Lucky Rabbit

The tower shuddered. Augustus crouched, dropping one hand to touch the step on which he stood. Pandy flattened her belly against his shoulder and splayed out her legs, desperately trying to remain in place without digging her claws into him.

“Rabbit? What just happened?” Augustus’s voice was calm, but there was a tension about it that hadn’t been there before. He’d been the Kingsman for almost a decade, and he’d seen a lot of strange and dangerous things, but apparently this situation had just tipped over into new territory.

<Kappa… Kappa is gone. The god who was… The god who brought me here. He’s not in my head anymore.> Her voice was small, and she could see from his expression that not all of that had made sense, though whether it was because his mind didn’t have a ‘concept’ for her speech to latch onto or because she hadn’t tried hard enough, she didn’t know.

Shaking his head, he said, “Your friend… is missing?”

That was putting it mildly, but Pandy nodded, and as she did so, the tower shook again. Stone ground against stone in a sound that seemed particularly ominous given that they were inside a column of stacked rocks.

Giving a single shake of his head, Augustus looked up. “I’m sorry, but we need to go. Up or down? Keep trying, or flee?”

<Up!> Pandy thought emphatically, staring at the ascending steps, curving away ahead of them. Her Augustus Steed immediately began to advance, with significantly more speed this time. There was no cautious probing of the steps, no examination of the walls and railing. He took the steps two or even three at a time, and they could see within seconds that whatever had been preventing them from reaching their destination was gone.

From somewhere below them, shouts arose, and Pandy finally realized that she hadn’t heard a single noise other than their own voices and footsteps since the moment they entered the tower. These sounds seemed to be filtering through the windows, so they were muffled and distant, but clearly the sound of men and women yelling. The yells didn’t sound panicked, so Pandy took hope from that.

A familiar door rose up in front of them. The last time Pandy had seen it, it was smoldering slightly along the bottom, and there were still visible black marks, though of course the fire had long since been put out. More muffled voices came from beyond it, and they held far more intensity than those coming from below. Augustus reached for the handle, but paused as a thud echoed up the steps, followed by a “Sir?”

With a sigh, Augustus murmured, “I’m going to open the door, and we’re going in before anyone else decides to join us. On three. One. Two. Three.” He threw open the door.

Only one of the people on the other side turned to look at them. The expression of despair and fear on Lian’s face was so intense that he almost looked like someone else entirely. When he saw them – well, Augustus – the despair began shifting into hope, which faded when Miller Oakden thrust his hand into Lian’s blood-stained hair and yanked his head back. Lian was kneeling on the floor in the center of a nearly complete ring of what looked like sugar or salt, with Miller standing behind him, knife to his throat.

“Stop,” a voice said, and Augustus froze, glaring at the rather bland-looking man who had spoken. The stranger’s hair was a muddy blonde, his eyes an indeterminate shade of gray-blue, and while he was tall and appeared fit, it wasn’t in a particularly outstanding way.  The man lying at his feet, on the other hand, looked like a Greek god. Because he was.

<Kappa,> Pandy whispered, unsure if anyone could hear her, but still using the code name that had become a sort-of affectionate nickname.

Keros lay still, his eyes closed and his long hair splayed out around him. His toga had ridden up, showing an unnecessary amount of muscular thigh, and his chiseled abs rose and fell in shallow breaths. Pandy tensed, preparing to leap down, but Augustus raised a hand to rest it gently on her leg. He wasn’t holding onto her, just asking that she wait, so she did, but she almost vibrated with the need to do something.

“Daedalus,” Augustus said, his voice carefully neutral.

The dishwater blonde looked up, his eyes seeming slightly unfocused. His mouth twisted in a crooked smile that would have been charming if he hadn’t been holding a bloody knife. Whose blood was that? Lian was injured, but not seriously, and she couldn’t see anything wrong with Keros at all, other than the fact that he was there in the first place.

