Chapter 38 – The Hour of Reckoning
Sir Kyr, glaring across the chamber at the smirking prince, bared his fangs in a vicious snarl. He flexed his hands, revealing curved claws which glinted sharply in the dim light. The twins well knew those talons were capable of rending through human flesh as easily as if it were made of cotton. As they all stood there, unmoving, as if frozen in time, Zull inanely noticed that there was an eerie symmetry to the room. In the center, like the crux of a great fulcrum, stood both Zaphyr and Zull, confused, frightened, and nearly overwhelmed by the revelations of the last few minutes. At one end of the room stood their sworn protector, his savagery and loyalty plain to see in equal measure.
Across the room stood Sir Kyr’s utter opposite in nearly every way. On the surface, Prince Blyth appeared to be a refined, sophisticated member of the royal family, but the twins now knew his mind was as bestial and cruel as Sir Kyr’s appearance made him seem. Prince Blyth had declared just a minute before that he was in fact the notorious Master, the criminal hand which had secretly guided the actions of every assassin and criminal who had tried to oppose them on their quest. Worse, he had gone to the effort of bragging at how he had killed Vard and their other friends, merely to torment them. Though he had resumed grinning amicably at them, there was no warmth in the expression, and his eyes were flat and cold. His earlier disguise of a naïve prince gone, he now acted like the shell of a man who had lost his soul. How did we not see it sooner? Zull wondered. We should have realized the instant he stepped into the room. His entire persona, every action, every word, were just a carefully calculated mask to hide the monster beneath.
“Sir Kyr,” Prince Blyth said, breaking the tense spell that had fallen across the room. “I must say, you certainly live up to your reputation…a more ferocious, ungainly looking beast I cannot imagine.” Prince Blyth’s smile grew wider, to an almost inhuman degree. “When was the last time you looked in a mirror?”
“You can’t twist or wound me with words, Blyth,” Sir Kyr responded. “My duty is to these children. If I need to tear your throat out with my own teeth to save them, then I will do so, without hesitation, and nothing you say may dissuade me.”
Prince Blyth raised a hand to the collar of his shirt and adjusted it, his smile abruptly becoming more forced. His dead eyes remained impassively on the knight, carefully watching him for any sign of movement, any hint that the knight was about to make his attack and that he would have to defend himself. He cautiously reached down and picked up the iron poker that lay beside the fireplace, holding it before him as a makeshift weapon. Sir Kyr twitched, but otherwise did not move. The tip of the poker still glowed a dull red as Prince Blyth idly waved it back and forth.
“Therein lies the difficulty, Sir Kyr,” Prince Blyth said. “You see, if you harm me, the children die.”
Sir Kyr growls sharply. “Spare me your meaningless threats. Tyer Melanc already tried that trap, and it didn’t work for him either. If you attempt to use your hemomancy on the children, then I will reach you and tear you in two before you have a chance to blink. Harm me, and the children will have an opportunity to escape. Either way, your schemes are thwarted.”
Prince Blyth tutted sadly to himself. “You make one grave mistake, Sir Knight. I am no mere hemomancer who relies on minions to do battle for him. I am the Master. Your every move and thought is as painfully obvious to me as the movement of the sun. I rule this empire, and while my body may be ill and feeble, I received the same training with the blade as dear cousin Grevel. Besides, whoever said that I would use my hemomancy on the twins?” Prince Blyth raised a hand, and Sir Kyr grasped at the sides of his head, howling in pain.
“Sir Kyr!” Zaphyr shouted, rushing towards him. She reached out with her hemomantic senses, trying to detect the Master’s line of attack, and was almost bewildered by the precise, numerous lines of assault she found. He was targeting specific blood vessels, trying to burst or clot them, to disrupt Sir Kyr’s circulation. Only the knight’s inhumanly hardy physique had kept him from dying already.
While Zaphyr stood there, taking this all in, Prince Blyth took advantage of her distraction by hurtling the poker at her. It struck her in the leg, the tip piercing nearly all the way through her calf. She shrieked in pain, falling over as she clutched at the wound. Sir Kyr hesitated, torn between racing to aid Zaphyr and striking Prince Blyth. Blyth twisted his fingers, and Sir Kyr reeled, brackish goo and blood flow intermingled beginning to leak from his nose. Prince Blyth laughed in triumph. “Exactly as I predicted. You all care about each other too much to act in your best interests, and therein is your downfall. You’re failing to demonstrate your vaunted strength and speed, Sir Kyr,” Prince Blyth said, his tone supremely confident and taunting. “Weren’t you just claiming to me that you bested the great hemomantic assassin Tyer Melanc in a similar situation? Where is that power and skill now, Sir Kyr? Where is it?”
