by K A Dowling
The Forbidden City
The Forbidden City
Book Two of Rogue Elegance
K A Dowling
© 2017 K A Dowling
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 9780692943564
ISBN-10: 0692943560
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017913587
Kelly Dowling, Sharon, MA
For my mom, who has always liked what I’ve written, even when it wasn’t very good.
Harvest Cycle 1511
Summer
Day one
The Rebellion is an old, creaking beast—a fortress of groaning wood, holding stalwart against the buffeting waves. She is a beast, and I am in her belly. My stomach is sick. My bones are rattling in this endless chill.
But it is good to be free. It is good to be free of her ghost. Every secret, shaded corner of Chancey mocked me with the breath on her lips, the shadow of death upon her porcelain face.
The task that has been entrusted to me weighs heavily upon my heart. The golden key is an anchor in my pocket, keeping me awake—aware. My spirit is a battlefield, and I—I am hungry for a ceasefire; my soul yearns for tranquility.
I will find it here, on this journey west.
Or I will die trying.
Eliot Roberts
Curse of King Lionus Wolham
The footsteps of the ancients lead to find
The blood-wealth of the blessed Saynti’s kind
Yet if ye seek what lies beyond the blood red stone
A treasure beyond measure that is not your own,
You’ll find those ancient footsteps are erased,
For dead men’s footsteps in the sand cannot be traced.
Harvest Cycle 1525
Summer
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: The Westerlies
CHAPTER 2: Chancey
CHAPTER 3: The Forbidden City
CHAPTER 4: The Forbidden City
CHAPTER 5: Chancey
CHAPTER 6: Caros
CHAPTER 7: Caros
CHAPTER 8: Chancey
CHAPTER 9: Chancey
CHAPTER 10: The Forbidden City
CHAPTER 11: The Rebellion
CHAPTER 12: Chancey
CHAPTER 13: The Forbidden City
CHAPTER 14: The Rebellion
CHAPTER 15: The Forbidden City
CHAPTER 16: Eisle of Udire
CHAPTER 17: Eisle of Udire
CHAPTER 18: The Great Forest
CHAPTER 19: Eisle of Udire
CHAPTER 20: Chancey
CHAPTER 21: Eisle of Udire
CHAPTER 22: Chancey
CHAPTER 23: Chancey
CHAPTER 24: Chancey
CHAPTER 25: The Rebellion
CHAPTER 26: Chancey
CHAPTER 27: Chancey
CHAPTER 28: Chancey
CHAPTER 29: The Rebellion
CHAPTER 30: Chancey
CHAPTER 31: Caira
CHAPTER 32: The Forbidden City
CHAPTER 33: Caira
CHAPTER 34: Chancey
CHAPTER 35: Caira
CHAPTER 36: Caira
CHAPTER 37: The Forbidden City
CHAPTER 38: Caira
CHAPTER 39: The Rebellion
CHAPTER 40: The Rebellion
CHAPTER 41: The Forbidden City
CHAPTER 42: Chancey
CHAPTER 43: The Rebellion
CHAPTER 44: The Rebellion
CHAPTER 45: The Forbidden City
CHAPTER 46: The Rebellion
CHAPTER 47: The Rebellion
CHAPTER 48: Chancey
CHAPTER 49: The Forbidden City
Chancey: Harvest Cycle 1525
Acknowledgements
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
The Westerlies
In a rowdy, run-down tavern somewhere along the eastern coast of the Westerlies, Captain Alexander Mathew slumps facedown upon the bar. He doesn’t care that his last precious coppers have been lost in a bad hand of cards. He doesn’t care that he should have stopped drinking three pints of rum ago. He doesn’t even care that his right cheek, thick with several days’ worth of scruff, is now resting in a puddle of ale.
“It’s hopeless,” he mumbles.
“What’s hopeless?” asks a rather unexpected voice. Unexpected because, on the one hand, he had been talking to himself. On the other hand, the voice belonged to a woman who could not have—should not have—been anywhere near dry land.
