She doesn’t suspect you, however. Not of the magic itself. Let her think you stole yourself a weather mage from the recruits. She’ll continue to think twice about the skies ever being safe again.
Picking up her fork, Despiris stabbed a sausage and chewed on the end. And as she did so, the hidden brilliance of her previous thought occurred to her. Why had she never thought to poach talent from the recruits before?
Because you wanted to catch Clevwrith on your own. No outside help. That would be cheating.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t have roped a couple of recruits into combatting Lady Verrikose. After all, if you fought fire with fire, didn’t it stand to reason you should fight magic with magic?
And where Lady Verrikose obviously had to resign herself to inquiring about said recruits, because she had a very niche specialty here at the palace and had not been invited to dabble elsewhere… The king probably would not think twice about Despiris poking into the Mystic Movement, seeing as she’d once been offered a position there.
She did not need a weather mage, per se, however… She could think of a few uses for another specialty. And with Lady Verrikose obviously still trying to find ways around her restrictions, Despiris would do well to stay one step ahead. Maybe two.
Pondering the intriguing notion, she finished her sausage. Then went for another biscuit.
Lady Verrikose absently buttered a muffin, eyeing the white gales howling outside the window with obvious displeasure.
Despiris hid her smirk behind her biscuit, embracing her descent into gluttony with morbid delight.
*
The problem with restricting a posse on a scent to snowed-in space-wasters was that they fell prey to the same affliction that had overcome Ophelious’ beasts. They grew restless. Without access to the greater arena that was the city, there was little to do but stalk one another through the ominous, wintry palace halls. Not an afternoon went by that Despiris didn’t catch a glimpse of one of her questionable ‘allies’ lurking suspiciously in her wake.
There was Lord Mosscrow, peering out of his hood from a shadowed archway, little more than a pale, pock-marked face hovering as if disembodied in the dual blackness.
And there was Lady Verrikose, stroking her comfort-sloth from behind a pillar or some other opulent nook or cranny, her glamorous form camouflaged with the surrounding luxury. She was like a life-sized painting, an almost unnoticeable decoration, always watching from the wings.
Sometimes, for fun, Despiris would pretend she was on some covert mission, sneaking through the palace as if to meet with her secret weather-mage, or some such equally scandalous contact. She would draw her watchers after her, leading them on a delightful little skitter-and-dodge through the halls, only to settle on a perfectly unremarkable bench or ledge for a perfectly boring nap.
Of course, eventually, they tired of these games, the restlessness driving them to drastic measures as restlessness always did.
Despiris should not have been surprised when, the next time she thought to check on the resident beasts in their roost, she found one missing yet again.
“The archangel,” she said the instant Ophelious opened his door. “Where is she?”
Ophelious wrung his hands inside his sleeves, his weary, frightened eyes pleading with her not to hold him responsible. “I…I…I don’t know where – that is, she knocked on the balcony door requesting entrance, cutting through my chambers to take the palace halls to the ground floor. And then…walked off toward the gates on foot. I…I didn’t see beyond that. You can’t actually see the gates, you know. She disappeared into the snow.”
On foot? It didn’t take a scholar to realize what that probably meant. Suspecting a weather mage of the current elements impeding her schemes, Lady Verrikose would probably recognize the unlikelihood of a city-wide storm. It was both unprecedented as a practice, and unnecessary as a discouraging tactic. And being the shrewd character that she was, she would see fit to test that theory.
The initial instinct to hunker down in one’s coziest cloak to wait out the storm had run its course and lost its charm.
The hunt was back on.
The race was back on.
And now it was the beastress once again by a nose.
A nose, a snout – whatever deviating, shapeshifting piece of anatomy it was that gnashed at the Shadowmaster’s heels today.
