Hadrian refused to believe it. He shouted and banged the walls in what, to Royce, seemed uncharacteristically excessive behavior. He might go so far as to label it irrational. The man had seen plenty of death. His alleged history suggested Hadrian had been present for hundreds of brutal killings, and Royce could personally vouch for his witnessing dozens of deaths. Never before had he been so violently distressed.

Royce did understand the skepticism, especially considering Arcadius had been in the room when the kid died. Anything that man was involved in needed to be questioned. What made Royce shake his head was why it mattered so much. Rehn Purim was a minor league operative working as a scout for Arcadius. He had posed as a Vernes street waif named Pickles, for reasons Royce still wasn’t clear on. Probably a last minute panic when the kid realized he couldn’t use his real name. Failing his assignment of traveling with Hadrian to Sheridan University, the kid showed up some time later to serve no purpose whatsoever. Shortly afterwards, Pickles “died”. As best Royce could calculate, the two knew each other for a matter of days. During that period Royce had been working extensively to teach Hadrian to climb, as such Royce estimated the time Hadrian had spent with Pickles to be best measured in hours rather than days. Why it was then that Hadrian broke down when they took him into the bedroom to view the body, was baffling.

There’s just some things I doubt I will ever understand about that man.

They left Hadrian alone with Rehn while the rest of them packed. No one slept. There would be plenty of time to do that on the ship. What else was there to do?

Royce hoped he could sleep though most of the voyage as well, but doubted it. He had only been on a ship once before. That had been enough. The rocking didn’t agree with him and he had been horribly sick for three days. Royce’s friend and genius-in-residence, Merrick Marius, had explained that while some people were prone to it, one incident didn’t mean Royce was one of those. Even if he was, it didn’t dictate that he would always become sick on a ship. Still, the memory of that agony had kept him from any further experiments beyond short river or coastal trips, which never bothered him.

So maybe Merrick was right. Maybe it wasn’t the ocean at all but something I ate. It’s possible that this time I’ll enjoy a lovely pleasure cruise holding hands with Gwen as we stand on deck and gawk at the sunsets…and I suppose I will also wake up and discover I am the Heir of Novron and she the Queen of Calis.

Royce had nothing to pack. Instead, he waited in the courtyard listening to the birds begin to stir and watching the sunrise. Despite himself, he had to admit this had been a nice trip. The food was good, the work easy, and there was that one night in the Blue Parrot when…

Royce had refused to even think about it. He had been terrified that if he analyzed that evening too much, he would realize he had made a fool of himself. Over time, however, the terror faded. Gwen showed no signs of hating him. In fact, he noticed how she stood closer than before. And where in the past she never dared, she now touched him. Just a light press on his shoulder or a brief tap on his hand to get his attention, but a touch nonetheless. And once while at the Blue Parrot, when Royce was perfectly sober, he had swept a hair from her face, and only realized afterwards that he had. As he watched the rising sun, Royce edited his earlier dream of waking up a prince, to waking up beside Gwen.

Auberon, who had left during the night, returned that morning with a freshly made coffin and dragged it inside. Shortly afterward, Hadrian came out carrying his swords and pack. He looked exhausted, his eyes red and underlined with shadows. Dropping his burdens near the table, Hadrian collapsed on the chair opposite Royce as if he weighed a thousand pounds.

“Doesn’t affect you at all does it?” Hadrian asked. There was an anger in the words.

“I didn’t know him the way you did.”

Hadrian leaned forward opening his mouth, then stopped. Looked puzzled, then sat back.

“What?” Royce asked.

Hadrian shook his head. “Nothing, it’s just that the last time we had this conversation, your answer was either Uh-huh, or nope. Something like that, I forget. I just remember it really made me mad.”

“That was several years ago,” Royce said. “You’ve matured a lot since then.”

“Hold on. You think that I—”

“Can I interrupt?” Gwen asked coming out with Albert. “We need to carry Rehn to the Ellis Far.”

“Now?” Hadrian asked.

