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acob could only hope he wouldn’t disappoint her trust.
The plan was to scale the rear of the palace. Hopefully, the noise from the fire brigades would keep the guards from doing their rounds for a while. The rope used to climb up to the second floor would not be invisible. It was not the first time Jacob was grateful that alarm systems were still a far-off idea in this world. The walls surrounding the palace were secured with iron spikes. Sokolsky plucked them from the stone like flowers. The only metal stronger than a Dwarf was silver, and most builders were careless enough to skimp on that expense.
Chanute and Sylvain had done a thorough job. The guards didn’t even look around when the Fly landed in the courtyard. The night was filled with the noise of carriages and excited voices. Jacob hoped Chanute wasn’t enjoying himself so much that he’d land in prison. One nighttime rescue mission was enough.
Sokolsky truly lived up to his stage name. Seeing the Fly climb up a wall really was like watching an insect. The barred windows on the second floor were as little an obstacle to his Dwarf hands as the spikes in the walls. The others were hidden so perfectly by their night skins that they had to keep whispering to each other to avoid grabbing the rope at the same time. The Wolfling was just starting to climb when one of the guards recalled his duties. He nearly ran into Jacob, who was waiting at the bottom of the wall, but thanks to the night skin, the guard noticed neither him nor the rope he was hiding with his body. Invisible. Jacob had never liked the feeling, even though he’d experienced it often enough in his line of work.
Ludmilla’s spies had discovered that since Tennant had so easily reached the door to the secret wing, the Tzar had put greyhounds on guard in the collection. The dogs pricked their ears as Jacob climbed through the window, but the Wolfling just had to shed his night skin and they immediately came to him like lapdogs.
They were now in the hall with the magic eggs. Jacob appreciated getting a second look at them without Molotov’s dusty voice in his ear. Some were barely bigger than chicken’s eggs; others would’ve made an ostrich proud. The shells were made of gold enamel, and, depending on their size, they contained gardens, forests, or entire exotic islands. The goldsmith who’d created these eggs, Hiskias Augustus Jacobs, had reputedly learned his craft from mine sprites, and his descendants were still the exclusive goldsmiths to the Tzar. Jacob was sorely tempted to steal one of these masterpieces for Fox—she would love having a forest to carry in her pocket—but the eggs were so famous they’d always be recognized as stolen.
The next room contained the item Jacob needed to disable the knife-wire: a melting ax from Nihon, forged to the same perfection as the swords from that country. Molotov had gone into great detail about how the ax had come to be in the Tzar’s possession, but he’d had no idea of its power.
Jacob only paid attention to the external safeguards of the glass case. His mind was too preoccupied with the thoughts it was trying not to think. He himself had often advised archivists about the tiny Hemlock-Flies who liked to bore into the wooden parts of magical objects. He felt the first sting as soon as he reached into the case. The effects were loss of balance and even unconsciousness. Well done, Jacob! The hand holding the ax was already swelling. He could only hope his body would resist the poison until they were done.
The others were already in the room with the magical creatures. The Wolfling was staring at the cage with the Gray Wolf.
“Once we have the prisoners, we should free him,” Jacob whispered. “We should free them all. They’ll distract the guards and help us get away.”
Ludmilla didn’t like the idea. Jacob could see her fear of the growling and screeching creatures. But she was smart enough to know the Wolfling would never leave without the Gray Wolf—and Jacob owed it to Fox to free the others.
The doors where Molotov’s tour had ended still showed signs of the explosives Ludmilla had procured for Orlando. Jacob wondered what Orlando had used to disable the knife-wire. The ax melted it without triggering the alarm, and the rest was easy, as the explosives had damaged the other safeguards. Jacob tucked the ax into his backpack before opening the door. If they got caught, the theft of a magical ax would be the least of their problems.
There were many in Varangia who were wary of all progress and who demanded a return to the good old times. The Tzar was a moderate among that group. The secret wing of his Magic Collection was a reminder that those old times had not been all good. Its windowless walls hoarded the past like dirt, and the cages didn’t hide their purpose behind gilded decor. The greyhounds tucked their tails between their legs as Ludmilla’s gas lantern revealed the spiked cages. The floor tiles showed traces of illustrious prisoners—claws, horned tails, feet that could melt stone.
The prisoner in the first cage had the face and breasts of a human woman but the body of a bird whose pale blue feathers had lost their luster decades earlier: Sirin, the bird of pain. Varangian lore had more stories about her than she had feathers. The Tzar’s ancestor had captured her in an attempt to exterminate pain itself, but barely a week later, Sirin’s sister Alkonost, the bird of pleasure, had been found dead in their forest. The egg they’d found in Alkonost’s dead body was stored in the next room. The Tzar had once tried to have it hatched, but whatever was hidden inside the egg either was as dead as Alkonost or was still biding its time inside the blue shell.
