Squinting now, she saw little fairy creatures flying below, landing atop the palace walls and shimmering into human—or more likely elven—shapes. It was the same busy hum of activity Loch would have expected at any noble’s palace. Far below on the ground, an elf on a ladder poked at a great hanging pod that was hung like a glowlamp, while somewhere ahead wagons pulled by large horses carried dark soil toward an airfield where treeships dug in roots to regain their strength.
The treeship slowed and descended, and Loch headed for the gangplank.
Irrethelathlialann was already there. “I will go first. It’s possible he has guests, and they might not react well to strangers bearing crystal artifacts.”
Loch nodded, and when the treeship touched down, the elf vaulted over the railing before the gangplank even extended.
I had forgotten the beauty of the Elflands, came a voice in Loch’s head, and she turned to see Ululenia coming out to stand by the gangplank as well. She was in her natural form, a horse with a horn that blazed with beautiful rainbow radiance. She was snowy white, save for the black marks at her flanks. I could stay here, I think, and be happy. Perhaps the Dragon has a virgin on staff.
“I will make sure to ask,” Loch said.
He is . . . Ululenia paused. I should stay on the ship.
“Why?”
You are worried, all of you. I understand, and your fears are not groundless. As dark fey, I am different from what I was. I am still me, but . . .
“I’ve known you since I was a child,” Loch said flatly. “You don’t have to tell me that you’re different.”
I’m sorry, Little One. I killed the chimera. That was my second taste of the blood of our people. Each time, it becomes harder to remember who I am. Each time, it makes me want more.
“Will it get better?” Loch asked.
In time. For now, as I said, perhaps I should wait on the ship.
Loch sighed. “Whatever you think best. Is there any way to—”
“Isafesira!” came the cry from the ground, and Loch looked over the railing to see Irrethelathlialann coming back to the ship. He was running with easy grace, and his rapier was drawn. “I need the unicorn and the priestess down here, now.”
“Dangerously close to giving orders,” Kail said as he came to the railing as well, “which I was given to understand elves don’t do.”
“Kail, get Desidora. Ululenia, we may have to rely upon your good memory of who we are.” She turned back to the railing. “What happened?”
“What happened,” Irrethelathlialann called up grimly, “is the Dragon is dead.”
Ten
AS CRIME SCENES go,” Desidora said while looking at the study from the hall, “I have more experience creating them than investigating.”
“Yes.” Ululenia was in human form, and her horn shone as a steady beacon. “I am no hunter, unless virgins are involved.”
“Well, let’s start with what we know,” Kail said, and stepped into the room. It was enormous and well lit with glass lamps that hung from the ceiling, and it was lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. Most were indeed filled with books, while a few had space taken up by small statues, old bones, and pieces of jewelry. There were several tables, a large stuffed couch, and a fireplace, with a drink tray next to the couch.
One chair lay on its side. The ground nearby was scorched.
Ululenia stepped into the room as well, wincing and shaking her head as she did. “What’s the magic look like?” Kail called to Desidora while walking slowly around the scorch mark.
The study was small enough for Desidora to get a decent look without stepping inside it herself, and some presence at the edge of the room pressed against her, urging her to stay outside. Desidora let the death aura take her, and the carpet shifted from a lovely burgundy-and-gold pattern into black and cold silver. At once, she felt a pressure across her brow, and she stumbled, then righted herself. “Wards. Strong ones.” She pulled the death inside her, keeping it there but contained, and the pressure lifted. “Very little magic, save that innate to fairy creatures, would function in this room. Some of the items in the room are magic as well. The wards keep them under control.”
“All right.” Kail popped his knuckles. “I need a drink. Anyone else need a drink?” He looked over at the elven servant who had been left to help them, and who stood outside the study near Desidora. “Hey, is there a way I ask for a drink without offending your culture of not making each other do stuff? Do I get it myself, or—”
The elven servant, a young man with pale-green skin in which pale-rose crystals glowed, smiled nervously. “In general, sir, you say that you are thirsty for something, and then I offer to get it for you.”
