Chrissa snickered. “The royals included.”
“Therrance mentioned her Grace might be sick,” Trent said as he buttoned up his shirt.
“Sick in the head, maybe. Sniffles if nothin else. You saw her—seemed fine. But everything’s been so strange since you roped me into this. How I saw nothing for so long”—she stopped and smiled. “Gods, I’m giddy.”
“That’ll pass if you know me long enough.”
“Ha.” Chrissa tapped the cutting table’s surface with her fingers.
Trent watched her watch him. “Oh, there’s a stick o’ beeswax and some aloe in my coat. For you.”
“Mm.” Chrissa didn’t check for them. “Ya gonna tell me what ya think she’s doing? One for the road or something?”
“I’m fairly certain it’s not nothing.” Trent slipped his arms through a dark green vest. “It’s worth the study, regardless.”
Chrissa scooted off the table and sauntered toward him to help with his belt—solely for show with dress clothes. Trent’s had a timepiece in place of a buckle. “Still playing it close to the chest.” She rested her right hand over his heart. “What did you do—before all this, I mean. There’s no way you were always a pumpkin farmer.”
Trent pulled on a coat that lengthened to his mid-thigh. “Nobody is or ever was just a pumpkin farmer.” He kissed her, then left her alone and naked in her shop.
Twelve minutes later, Trent spoke with Therrance in the garages. “… It’s good you got my slot.”
“Wasn’t easy, having to watch so close,” Therrance said. The penultimate carriage loaded with pumpkins followed its handler away from them. “Eleven twenty-five rolled around and, boy, I was sweating. Some kid got assigned first. Nobody said nothin when I took it instead, ‘specially the kid. More than glad to have an hour to himself.”
Trent deliberately didn’t check around before he pulled the box from his pocket. “Still no problem planting this?”
“Consider it done.” Therrance took the box, pocketed it. “How’re ya gettin up?”
“Elevator twenty-two. Didn’t know the guy on the residential floor. Someone new.”
“All part of the churn.” Therrance leaned toward him. “Twenty-two, though, that takes you up through the middle of the floors. If anyone—like a queen’s chambermaid—is there, they’ll see ya.”
Trent considered that. “Technically not. And what I’m lookin for is specific enough. Quick in and out. I’ll need the distortion open for four or five seconds.”
“Gods, you’re a magician.”
“Thank Them I’m not. And do remember, sir, this isn’t a serren’s happenstance”—
Therrance huffed. “Sir”—
“That’s all of them,” Sieku said as a girl led a cart off the end of the trailer.
Therrance winked at Trent. “Anyway. Good luck.” He trailed after the last carriage.
“And hope I don’t need it,” Trent said, then he addressed his urlan. “Start the journey home. Stop for nothing. I’ll be getting a port back. You’ll know if anything happens.”
“Of course, sir,” said Sieku. “I’ll keep communications open”—then he spoke through the pill in Trent’s right ear—“and silent.”
Trent breathed. Here. “That’ll do.” He headed back inside.
4
“What do I look like,” Trent said, pushing his tie into his pants pocket, “a damned engineer?” He stood against the wall outside the elevator hall. A castle guard slept upright next to him.
“Do you, sir?” Sieku asked.
“What?”
“Do you look like an engineer right now?”
“No, Sieku.” Trent fit his voice behind his hand. “Can you focus—are the charges ready or not?”
The communication line quieted. Brech’s voice echoed in his other ear. On Trent’s wrist, a small, three-dimensional version of the party hall beamed to him in real time.
“Seventeen years, it’s been,” said Brech, who stood on stage at the front of a ballroom, “and it feels like only yesterday I welcomed my son”—he looked at Denard—“my son, to the world. Pride doesn’t rightly describe what I felt. And in his lifetime, the world has seen the most peaceful season in our history. This cannot be coincidence.”
Scatterings of laughter wheedled through the crowd, the members of which sat at tables or stood in the hall’s wings and on a mezzanine that curved around the room. Staff had just cleared bowls of pumpkin bisque, in which Trent had questioned the use of cardamom this time of year—the late-winter harvests better suited savory dishes. A tinge of rustic sweetness still hung in the back of his throat.
