78
~ JOSLYN ~
Joslyn sat up in bed. Beside her, Tasia did the same.
“It’s time,” Tasia said. “We end him tonight, before he can grow any stronger.”
Joslyn wanted to ask Tasia what she meant about the deathless king growing stronger, but Tasia was already on her feet, stumbling a little as she headed to the antechamber. Joslyn hastened to catch her, relieved to see that Ku-sai’s sword was still in her hand, relieved that her physical body, though it was nearly skeletal in its thinness, at least still obeyed her commands.
Bong-bong.
As Joslyn’s boots struck the floor, the ringing bell stopped. She hesitated. “What was that – the bell? And why did it stop?”
“I don’t know.” Tasia’s hand was on the door to the antechamber, but as she glanced over her shoulder at Joslyn, her expression revealed her uncertainty. “It sounded like it was coming from somewhere outside the palace grounds. Or on its edge.”
“Do you think it’s an alarm bell?” Joslyn asked. “About us?”
Tasia shook her head. “Grastinga knew the bell was coming ages ago. She told me it was when you would return.”
Joslyn’s face fell. “I’m sorry. When I put you there for safekeeping, I thought – ”
“Hush, my love,” Tasia said. “There will be time for apologies later.”
Tasia flung the door open as if expecting to find the antechamber filled with Order of Targhan assassins bristling with rapiers and poisoned darts.
But the room was bare. Just dusty tapestries and a few pieces of faded upholstered furniture.
“No bookshelves,” Tasia observed, more to herself than to Joslyn. She stepped into the room and ran her fingers down one of the tapestries. “And this one … Dorsan III ascending to the throne after the Grandsons’ War.” She frowned. “It’s been behind glass since at least my great-grandfather’s time…”
“We should go,” Joslyn said. “If he doesn’t know we’re not in the Shadowlands anymore, he will soon.” But then she paused. “Where? Where do you think he is?”
“That’s the thing.” Tasia turned away from the tapestry, thoughtful. “Reading was unfashionable in the upper classes until the House of Wisdom convinced the Emperor it was a critical skill, even for royals. But bookshelves weren’t installed in this room until it became my thrice-great grandmother’s.”
Where Joslyn had heard bells before, now her keen senses detected something else – the distinctive ring of steel on steel. It was distant, but when she pushed her hearing to its outer limit, she was positive of what she heard.
“Tasia, we must go,” she said again. “There’s a battle outside the palace. Out the south gate, I think.” Joslyn cocked her head. “Perhaps two dozen armed soldiers in the conflict.”
“Wait a moment.” Tasia’s face scrunched in concentration. “This version of the palace …” She studied the tapestry of King Dorsan III’s coronation. “It’s at least a century and a half older than mine. That means there is no western drawing room, no northern drawing room.” Tasia glanced up sharply. “And no offices or council room.”
“Tasia, we really can’t dally –”
“The original throne room of the House of Dorsa,” Tasia finished. “The southern drawing room, before it was a drawing room – that was the palace throne room for over five hundred years. Gods,” she added, speaking only to herself now, “I actually did learn something from Norix’s history lectures.”
Tasia moved to fling open the door from the antechamber into the corridor as she had the bedroom door. But it was locked.
“We’ll have to break it open,” Joslyn said. She looked at Ku-sai’s sword, still in her hand. She really didn’t want to use her mentor’s blade to pry the lock off; she’d try her own fingernails first if she had to. Joslyn turned back to the antechamber’s inner door. “Did you see a fire poker in the bedchamber?”
But Tasia wasn’t listening. She’d knelt beside the door, tugging at a floorboard. “No need,” she said lightly, and she flipped up the edge of a board, opening it like a book. “The replica of this palace is faithful to the original – extremely faithful. Children of the House of Dorsa have been living in this room for generations. And figuring out ways to sneak out of it.” She reached into a hole beneath the floor, producing an iron key. “It won’t be the first time I’ve used this key to get out of my apartments.”
“How is there … how did you know there would be a key?”
“Cousin Anna showed me, of all people,” Tasia said. “We have a great-grandmother in common. She lived in here before my great-great grandfather married her off to the lord of House Aventia.” Tasia put the key in the antechamber door. It turned with a satisfying click. “According to Anna, this hiding spot is nearly as old as the royal wing of the palace itself.”
But that didn’t answer the question Joslyn had really been asking. “But why would the deathless king build a loose floorboard into a room he planned to use as a prison cell? Or leave a key inside it?”
“That’s the thing,” Tasia said. She chewed her bottom lip thoughtfully. “I don’t think the deathless king built this palace; I think the Shadowlands did.”
Her explanation made no sense to Joslyn, but figuring it out wasn’t important. Not now.
Tasia put her hand on the door knob again and glanced over her shoulder. “Ready?”
“Let me open the door,” Joslyn said. “I’m the one with the sword.”
“True,” Tasia acknowledged, “but I’m the sorceress.” She held out her palm, and a small sphere of flame appeared, hovering just above her skin.