“I arranged permission from Captain Callaghan to bring the body onboard,” Albert explained. “But we need to load the coffin early as it will be going in the ship’s hold and things will get tight in there once passengers arrive.”

“Auberon is closing the coffin now.” Gwen looked at Hadrian with soft eyes. “I thought you would like to take Rehn back and give him a proper burial?”

Hadrian nodded.

“Can you help carry him? Both of you? And Albert you go to and help to make sure there’s no confusion with the quartermaster or whatever. Arcadius and I will see that your things are packed while you’re gone. Ship leaves at midday.”

Baxter filled in as the fourth pallbearer. He had to go with Royce anyway and it must have seemed stupid not to help out. The ghost had grown lax in his duties of aloof silent sentinel. Royce had caught him playing that game with Albert, and sleeping on the cushioned bench. Couldn’t fault him, there never had been any point.

The lid of the coffin had been sealed tight, which Royce appreciated. Seeing Rehn tucked in the box would likely as not have set Hadrian off again. Even so, the trip home was not going to be a happy-go-lucky party. Instead, Royce imagined it would be one of those lengthy journeys where Hadrian would be too quiet. Strange, Royce thought, how a person can get so used to something annoying that its absence itself becomes annoying.

Rehn was a thin kid and not terribly heavy. Between the four of them they had no trouble hoisting and hauling him down to the harbor. People were already on the dock. Most all stood in a patchwork of clustered luggage waiting their turn at the gang plank where a host of dock workers tossed up chests and sacks with all the care of manure shovelers clearing a stable. They too were forced to wait while Albert went up and spoke to the longshoremen, or what he called the “wharfies”.

As always the seagulls kawed overhead while the ocean waves—crippled by the breakwater—lapped against the quay. The sky was oddly overcast, growing dark with rainclouds, which added to the anxiety of those waiting in line. As the minutes rolled by, Royce contemplated sitting on the coffin but imagined that was just the sort of thing to set Hadrian off. As it turned out, Royce well remembered the conversation the two shared after Pickles previous death. It had ended with the two promising to kill each other.

Funny how life repeats itself. If Royce was more optimistic—if he was Hadrian, for example—he might fancy that the world gave individuals repeated chances to get things right. Being Royce, however, he understood the proper philosophical takeaway: if a person will fall for it once, they will likely be deceived a second time. In the thieving world this was known as the Rule of Threes. If you rob someone who has no lock on their door, odds are you’ll be able to do it a second time, but not a third. People had a strong habit of convincing themselves that if something awful happened, there was almost no chance of it happening again. The second burglary changes that, and they get a lock. Given Royce had a tendency to see life as a sadistic entity that reveled in causing misery, he also imagined Life making use of the Rule of Three. Royce hoped to avoid making the same mistake twice, and refrained from sitting on the coffin.

Instead, he wandered to the edge of the quay, that was white with bird droppings. Standing at the edge near the center of Terlando Bay, Royce had a perfect view of the two towers of Drumindor. They were indeed huge. Not quite mountain huge, but bigger then anything he’d seen crafted by a hand. They were so big that the clouds were obscuring the tops. And yet, they were only about a third taller than the Crown Tower. A third. The thought repeated in his mind. Only a third. He found this significant because the bridge was just slightly higher than halfway. That meant…the distance to that bridge is shorter than the distance to the top of the Crown Tower—and even Hadrian had climbed that.

The problem, of course, was the dwarven craftsmanship. Unlike blocks of stone laid one upon another and stacked side-by-side, this was carved from living rock. No seams were available to exploit. Everything is just to annoyingly smooth—polished even. Except for—

“Royce?” Gwen’s voice drew him back.

She had arrived with Arcadius, Auberon, and all their luggage in a little wagon that Auberon himself drew.

“You going on the Ellis Far, too?” he asked the dwarf.

“No,” Auberon replied solemnly. “I’m done traveling. This here is my home.”

“You’re home is going to disappear in couple days.”

“And at my age, that still makes it a race as to which one of us will die first.”

