The Paladin Caper by Patrick Weekes Read Free Book Online Page A

are ready, someone will be happy to show you to your room.”
    “Thank you,” Dairy said again, and the captain headed off to the bridge.
    Dairy watched the great golden radiance of Mister Dragon’s estate fade in the night as the treeship slowly ascended. In what seemed like moments, the great thick trees that covered most of the Elflands had obscured the estate from view, and then the night was lit only by the silver-white moon and by the purple-and-blue glows of moss on the trees.
    The railing of the treeship was rough, the bark gripping his fingers. Overhead and behind him, branches rustled and creaked as countless intertwining leaves caught the wind, while the main hull beneath his feet was strong but faintly springy. It reminded Dairy of when he had climbed the young trees back on the farms, feeling the green wood flex beneath him.
    When he had ridden on the great treeship with Captain Loch, it had seemed almost like a normal airship, but with moss and leaves and no crystals. Dairy hadn’t realized at the time how much of that had been for the comfort of the humans visiting the Elflands. This was a real elven ship, though, as alive as the elves themselves, and as different.
    Dairy decided that he liked it. He was getting used to being different. He would find some way to help, even from the Empire. He hadn’t been able to help Mister Dragon with the reading, and he hadn’t been able to help Loch and the others with stealing things, but he would find something he could do.
    Whether he liked it or not, he was a child of prophecy, he noted with a little smile. He was bound to be important somehow.
    He turned to find someone to take him to his room, and that was when the bag came down over his head.

Three
    J USTICAR C APTAIN P YVIC sipped his morning kahva, which always made him think about the woman he loved, and then sighed and pushed himself up from his desk.
    “Something keeping you from the cabinet meeting, sir?” Justicar Derenky asked, poking his head around the corner of Pyvic’s door.
    Derenky was a freckled man who seemed to think that he could be in charge if he said everything like a question and smiled a lot. Once, Pyvic would have found that politically minded avarice off-putting. After seeing the man take a knife to the gut in defense of the Republic, however, Pyvic had been forced to accept, begrudgingly, that Derenky was a very good justicar, his desire for Pyvic’s job notwithstanding, and so he gave Derenky a comfortable smile and said, “I was deeply concerned about you not having asked me about it yet, justicar.”
    “Just a reminder that I’d be happy to attend these meetings if you are too busy with other matters, sir.”
    “Tomlin!” Pyvic called as he walked past Derenky into the main office. “Derenky said it again! Everyone has to take a drink!”
    “Right, sir!” The big man squinted, pinning a thumbtack to a map on the wall.
    “I expect a report about the fairy-creature disappearances when I get back,” Pyvic added with a look at both Tomlin and Derenky. “Something’s going on, and even if that something is in the woods, it could spill into the villages next week, and then the towns, and then I’ll be busy enough that Derenky has to go to my cabinet meetings.”
    “Wouldn’t want that, sir,” Derenky tossed back, and Pyvic grinned and headed off to the archvoyant’s palace.
    The floating city of Heaven’s Spire was quieter now than it had been a few months back. Businesses were open again, and the damage had been repaired, but the people who lived up in the sky had learned in no uncertain terms that night that their city was a weapon, and that weapons sometimes got sent into battle. The airborne metropolis had never been friendly for families—a floating city by its very nature restricted the amount of sprawl required to add new residential areas, and as the capital of the Republic, it catered to wealthy cosmopolitan tastes—and in the wake of Heaven’s Spire’s