Of Killers and Kings

by Will Wight

  There was also the possibility that its Intent had been hidden from him, as the Emperor or some skilled Magisters could do, but that would be far too arcane and elaborate a trap for Zhen’s front door.

  Lucan signaled for them to try another door, but Shera had made up her mind. She was already turning the knob.

  Slowly, a hair at a time, Shera twisted the knob and began to open the door. It slid outward so gradually that the bell on the inside caught with only the slightest sound…but if she pulled it open too much farther, the bell would fall back and ring in earnest.

  Lucan reached up and pinched the clapper of the bell with two fingers, preventing it from ringing. But Shera didn’t open more than a crack. She glanced through, looking up and down, even ducking down to peek under the door.

  She pulled out one spade and poked the floor—no glue.

  From her own pouch, she withdrew a hooded quicklamp the size of her thumb, activating it and sliding the hood open a crack. After a moment warming up, the device gave her a focused beam of blood-red light. Red light was supposed to be easier on their eyes as they snuck around in the darkness, less likely to blind them, and it was slightly harder for observers to notice than white.

  She moved the light across the entire doorframe quickly, including the floor, ceiling, and hinges, and then flashed it to the end of the hall.

  “Darts,” she muttered back to him.

  Kelarac take it, Lucan thought. They had bad enough luck to be up against the trap that was worst for them. When the darts activated, they would activate a second alarm.

  He was going to have to get creative.

  Thanks to the Emperor’s tutelage, he could destroy the door. He could bring down the whole building, using Reading as a weapon in such a way that was traditionally considered impossible. But there was no way to do it quietly. A door smashed to pieces by Reading would sound just like a door smashed to pieces by axes.

  This time, Shera had the solution.

  She had packed for this mission, just as he had, and she’d brought some solutions that he hadn’t thought of. In this case, the word ‘solution’ was particularly appropriate; she pulled out a stoppered alchemical vial and a tiny paintbrush.

  Lucan adjusted his shroud, making sure it was secure over his nose and mouth—it would help him against the alchemical fumes of the solution that Shera was about to use.

  It still smelled foul as she carefully painted a two-foot square at the corner of the door and the paint began to hiss quietly, sending smoke billowing up into the night sky. In under a minute, a chunk of the door had dissolved, leaving enough room for them to crawl through without triggering the darts at the end of the hall.

  And now they had to hurry. Useful as the alchemy had been, it wasn’t odorless. Zhen or his guards could easily be alerted by the chemical stench, once it reached them.

  Once they were on the other side, Shera’s blood-tinted quicklamp quickly revealed a line running from the top hinge of the door all the way to the mechanical dart-launcher perched on a tripod at the end of the hall. Shera cut it, and if they had not been trained better, they would have stopped there.

  Instead, she continued her examination and Lucan Read the floor. Quickly, they found the secondary activator: a pressure plate in the floor ahead of the tripod.

  They slipped past it and into a second hallway beyond. All of the doors on the second story led into this hallway, which had a handful of false exits leading to further traps, but one was real. Lucan popped the trap door and Shera tucked away her lamp, then both pressed an ear against the seams of the trap.

  “I tell you, there are no benefits to the old ways,” Zhen’s voice echoed from below. “Modern laundry soap is a miracle of alchemy. Quicker, easier, no residue, and only marginally more expensive. Leaves cloth softer than the Emperor’s silks.”

  Lucan Read for traps and found none. This trap door was supposed to be safe, but it was better to be careful.

  Shera looked into his eyes, where they silently coordinated. She gave him a smile he could barely see behind her shroud, but he could read it nonetheless. “Look at us,” she was saying. “We could be off work right now.”

  The door popped open and Shera fell like a panther.

  Spades flashed from her hands even as she dropped, three in an instant. They too had been coated with non-lethal poison, just for this evening; it was not traditional to poison spades, as they held it poorly and delivered unreliable doses, but the trick could be useful for disabling opponents.

