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19. Detour into the city’s most menacing spot (Part 1)

  broccolifloret

  Our room had been invaded by guards. Ten or twelve, so you knew they were expecting us—Valentino, specifically. You didn't need so many people just to ransack one hotel room. Though the one threatening to snap my wrist was almost a head taller than me and about twice as wide, so you can see they had no sense of overkill.

  Valentino grabbed the other guard by the wrist in turn. "What do you think you're doing? Release His Excellency at once!"

  He sounded outraged, but not really surprised—neither was I.

  A middle-aged guard faced me, arms crossed. "Where did you spend the night?"

  I wanted to reply that she wasn't my Mom, but it was probably better to let Valentino handle this one, too.

  They couldn't have found out about my visit to the improvised clinic, not so soon. Guards's sense of self-importance is easily bruised, so it wasn't difficult to guess they were mad at Valentino and me after we'd blown them off that afternoon. I'd been so smart to bring the gss shards along! If I hadn't, I might’ve never seen them again.

  The entire room had been turned inside out like a sock. All of our purchases from earlier were strewn over the floor, opened and discarded with the delicacy of a rampaging tornado. The nightstands and closets we hadn't even touched had been opened and emptied. They couldn't have found shit, so they'd gotten angrier and angrier, until they had to give up.

  My First Biology Book id open on the floor. Who knew if it had been damaged!

  I tried to tug myself free. The big guard's grip, though sweaty, didn't budge.

  Then an empty drawer came flying from behind and smacked him on the back of his head. He released me, falling on his knees. The other guards surrounded Valentino and me, but they didn't look so confident anymore—they'd realized everything in the room was a potential weapon against them. The air was thick with magic, like woodsmoke.

  Maybe, just maybe, the guards could overpower my Sabrewing if they all attacked together, but at least some of them wouldn't survive. And it was clear nobody wanted to be one of the sacrifices.

  "That's Her Magnificence's own great-grandson you're threatening," Valentino said.

  "See, 'bout that," the leader of the guards said. "He hasn't identified himself."

  She tried to sound reasonable, as if she thought she could talk us into going along with her.

  "What are you talking about? I saw His Excellency prove his identity! That should be enough for all of you."

  "Yes, we've seen the official document issued by Her Magnificence Letheia VII Lemarezin. We've confiscated it as evidence."

  My ears started ringing. It felt as if the world had been turned on its back.

  "It's evidence of His Excellency being who he cim to be," Valentino said. "And if you think this'll help you, you're even more ridiculous than I thought."

  "He doesn't have the Imperium's brand."

  Something was off. If they wanted to dig up some dirt on me, they could always have done it more subtly. Even if we found out someone had searched my stuff, we were in too big a hurry to kick up much of a fuss. But they'd gone out of their way to make it btant.

  This wasn't just a search. This was a message. To who, I didn't know. What I knew for sure was that they had to be absolutely convinced they'd find something worth the risk.

  And yet, they had nothing on me! What was going on? If they knew I'd visited the clinic, that'd expin everything—except they must've come to ransack my room before I had even discovered that pce! No wonder everything felt upside-down!

  I had to find out what was going on. Allowing Valentino to throw them all out of the window would be the most satisfying way to handle this, but not the most helpful. As long as I didn't know what were they thinking, it could always come back to bite me in the ass. And with my luck, it'd always happen at the worst possible moment.

  "Very well." Making a show out of rubbing my right wrist where the guard had grabbed me, I looked at the ten or twelve of them right in the eye. "None of you are in a position to question Her Magnificence's decisions, including why she didn't give me the Imperium's brand and why she wants to see me anyway, but I shall make my position perfectly clear. At the nearest station, not here."

  I doubted any of the guards liked the sound of my words. They hate it when you stand up to them; it's the fastest way to make them mad. But with Valentino on my side, they couldn't hope to simply threaten whatever they wanted out of me. Better to be smart and make me trip over my own words.

  The leader gave a long-suffering sigh. "I must ask you to relinquish all spells, for your own safety."

  That's a polite way of saying "hand over your spells or we'll hurt you". The pretensions of deference were new, though. I was moving up in the world!

  "You can't demand that!" Vanth's locket was safely hidden under my shirt, but I still carried a few spell neckces, and I refused to part with them. Just on principle.

  At least a couple of the guards gnced at Valentino. They couldn't force me to relinquish him, so nobody could believe a few spells more in my person would make much of a difference. Even so, the leader gave up too fast for my taste. As if nothing I did would make much of a difference anyway.

  Though I really wasn't in a mood to compin. If they'd found the spell neckces hidden in my underwear, they were as good as lost. Not that they were irrepceable or anything, but my family had given them to me. No guards should touch them!

  "One moment." I couldn't make sure the spells were safely hidden, but at least I could pick My First Biology Book up. There was a brand-new diagonal tear across the picture of the human digestive system. My shoulders shook with anger, but I didn't say anything. I closed the book and pced it on top of a nightstand. "I should wash my teeth first, too. Surely you don't have a problem with that?" I gred at the guards, who didn't bother reacting. "My toothbrush should be somewhere in this mess."

  I knew perfectly well it was in the bathroom, but I wanted an excuse to check the contents of my bundle, spread all over the floor. Turned out they hadn't found my hidden spells after all. Sloppy! These guards deserved the pay they got. I'd rather leave those spells on the floor, though. It's not as if they'd do much against a dozen—no, I might as well assume all the guards in the city were my enemies. Did I have anything at all I could use?

