The Unbound Empire

by Melissa Caruso

  “Are you all right?” I reached for his good hand and found it cold and clammy. “Did you forget one of your potions or something?”

  “Just a wave of pain.” He shook his head, and some of the color returned to his face. “The physicians told me it’s normal, with the potions speeding the knitting of my bones. I keep getting this horrid swarming sensation, like I can feel the healing happening—which you would think would be pleasant, but it’s really not.”

  I winced in sympathy. “Let’s go back to the Mews and get you some rest. Besides,” I winked at Istrella, “I hear there’s a party there.”

  The Mews didn’t look as if it were hosting a party.

  As our boat glided up to the dock through the moon-painted lagoon water, its hulking, jagged shape loomed black above us. I’d never seen it with so few lights at night. But the chilly radiance of luminaries gleamed from the high, narrow windows of the dining hall, so perhaps everyone was gathered together there in celebration.

  Still, our laughing conversation fell silent as the oarsman brought our overloaded boat to bump gently against the pilings. I could tell by the gleam of white at the edges of everyone’s eyes as we climbed out that I wasn’t the only one feeling uneasy.

  Marcello frowned at the great arch of the Mews gates. “Where are the guards?”

  He was right. I’d never seen the doors without at least a handful of alert soldiers stationed before them, but tonight they were gone. The rows of piers bobbed with the usual complement of boats of all shapes and sizes, but there was not a single person in sight.

  “That’s strange,” Terika said, drawing closer to Zaira.

  “It’s not just strange. It should never happen.” Marcello strode toward the gate with the air of someone ready to hand down discipline.

  Zaira and I exchanged a meaningful glance and followed after him. There were more reasons than laziness or bad planning for the guards to be missing. Terika followed, moving with a wary alertness that reminded me she had been raised as a soldier; Istrella alone seemed oblivious, and came along humming quietly, her eyes already drifting up toward her tower.

  The outer doors stood open, as they did during the day when traffic was heavy. I kept my hand on my flare locket as the yawning dark mouth stretched over us, ready to swallow us into the Mews.

  “This isn’t right,” Terika breathed. “This wasn’t the plan.”

  “Plan?” I asked sharply.

  “For the party. They were going to meet us at the gate when we got back. They might have had another idea, I suppose, but…” She trailed off and shook her head.

  “This doesn’t feel like walking into a party,” I agreed, my voice nearly a whisper.

  Zaira grunted agreement. “This feels like walking into a trap.”

  Marcello’s stern pace didn’t slow, and we passed through the dark gullet of the gate and into the cavernous Mews entry hall. The ceiling with its frescoes of Falcon military victories was utterly lost in darkness. Our footsteps echoed off the marble walls.

  Then another set of steps approached, pattering quickly, and a young soldier in Raverran blue hurried into the hall. He froze when he saw us.

  “Oh!” He saluted hastily. “Captain Verdi! You’re back.”

  “I am,” Marcello said, sounding dangerous despite the sling binding his arm against his chest as he advanced on the soldier. “Why are there no guards on the doors? Where is the officer who should be in charge of the gate?”

  “Ah…” The soldier glanced around wildly, as if hoping someone might come to his aid. Then his face twisted in apparent anguish. “Oh, Hells. I’m sorry about this, Captain.”

  He drew a pistol and pointed it straight at Marcello’s chest. “You shouldn’t have come home.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The moment froze in crystalline clarity, precise and fragile as a skin of paper-thin ice. Tiny details burned agonizingly into my senses, even as I lost precious grains of falling time to sucking in a sharp, shocked breath. The pink wetness of the soldier’s eyes, as if he’d been crying. The veins standing out in his hand as he fought against the compulsion to pull the trigger. The small reddish stain on his cuff, of wine or blood. The surprise on Marcello’s face twisting into anguish as he realized what must have happened. All of this tipped toward disaster, and I knew what had to happen next—the bright flash and stink of gunpowder, the cry of pain—but I couldn’t move quickly enough, couldn’t shake off the half second’s paralysis of shock that was more than enough to make the difference between life and death.