“How is Hadrian doing?” Gwen asked.

“He’s in his quiet phase. It will last until he finds beer, then he’ll shift into his loud phase. Not sure which I hate more.”

Gwen took him by the hand and drew him aside. “A lot of people are going to die here, Royce.”

He nodded. “Strange isn’t it? That people would chose to die? I suppose I can understand Auberon. What does he have to look forward to, really? A couple more years, then the misery and humiliation of his body breaking down will—”

“That’s not my point,” Gwen said. “What I’m saying is that a lot of people here are going to die that might not need to.”

Royce looked at her puzzled. “That is my point, too. No one here needs to die. They can leave. Even if they can’t get on the Ellis Far or the Crown Jewel, they can walk. They have two days left. They could easily clear the cliff and get miles inland.”

“Still not my point, Royce.”

Again he looked at her puzzled.

“These people are staying because this place means too much to them to abandon it. Most can’t begin to imagine a life elsewhere because most have already been elsewhere and know what that’s like. Tur Del Fur is special. It is one of a kind. Nothing like it has ever been before nor do I imagine will it ever exist again. It breaks their heart to see it destroyed—so much so that they can’t imagine breathing another day if it’s taken from them. Royce…” she took both of his hands in hers and looked in his eyes. “I think when they look at this city its like when I look at you. I could never feel the same way about someone else the way I do about you. It just wouldn’t work. You are as unique as this city, and I can’t imagine continuing to breathe if you were gone.”

Royce didn’t know what to say to that. He was still feeling the warmth of her hands in his as they squeezed. In her eyes was a desperation.

“Royce, I know you can stop it.” She turned and looked at the towers. “You can climb it. I know you can. What’s more I know you know it too.” She looked back at him. “Don’t you?”

“There is one thing I suspect everyone may have overlooked.”

Gwen smiled at him. “Take Hadrian with you.”

“I didn’t say I was going to do it.”

She simply smiled at him.

“What about me being like the city. Aren’t you afraid I’ll fall? That I’ll not make it and be killed in the explosion?”

She shook her head. “You won’t.” Her hands squeezed his again. “The one thing that has ruined this trip for you is my seeing you fail. You want to climb that tower as much for yourself as for anyone, but you’ll do it for me. And because of that you won’t let yourself fail. You’re going to do it, Royce. You and Hadrian will climb Drumindor and save this city from destruction. You will. I know it and I believe in you.”

Tears welled in her eyes as she said this.

She was right. He had wanted to try climbing Drumindor ever since he first saw it, ever since he placed his hand on the north tower. Given his alternative was a risky ocean voyage where he would likely become disgustingly sick in front of Gwen, and that he still had time to escape the city on foot if his idea proved unviable, her request clinched the deal.

The tears sealed it in stone.

Behind the curtain of rain, the Ellis Far rounded the shallows, turning to face the big waves head-on as the ship headed north into the Sharon Sea. Royce was surprised the ship was only now clearing the bay. They had said their goodbyes on the dock over an hour ago.

The ship had been packed with escapees. Those with rooms or berths paid for the privilege, but Captain Callahan waved fees and took on refugees with no space other than on the deck. Royce recognized the nameless faces he’d passed time and time again over the last month. Among them he spotted Tim and Edie, as well as Angelique, who stood with several other men that Royce guessed to be his many storied brothers. Apparently, whatever boat they used for fishing wasn’t good enough to flee on.

Gwen gave Hadrian a hug and returned the diamond key to Royce before bestowing a kiss that no amount of ocean spray had enough power to wash away.

“Get going!” Gwen had ordered them. “You don’t need to stand here and wave. You have a lot to do and precious little time left. I’ll see you back in Medford. I believe in you, Royce. I believe in both of you. Now go!”

An hour later, Royce was standing at the base of the north tower hopelessly soaked. A wave exploded on the rock. Not only were the waves breaking on them, but it was raining. Overhead, clouds of gray churned and boiled, while below the ocean mirrored the sky. Gone was the happy aqua waves crowned in white replaced by the colorless rearing fists of an angry sea. Looking out across the water at the Ellis Far rocking over those great white knuckled fists, Royce had but one thought. Take care of her, little boat. See her safely home, or I’ll track down every board, nail, rope, and sail and burn all of you to ash.

