Ally of the Crown

by Melissa McShane

  “We have to be careful,” he whispered, unnecessarily as far as Fiona was concerned. “Heaven only knows how many of those guards are around. There’s nowhere to hide on these streets, have you noticed?”

  “Nowhere to hide, no porticos, no public parks. And no one about except for us and the guards. It can’t be that late.”

  “I suggest we leave the speculation for later,” Holt said. Sebastian nodded.

  They had to dodge two more pairs of guards, one of which they only avoided by crouching low in a shadow barely big enough to fit all three of them. Fiona felt horribly exposed in her white clothes. Even in the shadows, she felt she stood out by a mile. But there were no shouts of “stop!” or cries of alarm. It was dreamlike, the kind of dream where you can will things to happen or not, and Fiona felt irrationally as if she were keeping the guards at bay simply through force of will. She made herself focus on the present. What was keeping them safe was sheer luck and, possibly, the guards’ belief that no one would dare breach the grounds of the Jaixante.

  A few minutes later, Sebastian stopped at a building that looked the same as all the others. Its door was barely visible as a crack in the marble façade. “Holt?” Sebastian said.

  Holt stepped up and laid his enormous hand flat against the door’s surface. Fiona turned around and scanned the street. Now would be the worst possible time for someone to appear, wanting to know what they were doing. She heard something scrape across the stone with a skree that set her teeth on edge and her nerves jangling. “Sorry,” Holt said, and there was another scrape, less shrill.

  “So what is it they do to criminals in Veribold?” Sebastian said.

  “Is that really something you want to know right now?”

  “Surprisingly, it’s at the top of my mind.”

  “Well, I’d rather not think about it, if you don’t mind.”

  “So it’s not pleasant.”

  “I can’t imagine criminal sentences ever are. But no, it’s not pleasant.”

  Another scrape, a click, and then the sound of stone grinding against stone. “We’re in, sir,” Holt said.

  The smell of woody incense filled the air. The interior of the foreign trade office was completely lightless except for what little came in through the door, and when Holt shut the door, even that was gone. “Wait,” Sebastian said, and a few seconds later there was a click and soft white light emerged from a small cubical Device in his left hand. He handed one to Fiona and another to Holt. “Stay by the door, just in case,” Sebastian told Holt.

  Fiona turned her Device on and looked around. They were in some kind of reception area, its tall ceiling vanishing out of the range of the light. Large square cushions, purple and green, lay on the floor instead of chairs. Beautiful woven fabric depicting men and women dancing covered the walls, interrupted by a couple of doors and a hallway leading off into darkness. A five-foot-tall counter made an arc across one corner of the room. Fiona went to the tall counter, behind which were a basin-chair and a cabinet with three deep drawers. The cabinet was filled with blank printed forms and, in the bottom drawer, a box of colored ink in jars and a tray full of stamps in backwards Veriboldan script.

  “This is as far as I got,” Sebastian said. He pointed off down the dark hallway. “The person who gave me the watch came out of the third door on the right, but I don’t know if that means anything. We need to find which of these offices belongs to Gizane.”

  Fiona waded through the cushions and went down the hall. “No names, just titles,” she said. “What is Gizane?”

  “I don’t know her title. She’s responsible for overseeing trade between Tremontane and Veribold.”

  Fiona ran her fingers over the first name plaque she came to. The curly Veriboldan script was only lightly incised on the brass plate, making it even harder for her to read. CHIEF COMPTROLLER, she read, shook her head, and moved on. Her slowness was driving even her crazy, but this was still faster than searching every office one by one.

  It was the last office on the left. MINISTER OF FOREIGN TRADE. “This one,” she told Sebastian, who’d been hovering over her shoulder. Sebastian tested the knob, then pushed the door open.

  “Already open,” he said.

  Sebastian and Fiona looked at each other. “That’s ominous,” Fiona said.

  “No one knows we’re here,” Sebastian said. “No one knows what we’re after. She just doesn’t lock her door.”

