My mind swam, and not just from the residual aura of fear. I had told the attendant to stay away for the rest of this watch. That had only been moments ago. Moments that felt like a lifetime for me certainly, but surely not long enough for the attendant to have been the one to fetch the Demon, or even have alerted any of their own superiors to the plot. No, the attendant was here on some other business and when they held out a small message scroll, I quickly realized who had sent it. I unfurled it to recognize River’s calligraphy.

  “I await you in our quarters,” the note said.

  ‘Quarters?’ What an odd choice of character. We didn’t have ‘quarters’ any longer. We had a manor, yes, but she maintained her own room, separate from mine. The last time I had anything I would consider ‘quarters’ was… when I had lived in the palace.

  I looked to the attendant, who hadn’t left. He beckoned for me to follow.

  I began to follow. Of course River had a plan, but why the palace rooms?

  Wait… had I been discovered? Was I being allowed to leave?

  Of course I was. Of course I hadn’t stood before the Prime Minister with a naked sword and played it off. He had known what I was considering and he had known he wasn’t in any danger whatever I decided.

  But this wasn’t just a trap for me. What did the Prime Minister care to catch one disloyal agricultural clerk? This was a ploy to root out the entire conspiracy in one fell swoop. Dreadwolf had known Noble Lion wouldn’t go quietly, had known Noble Lion would enlist friends and allies, so the Prime Minister had architected the perfect opportunity for an armed assassin to get nearly within striking distance.

  If I had thought to go through with it, I might be dead now at the Demon’s hand. Or, worse, I might be in a dungeon somewhere having names and locations wrung me by virtue of blood, fear, and fingernails. But now that I had failed to slay the wolf, they weren’t just going to let me walk out of the den and pretend nothing had happened. No, they wanted me to flee in blind, dumb fear. They wanted me to run back to my co-conspirators… and lead the Demon to their hideaway.

  If I had run back to River’s mansion, the Demon would tear through it, killing everyone within the estate yet again while he searched for Noble Lion.

  This attendant was in River’s employ, surely, one of her eyes in the palace, and they were going to help me lose the tail I had picked up. Sure enough, just as the attendant led me around the corner I heard – thanks to the pause to read the message and my delay in comprehending what it meant – the great double doors of the Imperial Quarters grind open, followed by armored footfalls.

  They had sent the Demon after me.

  ***

  Twists and turns, interminable corridors, I was still lost without the attendant’s aid. If they wanted to lead me right back into the clutches of the Demon, they easily could have. But River had been right about everything so far; I had to trust that she was right to trust this attendant. And I had to trust that “meet me in our quarters” meant the palace suite where she had first visited me, and stayed over on a few occasions.

  I named the room for the attendant, Residednce of the Ever Burning Lamp, I believe it was called, and though they did not speak, the attendant understood, as they led me in what I thought was the right direction.

  Every few moments or so, the attendant would pause, and I would hear the Demon’s footsteps slow and then stop, and then we would all resume. That monster of a man must know that if he could hear our footsteps, we could hear his. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the Demon didn’t care.

  He wanted me to know I was being followed. He wanted me scared. And the more I thought about it, the more I could sense his aura, once muted, now driving me ever onward like a horrific mental spur.

  But why? Why didn’t he care if I knew he was following me? Wasn’t the game to get me to lead him back to Noble Lion’s conspirators? And why did he want me so scared other than because he was a bastard?

  As the attendant led me to the room that River had visited me in for the span of a few months while she got to know me, they bade me enter the now uninhabited room, and then closed the door behind me.

  Alone now, I realized the answer all at once.

  The Demon wanted me to know he was there, he wanted me scared, he wanted me to feel like an animal hunted because he wanted me to make a mistake.

  He didn’t want me to run home and wait. I couldn’t run home and wait.

  I needed to at least get a message out to Noble Lion tonight, one way or another. Noble Lion only had until dawn to remain in the City of Lanterns to help pick up the pieces from the Prime Minister’s planned demise, or to get out to Frozen Bay to begin his high-ranking exile.

  My home would be watched until dawn, so how could I get a message out on the fly? I had no idea just now, but when I did try to get that message out, the Demon wanted me to be rushed, harried, hunted.

  Sloppy.

  And now I had just put myself in a room with only one entrance. A dead end.

  I heard the Demon’s footsteps in the hallway come closer, his aura of fear growing stronger as he neared, until he must have been standing just outside the door. I had nothing with which to defend myself, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to slip past the reach of his halberd and get out of here. No, if he came through that doorway I was as good as dead. Cut in half. Entrails on the floor. Probably secretly buried in a mass grave somewhere outside the capital, and River would never even know what became of me.

