The Palace Job (18 page)

It took took a lot of work from the guards Pyvic had pressed into service for the night's raid, but Prisoner Loch was, in fact, taken alive in the end.

She kept yelling even after she lost her sword, but one of the town guards, an Urujar fellow, showed some initiative and gagged her. Even after that, Pyvic had to knock her out cold to get the shackles on. She was going to be sore and unhappy when she woke up on Heaven's Spire.

"Report," he ordered as he came out of the alley to meet the rest of the town guards.

"We tried the trick with the flour and found a couple invisible people, but they ran before we could bring them down," said the Urujar guard. "We did catch the Imperial and one of the women. Haven't said anything, though. Shall we question them?"

"No." Pyvic gestured at the three local guards who held the two prisoners in their shackles. "You're still attached to me. We'll bring them all back up to the Spire and make them someone else's problem."

"Captain doesn't wish to give up custody, Justicar," said one of the other guards, a lean fellow with a warhammer. "Doesn't want it said he let them out of his sight if they get away."

"You can personally hand them over to the Archvoyant," Pyvic promised. "I don't care whose name the puppets shout in the news, as long as they're in custody. Come on. Think of it as a holiday." He grinned. "How many of you have ever gotten to see Heaven's Spire close up?"

It was late, and Pyvic was tired and giddy from finally catching one of the escapees, which was likely why the voice of the guard with the warhammer seemed slightly wrong—a bit high, almost musical, for the aura of professional combat power it definitely exuded. That was probably also why he kept catching flickers at the edge of his vision, tiny flashes of movement that revealed themselves to be shadows dancing in the torchlight when he turned to look.

It probably even accounted for the dove Pyvic would have sworn was following them as they marched through the city. Or the sense that the prisoners (the two conscious ones, anyway), despite their downtrodden stares and helpless eyes, somehow seemed just a bit too smug, considering the circumstances.

He would kick himself about that later.

Eight

The airship that carried them up to the Spire was a small passenger model, not one of the massive cargo lifters onto which Loch and Kail had smuggled themselves last time. Instead of huddled in a crate, Loch stood serenely on the deck, watching the pre-dawn world recede below. Invisible, of course, and under strict orders to move slowly if she had to move at all.

The ship's crew was... wrong. Loch couldn't place it, but they all moved with downcast eyes and didn't speak as they went about their tasks. She suspected that they were Silestin's personal men, along to ensure a smooth ride.

Loch hadn't seen many airships, except for the battleships during the war, and her experience then had mostly involved looking at the flag, diving for cover, and hoping that the ship had exhausted its magical flamecannons and could only drop grapeshot on them as it flew overhead. The passenger carrier had no guns that Loch could see.

It wasn't shaped like a real ship. Overhead, an enormous elliptical balloon contained a trapped wind-daemon. The deck was a big wooden oval with railings all around and a single control station with levers and multicolored crystals. There were a few chairs, but most people simply clung to handrails. There was complicated-looking rigging knotted all over the place.

Off to either side of the main ship's body, six great sailwings were tucked in close at the moment, ready to be extended to make a tight turn. Below the deck, instead of crew quarters and cargo holds, there was only a great ridge of wood hanging down to stabilize the deck.

Tern and Icy were seated, as their shackles made it hard for them to hold the handrails. They were being diligently guarded by Dairy, Kail, and Desidora, the last of whom wasn't even wearing a guard's uniform. No one had given the aura-manipulating death priestess a second glance, despite her alabaster skin or her pitch-black robes.

Ululenia was a dove perched on the rigging. Hessler could be anywhere, but he was definitely near enough to keep watch on Loch. He'd gone on at length about how difficult it was to keep someone else invisible when they were moving around.

She'd gotten all of them together, and all nine of them were on their way up to the Spire. And the woman who'd blown her cover last time was shackled and gagged in the seat next to Tern and Icy.

"I had no idea how dangerous these things were," Hessler's voice hissed in her ear.

Loch smiled and stared out over the edge some more. With his little whisper trick, the illusionist could make his voice appear right inside Loch's ear.

"Do you have any idea how much energy this ship has devoted to warding the wind-daemon inside that balloon? And how much more is devoted to making sure the balloon doesn't tear open on a passing tree branch?"

Loch sighed quietly.

"Ancients be damned, this thing is a
deathtrap.
I don't understand how they can—careful, careful, when you fidget like that, it's hard to keep the invisibility field on you. If you could hold still, that would be perfect."