  “Gizane’s not in Haizea. Why would she leave her door open while she’s out of the country?”

  “Let’s just see what we can find, all right? And worry about the rest later.”

  Gizane’s office was surprisingly small—or maybe it wasn’t so surprising, if she spent most of her time elsewhere. Fiona had no doubt her personal quarters were far more luxurious. There was a mahogany desk, Tremontanan, not Veriboldan, and a padded rolling chair to match. Five cabinets stacked with books, scroll cases, and loose sheets of paper lined the wall opposite the desk. Framed artwork, mostly oils of Eskandelic landscapes, hung on every wall, like little windows on a distant world. The smell of incense was stronger here, and Fiona traced it to an ornate burner on the corner of the desk. She flipped it open and prodded the stick of incense. Cold. So no one had been in here for a while.

  Sebastian eyed the cabinets with dismay. “We’re never going to find it,” he said.

  “I doubt she keeps her blackmail materials in with her other paperwork,” Fiona said. “Didn’t you say she probably has a plan to expose your family if she turns up suspiciously dead? In order for that to work, she’d have to keep it separate from the rest of her files—she has five cabinets, for heaven’s sake, who’s going to work through all of those for the sake of carrying out a dead woman’s vengeance?”

  “That’s true.” Sebastian removed one of the paintings from the wall. “Help me check these. It’s cliché, I know, but a safe in the wall…I prefer to think of it as ‘traditional.’”

  Gizane, however, wasn’t traditional; there was nothing but wall behind all the paintings. “Now what?” Sebastian said.

  “See if those cabinets are made to move. I’ll check the desk.” Fiona removed every drawer, carefully examining their undersides and tapping the bottoms for false panels. Nothing. “It might not be here,” she said.

  “She told my parents she’d sent it to Veribold and not to bother trying to find it,” Sebastian said, sounding short of breath. He had both hands on one of the cabinets and was trying to shift it, with no results. “She might have been lying.”

  “Let’s not give up yet. I meant, look for a button or lever or something that makes them move.”

  “I did. There’s no sign that they’ve shifted position in the last twenty years.”

  Fiona sat in the chair and regarded the desk. It stared back at her, smirking. The secret had to be there. Somewhere. There was a carved border all around the edge of the desk’s top, tiny apples and pears. Suppose one of them was a button? Too obvious, and too easy to accidentally press. But if there were a secret panel or button or something, it would be convenient to anyone sitting in the desk.

  Fiona stretched her arms underneath again and closed her eyes, feeling for the anomaly. “You think you’re smarter than the rest of the world,” she murmured, “but you’re just a petty—blackmailer.” The fingers of her right hand brushed a rough spot. She pushed on it, heard a click, and the top of the desk popped open half an inch.

  “Sweet heaven,” Sebastian breathed, and then he pulled the top open further. It only opened three inches, but it was enough for Fiona to reach inside. She pulled out a round, tightly fastened scroll case, its waxy leather clearly waterproof, then a flat portfolio like Sebastian’s.

  “There’s more. A lot more,” she said, bringing out two more scroll cases and a folder tied with black ribbon.

  “Let me look,” Sebastian said, holding out his hand. Fiona began handing things to him. There were five scroll cases in all, two portfolios, the ribbon-tied folder, an
d a fist-sized velvet sack that rattled when she lifted it.

  “What should we do with the rest?” Fiona said.

  “I hate leaving them,” said Sebastian, prying the tight cap off the first scroll case, “but I don’t feel obligated to find their owners and return them.”

  “We could keep Gizane from blackmailing them further.”

  “I don’t think her losing the material would matter. As far as her victims are concerned, she’d still have it. She could lie to them forever.” Sebastian shook the contents of the first scroll case into his hand, a sheaf of tightly rolled paper, and spread it out. “It’s not this one.”

