We met over breakfast, which we ate in stony silence without tasting any of it. A long and complex look passed between us. One by one we nodded. We were all still tired from the weeks we’d spent on horseback since crossing back into Vencar. We were still tired from the strange and unfamiliar journey by river from Nagaan, and the painful truths that my father had inadvertently revealed. We were still tired from the weeks marching up and down the mountains north of Mashandosaar. We were even still tired from the journey across the Holy Empire, and the Holy Lands before that, for all that we’d had months of inactivity in Ghol Vidar – our legs had rested, there, but we had spent the whole winter worrying about whether or not we’d be allowed to return to the mortal world. But, if anyone in the court-in-exile was to survive, we had to take down the Usurper as soon as we could and hope that word could reach his generals in time to convince them to stand down. We were as ready as we would ever be.
Derrek led us out into the city, still disguised as civilians. There would be an opportunity to don our arms and armor, he promised. We had little choice but to believe him.
He led us through a series of winding streets and avenues, past an imperial barracks and finally down a long and forgotten alley just barely wide enough for us to walk in file. There was a suspicious lack of large trash and piss-smell, given the area, but also a surprising volume of wind-blown debris. Two thirds of the way down the wall of one building, which looked like it might actually be the back of the barracks, was a plain wooden door, decrepit with age but kept intact and discreet by a half a hundred carefully inscribed runes along the planks and fixtures from which it was made. He opened the door for us and gestured us through.
Inside we found an empty room with nothing inside except a trap door in the floor.
“Sweet gods,” Rennin swore. “This really is it, isn’t it?”
“You doubted me?”
Rennin shook his head, speechless.
“How is it that no one has found this place?” asked Elana.
“The Usurper is startlingly incurious, in some ways,” Derrek said. “I found a record of this passage in the journal of emperor Agamos Memnon III. His father had it installed during the initial construction of the palace, then killed the builders and architects, which never sat right with him. And then I found the journal of the wizard who cast the obfuscations over it, which I was then able to scry, and then reinforce. If Aem … if himself had ever put any real thought into how you had escaped, he might have been able to find it, too, but he would have been much more interested in finding someone to blame.”
We opened the trapdoor and checked the cellar, too, before changing into our arms and armor. Rennin helped Elana into her ancestral breastplate, gleaming with intricate images of ancient glory. She, in turn, helped him into his formal Iron Guard hoplite’s armor.
Derrek, very much to my surprise, dug out what looked like a pristine copy of the Georgi peasant’s finery that I had first met him in: a white linen shirt and a blue velvet vest, bronze-colored damask pantaloons and elaborately embroidered felt boots. He buckled his sword around his waist and hung his dagger on the opposite hip. With a sigh, he ran his fingers through his short and shaggy hair, almost three months of growth since he had last shaved it in Ghol Vidar. I was a little disappointed that he had not chosen the elaborate and glorious white robes he had worn to face Elana’s court-in-exile and the Prince of the White Steppes, but I supposed that would hamper his footwork with the sword.
For my own part, I adorned myself in my Black Mask regalia over the black silk rhu xian sorcerer’s garb that I had worn to face the Prince of the White Steppes, wrapping my enchanted himation around my shoulders and hiding my face behind the void-dark Black Mask for which my order was named. I had never donned them publicly, not in the mortal world. Even in the wizards’ laboratories of Liddarn, even in the darkest hours of night, I had used them only sparingly and when I was alone. My quest did not yet feel quite complete, but …
I had made them. I had earned them. I would not dissemble and eschew them when we faced the Usurper. I was Khanaarre of the Black Mask. Come victory or death, I would face them – and the Usurper, himself – as such.
Elana gave me a long steady look, taking in my regalia. I thought she might say something, deny my right to wear the Mask or robe. Instead, though, her gaze drifted over to Derrek for a moment, and when she looked back to me, she nodded her head deliberately, a formal acknowledgement. I might or might not be fully forgiven for lying to her in the beginning, but she acknowledged my status, now. I nodded back, smiling behind my mask.
Through the Mask, I could see the warp and weft of the obfuscations that Derrek had mentioned, the characters of it blazing brightly in the air. I could also see the gleaming thaumaturgy that someone – probably Derrek, himself – had used to seal the door from the cellar into the secret passage we would soon take. I could see Derrek, himself, shining with the light of the Holy Land that flooded through him, a hundred times as bright as I could see with my mortal eyes, so bright that it would have blinded me. Elana shone, too, with the light of her enchanted ancestral armor, every inch covered in previously invisible magical writing. The Blade of Xadaer sang with the light of Serkitkala and the Eye of the Sun, its name and the tale of its making inscribed in bright celestial characters that swirled around it and Rennin.