  But Marcello, thank the Graces, reacted faster. Before the soldier could pull back the hammer, he lunged in and grabbed his wrist, forcing the gun down to point at the floor. In the same motion, he slammed his good shoulder into the young man, shoving him up against a marble column.

  My own time unfroze, and I rushed in to help, the copious skirts of the gown I’d worn to the Assembly vote flowing around me. I wrested the pistol from the guard’s sweat-slick hand and flung it away, while Zaira and Terika pounced on him and twisted his arms behind him. Istrella stayed back, staring with wide eyes, her hands over her mouth, as the four of us immobilized the squirming, straining, trembling wreck of a soldier.

  The scuffle was not quiet, with sharp shouts and thuds and grunts, and I expected reinforcements to arrive for one side or another. But no one came.

  “Where is everyone?” Marcello demanded, his voice rough with emotion. He raised his own pistol to point its trembling barrel at the young man’s face while Zaira and Terika held him still. “What’s going on?”

  The soldier’s eyes stretched wide and frightened. “Don’t kill me, Captain! I didn’t want to do it! None of us did!”

  “Do what?” Terika asked tautly.

  “Ruven’s potion,” I breathed. “He’s controlled.” And if one door guard was suborned and the rest missing, that was an ominous sign indeed of what might have befallen the rest of the Mews.

  At that moment, an orange light flooded the entrance hall. Around every window and the great arched doors, runes blazed to life, flaring with power.

  “The emergency wards!” Istrella flipped down her artifice glasses over her eyes and stared up at the runes avidly. “I’ve never seen them activated before.”

  Marcello swore. The soldier’s face went pale; he looked deeply, profoundly afraid.

  “What does that mean?” Zaira asked warily.

  “It means,” Marcello said, “no one can get in or out.”

  “It means they’re starting,” the guard whispered, looking as if he might be ill.

  “Starting what?” Sweat beaded on Marcello’s brow; I could only imagine how much the scuffle must have hurt his broken ribs and shoulder.

  But the soldier only shook his head, lips pressed tight, his eyes desperate and pleading.

  “Are there others who are controlled as well?” I asked sharply. “Where are all the Falcons and Falconers?”

  “I can’t tell you anything,” he whispered miserably. “But please, hurry, you’ve got to stop them.”

  “This must be Ruven’s plan. The one he killed Ignazio to keep us from learning.” Dread uncoiled in my belly. Now we were right in the middle of it, and we still knew nothing. “He’s targeting the Mews.”

  The soldier pulled against Zaira and Terika’s grip. He drew in a breath, as if he would shout for help, and Zaira stuffed a fist into his mouth to stop him.

  “Let’s stick him in a closet or something, shall we?” she growled. “And let’s get the Hells out of here. This room is too exposed.”

  We locked the struggling soldier in a guardroom and followed Marcello up a dim stone stairwell to a second-floor clerk’s office, to get out of the exposed entrance hall. The office had windows looking down into the Mews’ expansive courtyard garden, and we clustered around them, peering down at the deserted lawn. Only a few of the hundreds of windows surrounding the courtyard showed light, but the wards blazed orange around every door and window, turning the fami
liar lines of the buildings sinister and strange. An eerie silence smothered the place. The wind rustling through dry branches in the garden below was the only sound.

  “This is like a nightmare,” Terika breathed, her eyes wide.

  “All the tiny little Falcon brats had better be all right,” Zaira muttered. I thought of Aleki with a pang of deep, searing anguish. Whatever had happened here to plunge the Mews into this silent, ominous darkness, I prayed to the Graces that he and the other children were safe.

  “That soldier talked about others, and he was about to call for help,” I said slowly. “He wouldn’t have done that if he was worried about getting caught. There’s a good chance Ruven controls the Mews right now.”

