall, she coughed into her hand: Shera’s cue to stay put.
“Snacks for the Steward,” the girl announced, so close that she must have stood in front of the first door to the right. “Would either of you like anything?”
So there were two Guards. That was confirmed when two voices turned her down before the sound of the door opening.
Shera drew a needle in each hand and waited.
In some places in the Imperial Palace, it was impossible to hear conversations through the walls, centuries of Intent making the rooms impervious to eavesdroppers. But the Consultants had prepared for this.
At about Shera’s knee level, hidden behind a decorative vase, there was a tiny lump of paint on the wall. Shera pulled the plug out, exposing the tiny hole that had been drilled through the thin wall.
“…you can’t eat with the helmet on,” the girl chided. She must have been standing over the hole, because her voice was clear.
Calder’s voice came through, too muffled and distant for Shera to make out, but the Mason laughed heartily.
The Consultants hadn’t known exactly what room Calder would wait in while his double gave the address, so they had prepared a simple countermeasure: they had hidden one of these holes in every private room in the entire Stage building.
Shera plugged up the hole. A moment later, the door opened and shut again.
“Are you sure I can’t bring you anything?” the girl asked. “I couldn’t bear leaving you hungry.”
That was the signal. The word “bare,” however she could work it into a sentence, meant that Calder was unprotected by the Emperor’s armor for the moment.
Shera’s turn had come.
The maid Mason left the hallway, carrying her tray. Shera nodded to her.
“Oh no,” the girl said, suddenly turning back. “I think I left—”
She stumbled over her own feet, sending her tray crashing to the ground.
Shera raced around the corner, leaping over the girl. The two Imperial Guards were focused entirely on the maid, leaning over to help her up.
Before they could react, Shera had planted in a needle in each of their necks.
She watched them as they seized up and collapsed to the ground. Sometimes their Kameira enhancements could mess up the dosage, so the instant one of them made a single sound, she was going to plunge Bastion into their throats.
But they fell as expected, so Shera flicked a needle into the side of the girl’s neck as well. The scene would now look like Shera had come across a servant, immobilized her in the middle of her job so that she spilled her tray, and then knocked out both of the Imperial Guards.
A muffled question came from the other side of the door as Calder asked what was going on.
Shera opened the door, and Calder looked up to her, mouth stuffed with pastry and eyes wide. She hurled a spade right into one of his widened eyes and blood spurted out.
He slumped over onto the table, a knife in his eye.
“Never trust a mission that’s too easy,” Maxwell had taught her. That was a lesson she’d learned over and over again.
She dashed over to him, quickly opening his carotid artery with Bastion.
Still too easy.
But wasn’t that the point of a plan? To make everything easier?
Shera had never trusted plans as much as most Gardeners did. Something always went wrong, and then you could only count on your improvisational abilities.
But this had to be Calder. She’d seen his face only a moment ago. And he was wearing the Emperor’s armor…
Just in case, she struck the back of the white plate armor with Bastion. She’d seen this armor hundreds of times; she knew what it looked like. It couldn’t be an imitation.
Her knife cut it open easily.
Fake.
She’d been tricked.
She grabbed Calder by the hair and lifted him to get a closer look at his face. The disguise was almost perfect, but this close she could make out the paste used to fill in his chin, the shading used to make his eyes look bigger, a touch of the glue used to hold on his fake beard.
The primary plan had failed.
It was time for the backup.
The door hadn’t quite swung shut yet when she was out of the room and sprinting down the hall. Had her plan been leaked? Was there a spy or traitor in the Consultants?
She would get to the bottom of it after she survived the night.
One Imperial Guard, one ordinary Palace guard, and one servant all crossed her path and went down to one needle apiece. Her backup route was supposed to be clear of interference, but nothing was ever certain.
She finally located the door she’d been looking for, finding it unlocked. It was a room that another Mason in the Palace had left open. Inside, a Palace maid uniform in Shera’s size had been laid out on the bed.
Shera unbuckled her belt. Dressed as a maid, she would leave out the front door, where Meia and Jorin and a few other hand-selected Independents waited among the crowd below…
Some half-formed thought stopped her before she changed clothes.
How much of her plans had they anticipated? If they knew exactly what her plan was, they would have taken her on the roof.
They may have just swapped Calder out of general paranoia, but if they knew she was coming and not the details of her plan, what would they do?
Lock down the building.
She threw aside the shutters of the outer window. She tried to pull it open, but it had been glued to the frame.
They’ll have this exit watched.