  Fiona opened the bag and shook some of its contents into her hand. They were round chips of white ceramic roughly twice the size of her thumbnail that made a sound like raindrops striking metal when they struck each other. Each tile had a strange symbol incised on one side in which ink or paint had pooled, purple or orange or red or green, colors that were dim in the low light. “I wonder what these are for,” she mused. She poured them back into the bag.

  A loud thump came from the reception area, then the sounds of a scuffle. “Holt?” Sebastian called. There was a wordless grunt, then silence. Sebastian rushed out of the room. Fiona followed him, her hands full of scroll cases.

  Holt had just lowered a still bundle to the ground. The man was dressed in black and his face except for the eyes was covered. His clothes were loose and tattered, though the tattering was unusually regular. Fiona thought they were made that way on purpose. A Jaixante guard.

  “He did not anticipate my presence at the door,” Holt said. He didn’t sound the least bit winded. “What concerns me is that his partner was not with him. I cannot guess where the man might be.”

  “Take everything,” Sebastian said, handing off a few of his burdens to Holt. “We’ll look at it later. We need to find a back way out of this place.”

  Fiona stowed a scroll case and the rattling sack inside her shirt. One of the doors off the reception area turned out to be a hallway, headed away from the front door, and she followed Sebastian and Holt down the passage. It was gray and utilitarian, uncarpeted, smelled faintly of mildew, and its low ceiling sagged in places from water damage. It was hard to reconcile this stinking, depressing hall with the beauty of the Jaixante, though it did make the Veriboldans seem more human.

  The hall dead-ended in a blank wall, or at least it looked like a blank wall to Fiona. Holt, however, went down on one knee and brought out his lock picks. When she looked closer, she could again see the outline of a door, and hinges painted gray to match the surrounding walls. Sebastian put a hand on hers and clicked off her light Device, then turned off his own. “No light when the door opens. Damn, but I wish there were windows. What is wrong with these people, that they don’t have windows?”

  “They have windows, just not at ground level,” Fiona said, thinking of her cell.

  “Even so. Veriboldans are strange. All right, maybe just the noble Veriboldans. I can’t wait to be home again.”

  Fiona said nothing. Planning too far ahead when there might be guards waiting to snatch you seemed like asking for trouble. Or was it just that she no longer had a home to return to? She closed her eyes in the dimness made by Holt’s light, focused on the keyhole. Wrong time for those kinds of thoughts. Possibly there was never a right time.

  The lock clicked. Holt turned off his light and Fiona shivered at the darkness that surrounded them. She could feel Sebastian standing near her, the body heat he gave off, and she knew where all the walls were; there was no need for nervousness. Then a slim line of pale light appeared, stretching to outline the door. “Careful,” Holt said, and pulled the door open all the way.

  They stepped into an alley between buildings, featureless and blank like white canyons surrounding a dry riverbed of concrete. The half-moon rode higher in the sky, casting more faint shadows that were overcome by the blue light of the lanterns. “Do we leave now?” Fiona said.

  “We go back to the Irantzen Temple and pretend we never left,” Sebastian said. “And then—”

  A shrill whistle split the silent air, echoing off the walls until it sounded like a dozen screams. Down at the far end of the alley, a man in dark clothes that fluttered around him like malevolent moths ran at them, alternating blows on his whistle with shouts of “Intruders!”

  “Run,” Sebastian said, and they sped away down the alley.

  15

  Fiona caught her toe on the concrete and bit her lip to keep from crying out, though the guards already knew she was there. The hard surface tore at the soles of her feet. She felt dampness and was sure she was leaving a blood trail. She risked a glance backward. They’d left the man behind, but that wouldn’t last long. And he’d no doubt have friends.

  “What now?” she said as they ran.

  “Have to get…back to the Irantzen Temple,” Sebastian panted.

  “That’s the first place they’ll search for foreigners. We have to get out of the city.”

  “We left all our money…if we don’t have our things, we’ll never make it out of Veribold.”

  “Then we have to split up.”

  Sebastian stopped running and leaned, panting, against one of the white fairy buildings. “We’ll never find each other again.”

