by Debra Dunbar
Letting out a breath, I looked at the twig I held in my hand. At the other end would be the relay, an exact replica of this twig with opposing spell components burned unnoticeably into the end during a complicated incantation. I had no idea how Kirby had managed to do this to his marble, but it was impressive. I ran my finger along the twig and felt nothing. Even to a demon, it appeared to be just a small stick. I hoped the elves hadn't found it and tossed it out into the woods or I'd be in deep shit.
Ly-swiciall.
Unlike the elven buttons, this transportation gave me the same vertigo I got when Gregory moved me from place to place. Blinking to clear my eyes of swirls and stars, I felt myself on my side, laying on a cold, hard surface. As I went to sit up, I smacked my head on something and heard a bump and crash—so much for stealth.
The room swam into view. I'd transported myself to a hallway, underneath a table. The crash was some kind of pottery item that now lay in tiny pieces all over a shiny marble floor. Frantic, I looked around for somewhere to hide, diving through the nearest door as I heard footsteps from the hall.
The footsteps quickened. Whoever it was, they must have seen the broken vase, lamp, or whatever the fuck was on the floor. They halted, and I heard a gasp. It must have been one hell of a gasp because I was in a tiny closet-sized room that was stuffed full of hanging fabric things. Draperies? Tapestries? They smelled clean but old, and I was getting hot, wedged in among them.
"Oh no, oh no," a voice cried. "His Lordship will be furious."
Hopefully his lordship would be dead in an hour, so any fury would be short lived.
I heard clinking sounds, and a brushing noise, presumably this servant cleaning up the broken stuff. It better not take long. It would really suck if I was still trapped in a closet, hiding, when Taullian attacked. I'd never be able to find Feille in time. The soft sound of crying reached my ears and I couldn't help myself. I opened the door just a crack and looked out to see a boy, barely ten, on his hands and knees sweeping the broken bits into a piece of cloth. Judging by his naked chest, I assumed it was his shirt. A tear slid down his nose and onto the floor.
"Hey, it's okay. Don't worry." Stupid, I know, but I couldn't help myself from reassuring the poor child.
He jumped, cutting off his scream with a palm to his mouth. "Was it you that broke the urn?" he whispered through his fingers.
He clearly thought me one of the human servants. I was wearing a Wythyn style outfit and was relieved to know I could at least still fool the humans into thinking I was one of them.
"Yes," I whispered, coming out of the closet. "Don't cry. You won't be blamed for it."
"But I will." He shuddered. "Why would you take the blame? You'll be killed."
I thought fast. "I've got a secret. Can you keep a secret?"
He nodded, and I pulled the wand from beneath my pant leg. His eyes grew huge when he saw it, and he began to slowly back away.
"Don't worry. It's not one of those wands." I swept the birch stick in a series of arcs, ending with something that looked like an exclamation mark.
"Bwak."
The boy grinned at my chicken noise then gasped as a spray of white feathers burst from the end of the wand to land squawking on the floor.
"Run and tell the housekeeper that some idiot has let a chicken in and it's trashing this room." He nodded and began to leave. "Wait. Where is his lordship's royal chambers? I'm… a bit lost."
He gave me a puzzled look. "Down that hall, through the third archway. But he's not there. He skipped his devotionals and went to pay a surprise visit to the guards. Well, it was supposed to be a surprise, but everyone knew it was coming."
Fuck! Double fuck! I could hardly assassinate him surrounded by his troops, and now Taullian would face an army alert and ready due to Feille's paranoia. On the other hand, although I didn't know much about elven religion, skipping morning prayers couldn't be a good thing. Hopefully his goddess would turn her smile on some other, more deserving elf today.
The boy raced off. The chicken strutted around, occasionally pecking the marble floor, and I sped down a long hallway, counting archways as I went. My hope now was to find Feille's safe room and lay in wait for him. I hoped my assessment of his character ran true, and that at the first sign of battle, he took off for shelter, leaving his sorcerers and generals to do his dirty work. Otherwise, I would have risked the lives of my entire household for nothing.
