by Terah Edun
Slowly Vana eased back and turned around. Then they heard a bark of laughter.
Instead of an individual with nefarious intentions leaning over the windowsill, a woman came into view.
“Hey, you!” she shouted, “You and your painted woman. Get yourselves out of my alley! Now!”
Vana stepped away from Ciardis ... whether to speak or to draw a knife, Ciardis wasn’t sure, because the woman didn’t give Vana a chance to do either.
“I won’t have those bordellos plying their trade on my doorstep,” the woman, broad of shoulder and girth, howled.
Ciardis raised a peaceful hand. “We weren’t doing anything of the sort.”
The woman didn’t bother listening. Instead she swiftly raised a bucket filled with indeterminate contents from inside her room and, as Ciardis watched, flung its contents out into the alleyway.
Ciardis and Vana quickly dodged back further into the alley. It didn’t take Ciardis long to realize what the contents were, as the smell of hot piss quickly rose from the dirty street where the woman above them had flung her chamber pot’s contents.
“Git!” yelled the woman.
Vana urged Ciardis further up the alley in a run, and they turned the corner to the sound of yowling cats and shutters thudding closed.
As they halted in the enclosed courtyard Vana had said would be there, Ciardis raised an arm and sniffed her clothes incredulously. “Did she just throw hot piss on us?”
She couldn’t believe she was saying it, but the evidence was irrefutable. Her clothes smelled like urine.
Then she heard a chortle. A chortle that became outright laughter.
Vana was grinning at her and shaking in mirth.
Ciardis screeched, “I’m covered in piss and you’re laughing?”
Vana shook her head as she got herself under control. “You have to admit, it was funny.”
“The piss or her attitude?” Ciardis said, astonished.
“Both,” Vana said while looking around. “Our exit’s over there.”
“Well, I would never....”
Vana walked ahead of her to climb the small staircase into the alley. “Never what?” she asked. “Hire a prostitute? I have.”
Ciardis gaped at her from behind as they began to climb the stairs. “Never chase people out of an alley with piss in my hands, but that too.”
Vana paused and looked down at her. The light of a lantern in the staircase cast her pensive gaze in a bright light.
“People do things for a lot of reasons,” Vana said with mirth in her eyes, “but the piss is one I’ve never quite managed myself.”
Ciardis felt her mouth twitch into a smile as she tried to avoid thinking about what was all over her cloak. “You know, I’ve never seen you run so fast from a fight in my life.”
Vana frowned mockingly. “And you’ll never mention it again. Not if you value your life.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ciardis huffed while prodding Vana in the side to get her moving. “You don’t scare me, ‘Miss I Can Kill a Person in Twenty Different Ways, but Throw Piss on Me and See Me Run into the Wind.’”
Vana rolled her eyes and kept walking up the stairs. “You’ll never let me live this down, will you?”
“Not on your life,” Ciardis said cheerfully. It felt kind of good to finally have some dirt on the infamous Vana Cloudbreaker, even if she had to get pissed on to get it.
Chapter 5
After making their way along Vana’s pre-described route, it took them only ten minutes to make their way through the back paths to their final destination. Now Ciardis stood staring up at the building where she’d had her first—no, second—kiss from Thanar and had found out they were bound. As in bound for life. Until death did they part. Or at least that’s what Thanar had said.
Not that Ciardis believed a word that came out of his devilish mouth. He had a way of flat-out lying when the cause suited him, and she had no doubt that it suited him very well when it came to their seeleverbindung.
Even as she stood there now and thought over what he had said and done to intertwine their mage cores and bind their souls, it didn’t feel real. And that scared her. Because she should be ready to kill him. Instead ... she felt like throttling him one second and reaching up to cup his face the next.
“Unsettling” was the kindest thing she could say about her mood swings toward the daemoni prince.
Vana cleared her throat impatiently. “Can we get on with it?”
Sighing, Ciardis uncrossed her arms. Better now than never.
She started to walk around the perimeter of the building, looking for a bottom-floor entrance that would let them inside. Rounding the corner, Ciardis spotted a door with a pull ring and a dusty surface that would have fooled her into thinking no one else had entered this building in years if she herself hadn’t been inside in the past week.
She reached down and pulled the ring outward with a tug.
As she did, Ciardis felt a current of energy zap through her like a shock of electricity. It hurt about the same too. She dropped her grip on the door with a muffled scream and stumbled back.
Vana ran forward to grab her hunched-over form by the waist and drag her back.
“What just happened?” Vana hissed.
“I don’t know,” Ciardis answered with a grimace. “But when we first came here it didn’t react like this.”
“Like what?”
Ciardis stood and stared at the door in wonder. “As if the door was ... angry.”
Vana said, “Did you get any other sense from it?”
“Like what?”
“Don’t be coy,” Vana said in disgust as she let her go and walked forward. “It doesn’t suit you.”
Before Ciardis could respond, Vana grabbed a large rock that sat in the empty, but broad road. As the wind whistled between the rows of warehouses, Vana hauled back her arm and threw the rock at the door with all her strength.
