Chapter 57: The Master’s Student
A goblin sentry stood on the outer parapet, staring out into the night, and yawned loudly.
It had been a long shift. The quake two days past had thrown every patrol route into disarray, and the reshuffled rosters meant longer watches in colder posts, and the sentry had strong opinions about all of it that he was too tired to voice. He shifted his spear to his other shoulder and stared out over the dark slopes, where the ashen forest made its black lines against the stars.
Behind him, a silhouette crested the light of the stars in a single silent leap.
He turned, sleepily, and looked at the sky. Nothing there. He turned back to the night, satisfied that the world was exactly as boring as it had been a moment ago.
Strange games were afoot tonight.
The time to strike was now. Fate was fortuitous. The moon was new and shadowed, the night deep and blind. The recent quake had distracted the patrols, scattering their routes and thinning the watch. Any student of opportunity would have called it a perfect convergence of heaven's favor.
A pair of fabric slippers ran across the stone parapets of the exterior fortifications, light as falling paper. The silhouette of the eastern princess Xiang-Mei slid from shadow to shadow, her body low, her breathing measured, her jade eyes catching the starlight and holding it. She had studied this mountain from the valley for weeks.
Tonight, heaven opened the way.
Ahead, the massive obsidian gate was closing for the night, a team of lizardmen leaning into it, the stone groaning along its track.
Xiang-Mei swiped a hand across her face. Her chi shifted, and her body shimmered, fading to a partial transparency. Not full invisibility. Nothing so crude. Just enough of an absence that a tired eye would slide off her.
She slipped from her hiding place behind the guardpost and crossed the open ground in an elegant stride, timing the last supply carriage of the evening as it rattled through the narrowing gap. She had studied the dead spot in the gate's coverage well. She climbed into the back of the carriage as it passed, folding herself between crates with the stillness of a held breath.
The gate closed behind the carriage with a slam that shook the stone.
She counted to seventeen, exactly, the number of seconds the escort goblins needed to pass the first bend. Then she rolled from the carriage, unnecessarily, landing in a corner of the dungeon hallway and rolling again into the shadow of a stacked crate pile.
Unnecessary.
The goblins at the front of the procession grunted and looked back. Seeing nothing, they grunted again and moved on.
She was inside the dragon's lair.
Xiang-Mei observed her surroundings, then moved, running as a shadow along the wall.
She leapt, propelling herself from one massive chain to the next, the great support links swinging gently as her weight touched them and left them. Below her, the dungeon worked. Goblins ran this way and that, the minions of the dragon bent to their dark labor. Lizardmen crawled the walls in their patrol patterns. Beasts and whelps were herded into their containment chambers for the night, complaining and snapping their long maws.
Above, in the narrow slits high in the walls, ran an interior fortification. Murder galleries, cut for defending archers to fire down upon intruders. It was only manned during attacks.
She jumped, kicking off from wall to wall, ascending in bounds, and slid herself through a slot.
She hung inside the gallery, arms hooked on the ledge, legs drawn up beneath her. She was flexible as a mantis and quiet as snowfall. She held there, listening.
Voices. Goblins.
"I can't believe she said yes to an ugly one like you, Dram-Mo," said the first.
A laugh rolled up the gallery. "My heart is hers. How could she say no?" replied the second. "Besides, I am the great dragon's chosen champion. In the old world, even the princess would have desired me."
"The princess would not be seen dead standing next to you."
"You wound me. Wait until the wedding."
They walked past, arguing about table arrangements.
Silence.
Xiang-Mei dropped down from the ceiling, where she had been stretched flat across the gap, and landed without sound. She ran, making her way into the inner passages.
It was a labyrinth. The dragon's lair was larger than even she had estimated, and she had estimated generously. Most confusing were the sheer number of chambers and the purposes they served. A canteen, with benches and a serving counter. A bathhouse, steaming, with carved seating along its edges. A game room, where goblins sat around a table throwing small clay tokens into a pot in some sort of game.
It puzzled her. This was no fortress. It was a city.
Steam vented from a pipe in the wall, a scheduled blast of heated air. She waited, timing the rhythm of it across two cycles, then crawled inside during the gap. The pipe ran deeper, descending through the stone in slow spirals. She moved through it in the dark, counting the turns.
Right on time, she dropped out of the next opening, landing soft, just before the next venting came.
Deeper and deeper into the mountain. The heat grew with every level, pressing against her skin, dampening her dark fabrics. The light changed, the warm glow of the deep stone replacing torchlight.
She was close now. She could feel it, the way a blade feels the approach of its sheath.
The sword of her ancestors sat at her waist. Its edge had drunk the blood of demons and corrupted cultivators. Tonight it would drink the blood of a dragon queen, and the name of her sect would ring across two continents.
"I will strike as a crane upon minnows," she whispered to herself.
Then she ran inside, the assassin hunting her target.
Gold. Wealth. Treasure beyond reckoning.
Mountains of it rose into the dark, coin slopes and gem fields and crowns and swords, all of it heaped together in glittering ranges that went further than the light of any single lantern could follow. Enough to make even an eastern princess, raised on imperial treasuries, falter in her step for one stolen heartbeat.
She faltered for exactly that long.
"NOW!" yelled a voice. "Get her!"
Xiang-Mei turned her head fast enough to see a blast of frigid blue arcing toward her. Ice magic. She threw herself sideways, and the spot where she had been standing froze solid with a crack that split the tiles.