  I pictured the Demon standing there like a pulsating thunderhead. I backed further into the room, until I felt the wood paneling against my back. The door latch lifted, gently, and then fell back into place. I heard the Demon’s footsteps recede. His aura was still there, on the edge of my senses, but he had, for some reason, decided not to come in and slaughter me.

  Perhaps he hadn’t expected this. He thought I might run home and send out an easily followed messenger, or even try to lose him in the streets to meet up with the other conspirators in person. He had not expected me to put my back to a wall. And now here I was with my back to a wall. So he would just wait me out until dawn.

  But, no. I didn’t have my back to a wall. I turned and stared at the wooden paneling that I had come to know so well from from River’s little act at playing the concubine. There was a hole in the wall. Where was it… there! A spy-hole cleverly disguised as a seam in the paneling. And if there was a way for the spy to get in, there was a way for me to get out without the Demon knowing.

  This was River’s plan!

  As I ran my fingers up the seam I pressed sharply and the seam fell away, into the wall. I dug my fingers into the gap. Gently, ever so gently, I began flexing the panel back and forth, hoping that the Demon couldn’t hear the wood groaning and creaking as I forced it further and further, little by little. If he heard anything suspicious, he would come running in, sword or halberd bared. But if he heard nothing, he’d be waiting out there all night, thinking I was cornered until he lost patience, or dawn came around and it was time for me to die alongside my friend.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  With a sharp crack the panel finally gave way. I looked to the door, but decided there was no help for it. The Demon had either heard that or he hadn’t, and either way the space into the wall was just big enough for me to squeeze through, so it was time I made myself scarce.

  There was no sharp uptick in the Demon’s aura, no heavy footfalls outside the door as I slipped into the narrow corridor behind the wall. If my hunter burst in now, there would be no one in the room, but he would see the crack in the wall plainly enough and then I’d be running for my life through a warren barely the width of my shoulders. I could picture the mountainous man not even bothering to follow me into the tight space, but blindly cutting through the wall with his halberd, at waist height, until he heard the top half of me fall from the bottom half with a wet thwack.

  I looked back at the shaft of light that had been my quarters and kept sliding down the passageway, pulling a year’s worth of cobwebs from my face and arms as I pressed forward.

  Through the walls, I heard the sounds of one couple in vehement lovemaking. I heard the muted plotting of a different pair who thought they were alone. I heard shouted threats and sobbing, and other things that had become common under the wolf’s regime that were too horrific to dwell upon for long.

  But I kept sliding, no, slithering down the narrow passage behind the walls in near total darkness until I came to what appeared to be a dead end. The Demon’s aura of fear was long behind me now, but still a moment of claustrophobic panic gripped me.

  What if there was no way out? What if this corridor were as much a prison as my former quarters had been? What if my only choice was to turn back and face the Demon?

  I forced myself to calm, trying to push past my fear-frayed nerves. These passageways may be disused now, but they had once been an integral part of the Ten Imperial Attendants’ stranglehold on the palace elite.

  Surely there was some trick to it, like a puzzle not unlike the spy-hole in the wall. I ran my hands along the wall in front of me, along the edges, until finally my hands fell upon a cord that I followed into a hole. I pulled on the cord and felt a wooden mechanism lift. I pushed…

  …and tumbled out of a standing chest into what appeared to be a pantry.

  Of course this passage would lead to some out-of-the-way corner of the servant's realm; it had been last used by a faction that had started out as no more than servants themselves.

  But now my biggest fear was an attendant spotting and reporting me. At least one of them had been complicit in my attempted crime, possibly even in River’s direct employ, but would the others be so forgiving?

  I pressed my ear to the pantry door, and heard no sounds except for the distant shuffling of feet. I waited until I thought the hallway was empty beyond and slipped out.

  I had thought wrong.

  I nearly crashed into a servant, much like the attendant who had helped me escape the Demon’s clutches, but not the same person. Their eyes flicked in my direction in momentary surprise, but they quickly bowed their head and pointedly hurried onward. Another did the same as they made their way past, then another. They didn’t bow to acknowledge me, but nor did they lift their eyes to notice me. They bent as if they were simply going about their duties in a most diligent manner and I wasn't even there.

  They would have seen the Ten and servants-of-the-Ten use these warrens in the past. Perhaps to notice the workings of the Ten Imperial Attendants was to invite a death sentence. Or… better yet, perhaps they all knew what I was up to, and they were deliberately taking no notice of me. Perhaps this was the palace attendants’ own form of rebellion: to see nothing of a man who had thought to kill their loathsome lord, to know nothing when questioned, to lend me their support by virtue of doing absolutely nothing.

  Suddenly the shame of my failure to kill Dreadwolf burned in my chest. It had been a trap, yes. I may not have been able to close the distance between myself and the Prime Minister before the Demon would have stopped me, but I hadn’t even tried when given the closest shot anyone had gotten in over a year.

