But Daavn darted ahead of the goblin and the bugbear. He walked just behind Tariic and Geth, strutting and waving as if he had taken the crown himself. Geth looked ahead once more, then, as they reached the doors, called back to the warlord of the Marhaan. “Daavn, go before us and announce the lhesh’s approach!”
Those lining the aisle heard. Makka and Pradoor heard. Daavn’s face tightened in suspicion. Tariic turned to look at his ambitious friend—and Geth twisted around, reaching between himself and the new lhesh to grab a fistful of fur and drag the trailing edge of the long tiger skin cloak forward.
It was a ridiculous, desperate trick, but it worked. The heavy cloak tangled between Tariic’s legs. Caught off guard and off balance, he stumbled. His raised arm came down, his grip eased momentarily, and Geth wrenched his hand free. Leaping ahead of the hobgoblin, he turned back and said loudly, “No? I’ll do it myself!”
He whirled again, ducking between the startled guards. The antechamber to the throne room flashed past him, then a corridor, then he was bounding up stairs two at a time, racing for his chamber like a fox before hounds.
The moment that Tariic slid the false rod out of Geth’s grasp, Ashi narrowed her eyes, focused her concentration, and drew on the power of her dragonmark. Warmth flashed through the colorful lines that patterned her body and a sharp clarity wrapped around her. The mark had protected her from the influence of the tainted dragon Dah’mir, the alien madness of one of the terrible daelkyr, and the commanding power of the true Rod of Kings—the magic Tenquis had woven into the false rod didn’t have a chance. She could even have fought it off on her own, but she needed all of her wits about her.
Suspicion made a hard lump in her belly. Something was very wrong. Geth’s eyes had a startled, hunted look to them as Tariic pulled him up to the edge of the dais. And when Razu proclaimed Tariic as the new lhesh, the shifter should have looked triumphant—but he didn’t. Protected by the power of her mark, Ashi knew she was probably the only one to notice that for all of Tariic’s apparent goodwill and pleasure, he gripped Geth’s hand with the strength of someone holding a prisoner.
She turned and grasped Vounn’s shoulder, drawing on her dragonmark once more, but this time channeling its protection into her mentor. Heat like a fever flashed on her skin, then Vounn blinked and looked at her, the influence of the false rod banished. “Ashi, what—?”
“Don’t trust Tariic,” Ashi said. “Whatever happens, don’t trust him.” She released Vounn and turned away.
The lhesh had come down from the dais and was passing through the cheering crowd with Geth at his side. The shifter’s gaze was sharper now. His free arm rose and he started to wave along with Tariic. What was he doing? Ashi cursed under her breath and tried to push forward. The crowd resisted. She cursed again and wished that she were the size of a gnome—Midian could have slid through easily. Hopefully he had seen things as she had.
Makka passed along the aisle with Pradoor on his shoulder and she crouched down to avoid being seen. Through a gap among arms and elbows, Ashi watched her grandfather’s sword swing at the bugbear’s side. Her hands clenched and she forced her eyes away. So close to the stolen weapon and yet she couldn’t risk stealing it back. Not here. Not now.
When she looked up again, Tariic and Geth had reached the throne room doors. She was losing them! She shoved the nearest hobgoblin hard and his gaze finally shifted from Tariic. “Watch yourself, taat!” he snapped at her.
“Yes, sorry,” she said, pushing past him to the next obstacle in her way. “My fault. Excuse me—”
A commotion interrupted her and she looked up just in time to see Tariic batting aside his cloak. She heard Geth’s voice over the noise of the pipes, drums, and crowd. “No? I’ll do it myself.”
Past Tariic, she caught a glimpse of the shifter, free of the lhesh’s grasp, breaking past the guards that stood outside the throne room. Tariic did not look pleased. He summoned Daavn to his side with a sharp gesture and spoke to him in tones that did not carry. Daavn nodded and slipped ahead of Tariic, pointing to four guards who fell in behind him. Tariic turned back to the crowd in the throne room and waved the rod, raising another cheer, then resumed his progress as if nothing was wrong.