The door behind her slammed shut.
Around her, from a dozen directions at once, came a sea of voices and a dozen charging figures.
A trap.
Xiang-Mei leapt. The stone beneath her gave way, as if something had tunnelled it out from below in the exact spot she was about to land. She stumbled, caught herself on one hand, and barely escaped as a heavy, woolen shape lunged through the space she had occupied, grabbing nothing, and dropped screaming into the hole.
The assassin slid across the floor, landing on a slope of gold, and looked behind herself.
"ROU-YA!"
A goblin threw a net down at her from above. Xiang-Mei's blade cut through it in one stroke, and she rolled to her feet, scanning for an escape route.
She turned her head and felt the impact.
A punch, faster than her eyes could follow.
The world shook. The fist met her guard and went through it as if the divine gods themselves had swung it, and Xiang-Mei experienced a single frozen instant of perfect clarity.
Then she flew like a comet and hit the wall.
Quiet.
Veliah stood there watching and then sighed. "...At least we got her."
"You guys are fun!" Edelgard was laughing, clapping her gauntleted hands together, her fist still smoking faintly from the punch. She bounced on her heels, looking around at the gathered princesses as they began to circle the crumpled intruder. "Are we going to kill her now? Or do we torture her first?"
"Are you insane? We have to get her out of here before Barjuchne finds out!" snapped Veliah, tapping the side of her own head with two fingers. "Use the brain I know is in there somewhere."
In the background, Ei lowered herself into the pit and helped Bruschetta climb out. The sheep princess emerged from the hole covered in gold dust, wool askew, clutching the ant princess's offered hands with both of her own.
"Yes," agreed Ead, adjusting her hat. "We must act quickly. If we don't, Barjuchne may yet collect her, and then we are all going to have to wait another night longer for our appointments."
"I don't think we should have secrets from Barjuchne," said Blibli.
Everyone looked at her.
"I'm trying to reform my evil ways," added the slime, sadly.
"Blibli." Veliah knelt and put both hands on the slime's shoulders, looking into those enormous googly eyes. "If we leave her here, Barjuchne is going to collect her too. And then you will get less time with her than ever. Is that what you want?"
Blibli's eyes went wide. She looked left, then right, then left again, processing the calculus. "Nooo~!"
"The princess collective has decided," said Veliah, standing. "The mountain is full. Is anyone not on board with this anymore?" She looked around the circle.
All of the princesses were present. None of them objected.
"Good. Let's go. Get her back outside."
The twin saintesses came forward, each taking one end of the assassin, and lifted her into the air between them. They turned toward the door, moving in their perfect step.
Heavy footsteps sounded beyond it. The door opened.
They all froze, staring as Barjuchne stood in the doorway, the dragon queen looking into her own treasury. Her ruby eyes swept across them, one by one, missing nothing and saying nothing about any of it.
"The hell are you all doing in here?" the dragon asked. Her voice rattled the coins.
"We were scheming together to get you to love us and nobody else, ever!" said Blibli. "In secret!"
F.P. hissed at her for silence.
"Oh..." said Barjuchne. Her eyes moved, visibly processing. She looked back up. "That seems... normal. Anyway, Rou-ya, I..." She looked up, tracking something above her. Rou-ya was climbing down from the ceiling, descending hand over hand along a chain.
"I was just climbing," said the goblin, dropping the last several feet and sliding down the gold slope with practiced ease.
"...Right." Barjuchne rubbed the bridge of her nose. "Anyway, I-"
She stopped.
Her eyes narrowed. Her nose twitched, once, twice. She stepped into the treasury, her head turning slowly, the dragon senses spreading outward through the room like a net.
The princesses looked at each other, nervous.
"Why do I smell princess?"
"...I haven't bathed in a week," said Blibli, looking sad.
"You're a slime. You don't need to bathe," said Ead, from beside her.
"Oh, right!" replied Blibli, as if she had genuinely forgotten the parameters of her own existence.
"No reason. It's just us here," said Rou-ya.
Barjuchne turned her head sharply, and her eyes went wide. "Aha!"
Everyone flinched.
"You poor thing, what happened to you?" The dragon's voice came out genuinely concerned.
Veliah opened one eye, then the other. Barjuchne had crossed the room and was crouched over Bruschetta, examining her arms, which were scraped and showing thin lines of blood where the pit fall had caught her.
"Ah- I- I fell!" said Bruschetta, pointing at the half-frozen hole by the door. Her leg shifted with embarrassed excitement, and she was visibly, catastrophically pleased to be noticed.
"You all." Barjuchne stood, scooping Bruschetta up in her arms. "I told you before to play nice. What am I supposed to do if one of you gets hurt?" She tucked the sheep princess against her shoulder. "No more rough games. I mean it."
As she was carried away, Bruschetta smiled smugly at the others over Barjuchne's shoulder.
The remaining princesses watched them go and then waited a full minute.
Veliah turned her head and looked at the saintesses, who were standing, quite naturally, in front of a lump of gold coins that had been arranged over something person-shaped.
She nodded her head once.
They nodded back and picked up the lump and carried it out.
Xiang-Mei opened her eyes.
The sky was above her. Stars, scattered and indifferent. The cold, clean air of the outside world filled her lungs, and she sat upright, holding her head in a reorienting daze as the sun began to rise over the horizon.
A note fell from her shirt. She caught it, confused, and unfolded it.