Tolem stood up, towering over the table and everyone sitting around it. “I'm going to say this just once, and you're going to have to believe me on this,” he said. “Samus is beyond suspicion. Question anything else you want. Samus, you don't get to question. If Devan's new hump chump is on the other side, then Samus got played just as much as we did. End of fucking story.”
Devan looked around the table. Zella raised her eyebrows. “End of fucking story, then,” Z said.
“Is this the vault?” Nalan tapped a bold red “O” drawn on the map, trying to tune out the conversation happening around him.
“That is the vault,” Tolem said. The red “O” was the only bit of color on the black charcoal sketch. It looked tiny compared to the immense casino floor and the even more immense arena that surrounded it. “When the cashiers exchange gold for chits anywhere in The Palace — the gaming halls, the betting parlors down in the coliseum — they feed the coins into the tabernacles, which teleport the gold to this room.”
Nalan flipped through the sketches. “No drawings?”
Tolem shook his head. “Samus isn’t allowed near there. We have maps of the hallways, but they’re incomplete.”
“Great,” Allister muttered.
“For their first night in Kauleth,” Tolem said, “The Cenerons are planning a big fight.” Breigh, who had been cleaning under her nails with the tip of her dagger, suddenly became interested in the conversation. “A huge fight,” Tolem continued. “Two top names from the big fight towns out on the coast.”
“Arachnus of the Fall?” Breigh asked, leaning forward.
Tolem pursed his lips. “That sounds right.”
She put her hand on his forearm. “Titanus of Parsifale?” Tolem, uncertainly, shook his head. “Steel Goliah?” Again, no. “Terrabole the Unfortunate?”
“Two. Top. Names,” Tolem said, picking Breigh’s hand off his arm and dropping it on the table. Breigh sat back in her seat, eyes dancing left and right. “The point is, when they're in the ring, all eyes in The Palace will be on them, and all the gold in The Palace will be in that vault. Bets close when the fight starts, so we'll have however long the fight lasts to pull the job.”
Breigh snorted. “So we have between twenty and thirty seconds?” Nalan scrunched up his forehead in confusion. Breigh saw him do it. “Rarely does a fight go longer than three minutes,” she explained to him. “More often than not, pit fights end in under a minute on a single savage thrust.”
“That would be the problem,” Tolem said. “That's why we'll be counting on you, Breigh, to keep the fight going for as long as we need.”
She looked over and locked eyes with Tolem. “Explain what you mean by that,” she said slowly.
Tolem smiled. “It doesn't matter who the other combatant is. He's going to have a terrible accident. And we're going to give them someone even more famous to take his place.” He pointed at Breigh. “Breigh, of Fold and Fael.”
Breigh looked like she'd stopped breathing. Allister reached over and shook her. She gasped wetly for air. “Me?”
“Not to point to the obvious,” Allister said, “but Breigh isn't famous.”
She jabbed him hard between the ribs with her fingers, making him cry out in sudden agony.
“...Yet,” he gasped. Breigh smiled.
“Let me worry about that,” Tolem replied. “Breigh, I just need to know if you think you can keep yourself alive against one of the best pit fighters in the world for ten minutes.”
Breigh looked around the table. Nalan didn’t fully understand what Breigh saw in fighting, but he did know it made her happy. Right now, she was positively glowing. He smiled at her. All of them did.
She smirked back at them, then buried the tip of her dagger in the tabletop. “Better to ask, 'can I keep him alive for ten minutes?'“ She threw back her head and roared with laughter.
Devan reached over and squeezed Breigh's muscle-knotted shoulder through her blouse. “So Breigh buys us the time. What are we going to do in those ten minutes? Have Allister teleport it out of there and onto a ship?”
Nalan noticed that Allister stopped laughing abruptly.
“No, a magical discharge of that size is sure to attract the mages,” Tolem said. “Plus, teleporting that much mass over that much distance...” He looked over at Allister. “No offense, lad.”