Ashi paused, uncertain of what to do. Try and find Geth or catch up to Tariic and watch him? Either option would be slow—
The hobgoblin she had shoved gave her a push. “Don’t just stand there!”
She glared at him, lips peeling back from her teeth in a snarl—then looked past him and realized that the whole crowd was moving, following Tariic out of the throne room. She could ride the current out.
Or she could swim against the stream. Snarl turning to a fierce smile, Ashi thrust herself against the moving crowd, forcing hobgoblins aside. The progress of the crowd toward the throne room doors was a slow shuffle, but in just a few moments she had reached the thin edge of the mass and vaulted onto the dais. With no one to block her way, she dashed across the dais to the door and the small room on its other side, and then into the corridor beyond.
Where had Geth gone? He wasn’t one to run from a fight, which, Ashi guessed, meant that he was running to something—his chamber and the rod. There would be no following him through the crowded antechamber outside the throne room, but there was always more than one way through Khaar Mbar’ost.
She started running.
Flight after flight of stairs passed under Geth’s feet. He had darted past three floors of the fortress before the sounds of pursuit echoed after him. He recognized Daavn’s voice calling more guards to the chase. He smiled without humor. A shifter was still faster than a hobgoblin. Thankfully, he met no one coming down the stairs—anyone who was of importance in Khaar Mbar’ost had been at the coronation and anyone who wasn’t would either be at work preparing for the feast to follow or in the streets celebrating. Another floor passed and another. His breath rasped in his lungs but he drove on. Another floor, then only one more to go. His chamber and the rod were close. Did he have time to grab a pack? Maybe. He dragged the keys to the locked chest up from beneath his shirt—
—and came to a halt so abrupt he almost fell over. A hobgoblin guard wearing the red corded armband of Khaar Mbar’ost sprawled across the stairs. Blood ran in the thin streams down the stone steps.
Geth sucked air between his teeth and moved closer, quick but cautious. The guard was dead, no doubt about it. The blood poured from a slit throat and, strangely, slashed legs. He’d been hamstrung, his legs rendered useless. He would have been kneeling or fallen when his throat was slashed.
There were no smears or handprints or any other signs to indicate that anyone else had already seen the corpse. He was the first. Stepping around the dripping blood, Geth touched his fingers to the body. It was still almost as warm as life. Death had come recently. The hair on his arms and the back of his neck rose. Who would have done this? And why?
There was a yelp and a crash as one of his pursuers missed a step. Geth’s head snapped around and a growl forced its way out of him. Every moment he spent standing still was a moment in which pursuit grew closer. He glanced once more at the nameless guard, and bounded past.
He moved more slowly, and where the central corridor of his floor opened off of the stairs, he stopped and peered around the corner before moving on. Whoever had killed the guard might have gone anywhere in Khaar Mbar’ost, up the stairs or down. But so close to his floor? That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Geth glanced at each door along the corridor as he came to it. Closed tight—except for his. He put his back to the wall. The hard breathing of his race up the stairs became cold and shallow.
The door to his chamber stood ajar. The guards who had stood outside his door since Haruuc’s death were gone—with the Rod of Kings passing to Tariic’s possession, at least in theory, there had been no reason for them to remain. If they had still been on duty, Geth suspected he would have found them on the floor with their throats cut.
From the s
tairwell, sounds of pursuit became sounds of surprise and anger. His pursuers had found the dead body. With their cries as his cover, Geth moved, leaping in front of the door and kicking it wide.
Chetiin froze in the middle of the room. There was a thick tube of stiff leather slung across his back. The chest that contained—had contained—the Rod of Kings lay open, all locks and magical protections defeated, a pair of blacksmith’s tongs and a bloody dagger with a wicked curved blade abandoned beside it.
And Geth froze as well, caught in the doorway as the black-clad goblin’s treachery crashed down on him.
No, he tried to remind himself, it had been another of the shaarat’khesh who’d killed Haruuc. If another goblin had taken Chetiin’s place before, why not again?
His mind told him that. His heart fell back on the betrayal he’d felt after Haruuc’s assassination. Then Chetiin spoke and Geth knew his heart was right.