Denard sat to the king’s left, a soft-faced young man who looked embarrassed to receive attention. Interest, not excitement, surrounded the royal son, and others—even the king—dismissed the boy for what he would become.
“It seemed like he welcomed himself in many ways,” said the king. “Ambition beyond measure, exceeding wit”—
“And all the other superlatives you hope your kids live up to,” Trent said, murmuring as he turned the volume down on his watch.
“Confirmed,” said Sieku. “They’re in place.”
“Thank the Goddess.” Trent looked around. Electric torches lit the wide hallway. Burgundy carpet spread from wall to wall and stretched toward the party chambers a hundred feet to his right. “Let’s get this done. How long precisely?”
“Based on the nodes’ positions”—clicking underlaid Sieku’s voice on his end—“and with the strength of the castle’s encryption, three-point-seven-two seconds.”
“Three point—Sieku, we’ve been doing at least four.”
“I can edge out one, maybe two tenths. But the genetic growth updated since the models you had me train against.”
Trent rolled his head against the wall behind him. He’d set up the pieces, but as the night went on, an inescapable apprehension bullied his gut, incongruous with his expectations. To turn back now—he couldn’t. “Fine. Is the elevator halted?”
“Top floor.”
“On my mark, then,” Trent said, and he waited for the second hand on his watch to pass the eleven. “In three, two, one.”
“Pulse initiated.”
A quiet yet leaden hum whirred through the castle. Trent bated his breath. “Wait for my call once I’m out.” His whisper caught in his throat like a boar’s snore.
The king’s words blended as the hum died, and at its end Trent pushed past the door that led to the hallway of elevators. A guard stood at the other end.
Sieku started, “Full pow”—
Trent’s muscles threatened to launch him forward like a stone from a slingshot as he walked toward the twenty-second door, where he skidded to a stop and slid a key past its access panel. He rubbed his eyes while he waited—Gods, they itch—and tried to get his ears to pop as he looked around. The guard at the end of the hallway hadn’t moved.
The doors parted. A creeping pitch drifted through the air, and Trent slipped past them and into the shaft, where the elevator hung forty stories overhead. He counted the gates that hung above him, then crouched and sprang. Still air rushed past his face as he catapulted toward the thirty-second floor.
He slowed himself on support beams after the twenty-eighth egress passed him by and climbed the remaining floors one at a time. The rough metal rang between his fingers and smoldered against his touch. At the thirty-second, Trent pried doors open enough to look either way down the hall.
To his right, a serviceman stood frozen, his coat of ivory kicked out behind him; to his left, an empty hallway curved out of sight. With the last of his impetus, Trent rocked himself up and landed and headed toward the staff member.
He snapped his fingers next to the man’s left ear. The right corner of the staffer’s mouth curled, and Trent turned a dial on his watch until the man’s eyes twitched toward him.
The serviceman turned his head. “Hello, sir.” His voice echoed through the distortion, and his face recomposed
to the benign acquiescence he’d trained. “Can I help you with something?”
“I seem to have gotten turned around,” said Trent. “Could you direct me to the queen’s suite?”
“The entire thirty-second floor of the Mazim Estate houses her Grace’s royal rooms. Could you be more specific?”
Trent’s gaze followed their voices’ echoes, which chased a currant rug the length of the passage. “Is there a place where the queen keeps her private things?”
The man nodded. “First right past the central elevator.”
“Central. Which one is that?”
The man’s brow bounced. “Twenty-two.”
Trent huffed. “Sure. As you were.” He turned the dial on his watch. The serviceman’s head turned forward, and his countenance fell as he refroze.
After passing two corridors that forked left past the central elevator, Trent turned right and faced a wall between two doors. He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, trying to scratch their itch. They lead to the same place, he remembered Chrissa telling him. He checked his watch—the second hand had passed point-five-two seconds past vertical—then he felt for his query within, tried to discern if one way led to it faster than the other, but no inclination came to him.