Derrek chanted over that door, even now. Its glow faded, and it swung open. Conjuring a dim magelight, he led us through into a dark corridor. Rennin followed immediately behind him. Elana went next. I brought up the rear. We left our bags behind. Either we would live to retrieve them, or they would surprise and confuse the next person to discover this passage.
The first stretch was a long straight shot. Our footsteps echoed in the narrow stone hall. Our breath sounded like bellows. From time to time, Elana or Rennin would brush the edge of their shield or pauldron against the walls, producing an awful steely scrape or ringing sound.
After a while, we came to a second door, locked with the same golden glow of thaumaturgy that had sealed the first. There was something else here, as well, though: a blue-black shimmer that whispered as it rippled. I saw the shimmer first, long before I saw the door, and by the time we came to it, I had puzzled out enough about its nature to be concerned.
“Derrek, wait,” I said, just before he reached out to the door.
“What?” It was the first time that our voices had broken the silence since we had entered the passage.
“Your enchantment isn’t the only one here.”
“What else do you see?”
“A dark blue wall,” I said. “It shimmers and shadows like the surface of a lake. I can’t see any characters, which is very strange. It’s making a sound that I can’t quite make out.”
He grunted.
“An aegis,” he said. “Fed by the syphon the same way his personal one is.”
He thought for a moment, silent. Between us, Elana and Rennin waited, looking from one of us to the other.
“It has to be physically permeable,” he said after a moment, “or they wouldn’t be able to let anyone in and out the main gates without his personal attention, which would be absurd, or some token, which would be even worse. Do you have any sense of what it does?”
I shook my head, a gesture probably invisible in the dark and the Mask.
“No,” I said aloud. “Not without any characters to read.”
Derrek grunted.
“Then get behind me,” he said, “and ready a shield. Let me know if anything interesting happens.”
I nodded, again futilely, then pushed carefully past Elana and Rennin. I took the moment to look each of them in the eyes – even if they couldn’t see mine – and touch their faces, just in case it was the last time I got the chance.
Once again, Derrek chanted in the celestial tongue that he had learned from the priestesses who raised him, the language of the rhu xian. Once again, the light went dark. Now I could see the shimmer – the aegis – more closely.
“Wait,” I said again, looking it over closely.
I brushed my wizard’s claw against it. There was a ripple, but no stronger reaction. I heard Elana’s breath catch behind me.
“It may be dormant,” I said, “or it may alert when we cross it. I can’t tell.”
A short silence followed.
“Do we have any other ideas for entry,” asked Rennin, his voice tight.
“Brute force attack,” Derrek suggested. “Sneak in the back door dressed as servants. Smuggle ourselves in barrels from upriver.”
Elana and Rennin and I had discussed and discarded a dozen potential plans over the last year. I had no doubt that she and Rennin had suggested and discarded a hundred more between them. Derrek’s mad proposal, made before the whole of the court-in-exile, had been the only one that sounded at all likely to succeed, and had been approved – albeit with ashen faces and horror-wide eyes – by the diviners and tacticians.
“Barrels,” Elana said. “Tell me about the barrels.”
There were a few minutes of mad laughter.
“Lead on, my lord,” Elana said soberly.
He did, pushing the door open and slipping through. The aegis shimmered, but that was all. When he didn’t die screaming, and I gave no further warning, Rennin followed after. Elana followed him, in turn. With each passage, the aegis rippled, but gave no stronger or more threatening response. I followed last, sensing nothing more or less than when my companions had passed, and closed the door behind me.
The narrow hall continued, turning abruptly after a few dozen yards. Soon, we found the first steep and narrow flight of stairs. There was a new tension to Elana and Rennin, now. They began to bump the walls more often, and to reach for one another when they did. They had shared little with me of what had happened when the Usurper attacked, but what they had said had made clear that the memories haunted them to this day.
It was surreal, moving through the walls. Most of the time we could hear only ourselves, but there were stretches of passage – particularly the stairs – where we could hear conversation and movement coming from inside the palace. We moved cautiously and quietly, stopping when we thought we might be – or might have been – heard. Mostly we could only hear heavy footsteps, or a susurrus of conversation. Other times though, we could hear disturbingly clearly. More than once, we heard jokes about the hallways being haunted, and the ghosts of long-dead soldiers.
Stranger still, visible only through the enchantments of my Mask, greasy blue-black shadows flowed down the halls and pooled in corners like water, save that they bore no concern for gravity. They shimmered like the aegis, but darker and more viscous. Like the aegis, they bore no characters for me to read, but they did not … hum the way it had; instead, they had a … smell about them, which I could not quite find the words to describe.