  My sewing kit was in more or less good shape, too. Leaning over it so the guards wouldn't see, I slipped a cloth with a few needles threaded on it into my jacket pocket. They probably wouldn't be good for much, but you never know. More comfortingly, my utility knife was still hidden on my right boot. I wasn't very good at most spells with offensive potential, so cold metal felt safer. That was something I could cling to, even if only for the psychological effect.

  I stood up. "I forgot I'd left my toothbrush in the bathroom."

  The guards weren't amused by my poor memory and the continued deys, but I made sure Valentino brushed his teeth too, and he made sure I carried a water bottle. With all that chaos, I hadn’t even noticed I was in fact a bit thirsty.

  The guards tried to herd us to the service elevator. I dodged them and entered the main one, helped by Valentino, who stood in their way as much as possible. The leader snorted like an ox and said nothing. It couldn't look well for the Luxury Heights Hotel to have one of its guests escorted away by guards. That's why I made a point of lingering in the hall as if I was trying to remember whether I'd left a pail of milk on the fire. Not many people hung around at that time, other than a few staff members—the guests who were still up likely hadn't returned yet—but I managed to be very irritating, and that's what matters.

  A megabeast-drawn penal cart awaited us—not by the front doors, naturally, but the back ones, so that we drew even more notice getting to it. The guards in El Meandro didn't have a cart like that one, even substracting the megabeasts: solid teak wood carved so densely with spells you wondered if it wasn't too heavy to trundle along. But at least it was pretty spell-proof. Stuffy as all hells too. It didn't help that four guards came in with us, the big one included.

  I crossed my legs, wagging a foot in the air, trying to make it look like this was only a minor inconvenience to me. If it was believable, then it was real good acting. Normally, entering a penal cart meant preparing for the worst, and I couldn't shake off the feeling of impending doom. Though it helped that Valentino was sitting right by my side, the very picture of affronted dignity.

  At first, I tried to stifle my yawn, but then I realized it contributed to my indifferent fa?ade. And even if it hadn't, I couldn't help it.

  Though that was as far from an ideal resting pce as I could imagine it, some sleep would do me good. If nothing else, it was better than staying awake and worrying. If only I could be absolutely sure I wouldn't have another weird nightmare.

  Even now, its shape lingered at the back of my mind, like the residual pain of a burn. I didn't have time for this! If only I could turn nightmares off till I was safe—but when would I be safe, anyway? Not while I stayed in Vorsa.

  Like that, I fell into a weird space between sleep and awareness. The cart stil rattled around me, but I felt distant. Not quite safe, of course. Even half-asleep I couldn't forget where I was. Better than falling asleep and being chased by some weird creature, I guess. Though it'd be nice if I could make them chase me all the way into the world of the living, so that they went after the guards instead. That pn made sense to me because I was mostly asleep. If the creatures ended up stuck in the world of the living, we could always just turn them into jerky. Though Underworld creature jerky was a tough sell, and likely tough meat as well. Dog jerky sounded better.

  I jumped on my seat.

  Valentino held me down with a hand on my shoulder. "Terrible driving!"

  "Absolutely!" I couldn't tell if he truly believed I'd been startled by the cart driver, or if he'd just taken that chance to insult the other guards. That didn't matter, though.

  Why didn't I figure it out before? Sometimes I'm so slow! I guess I didn't really want to admit it. Or maybe couldn't admit it. But the more I thought about it, the more it convinced me of its truth, or at least a general proximity to the truth.

  That guard with the dog's head, the one they'd left right before the governor's mansion, that hadn't been just an empty provocation. The people who did that wanted to draw Cassel out of the capital.

  Of course, it didn't make sense for them to do that on purpose. But they couldn't ignore what would come as a consequence of their actions. The sawmill woman knew what'd happen; that's why she'd run away. But she had been a minor pyer among the strikers.

  What if at least some of the others knew something she didn't know?

  What if instead of shing out in blind anger they'd acted with calcution?

  What if they actually intended to force Cassel to come to High Tomenedra in person? Unless the sawmill woman was mistaken—and that was always possible—the corpse had been left where word of it would almost unfailingly reach Cassel. That corpse really felt like a taunt aimed at the governor, too.

  Fine. What if someone wanted Cassel to come to High Tomenedra? What then? I thought of those Tekitekis who'd attacked Valentino and me. And how Mayor Retana had easily roused the bck market against us, too. Talking to Torres, I said these things were all connected. I still thought it was probably true, but I didn't think these people were all reacting separately. There had to be something more than coincidence to it.

  My head buzzed. As Grandma Cielo always said, there's a way out of everything, but you won't see it if you don't calm down.

  Somebody sent Governor Cassel a message.

  Somebody was funding the strikers.

  It made sense for these two things to be connected. But it wasn't so simple. I was missing a crucial part of the puzzle.

  I was still pondering this when we arrived to the station. Dawn was already breaking into cheerful pinks and oranges, so we were hastily herded inside before our moods could be lifted. As I warned you, this building had the same dreary aura as the one in El Meandro, except more of it. Three whole floors's worth of it.

  It was bad enough in the entry hall, grey-tiled and chlorine-scented, unpleasantly chill so as to make you doubt it was really summer outside. We didn't have any time to linger there, though, and that wasn't an improvement because we were ushered straight to the underground cells.

  "You do understand," Valentino said, "His Excellency hasn't confessed to any crimes, do you? He simply intends to make his case clear, to avoid further deys caused by the likes of you."

  The leader of the guards cleared her throat. "We do understand. This is the best pce to ensure His Excellency's safety, see."

  broccolifloret

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