Allister snorted. “Hey, you'd be surprised, old man.” But Nalan could tell that, inwardly, he was breathing a sigh of relief.
Tolem peeled back three pages of the large sheets of paper that covered the table, exposing a fourth. Nalan leaned in close to get a better look; each page contained a different level of The Palace. “The vault is three floors above this room.” He reached over and drew a red square in a large, cavernous chamber that took up almost a third of the floor plan of that level of The Palace. “It's a docking bay, used for small maintenance airships, as well as the wealthier patrons' private airships. Although nowadays, the state of things being what they are, it'll probably be mostly empty.”
“Probably?” Devan asked.
“Just listen for a second, kid,” Tolem sneered. “This is a blast job. Explosives. We plant charges here, here, and here...” On each page, he made a small red “X,” which lined up as each page was laid back down, creating a descent path from the red circle of the vault to the red square of the docking bay. “We set them off, and the gold drops, boom, boom, boom, down into our airship, with our mage here in the driver's seat. And away we go.”
Nalan’s eyes flicked back and forth from one end of the map to another, tracing in his mind the patterns of force and stress that Tolem was describing.
“So what happens when the guards chase us in their airships?” Breigh asked, intently. “Is it too much to hope for a desperate, high speed test of wills, skills, and steel as we soar above the clouds?”
Tolem cocked an eyebrow and looked over to Allister. He shrugged. “That's my baby!” he declared with an exaggerated grin.
“To answer your weird-ass question, Breigh, no. Airships are magical in nature, which is why we need Allister in the pilot's seat. Because there's no magic field in Kauleth since the Calamity, airships won't fly in Kauleth without being fitted with Aurium. Ours will be. But theirs won't.”
“How do we know that?” Devan asked.
“Because if, on the off chance The Palace is able to afford to outfit their airships so they can fly in Kauleth, we're going to sabotage them in the bay before the job gets going. That's going to fall to you, Nalan.”
Nalan said nothing as his eyes continued to jump around the table from one sketch to the next. He knew people were talking. He even knew they were talking to him. He just didn't have the attention span to spare.
Allister nudged him. “Nalan?”
Nalan pushed him back. “Quit it,” he said.
“You see something, Nalan?” Devan asked.
“I don't think blasting those three rooms is going to work,” he said slowly. “Look.” Nalan peeled back the pages to the show the level just below the vault. It had a high cathedral ceiling. Nalan shuffled through one of the stacks of smaller sketches, finding one that seemed to match the rough illustration on the map. “The ceiling in this room is made up of a series of load-bearing joists that help support this whole section.” He traced his finger along the elaborate archways on the smaller sketch. “If we blast there, most of this level will collapse.”
“And this...” Breigh said slowly, trying to understand where the problem lay, “...this is a bad thing, you mean to say.”
Allister leaned in to look at where Nalan was pointing. “Well, on top of killing hundreds of people, we'd probably lose most of the gold and probably the airship as well.” He nodded. “So, yeah. Bad.”
Tolem stared at the sketch Nalan handed him, compared it to the map, and stared at the sketch some more. Finally, he grimaced, shook his head slightly, and sat down.
“Shit,” he said.
Zella
Across th
e table, Devan bit his lip, but he couldn’t hold back the smile that bubbled up from inside him. His eyes met Zella’s. She was smiling too. She knew he was thinking the same thing she was: This is it.
“Okay,” Devan said brightly, rubbing his hands together. “New plan.” He spread out the small sketches in front of her. “Starting from step 1, what do we have? The gold gets dropped into the tabernacles. The tabernacles teleport the gold from the cages to the vault.” He snapped his fingers and pointed over at Allister. “Alli, that thing you were telling me you did in Instructor Baelgeroth's class, the thing you can make to redirect a linear spell...”
Allister's mind raced for a moment, then: “A shunt?”
