67
~ PRESENT DAY: AKELLA ~
Impossible. There was no way, no way at all, that Akella would be able to make her way up to the palace without being noticed, and then make it into the palace without another life-or-death confrontation against the assassin-witches.
Akella put the makeshift farscope into her pocket and crawled slowly backwards from the ridge, belly pressed to the ground the whole time. Such abundance of caution was probably unnecessary; none of the palace guards had farscopes of their own, not that she’d seen anyway, and there was no way she had gotten close enough to be seen with the naked eye.
But then again, all these black-clad palace guards had shadows inside them, so who knew what they could see or not see.
Which was why Akella kept her belly to the ground all the way back to the boulder where she’d stashed her pack. Even when she got to the boulder, she didn’t dare stand up. It would have made her head and shoulders visible to someone with keen eyesight or a farscope who happened to point their attention in her direction at just that moment.
“Aye, if they were an osprey they’d see you, maybe,” whispered the voice that always mocked her.
There had to be a way into the palace that didn’t take her directly through the compound of witches at its foot. There had to be. People who built castles and palaces were quite fond of building secret ways in and out, ways that could always be discovered by the enterprising mind. After all, she’d led the Commander and the Empress out of Pellon’s castle when escape had seemed all but impossible, hadn’t she?
“Led them out of one deathtrap and right into another, as a matter of fact,” the mocking voice whispered again.
That wasn’t quite fair. She’d been the voice of reason when they reached Persopos; she’d been the one who’d watched the patterns of shadow infected long enough to figure out how to disguise themselves to get into the city without being noticed. The stubborn Commander and even more stubborn Empress had initially wanted to fight their way in, as if they would have gotten any further than the first tier of the corkscrew city that way. Her method had gotten them all the way to the top of the mountain, right to the witches’ front door.
They might have even gotten into the witch compound, too, except the Empress’s basket of fish started to tilt. Just a little at first. Then more and more while Akella, her face as blank as a shadow-infected face should be, let out a litany of silent curses in the Empress’s direction. The Commander had no problem with a tilting basket. Akella had no problem with a tilting basket.
But apparently they just didn’t teach princesses how to balance heavy loads on the head.
The Empress subtly tried to right the basket. Instead she overcompensated and made it worse. Much worse.
Fish. Fish everywhere.
Even that might have been all right if she hadn’t proceeded to drop to her knees and start scooping the fish back up again, because shadow-infected drones didn’t notice if they dropped things – they just kept walking. And shadow-infected drones definitely didn’t put things they dropped back into a basket.
The line of fifty-some-odd fish-basket-balancing drones Akella, the Commander, and the Empress had joined was escorted by only two Order of Targhan witches – one at the front, one at the back. Akella had hoped the one near them, the one in the back of the line, wouldn’t notice what had happened with the basket and the fish and the scooping, but of course she did.
If Akella had been in the Commander’s shoes, she would have just kept walking. Sometimes, in the midst of a storm, it was more important to focus on the masts than to try to rescue a single sailor who’d fallen overboard. Better to sacrifice one man than the whole crew.
The Commander made a different choice, perhaps because, in her perpetual arrogance, she assumed she could take two Order of Targhan assassins without too much trouble. Or, more likely, the Commander was just a better person than Akella.
“Bloody concubine,” Akella muttered now, remembering the incident.
Dispatching the witch closest to them hadn’t been a problem. The Commander had produced the rune-marked dagger from beneath her peasant’s disguise and turned the beautiful young assassin into a withered old lady before the woman could get a shout of alarm out of her throat. The witch was dead before she hit the cobblestones. But then the witch at the front of the line turned around to see why the drones in the back had stopped moving.
Akella didn’t even get to see what was beyond the semi-circular compound wall – and she had to admit that a part of her had been morbidly curious to see what was inside. But there was no chance, because the witch closest to the door ran from the Commander instead of towards her, and seconds later, six more witches in black cloaks were swarming out of the compound.
In the chaos of the battle that followed, Akella retreated. And the Commander gave her that look, that evil look when she did.
“I wasn’t abandoning you,” Akella said to her mental image of the Commander. “I was retreating in order to regroup. I can’t help it that your black-and-white notions of honor prevent you from thinking more than one second ahead sometimes.”
Retreating in order to regroup.Was that why Akella had left her crew here the first time? To regroup?
But just as she felt the familiar sneering self-disgust rising to twist her mouth into yet another expression of self-mockery, Akella froze.
“The crew,” she breathed.
She’d been spying and planning for months, trying to figure out the best way to stage a one-woman rescue of the Commander and Empress. It would be a rescue with no backup, no reinforcements, no one to watch her back. Or so she’d assumed. But she’d become so wrapped up in the capture of the two Imperial arseholes she’d arrived with in Persopos that she’d nearly forgotten her original reason for agreeing to come back to this Preyla-forsaken city in the first place: her crew.
Akella grinned to herself. “And I’ll take one single crew of well-trained, well-led Adessian pirates over an entire brigade of Imperial farm boys any day.”
She knew what to do now. She knew exactly what to do.