It was most of an hour before Derrek brought us to a stop in front of another place where, to my Mask-augmented eyes, the wall glowed with divine magic. When he did, he pressed his head to that section of wall and listened. Then he turned to face us.
“This is the door to what was Elana’s quarters,” he said. “What was once the royal bedchamber is a little further down the path. I do not know what either of these doors may open into, today.”
Elana and Rennin paused, exchanging a long, half-wild look.
“Whatever else we do,” Rennin said, “this is the palace, not the frontier. I want to hurt as few people as possible on our way to the Usurper, and to kill no one who isn’t armed and armored.”
Elana nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “Agreed.”
I nodded. So did Derrek. I didn’t want to kill anyone else, either, and I feared that sentiment would get us killed, instead. But it made sense that they wanted their revenge to be as surgical a strike as possible, both for the sakes of their own consciences and as a counterpoint to the Usurper’s invasion, which had been far less discriminating.
“Do you think,” she asked after another moment, “that our enemy would claim the royal bedchambers for himself?”
Derrek nodded.
“I don’t know for certain,” he hedged, “but it seems very likely to me, yes.”
“And he is likely to be attending his court at this time, not indulging himself.”
“Almost certainly, yes.”
“Then let us go there.”
The strategy was sound. But between the magelight and the Mask, I could see her face quite clearly, and I knew that strategy was not the only reason Elana did not wish to return to her childhood bedroom.
A few yards of gently arching hallway further on, we came to another glowing section of wall. Again, Derrek pressed his ear to the door. This time, apparently hearing nothing, he did not turn to us. He simply placed his hands on the wall and chanted as he had twice before.
“Rennin,” he said quietly, “would you do the honors?”
Rennin nodded, and Derrek operated the latch. Rennin pushed through the door. For a long minute, we heard only the rustling of cloth and the shuffling of footsteps. Then Rennin called in a clear and quiet voice: “All clear.”
We emerged in the royal suite. It was, as we had guessed, unoccupied. The secret passage opened at the head of the bed, with just enough space to walk between the bedframe and a massive wooden wardrobe on the other side. A vanity occupied one of the far corners, and a comfortable looking chair squatted in the other. The décor was all dark wood and red leather. The space was immaculate. Everything was carefully placed, nothing out of order.
“I don’t know what I expected,” said Elana, “but whatever it was … wasn’t this … austere.”
Derrek looked around, his face carefully unreadable.
“I had hoped for something else,” he said. “But this was what I feared.”
There was something in his tone that kept any of us from asking him to elaborate.
We spent another minute inspecting the room, making what would have to pass for lunch out of some jerky Rennin had kept from his bag and the bowl of almonds that we found on the Usurper’s desk.
The oily shadows lingered here, too, and thicker. They did not merely cling to the corners and along the baseboards, but stained everything in the room. Were they a side effect of the aegis barrier at the wall? The one the Usurper lived in, day and night? Or were they some effect of what he and Derrek had done to become Great Wizards, what Derrek had once called the syphon, like the corona that even now shone around our own Great Wizard?
The last, I decided, watching the shadows recede from Derrek’s light like fog dissipating in the sun. The oily shadows in the corners were the stain of miasma leaking through to the mortal world from the Shadow Realm, pooling within the confines of the palace aegis. If I had donned the mask outside Derrek’s secret entrance, would I have seen them staining the city, as well? No. I had donned my mask on the far side of the palace aegis; there had been no sign of the miasma outside, even at the very edge.
I could not find the words to describe what I was seeing, but I doubted that it had any tactical pertinence, so I let it lie. Derrek and I could investigate it later, when today’s awful work was done. Whatever else Rennin and Elana and Derrek found as they searched the room, they saw nothing to remark on, either.
Rennin took the lead when we left the room. Elana had still been a child when she had been here last, if only barely. He had been captain of the Iron Guard, the youngest to hold that title in generations, and we trusted his recollection of the halls. She followed close behind him. Derrek and I followed two steps after.
The royal bedroom had its own antechamber, which opened in turn to an antechamber shared by the rest of the royal suite. Where the bedroom had been done up in the Usurper’s personal colors of black and red, the rooms beyond were done in Solirium House hues of yellow, white, and gold, with accents of sky blue and leaf green. Low couches flanked by low tables, the Vencari fashion, each with a lamp or candelabra and some magnificent art object, everything was as opulent as it was tasteful.
We heard quiet singing from behind one of the doors of the greater antechamber – someone cleaning, perhaps, or an official mistress just barely out of bed. We preferred not to find out, and we moved past as quickly and quietly as we could.
We found the first of what would, inevitably, be far too many guards just outside the royal suite. He was Heart’s Guard, dressed in red linen and blackened steel, with a halberd in one hand and a hook-curved kopis sheathed on his hip.