“Rusty,” Trent said to himself, and he picked the door on the right. It slid partially into the wall when he depressed its latch.
Two others already occupied the room. Against a desk on the opposite wall, a pair of chambermaids stood naked in a tight embrace. The one facing him had pushed a knee between the other’s legs. A mirror hung on the wall to his left and spanned the room’s length; at its other end, a door led elsewhere. Rope lights fit into the room’s upper corners, and against the wall to his right, her Grace’s bed waited, made and unrumpled. A periwinkle canopy hung over it.
Wooden side tables stood on either side of the bed. Trent checked the closer one first. A lamp and hard-cover tomes rested on the table’s surface. One of the books, leather-bound and ancient with gold-leaf lettering, consisted entirely of Old Magornian writings. Trent thumbed through it, able to pick up bits of what the author had written: namely about the War of the Bridges, nearly eight-thousand years past. He tossed it aside. Hand cream, a portable reading device, and a notebook with fountain pens filled the drawer. Trent knelt and checked under the bed. Nothing.
He scooted past the infatuates on the bed’s other side, where flowers the color of strawberries lilted in a vase between a plate of gold jewelry and an analog clock on the other bedside table. The flowers looked like hybrids of roses and lilies; Trent guessed they had come from her Grace’s garden. Inside this table’s drawer: tissues and a remote, which he picked up and clicked a few times. It did nothing in instance.
Trent edged past the lovers again and snapped his fingers next to the closer girl’s left ear. Again, he turned the dial on his watch and waited for her to move. A nearly inaudible purl escaped her mouth when her lips parted from the other’s, and when she turned her head toward Trent, her face didn’t rearrange as the serviceman’s had. Her lover’s statuesque hand pulled damp black hair in front of her face.
The chambermaid licked her lips. “Yes?” Her voice echoed.
“Are you and your friend part of the queen’s personal staff?” Trent asked.
“That’s why we’re here,” she said, as though her answer should have been obvious.
“Would you be able to tell me if the queen keeps anything unusual around?”
“You’re talking about a royal. There’s nothing usual about them.”
“Sure, but”—
“Her Grace hasn’t been spending much time up here lately anyway. She’s removed most of her more personal effects from the floor and wouldn’t say why. Evasive, my—friend—called it. Though, the queen doesn’t answer to anyone, of course.”
“Any reason, ya think, she’d be doing that, acting that way?”
The girl’s brow creased. “Not that I know.”
“Have you overheard anything from the other service staff—anyone?” Trent thought it a long shot that she had. “No one can hurt you if you tell me anything,” he added, even though a person’s echo acted the same as their counterpart outside the distortion.
The girl shook her head. “I’m just here because the royals pay for our etiquette classes, and my nephew told me this would look really fucking good on a resume. I don’t pretend to know what goes on up here—I don’t want to know what goes on up here. It’s not our business, and I don’t want to end up pieced out in the Underground.” The young woman spoke with candid unconcern. Trent misliked it.
“Dead. Makes you wonder what they’re hiding, then.”
Her face remained plain. “No, it doesn’t.”
Trent knew more about the queen than these two did, and Chrissa even more than he. If something hid up here, it remained outside this girl’s head. “As you were.” She rewound. The other’s hand combed back her raven hair, and her eyes closed as their lips met.
He headed for the door at the back of the room, eyeing himself in the mirror. If I were a secret Trent Geno wanted to find, where would I hide so he couldn’t? He laughed at himself and pushed the door into the wall.
A closet the size of a room. Trent ran his hand over the penetralia of the queen’s wardrobe, feeling for any accesses that hid in its depths. Many of the drawers and cabinets stood empty; Trent didn’t even have to open them to check—whoever had cleared them out had left them that way. Dresses, shoes, blouses, pants both short and long, bathing suits, and costumes all hung on hangers or rested on shelves in apses through the length of the room, half a dozen of which also stood empty. Two stacks of stationary rested on a davenport near the door to the next room.
