Paul Thompson - Nemesis

The door opened into the corridor. The smell of filth from inside was overwhelming. Something gray stirred within, and for a second Eladamri thought he'd been tricked by another one of Volrath's monsters. The gray shape became a human form-a gaunt, red-haired young woman of modest height, clad in filthy rags.

She blinked at the light. "You are an elf," she said. "I thought my time had come, and Volrath was playing a little game with me."

"Who are you?"

"My name is Takara, daughter of Starke."

He knew the name from Darsett en-Dal. Takara had been part of the early Dal resistance movement. Why was she still alive?

Takara slumped against the door. "Has there been a revolution? Or are you the new chief warder?"

"Neither. I'm escaping, if I can. If you would be free, come along."

Though limping himself, he gave his arm to the stranger. Takara didn't look like she'd been Greven's guest in the interrogation cell. Her skin was unmarked, but she was terribly thin and weak, probably starved for weeks.

She looked down at his makeshift splint and battered hands. "You're not in any shape for this, are you?"

"I'm not alone," he advised. "Some of my people are in the Citadel, but we have to find them."

Takara lowered her head to his shoulder. "Oh well, this has broken the tedium…"

The alarm bell ceased. It had been part of the background so long, its sudden cessation seemed louder than the noise had been. In its place they heard footfalls echoing along the curving corridor.

Takara lifted her head. "The world's shortest escape," she said, sighing.

Eladamri held a finger to his lips. He pulled the iron splint from his tortured leg. Without the brace, he almost collapsed. Takara held him up, though her frail arms trembled from the effort.

He nodded thanks.

They huddled in the shallow recess of a shut cell door, waiting for the runners to appear. Eladamri caught a glimpse of Rathi boot and breastplate and swung his iron. It whistled by Kireno's nose, missing him by a hair.

"Brother!" the Vec rebel cried. "It's us!"

The momentum of the swing carried Eladamri to the floor. Takara couldn't disentangle herself and fell on top of him. The two were gently separated by Kireno and one of Teynel's many cousins, Shamus.

They propped the elf against the wall.

"Be easy, brother," Kireno said. He took the water bottle from his hip and gave it to Eladamri. He drank greedily until he saw Takara watching him with parted lips. He wiped the mouth of the bottle and offered it to her.

Takara seized the bottle with both hands and raised it high. Water spurted from the corners of her mouth and ran down her chin, cutting white tracks in the gray grime on her face.

Eladamri smiled. "What news of Teynel, Liin Sivi, and the rest?"

"We fear Teynel and cousin Garnan are dead," Shamus put in. "We were trying to find the lower airship dock we'd heard about and got lost in some tunnels deep in the fortress. Teynel and Garnan went ahead to scout, but we were attacked!"

"Greven? Crovax?"

"Creatures, monsters!" Kireno said. "Poor Vellian put his hand in a nest of them. These two-legged ratballs devoured him… we had to run, we had no weapons to fight them with. We were supposed to meet Liin Sivi and her men at the hall where we saw Greven and Crovax, but the bell started ringing and there were guards all over the place-"

"-so we came to find you instead." Shamus finished Kireno's sentence for him.

"What's it like in the Citadel?" asked Eladamri.

"Chaos," Kireno replied. "They're bringing troops in from the city garrison, I heard them say. The whole place will be overrun with soldiers."

"Sivi must have drawn their attention. Very well, we need to get out of sight for a while and wait for things to calm a bit before we try to get out," the elf said.

"Where can we go?" said Shamus.

"Greven's bound to return here to finish with me," said Eladamri. "I can't decide whether to ambush him here or clear out to fight another day."

"Begging your pardon, O Eladamri, but you're in no shape to fight," Kireno said. "Let's find a quiet corner to hide in, as you said."

Takara interjected. "The map room," she said. "It's the next building over, before you get to the mogg warrens. It's for the evincar's use only, so no one goes there much."

"You know your way around this maze?"

She looped dirty copper hair behind her ears. "My father was Volrath's mentor and later his servant. I know something about the Stronghold." She handed the empty water bottle to Eladamri.

"The map room it is," he said.

He and Takara had to be helped to stand. They braced each other.

Takara smiled wryly. "You never know what you'll find behind a closed door, do you?"

When the alarm went off, Belbe was in the control room of the flowstone factory making the third of her subversive adjustments to the output meter. As she suspected, the monitoring units built into the factory machinery had detected the reduced output by comparing current production figures to those of the past. All through the day the production of flowstone steadily increased. By the time she arrived late that night, the works were churning out flowstone at 90 percent of capacity. The speed at which the factory corrected itself troubled her. It meant she would have to be more vigilant in her sabotage if her goal of preventing the conjunction with Dominaria was to be met.

When the alarm sounded, she covered all traces of her tampering and started back to the palace to find out what was going on. She found the corridors clogged with guards. Though the palace garrison numbered over two thousand men, she found hundreds of troops of the regular army mustering on the factory concourse. She accosted a captain of the Tenth Company and asked him what he knew about the situation.

"Forgive me, Excellency, I don't know much more than you do," the officer said. "I heard something about Predator-a riot between the moggs and the workers, maybe. I don't know."

"Why would they need so many troops to quell a brawl?"

"There's thousands of moggs in the warrens, Excellency. If they get out of hand, it would take the entire army to put them down."

"Who's commanding this operation?"

The captain frowned and pointed. Belbe followed his gesture and saw a sergeant standing on a flowbot armature, shouting orders. If the Corps of Sergeants was involved, it meant Crovax was in charge.

Belbe was seized by a sense of foreboding. She smelled a plot. If Crovax had engineered an emergency in order to flood the Citadel with army troops, it gave him an unbeatable advantage in the struggle for power. True, she had offered him the evincar's crown, but that was just a ploy to save Ertai's life. She'd still held out hope that with Greven's help she could suppress Crovax and lead Rath in an entirely new direction. Now things looked very bad, if not hopeless.

Once in the palace, she learned there had been a disturbance at the upper airship dock. She went there immediately and found the pinnacle heavily occupied. The docking platform was littered with slain guards, and the air was spiced with the smell of burnt gunpowder. Predator floated evenly on its tether, but there was obvious damage to the deckhouse and main bridge.

She easily picked out Greven and Crovax among the mass of troops. Greven bowed when he saw her. Crovax did not.

She approached Greven. "What's the matter?"

"Things are unclear at the moment, Excellency," he replied. "We're questioning the workers and moggs who were on board when this happened, but we're not getting a coherent story from any of them. The guards who responded to the first call for help are all dead, killed by that." He indicated the twelve-foot-long harpoon head, now imbedded in the far wall of the platform. "Someone fired the deck gun without closing the breech. The gun's mangled, and the harpoon cut down more than twenty men at once."