He closed the distance between them, ignoring the twins, then struck Sir Kyr in the chest with a vicious kick. The knight, anguished, could do nothing to defend himself. Prince Blyth raised his hands, preparing to finish Sir Kyr off one and for all, when abruptly, he was struck in the back of the head by a hurled ink pot, which shattered on impact. Prince Blyth raised his hand to the back of his neck and drew it away, seeing that his fingers had blood on them from where his neck had been cut. He paled, eyes widening, and began to shiver. Zull, who stood beside the prince’s bedstand, held the quill which had sat in the inkpot he had just thrown.
“That confidence vanishes very quickly when the tables turn, don’t they, Prince?” Zull asked pointedly. “You relish in the pain you inflict on others, all the while forgetting a single scratch could cost you your life.”
“Not for much longer, boy,” Prince Blyth hissed. Stumbling away from Sir Kyr and Zaphyr, Prince Blyth turned and sprinted towards the bedroom’s shattered door. Zull started to follow him, but glancing back at Sir Kyr and Zaphyr, he hesitated for a moment before running to them instead. With Sir Kyr supporting her under one arm and Zull under the other, they helped Zaphyr stand up and limp across the room. Sir Kyr then knelt and pulled the poker free. Zaphyr, biting her lip, made no noise, but her agonized expression told Zull just how much pain she was truly in. Zull used his hemomancy to quickly staunch the wound before it could bleed, but the injury itself remained, an angry accusation of how their carelessness had nearly cost them everything.
“He got away,” Sir Kyr said. “We had the Master here, within arm’s reach and he escaped.”
“We have more pressing matters at the moment,” Zull said. “We need to find Vard and the others or-” He stopped speaking as Zull recalled in an oddly detached way that Vard, Henricks, and Shaw had all been struck down in cold blood; that they had died trying to aid the twins on their quest, another senseless tragedy. For the moment, this fact was just another screaming voice in the cacophony within his mind as he feverishly worked to try and find a way out of their impossible situation.
Ignoring her brother’s sudden silence, Zaphyr asked worriedly, “Sir Kyr, are you alright?”
“I will be fine,” Sir Kyr said. “You are the one whose wound we should be tending and fussing over.” Belying that claim, an instant later he began to cough and hack repeatedly. The coughing fit only ended after well over a minute and seemingly left the knight even weaker than before. As he shuffled along, besides Zull, he said, “I have failed in my duty to protect you…”
“No, you haven’t!” Zaphyr protested.
Zull said, “We’re still alive, aren’t we?” Sir Kyr had to concede that. “There has to be a way out of here,” Zull thought aloud, frantically glancing around for paths to escape as he did so.
“Even if we did, what’s the point?” Zaphyr asked as she gingerly massaged her injured leg. “The letter is destroyed. Prince Blyth is the Master, and he’s already seized everything he wants. We have to escape the city.”
“Not yet,” Sir Kyr said. “We must head to the Summer Palace and rescue the Empress first.”
“No,” Zull said, shaking his head violently.
Both Zaphyr and Sir Kyr looked at Zull in astonishment. “No?” Sir Kyr echoed. “I’m surprised you’re giving up so easily, Zull.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Zull said, frowning in annoyance. “There’s something we have to do first before we can leave the palace.”
“What?” Zaphyr asked, anxious to keep moving.
“Vyle,” Zull said simply. “We have to save him; we dragged him into this disaster in the first place.”
“He could be anywhere in the palace!” Zaphyr protested.
“We can’t just leave him here, in the hands of Prince Blyth,” Zull insisted. “You saw what the Master’s hired assassins were capable of. Do you think he himself would be any less ruthless?”
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Sir Kyr put a hand on Zull’s shoulder, the knight’s amber eyes betraying the inner pain he felt at what he said to say. “We will return to save Vyle, Zull. But, if we are captured and killed while wandering about attempting to save him, then the Master has truly won. Now, while the palace guard might be treacherous, there may still be forces elsewhere in the city still loyal to the Empress. We must hope so, else all is truly lost. After we rescue the Empress first, she can rally those loyal to her and then, with her forces by our side, return to take the Master and his minions by storm.”
“I…,” Zull said, face twitching, at a loss for words. Reluctantly, he nodded, saying, “Your plan does make the most sense.”
“I…I don’t know if I can go on, Zull,” Zaphyr confessed. “Coming all this way, just for nothing…”
“After everyone whose died? Gerok? Henricks? Velen? Vard?” Zull pressed. Zaphyr reacted as if stung, flinching back at each name her brother spoke. She chewed anxiously on her lip for a moment. “It’s only for nothing if we let their deaths be in vain,” Zull said. “They must be avenged.” Zaphyr said nothing further.
They limped down the hallway, Zaphyr supported by Zull and Sir Kyr beneath each arm, each agonizing step seeming to take longer than the one before it. Though they could hear the raucous clatter of boots racing through the palace corridors in the distance and heard sharply barked commands and panicked shouting intermingled from far away, they saw no one.