“You’re absolutely right,” Auberon told Royce as he studied the stone of the tower.

“He’s still insane,” Baxter shouted over the roar of the ocean as he joined all of them in staring up at the heights of the north tower. “You can’t climb this. No one can. Go up there, and the wind will rip you off and toss your body in the sea.”

“Maybe,” the dwarf said, “but at least this here is climbable.”

“You call this climbable?” Baxter shook the water off of his face, his long hair whipping like a dog. “I used to be a second-story guy. My specialty was drainpipes and steep roofs, but this—this is vertical. And there’s no grips.”

“Yes there are,” Royce said running his hands over the surface, reading it with his fingertips. “The face of the south tower is smooth as polished glass, but this is pockmarked, coarse, gritty.”

“The salt spray,” Auberon said. “Eats everything. Chews up boats, rusts metal, even erodes granite. What made you think of this?”

“The way everyone always went to the south tower,” Royce said. “Each attempt to climb was made there. Not a single person thought to come out here.”

“It’s too far, too much trouble to hike through all that brush,” Baxter said like the husband of a cheating wife denouncing marriage. The ghost was a city boy who seemed uncomfortable trudging through anything more challenging than a dark alley. “Carpenters aren’t going to carry lumber all this way through that forest and scrub. I suppose they could have boated it out, but why bother when the south tower is right on the paved square, and that’s where the old entrance always was anyway. Just made sense to try there.”

Royce nodded. “Everyone thought that…even the dwarfs.”

“Of course!” Auberon’s eyes widened just before another wave burst behind them. The water wasn’t cold, but accompanied by the wind and without the sun, it wasn’t warm either. “No one ever came out here. There was never any need. They kept the south tower in pristine condition because that’s where everyone went in and out, but they never bothered to do any maintenance out here where it was hard to get to, hard to build scaffolding, hard to provide workers with food and water. And I guess everyone gets lazy.”

“And,” Royce added, “Where the winds that blow primarily down from the north has been salt-blasting this unseen side of the north tower for thousands of years.”

Royce backed-up as far as the ledge allowed and peering up, studied the route he planned to take. “The stone isn’t just roughed up, it has cracked in places. See it? There’s even a little crevasse that crosses the fins going right up toward the bridge.”

“Your eyes are better than mine,” Auberon said. “But then there’s not much left of me that’s any good.”

“If I could climb up to that jog, I could catch hold of it. Problem is, I’ll need anchors.”

“Can’t hammer a piton into solid rock,” Baxter said.

“No. For that I’d need to drill and set bolts, and we don’t have that kind of time. I’ll just climb to the crack and hammer anchors in it.”

Baxter pointed. “The crack is way up there; how you gonna reach it?”

Royce examined the wall. “I’ll press into the corner here where the fin joins the cylinder. The stone is rough, there’s plenty of friction.”

“I don’t know where you come from but the laws of nature and man don’t work that way in this world.”

“No?” Royce looked back and waited for the next set of waves. When they finished breaking, he leapt up and using fingertips, elbows, knees and toes pressed himself into the sharp V where the tooth of the gear met the tower’s body. The stone was wet, which made holding himself by pressing out significantly harder, but as expected, he managed to locate—mostly by feel—tiny dimples in the stone that were just large enough to catch a hold and keep him in place. He found more and climbed up about ten feet then dropped back down before the next set of waves arrived.

Royce smiled as he nodded to himself. Gwen was right. He could do it. Wouldn’t be easy, but once he drove an anchor into the crack and hooked a line, the rest would be inevitable.

“It’s like you're a fly, or one of those little lizards they have here,” Baxter said.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be doing that part. You can climb the rope behind me like Hadrian.”

“Oh, no thank you,” Baxter replied. “I’m not climbing anything. I said you’re insane and I’m standing by that.”