  Lucan landed only a blink after Shera, spades in his own hands.

  He stopped himself instantly.

  Zhen crouched behind a fully set dinner-table, holding a soup bowl up like a shield in front of him. Judging by the steaming liquid dripping from the tablecloth, the bowl had been in use only seconds before.

  A Consultant in blacks leaned drunkenly against the far wall, trying to draw a weapon. A line of red against her shoulder and the spade embedded in the wood behind her showed Lucan that Shera’s aim had been true. Another stranger, probably a Mason by his lack of a black uniform, slumped over onto the table. A third, another Shepherd, tripped as he tried to run for the door. He struggled to rise, but a poisoned spade was stuck in his back.

  Zhen peeked over his bowl-shield. “Shera? Light and life, girl, calm down.” He sniffed the air. “Did you burn through my door with acid? Your answer gets a nine out of ten, but you’ll be replacing my door.”

  Shera moved forward with another shear in one hand and a needle in the other. “Do you want a nap?” It would look better for Zhen afterwards if the Architects found him immobilized by Gardener weapons.

  The old Mason snorted. “I don’t know what they taught you in the Garden, but I trained you better. If you’re really after that basement, you should give it up. There’s no victory here.”

  Lucan frowned. Zhen knew what was buried there. He should understand what was at stake, and therefore should either be fighting them or helping them. Not standing idly by.

  What did he know…

  The answer interrupted the question: he knew what defenses waited between them and the frozen Regents. Shera and Lucan had discussed as much before their voluntary mission began.

  Shera held up the needle with its glistening point. “Let me know what we’re in for, and I’ll knock you out.” She sounded casual, close to bored, not icy. That was a good sign.

  Zhen’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “You know they’ll find out. If I tell you what to expect, they’ll punish me with you.”

  Shera glanced over at Lucan. They had both agreed what to do in this situation.

  She jabbed the needle into his neck and he didn’t resist. Even if they had been willing to interrogate an old friend, they didn’t have the time.

  And they weren’t willing. Even Shera said she’d rather fail and face punishment than to hurt the Mason.

  He must have made a real impression on her.

  As Zhen’s body tightened up, he groaned, stretching himself out on the floor. “Foolish. They’ll assign you to the…northern wastes…for…this…” That was all he managed before his jaw locked up.

  Lucan snatched up a pillow from a nearby couch and levered Zhen’s head up, sliding the pillow underneath. He would still wake up with a headache, but maybe not as much of one.

  Shera had started to move downstairs. “If we have two minutes left, I’d be surprised. So far, so easy.”

  One of the incapacitated Shepherds groaned.

  Lucan had to admit, Yala had underestimated them. She habitually underestimated Gardeners; she considered herself the equal to any Gardener, or so he’d interpreted from his occasional Readings of her belongings. Maybe she simply didn’t believe that they would really come here.

  He and Shera pushed through the room with the crates of documents, using Shera’s hooded quicklamp for light. He tried to turn on a nearby light, but it was out of fuel, so they proceeded carefully through the darkened room.

  This time, in
stead of the rug covering a few nailed boards over the trap door, there was a metal plate welded in place.

  Shera stepped back, letting Lucan take the lead. “Your turn.”

  Lucan pulled both of his gloves back and pressed them against the iron, focusing his Intent. Active Reading was a difficult skill, more like Awakening than investing, changing an object’s physical form by twisting its Intent.

  Fortunately, the easiest physical change was destruction.

  The iron plate had little Intent to work with, which made his job difficult, and he strained to grasp at its physical form.

  The metal gave a shriek as it peeled back.

  He was sunk so deep into his Reader’s trance that, when the gunshot rang out, he thought for a second that it was the sound of a rivet popping out of the iron.

  He only realized what it was when the lead ball kicked him in the chest.

  He tumbled back, the ball stopped by the investment in his camouflaged cloak and in his masterfully crafted blacks. He lost control of his active Reading…and instead of merely pulling back the metal plate, the entire plate and a chunk of the floor beneath it exploded into the ceiling.