Rennin, probably anticipating someone outside this door, saw the guard a moment before the guard saw him, and that was all the advantage he needed. He struck fast and hard, not with the Blade of Xadaer, but with a stiletto knife that he buried to the hilt in the other man’s throat, piercing his carotid artery and his windpipe in the same blow. The guard choked and gurgled and shuddered as he died, and Rennin eased him down into the corner, rising with a red-soaked knife but a surprisingly small amount of blood on his hand.
“We should hurry, now,” he said. “We have, at most, until whoever was in there comes out, or someone comes for them.”
We all nodded, and followed after as quickly as we could.
“Where will we most likely find our enemy?” Elana asked as we moved down the wide and well-windowed hall.
“Unless he has moved the Rorgoth Throne to some private observatory,” said Derrick, “he will be in the throne room.”
Elana nodded. Rennin led the way. Derrek and I followed.
I felt more desperate and afraid with every step we took. There were just the four of us, no matter what magics we wielded. How many dozens, hundreds, of guards and servants lay between us and our objective? How could we avoid them all, even with some bloodshed?
And yet, somehow, we did. One hall, one room at a time, we made our way through the palace by a combination of stealth and strength of arms. Some guards – and some staff – we heard coming. Most moved through the halls in pairs, their laughter and conversation announcing their presence in just enough time to duck into a side room. But this strategy led us to fully half our encounters with castle staff: maids and pages sweeping and dusting offices and meeting rooms, polishing jewelry or ceremonial armor or – in one hilarious instance – each other’s knobs.
These encounters were made easier by a swift and sudden inspiration on my part, the first time we fled a pair of Heart’s Guard by means of a conveniently unlocked door, only to find a middle-aged maid oiling the surface of a fine wooden table. Rennin and Elana had frozen – possibly by the impossibility of their own imperative against bloodshed, possibly from the shock of recognition, because instead of screaming or demanding who we were, the woman stared at us like we were ghosts.
“Rennin?” she said.
I squeezed my wizard’s claw into my palm and spoke a word of power, an imperative of the verb “to sleep” in the earth-gods’ tongue. The woman’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she fell to the floor in a slump.
“Good work,” said Derrek, quietly, while Elana and Rennin ran to make sure she was both out of sight and unlikely to choke on her own tongue.
“Thank you,” I said. He had done something similar to the border guards’ horses when we had returned to Vencar, but he had used a different word from a celestial dialect that I did not know well enough to reproduce on the fly, and the effects could be similarly different. “Later, we can find out if she’ll wake up on her own or if I just discovered a fairytale curse.”
Other times, we came upon guards standing silent at corners. These died in fast, brutal battles with Rennin and sometimes Elana, depending on the angles. And then we waited, tense and afraid, listening while we disposed of the bodies as best we could, half hoping and half afraid that the fight had been heard and the time for stealth was over. Each such encounter left our prince and her consort looking more and more desperate and crushed. This almost never happened with staff – they rarely worked alone, and never quietly – and only a few times were we put in a position where Rennin or Elana had to cold-cock them before I could target them with my newly-minted sleep spell.
Derrek, for his part, conserved his magical power for the ultimate confrontation with the Usurper. Once, he was caught between an oncoming guard and the rest of us, and was forced to draw and use his sword. I should not have been surprised at his competence with the blade – would Derrek Rowan really carry a tool he could not use? – but he was an amateur compared to Elana, let alone Rennin, and succeeded chiefly in holding the guard back until they could push past him to end the fight.
The oily miasma of the Shadow Realm was everywhere. Nowhere was it as thick as the royal bedchamber, where it had stained the walls and ceiling, but it flowed like water along the baseboards of the halls, and pooled deep in corners where the lights did not always reach. I think the others sensed it, if only I and perhaps Derrek knew what it was. It made our impossible task feel even harder. We were all shaking with nerves by the time we came to the throne room.
It was an utter shock, almost too much to ask for, to find only two pairs of bored-looking guards outside the open double doors: a gold-liveried soldier from the House Solirium and a black-and-red armored Heart’s Guard to each side of the arched portal. They didn’t even see us, at first, giving us a long moment to listen to a heated exchange coming from inside the throne room.
“He’s here,” Derrek said. His voice was cold, bordering on hollow.
“How many guards will he have inside,” Rennin asked softly.
“Him? None, probably. His guests? Who knows?”
Rennin nodded. He touched Elana’s face with his fingers. She returned the gesture. Then, together, just as the guards at the door seemed to register us, they charged.
“Don’t any of you dare die,” I muttered, brushing Derrek’s hand with mine before I swept into the hallway after them.
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