“Perfect. Can we assume I did that for an ale for me, a white wine for the priestess here, and . . .” Kail looked at Ululenia.
Ululenia was looking at the young man, her eyes half lidded and her pale dress tight and clingy. “He may surprise me.”
The servant flushed and stammered and headed off to get the drinks.
Desidora hid a smile. “So. A direct magical attack seems unlikely. Silver is impossible, so unless the ground was scorched by alchemical fire of some sort, it must have been the Dragon himself, trying to defend himself even as he fell.”
“Alchemical fire would not harm him,” Ululenia murmured. “He is to fire what I am to nature.”
“Then what struck him down?” Desidora hopped up onto tiptoes and looked into the room at the scorch mark. “You said he is the most powerful fairy creature you had ever met.”
“Indeed.”
“A golem sent by the ancients?” Desidora shut her eyes and felt the magic around her. “No, wards. One of the ancients, a weapon or one of those crystal bands carried by a warrior? I don’t think the wards would keep one of them out.” The magic of the ancients had certainly ignored her attempts at magic.
Ululenia shook her head. “We cannot say for certain what magic the ancients possess, but the Dragon prepared for centuries against them. If they killed him, I would think to see this house burning around the site of their battle.”
“Dumb-guy question?” Kail was standing by the table where the chair had fallen. “Why is silver impossible?”
“The wards,” Desidora said, pointing at the lines of magic she could see and Ululenia could at least sense. “No silver may enter the Dragon’s palace.”
“Wait, which wards?” Kail blinked. “There are wards in here, and wards all over the palace?”
“This estate was marked as his hunting ground,” Ululenia said, “but this room was his lair.”
“Baseline wards all over the estate,” Desidora clarified. “As far as I can tell, they would trigger an alarm if silver, or a weapon of the ancients, entered the palace. And in this room, almost all magic is entirely suppressed, which is why I’m standing outside it.”
Kail picked up the chair carefully, holding his foot against the back feet as he brought it back up to its normal standing position. “It just seems like it fits. Silver, scorch marks.” The chair, standing up, was several feet away from the table. “He knew whoever did it.”
Desidora couldn’t see what he meant, but Ululenia nodded in agreement. “He pushed the chair back from the table and stood to greet them.”
“Right. So not a surprise attack while he was sitting, or the scorch marks would be on the chair. And not an enemy—”
“Because he would have stood up quickly and knocked the chair in another direction,” Desidora finished. “You would make a decent justicar.”
Kail made a face. “Think I’ll see how those drinks are coming along.” He stepped out from the study, gave Desidora a quick kiss on the cheek, and headed off down the hallway.
As the two doves huddle together against the winter’s chill, Ululenia thought to Desidora with a laugh in her voice.
“We’re taking it slowly,” Desidora said, but smiled. “There has hardly been time to take it any other way.” She let the death aura s
lip away, and for a moment she was a love priestess again. A very happy love priestess.
Ululenia smiled in return, but her brow furrowed, her horn flaring momentarily. “Scorch marks. Hmm.” She stepped around the dark patch on the floor, squinting. “If this had killed the Dragon, it would be much larger.”
“What if someone disabled the Dragon, then captured him instead of killing him?” Desidora asked.
“It may be. But why waste the power?” Ululenia stalked away from the scorch marks with sudden energy. “Why not take him here and be done? It is what I would do.” She stroked the spine of a book, ran a finger along an old statue, and kept walking. “Unless they are ancients, against all we said was possible before. A Hunter would store the magic that had made up the Dragon to return to the Forge of the Ancients. They feed in different ways. Can you sense their magic?”
“Barely.” Desidora avoided saying anything about how what I would do sounded. “I still don’t see how an ancient would have gotten past these wards, though.”
“True.” Ululenia paused at the table and looked at the book that lay open. “He was reading about the war between the Glimmering Folk and the ancients.”