23
Grounding Angels
“There are two epic battles playing out here, as far as I am concerned. One between you and your estranged master, and one between you and that formidable sorceress of a noblewoman.” – King Isavor to Despiris
*
Knowing Lady Verrikose would only be present in the mind of the archangel, Despiris sought the assistance of another beast. Ophelious was, after all, still the master of the menagerie when their minds were their own, and it took little but a declaration of her needs and an unflinching stare to send him skittering to oblige. He scurried about sweeping a handful of large, white feathers off the balcony, shaking the snow off and hurrying them over to the equine. He then performed a most peculiar little ritual that involved tickling Keshgal’s muzzle with said feathers and whispering in the beast’s ears, criss-crossing the tufts up and down its face as if painting with wild abandon, braiding a feather into the animal’s long forelock to dangle the scent by its nose, and then slapping the beast on the rump as if to send it on its way.
Then he gestured for Despiris to mount.
Swinging onto the horse’s back, Despiris twined her fingers into its mane and wasted no time sending the beast sailing over the rail. She parted the currents of snow with her mind to allow passage, and past the gates, the storm petered out altogether. They surged out into clear skies, the city sprawling before them, Keshgal snorting with excitement to be free of his balcony prison. The bone-jarring thrum of giant wingbeats sent Despiris’s adrenaline pumping, fury and dread humming in her bones. She could not abide Lady Verrikose’s defiance, would not sit quietly planning some devious new countermove. Not after seeing the slash across Clevwrith’s chest from his recent encounter with dragon claws.
Too close. The beasts were grazing too close.
She hadn’t thought through exactly what she planned to pull in order to send Asborea home with her tail between her legs, but one way or another she would intercept this unauthorized deployment and leave Lady Verrikose wishing she’d never contrived such treachery.
I’ll cast a personal stormcloud around every beast if I have to. I’ll pretend I was chasing Clevwrith and the angel hurt me when she aimed for him.
She could play dirty. She could pretend she caught the Shadowmaster’s scent first, and lead the angel on a wild goose chase. She could draw Asborea down into the sewers where an unfortunate swell of sewer water happened to rise from those deep, dark channels and cause the tragic, unnoticed death of an angel. Beasts of the sky should be careful treading where they don’t belong. The underground is no place for an angel.
The brutality of her own thoughts startled her, and for a brief moment she questioned her sanity.
But when she caught sight of her quarry, Keshgal swooping toward St. Abberton’s bell tower where two figures squabbled across its sky-scraping, outer ledge, she recognized the vengeful feeling for what it truly was:
Protectiveness.
Clevwrith and Asborea courted the edge of the precipice in a violent fist-fight, trading blows in quick succession. Despiris’s breath caught in her throat seeing the precarious exchange. Evading the mythical hounds was one thing, but when it came to an actual physical altercation with one…
She knew all too well what it had taken out of Clevwrith to overpower the first gargoyle that had been sent after them. He was capable, to be sure, but his chances diminished greatly.
With a ferocious flap of her wings, the archangel sent Clevwrith skittering off-balance in the resulting gust. He fell backward, barely catching himself on the ledge.
Asborea was on him in an in
stant, pinning him beneath her impressive form.
The fluctuating, wind-blown movements of the equine beneath Despiris jostled her visual of the altercation, making it impossible to follow exactly what happened next. But somehow, Clevwrith twined his legs around the angel’s upper torso, twisting her wings with his calves. It seemed the wind caught on a disjointed wing, throwing the angel off-balance this time. She spilled off him, grasping for purchase with her stone-gouging ivory claws.
A boot to the face ensured she remained dazed long enough for Clevwrith to find his feet again. A fist followed the boot, and Asborea stumbled back a step, but her wings would always prove an advantage more than a handicap. She used them now to catch her balance, and then retaliated tenfold, thrashing Clevwrith against the side of the tower with the full brutal strength of one feathered appendage.
Despiris thought she could hear his skull crack even from a distance. Horror splashed through her as Clevwrith went limp, slouching against the tower. She’d been right to waste no time coming after Lady Verrikose’s hounds, her instinct spot-on. The integrity of the hunt had deteriorated, spite and desperation turning it ugly. Hasty. Impulsive.
