Chapter 25

With a whispering sound, the epée blade carved a cone in the air, as its wielder's wrist and arm completed the circular blocking motion. The man wielding it and the demon watching were pleased to see the point had not described so much as an inch-wide circle during the whole parry.

"Good," Azer told Shan Hu. Sable took her blade back to the ready, willing to help ingrain the movement into Shan Hu's muscle memory, but the demon held up a hand, a faraway look in his eye.

Before the demon, a small black cloud formed. Perhaps it wasn't so much a cloud as a wavering, a small space where lines of the everyday world in the courtyard inside the house were interspersed with an arcane space. From the cloud came a voice, one Sable took an instant dislike to, forming the nearly-instant conclusion the world would be a better place without that voice in it. She noticed Shan Hu had pointed the epée at the small dark cloud hovering at chest-height before Azer.

"Young Master," the voice said, in Denarian. Azer stiffened, a look of distaste on his face.

"Karsu," he replied, lips twisted into a sneer. "I thought I had made it clear you might only contact me in this way if there were a disaster." Sable marveled to hear the change in the young demon's voice, from open and friendly with her and Shan Hu, to cold and domineering with the grotesque voice.

The voice took on an ingratiating tone, making Sable squirm. "My plan to subvert Savonne and besiege Marcelon worked flawlessly," the unknown Karsu said, the sibilant sounds in the words the man said drawing Sable's attention sharply.

"Why," Azer said, looking Sable directly in the eye, "do I sense that things did not go so well with your flawless plan when you flushed the man out?"

"Young Master, you do me injustice," the voice said, and Sable wondered if it were something about the owner of the voice or the means by which she heard the voice that made it so ... horrid. "I landed a blow on him with the instrument, the mace, though I could not invoke the magic in it."

Azer snorted then, every inch the aristocrat. "More likely you threw it at him and ran. If you had it in your hand, it should have triggered on the blow. Where is it now?" The demand was sharp, pointed.

"One of the others, those who had sworn before your arrival here, claimed it, and triggered the change upon himself," the voice from the small cloud returned.

"Willingly?" Azer said, with a tone of surprise, though Sable had reported the event the day before.

"I don't know," Karsu replied, and there was surprise carried in his words also, "I only have a report from an ally who was there. Young Master, this ally will be of great importance. Should you not send more charms of power so we may arm him?"

Sable caught Azer's eye, and pointed with her left hand at the small black cloud hovering between the three of them, then made a beckoning motion to it. When Azer's eyes widened, she made a stabbing motion toward the cloud with the sword in her right hand, and the demon smiled.

"Come to me, Karsu, and present this ally. I will not send you more of my family's gifts without discussing their misuse with you. I haven't felt any of the others be used, and I will demand an accounting. Yes, I think you'll need to discuss this need for more of my charms with me, face to face. So much is lost in this remote speech, don't you think?"

A long and liquid sigh sounded from the cloud then. "Very well, young Master. Can you send a healing-charm, then? I seem to have broken my hand."

Sable flashed a wicked grin at Azer, and with a quick upward slash of the sword showed him how McAllister broke Karsu's hand with his saber, and Azer nodded.

"Karsu," he said, "perhaps the pain of the hand during your journey here will remind you of your place. You've become disturbingly familiar with me in your speech and manner. Ponder this while you take sail. Leave the man McAllister alone for now. He goes to Saint-Raphael, and that place has devices and persons that exist solely to do those like you harm. The man McAllister will succeed there or not, but he must come to me to reclaim something he has lost." With a palms-up gesture, he shrugged an apology to Sable, who acknowledged it with a toss of her silvery-dark tresses.

"We come," Karsu said, after a lengthy pause while the edges of the black cloud hummed and skittered. "The ally I mention has something with him you will find of interest, Milord."

Azer regarded Sable above the space where the cloud had been. "Why don't we," he offered conversationally, "be done with the swords for now and return to our research into magecraft?"

Savonne and his troop had left their homes expecting only to conduct a siege, not to journey into the heart of Middle-Sea civilization. Pragmatically, the Duke departed without much coin on his person, and the troop with less. What little remained of Fondalk's gold bought the second floor of a solid-seeming inn, on an avenue which had little garbage in the sewers and actual cobbles down the middle. McAllister judged it similar to any avenue in the London or Madrid of his home world. Eight rooms were let for a week, and stabling for the horses also. He didn't appreciate the condition of the stables, though there was little choice.