Ciardis instinctively flinched with a wince, awaiting the harsh crack of wood in the way of stone. She was glad she did. Instead of the wood taking the brunt of the impact, the rock hit the door, glowed for a second, and exploded backward like a cannon firing projectiles. Projectiles that would have ripped them to pieces if they had still been standing.
Fortunately, Vana had the reflexes of a cat and Ciardis was already on the ground. Just before the explosion happened, her magic had surged and her mage sight had turned on without her request.
Ciardis had felt her vision turn from the physical to the ethereal, and she had seen what was coming enough to realize that it would be better if they weren’t standing when the magic reacted. It wasn’t just the door but the whole building that was protected.
“No wonder no one’s found this wreck of a building right under the emperor’s nose,” Ciardis muttered as she stood.
“It’s spelled against entrance,” Vana said in a voice of admiration that had Ciardis glaring at the back of her head.
“A spell that almost killed us,” Ciardis snapped.
Vana turned with some kind of metal object in her hand, and Ciardis hastily wiped her face. “Yes, it did. Why didn’t you tell me of that before we tried to get in?”
Ciardis blinked at her. “Do you honestly think I would have zapped myself willingly if I had known? The door we came in didn’t do this.”
Vana stared at her as if she had two heads. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Which part?”
“Weathervane,” Vana said in a dry tone, “trust me when I say this entire building is spelled. Not just this one door.”
Ciardis stared up at the bare walls breached by a line of windows so far above her that they weren’t visible from the street.
“Then—” Ciardis muttered just as the round object nestled in Vana’s hand let out a shrill beep.
Ciardis’s gaze snapped to the little bronze case with a glass compartment, but before she could discern anything but basic features, Vana snapped a lid down on it and said, “Well,
that confirms it. This is no base spell.”
Vana walked back to the building and reached out a hand.
“Uh, I wouldn’t do that,” Ciardis said.
“Relax, I just want to feel its aura,” Vana murmured. “Get a sense of what it is that is protecting this building.”
Ciardis watched as Vana slowly moved a hand back and forth just above the building’s surface. Her mage sight was still on, so she could see the magical ripples that trailed Vana’s hand as she waved it gently back in forth. As her fingers moved, so did the ripples in rainbows of light.
“It almost looks like a sight and sound shield,” Ciardis said finally.
Vana stepped back with a sigh. “Not almost. It is. A more perfect one I’ve never seen before. It not only is attached to this building like a second skin, but it also mimics the environment around it so that unobservant passerby only sees a boring warehouse.”
“And the protective aspects of it?” Ciardis said while remembering the painful zap that had gone up her arm.
“One of a few defensive mechanisms I’ve been able to detect just in my swift perusal of its aura,” Vana said.
Ciardis groaned. “This is going to take forever, then.”
Vana turned to look at her in surprise. “What do you mean?”
Ciardis looked at her and then gestured to the building. “To get inside.”
Vana blinked. “Well, I can’t get inside.”
“What do you mean you can’t get inside? Of course you can.”
Vana shook her head. “The entrapments on here would take me days of nonstop work to break, and if you hadn’t led me directly here, I wouldn’t have known it was here. I suspect there’s occlusion spells in the aura to prevent an individual from returning as well.”
Ciardis gasped. “But I was here. I went inside. I returned.”
“Yes,” Vana said. “Now we need to find out how, because obviously there’s something else to this building that we don’t know.”
Ciardis said, “And how do we do that?”
“We experiment,” Vana said with a grin, “and we think.”
Two minutes later, Ciardis and Vana were still staring up at the warehouse building. One in confusion. The other in brooding silence.
Ciardis had tried opening the door again, to the very same reaction as the first time.
When Vana had physically tried to open the door herself, she’d been thrown a couple of feet across the avenue and broken her finger in the process. The door didn’t play around, although it seemed to treat Ciardis with more gentleness than it did Vana.
It looked like nothing of possible worth could be contained inside. Until you touched it and thought differently.
It was just her, Vana, and the biggest secret in the empire.
Vana snapped her fingers. “We know two things. You were able to gain entrance before, and it shows deference to you.”
“If you call an electric shock deference,” Ciardis said with an irritated shrug.
“What else is different?” Vana asked. “How did you open the door before?”
“I didn’t.”
“Thanar did,” Vana said.
“No,” Ciardis said slowly, “the dragon ambassador did.”
Vana turned around and looked at Ciardis fully. “You didn’t think to mention that little tidbit before?”
Ciardis looked over at Vana with a raised eyebrow. “You didn’t think to ask, and we were trying to keep the fact that Raisa was here before a secret from others.”
Vana shook her head in irritation. “Only the dragon can get inside, then.”
“I don’t think so,” Ciardis said as she closed her eyes with a wince. “I think it’s more than that.”
“What more?” Vana asked.
Ciardis took a deep breath. “It’s the Princess Heir Marissa’s warehouse, with her most prized possession hidden under the nose of both her brothers and an entire city. Why would she entrust the key to someone she didn’t know?”
