Chapter 54
Though she knows she’s in Talusar territory, Elegy still finds herself waiting for street lights to turn on in Dexa, for the whole place to awaken after nightfall. Instead, of course, everything stays dark, except the inconstant glow of firelight behind closed curtains.
Theren leads them on a winding path through the streets without incident.
At one point he ushers them all into an alley and waits as a group of soldiers passes, but he timed their journey so they wouldn’t encounter any shift changes going to or from the monastery.
When they reach a narrow wooden building near the edge of the outpost, he pushes through the door and leads them up two flights of creaking steps to the third--floor apartment.
There, Elegy encounters a man she’s seen only in Theren’s memories. Tall and striking, his skin bathed in the warm light of a lantern, Orda looks just as he did when he was teaching Theren how to mercifully kill Maeve. Handsome in a worn way. His eyes sleepy and his mouth clever.
Parekh stays in the hall to keep watch, but Arias moves toward the guitar hanging on Orda’s wall automatically, and Hela examines the low bookshelf near the foot of his bed.
Orda asks Theren, “Do any of them speak Talusar?”
“I do,” Elegy says.
Orda’s eyes glint as they settle on her. “Of course you do. I’m Selio Orda.” He comes to his feet, and offers her his hand.
“Elegy Ahn,” she says, shaking it.
His hand goes slack in hers, and slips free. But he recovers well, bowing his head, and gesturing to the chair across from his.
“Please. You should sit,” he says, and his address is formal now, respectful.
There are no other chairs, so Theren leans against the kitchen counter instead. Elegy thinks this must be strange for him—-two people from his past and his present, sitting across a table from each other.
“I’m surprised to see you here, Your Grace,” Orda says to Elegy. “Surprised you are permitted to put yourself at risk in this way.”
“I’m not so easily restricted. Theren tells me you’re willing to help us in return for a place in Cedre.”
“That’s right.”
“That won’t be a problem.”
“I’m pleased to hear that.” Orda looks up at Theren. “There’s paper and pen in my bedside table.”
Theren pulls away from the counter to fetch them. Hela and Arias are standing off to the side, with Hela translating for Arias in a low murmur.
Theren sets pen and paper in front of Orda. There’s still ease between them, she notices. No please or thank you. No formality.
“Our mission is twofold,” Elegy says. “We came to retrieve Fenn Kovek, but the augurs told us to rescue one of their own who is apparently being held in the same building.”
“An augur, in the monastery?” Orda frowns. “That explains the presence of Rava’s guards in the north wing. We’ve been barred from the area for the last day or so. I thought it meant she was there herself, but . . .”
“Rava’s guards.” Elegy sighs. “Great.”
“You’ll need to split up, of course.” Orda bends over the paper and starts to sketch, in neat, straight lines, the outline of the monastery.
She recognizes the shape of it from the surveillance images they analyzed before their departure: like a neuron, with a circular room at one end buried in a tangle of short corridors serving as the cell body and dendrites; a smaller tangle of rooms at the other end standing in as the axon terminals; and a long hallway connecting the two ends, like the axon itself.
“One group can’t possibly attack one end and make it all the way down that hallway to the other without encountering Talusar guards at some point along the way. ”
“We need speed and surprise on our side, since we don’t have might.” She pauses, and asks Theren, “What do you suggest?”
Theren watches Orda marking the augur’s probable location on the larger half of the neuron, the north side of the building. Fenn’s location, meanwhile, is on the left half of the neuron, the south side of the building.
“Arias and Parekh will go to Fenn,” Theren says.
“They’ll encounter less resistance that way.
But if they can create a disturbance on their way in, that would draw some of the soldiers guarding the augur away, which would help Hela, Elegy, and me.
” He pauses a moment, then looks at Orda. “Feels like you don’t like it.”
“It’s not that.” This, too, is casual—-that he’s not fazed by Theren reading him even for a moment. “I’m just surprised you would send someone else to retrieve Fenn, that’s all.”
Elegy feels the slightest flutter of worry. She doesn’t know how long Theren’s relationship with Fenn lasted—-or even if they called it a relationship. She was so afraid of loving him that she never stopped to wonder if he loved someone else.
Theren just shrugs. “I trust them.”
“Well, if you trust me to lead your friends to Fenn, I can join them to even out the groups.”
“That’s more than we agreed to.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Orda says, taking his time with each word.