A single pane of glass opened to a view of the Mazim Corridor, where an orange sun retreated from the day. The sky had glazed a hue of burnt purple.
At the closet’s other end, the hairs on Trent’s neck stood, and he looked back, uneasy of all the dark channels that tucked themselves away. A pair of gray lights peeked from behind a dress display. “Remain,” he said and stepped one pace toward them when came a pounding from the next room. He stopped, waited. His watch told him he still had two-and-change seconds of reliable time. When he looked again for the shining pair, nothing spied him. Still, they disquieted him. Goddess alive.
Dark stone floored the next room in a single slab, and to his left a mirror spread across the entire wall. His ears buzzed for each step he took, and the cupboards echoed as he went through them: a closet full of towels and linens, a drawer full of toiletries, a cabinet full of pain killers and prescriptions and perfume and hair product. The air smelled of lilacs and cinnamon, thick in a shower’s aftermath.
Gods damn it, why isn’t this easier? Will this turn out nothing?
Through the mirror: boom. Trent looked at himself, wide-eyed and unshaven. He raised his hand to his ear. “Sieku.” His voice echoed, muffled and distant. The urlan didn’t respond.
Th-dump. He exited the washroom through the other door and stared at the wall in the suite’s foyer. Hesitant, he touched it with his right hand. Whack, through the wall. Vibrations hissed against his skin. Steam, he thought, then he pressed his ear to the surface. What he heard relented and became smoke, a passing whisper that almost formed words, begging. Raw emotion—excitement, panic from outside himself—rent through his body while he audited the noise, to which he felt within arm’s reach. The smoke coalesced into a wind that sung a haunting madness and devolved into a scream.
“Down!” a woman yelled in a language most couldn’t understand. “Away!”
Trent ran.
The distortion’s agent should have been the only thing able to act on it, but another way to get inside existed. Trent’s query changed, and he wished he had more time as he skidded to a stop in front of the elevator. He wrested the doors further apart and swung to the floor below. Its doors cleaved, and Trent crashed into an orderly, whose hand hung inches from the call pad. She hurtled towar
d the door behind her as though suspended in ice and stopped upright.
He rushed toward the anteroom under the queen’s bed chamber, where something beat heavily against the wall, and he twisted the dial on his watch, parsing through files he’d gathered on the Mazim Estates until he found a rudimentary sketch of the thirty-first floor. On his watch, just like in front of him: a wall, nothing else. Trent stepped toward it, searching for any sign of hidden contrivance. He hadn’t prepared for this. What he sought, he’d convinced himself, would be on the floor above, but here, he only found a jumbled mess of his expectations.
“Pieces tumble and they fall”—
“No,” said Trent. The words passed through him like an ephemeral breeze.
The voice went on from the wall’s other side, but Trent couldn’t discern what she said when she yelled and laughed. Impotence crept back into his life from the corners of his mind, chilled him, reminded him of the path he’d chosen. The pounding spread into a whir of sound—a sharp wind down a chimney, hammers against sheet metal, a mechanical clock stripping its gears—and he stepped back.
“Russell,” a woman said behind him. “Where are you?” Trent turned, his heart aflutter, his breath quick through his mouth. No one stood in the voice’s place.
Hurricane filled his ears when he touched the wall’s paneling, which melted against his hand to reveal the mouth of an endless hallway, painted red and brown. White dust flecked his jacket and bounced off his face as he peered inside. With his left palm flat against the wall, Trent twisted his arm counter-clockwise. Pinching tones joined the fuoro like ropes growing taught. Their pitch undulated when he turned his hand the other way. A point of light that his eyes couldn’t resolve materialized at the passage’s end.
Then a face appeared in front of his, and his breath caught sharply in his chest. He stumbled backwards.
“Another!” she yelled and reached through the tiny space Trent had cleared, grabbing at air, peering at him from underneath her arm. A mark marred the left side of her face, and a black mop atop her head hung in a dirty sheet. “So close. So close to him! Knows. Knows where you are now.” She cackled, leering over him like a prized morsel while she struggled against the hole.
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