Word of Traitors: Legacy of Dhakaan - Book 2 (26 page)

He had to get away from the new lhesh before then.

He raised his gauntlered arm and waved to the crowd in imitation of Tariic. The hobgoblin glanced at him and growled, “What are you doing?”

“The same thing you are,” Geth said through a false smile. He tried to find Ashi, but it was harder to see through the mass of waving arms from the floor than it had been from the dais.

“Where is the rod?”

“Somewhere safe.”

“You knew, didn’t you?” Tariic kept waving. “So did Chetiin. He did us all a favor by killing my uncle.”

Geth couldn’t find a reply to that but Tariic didn’t give him a chance to answer.

“Haruuc couldn’t master the rod—I felt it trying to reach him and I felt him holding it back. That was his mistake. Embrace the glories of Dhakaan and you become the master of the rod. I’m not going to make the mistake Haruuc did. Give me the true rod, Geth, and I’ll tame it. I’ll unlock its secrets.”

A chill ran through Geth. “That’s what I’m afraid of, Tariic.”

The doors of the throne room were getting closer. An honor guard waited on the other side, ready to escort Tariic—or obey his commands to whisk a treacherous shifter out of sight. Geth glanced back over his shoulder. The others who had participated in the coronation ritual had followed them down from the dais. Munta and Razu, the two he might have counted on for some kind of aid, were last and too far away. Aguus was paying more attention to the crowd than to the others in the procession. Pradoor and Makka—out of the question.

But Daavn darted ahead of the goblin and the bugbear. He walked just behind Tariic and Geth, strutting and waving as if he had taken the crown himself. Geth looked ahead once more, then, as they reached the doors, called back to the warlord of the Marhaan. “Daavn, go before us and announce the lhesh’s approach!”

Those lining the aisle heard. Makka and Pradoor heard. Daavn’s face tightened in suspicion. Tariic turned to look at his ambitious
friend—and Geth twisted around, reaching between himself and the new lhesh to grab a fistful of fur and drag the trailing edge of the long tiger skin cloak forward.

It was a ridiculous, desperate trick, but it worked. The heavy cloak tangled between Tariic’s legs. Caught off guard and off balance, he stumbled. His raised arm came down, his grip eased momentarily, and Geth wrenched his hand free. Leaping ahead of the hobgoblin, he turned back and said loudly, “No? I’ll do it myself!”

He whirled again, ducking between the startled guards. The antechamber to the throne room flashed past him, then a corridor, then he was bounding up stairs two at a time, racing for his chamber like a fox before hounds.

The moment that Tariic slid the false rod out of Geth’s grasp, Ashi narrowed her eyes, focused her concentration, and drew on the power of her dragonmark. Warmth flashed through the colorful lines that patterned her body and a sharp clarity wrapped around her. The mark had protected her from the influence of the tainted dragon Dah’mir, the alien madness of one of the terrible daelkyr, and the commanding power of the true Rod of Kings—the magic Tenquis had woven into the false rod didn’t have a chance. She could even have fought it off on her own, but she needed all of her wits about her.

Suspicion made a hard lump in her belly. Something was
very
wrong. Geth’s eyes had a startled, hunted look to them as Tariic pulled him up to the edge of the dais. And when Razu proclaimed Tariic as the new lhesh, the shifter should have looked triumphant—but he didn’t. Protected by the power of her mark, Ashi knew she was probably the only one to notice that for all of Tariic’s apparent goodwill and pleasure, he gripped Geth’s hand with the strength of someone holding a prisoner.

She turned and grasped Vounn’s shoulder, drawing on her dragonmark once more, but this time channeling its protection into her mentor. Heat like a fever flashed on her skin, then Vounn blinked and looked at her, the influence of the false rod banished. “Ashi, what—?”

“Don’t trust Tariic,” Ashi said. “Whatever happens, don’t trust him.” She released Vounn and turned away.

The lhesh had come down from the dais and was passing through the cheering crowd with Geth at his side. The shifter’s gaze was sharper now. His free arm rose and he started to wave along with Tariic. What was he doing? Ashi cursed under her breath and tried to push forward. The crowd resisted. She cursed again and wished that she were the size of a gnome—Midian could have slid through easily. Hopefully he had seen things as she had.

Makka passed along the aisle with Pradoor on his shoulder and she crouched down to avoid being seen. Through a gap among arms and elbows, Ashi watched her grandfather’s sword swing at the bugbear’s side. Her hands clenched and she forced her eyes away. So close to the stolen weapon and yet she couldn’t risk stealing it back. Not here. Not now.

When she looked up again, Tariic and Geth had reached the throne room doors. She was losing them! She shoved the nearest hobgoblin hard and his gaze finally shifted from Tariic. “Watch yourself,
taat!”
he snapped at her.

“Yes, sorry,” she said, pushing past him to the next obstacle in her way. “My fault. Excuse me—”

A commotion interrupted her and she looked up just in time to see Tariic batting aside his cloak. She heard Geth’s voice over the noise of the pipes, drums, and crowd. “No? I’ll do it myself.”

Past Tariic, she caught a glimpse of the shifter, free of the lhesh’s grasp, breaking past the guards that stood outside the throne room. Tariic did not look pleased. He summoned Daavn to his side with a sharp gesture and spoke to him in tones that did not carry. Daavn nodded and slipped ahead of Tariic, pointing to four guards who fell in behind him. Tariic turned back to the crowd in the throne room and waved the rod, raising another cheer, then resumed his progress as if nothing was wrong.