Then she caught sight of two more figures. One sat, leaning over the table where Bryan and Grace used to do art together, and which had probably served as an autopsy table in more recent times. His almost shoulder-length gray hair was tangled and greasy, and his hand moved madly over the pages of a book lying in front of him, the pen he gripped scratching at paper. As far as Pandy could tell, he hadn’t even twitched when they entered.

The second figure stood, the shadows against the far wall seeming to take him in as if he was one of their own. He wore most of the armor of a Knight of the Royal Eagle, but his helmet was off. A blue half-cape draped from his shoulder to his waist. His face was bleached of all color, a deep but bloodless cut slicing from his temple to the corner of his mouth, the gleam of something that might have been bone visible in its depths. He stared at Pandy with pale, unblinking eyes, and she shuddered at the naked hunger she saw there.

“Kingsman,” Daedalus said pleasantly, then, “No. Augustus. Gus. Fergus’s favorite little cousin, raised up beyond his place and before his time.”

Absently, Pandy wondered how she’d failed to notice that both Augustus and Fergus had ‘Gus’ in them. Was that intentional, or a coincidence? Had two boys called Gus once laughed over it? Had it been the spark that lit a friendship between the heir to a kingdom and his distant younger cousin?

“You were never going to be Kingsman, Nick,” Augustus said, impassive. “You hated Dark mages, and that’s not what Fergus wanted. He knew you’d assume they were all guilty of whatever someone could think of to accuse them of.”

“And I would have been right, wouldn’t I, Gus? Out of all the worthless Dark mages you chased down, for all the time you spent giving them the benefit of the doubt, the effort you put into making sure they had committed those atrocities, how many accusations were wrong? One? Two?” Daedalus asked, mocking. His eyes narrowed to slits as he pointed the tip of the knife at Augustus accusingly. Pandy began to edge her rear end back behind Augustus’s neck, moving as slowly as possible.

“Eight,” Augustus said. “Out of more than two hundred, there were eight who had been falsely accused. I saved seven lives you would have ended without thought.”

“And failed how many innocents in the process? How many people did the other one hundred and ninety-two kill while you were ‘gathering evidence’?” Daedalus mocked, taking a single step closer to Lian and Miller, though he stayed outside of the circle of white crystals.

Pandy was focused on slipping very, very slowly down Augustus’s back, using her claws to prevent herself from falling. He shifted his weight to lean forward ever so slightly, so she had a slope to slide down. His body very nearly vibrated beneath her paws, though you couldn’t tell by his voice.

“I did the job my king gave me,” Augustus said, voice filled with finality. “The only one I regret is the last, and even then I did what Fergus told me I should if I ever found myself in that position, and retired.”

“Oh yes, Lady Delia Forrest.” Augustus flinched so hard Pandy nearly lost her grip on his pant-leg. Daedalus obviously saw the reaction, because his voice became even more mocking. “Fifty-two-year-old mother of three. Shortly after Fergus died, she suddenly began appearing at all of the black market sites throughout the city, claiming to be looking for an Apparition, or bodies to form Bound, or blood to create binding dolls. She was oblivious to the fact that these are not things people generally do out in the open. You set up a meeting in a back alley, and she was murdered for her purse on her way there. Killed for nothing.”

Daedalus’s vicious laughter tore through the tower room. “Come to find out she was only looking for her missing Dark mage son, who had vanished into the underbelly of the city some months earlier. She wasn’t even good at acting like a criminal, but you just wanted to be done so you could mourn, didn’t you? So you sent her straight into a place she had no business being. She died because of your negligence, and your assumption that she was exactly what she’d pretended to be.”

Oh. This was the story Augustus had alluded to. One she’d assumed he’d tell her when he was ready. But here it was, laid out in the harshest way possible. Pandy darted for what had probably been a chair before it caught fire, and was now little more than a pile of charred wood. Fortunately, small rabbits could hide behind small piles of charcoal surprisingly well.