Sirin flapped her wings as the Greyhounds slunk past her cage. The golden quills of her feathers made the cage bars ring out like bells, and the scream she uttered was so shrill even the Wolfling had to cover his ears. The voice of a bird from the mouth of a woman. Ludmilla extinguished her lantern in case the guards came to check out what had made Sirin scream. But nobody came. All they could hear was Sirin’s claws scraping her perch—back and forth, back and forth, more than a century of back and forth.
Ludmilla turned up the flame of her lantern again. Jacob forgot his swollen hand and his increasing dizziness as the light illuminated the next prisoner. This cage was almost as big as a railway carriage and still too small for the creature huddled inside. There’d always been stories that the last Dragons, before vanishing forever, had interbred with other animals. The creature in front of them had the body of a Dragon, but the heads at the end of two scaly necks looked like the giant bucks found in the mountains of Varangia. Whatever the ancestry of this scaled creature, being caged up had done it as little good as the bird of pain. Yet the sight made Jacob’s heart beat faster. Dragons…He’d never stopped dreaming of seeing one. The creature staring at him through empty eyes had as much to do with his dream as a donkey had with a horse, but it was enough to rekindle that dream.
The next cages had walls of solid iron and only a peephole to look at the captives. This was how Witches and Wizards were held. The first cell was empty, but through the next peephole, Jacob saw two men sleeping on an iron grate.
Brunel seemed unharmed, but Orlando had been badly knocked about.
The lock was tricky, so Ludmilla pushed in the door with her elbow. The strength of the Dwarfs was not limited to their men. Sokolsky helped to wrench the torn metal farther apart. Orlando barely managed to get to his knees, but Brunel crawled so quickly through the opening that it was clear this wasn’t his first time escaping from captivity. When he saw Jacob, Brunel stared at him with such surprise he even forgot to stand up straight. Jacob had not expected Brunel to remember him. The officer who’d introduced them in Goldsmouth must’ve really sung his praises.
Orlando just gave Jacob a nod as he struggled to his feet. He didn’t look like he had strength for any more than that. The Wolfling had to support him. As they all left the chamber, they opened the other cages only a little and managed to get back to the window before all the captives noticed they were free. They could hear scraping and fluttering as they quickly pulled the night skins back on. Ludmilla had brought two more for Orlando and Brunel.
Orlando was too weak to climb, so they secured him with a rope. Ludmilla was probably wondering whether he’d given her
name to his torturers. The sky above the park was bright red. Jacob worried that Chanute had blown himself up, together with the music pavilion.
The Wolfling had just reached the ground when the one of the guards spotted the rope. The soldier managed a couple of steps and fired off one shot before the Wolf buried him beneath his body. Jacob had grabbed the pistol by the time the other guards appeared, but Sirin spared him from shooting anyone. The guards writhed on the ground in pain as Sirin launched herself out the window with an angry screech. The Grey Wolf flew after her as Jacob jumped off the wall and down into the street. The useless guards had lost all sense of who they were or why they were in uniform as they stared like children after the rescuers and the rescued. Circling among the stars above them were the stories of every Varangian’s childhood.
The trash cart was waiting, as planned, behind the Magic Collection. The night skins were becoming as see-through as the spiderwebs they’d been woven from. They quickly shed the skins before they climbed into the cart. Despite the hideous stench that greeted them, Brunel clambered aboard their clunky escape vehicle as fast as he’d crawled out of his cell. In light of all Brunel’s inventions, Jacob would’ve imagined him to be a braver man, though his cowardice was probably a good motivator for the invention of weapons and armor plates.
Orlando and Sokolsky were sitting in the trash cart when a huge semi-invisible wolf leaped over the wall as though gravity did not apply to him. He shifted back to his human form more slowly than Fox. The fur on his face only vanished as he strode across the street. He was hobbling, but the blood on his hands was definitely not only his own. One of the guards had taken his attention off the magic in the sky and had trained his gun on the Wolfling. Ludmilla had shot the guard down. She dropped her pistol into her bag like someone who’d killed many times before. That morning, Molotov had briefly chatted with one of the guards about his sick sister. They’d all been about Will’s age. Jacob had also killed many times, but he was glad it still made him queasy.
Jacob could feel the Hemlock-Fly’s poison working on his body, and when Ludmilla asked him where they should drop him off, he couldn’t even answer. The Wolfling and Sokolsky caught him as his knees buckled. Jacob wanted to show them the sting on his hand, but he couldn’t even do that. They lifted him into the foul-smelling vehicle, and the last thing he saw was Brunel’s anxious face.
A Fairy Tale
Seventeen raged against the rain like an enemy. Nerron had watched him ram his silver fingers deep into the trunks of trees to make them suffer for what the curse of the Fairies was doing to him. And he kept squabbling with Sixteen. He didn’t like that she was no longer hiding from Will. He should have been grateful!
The Pup was ever more restless in his pursuit of the Dark Fairy, and Nerron knew that Sixteen was the reason. Will’s eyes kept searching for her. Nerron pictured her turning the Pup to silver with a kiss, but the thought of melting Sixteen and Seventeen down to make silver chamber pots was much more satisfying.
The jade.