A sideways face appears in his field of view. For a moment, Alexander studies the pointed nose and the long, narrow lips without immediately recognizing the woman to whom the features belong. Tousled black ringlets escape from the leather binding that holds them, springing errantly around an angular jaw and tangling in the golden hoops that hang from the woman’s ears. Two catlike green eyes blink at him in a semblance of concern.
Right, he remembers. The Rogue. The gypsy. The stowaway. The thorn in his backside. The damned nuisance that he had picked up back on Chancey months ago, after blindly agreeing to help rescue her from the clutches of Rowland Stoward’s golden thugs.
The woman he specifically instructed to stay on the ship.
He tries and fails to summon up the energy to be furious. His anger fizzled out several drinks, several coppers, and several broken glasses ago.
“What’s hopeless?” Emerala the Rogue repeats. He stares up at her blankly; beginning to realize that it is not her face that is sideways, but rather, him.
“Life,” he slurs.
“Life,” she echoes, one thick black eyebrow arching dubiously.
“My life, to be specific.”
Emerala frowns. “How terribly morose.”
“You don’t seem that sorry for me,” Alexander observes.
“I’m not. I’m bored. You left me on the ship. Again.”
“And you’ve ignored my orders,” Alexander points out. “Again.”
Emerala drops down onto the stool next to him, studying the gloomy surroundings of the tavern as she tries and fails to straighten out the fabric of her ruffled taupe gown. Leaning backwards, she snatches a pint out of the unfurling grasp of an unconscious drunkard to her left, sniffling at the contents before taking a sip. A look of disgust passes across her pointed, olive features and she replaces the pint on the bar.
“Is this part of your all-important mission?” she asks, studying the peeling molding on the ceiling through narrowed eyes. “Getting drunk off of cheap rum and losing all your money in cards?”
“You saw that, did you?”
Emerala glowers at him and says nothing. He sighs.
“I’m following a lead.” He pauses and adds, “Or, I was. It was a dead end. They’ve all been dead ends.”
“What exactly are you looking for?”
“Not what,” Alexander says, sitting up and pawing at his dripping face with his sleeve. “Who.”
Emerala rolls her eyes, procuring a handkerchief from beneath her tightly laced corset and leaning forward to dab the sticking ale off of his cheek. He sits slumped upon his stool and allows her to dry his face, his stomach beginning to feel more than a little bit ill.
“Who are you looking for, then?” she asks, her breath tickling his nose.
“If you must know, I’m looking for a mapmaker.”
Emerala pauses, drawing back upon her stool to get a better look at his face. “You need a map made?” she asks. “Don’t you already have one in your quarters that you’ve been studying day and night?”
“That map is written in a dead language. I can’t make heads or tails of it. Look,” he starts, an aura beginning to swi
m at the edge of his vision. “My head is killing me. I just want—”
“So you need to find a mapmaker to translate the map for you? That doesn’t seem that hard.” Emerala hops off the stool. “But we’re not going to find one in the middle of the night, and we’re most certainly not going to find one in the bottom of a pint glass. So let’s find a place to sober you up, and we’ll go tomorrow.”
“Slow down,” Alexander says, grabbing her wrist and drawing her back to him. He pulls at her harder than he’d meant to, and she collides into his chest, nearly knocking him off the stool. “Ouch. It’s not that easy. I don’t need any old mapmaker. I need Charles Argot.”
Emerala frowns up at him as she draws back, prying her wrist free of his grasp. “I haven’t the faintest idea who Charles Argot is.”
Alexander groans. He tries to remember when Emerala arrived at the bar, or how he ended up in this conversation. Everything before this moment seems like a disjointed collection of lights and sound. “Nor did I. Not until recently. Any pirate worth their salt has heard of him, as the Hawk keeps reminding me.”
“And he can decipher your map?”