I slid as I ran on the marble floors. They were polished to high gloss, golden brown, with cream and black inlaid patterns. The walls served as a backdrop—a lighter brown with faint fleckings of gold. Artificial skylights and windows lit the room, focusing all attention onto the beautiful floors. It was an odd arrangement for an elf to have in his palace. Usually all the attention was directed upward, toward the light, intricate foliage, sculpture, or artwork. This drawing of the eye toward the floor and the encouraged appreciation for the stone below gave me the idea that the designer had been a dwarf. Not what I'd expected of Feille. Perhaps one of his ancestors had commissioned this design, and he'd not had the time or inclination to change it.
It took a while to get to the third archway. This had to have been the longest hallway in all the elven kingdoms. Wondering how close to the breakfast hour we were, I dashed through the archway and down another length of hall—this one more in keeping with elven tastes. Thick vines covered the walls, giving the impression of being in a secret garden. Morning glories of white and blue were open, along with orange trumpet flowers, giving me hope that I still had a few moments until Taullian's attack. The hallway stretched nearly fifty yards, yet when I skidded to a stop at the end, I hadn't seen even one door. Had the little boy led me astray? How could there be such a long hallway with a dead end? There had to be a secret door somewhere. Fucking elves. I had no time for this bullshit.
I was ripping out vines and patting the walls behind them when to my left, an elf materialized from the wall. An illusion. I would have spent half the day looking for the thing if he hadn't appeared. Of course, now that he had appeared, I was totally busted.
"What in the name of the Goddess are you doing?" he barked, striding over to me and grabbing me by the ear.
I squealed like a human and cowered. "Sorry! Sorry! They told me there was a chicken up here, and I needed to get it."
His eyes bugged out. "In the vines? What would a chicken be doing in the vines, or in the palace at all? You stupid, incompetent, worthless human. I'll have your ears removed for this. I'll have you whipped at the stake and left in the sun for two days. I'll have you buried in a hole in the forest."
As a demon, that all sounded mighty fun, but for a human, the threat would be terrifying. Anger surged up inside me, furious that they would do this sort of thing as punishment for such a paltry mistake. I wanted to tear the ribs from this elf one at a time as he screamed in pain, pull chunks of his brain out his nose, tie him in the desert for the sand snakes to slowly devour, but that wouldn't help me kill Feille, and it sure as fuck wouldn't help the humans.
"Sorry! So sorry!" I wailed. The elf drew back a fist to punch me but paused as the sound of frantic squawking and flapping came from behind him. He turned to look down the hall and saw a blur of white feathers being chased by two elves through the doorway.
"By the Lady, what is that doing in here?" he shouted, letting go of my ear and racing down the hallway. I could almost hear his thoughts: Feille would string them all up to find a chicken running around his personal quarters.
I took advantage of the distraction and slipped through the shimmering illusion of vine and flowers that led to Feille's chambers. A lavish greeting room met me—plush couches, waterfalls and fountains with aquatic plants floating in them. A flash from the iridescent scales of brightly colored fish and birdsong from the indoor trees completed the vision. It was an idyllic reproduction of a forest retreat, complete with mossy benches and soft grasses underfoot. I raced around the mini forest, desperately searching for a doorway to t
he private areas and very much aware that I was running out of time.
The sound of alarms echoed through the palace, and I panicked. I'd run out of time. Who knows how many entrances Taullian would have to his safe room. If I didn't find it right now, he'd be behind a dozen salted circles while I was still racing around this damned fake forest.
Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and tried to block out the sound of sirens filling my ears. What would Gregory do? WWGD?
A calm filled my mind, the calm of six billion years. Where would Feille sit in this greeting room? The door would be behind him. The safety of his own quarters in his blind spot. Opening my eyes, I looked around and saw a mossy couch, higher than all the others and covered with purple flowers. Behind the couch was a large oak, gnarled and twisted as it rose toward the ceiling far above. As I reached out to touch the oak, it shimmered before my hand, revealing an opening, and beyond that opening, a room.