“Teleport spells are linear, aren't they?” Devan scratched his chin. “Could we set up shunts to push where the tabernacles send the gold?”
Allister considered it. “I guess so...yeah, we could do that.”
Nalan shook his head. “There are going to be people watching the vault. It won't take them long to notice the gold isn't flowing where they want it to be.”
“Could we replace the gold with something else?” Zella chimed in. “Iron coins with gold paint, something like that?”
“I like it...” Devan said, studying the plans in front of him. “Yeah. We hijack a tabernacle that doesn't have a shunt on it, park it in some out of the way spot.” He flipped through the stack of large drawings until he came to one of the lower levels the Cenerons used for storage. “We point all the other tabernacles at that room, and as gold coins come in, we send about the same amount of iron coins out. And that's what ends up in the vault instead.”
Zella grinned just a little. Even as pissed at him as she was, she loved watching Devan work. The way his mind drew connections from one puzzle piece to another never failed to amaze her. “Maybe we can find a place next to the airship bay,” Zella added, “or even in the airship bay. We could be done and gone before they knew we were there.”
Devan snapped his fingers and pointed at her approvingly. “Yes.”
“No,” said Tolem.
All five turned to look at the older man. Zella was gripped with an aggravating sense of inevitability. Of course Tolem says ‘No,' she thought. Tolem always says ‘No.' “And why not?” Zella asked flatly.
Tolem ticked off the reasons on his fingers. “You won't be able to make that many shunts in time. You won't be able to get the shunts into the cages and onto the tabernacles without someone catching you. You won't be able to sneak a hundred tons of iron coins onto the ship undetected. You won't probably even be able to get a hundred tons of iron coins in time, let alone get them all painted gold.” He looked over at Devan. “You're still thinking like a character in a goddamn crime novel.” Devan visibly bristled at the dressing down. “Simple, kid. Keep it simple.”
“So, like, smuggling high explosives past an army of guards...that kind of simple?” Allister said, jumping to Devan's defense.
“Get your tongue under control, or I'll feed it to you,” Tolem said with quiet menace. Allister froze in his seat.
Zella narrowed her eyes to slits, but Breigh spoke first: “You like the taste of body parts?” she asked, fingering the hilt of her dagger, where it sat, still embedded in the tabletop. “I know something I could feed you.”
“All right, this isn't helping anything,” Devan said, rapping his fist on the table.
“We need more information,” Nalan said at last, his examination of the sketches seemingly complete.
Devan nodded over at Zella. “Assuming these drawings are correct, we know where the vault is. But we’re going to need to see it for ourselves.”
“Great idea,” Tolem said, scowling at his nephew. “How?”
Nalan
While the others had been eating tortes and embedding themselves in redheads, Nalan had been working.
He positioned himself here and there, and he watched, tracking the patterns of life in The Palace. Once he taught himself to look past the chaos caused by the patrons, what he found beneath was exquisitely rigorous and regimented.
The guards, with their black hair and silk-covered quiet mail, conducted two-man patrols which fell into surprisingly simple patterns. When one member of the pair was distracted from the pattern, the other would continue on, and the first guard would eventually hurry to catch up.
The mages, with their shaved heads and flowing blue robes, also had patterns, but since there were far fewer of them on the floor, their patterns took much longer to complete. The gold-blonde money handlers, the white-blonde sex workers, the redheaded hospitality staff, the brunette cleaning crew—if you drew a salary from The Palace, then you had a pattern, and you held to it with religious fervor.
That's why, when the shift's alpha guard disappeared around the corner of the wine concession, Nalan knew they had at least two minutes before the beta guard rounded a different corner behind them. There wouldn't be a support team member in this part of the gaming hall for another ten minutes. There wouldn't be a mage by for another twelve. It was time. Nalan nodded at Allister.