Alexander frowns up at her, pressing one throbbing eye closed. “You’re asking a lot of questions, and I’ve really resigned myself to spending the rest of my night ruminating in my failures. Preferably alone.”
“Maybe I’d be less invasive if you hadn’t left me alone on the ship all day while you gambled away your belongings,” Emerala suggests.
“I told you, I was following a lead.”
Emerala flicks at an invisible speck of dust on her forearm, looking bored. “Yes, so you’ve said. Seems like you’ve been making impressive work of your search.”
Alexander grimaces. “You’re mocking me.”
“Drunks are always easy to mock.”
“It isn’t nice.”
They are interrupted, then, by a phlegmy hem-hem. Alexander follows Emerala’s eyes as she turns toward the newcomer to the conversation. A few feet away from them teeters a rotund man with a ring of unkempt, greying hair around his temples. His sagging cheeks and overlarge nose are ruddy with drink. He hiccoughs loudly, brandishing a small slip of parchment in Alexander’s direction.
“I was told to give this to you,” he says, and hiccoughs again.
“What is it?” Alexander demands.
“Don’t know,” says the stranger, pawing at his scraggly, grey beard as Emerala takes the parchment from him. Alexander leans forward, plucking the paper out from between her fingers before she can so much as protest.
“Who gave it to you?”
“Don’t know.”
“You don’t know much, do you?” Emerala asks, crossing her arms across her chest. The man hiccoughs in response, teetering dangerously where he stands.
“He’s drunk, Emerala,” Alexander says distractedly. He feels himself sobering quickly as he fumbles with the folded bit of parchment.
“So are you.”
Alexander glances up at the stranger, now scratching the top of his head as he glances around at his surroundings with no clear sign of recognition in his glassy eyes.
“I’m not nearly that bad,” he argues.
“Maybe not in terms of intoxication,” Emerala assents, wrinkling her nose. “But certainly in odor.”
Across from them, the stranger seems to have resigned himself to his current circumstance. “Well,” he says cheerfully. “Good day to you.”
“It’s the middle of the night,” Emerala counters, taking a step back as the man’s eyes roll back into his head and he plummets to the floor.
“That’ll hurt in the morning,” Alexander remarks, his attention returning to the parchment in his grasp. Five words march across the page in cramped, crooked penmanship. The letters are transcribed in blood, the macabre ink still wet. Alexander’s heart rises to his throat, all traces of inebriation falling away from him as adrenaline creeps into its place.
Traitors are sent to Caros.
“What does it say?” Emerala demands, snatching the parchment out from his hand. He allows her to take it, reaching across his stool for his hat, still resting in a sticking puddle of ale. Emerala’s green eyes scour the parchment, not comprehending.
“What does this mean?”
“It means my lead wasn’t as dead as I’d thought it was,” Alexander says, grinning. He heads off across the bar, his headache abating. Emerala trails in his wake, her unruly, black curls bouncing with each step she takes.
“Where are you going?”
For once, her ceaseless onslaught of questions fails to irritate him. Excitement swells in his chest—anticipation crowds his thoughts. Month after month spent searching fruitlessly for the infamous old mapmaker and now he finally has a solid lead.
“I need to gather the rest of the crew. We leave for Caros at first light,” he says, and rams his cap back on his head.
CHAPTER 2
Chancey
The man races down the winding path as fast as his feet can carry him, stumbling as he loses his footing upon the sticking mud underfoot. His untamed hair blows back from his face. His skin pulls taut across the lines of his skull, causing him to appear skeletal beneath the lingering fingers of night that spill across the earth.
“Halt,” James Byron cries, not for the first time. His voice rings out across the dew-laden grass. Several birds take flight from a nearby tree. The branches spring upward in their wake, their fluttering green leaves shaking loose the grip of night as the rising sun breaks across their unfurling veins.