  The way down was now completely open, but Lucan couldn’t spare a thought for it. He held up a sleeved arm to protect his face as another pistol cracked and another shot hit him like a kicking horse, snapping the bone in his forearm.

  The pain blanked him out, but one priority remained: What about Shera? Where’s Shera?

  He pushed through his tears to see around him.

  Consultants had hidden in the crates, waiting for them to arrive. No doubt they had come in through the door at the far end of the room, the door leading to the hidden harbor, alerted by Zhen or one of the others as soon as Shera and Lucan had breached the dining room.

  They stood now, quicklamps bright, the lids of the crates discarded and firearms in every hand.

  Shera stood over a body, and Lucan couldn’t tell if the woman at her feet was dead or unconscious.

  Shera had a shear in her right hand, and her left was held in front of her face.

  Lucan was forcefully reminded that others could not focus their Intent. She didn’t have the additional protection of his cloak, and her blacks weren’t bulletproof.

  There were red holes in Shera’s shoulder, her stomach, her left arm. Her ear was missing, the right side of her face painted in blood.

  Still, she drove her shear into the chest of a Mason who had come too close.

  Lucan screamed. Or someone did.

  Why are they trying to kill us?

  He was not unfamiliar with a sudden, unexpected transition to violence. That was part of a Gardener’s work.

  But they had planned this operation knowing that Yala would follow the unspoken rules of the Consultant’s Guild. If Lucan and Shera’s mission had succeeded, they would have won the game. If they were caught and failed, they would gracefully accept their loss and punishment.

  Even Zhen had said it a moment ago: “They’ll assign you to the northern wastes…”

  They had all assumed that Yala would follow the rules.

  What fools they’d been.

  Bitterly, he lashed himself with regret. He had given Yala too much credit. Too much trust.

  Two more pistols discharged, deafening in the enclosed space.

  The gun aimed at Shera missed, but Lucan’s didn’t. This bullet caught him in the side of the skull. He spun, his world dissolving.

  His last sight was of Shera, dribbling blood, dropping her shear to the ground and reaching for her left side.

  Chapter Fifteen

  present day

  Silver mist filled the bedroom in which Shera crouched, flooding through the building, pouring out the hole the bullet had broken in the outer window.

  She slipped behind the bed, hiding herself from further shots. Her head spun with the effort of using her Soulbound power so heavily with no preparation.

  Bastion whispered contentedly in her mind.

  It was satisfied with a job well done; the mists would protect her now, and they would serve as the signal for others who would soon come to protect. Its greatest purpose, to defend the Am’haranai in the execution of their duties, was being fulfilled.

  Meia and Jorin had gone to great lengths to bring a team into the Capital, hiding them among the crowd.

  An assassination was far better than a frontal attack, but they had come to back her up. They didn’t want to start another fight like the one in which Estyr had fallen…but they would if they had to.

  Now, the stealthy approach had failed. Backup was on its way.

  She just had to survive.

  When Jorin and Meia saw the mist, they would enter the building. Shera would evade her enemies long enough for that to happen.

  Once her head stopped spinning, she dipped her awareness into the fog. She couldn’t afford to tire herself out here, but she caught a few glimpses of what awaited her outside the door.

  She waited until the pair of Imperial Guards had approached her room, then she leaped from inside.

  Her objective was to escape, not to kill, and even now it was better to keep the body count low.

  Jorin and Bareius and Kerian had all emphasized that fact over and over. She wasn’t supposed to kill anyone she didn’t have to.

  So the first Imperial Guard took a needle to the side of the neck and the second took one in the thigh.

  She was already dashing down the hall when she realized that her fears had been realized: one of the Imperial Guards processed poisons faster than the others. The Guard screamed an alarm, her voice echoing through the halls: “THIRD FLOOR, HEADING EAST!”