McAllister had the men and horses out and about in the city, running many errands. Some were simple reconnaissance. Three of the Duke's men each left with a deacon to go count windows in the Basilica, rooflines, how many rooms must be under a roof, and in what pattern they must be laid out.

Other errands were more prosaic, such as the order for the man Savonne named Cook to procure foodstuffs for their meals. McAllister flatly refused to pay the innkeeper the exorbitant sum the man named for board. In turn, the man allowed McAllister the use of the kitchen rather than see McAllister's gold ride down the avenue and find another inn for the troop.

McAllister had Savonne name another man for a curious role the Duke did not have in his forces. "Sergeant," Savonne sounded the word, trying the feel of it.

"Subofficer," McAllister had responded, while drawing the pins he had a perplexed soldier buy from a tinker against his lodestone, "if you prefer that better. The Sergeant insures the welfare and fighting condition of the men and their gear, as well as the horses. Each man is still responsible for his horse and gear, but the Sergeant will inspect both and act to keep them ready for action." McAllister tested the pin he pulled along the lodestone, and when he saw it would pick up another pin, grunted in satisfaction. He ignored Savonne's pointed glance at the small pile of pins.

Savonne agreed with the need to name a sergeant, and now men searched the city for needles, coarse thread, leather, and fittings to replace personal gear and horse tack. Others were finding whetstones and oil, and one found crossbows and quarrels.

One man was tasked to search for used spectacles, eyeglasses. McAllister wanted a detailed watch of the men who left the Basilica proper to cross the grounds to the outbuildings in the walled area. The walls themselves meant the men detailed would need to be a distance away. Fortunately most of the buildings in the same area as the Basilica had roofs and chimneys more than twice as tall as the wall. McAllister gave the man the last of his silver to find clear lenses.

"Never buy more than two of any one thing in a single place," McAllister heard the deacons explaining to the men. "Don't give them a reason to remember your face. Pay with small coins, never pay them with too large a coin they cannot make smaller change for. Keep your faces down, don't act like a Duke's man. If anyone should ask, you're a sailor from Sudania, traveling inland to find dyes."

Reminded again the deacons came from the ranks of Marcelon's spies, McAllister simply left the men to it. "By the Mother," Savonne said, reverentially, in an aside to McAllister, "I could use men like those. It's no wonder I could never best her."

"McAllister," the Duke of Savonne said later that evening, "what is your plan?"

McAllister looked up from the pan of biscuit and pork. The cook had bought an onion and some clotted cream, and the resultant mash wasn't too terrible, in his opinion. The man promised bread in the morning, after muttering darkly about the innkeeper and his kitchen.

"Either an assault in strength where we expect the least resistance," McAllister replied after a moment, "or invasion by stealth, in small groups, dressed as the inhabitants do. It will depend on the report from the deacons."

"What have you to report, Héber?" McAllister said as he opened an eye. Though it was in the small hours of the morning, McAllister gave no sign of the man's arrival having woken him.

"Captain, this would be easier if we could speak to each other directly over a distance. It is much faster," the deacon McAllister had named complained.

Comprehension dawned, and McAllister tried voiceless speech with Héber's Gesele. "Gesele," though the memory of the woman was tenuous, shifting in a cottony and vague remembrance that was frustrating to McAllister. He'd only met the woman once, though he'd bedded her while traveling to Marcelon with Sable, and so he was gratified to feel her response.

"McAllister," she answered, though faintly, and as if having been awoken, "how may I be of service?"

"Héber. If he should need, in the next several days, to message me with urgency, he must first contact you, then you, me."

"I understand, McAllister. Hearing you in my dreams reminded me pleasantly of you in my bed. When you have finished what you are about, will you spend another evening with me?"

"Héber has named me Captain, Gesele. I would not abuse that trust."

"McAllister, you are a good man," she answered, and McAllister let the awareness of the faraway woman fade with no small sense of relief.

"It will be difficult if you are pressed," McAllister told Héber. "She can pass the message to me, if faintly. I may not understand her intent if I am pressed myself, this is an imperfect thing."