  My shame congealed into anger as I realized just how thoroughly I had failed these people, prisoners in the palace that employed them.

  Then that anger blossomed as I realized just how much we had all failed them.

  Yes, I had failed to act in the moment. No, I was not the hero these grim times required. But a plan that required extraordinarily heroic acts was no plan at all. The true failing was that we had come up with a strategy that was so easily countered, and I had agreed to lend my services to it. We had been outwitted by a beast and a monster, and that had been my true failing, not the act of refusing to swing a sword when there was no hope in making a difference.

  River had told me as much on that night we first laid eyes upon the Demon. No, she had tricked me into leaving my sword behind so I couldn’t act rashly and throw my body onto the pile next to the Gray Dowager.

  As I made my way down that bare, dusty subterranean palace hallway, surrounded by silent rebellion, I resolved to myself that if I ever had half the chance to kill the wolf, next time I would not hesitate. Before that, I resolved to win free of this palatial trap.

  I turned off the main corridor long enough to follow the smells and sounds of cooking at a large scale. The moment I stepped into the kitchens a young man, perhaps a cook’s assistant, noticed me. The chef beside him wordlessly smacked him on the back of the head, then resumed being enthralled by the stirring of his soup. The young assistant must have been a slow learner, because he looked puzzled for another moment. A different passing chef smacked the boy again, and upon a wordless gesture, the boy grew red-faced and then began chopping a carrot with an exaggerated studiousness that rivaled his superiors.

  That would do.

  I might as well have been invisible as I crossed the kitchen and took the knife from the boy’s hand. I made to depart with it, but another chef stepped in front of me, still deliberately not making eye contact, but looking up at the ceiling as if it were a painted tapestry. He was hefting a cleaver twice the weight of the knife I had chosen, idly smacking the flat of it into his palm.

  I smiled and snatched the cleaver from his hand and then exited back into the corridor.

  The servant’s entrance had two gray-clad guards posted beside it, but this was a palace not a prison. They were expected to guard the palace from outside intruders, not inside escapees. Plus they were on the verge of either falling asleep or passing out from drink. They didn’t even look up when the servant’s entrance door opened, and there was a cleaver in one man’s neck before he knew it. Before the second man’s halberd could be brought to bear, I fell on him with the carrot knife, forcing it down again and again until it found its way past the man’s armor.

  He died loudly, and two more guards, slumping by the nearby side-gate roused themselves. I wrenched the cleaver free and turned to face them as they brought their polearms down and shouted at me to surrender.

  Two on one, a cleaver against two halberds. Those were bad odds, but I liked them better than what would happen if I let them drag me back in front of the wolf.

  “Sparrow. Sparrow. It Is Me.” A large form waved at me from just outside the gate.

  The guards paused and turned, confused at the sudden appearance of the other man.

  “Windstopper?”

  “Yes. It Is Me. Can I Come Through The Gate.”

  “What?” I hissed, and then realizing my order from a year ago, I dropped my face into my palm despite the guards before me. On the day Dreadwolf took power, I had told Windstopper not to rush through any more gates unless I gave him permission. “Of course you can come through the gate. Help me!”

  “Thank. You.”

  Windstopper hefted his dagger-ax-anvil and charged at the two guards with as much speed as a raging bull. They yelled in fear and went opposite directions. Windstopper ran down the first drunken Gray Wolf guard and pummeled the life from him, while I chased the other across what was otherwise a quiet courtyard. He zigged and zagged, screaming all the while until I fell on his ankles, pulled myself up on top of him and brought the cleaver down with one clean swing through his helmet.

  The last of his screams echoed off stone walls and wooden palace architecture. I waited for the sounds of an alarm gong, but there was nothing. I pictured some drunken guard stirring in their sleep, groaning, and then rolling over. In the time it took for me to play that scene out in my mind, still no one raised any alarms.

  Celestial Master must brew some potent stuff down in the Skylands, I thought, as I rushed through the gate and back out into the City of Lanterns.

  I thought my escape was coming to a close. I didn’t realize that it had only just begun.

  ***CONSPIRATOR’S MISSION REPORT: ASSASSINATE THE PRIME MINISTER***

  FAILED Primary Objective: Kill Dreadwolf if he wields no Mandate.

  FAILED Secondary Objective: If he does not, deliver the sword and leave without raising alarm.

  SUCEEDED Bonus Objective: Survive.

  FAILED Fail Condition: Dreadwolf lives AND Sparrow is known for an assassin.

  Enemy Slain: 4 | Enemy Captured: 0 | Losses: 0

  Overall Grade: F (Crippling Defeat)

  published published now so read it while its free: !