Allister smiled and pointed two fingers at a Paulmac table two rows down from them. A shriveled old woman watched the wheel spin, praying to her household deity to intercede on her behalf. Much to the surprise of the old woman (and, presumably to her household deity, who obviously hadn’t thrown much good fortune her way in the past century), the ball dropped precisely on forty-one. The old woman threw up her hands toward the ceiling. The dealer rang the bell, and suddenly all eyes were on her. By the time those eyes were anywhere else, Allister and Nalan were gone, the curtain to the back room rustling quietly in the wind of their passing.
Blending the pair of them into the shadows took more than a quick finger waggle, but Allister was able to complete the ritual relatively quickly, despite a pair of false starts and a mispronounced word or two. The darkness of the hallway seemed to reach out and engulf the two boys, and as it did, Nalan could literally feel the blood in his veins grow colder. On the edge of his hearing, he thought he could detect the sound of children screaming. Not for the first time, Nalan wondered if Allister knew what all those archaic words he chanted actually meant.
The spell relied on the presence of shadows, so on occasion, they had to duck down a side corridor as a pair of guards strolled past carrying a torch. The route that Samus had taught them was intentionally long and winding, allowing them to avoid any magic-detecting cantrips. That said, security was, to Nalan’s mind, astonishingly light, especially considering the way Tolem had described these dark and twisting tunnels.
Occasionally, he and Allister would look at each other, as if to say, “Is this it?”
Zella
The concierge inspected Zella's ham sandwich thoroughly, then nodded and tucked it into his jacket pocket. “Welcome to the mezzanine, Ms. Peregrine.” With an obsequious smile, he opened the velvet rope to let her pass.
Zella smiled back and walked on through. She could have handed him a slip of paper instead; that certainly would have made it easier to convince him he was looking at an invitation to the Ceneron family afternoon tea. But something about the idea tickled her, and so she allowed herself this small indulgence. Besides, she hadn’t had a chance to really stretch herself since that night in Instructor Winselle’s chambers.
As she crossed the mezzanine, Zella hummed Tolem's eight-note melody, keeping time with her steps. The raised terrace encircled the casino floor completely, and it had two main access points—a pair of grand staircases at the north and south ends of the gaming hall. Zella had ascended the north stair, which ended in a great, glass-domed atrium filled with round tables. Each was laid with fine white linens, and each was encircled by fine people, all wearing their finest white clothes.
With a broad and gracious smile, Zella accepted a champagne flute from one of the wait staff and held it without drinking. Alcohol was not conducive to her special talents. She put her back against a lacquered redwood pillar and traced a lazy circle around th
e rim of her glass with her fingertip. She focused on the dry smoothness of the edge, letting the sensation lull her into a state of deep relaxation. Her mind began to unfurl, its edges parting like the leaves of a blossoming lily. Gradually, the sharp, percussive sounds of conversation faded away, to be replaced by the languorous legato of mindsounds.
Unfiltered thoughts came in sentence fragments, repetitive mantras, and half-remembered songs. It was rare to find someone who thought in complete sentences—apart from other mentalists, of course. But usually single words and phrases were enough for Zella to find what she was searching for.
And today, what she was searching for was the Lieutenant. Thomme Faerathore. The judgment angel of The Palace, who watched from on high and passed sentence on those below. Even now, he was patrolling the catwalks above the mezzanine, eyes cast ever downward at the gaming tables, waiting for prey.
The general tenor in the crowd was light and vacuous; banal and catty and superficial, with smiles on top belying rancor underneath. But when Faerathore came into view, Zella could feel the crowd's thoughts grow quiet and cold. Shrill declarations faded to mumbles and murmurs in his passing, as though everyone seated at the white, white tables could feel his eyes on them.
Zella cocked an eyebrow and listened closer.
As Faerathore passed out of sight again, the mindsounds in the room began to warm and relax. “Interesting,” Zella said aloud to no one in particular. She took a small sip of champagne and set to work, digging deeper into the minds of the partygoers most unnerved by the thin man's passing.
Breigh
Proper Thieves Page 13