  “That can’t be true.” Marcello’s denial held a ragged edge of desperation. “We’ve been watching so closely for any sign of Ruven’s potion. Maybe one or two people might have slipped through, but not dozens or hundreds. And that’s what it would take to seize control of the Mews within a few hours. They could still all just be gathered together for the party, or…” He trailed off, staring miserably at the lines of orange light burning around each window, well aware that the lack of commotion over the activation of the wards told a different story.

  “The party,” Istrella said suddenly. She was staring at the dining hall windows, her artifice glasses turning her eyes to round silvery disks in the reflected moonlight. “When we left, they were putting out the food and drink, remember? And everyone in the castle who wasn’t on duty was there.”

  Terika groaned and put a hand to her forehead. “That’s right. Someone had broken a few forty-year-old bottles of Loreician white out of the cellars, and they were about to have a toast to the new law. And to think I was sad to miss it.”

  My stomach flopped over. A toast. Most of the Mews drinking tainted wine at the same exact moment. “That would do it.” Ruven couldn’t have known this would happen; he must have planted a spy here, controlled or otherwise, and the spy had seen the opportunity.

  “So we have to assume the entire Mews is under Ruven’s control.” Marcello put his back to the wall and slid down it, looking as if he might faint.

  I closed my eyes. This was worse than my most dire nightmare scenario. The Mews lay at the heart of the Serene Empire; no enemy was ever supposed to make it this far in the first place. If they did, the mighty Imperial Navy would stop them, and if that somehow failed, the Falcons themselves were more than powerful enough to destroy any army that came against the Mews. It had the best wards in the world, and other magical defenses I could only guess at. No one seriously considered the Mews vulnerable.

  But now all that power was turned against us.

  “So what about the secret protocols you have in place to kill us all if we rebel?” Zaira asked, cynicism bleeding from her every word. “Don’t tell me you don’t have them.”

  Everyone looked at Marcello.

  He winced. “The builders of the Mews did take steps in case of a Falcon uprising. But much as I won’t blame you if you don’t believe me, they’re not actually designed to kill you all.”

  “No, I suppose the Falcons are too valuable.” Zaira snorted. “So much the better. What have you got?”

  Istrella pointed to the runes that ringed the windows, still faintly glowing orange. “It’s a lovely piece of work, actually. They wove additional capabilities into the wards. It’s so subtle that it took me years of staring at them to figure it out. There’s a thread you can activate to put everyone in the Mews to sleep.”

  “Or everyone in a particular section of it,” Marcello agreed, but no spark of hope lit his weary face. “But if they’ve activated the wards, that means they’ve seized the colonel’s office, which is where all the controls are. They could knock us out, if they knew we were here, but we’d have to take Colonel Vasante’s office back to do it to them.”

  “Or the doge can do it,” Istrella added.

  Marcello stiffened. “What?”

  “Of course he can,” Zaira said dryly.

  Istrella shrugged, turning her gleaming spectacles on her brother. “Didn’t they tell you? The Master Artificer told me, when he was teaching me about the wards. The doge can also put the whole Mews to sleep from the Imperial Palace.”

  It was a strange feeling, being so intensely grateful to hear such a sinister piece of news. “Then we just need to get to the courier lamps, and send a message to the doge.”

  “There’s one problem with that,” Zaira said, jerking her head toward the window. “They’re getting organized.”

  A large group of soldiers, Falcons, and Falconers had entered the courtyard from the dining hall. They spread out in twos and threes, moving to take up guard positions by certain doors: the ones leading to the entrance hall, the armory, the alchemy and artifice workshops, and the courier lamps. The moonlight caught on the faces of a Falcon and Falconer pair walking past, and they looked absolutely miserable.

  “At least they’re alive,” Terika murmured. “No one looks hurt.”

  Then a rustling noise came from a bush someone more skilled than I could have hit with a rock from our window. A little girl perhaps ten years old bolted from it, hair flying, a jess gleaming on her wrist.

  “Grace of Mercy,” I whispered. “No, no, stay hidden.”