Ashi paused, uncertain of what to do. Try and find Geth or catch up to Tariic and watch him? Either option would be slow—

The hobgoblin she had shoved gave her a push. “Don’t just stand there!”

She glared at him, lips peeling back from her teeth in a snarl—then looked past him and realized that the whole crowd
was moving, following Tariic out of the throne room. She could ride the current out.

Or she could swim against the stream. Snarl turning to a fierce smile, Ashi thrust herself against the moving crowd, forcing hobgoblins aside. The progress of the crowd toward the throne room doors was a slow shuffle, but in just a few moments she had reached the thin edge of the mass and vaulted onto the dais. With no one to block her way, she dashed across the dais to the door and the small room on its other side, and then into the corridor beyond.

Where had Geth gone? He wasn’t one to run from a fight, which, Ashi guessed, meant that he was running
to
something—his chamber and the rod. There would be no following him through the crowded antechamber outside the throne room, but there was always more than one way through Khaar Mbar’ost.

She started running.

Flight after flight of stairs passed under Geth’s feet. He had darted past three floors of the fortress before the sounds of pursuit echoed after him. He recognized Daavn’s voice calling more guards to the chase. He smiled without humor. A shifter was still faster than a hobgoblin. Thankfully, he met no one coming down the stairs—anyone who was of importance in Khaar Mbar’ost had been at the coronation and anyone who wasn’t would either be at work preparing for the feast to follow or in the streets celebrating. Another floor passed and another. His breath rasped in his lungs but he drove on. Another floor, then only one more to go. His chamber and the rod were close. Did he have time to grab a pack? Maybe. He dragged the keys to the locked chest up from beneath his shirt—

—and came to a halt so abrupt he almost fell over. A hobgoblin guard wearing the red corded armband of Khaar Mbar’ost sprawled across the stairs. Blood ran in the thin streams down the stone steps.

Geth sucked air between his teeth and moved closer, quick but cautious. The guard was dead, no doubt about it. The blood poured from a slit throat and, strangely, slashed legs. He’d been
hamstrung, his legs rendered useless. He would have been kneeling or fallen when his throat was slashed.

There were no smears or handprints or any other signs to indicate that anyone else had already seen the corpse. He was the first. Stepping around the dripping blood, Geth touched his fingers to the body. It was still almost as warm as life. Death had come recently. The hair on his arms and the back of his neck rose. Who would have done this? And why?

There was a yelp and a crash as one of his pursuers missed a step. Geth’s head snapped around and a growl forced its way out of him. Every moment he spent standing still was a moment in which pursuit grew closer. He glanced once more at the nameless guard, and bounded past.

He moved more slowly, and where the central corridor of his floor opened off of the stairs, he stopped and peered around the corner before moving on. Whoever had killed the guard might have gone anywhere in Khaar Mbar’ost, up the stairs or down. But so close to his floor? That couldn’t be a coincidence.

Geth glanced at each door along the corridor as he came to it. Closed tight—except for his. He put his back to the wall. The hard breathing of his race up the stairs became cold and shallow.

The door to his chamber stood ajar. The guards who had stood outside his door since Haruuc’s death were gone—with the Rod of Kings passing to Tariic’s possession, at least in theory, there had been no reason for them to remain. If they had still been on duty, Geth suspected he would have found them on the floor with their throats cut.

From the stairwell, sounds of pursuit became sounds of surprise and anger. His pursuers had found the dead body. With their cries as his cover, Geth moved, leaping in front of the door and kicking it wide.

Chetiin froze in the middle of the room. There was a thick tube of stiff leather slung across his back. The chest that contained—
had
contained—the Rod of Kings lay open, all locks and magical protections defeated, a pair of blacksmith’s tongs and a bloody dagger with a wicked curved blade abandoned beside it.

And Geth froze as well, caught in the doorway as the black-clad goblin’s treachery crashed down on him.

No, he tried to remind himself, it had been another of the
shaarat’khesh
who’d killed Haruuc. If another goblin had taken Chetiin’s place before, why not again?

His mind told him that. His heart fell back on the betrayal he’d felt after Haruuc’s assassination. Then Chetiin spoke and Geth knew his heart was right.

“Give my regards to Tenquis.”

Only four other people knew that name. Three of them Geth would have trusted with his life. The fourth was Chetiin.

“No,” Geth choked.

The proof of innocence that Chetiin had offered in his story of a second assassin and an attempt on his own life, of blame laid on Midian, shattered like glass on stone. A lie. It had all been an enormous lie, right down to his promise to watch over Ekhaas and Dagii. The
shaarat’khesh
elder had waited for the one moment that all eyes had been elsewhere to make his final move on the true rod.

Chetiin gave him a smile that seemed almost pitying—then he moved. In one jump, he went from the floor to a chair, and in another from the chair to the windowsill. A thin rope had been secured to a shutter in the same place Geth had secured the blanket he had used to signal the goblin. Chetiin grabbed it and whipped it around his body in a smooth motion. Then, with a last look to Geth, he pushed himself back into space.

“No,
you bastard!”
screamed Geth. He ran to the window. Chetiin was already halfway down the wall, gliding in long arcs of descent slowed by brief brushes with the wall. A few people in the plaza below looked up and pointed, their attention drawn by Geth’s scream, but most were moving to the fringes of the vast crowd at the front of the fortress. Tariic must have emerged, displaying the false rod even as Chetiin made off with the true.

The word of traitors is written on air
.