Desidora raised an eyebrow. “That’s a rare book.”
“Older even than the Love Song of Eillenfiniel,” Ululenia agreed. “It looks to have been written by the earliest elves.” She flipped through it. “They believed the dwarves and the elves were creatures of the ancients, bred from humans as a noble might breed dogs.”
“An unpleasant notion.” Desidora frowned. “How did we forget that? If the ancients committed so much evil upon us, how do we remember them as nothing but a great civilization that left us a lot of magic when it disappeared?”
“Who writes the history books?” Kail asked from behind her, and Desidora turned to see him coming down the hallway with a tray of drinks, the embarrassed elven servant trailing behind him. “White people only even sort of remembered that there were Glimmering Folk, because they were off in the Old Kingdom. It was dwarves and elves and Urujar over here, and we at least had songs and stories about the Glimmering Folk as dangerous bad crap, but even we didn’t have much about the ancients, because the Urujar didn’t hang out with them.”
“Your people tilled the fields,” the elven servant said, and then looked down nervously. “We were kept closer to the ancients, to tend their crystals, and so our stories remember more.”
“Right.” Kail passed Desidora a wineglass. “And then later, the Old Kingdom white folks come over and see us tilling the fields and assume that’s all we’re good for, and they run the elves back into the Elflands, and they never bother asking the Urujar about the old stories, so most of it gets lost.”
Desidora sipped her wine. It was cool and sweet and very, very good. “That’s a dark picture.” Kail shrugged, and Desidora turned back to Ululenia. “If the elves tended the crystal, and the Urujar—”
“Tilled the fields,” Kail finished.
Desidora grimaced. “Then who fought in this war? The ancients themselves?”
“Some of them, yes.” Ululenia flipped through the book. “But the dwarves did most of the fighting. They turned from miners into warriors to fight against the minions of the Glimmering Folk. The trolls, the scorpion-folk, and”—her voice softened—“the ogres.”
“Your buddies in the woods were made by the Glimmering Folk?” Kail whistled.
“I suspected,” Ululenia said, “but I did not know for certain. Most of their tribes try to live with the land, but there is some part of them that always felt different.”
“The Dragon once said that we are not who our creators made us to be,” said the elven servant. “We are what we do with what has been given us.”
Ululenia smiled as she came his way. “I agree. I try to create as much joy as I can with what is given me.”
The elven servant flushed again and stammered a little, and Ululenia brushed his robe as she walked by. “After seeing such destruction, I would greatly appreciate a bath.” She looked over her shoulder at the elven servant. “Though I confess, I am unused to the indoors. I would likely get lost unless someone showed me the way personally.”
“I can help,” the elven servant squeaked, and Ululenia took his hand and led him off.
“She’s a tiny bit off, isn’t she?” Kail asked when he and Desidora were alone.
“More than a tiny bit.” Desidora sipped her wine.
“I was being polite. To manners. And silver.” Kail took a generous swig of ale.
“It couldn’t be silver.”
“What if it wasn’t silver when it came into the estate? Remember what Hessler did on the train job? He turned the book into a knife, turned the knife into a book?”
“Wouldn’t work.” Desidora pointed at the wards. “Transmutation effects have a sort of built-in reversal, so that the wizard who casts the spell can remove it at will.”
“Like leaving the door open a crack?” Kail asked. He looked around the room at the multitude of bookshelves, then started poking around in a very unsexy imitation of what Ululenia had done earlier.
Desidora rolled her eyes. “Not particularly, no. But for the purposes of this metaphor, yes, the wards could see that the door was open, even if it was just a crack.”
“Could you shut the door all the way?”
Desidora considered it. “Oh, this is silly, hold on.” Ignoring the oppressive feeling of the wards, she let her death aura slip away and stepped from the hallway fully into the room as well. The wards weren’t as painful when she was merely a love priestess. “It would take a great deal of energy,” she said, looking on the floor by the table. She had no idea what exactly she was looking for, but she was following Kail’s lead.