“You’re – what?”
Tasia cocked her head. “I spent ten years in Xochitcyan with Grastinga and the other small men. What did you think I did all those years? Pine away for you?”
Outside Tasia’s chambers, the corridor was empty and dark. If there had been Order of Targhan guards watching the palace’s royal wing, they were nowhere to be seen now.
Either the deathless king was more arrogantly confident in his ability to hold Joslyn and Tasia than Joslyn had believed, or the fight outside the palace had drawn the guards away.
“This way,” Tasia whispered, but instead of turning left down the corridor like Joslyn expected, leading them through the atrium at the palace’s center and then to the southern drawing room, Tasia walked directly across the hallway and slid her hand beneath another tapestry. Something clicked and slid along hidden tracks, and Joslyn smelled the musty air of a cellar waft towards her. Tasia smiled. “As I said: extremely faithful.” She slipped behind the tapestry and held it out for Joslyn to follow. The interior was pitch black, but Tasia moved forward sure-footedly, as if she had traversed this tunnel many times before. One of her hands trailed along the wall, the other clasped Joslyn’s. “Secret passages were built into the royal wing when it was originally added to the palace,” Tasia said as she walked. “The idea was that members of the House of Dorsa would always have a way to move in and out of the palace without being seen if they needed one. At least that was what my father told me when he showed them to Nik and me.”
The darkness brought Joslyn back to times in the Shadowlands when she had been forced to hide in lightless places, cowering like a rodent for far too long. Tasia once again created a ball of flame that hovered a mere inch above her palm to dispel some of that darkness, but that only made Joslyn more anxious.
“What exactly did Grastinga teach you while you were in Xochitcyan?” she asked.
“More than we have time to talk about right now,” Tasia answered. She glanced back, giving Joslyn what was probably supposed to be a reassuring smile, but the dancing flames in her palm cast eerie, uneven shadows across her face. “The best way to explain it,” she said, “is that the Brotherhood’s knowledge of the shadow arts is like a single pail of water, whereas the small men have access to the entire ocean. The arts have more beauty to them than I think you could possibly imagine – and believe me, not all shadows are like the undatai.”
Joslyn shivered. The last person she’d heard speak with such reverence about the shadow arts was Rennus. But she held her tongue and followed Tasia.
Tasia led them down a set of stairs, through a maze of corridors, storerooms, and dusty kitchens that Joslyn never even knew existed beneath the palace. Eventually, they came to a kitchen that smelled as if it had been used not too long ago. It was far smaller than the palace kitchens that Joslyn was most familiar with, the ones that, in another lifetime, she used to take the children to after their morning training session along the beach.
“We’re here,” Tasia said, extinguishing the flame in her hand and dropping her voice to a whisper. “This is the original palace kitchen. Those stairs lead up to the southern drawing room – the throne room.”
Joslyn nodded and took a steadying breath, carefully calming her mind. On the other side of the narrow door at the top of those stairs was likely to be the deathless king, the shadow-enhanced man she’d played cat and mouse with in the Shadowlands for nearly a decade. Once she and Tasia went through that door, the endgame would at last begin, and one way or another, the stalemate of the past ten years would finally be over.
“Sorceress or not,” Joslyn said to Tasia, “I go first this time.”
She didn’t wait for a reply. She spun Ku-sai’s blade in her hand once and mounted the steps, pausing to press an ear close to the door at the top. Someone in the throne room was speaking – the voice was feminine, but the language was that gravelly tongue spoken by the Order of Targhan. Though Joslyn couldn’t understand the words, the urgency of her tone was clear enough.
A masculine voice replied in the same language, but there was no matching urgency in his voice. His was measured, clear. Bored.
The female answered him with only a few syllables. Then there was a click of heels and quick, booted footsteps vibrated against the floor. Joslyn understood those sounds, because she’d heard them often enough during her time in the Imperial Army. Heels clicked together when a soldier snapped into a salute, and they marched away swiftly once their superior officer dismissed them.
Door hinges creaked, and the sound of a heavy door falling shut echoed hollowly. No other sounds followed. Whoever the man on the other side of the door was, it sounded as if he was alone.
Yet if Tasia was right and the deathless king truly was on the other side of this door, he wouldn’t be alone. At least not entirely. In Joslyn’s memory of the southern drawing room, there was a door in the northern wall that led into a tapestry-lined corridor, and an ornate archway in the southern wall that led into a set of receiving rooms. There would be Order of Targhan guards on each point of entry, Joslyn was sure. She tried to visualize them – four ferocious fighters rushing in to protect their king from north and south the moment she and Tasia burst in for their assault on the king.
Joslyn beckoned Tasia closer, then whispered directly into her ear. “Do your new shadow arts include any offensive moves?”
Tasia nodded.
“Good. I will handle the king. You keep the assassins off of us.”
Tasia nodded again.
Joslyn opened the door.