The Imposter

Opening

The crash was still ringing in the rafters when the plan stopped being a plan.

Somewhere below, in the dark of the basement corridor, Lissandra had stumbled into a stack of crates and brought it down, and the sound had gone up through the whole cavernous body of the warehouse like a struck bell. On the upper catwalk, Zuktind stood with the stolen documents in hand and the disarmed coin-box beside them, and he knew before anyone said it that the quiet part of the night was over. Rathenfall was beside him, invisible, a shape of nothing at all. Out past the exit Yeltsu waited with the rescued prisoner clinging to his arm, and Telno held the door, and Rusty crouched at the head of the stairs where he had been told to wait.

They had come in to steal without being seen. Now the building knew they were there.

The Way Out

Della would not let go of him.

Two weeks she had spent below this floor, in the holding cells, and the memory of it was in her grip — she had caught Yeltsu's arm the instant Lissandra's crash went off and now she held on the way a drowning thing holds on. He was invisible; she was invisible; she could not see the hand she clung to, only feel it. When he asked her, gently, whether she wanted to stay and see this through, whether she wanted to turn on the people who had caged her, the answer came out of the dark fast and low and shaking.

"Stay? Are you mad? We need to leave now. I want to get out of here. I don't want to go back to the basement."

That was all he needed. He told her to hold tight and moved, threading her between the tall shelving stacks — crates and pots and product stacked to the high ceiling, a maze of the stuff — and out toward where Telno held the door. He found Telno's hand by touch, in the dark, two invisible people passing a third between them, and pressed the girl's fingers into hers. Take care of her. Then he stepped back, breathing hard, letting himself feel for the first time how tightly he had been holding it all in. It had been the most afraid he had been in a long time. It had been worth it.

Above and behind him, Rathenfall made his own way down. There was no clean route to the ground floor but the stairs, and the stairs were exactly where he could not be seen — so he spread the cloak of the bat and dropped from the catwalk in a long silent glide, invisible, and came to rest on the warehouse floor near where Lissandra lay sprawled. She had gone down on her low, unlucky moment and stayed down. He put his voice near her without a body to attach it to, told her it was him, told her Zuktind had the documents. Then Lissandra rose, whispered that she had had enough, that she was getting out — and slipped away toward the door and the night.

A Borrowed Face

Zuktind was still wearing the enemy's skin.

He had worn Vorath's shape since he watched the red dragonkin walk into the warehouse hours before — Disguise Self, memory and will stitched into a mask. It was a good mask so long as no one looked too hard, and a useless one the moment he opened his mouth, because he had never once heard Vorath speak. He could be Vorath's face. He could not be Vorath's voice.

He needed speed more than he needed the disguise on Rathenfall, so he made the trade without pausing to like it: he pulled the haste into himself, and Rathenfall's invisibility guttered out along with it — the paladin standing suddenly visible on the warehouse floor, no longer a shape of nothing. Zuktind was already apologizing even as he did it. I need you to act with me. And Rathenfall, terse, resigned, sank to a knee.

"I just wish I didn't have to be myself for this," the paladin said.

"Exactly," said Zuktind — Vorath's face, Zuktind's voice — and got Rathenfall up by the scruff of his cloak, marching him ahead like a captured intruder being walked to the door. It was a clean idea. Vorath had caught the problem. Vorath was handling it. No one else would question the man who owned the place. He steered them toward the front and reached for the doors, and the doors did not open.

Locked. Of course they were locked, and of course Vorath would have the key, and Zuktind did not. There went the exit. He thought about the thieves' tools still in his kit and thought better of it — a man does not pick the lock of his own warehouse, and doing it under a stranger's eyes would take a lie he could not sell. So he improvised, dragging Rathenfall on toward a side way instead, when two of Vorath's guards came into view and stopped and looked at him too long.

How good is this disguise? the question hung there. Zuktind had built the face from a glimpse across a distance. The guards' hands drifted toward their sword-hilts. He reached for the last of himself — his final Flash of Genius, spent right there and gone — and forced the resemblance to hold. It held. They half-believed the face. But the face said nothing, and a silent Vorath was a strange Vorath, and one of the guards muttered that something wasn't straight. Zuktind pointed at his own throat, miming an injury, a reason he could not speak. It was too thin a lie for the moment and it landed as thin as it was. Their suspicion hardened.

So he stopped acting. He let his own voice come out of Vorath's mouth, low, almost a whisper meant for them alone.

"You're smarter than I thought," he told them. "You'll be down so fast. No one else will question this disguise."

Turning Point — The Witness on the Catwalk

He was still deciding how to take the two of them quietly when a third voice came down from above.

"Too bad — I'm here to witness."