“Where did the Master go?” Zaphyr wondered aloud as they limped onwards.
“Most likely somewhere secluded, to nurse his wounds,” Sir Kyr said.
Zull, thinking aloud, said, “For all his vaunted power, his body is still incredibly fragile; he could well bleed to death from that scratch on the back of his neck, if he does not treat it properly.”
As they were talking, they reached a split in the hallway; to the left, it stopped after a short distance at a closed, plain looking door. To the right, it eventually ended at a spiral staircase leading upwards.
“Where do we go from here?” Zaphyr asked.
“Sir Kyr,” Zull said. “What do you smell?”
Sir Kyr lifted his nose, taking a long, deep sniff. He wrinkled his face in a slight grimace, then said, “that door to the left reeks of the Master’s men.”
“How can you tell they work for him?” Zaphyr asked.
“They smell of confidence, rather than the confused panic of the rest of the palace staff,” Sir Kyr explained.
Zull frowned thoughtfully. “And the other way?”
Sir Kyr tilted his head slightly. “Not much better. I smell less guards, but there also isn’t the stench of the outside. Only more dust and fabrics.”
“Better to be safe,” Zull said. The three of them turned to the right, heading to the base of the stairs, which they began to ascend. The stairs deposited them in a narrow corridor connected to a large, empty ballroom. The curtains which normally hung above the ballroom’s windows had been torn down, lying in heaps on the floor. Additionally, the tables and chairs which had stood in the room had been smashed into so much firewood, and the remains of broken pottery and other valuable items were littered about as well, forcing the twins to tread carefully to avoid injuring their feet. Sir Kyr strode across the chamber, oblivious to the danger.
“The Master’s men have already started an orgy of destruction to commemorate his rule,” Sir Kyr noted, distaste plain to hear in his voice. “I would expect nothing better from the kind of thugs and criminals willing to sell out their sovereign to the highest bidder.”
The three of them headed to the nearest window and looked out and down. They were on the second floor, still high above the ground but far less so than they had been during their daring entrance into the palace. Zull reached up and experimentally jostled the handle of the window; it appeared to be unlocked.
“Zull, what are you thinking?” Zaphyr asked, exasperated. “Even if we can open that window, we don’t have a way to get down from here safely.”
“On the contrary,” Zull said, gesturing with one hand to the torn curtains. The light of realization dawned in both Zaphyr and Sir Kyr’s eyes.
“You can tie the curtains into a rope, throw it out the window, and climb down,” Sir Kyr said slowly. “Ingenious.”
Reaching up and grasping the handle, Zull threw the window open, breathing in the blast of cool evening air which struck him in the face. Night was almost upon them, and only the tiniest sliver of dull red sun was still visible above the roofs of the surrounding buildings. However, the light of the city more than made up for the sun’s absence, and the twins could clearly see the crowds milling about below, excitedly anticipating the Empress’ parade. The first few fireworks were exploding in a cascade of sparks above the horizon, heralding the beginning of the celebrations in earnest.
“Help me tie these together,” Zull said as he picked up the fallen curtains. Sir Kyr and Zaphyr both joined him, hastily working to braid the sheets together to create a strong rope. “We need to move quickly, or else-”
Zull fell silent when, just as he was attempting to warn the others, a group of three men wandered into the ballroom, clearly just as surprised as they were. By their disheveled uniforms and the spears which they each carried, it was plain to see that they were palace guards roaming for servants to bully or valuable items to loot. For a brief instant, all six didn’t react, staring across the empty ballroom at each other, before the foremost of the three guards, a leering man with a heavily scarred face, laughed.
“Looks like we got lucky, boys,” he said to his companions. “These are the three the boss was looking for. We’ll get quite the bonus for bringing their hides- or should I say, pelts- in.” He and his companions guffawed at the supposed cleverness of their leader’s joke, while Sir Kyr and the twins watched them warily.
“If you wish to harm the twins, you shall have to answer to me, first,” Sir Kyr warned, growling loudly.
The lead guardsman sneered, gesturing threateningly with his spear as he did so. “Is that so, little wolf? Oh, we’ve heard the stories- the boss made sure to warn us of what all three of you were capable of- but that was weeks ago. From the look of things, you’ve had a hard journey, haven’t you?” His mocking grin grew still larger. “Well, let me tell you, it’s about to get a lot harder.”
Sir Kyr gestured gently to Zull and Zaphyr, moving them to stand behind them. Hastily, they got to work finishing the weaving of their escape route. Sir Kyr tottered, his breathing heavy and slow. “Admittedly, I am quite ill, and my strength has been sapped,” Sir Kyr confessed. “But am I simply faking the extent of my weakness? Or am I truly on death’s door?” He bared his fangs. “Are you brave enough to find out?”