She threw herself aside as the thought occurred to her, and a hole appeared in the glass a moment later. She still didn’t hear the shot, but a puff of feathers flew up from the bed as the musket-ball landed.
Ice crept over her thoughts as she realized that she was trapped.
Her primary and secondary plans had both been cut off. It was time for the emergency plan.
She clutched her shear in her right hand and concentrated.
Bastion’s Veil swallowed the Emperor’s Stage.
Chapter Fourteen
two years ago
Shera and Lucan didn’t make it anywhere near Zhen’s house.
The gray headquarters of the Masons was made to blend into Bastion’s Veil and the hill leading up to its doors was covered by nothing but grass, but there was nowhere on the Gray Island without hiding spots.
With the slightest inclination of her head, Shera signaled to indicate a figur
e hiding inside a clump of grass. In one intentionally loud footstep and a subtle hand gesture, Lucan responded by indicating that he had seen another hiding inside the Veil itself.
Yala, it seemed, had wasted no time.
Having realized what Lucan was after, she wouldn’t give him a chance to get so close to the sleeping Regents again.
Lucan had been forced to wait an entire day since his meeting with the High Councilor, waiting for the cover of night. He had known the delay would put him at a disadvantage if Yala decided to act, but he and Shera had agreed they needed the time.
By posting guards, Yala proved that she wasn’t going to allow him to simply push a lid off of a coffin. And she had shown that she didn’t trust his outward show of agreement…or at least she wasn’t relying on it.
As soon as they spotted the sentinels hiding outside of Zhen’s home, this stopped becoming a personal attempt of Shera and Lucan’s and became a Gardener mission.
Shera melted into the grass, snaking so subtly up the hill that Lucan could barely track her even knowing what to look for.
Lucan himself had not wasted the day; he’d stolen a tool from another Consultant Reader. A color-shifting cloak made from the fur of a Nightbender, a Kameira that stalked jungle trees while invisible.
The cloak’s Intent was strong, and while it wouldn’t render him invisible unless it was Awakened, the investment still helped hide him. Lucan wrapped the cloth around himself, pulling it tight rather than letting it hang loose and brush the grass, and then he too began to stalk the grass.
While Shera moved to circle around and intercept the Shepherd nearby, Lucan targeted the one in the mist. He moved in a wide loop, slowly, because stealthy meant slow.
They had hoped that Yala would leave the room open so they could infiltrate the house, sneak past Zhen, and release the Regents.
But they hadn’t relied on hope.
The cold of Bastion’s Veil gripped Lucan, seeping through the gaps in his clothing and his few patches of exposed skin. The Shepherd was wearing a cloak of his own, gray to match the fog, and there must have been some investment in it as well. Lucan had a hard time keeping his target in vision, though he knew they were only a few yards apart.
He had considered throwing a paralyzing needle, but now it was impossible. Throwing a needle was a risky gambit under the best circumstances, but when he couldn’t see his target clearly…he might as well stand up and announce himself.
Delicately, he crept around, running over his personal inventory of invested items. Most were disqualified as being too lethal, too loud, or too necessary to part with…but there was one that caught his attention.
He snaked two fingers into a pouch at the back of his belt, pulling out a few glass marbles. When he thought his target’s head tilted a different direction, he hurled the marble past.
Thanks to the Veil, there was no moonlight to glint off of the glass orb, which had been invested with a very special property. When it hit the soft ground, it shattered instantly, smashing the quiet of the night like a porcelain bowl hitting tile.
This was a perfect example of why Consultants worked in teams.
At an unexpected sound, one of the Shepherd lookouts would glance in the direction of the sound, while the other should be trained to look in the opposite direction.
But with Shera distracting or incapacitating the Shepherd’s partner, Lucan was confident that this one would give in to instinct.
As the cloaked figure turned to see what had made the sound, Lucan leaped up. His target spun, pulling a weapon, but Lucan had the momentum and the needle already in his hand.
The poisoned point sunk into the other man’s bicep, which wasn’t ideal. The poison would take longer to affect him from that location and might not paralyze his entire body. Lucan had already pulled out another needle, but the Shepherd was no pushover.
He tried to shout, raising a cry that lasted only a second before Lucan clapped one gloved hand over the man’s mouth. They struggled against each other for a long moment, grunting, before Lucan finally inserted another needle into the man’s opposite shoulder.
Finally, the Shepherd slunk immobile down to the ground, and Lucan wanted nothing more than to fall down panting and join him.
Instead, he moved instantly, fading deeper into the Veil and slithering away from his last known position. He and Shera had spotted only two guards outside and expected there to be only two…the other teams would be inside the house.