  A few curses sprang up from the people guarding the courtyard, and a cry of “Run!” immediately contradicted someone else’s “Stay down!” A handful of guards broke off and ran after her, closing quickly from multiple angles.

  Marcello gripped the windowsill. “We have to help her.”

  “How?” Terika asked, her voice breaking.

  I clutched my flare locket, desperately trying to think of some way we could distract the guards and let the girl escape. But a flash of light would only give away our location. I had never felt so utterly helpless.

  A Falconer tackled the girl to the ground, rolling to take the impact on her own shoulders, cradling the girl protectively against her chest. The girl kicked and hit, wailing, but the Falconer kept her arms wrapped tightly around her, saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over. Her Falcon helped her up, and the two of them started carrying the squirming girl toward the dining hall, apologizing the whole way. A sick feeling settled in my stomach.

  “They’re going to give her the potion.” Terika shuddered. “I take back what I said before. This is worse than a nightmare.”

  “The courier lamps,” I said firmly. “We’ll just have to deal with anyone who tries to stop us, without hurting them.”

  Zaira put her fists on her hips. “And how will we do that? We have a fire warlock, three noncombatants, and Captain Armless here with a sword and pistol. We can either flail at people ineffectively or murder them.”

  “My darling, you should know better than to underestimate an alchemist,” Teirka said sweetly, and drew a small glass bottle from her belt purse.

  “Sleep potion?” I asked, hope piercing the cloud of dread that had settled over me. A drop in a drink would be enough to knock anyone out, which wasn’t much use to us now—but if she shattered that whole bottle, the fumes would be enough to put anyone who breathed a lungful in close quarters to sleep.

  “After our adventures in Vaskandar, I carry some around with me, just in case.” Terika shook the bottle gently. “I only have three of these on me, though.”

  “It’s certainly better than nothing,” I said. “And I have a couple of artifice rings Istrella gave me that might temporarily stop an attacker.”

  “I have so many useful things in my tower,” Istrella sighed. “But it’s on the other side of the castle.”

  “I think we’d better hurry straight to the courier lamps.” I turned away from the window, taking in my friends’ grim, shadowed faces in the harsh orange light of the wards. “Let’s go.”

  We climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, hoping there might be fewer guards on a higher level with no strategically important points to protect, and started making our way thr
ough the dark corridors in the direction of the courier lamp tower. This level held mostly the living quarters of common soldiers, interspersed with the occasional storeroom. Stark in their contrast to the more lavish quarters of the Falcons, the simple whitewashed hallways had no luminaries, and no one had lit the lamps. The only light came from the infrequent narrow windows looking down into the courtyard, and the vivid glare of the runes surrounding them.

  In the black spaces between the windows, it was hard not to think of terrible things. Of what might have happened to people I cared about, or what Ruven might be planning to do with the Mews in his power, or how little chance we had of stopping him. Most terrifying of all was the thought that as soon as he was certain he had every Falcon under his control, he might put them all in boats and make them leave the Mews, at which point we’d have no way to stop them at all.

  A bitter wind had picked up outside, and it howled tunefully across the window slits, as if the Mews were now populated by ghosts. Istrella shivered at one particularly loud gust, and I patted her shoulder.

  Then an awful thought struck me. The wind.

  I dashed to the nearest window, bumping Terika in passing, who let out a startled squeak. The bare trees below swayed, even in the sheltered courtyard; the banners on the roof snapped taut, edges quivering frantically. Clouds scudded across the moon, plunging the castle into light, then shadow, then light again, with alarming rapidity.

  “What is it, Amalia?” Marcello asked, coming to my side to peer out into the night.

  I scanned the rooftops and balconies, my lip caught between my teeth. It didn’t take long to find what I most feared to see.

  A lone, slim figure stood atop a watchtower halfway across the Mews, the moon gleaming in his pale hair. He lifted his arms to the sky, back arched, coat flying on the wind.

  Marcello saw him, too, and let out a soft curse.

  The others came and clustered around the window; Istrella strained on tiptoe to see. “What? What is it?”