Up ahead, the man runs faster. James stifles a sigh, his brows furrowing low over his eyes. He picks up his pace, following behind the man as he makes his way through a sparse copse of tangled trees. The mud beneath James’s boots is heavy and damp, scarred with the shallow, indistinguishable grooves left by both hooves and wagons. The sleeping world before him is cloaked in muted grey. Only a minute tinge of gold smolders faintly upon the eastern horizon, dying the purple sky overhead an uncertain shade of blue.
There’s no good reason for James to be awake at such a colorless hour—no good reason for him to be miles from the city walls, chasing down a stranger as he ducks in and out of the shadows of the trees.
No reason at all, and yet here he is all the same. He has been unable to sleep. His nights as of late have been frequented by unrest—his sleep interspersed with lurid, fleeting fragments of dreams. His subconscious, like the whip of some relentless master, is determined to drive him into remaining constantly awake.
He takes a deep breath, filling his lungs with air.
“Halt,” he cries again. “Halt in the name of His Majesty, the King!”
His words barrel into the running man. The figure stumbles and slows upon the path up ahead. He turns on his heels, cupping his hands to his mouth.
“Bugger the king!”
James inhales deeply through his nose, scowling as the air leaks out from between his lips. He wishes, not for the first time—and certainly not for the last time—that he had stayed in bed. He can feel the heat of the rising, summer sun tickling the back of his neck.
A thought occurs to him, suddenly, as he idles alone upon the disfigured path, staring at the stumbling figure up ahead.
How can two months have gone by, and nothing?
He starts off down the path at a brisk jog, squinting up at the steadily widening expanse of gold that leaks across the sky like spilt ink. Two months have passed since the Cairan people disappeared—two months have passed since the streets went silent—and still the unsatisfied king demands that his Golden Guards search the city.
Rowland Stoward is desperate, they all know, to find Emerala the Rogue—to have her once again within his grasp. And yet she, like the others, has disappeared into the wind. James did not sign up for a life of picking drunkards off the street and settling disputes between rivaling blacksmiths, and yet those are the tasks with which his shifts have been filled as of late.
Still, the myster
y remains.
How can an entire race of people disappear without a trace?
The question that plagued James for the past few months blazes through his mind, searing the backs of his eyes with the burning desire for some sort of answer—any answer.
The Chancians did not take the sudden absences quietly. Gossip sprung up in taverns and bakeries immediately following the strange disappearance. The dwindling months of spring were laden with false whispers about the Cairan whereabouts. The paltry gossip followed James like a hound all throughout the planting season. He could not escape them, not even in his own mind—not even as the rainy spring gave way to the sticking heat of summer.
He happened to overhear two women discussing the possibility that the Cairans had merely managed to blend successfully into the crowds of commoners around them. James immediately dismissed the rumor as nothing but the trivial gossip of bored housewives. There were far too many gypsies—and each of them well known among their neighbors—to have dissolved so completely and seamlessly into Chancian society.
And yet for weeks James peered into the faces of everyone he passed on the street in the vain hope of finding some spark of recognition. He was looking for her, he knew—was looking for the blue eyed woman he had kissed beneath the paltry moonlight on that fateful night—and yet to admit that to himself would have been an entirely different type of treason.
No. He pulls himself back to the present, batting away the thoughts of the Cairan woman. The trees around him are ablaze with golden sunlight. Heat creeps into his skin, burning his forearms through the heavy cotton of his uniform. James has always been the man with the answers. He does not enjoy puzzles, and, to be sure, he is not enjoying this one.
His eyes narrow as he again draws to a stop. He is closing the space between himself and the racing man—drawing nearer as the emaciated figure continues to stumble across the earth. They are approaching the western cliffs of Chancey at an alarming speed.
It’s high tide; James can hear the muted roar of the waves below as they pummel against the sheer face of the cliffs. A jolt of adrenaline surges through his body as he realizes what the man is about to do. He draws his pistol from the holster at his waist.