The lead guardsman hesitated for the barest of seconds, then charged forward, spear outstretched to pierce the knight’s heart. Sir Kyr dodged to the side, bringing his hand down along the spear’s shaft in a chopping motion, splintering it in two. As the guardsman stumbled, his balance thrown off, Sir Kyr snatched up the broken spear tip and rammed it through the guardsman’s head, killing him instantly. A violent spurt of blood from the guard drenched the knight’s features. Amber eyes glowing in the light, hunched over, spear tip in hand, Sir Kyr glared at the remaining guards. He laughed softly, seeing as their former smugness melted into raw terror.
“It appears I still have some strength after all,” Sir Kyr said, his voice deeper and more monstrous than ever before. “The stories don’t really do me justice, do they?”
The guardsmen hesitated for a second, then turned, preparing to flee. Sir Kyr pulled the broken spear from the head of the man he had slain and hurtled it with all his strength, striking the second guard in the back. The man screamed as the sheer force of the blow drove the spear through his body and into the wall, pinning him in place. He struggled for a few seconds, then hung there limply. The third guardsman made it to the door from which they had entered, where he paused long enough to look back at Sir Kyr before fleeing the room.
“If he gets away, he’ll alert the whole palace,” Zull said in a hushed voice.
“He won’t get away,” Sir Kyr promised, before dropping to all fours and racing out of the room. From the hallway beyond, they heard a strangled cry of fear, which quickly fell silent.
“It’s horrible,” Zaphyr said quietly as she finished the final knot in the curtains. “All of this, this whole bloody day, has turned into one long nightmare.”
“It’s what needs to be done if we’re going to save the throne. The alternative is Prince Blyth’s rule, and that will lead to an unimaginably higher number of deaths,” Zull reminded her.
“I’m well aware,” Zaphyr said bitterly as she and Zull took their improvised rope between them to the window, throwing one end out. It was long enough that, when they tied one end to the open window, the other fell right to the cobblestone street. Several people were by now looking up at the open window and the twins with curiosity, though neither Zull nor Zaphyr cared enough to bother about them. “That’s how it always is; we must commit a horrible deed so we can prevent a worse one. How will we be able to live with ourselves and all this regret when this is all over?”
“That’s a worry for the future,” Zull said as he climbed out and began shimmying down the tied curtains. “For now, we need to make sure we live long enough to regret it.”
Zaphyr followed closely behind Zull as they climbed down, jumping the last few feet to the cobblestones. Several people pressed around them, beginning to ask questions, but a sharp look from Zull and Zaphyr’s intense glare kept them at bay. The twins glanced back up, worried about Sir Kyr. Their concerns were answered shortly when he appeared in the windowsill, grasping it with one claw as he vaulted over and fell to the ground, using their makeshift rope as a means of slowing himself so he could land safely. His protective cloak discarded and his bloodied wolf face bared, the crowd reacted instantly, screaming in panic as they trampled over each other in attempt to escape the supposed monster. Sir Kyr and the others ignored them; for the moment, they had greater concerns.
“Did you take care of him?” Zull asked.
“I wounded him badly, but several other guardsmen appeared and came to his rescue. I had to retreat in order to save my own skin,” Sir Kyr explained, licking some blood off the back of one of his hands with a long, coarse tongue as he did so. "Once again, I have failed you."
“No, you did your best,” Zaphyr said. She reached out a hand towards Sir Kyr, and with a thought, used her own hemomancy to wipe the blood from his muzzle and hands. He gave her a short nod of gratitude. “Thank you, Sir Kyr, for everything you’ve done. Without you to save us, we would have died many times over by now.”
“You two have proven quite adept at protecting yourselves, and me as well,” Sir Kyr commented. “But we mustn’t become overconfident and complacent; this is the Master’s city now. Nobody can be trusted, save for the Empress herself.”
Zaphyr, glancing at the merchant’s house they had used to enter the palace in the first place, said, “I’m going to retrieve my cat.”
Zull shrugged; at this point, it was too minor of a point to bother arguing with her about. “Very well. From there, however, we need to proceed directly to the Summer Palace, to rescue the Empress.”
“She will be well guarded, I can promise you that,” Sir Kyr cautioned. “The Master will have made sure his plans could not be disrupted easily. It would take a small army to overthrow the Summer Palace.”
“Perhaps, but we aren’t an army,” Zaphyr responded. “We are Zaphyr and Zull Tyrell, and we have Sir Kyr to protect us. Nothing in the Empire has bested us, and nothing will.”
“Bold words, Zull,” Sir Kyr said. The first few fireworks went off overhead, showing the crowd in a riot of green, blue, and red sparks. This unearthly light made Sir Kyr’s wolfish smile seem almost unearthly, even ghoulish. “Let us put them to the test.”