“So it’s not impossible?” Kail poked behind a few books, then moved a statue discreetly to one side.
“Not impossible, no. But then you’re inside, with a silver weapon that is neither silver nor a weapon.” Desidora reached the couch and ran her fingers between the cushions. “And you’ve got no way to turn it back into the silver weapon you need for your attack.”
“Sure you do.” Kail passed her, grabbed the fireplace poker, and jabbed at the ashes of the fireplace. “You turned your silver weapon into a book or a scroll or something with magic, right?”
Desidora stopped. “Oh. Of course. I’m an idiot.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself.” Kail leaned over a vase by the fireplace. “Love priestesses don’t have to sneak anything more than love notes into places they don’t belong. Scouts have to handle this crap all the time.”
“I walk into this room with a scroll or a book,” Desidora said, “and then the wards, which nullify most magic, dispel the transmutation magic, at which point I have . . .”
Kail pulled a blade from the vase. “A silver dagger in the one place in the world that you shouldn’t find a silver dagger.” He held it up. “And all the wards in here override the normal ones out in the rest of the estate, so it doesn’t even trigger the alarm when it turns back.”
“You are a devious man, Mister Kail.” Desidora leaned in and kissed him. It was a slow kiss, more than a peck and less than a big stage-play make-out scene.
He actually blushed when he pulled away. “Well, I try. Come on, let’s show Loch.”
He took four steps, left the room, and sighed as an enormous blaring alarm sounded throughout the palace.
“And you’re very distracting, Sister Desidora,” he called back, and she laughed despite herself, which was something she needed to do very much right then.
Justicar Captain Pyvic flicked his message crystal absently, then sipped his morning kahva and walked into the main pit. “Where are we on the fairy-creature disappearances?”
“Looks like some of them are hiding,” Tomlin said, squinting at the map on the wall. “But there are fights too.”
“Territorial disputes, from what we can see,” Derenky added. “They’re moving into each other’s territory
and fighting as a result.”
Pyvic took another sip of his kahva and looked at the map. “Any reason they should be doing that, beyond a desire to make my life harder?”
Tomlin was messing with the thumbtacks he’d stuck into landmasses. “Nothing we’ve heard. I’ve got the disappearances marked in blue, and the fights people have reported marked in red. I’ve still got the last few days’ worth of reports to go through, though.”
“Oh, let me.” Derenky lifted his right arm. He had some new crystal gadget on his arm, red and glittery and exactly as flashy as Pyvic expected for something Derenky would wear. It glowed for a moment as he tapped on the band, and then the device projected a series of tiny glowing dots onto the map.
“What’s that thing?” Pyvic asked, impressed despite himself as Tomlin started quickly sticking thumbtacks into the glowing dots.
“Paladin band.” Derenky grinned. “They just came out. It can do everything from simple image projection to tracking my calendar. There’s even a built-in message crystal, so paladins—that’s what we call ourselves—can talk to each other.”
“Damn.” Pyvic nodded. “How much?”
“Oh, I’m never buying a house, ever,” Derenky said, “but it also includes something like a health enhancement. As far as I’m concerned, it was worth it. If everyone in the department had one of these, we could stop using paper and thumbtacks.”
Tomlin glowered. “I like the thumbtacks.” He stuck a few more into the map, his big beefy hands pinching carefully to get them into place.
“Were you waiting to go to the cabinet meeting until you heard more about the fairy-creature disappearances?” Derenky asked politely. “My understanding was that the recent incident at the Sunrise Canyon processing center was a higher priority.”
Pyvic sighed. “I thought that thing tracked your calendar.”
“Oh, I added the cabinet meetings to my schedule, just in case you became too busy and wanted me to take your place.”
Pyvic waved and raised his kahva mug. Tomlin and everyone else within earshot took a drink while Derenky rolled his eyes.
The Paladin Caper Page 14