I raced through it, the sound of sirens pounding through my head. A reception room connected to a private entertainment area, which had both a wardrobe a bath, and a bedroom led off it. The devotional area was off the bedroom, as well as the saferoom. Bingo.
I halted, my feet inches from the threshold, and looked down. A row of runes shimmered along the gilded trim, encircling the door. Carefully, I backtracked and grabbed a chair, throwing it through the doorway. Fifty arrows thudded into it. Then it caught fire. Thankfully, the runes around the doorway vanished in a puff of smoke, hopefully meaning this was a one-charge booby trap. I peeked my head in the door, tensing just in case more knives came my way. None did, but the whole room lit up in a swirling globe of runes. They hummed, rotating in opposing directions around an ornate throne. Idiot. Some fucking panic room this was. Where was the cooler full of beer? The twelve days of dried rations? The extensive library of reading materials? Feille must think whatever threat he would encounter would be over pretty fucking fast. I chuckled, imagining him sitting with his ass in the chair while his country exploded into months-long revolution. He'd be pretty damned hungry and bored by the time he felt safe enough to emerge from his hidey-hole. But where the fuck was he? He should have been here by now, with the chaos of the attack, the absence of a bunch of guards who were chasing demons in the forest, the incapacitation of most of his magical staff with a mysterious paralysis. He should be racing down the hallway right now in a hurry to get behind these runes.
Or not. Something tickled in the back of my mind that Feille would definitely want a saferoom close to his sleeping quarters, but he might be paranoid enough to want a second one closer to the main palace areas, or perhaps even outside. I tore back out into the reception room, frantically trying to think. Would Feille want several entrances to his quarters, or would this one room be it? I weighed the risks of having one escape versus having only one entrance to defend and decided that if there was another entrance, it would be a hidden one. But the silence of the whole area struck me. Feille didn't spend the day in his private quarters; he spent them out and about. At night, the room by his bedroom would suffice. During the day, he'd need something closer.
I smacked my head in frustration. I'd lost my chance. I should have gotten here earlier, before he awoke. I should have taken this fight to him when I realized he wasn't in his quarters, instead of trying to do some kind of wait and ambush. I'd failed. The battle had started, and I had no idea where Feille's other hidey-hole was. I'd lost all opportunity to take him out.
I may have missed my shot at the elven lord, but I sure as heck could make sure the battle turned the way I wanted it to. I raced out of the illusionary doorway and down into the main hall. Just as I rounded the corner, my feet flew out from under me, and I landed ass-hard onto the floor. What the fuck had I slipped on?
Chicken shit.
"Are you okay?"
I looked up from the floor to see the boy from before, a sponge in one hand, a bucket next to him. There was chicken excrement everywhere. Who knew that one chicken could have that much crap and manage to dump it out all over the glorious marble floors of this hallway before being caught.
"You're cleaning the floor while the city is under attack?"
It seemed an odd thing to be doing. He was human, and certainly not old enough to be fighting, but I'd assumed they would have had him caring for wounded, or hiding safely away somewhere.
He shrugged and knelt back down onto the floor, scrubbing the whitish poop around with his sponge. "They're not likely to come here. All the soldiers are outside, and his Lordship is in his sanctuary. Nobody's in here but servants. All the elves who aren’t fighters ran and hid."
Leaving their humans behind like abandoned, heavy luggage. Fuckers.
"You wouldn't happen to know where Fe… I mean, his high lordship's sanctuary is?"
He glanced up at me in curiosity before dropping his eyes back down to the task at hand. "Sure. It's under the gnarled feetig tree garden."
Well, that information was better than nothing, although I had no idea what a feetig tree looked like, where this garden was, or what exactly the boy meant by "under".
"So, like a subterranean room? Or is this a raised garden?"
He laughed, as though I was the stupidest adult he'd ever encountered. "The tunnels. Don't tell me they've never sent you down there? They're under the whole city."
My heart sank. Catacombs, no doubt with all sorts of magical and non-magical traps and many escapes—a labyrinth of underground tunnels. Feille was slyer than I'd ever given him credit for, although these tunnels may have predated his rule, or even his birth.