  “Meeting place,” Holt said. “The stables where we left the horses. Those are in Sebastian’s name, but we are registered at the temple under Miss Cooper’s name. It is unlikely they will make the connection, and there are many foreigners in Haizea.”

  The whistling grew louder. “Holt, you return and collect our things,” Sebastian said. “Fiona, come with me. We’ll draw them away from Holt.”

  “It will be better if we separate.” Fiona rubbed her foot. “Give them more targets to chase.”

  Sebastian looked torn. “But—” He scowled. “All right. Just don’t get caught.”

  “You too,” Fiona said.

  “Then go,” Sebastian said, and took off running. Holt headed back toward the ramp. Fiona turned and ran.

  She had no idea where she was going, other than that she needed to draw attention to herself so the guards, or whatever they were called in the Jaixante, wouldn’t follow Holt back to the temple. So she retraced her steps. Almost immediately she saw them: dark, indistinct figures milling around the front door to the foreign trade office. She slowed, thought about hailing them, decided that would be ridiculous, and settled for jogging past in her white linen clothing that practically glowed under the blue lights. Someone shouted, figures began moving toward her, and she ran.

  Her feet felt raw, burning against the rough road. What she wouldn’t give for a pair of shoes. She rounded a corner and dashed across the street. More whistles told her they were still following. Good. She put on a burst of speed as she crossed an intersection, skidded, and turned another corner. Even more whistles, these coming from ahead of her. Not good.

  She nearly ran into the second group and managed to stop her headlong flight in time to stay out of sight around a corner. Breathing heavily, she waited, listening to their running feet and the shrill whistles until the sounds faded. Drawing attention was one thing; being captured was unacceptable. She rubbed her foot and her hand came away bloody. She couldn’t be leaving much of a trail, or they’d have caught her already. She set out again, this time heading downhill.

  The white, faceless buildings, the pale moonlight, the blue lamps all left Fiona feeling disoriented, as if this were no city, but a nightmare realm populated by ghosts. More whistling echoed through the canyons—no, they were streets, this was a real city, if a strange one, and she needed to get out of it. Surely Holt had had enough time to make his escape.

  Fiona pressed her hand to her side and felt the bag shift. Why was she still carrying it? At least it weighed hardly anything. The scroll case jabbed her hip, and she moved it to a more secure position. Past time to leave.

  She rounded a corner, took a few strides, then skidded to a halt, tearin
g the soles of her feet further. Two of the dark, indistinct figures were staring right at her. Beyond them, she saw one of the bridges, its guard station unmanned. One of the figures raised a pistol and pointed it at her. “Stop there,” he said. His voice was muffled by a scarf drawn closely around the lower half of his face, and he and his partner were dressed in dark robes that fluttered around them like tattered wings.

  Fiona screamed, making them both jerk, turned and ran. She heard a loud clap of an explosion behind her, and a ball whined past her ear, then another bang and whine as the second man’s shot went wide. She turned a corner and reviewed her path, madly looking for a way out. If she could get them sidetracked, double back, she could reach the bridge and disappear into Haizea. With her luck, the bridge led to the wrong side of the river, but she could make that work. She just needed not to get shot.

  She turned a corner, wishing there was shelter—even a shallow porch would do—and heard running footsteps coming after her. Her feet were screaming pain, her side and chest ached, and it wouldn’t be long before she couldn’t run anymore.

  More whistles, from ahead. They’d driven her into a trap. Desperate, she turned and ran back the way she’d come and saw a narrow street she hadn’t noticed before. It wasn’t narrow enough to hide her, but it had to lead back toward the bridge. She tossed a quick prayer heavenward, then a second prayer apologizing for her impiety, and ran.

  The pavement of the narrow street was cracked, not nearly as well-kept as the main streets, and Fiona stumbled over a chunk of concrete and went to her hands and knees, her eyes watering from the pain. She pushed herself up and limped on. Giving up was not going to happen. They’d have to take her by force.