He kept talking. Loch stopped listening. Overhead, the tiny sliver of sky not filled by the balloon began to be filled with the underside of Heaven's Spire. The violet
lapiscaela
had already begun to glow as the sunrise hit them high overhead.

Just a few minutes more, Loch thought, and they'd be there. Everything was going perfectly.

"Not long now!" Archvoyant Silestin declared to the crowd at the airdock as the passenger ship approached. "You can run, and you can hide, but eventually the law catches up with you!"

The open-air dock was connected to an enormous hangar where the ships were stowed, their wind-daemons banished when not in use. It was a cold, bright morning. Silestin wore his military uniform. The crowd included several other Voyants, a few news writers, and a number of general hangers-on.

Beside him, Warden Orris made as though to say something, but Silestin quieted him with a casual gesture.

"What do you plan to say to them, Archvoyant?" one of the writers asked.

Silestin chuckled. "I thought I'd just tell them, 'Nice try.'" The crowd laughed.

"Odd," said Ambassador Bi'ul, staring down at the ship. "What's that, Ambassador?" Silestin asked, glancing at the crowd of onlookers and giving an amused shrug.

The ambassador kept looking at the approaching ship. "As I examined the supple threads that knit your world into the fabric in which your souls exist, I sensed an... unusual... pattern. Something very old, but unfamiliar to me, though—"

"Loch's got a death priestess," Orris chimed in. "I bet that's it.

"I'm sure," Silestin said firmly, "that it's nothing our boys on the ship can't handle."

Just a little longer, Pyvic thought, and it would be over. Everything was going perfectly, except for the nagging feeling in his gut whenever he looked at the crew.

He'd taken the trip up to the Spire dozens of times, and something with the crew wasn't right. He'd worked a case once involving a crazed alchemist. When he finally caught the bastard, Pyvic had had the feeling that the man wasn't really there—that when he stared at the man, there was something he wasn't seeing, something pulling the strings. The alchemist had died rather than surrender, and Pyvic never worked up the energy to regret it.

The airship crew, to a man, reminded him of that alchemist.

He watched the Spire draw closer. They were almost directly under the great disc of glowing violet that formed the underbelly of the city. Pyvic didn't know why the helmsmen always took them up that way—he'd heard the ship had to come up inside the magical field that protected the city from storms, but a magical field with a great big hole in the bottom didn't make much sense.

And then one of the guards, the young one who hadn't talked much, cleared his throat nervously and asked, "Are we going to hit the glowing things on the city?"

Pyvic would've sworn he saw one of the other guards drop his head and sigh, would have sworn that he
heard
another sigh coming from off to his left, though there was no one over there.

"Of course not," one of the crewmen said in a low rusty voice with a coiled snarl lurking at the edges.

The other crewmen stopped what they were doing and turned to the guards in unison. "A trooper from Ros-Oanki would know that," another one added.

The first crewman poked the young guard hard in the chest. "Who are you?"

Pyvic looked at the other two guards, blinking as he saw them by daylight. The Urujar's armor didn't fit right, and the... the third one was somehow hard to focus on, but it was almost like he wasn't even wearing armor... and that warhammer certainly wasn't standard issue.

"Hell, how could you
not
know who I am?" the Urujar guard demanded indignantly. "Your mother was shouting my name
all night long!"
Then he cold-cocked the man with a right cross to the jaw. "Loch! Plan B!"

The nineteen crewmen had their swords out before the twentieth had hit the deck, and they drew with the same motion and snarled with the same voice. The helmsman was trying very hard to ignore everyone, the guards themselves were leaping into motion, and the prisoners...

The Imperial slid out of his shackles and leaped into the rigging as blades crashed down on the chair where he'd been sitting. Pyvic shouted, "Wait, we need them alive!" while drawing his blade, and then the mousy woman in the brown dress with all the pockets lifted her shackled arms, smiled at Pyvic, and touched one of the metal studs on the shackle chains.

A dart hissed against Pyvic's neck, and he had time to swear before the world went dark.

"Something is happening," Bi'ul said, his dry voice cutting through the murmurs of the crowd.

"I don't see how you could tell," Orris huffed. "All we can see is the balloon."

"Do you make a habit out of proclaiming things in ignorance?" Bi'ul asked. He sounded genuinely curious. "Is misplaced confidence sufficient to advance an otherwise unskilled mortal into a position of comfort, or is it simply a behavioral flaw on your part?"