Zuktind looked up. On the high catwalk, looking down into the maze of crates with the patience of a man watching a play he already knows the ending of, stood the real Vorath — red dragonkin, unhurried, unbothered. Whatever thin margin the disguise had bought was spent in that single sentence. Plan A had died at the locked doors. Plan B died here.

Vorath lifted a hand and pointed, not at the false Vorath, but at the paladin kneeling in the false Vorath's grip.

"Kill this one," he said to his guards. "I'm going to take care of the other — of the imposter."

The guards drew. The night's careful theft became a fight on the warehouse floor.

The Warehouse Floor

Rathenfall came up off his knee already swinging. His blade caught one of the guards and he wreathed the man in a searing smite, fire crawling up under the guard's guard, a thing that would keep burning turn after turn. Then Vorath came off the catwalk.

He dropped straight out of the high dark and onto the paladin — claws that raked and lashed through with a heat that smelled of burning flesh, slashing and fire together, and a great beat of his wings that threw a burst of hard air across the floor. Zuktind and Rathenfall both went down under it, flat on the boards. Vorath had chosen his ground and taken it.

Zuktind got up furious. He brought the musket around — sharpshooter locked in, the extra speed of the haste giving him a fourth shot — and emptied it into the dragonkin. The shots walked up out of misses into a crit and a second crit, arcane force jolting through the last of them, and when the smoke cleared Vorath had taken eighty-five points of damage in a single ruinous turn. Zuktind spat the taunt at him as he fired:

"As I eat this filthy feral — you don't even bother to use your own weapons like someone civilized."

Then he stepped back toward the foot of the stairs, deliberate, making himself the largest and loudest threat in the room, so that if Vorath wanted him he would have to cross the floor to get him.

The rest of the party was still trying to reach the fight through the crate-maze that hid it. Rusty, following the thread of Zuktind's mind, shoved through the door and clamped his jaws on Telno's cloak and hauled — dragging her back into the warehouse she had just been leaving, the only way the beast had to say your brother is in trouble. She fought it at first — "stop it, Rusty, let it go" — until the four cracks of musket-fire and the dawning sense of it turned her around: Zuktind needed them. Outside, Lissandra held Della back from bolting and kept the desperate girl clear of the doors. Yeltsu, hearing the noise change, hauled the haste into himself now and ran back in, invisible no longer once he cast, moving fast through the shelving to find an angle he could use, and finding mostly product stacked to the ceiling and a paladin he could just barely see — enough, at least, to lend Rathenfall a note of bardic steel.

The guards crowded Rathenfall where he lay exposed, striking with the advantage of a prone target. He answered with the shield generator — an item that had gone dead long ago and come back to life only because the party had stolen ten minutes of catnap before the raid — and a shimmer of protective light spread around him, sparing his allies and turning aside a blow. One crit still found the gap and bit for fifteen. He rose anyway and set on the burning guard again, running an improved divine smite up through the strike.

Then Vorath crossed the floor for Zuktind, and did it without paying the price. He slid past Rathenfall too nimbly for the paladin to catch — "I'll show you what my class can do" — and closed on the false version of himself with claw and bite. Zuktind threw up a shield of force to blunt it and still took forty-four, and marked, coldly, that he had a hundred and twelve left in him. Vorath's voice was almost curious as he tore at him.

"Who are you, dragonkin, to come here betraying your own kind?"

He was too close now for the musket. Zuktind drew the Mace of Disruption instead, and swung — and in the swing learned something worth learning: no radiance answered the blow. This Vorath was no fiend wearing dragonkin shape, not like the ones they had fought in Celestia. He was only what he appeared to be — dragonkin, and no more. The mace still bit for twenty-eight, and its old cruelty took hold: Vorath was left unbalanced, sapped, his next strike already fated to come wide. Zuktind stepped back to the stairs and would not give him the opening to retaliate.

The burning guard shrugged off the fire at last. His companion passed the moment of doubt where lesser men would have run, and pressed Rathenfall, and a longsword found the paladin's back for thirteen.

Closing

And then, under it all, a bell.

Not the great alarm of the building — a small bell, sharp and thin, from somewhere outside and above. It cut across the fight, and it was answered a breath later by a woman's voice, called down from the upper catwalk where none of them had been watching.

"Vorath, they have the documents."

Meridian. Awake at last, arrived at last, and in the same instant that she appeared she understood what had been taken from the office upstairs. The theft the whole ruse had been meant to hide was a secret no longer.

Zuktind's musket still smoked. Rathenfall bled where the sword had opened his back. Vorath stood sapped but standing, red and unhurried and very much alive, and now Meridian stood above them all with the truth in her mouth. No one had escaped. Nothing had been resolved. The party was still inside the warehouse, the enemy still on their feet, the documents still in hand and the whole building turning to face them.

They marked the sap on Vorath so they would not forget it, and there — mid-fight, both antagonists up, the bell still hanging in the air — the night held its breath and would not let go until the next.