But that was only an assumption.
He hid in the mist, surrounded by his Nightbender cloak, listening. Even the sound of the wind was muted in the Veil, but as he got closer to the silver barrier’s edge, the sounds of the night returned.
He had left the Shepherd’s eye-bending cloak on, so any ally would have to search for him in the grass, and Lucan spotted no movement in the grass nearby. He heard no crunch of broken vegetation, saw no glint of moonlight off the lens of a blade or a telescope.
When he was satisfied that any further backup was either immobile or nonexistent, Lucan crept over to where he’d last seen Shera.
She bent the grass aside, blinking her eyes in a way that suggested she had been asleep just a moment before.
Lucan signaled for her to watch over him as he approached the house.
They had plenty of time before the guards awoke, but they still couldn’t be certain that there were only two, and there was always the chance of bad luck. In the event of a scheduled guard change or another Consultant accidentally wandering onto the scene, the whole mission could be over.
He snuck up to the walls, throwing up a grappling-hook that had been used by a wanted burglar for the entirety of his distinguished career. The soft rope wrapped around a second-floor balcony railing, the hook catching without a sound.
In this case, the longer he left the rope standing out against the face of the house, the greater the chance he would be spotted. He ascended the rope like a spider, reaching the top in seconds.
So there was something to be gained from keeping up with his standard Shepherd exercise routine after all.
He spun when he landed on the balcony, pulling a miniature crossbow from his belt and cranking it back to load a bolt.
The bolt was tipped with the same immobilizing poison as that on his needles, but he was reluctant to use the weapon at all. No matter how carefully he aimed, a crossbow bolt was no needle-prick. He was likely to kill or permanently maim his target, which he wanted to avoid.
And it wasn’t as though he was some kind of legendary marksman with the pocket crossbow; he might catch his target in the neck or through the eye.
Even so, he needed something to cover Shera. When she saw him set up, she dashed to the rope, hauling herself up and flipping over the railing. With a few quick motions, she pulled the rope back to the hook and wove it all into a tight loop, which she handed back to Lucan.
He enjoyed working with Shera. They knew each other so well, had trained together so often, that they often felt like two hands working in unison. There was something exhilarating about being so in sync with her, as though she lived in his mind and he in hers.
He stopped watching the quiet horizon to take the device and tuck it back into his belt. Shera, all business now that the mission had truly begun, had already turned to the door.
There was only one safe entrance at a time to Zhen’s house, while the other doors that covered the building’s face were all decoys.
At the same time, they would technically lead into his home. They were just trapped.
There would be an alarm on this door designed to ring when it opened, as well as some sort of non-lethal trap meant to incapacitate them.
Zhen wouldn’t want some young Consultant to get full of their newfound skills and try breaking in, only to take a musket-ball through the eye or a swinging blade to the neck. Yala might have ordered him to use lethal traps this time, but Lucan doubted it; whatever else they were, he and Shera were still Consultants. Yala w
as nothing if not loyal to the Guild.
Though they could be relatively certain that the traps weren’t meant to kill or maim them, that still left the problem of identifying what the traps actually were.
There were eight commonly used door alarms that every Consultant knew, and ten more exotic forms that Lucan could think of off the top of his head. There were far more possible traps: poisoned needle in the doorknob; gas dispersal triggered by the movement of the hinges; darts from the hallway on the other side; alchemical glue on the floors that would trap not just their shoes, but their feet if they set foot inside.
And there could be uncountable variations more.
Worse, Reading would be of limited use. The door would hold no Intent based on the traps it concealed, as the traps changed so often, so he would have to try and Read through the door to the trap on the other side. Which was not only difficult and imprecise, but potentially misleading.
Though he would still try.
He pulled off his glove, resting four fingers against the door. That itself was dangerous; Zhen could have put a contact poison in the gray paint. But if he had, at least Shera would have some warning in the form of his seizure.
“Good news,” Lucan said to Shera, in a low voice that was less audible at a distance than a whisper. “I found the alarm. Just a bell.”
Zhen would have used a different alarm for every one of the potential entrances to his home, and there was nothing wrong with the classics. Eager infiltrators on the watch for more elaborate alarms might overlook something so simple.
Shera brightened, but he held up a hand in caution. “Bad news…no trap.”
He could sense nothing beyond the door, which could mean almost anything.
It could be that this door wasn’t trapped because the trap was in the floor or down the hall, in which case it would almost certainly be designed to release a secondary alarm in case the first failed. Or it could be that the door was trapped, but it had been assembled by such a distracted or uninterested worker that it held almost no Intent.