He reaches out, as if for a handshake. Theren clasps his hand around the thumb, and brings it to his sternum.
“If we’re agreed, I’ll brief the others in English.”
“Please do,” Orda says. “I’ll take the Hope of Cedre to the roof and show her our entry points.”
Roof access, as it turns out, is as easy as Orda poking a door in his ceiling with the handle of a broom, and bringing over a ladder from the hall closet. He climbs up first, and Elegy follows, only a little alarmed by how the ladder creaks with each step.
The roof is almost flat, pitched toward the front so rain rolls into the gutters. The view of the monastery is clearer than she expected—-it looms over them on the hill, lit in the same halting, dim way as the rest of Dexa.
Orda points at one of the distant flames.
“That’s your entry point.” He shifts his hand over to the left. “And the others.”
“The odds of them seeing us coming?”
“Your group will have to find your own way, but I think I can pick a path that disguises us, for the most part. We’ll need to move fast and hit hard at the guards by the door.”
She nods. Silence falls between them, and she thinks there’s no reason for them to be out here, discussing entry points—-not really. So he must have suggested this to get her alone for some other reason.
“Something else you’d like to say?” she says.
He looks at her out of the corner of his eye. “Only that there’s nothing for you to worry about.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I may not be able to read you like he can, but I saw the look on your face when I mentioned Fenn,” Orda says. “He’s made his feelings for you quite clear, hasn’t he?”
She feels like she’s missing something. “Has he?”
“In the way he addresses you,” Orda says, as if it’s obvious.
“My Talusar is good, but I don’t understand all the nuances,” she admits. “Status indicators in particular.”
“Ah.” Orda smiles a little. “Well, you should ask him sometime.”
She hears voices in the street outside, and footsteps. Orda ducks down, and Elegy imitates him.
“Changing of the guard,” Orda says. He turns back to the ladder. “Time to go.”
The path to the monastery leads them down the main thoroughfare of Dexa—-uneven packed earth, riddled with rocks the size of her fist—-which narrows into a worn path at the foot of the hill.
The path splits in two, one leading up to the south wing of the monastery, and the other leading along the foot of the hill until it climbs to the north wing.
At the split, Elegy reaches for Parekh’s hand and squeezes it. Orda is already walking, his sword tapping his thigh as he moves, but the others turn toward her, and she considers that all these people have supported her at different points in her life, and she’s given them so little in return.
“Thank you,” she says to them. Hela rolls her eyes, and Arias blows her a kiss, and Parekh squeezes her hand again.
“Shut up,” Parekh says warmly, and a moment later, she and Arias are gone, following Orda up the southern path.
Elegy turns to Theren. “Lead the way.”
She thinks he has better night vision than she does, though they hardly need it on a night this clear.
She knows he has better footing on this type of ground.
She watches his feet, and tries to copy his movements as much as possible, moving in his shadow.
With Hela at her back, she walks the winding path through calf--high grass, steering around dry bushes and boulders.
She hears an owl hooting somewhere in the distance.
She’s not used to climbing, and by the time they make it to the top of the hill, she’s winded.
So is Hela, though she does a better job of hiding it.
Theren leads them to a cluster of trees near the outer wall of the monastery, and together they crouch down there to wait for the others to do their work in the south wing.
Theren and Elegy are in one cluster of greenery, and Hela is a few feet away, in another.
The moon—-or Cedre Station, it’s hard to say which—-brightens his face.
He’s focused on the monastery, likely tracking the movements of the guards.
She can’t see far enough to even attempt that, so she watches him, instead.
His furrowed brow, drawn low over his eyes. His hands twitching at his sides.
Ready. Present.
“What is it?” he says to her, in a quiet voice.
“Nothing,” she says, just as softly. “Orda said I should ask you what the pronouns you use for me mean. I didn’t learn many, since I prefer the ones for equals. But . . . now’s not the time.”
She feels Hela’s eyes on her, and ignores them as she searches for the outer door, the one they’ll need to pass through.
It will be flanked by two guards. They need to disable both without making too much noise.
She touches the spear strapped to her back, though she can already feel it against her spine.
“I’m still not speaking to you as an equal, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Theren says.
She rolls her eyes.
“It’s not accurate,” he says, defensive.