"It is the distance," Héber said flatly. "This is what I have learned," Héber began his report. McAllister listened intently.

The deacons' best guess at the floor plan to the Basilica was drawn on a piece of expensive paper tied to his wrist. McAllister, Savonne, and three others climbed the rope to the roof from the wall in the southwest corner. At other corners the other three groups of men, each with a Deacon, were doing the same.

This building was a stable, though it was horseless at the moment, housing as it did the various carriages and conveyances of the Prelacy. Still, it was under guard, and McAllister had given orders to render unconscious the men they encountered in the outbuildings. Killing was to be a last resort. McAllister had a fine appreciation for the injustice of murdering one when one was simply performing one's station in life. Damnation was a hard thing to escape, and McAllister would not chance subjecting another living soul to it without just cause.

Savonne's sharpest-eyed man had been invaluable, making detailed notes of the movements below from his vantage amongst the rooftops and chimneys. He used the awkward spyglass McAllister showed them how to construct from spectacle lenses, wire, and a dowel he had removed from the stair-banister at the inn. Thus, the plan was made.

At the midnight changing of the guard, McAllister and the other groups of men would steal into the Basilica grounds, and incapacitate the guards returning from duty. Tired and thinking only of their beds, they would be less alert, McAllister knew, and thus unwary. Men in the barracks would be asleep, and the returning guards were wont to move quietly so as to not awaken their fellows

Quickly, then the five made their way across the roof, and dropped down the rope again into the courtyard.

The first pair of guards returning to their beds were taken silently, only the sound of sand-filled bags striking the base of each head in rapid succession disturbed the night. McAllister dragged his target to the darker shadow under the eave of the Basilica proper, where the outlying rooms were only a story high.

Moments later, with another pair of dull sounds two more guards were dragged to the dark shadow under the building wall. McAllister and the others quickly bound and gagged their men, and tied them foot-to-another's-head to keep them from working and rolling around to someplace they could cause a commotion.

Leaving the bound guards, McAllister and the others found the shuttered window by the kitchen, and, with a pair of pliers, removed the pins, laying the wooden shutters down beside the window. Moments later, all five were inside.

"Gesele, I am inside," McAllister told the woman nearly three hundred miles away.

"Bide," came the curt response. Savonne and one of his men propped the shutters in the window to protect against the off chance a sentry or servant might notice the oddity of a window bare of its shutters in the winter night.

An interminable time later, Gesele reported "The priestesses report the other groups have entered."

"Proceed," he said, curtly.

The pin hanging from the coarse saddle-thread stopped swinging, and the man behind McAllister swore softly. "I thought that was north," he said sourly, pointing to the east.

McAllister nodded. "It's why I made them," he agreed, softly. Corridors and rooms in this place were ... hard to map. Only the rooms with windows had any relation to the best guess recorded on the paper McAllister and the other deacons in the other groups carried.

"That's useless," Savonne pointed at the paper, when McAllister could not retrace their path on the map the deacons spent so much time drafting. McAllister could only agree.

Somehow, the corridors and rooms subtly changed direction. After the third room they'd passed through between successive corridors, McAllister had the sense he was headed along the outer wall, and not inward to the heart of the massive building. Silently, he thanked his long history of training with map and compass for land assault for teasing him into magnetizing the pins and showing the others their use.

"Gesele," McAllister called, "tell the others the maps are useless, and to navigate to a point under or near the chimney we marked as the fifteenth on the map." The point was near the centerline of the building, drawn from the massive ornate entrance doors toward the golden dome at the center of the Basilica.

Five more minutes of furtive movement through darkened rooms, and McAllister swore silently. Knowing the others could not see, he created a dim ball of deep-red light. Mostly furnished, carpeted with rugs and hung with tapestry, many rooms had no function he could see. The lavish use of furniture and carpet, however, came with a cost, and McAllister was certain the poor of the world had supplied much of the opulence so openly displayed here.

"I've seen this place, somehow," McAllister muttered under his breath, and Savonne sucked air through his teeth.

"Where?" he asked softly, as McAllister swore again.

"If I knew..." McAllister began, but didn't finish.

Constantly now, McAllister slowed them, his unease clearly communicated to the others. They all watched his trick with the needle on the string. "That's the third time," one of the others whispered to his fellow, "the third time I've been wrong."