Still, she fully expected to hear someone say something – order her to stop, tell Augustus to order her to stop, something – but no one did. In fact, nothing moved except for Lian as he shifted nervously, and Miller as he reacted to those movements. Well, and Bryan’s hand, still frantically writing something. And Daedalus. Lots of movement, actually. Too much to keep track of all at once, even for her wide bunny-vision.

Daedalus took another step, this time to the side, still skirting around the ring of white dust. Pandy really, really wished she knew what that was. If Daedalus didn’t want to disturb it, she probably did, but was it safe to do so? Certainly not with that knife at Lian’s throat. She also really wanted to check on Keros – why was he here? – because she couldn’t even see him now, her line of sight blocked by the formerly-chair just as much as it prevented anyone else from seeing her.

“And that’s something I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life,” Augustus said, his voice finally showing the strain.

“I have good news for you, then,” Daedalus said, and she could hear him take one more step, his foot sliding over the floor, rather than lifting all the way. “The rest of your life is going to be very short.” There was a crunch as he moved again, and Pandy popped her head up, all attempts at stealth over. It had probably been pointless anyway, but at least now she wasn’t in Augustus’s way.

He’d kept his knife out the whole way up the stairs, and his blade met the one Daedalus swung at him with a surprisingly musical clash. It sounded like the most murderous windchime Pandy could possibly have imagined, and it happened again and again as the two men began to dance.

A dance was exactly what it looked like. One would shift forward, and the other swayed away, only their weapons coming into contact. They were about the same height, with similar reach and similar blades, but Augustus looked to be a little faster, while Daedalus might be slightly stronger. The important thing was that neither man had the immediate upper hand, and Pandy had a boy to save.

She eyed the ‘salt’ again, knowing she needed to make a decision. There was already a gap of about six inches. Did she break it further, or leave it as it was? Should she go through it or over it? Either way, her priority was Lian. She didn’t like the Knight-thing she was almost certain was a Bound standing over Bryan, but as long as it stayed out of things, she wasn’t going to mess with it. But Miller needed to get that knife away from Lian’s neck right now.

<Minor Heal Lian. Shield of Darkness Lian,> Pandy thought, as she came to a decision and Hopped straight for Miller’s face. There was nothing like an incoming face full of rabbit to get someone to instinctively raise their hands.

Minor Heal failed.

Shield of Darkness failed.

Lian not found.

Pandy’s limbs flailed as she attempted to course correct, but it was too late. There was nothing for her to push off of, so she just ended up sending herself into a spin. No, she could use Wings of Glory to-

Miller let go, and ‘Lian’ lunged out of the circle. The reddish tinge in his hair that Pandy had seen as blood flooded down the golden strands, which unfurled into longer red tresses. It wasn’t Lian at all, but the woman who had helped ‘kidnap’ Pandy-as-Thaniel, Lady Grooth. No, that wasn’t it. Roost? Ruth!

A hard hand clamped onto Pandy’s ears, halting her forward momentum in a rather painful manner. She was briefly glad neither of the fuzzy appendages came off, and then she promptly had reason to regret it, because at least she could have run away without ears. Instead, she swung helplessly, her fluffy paws and sharp claws unable to reach the boy who held her, no matter how she twisted.

Daedalus shoved Augustus away, forcing the chancellor to take a step back even as Daedalus did the same. The man grinned, swiping the back of his hand against teeth stained red from a split lip. Augustus had gotten in at least one blow, then. Good!

“Thank you for bringing us the next piece of the puzzle, Gus,” Daedalus said, taking another step backwards, so his heel very nearly brushed the circle. Pandy was still swinging dizzily, and she saw Lady Ruth crouching by the powder ring, wearing a pair of long gloves and pouring more of the white powder onto the floor, closing the last gap in the circle. “You did a remarkably good job of not forming attachments during your time as Kingsman, but now here you are, handing us not only a fresh Dark mage, but also a way to convince you to do as we tell you. Now. Where is Zheraphon’s Touchstone? Tell me, or the rabbit dies.”

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