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The grand assembly of the Red Empire’s forces lent credence to Gruoch’s worries about a new war of conquest. It certainly made more sense than the other theories we’d heard—no matter how much I’d prefer it to be a war on voles, which were a dire threat to tulip bulbs as well as cucumbers. But why would the Red Empire launch an invasion now, after decades of peace? What had changed?

I was still turning it over in my mind when, late in the day, we reached the end of the pass and saw the Crimson City spread out below us. We brought the horses to a halt so we could gawp, which annoyed the platoon of pikemen behind us.

“We’re not in Ecossia anymore, Sunbeam,” I murmured.

The city stretched for miles across a vast shelf of rock that thrust into the western sea. Colossal structures dominated the skyline. A five-towered fortress rose from the city’s center like a hand thrusting up through the earth, surrounded by a ruffled cuff of concentric walls. At the edge of town, a collection of slender spires twisted into the sky in architecturally unlikely ways. The wizards’ college? Everything was constructed of the ubiquitous red stone. The setting sun turned the buildings a bloody shade of rust.

I’d never seen a city so enormous. It was impossible to guess how many people crowded its streets. It could be a hundred thousand, or a million, or more. My sense of scale had been completely overwhelmed. By all accounts, this had been a place of average size and little significance only half a century earlier. Its current grandeur had come at a steep cost for the nations subjugated by the empire.

Frigates and galleons packed the harbor, so many that most of the ships were anchored out to sea, waiting their turn to come to the docks. Vessels beyond number dropping off troops and supplies. The legions of soldiers hiking through the mountain pass were insignificant in comparison to the ones coming by the sea route.

Outside the town walls, taking up nearly as much space as the Crimson City itself, the troops were collecting into camps. A hundred or so regiments and battalions, slowly growing in size as more soldiers trickled in from the pass and the docks. How could Tailliz defend itself against an army like this if it marched to their border? It was a miracle that Ecossia had managed to hold out for so long.

If Yudit and I had been here for the same reason as everyone else, it would make sense to start by finding our place in those regiments and battalions, poking around until we discovered where they’d billeted all the least-favored sons and brothers of the Ecossic nobility. But we were there with another agenda. We had an appointment to keep. One we were very, very late for.

Chapter Eighteen

Family Reunion

“There’s no possible way Lulach is still waiting for us, is there?” Yudit asked Sunbeam. The horse glanced at her but remained silent. “Oh, come on!” she said. “Are you not talking to me now, either?”

“I am trying,” Sunbeam murmured, moving his mouth as little as possible, “to pretend I can’t talk.”

“What?” Yudit said. “Why?”

He gave her an exasperated look. “Because we’re spies!” He gave up on muffling his voice. “We’re supposed to be sneaky! A magical talking horse might attract some attention.”

“All right, all right!” My sister threw up her hands in surrender. “Just stop yelling at me!”

Honestly, I thought Sunbeam was being silly. It would take a lot more than a magical talking horse to make us stand out from the crowd here. I was more concerned about him shouting our clandestine intentions aloud for anyone to hear. At least no one seemed to have noticed or cared.

The Crimson City wasn’t just the largest metropolis I’d ever seen. It was also the most cosmopolitan. I’d spent my life in busy seaports, in Ecossia and in Tailliz. They were provincial backwaters in comparison.

Many of the people we passed had the deep bronze complexion and caramel-colored hair characteristic of the region, but an equal number had their origins in distant lands, from the ancient hilltop forts of the Green Empire to the strange tree-cities across the western sea. There was even a sprinkling of nonhumans—slender elves, stout dwarves, and those little people with hairy feet who’ll sue if you use their name. Rarer still, we caught glimpses of beings we’d barely heard stories about. Lionfolk, steam automatons, straw golems. It was said that the Crimson City offered goods and services unknown in most of the human-settled world. If you wanted your claws sharpened or your metal carapace buffed, you could get it done here. I’d heard you could even get your eye color changed to match the color of your dress.

But the Crimson City was also a seaport, and every seaport in existence shares certain similarities. There was, of course, a dockside, and wherever there is a dockside, there are seedy dockside bars. From a sailor in Tailliz, we’d learned the location of the seediest bar of them all, a place where thugs, ruffians, and hoodlums could get drunk in peace after a long day of thugging, ruffing, or hoodling. A place where spies could meet a contact without attracting undue attention.

As we made our way to the Frolicsome Mallard Inn & Suites, the smell of the streets got noticeably worse. Most of the red-stone buildings were blackened with smoke. Rotting garbage choked the gutters.

There was another problem that we only noticed when a foul-smelling brown glob fell from the sky, scarcely missing Yudit’s head.

“It’s raining shit?” she shouted as it landed with a splat. Stinky danced away from the smear of ordure on the ground.

Sunbeam motioned his head toward the rooftops. “Up there.”

Shrieking, chittering creatures crouched in the shadows of the eaves. The one fluttering in the air above us joined them, folding its wings as it landed. It pointed at Yudit and screeched with laughter.

“What in the world are those?” Yudit asked.

“Flying monkey infestation,” Sunbeam said. “Worse than pigs with wings for stinking up a place. You might want to get an umbrella.”

It was full dark by the time we reached the narrow lane that led to the Frolicsome Mallard. If at one point the inn’s sign represented a playful duck, years of weathering had worn away the paint until it now resembled a slug that someone had stepped on. It was only visible because of the firelight that leaked through the dense coating of grime on the windows. Which, surprisingly, were rather grandiose picture windows.

When I dismounted from Sunbeam and walked to the door, I was startled by the figure that unfolded from the darkness beside it. A large blond woman had been sitting in a chair by the entrance. One of the tallest women I’d ever seen, at least of the ones who were still clearly human. My eyes only reached the level of her sternum, and she was as broad across as two people stuck together. The faint light dimmed her features into a blur, but I could make out a patch over her right eye with heavy scarring running beneath it, and a few fingers missing from the hand she stuck in my face.

“Yeah?” she said through a mouth lacking several teeth.

“We’re here to meet someone,” I said as Yudit stepped up beside me.