In a single instant between wingbeats, Despiris realized she was at a crossroads. In the moments that followed, she would make a fateful decision:
Defend Clevwrith.
Or finish him.
The fine line between allies and enemies had long been blurred in this convoluted game, but when it came down to watching Clevwrith getting ravaged by a deadly beast, knowing he would rather fight to the death than surrender to imprisonment, there was only one decision she could make.
If the elements had been available to her, she might have followed through with the notion of blasting the angel with a spurt of weather, and avoiding incriminating herself with direct opposition. But fate was a stingy benefactor, the skies over the city clear and blue and devoid of her choice element.
And so it was to be direct incrimination.
She drove Keshgal hard toward the bell tower, pulling up short at the last moment where the angel reached for Clevwrith. The rearing of hooves and battering of huge black wings in Asborea’s face was enough to fluster her, and Despiris leapt from the equine’s back to the bell tower ledge behind Clevwrith, catching him under the shoulders as he sagged. His fluttering eyelids and groping hands told her he was conscious, but struggling to come out of his daze.
With no orders from Ophelious beyond tracking the angel and delivering Despiris, the equine flapped away at Asborea’s first defensive slash. Despiris was left on the ledge to face the archangel by herself, those stunning, wrathful amber eyes veering to her.
Would Asborea think she had come to assist in the catch?
Was it obvious she intended to defend Clevwrith?
A moment of uncertainty flickered between them, but it was clear Despiris was trying to prop Clevwrith up, making no move to secure him beyond that.
A flash of canny rage in the angel’s eyes pegged Despiris as a threat.
But there also came a twinge of eager delight.
Because it was Lady Verrikose behind those eyes, Despiris knew, and it was no secret she’d probably been waiting for this moment for a long time. This chance to openly oppose Despiris at last.
Flashbacks of fighting off the first gargoyle battered Des’s resolve, no part of her eager to cross one of the beasts in that way again. But she’d warned them what would happen if they went rogue, and she intended to stick to that.
The archangel would yield to her blade, or end up like a certain beheaded kinmate.
Asborea strode down the ledge with murder in her eyes, and Despiris had no choice but to shove Clevwrith toward the tower, still mere inches from the edge, and spring across his form to intercept the angel. She swept a knife into each fist in the same motion, making no secret of whose side she was on as she landed between the beast and her master.
A quick, metallic friction highlighted the angel’s ivory claws elongating to double their previous length. Cute knives, she seemed to scoff, and slashed viciously at Despiris.
Ducking the blow, Despiris jabbed back, cutting close to the angel’s abdomen and forcing her to retreat a step. The one advantage to being a whole head and shoulders shorter than her adversary was that it was easier to duck the angel’s blows, and go straight for her tender belly.
Won’t do you much good when she swipes off your head landing a single blow, chimed the logical commentary ever making cheeky remarks in the back of her mind.
The angel’s main target was still the Shadowmaster, however, and suddenly her focus shifted to what was happening over Despiris’s shoulder. Despiris didn’t dare take her eyes off those razor-sharp claws, but Asborea abruptly lost all interest in continuing the fight, and her advantage was that a figure planted between her and her quarry was entirely inconsequential when two quick flaps of her wings carried her right over the impediment.
Despiris spun as the angel landed behind her, catching a glimpse of Clewrith’s disappearing limbs just as he slithered over one of the waist-high open sills that framed the bell alcove.
The huge bell swung, signaling Clevwrith’s descent down the rope, and Despiris covered her ears just before the deafening toll rang out across the city. The tower reverberated with the din, tremors shimmering up her legs.
Either deterred by the sound or not eager to test her winged bulk in the cramped tower shaft, Asborea took flight from the ledge, folding her wings and diving down the face of the tower.