“We don’t know if she and Marissa were unfamiliar with her,” Vana said.
“But we don’t know that they were familiar with her either, and from what we do know of the princess heir she didn’t trust anyone. She had secrets hidden all across the empire and didn’t tell anyone of her plans, let alone give them direct access,” Ciardis replied.
“True,” said Vana.
“So then what is it?” Ciardis murmured to herself. “Raisa came out of the shadows of the doorway the first time we met her.”
“And did you do anything to the door to gain entrance?” Vana asked.
“No,” whispered Ciardis, almost to herself, “we just walked forward into the darkness with her.”
Vana snorted and said, “Sounds like a good way to get stabbed.”
Ciardis rolled her eyes as she said, “Let me try something.”
Vana shrugged and held out a hand to indicate the warehouse door. “Be my guest.”
With trembling fingers, Ciardis raised her hand and placed her flesh just above where she had seen Vana’s. She opened her mage sight and smiled at the rainbow of light pulsing away from her hand. The building wasn’t threatening her this time ... if anything it was if it was...measuring her.
And it finds me wanting, Ciardis suddenly knew. But it didn’t before.
She thought hard about what she planned to do, but she didn’t see much of a choice.
Ciardis dove into her magic until she sighted her core. Gathering up her gift with a healthy chunk of Sebastian’s and Thanar’s own entwined powers, she decided to test the limits of their new combined magic ... alone.
Pushing the power out through her hand, Ciardis saw her magic meet the building’s own in a rush of power. At first, the aura resisted the onslaught of her gift. The building would pulse and push back against her power, trying to get it to recede to her. But Ciardis was firm until something changed. The aura on the building became flat, and the defensive hills and valleys and cracks disappeared as if never there. Her magic rushed out along the flat surface until it covered a few feet around the door and her. She stopped its creep there.
Testing it, Ciardis pushed her magic forward, and she felt the building’s aura bend in response.
Her heart flipped and she knew she was in.
Ciardis smiled and looked over at Vana. “I think we’re in.”
Vana raised an eyebrow and gestured. “Then by all means, princess heir-in-waiting, please open the door.”
The smile vanished off Ciardis’s face. Not at Vana’s tone. But at what her words represented. It made Ciardis feel dark and tainted.
That’s silly, she said to herself. There’s no taint to an official title.
It didn’t make her feel any better, though.
Sighing, Ciardis withdrew her magic and carefully placed her hand on the metal ring that had shocked her twice before. Now, to her surprise, no electricity emitted. But she didn’t sense any defensive magic connected to it either. In fact ... the building almost felt welcoming.
She knew that whatever she had just done wouldn’t last long, however. The building’s aura was pulsing as if warning her to hurry up.
Gritting her teeth, Ciardis reached back a hand and felt the female assassin take it. Then she pulled open the warehouse door with a creak and they stepped inside.
Chapter 6
Ciardis breathed out, turned the knob, and opened the door to a gloomy darkness interspersed with the moonlight rays shining down through the vertical windows that went straight down the side of the warehouse building not visible from the front.
Inside was a sawdust-covered floor in a room barely three feet wide. But the familiar peeling wallpaper and the dusty cobwebs from high above were still there. The only thing in the room aside from the floor and the window slits was a narrow staircase that rose into the dusty air of the enclosed chamber above them. Vana shut the door behind her with a creak and said to Ciardis, “So this is it? The secret to the empire?”
She didn’t
sound impressed. To be fair, Ciardis wouldn’t be either.
Ciardis grimaced. “It’s further inside. But the only way to see it is to go up those stairs and onto a balcony. Then you’ll know why I brought you here.”
“Since that’s about eight landings by my count,” Vana said as she circled the staircase and looked at the platforms that appeared at every landing, “I suspect you think this secret is worth it.”
Ciardis pushed past her and started to climb the stairs. As her foot hit the first metallic step, she said, “I don’t think so. I know.”
It took them twenty minutes, three pauses on three separate landings, and a lot of wheezing before they got to the top of the platform.
When they finally made it, Ciardis was doubled over, tears were streaming down her face, and she was wheezing.
I really need to get in better shape, she thought while trying to draw in a breath to her lungs and ignore her burning calves.
Vana paused on the landing and looked down at her. “Are you all right?”
Ciardis waved a flippant hand. “Fine, fine. Just, um ... still getting over that illness that had me on bed rest at the Lord Chamberlain’s manor.”
“Right,” said Vana sarcastically.
Ciardis paused, glared up at her, and said, “Just go look at the Marde, won’t you?”
Vana let a smirk grace her face as she walked over to the edge of the platform.
With one last cough as she tried to make her heavy breathing quieter, Ciardis limped over to stand beside her.
“Ciardis,” said Vana in a quiet voice as she approached her. “Why did you bring me here?”
Ciardis turned to her in surprise as she said, “Don’t you remember? The trial and the kasten ship? We told you about it after you testified to my mother’s actions.”
“And this ship is what?” Vana said while not taking her eyes off its glory.