Moving away from the ridge she had been spying from, she picked up her sack of supplies and crept towards the trail that would lead her back down the mountain. From there, she’d travel north again, one day and one night, back to the ruined, abandoned city where she’d made camp. But she’d only go back long enough for one good night’s sleep and a few preparations, because Akella finally had a plan.
She tried to imagine the look on the Commander’s face when the insufferable woman realized she was being rescued by a gang of pirates. She grinned the entire journey back to her camp, grinned so much her cheeks were sore by the time she got back.
#
Persopos’s harbor was shaped like a crescent moon, with nasty, tooth-looking rocks on the two far prongs and a labyrinthine network of docks in the center, a few hundred yards away from the ornate gate into the city. Blank-faced drone laborers were as numerous as ants, scattered about everywhere just outside the city. They were as busy as ants, too. Under the watchful gaze of surprisingly few of the black-clad witches, the ants scrubbed the outer wall to keep it a glistening white, tended to the manicured hedges lining the wall’s foot, and, most importantly to Akella’s plans, toted crates out of the city and onto the two waiting ships at the end of the docks.
Akella had a sense of what was inside those crates. When she’d snuck into the city a few weeks earlier with the Commander and Empress, they’d witnessed shadow-infected blacksmiths hammering away at weapons and armor. Finished arrows, swords, spears, helms, and breastplates were being packed into wooden crates that looked an awful lot like the ones now being carried onto the ships.
The Empress had kept her face schooled in that blank, faux–shadow-infected expression as they’d passed the rows of forges and clinking hammers in Persopos’s lowest cake tier, but Akella knew what she had to be feeling. The Empire had long suspected that the impoverished mountain men were getting better weapons and armor from somewhere, and here, before the Empress’s very eyes, was the evidence. And there was nothing she could do about it, short of bringing death to the so-called deathless king.
Yet with the fall of Pellon, the War in the East was all but over. The mountain men had achieved their goal of retaking their ancestral homeland. The deathless king had gained his first toehold upon the continent. The fact that hammers still rang upon anvils night and day in Persopos was ominous.
From her hiding place on the northern side of the harbor’s crescent moon, Akella watched through her farscope as shadow-infected drones working in ones and twos carried the crates down the long dock and onto the two ships. She counted the seconds from the time they disappeared into the cargo holds with crates in their arms and then reappeared on deck, crate-free.
One hundred fifty … One hundred seventy … Two hundred … Two hundred thirty.
All right. Three or four minutes to accomplish her task. That seemed manageable.
With the sun falling on the far side of the harbor, backlighting the ships and sending lavender tones of evening curling outwards towards the white city in the east, Akella didn’t quite trust her count of fifty-two drones carrying crates. But what she was sure of was that, just like before, there were only two Order of Targhan women supervising them – one on the dock, looking bored, another standing hundreds of yards from the shore, posted at the top of the hill beside the city’s polished black gate.
Two against one were odds Akella would normally take, but she’d never seen anyone who could fight like these deadly Order witches. Even the Commander herself was only barely a match for them. Akella liked to think she was the Commander’s equal with a sword, which meant she could probably take one of the Order under the right circumstances, but she hoped she wouldn’t need to test that theory. If all went according to plan, she would walk right past both and into the city without them so much as noticing her presence.
If.There was a lot riding on that if.
“Stop thinking and move,” Akella whispered.
She slipped off her boots, half-burying them with sand behind the jagged boulders that hid her. Hopefully she’d come back for these. They were Adessian-style boots, and she’d managed to hang onto them through this whole months-long misadventure. It would be a shame if she had to leave them behind.
Beside the boots, Akella also buried her Imperial short sword, which was even harder to part with than her favored footwear. She had to hand it to the Empire; she’d never owned a better sword in her life. Once the sword was buried, she stripped down to her small clothes, stuffing her tunic, vest, and breeches into her boots. She was taking only one object with her – the rune-marked dagger. It would have to be enough.
Akella waited a few more minutes until the sun had fallen completely, gooseflesh rising on her bare arms, then she slipped into Preyla’s chilly embrace. By the time she reached the starboard side of the closer of the two ships, her fingers were already numb with cold. But she bypassed that ship and swam silently around its stern until she came to the port side of the second ship. There was more light on this side, but the view of the two Order women was obscured. Akella didn’t particularly care if one of the drones saw her. She had a feeling that they wouldn’t pause in their mission regardless of what they saw or didn’t see; when Akella, the Commander, and the Empress had snuck into the line carrying foodstuffs the last time, the shadow-infected drones had not so much as blinked.
Akella dug her fingernails into the side of the ship and began to climb. The vessel was well-constructed, which meant that finding suitable handholds and footholds was next to impossible, forcing her to sometimes slip her dagger between the ship’s ribs to use as a climbing peg. Two things worked in her favor: First, as well-constructed as the ship was, it still wasn’t Adessian; second, this wasn’t the first time Akella had snuck aboard a ship from the sea, alone and badly outnumbered. The first time, she’d been a girl of not quite eleven summers, sneaking aboard an Imperial war galleon with her brother and a handful of others after the galleon’s captain had arrested a boy from her village for stealing. Perhaps it had been the thrill of that original escapade that set her on a course of lifelong piracy – and hatred of the Empire.