Cursing, Despiris followed Clevwrith’s path, not seeing another way down. If Clevwrith was smart, he would disappear into the nooks and crannies and refuse to reemerge, denying the angel another stab at him. But Despiris was not sure of his options. Was there a covert way out of the tower? He might just end up cornered at the bottom.
The instant her eyes adjusted to the dark interior, she glanced down in search of Clevwrith. He was nowhere to be seen, and the slack rope suggested he’d jumped ship before she even started her descent.
Surely he couldn’t have slid to the bottom that quickly.
Surely he hadn’t slipped and fallen?
Halfway down, a more plausible explanation presented itself, a second tier of open archways and surrounding ledges providing an exit at rooftop-height. Despiris cinched her grip abruptly tight to halt her descent, cringing at the rope-burn that seared across her palms.
The drawbacks to going out without gearing up. Next time, she’d grab her gloves and other accoutrements before jumping on the first pegasus that could spirit her over the palace walls.
Grabbing at the lip with the toe of her boot, she pulled herself onto the ledge, glancing about for Clevwrith. The only movement was a gliding M of white, perusing the alleyways a few domiciles down. The quietly stalking angel swooped right at an intersection, disappearing into an adjoining lane.
Despiris skittered down the ledge and hopped to the nearest rooftop, cutting across its neighbors at a diagonal toward the angel’s location. It was anyone’s guess where Clevwrith had scampered off to, but considering how well the beasts had been able to track based on mere scraps of scent in the past, Despiris was willing to bet getting up close and personal with the Shadowmaster established a much fuller profile of him. Asborea likely had a sense of him close by in the surrounding area.
And once they truly know his scent, he will never be able to hide again.
Tamping down a persisting swell of dread, Despiris honed her focus, settling into the frame of mind that severed emotion from the equation and viewed the task before her as any other mission.
Analyze. Calculate. Execute.
A clear mind would prevail. Emotion would only cloud her judgment, distract her from critical small details. Details made all the difference when up against an equal foe.
Settling into a stealthy rhythm, she clambered spider-like after her airborne adversary. Cresting the fifth rise, she slid quietly down the steep shingles and caught herself at the gutter along
the eaves, peering over into the street below. Those vulturous white wings prowled two domiciles down, drifting without a sound through the stacked neighborhood. Half-rising, Despiris followed in her wake, traveling parallel to the streets now instead of crosswise over the apex of each house.
Suddenly, from behind a potted tree by a doorstep, a blur darted down the alley toward the next intersection. Asborea surged after the figure, and Despiris broke into a run in tandem.
What’s Clevwrith doing hiding behind potted plants? Doesn’t he know she can smell him? His best chance was to put distance between himself and the beast on his tail, get underground where maybe – maybe – she would lose the scent. The sewer would muddle it, even if it didn’t hide him completely.
There was only one explanation. He’d been injured enough to slow him down. And that left Despiris with one option.
She had to take the angel down.
At the crossroads, the Shadowmaster came into view down the adjoining alley. He was running, but there was a limp to his gait, a hunch to his shoulders that suggested that blow to the head had really left him addled. The angel flapped hard after him, her prize in reach. Despiris leaped to the rooftop across the way, bridging the alley gap to follow. No longer caring about stealth, she pushed to gain ground.
She’d once envisioned herself leaping onto the back of a gargoyle to sink him from the sky. It looked like she finally had her chance to execute that stunt in real time.
She lengthened her stride, pumping her arms to surge into top-speed. A quick chopping of boots across shingles, and she was at Asborea’s flank, positioned for the jump. She launched from the roof’s edge, throwing herself out over the alley void and coming down hard on the angel’s back.
Asborea hitched and plummeted, Despiris flailing for balance as she rode the angel’s descent to the ground. Confused wings struggled to account for the added weight, but Despiris wasn’t about to let the beast recover. Giving up on a smooth ride, she let herself fall, catching herself on one of the angel’s wings on her way down to immobilize her completely.
Game of Towers and Treachery (The Shadow's Apprentice Book 2) Page 19