The boy shuddered. "The rats take over every few weeks, and we have to go down and run them out of their nests. I'm little, so they suit me up, give me a wand, and stuff me down a hole. They can't bite through the suit, but they try."
"Think you can show me this hole? Think I'll fit through it?"
He looked up in surprise, his gaze wandering over my human form. "Probably. Why would you want to go down there? And why would you want to go out of the palace in the middle of a fight?"
I thought of what I could offer the boy for his help, but I had nothing. This whole thing had impoverished me, and I couldn't even trade a favor. I had none of my demon abilities to deliver on it, and I wasn't sure Ahriman would allow me to honor my commitment. All I had was two knives strapped to my calves, hidden by my pants, and a chicken wand. I wasn't giving up my chicken wand.
"If you can show me the hole, tell me how to get through the catacombs to Feille's hiding place, I'll give you this knife."
He sucked in a breath as I pulled it from beneath my pants leg, his eyes growing round as saucers. "Dwarven made! With magical resistance!"
Yes. And I only had two. They were my hope for getting through any magical circles protecting Feille. I'd need multiple knives to pierce multiple circles, but if I couldn't find him, the knives wouldn't do me any good.
The boy jumped to his feet, knocking over the water bucket in his haste to reach for the knife. "Uh-uh," I told him, holding it up out of his reach. "Hole and directions first, then knife."
His eyes narrowed. "The entrance I know is by the kitchen, but the sanctuary is under the gnarled feetig tree garden. You'll need to keep heading west, but there are some places where you'll double back."
"Tell me as we head for the kitchen," I commanded, waving him on to lead. The boy took off, and I raced after him, slipping and sliding on the soiled floor.
"Take the first left, then go for about fifty feet taking the third right."
"Wait, the third right after fifty feet or the third right, which is about fifty feet from my first turn?" I sensed disaster. I sensed I'd be found two thousand years from now, pale and hunched over, my eyesight wasted from the darkness in the tunnels, my body emaciated from existing on bugs and rats for two millennia.
"Third right about fifty feet down the tunnel." He darted through a series of small rooms, and into an unadorned part of the palace, clearly designated for servant use. "Y
ou'll go uphill, and the tunnel will turn further right and narrow. There's a portion where you'll have to crawl."
Great. Just fucking great. Cause that's how I wanted to spend my morning, crawling through a dark muddy tunnel wondering where the rats were.
"There's a huge root that comes down, forking the tunnel in two. Take the left fork, then take the fifth left, the eighth right, and the second left."
What the hell? Where was this fucking sanctuary? In the next kingdom?
"You'll begin to see the walls change from dirt to wood. It's the roots from the gnarled feetig trees. They look like striped, glossy wood on the walls. The hallway will seem taller and lighter, with a paved stone floor. The sanctuary is straight ahead."
I frowned. There was no way Feille got there through the kitchens, crawling in the dirt. "There has to be another entrance."
"Well, sure. There are two directly into the sanctuary. There are hundreds into the catacombs."
We'd reached the kitchens, and the boy slowed, looking around in surprise. The kitchen was a huge, long room with two mammoth-sized fireplaces and four stoves. Pots dangled from the ceiling from one end of the room to the other. Three washbasins had an intricate series of tubes and hoses connected to them, and several wands sat alongside the stoves. One pot boiled furiously, another smoked, on the verge of burning. The only two humans in the room were sprawled on the floor, snoring. I hadn't given Leethu any sleep potions. What the heck had happened here?
"Where are the traps to the sanctuary?" I grabbed the nearest wand and turned off the magical fires under the two pots. Safety first. It would really suck to risk everything on freeing a bunch of humans, only to have hundreds of them die in a palace fire.
He grinned. "There are wire traps in the spot where you need to crawl, and spells in place once you get under the tree garden. I don't know what those do since I've always had an amulet on. I've never actually been in the sanctuary. Rats won't go within five feet of the place. Looks pretty though, with all the words on the walls and floor."