“You’ve seen me naked, you think I want you to call me ‘Your Grace’?” She says it quietly enough that Hela won’t hear her—-she hopes not, anyway.
Theren surprises her by grinning. “You don’t?”
She jabs him in the ribs with her fingers.
“I don’t speak to you like a subject, either,” he says. “The term I use is intimate. The connotation isn’t subservience, it’s . . . devotion.”
For a moment, he looks almost . . . bashful.
“Oh,” she says. Orda’s sly smile on the rooftop makes more sense now.
Then Theren frowns, shifting forward onto his toes as he tips his head toward the monastery. He touches a finger to his lips, and closes his eyes as he listens. A moment later she hears it: a bell.
“That’s the alarm.” He nods to Hela. “Let’s go.”
They break away from the tree line and sprint toward the door. Theren reaches it yards ahead of them, the butt of his sword colliding with the side of one guard’s head. The man stumbles back, and the second guard draws his weapon on Theren.
Elegy doesn’t slow down. She throws her body at the man as hard as she can, sending him face-first into the monastery wall. Before he can recover his senses, Hela lunges and hits him hard in the jaw. His head snaps back, and he, too, goes limp.
Theren adjusts his grip on his sword, and opens the door. Before they left, they all memorized the map Orda drew for them. They have to go to the end of this hallway, up a flight of stairs, and then travel east until they reach a blue door on the right.
The interior looks different than she expected.
She thinks of the Talusar as spare and practical, because that’s how the people of Valla are, living at the edge of Vidara territory.
But she forgot that most of the Talusar occupy the best spaces that remain of pre--Fever civilization, repurposing all its beauty for their own.
The monastery is no exception. Every surface is intricately carved, here in a leafy, florid pattern. The fixtures on the walls—-lit with flames, like lanterns—-are made of bright copper. There’s a plush runner down the center of the hallway, muffling their footsteps.
Theren moves fast, sword in hand, and she’s still impressed by how silent his footsteps are for a man of his size—-for a man of any size, really.
He reaches the foot of the stairwell and collides with a guard.
She can hardly see; his sword catches the light, and there’s the sound of metal against metal, a grunt of effort.
She steps aside as Theren stumbles back into the hallway, parrying with a woman in febra armor.
Elegy slams her spear into the soldier’s legs, and the woman goes down with a grunt.
Hela is ready with the butt of her sword; neither of them wants to kill when they don’t have to, though the blow Hela delivers to the woman’s head may be hard enough to cause damage she doesn’t intend.
Together they climb the stairs to the second floor. Hela runs her fingers along the wood paneling, over the triple circles beneath each light fixture. There are no guards ahead.
Elegy frowns at Hela. That’s strange.
They creep toward the next hallway, and turn the corner, weapons ready. But there are no guards there, either.
Theren holds up a hand to stop them. He looks over his shoulder at Elegy.
“Something’s wrong,” Elegy says, and Theren nods.
“I don’t hear anyone. Feel anyone,” he says. “I think . . . Hela should go find the others.”
“I’m not leaving her,” Hela argues, her hand coming up automatically to grip Elegy’s elbow.
“One of us has to go,” he says gently. “And I’m her Knight.”
The flame in a nearby lamp lights Hela’s cheek unsteadily.
Elegy and Hela have been going on missions together for four years now, though none of them were as important as this one, and Elegy knows it’s not easy for Hela to yield her place at Elegy’s side.
But there’s nothing to be done about it.
Elegy can’t go alone, and Theren is the best person to stay with her.
“Take weapons and armor from some of the guards we already knocked out so you can pass as Talusar,” Elegy says. “But go. Now.”
She braces for Hela to argue with her again, but all she does is squeeze Elegy’s shoulder and nod.
“Be careful,” she says, and then she turns and runs back the way they came.
Elegy doesn’t like to watch her go, but at least if Hela, Talusar--born, is caught . . . they’ll probably send her to the Crucible rather than kill her.
She can’t think about that now. They still have to find out if the augur is here. Elegy nods to Theren, and they continue down the hallway toward the blue door. It’s been painted so many times the blue is shiny as plastic, peeling in places to reveal a lighter shade beneath.
Dread gnaws in her stomach, but there’s nothing to be gained from standing still. Elegy reaches for the knob, and opens the door.
Behind it is a woman with her hair in a high knot. Elegy recognizes her:
One of Rava’s lessers. Nyx.