“Give my regards to Tenquis.”
Only four other people knew that name. Three of them Geth would have trusted with his life. The fourth was Chetiin.
“No,” Geth choked.
The proof of innocence that Chetiin had offered in his story of a second assassin and an attempt on his own life, of blame laid on Midian, shattered like glass on stone. A lie. It had all been an enormous lie, right down to his promise to watch over Ekhaas and Dagii. The shaarat’khesh elder had waited for the one moment that all eyes had been elsewhere to make his final move on the true rod.
Chetiin gave him a smile that seemed almost pitying—then he moved. In one jump, he went from the floor to a chair, and in another from the chair to the windowsill. A thin rope had been secured to a shutter in the same place Geth had secured the blanket he had used to signal the goblin. Chetiin grabbed it and whipped it around his body in a smooth motion. Then, with a last look to Geth, he pushed himself back into space.
“No, you bastard!” screamed Geth. He ran to the window. Chetiin was already halfway down the wall, gliding in long arcs of descent slowed by brief brushes with the wall. A few people in the plaza below looked up and pointed, their attention drawn by Geth’s scream, but most were moving to the fringes of the vast crowd at the front of the fortress. Tariic must have emerged, displaying the false rod even as Chetiin made off with the true.
The word of traitors is written on air.
Rage burst inside Geth. He grabbed for Wrath. One blow would sever the rope and send Chetiin plummeting—
“Stop!”
Wrath half-drawn, Geth whirled around. Daavn and three hobgoblin guards stood across the room with more guards crowding the corridor outside. All of them had their swords out.
Ashi emerged from a flight of narrow stairs onto the floor where Geth had his chamber to the sound of angry cries and running footsteps. She drew her sword and hurried along a side corridor, moving with the practiced silence of a hunter of the Shadow Marches. She had almost reached the main corridor when a scream pushed her back against the wall.
“No, you bastard!”
Geth’s voice. Her breath caught in her throat. She slid along the wall, then peered around the corner into the main hall just in time to see Daavn and three guards push into Geth’s chamber while five more guards crowded around the door.
“Stop!” ordered Daavn from inside the room.
Ashi pulled back and tightened her grip on her sword. Nine to one if Geth was forced to fight Daavn and the guards alone. The odds would be far better if he had some help.
She drew breath and tensed, ready to spring around the corner and charge.
Arms grabbed her, one around her neck with a hand covering her mouth, the other catching the crook of her sword arm and forcing it back. A soft voice rasped in her ear. “Don’t do something stupid.”
She moved on instinct, punching back with her elbow, flinging back her head, and biting down hard on the hand over her mouth. Her assailant avoided her elbow and her head bash with surprising grace and endured her bite with remarkable discipline, even though she tasted blood. “It’s Aruget!” the voice said, pinched with pain. “Aruget!”
The guard forced her around so she could glimpse his face. Ashi blinked, opened her mouth—the hobgoblin guard snatched away a bleeding hand—and snapped, “They’re attacking Geth! Let me go!”
“No, you—”
A loud gasp and a curse of “Maabet!” from Geth’s chamber interrupted him. Ashi’s heard rapid footsteps and another curse, then Daavn’s voice speaking in Goblin. “No, alive! Tariic wants him alive!”
Ashi growled and strained toward the corner in an attempt to see around it again. Aruget’s hold on her loosened. She pulled forward—and something hit her hard across the back of the head. Dark blotches swam before her eyes, then the world turned upside down as Aruget heaved her over his shoulder and trotted with her back to the narrow stairs.
Daavn and the guards spread out around the chamber, more of them squeezing in. Geth sank down into a crouch, Wrath still only half-drawn. Daavn had the advantage of numbers and he had—
Nothing. Not even the Rod of Kings now.
Daavn’s eyes narrowed as he circled closer. “Come quietly, Geth. Tariic just wants to talk to you.”
“Boar’s snout, he does,” Geth said.