Royce faced him. His hood was up but starting to sag under the weight of the wet. “I’m going up. As my ghost, you’re obliged to follow me.”

“That’s okay. I’ll stay here and dodge your falling body instead.”

“And you realize that the book is up there. Hadrian and I could find it and sneak out while you’re twiddling your thumbs. The big guy won’t like that.”

“Don’t care.” Baxter looked up at the dizzying height of the tower. “All the money in the world can’t get me up there.”

Royce glanced up. Now that the storm had arrived the top was no longer visible. Even the bridge was mostly lost in clouds. “You’re scared of that? I thought you were renown.”

“Renown—not suicidal. A year ago, I led a team that assassinated a sitting magistrate—in his own home.”

Royce shrugged. “I murdered my first judge all by myself when I was sixteen. Honestly, what passes for elite these days?”

Royce looked at Hadrian for agreement, but his partner was letting the rain drain down his face as he stared out at the waves. He wasn’t looking good, and Royce was starting to suspect he might be doing this alone.

“You have another problem,” Baxter said. “You have no gear, do you?”

Royce scowled. “This job was supposed to be an intimidation contract—a simple killing if that didn’t work. Didn’t expect to be rock climbing.”

“What do you need?” Auberon asked.

“Several blade pitons of varying lengths—one to five inches, I suppose.”

“What are those?” Auberon asked.

“Just thin bits of strong metal I can hammer into cracks and tie a rope to—having a flange on the end and a hole through it would be nice. And obviously I’ll need a little hammer, and lots and lot’s of rope—good rope, light and strong. And we’ll need harnesses, some clamps, and I could use hand-claws, too. And a few light bags that are easy to open and close. Maybe some chalk powder. Don’t usually need it, but it’s warmer here. It’s possible I’ll sweat.”

“Possible you’ll sweat?” Baxter blurted out then laughed. “You’ll be pissing yourself before you get halfway.”

“Can you make a drawing of these claws and other stuff?” Auberon asked.

“Why?”

“Easier to make them that way.”

“I didn’t think you knew anything about crafting metal.”

“I don’t, but you’d be surprised how many of my people do.”

Royce stared at the dwarf for a long while as he finally faced the truth. He had been eager to give up his bed on the Ellis Far because he’d rather walk home than take that ship. Gwen’s request had provided him a wonderful excuse and he was going to take it. No one could fault him for failing to do what everyone knew was impossible. But then came those tears and that kiss and with them a stupid desire to actually try.

It only took a fraction of a second to stamp out the spark, but in that instant Royce caught a glimpse into the mind of Hadrian, and felt sorry for him. He likely feels this way all the time. Royce wanted to please Gwen. He’d steal her a pony if she showed the slightest interest because he knew he could do that. The odds were well in his favor, and the reward far outshined the risk. But climbing this tower was nearly impossible—at least it had been until he confirmed the poor upkeep of the north tower. Still, Baxter was right. They didn’t have the gear or the time to obtain it, and that had left scaling Drumindor a fantasy…until now. If Royce believed in gods, he’d swear they were behind this.

This is really going to happen, he thought.

“She’s not on it,” Hadrian said, and Royce realized he was still looking at the Ellis Far.

“What?” Royce asked concerned. “Who? Gwen?”

“No. Millie.”

“Millie? Who’s Millie?”

Hadrian shook his head. “A woman who has a habit of not listening to me.”

Royce didn’t like his partner’s despondent tone. He’d had no difficulty persuading Hadrian to stay, no problem convincing him to climb the tower. That right there was odd. This melancholy was worse. “Hadrian? How do you feel about climbing this tower?”

“Huh?” he looked up as if he’d been asleep, as if he’d forgotten why they had hiked out through the brush in a pouring rain. “Oh.” He shrugged. “I don’t care.”

“You don’t care?” Baxter mocked him. “You two are nuts. You try and climb that and you’re both going to die.”

“If they don’t,” Auberon said. “A lot more will.”