  Bastion’s Veil treated sounds strangely. If she had just yelled for an intruder, her allies might not have found her, but she had shouted Shera’s location.

  This is exactly why you kill people.

  Shera dashed down the hall, gripping Bastion tightly. She only needed to dodge pursuers until Meia showed up, so she would find another unlocked room and slip inside. After they checked the halls, they would realize that she had hidden somewhere, but by then it would be too late.

  But when she turned the corner, the Veil granted her a vision of a new pursuer.

  He dashed through the mist in a blur of motion.

  Champion.

  She leaped backward just in time to avoid a man crashing through the wall after her. Wood and painted plaster exploded outward, coating the walls and floor.

  The Champion was covered in weaponry, as though he’d made himself armor out of every sword, knife, and axe-head he owned. Three swords were strapped to one hip, two swords on the other, and another on his back. He had sheathed knives everywhere they could fit.

  Under other circumstances, he would look ridiculous and impractical. How did he even draw a sword without it getting tangled in the others?

  But having just seen him tear through a wall, he was frightening enough. There was no doubt he was a genuine Champion.

  She recognized him from the Consultant’s Guild reports: Rosephus, one of the two Imperialist Champions who had evaded her Gardeners. She had known he would be here, but every plan involved not coming face-to-face with him.

  His expression was hidden beneath a helmet made from a hollowed-out hammerhead with a spike on the end. It swiveled to look at her, and his eyes gleamed orange from the helmet’s shadows.

  Shera had only one mission left.

  Run.

  A short spear shot toward her, but she had already dropped to the ground and thrown a spade into his face. Bastion’s Veil thickened around her and she ran.

  When the Champion overtook her in an instant, it was no surprise.

  Shera had run only a few steps forward, then crouched and slipped back the other way. With his senses confused by the Veil, Rosephus plunged deeper into the hallway, each of his footsteps ringing like thunder.

  Meanwhile, she ran the opposite direction. When she reached the end of the hall, she tugged at the wind
ow.

  This one must have been glued shut as well, because she couldn’t budge it, but she saw no nails. How had they managed to glue all these windows shut so quickly? Her Masons would have reported a bunch of servants crawling all over the building with jars of alchemical glue.

  She shoved a spade under the windows…but it stuck. Even the thin knife couldn’t slip inside.

  Frustrated, she tried Bastion, but the shear let out a crackling light as it met resistance.

  Foreign Intent. They had used a Soulbound power or an Awakened object to seal the building.

  Instead of panic, ice grew over her thoughts, fighting against Bastion’s haze of protective calm.

  There would be no escape. Could even Meia and Jorin break in?

  Shera ran down a different hallway, shaking her doubts away. Of course they could. The musket-ball had broken the window earlier, so the glass could be broken. If she broke through the glass and leaped outside, the Guards would know her location and be on her in an instant.

  If a bullet could break its way in here, so could Meia and Jorin Maze-walker.

  Bastion flashed a warning into her thoughts: the image of a woman stopping to stab a long silver spike into a wall.

  Shera reversed position as silver light speared through the wall, grazing her shoulder and leaving a bleeding gash in her skin. She still couldn’t spare the attention to dive into Bastion’s vision, but she caught glimpses of her opponent: a tall, lithe woman with caramel skin who moved with a dancer’s grace.

  Her long hair was tied back into a tail, she carried a thick silver needle the length of her arm, and she wore armor of leather and chain that looked easy to move in.

  The second Champion.

  In Shera’s reports, Tyria was described as having an atypical personality for a Champion. She didn’t seek out fights, rarely carried weapons, and had little loyalty to the Empire. Shera’s Gardeners had found no opportunity to assassinate her, as she had never left her rooms in the depths of the Imperial Palace.

  But she was all business now, sending another spear of light lancing through the wall as she ran around the corner to find Shera. The light was several feet wide, but Shera didn’t know how Tyria had found her at all. Bastion’s Veil dampened sight, sound, smell, and even Intent.