Eight guards and the warlord of the Marhaan. Daavn held his sword with a veteran’s ease. Geth had a nasty feeling that even Wrath and his great gauntlet weren’t going to be enough to get him past them. In the close quarters of the chamber, they’d pile on him and the fight would be over. He also had a feeling that any “talk” with Tariic wasn’t something he’d likely survive. He could try and fight his way out—or he could attempt the same route Chetiin had.
Geth slammed Wrath down in his scabbard, spun, and swung himself up to straddle the window sill. Down below, the treacherous goblin had vanished. Geth grabbed the rope, wrapped it once around his gauntleted forearm, then gripped it hard with both hands. One of the guards gasped and Daavn jumped forward, but the warlord was too late. Geth swung both legs over the sill, braced himself for a moment then pushed out and let himself drop.
The thin cord sang with tension as it raced around his gauntlet and the shutter creaked, but both held. His unprotected left hand burned, skin rubbed away by the rope, but when he swung back toward the wall of Khaar Mbar’ost, he’d dropped almost a full floor.
“No, alive!” came Daavn’s voice from above. “Tariic wants him alive!”
Geth looked up to see the flash of light on polished blade as a sword was drawn away from the rope. A chill passed through him—he’d planned the same fate for Chetiin. He started lowering himself as fast as he could, hand under hand under hand. The movement bumped him back and forth against the hard wall of Khaar Mbar’ost. The thin rope swung and lashed below him with every motion. He hooked it with his foot, twisting it around his leg in an effort to keep it steady. The ground approached at a snail’s crawl, those few people who had not deserted the plaza below after Chetiin’s descent staring up at him.
Then the rope jerked with such force that it almost pulled his arm out of his socket. He shouted as pain lanced through his shoulder and chest. His burned hand jumped free of the rope. The grip of his good hand failed. He dropped and the rope screeched as it slid around the metal of his gauntlet—and stopped short with another jerk as the rope twisted around his leg and closed tight on his flesh. For a long, long moment, Geth dangled above the plaza. He shivered uncontrollably, watching the stones of the plaza twenty paces below spin in his vision.
The rope jerked again. With a yelp, he closed his metal-clad fingers on it in a hold tighter than the Keeper’s. His other hand joined it, pain forgotten in fear. He held very still.
And yet the wall in front of his nose was still moving past him—in the wrong direction. Geth craned his head back. Hands were on the rope where it emerged from the window of his chamber. Daavn and the guards were hauling him back up! An armslength of wall slid past in fits and stops, then he felt the pull grow steadier and str
onger. Another guard had joined in.
With eight guards heaving at the rope, it would be like drawing up a fish hooked on a line.
Heart trembling, he kicked at the twist that had saved him, loosening it so that he could descend again. He forced his right hand to open, shake the loop from around his gauntlet, and move below his left, then his left to move below the right. The surface of the rope was stained red where his left hand gripped it. He was moving again—but not for long. Climbing as fast as his shaking body would allow, he was still only barely holding position against the hobgoblins pulling him up. And he was running out of rope. A knot-weighted tail that had dangled no more than the height of a tall man above the plaza was now nearly ten paces up and rising fast.
Geth scanned the walls for windows, but for all that Khaar Mbar’ost might have been a palace at the heart of a busy city, it was still a fortress. Only the upper floors had windows worthy of the name. The lower floors were largely featureless except for narrow slits for light and defense. They offered no hope at all of escape. If he waited for the guards to pull him up higher, maybe he could swing to an upper window and make his way back into—
Shouts from below caught his attention and he looked down again. Two guards had appeared, attracted by the commotion. No. Three guards. One was running off, probably to find support. One of the others was dragging at the crossbow slung across his back. Geth’s heart jumped.
“No!” Daavn shouted from above. “The lhesh wants him alive. Hold your bolt! Hold your bolt!”
Even Geth heard only half the warlord’s words clearly. To the hobgoblins on the ground, he would have been all but unintelligible. The guard with the crossbow planted the nose of the weapon on the ground, held it with a foot, and hauled up on the cord, trying to draw it into position.
Word of Traitors: Legacy of Dhakaan - Book 2 Page 19
