Root listened to Saly’s relaying of the conversation carefully. Elijah had a point—David was looking awfully woozy, and he was right to worry. It sparked an idea. She meandered down the room a bit towards their conversation.
As she approached, Elijah peeled away and started towards a hallway. Root intercepted him.
“Excuse me?” she said.
Elijah paused. He looked around, the look of a person who hoped to make eye contact with someone they could throw in front of a question to take the hit. He found no one.
“Sorry,” said Root, “but Grand Priest David—he isn’t looking well. I was just a little worried, that’s all. Is he all right?” She threw in some pauses for good effect, a few grapples for basic words. Seconds mattered right now, and Vit needed as many as they could give them.
“He’s just fine—the picture of health,” said Elijah, but his expression said otherwise, and he hesitated an extra moment. Clearly he was worried—honestly, truly. He looked like he wanted to say more—or even double back, check on David again or insist he go lie down while the others sort out the tangle the evening had devolved into. But after that fleeting moment of deliberation, he started to move away again.
“You’re a pyvrin, isn’t that right?” Root cringed as she said it, but it was the first thing in her mind.
“Yes,” said Elijah shortly. “My apologies, I really have to run.”
“Oh, so you’re not staying for the rest of the event? Much nicer now that we’ve all moved in here and that storm cooled everything off a bit.”
“Afraid not,” said Elijah without stopping, and then he was gone. It was all Root could do, and that had never been much. She didn’t want to look even more suspicious, after all.
Azriah joined her. “Good work.”
Root huffed. “Like, thirty seconds.”
“Could be the thirty seconds that makes the difference. They’ve got some time. I mean, we don’t know what the entrance to the palace vaults looks like now, but Brock’s guess was at least ten minutes to get down to that level and through whatever protections are in place.”
“Yeah, still. Eleven would be better.”
Root turned aside, looking back to where David, Leslie, and their guards and staff discussed. Syrus had vanished again, slinking around like a rat.
David was now seated in a chair carted over by the staff. It was practically a throne. He wagged a finger at a staff member.
“Go and fetch Lucky,” he said.
“Sir,” said the man, looking apologetic, pitying. “I’m Anzo. I’m a human. Lucky is your dog. The one you play fetch with.” He spoke quite loudly and slowly.
“I mean go get Lucky, you moron!” David sputtered. “In case we need her.”
Anzo paled. “Of course. Of course, sir, right away.” He ran off. A few minutes later, he returned empty-handed. “Er, sir?”
“Yes, what is it?”
The loud, slow voice had returned. “Lucky—your dog—is with the dog walker right now.”
David’s face fell like a collapsing building. There was a hardness in his eyes that nearly pushed through the dazed sheen, an expression that could’ve frozen an oasis mirage in a desert. His jaw worked as fresh understanding bloomed across his face. He was silent for a long, tense second.
“I most certainly did not hire a dog walker.”
Vit descended silently through the narrow, dark air shaft. It was tricky, keeping the king’s brick from scraping on the sides, as the space was barely wide enough for the two of them. When Vit leaned too far and his corner scraped the wall, it clattered, stone against timid, shuddering stone. Vit tried to downplay their arachnid-ness, but that was hard given the circumstances. It was also not the priority.
The air shafts wormed around like a termite maze. It made Vit hungry for some reason, but that was also not a priority. Though utilized by the display case for pressure-neutralizing, the shaft seemed to be connected to the palace’s general ventilation as well and the air supply for the subterranean rooms. Other vents opened into other rooms, dark and empty. A few times Vit had to backtrack and follow a different route, but they kept moving down, and down was good.
At the bottom of one offshoot that split away from the central column, Vit landed on a grate. It rattled; their claws clicked on the metal.
“Anyone in there?” whispered the king, his voice shaking. It looked like he had his little carved eyes squeezed shut, but that likely didn’t help the sensation of the harness of webs Vit was using to carry the heavy burden.
Vit clicked their jaws twice as a way of saying “no.” The king whimpered and shivered again.
The claw of one leg could just fit through the grate. Vit reached through and worked away the bolts—a painfully slow process. One slid free and fell into the room below, clinking on the floor with a sound like a rockslide in the mountains. As the second fell, Vit caught it and shimmied it up through the grate with their claw. They placed it delicately in their mouth.
The grate bent enough now, one side freed, that Vit was able to squeeze through with the king. They rappelled to the floor and landed silently.
Back in human form, their ability to see in the low light was diminished, but it didn’t matter. A steady glow emanated from a small globe mounted above the door.
“We’re in the—uh–heh! Vault,” said Vit to the stone in their ear as they caught the grate bolt from sliding down their windpipe and spat it to the floor.
It was an uninteresting room—the most uninteresting, the least overdecorated room anywhere in the palace. Vit had expected a gaudy room of exceptional shimmer and shine, but the simple stone walls were unadorned, uncarved, simple brick and metal.
Heavy steel beams crisscrossed the walls, floor, and ceiling, a lattice inlay of hefty proportions. The brick in the gaps looked no less sturdy, and looking closer, Vit noted a secondary mesh woven through even those gaps, similar but smaller, like several layers of finer and finer filtering. Vit had descended into a cage.
Aside from the dark metal door, there were no other features in the room besides three more vents identical to the first and another larger opening in the ceiling, now closed in the same manner as the one above in the Hall of Relics. Two metal rails ran like pitons from the closed door of the case’s descent shaft to its place in the room, suspended on its track a foot above the vault’s floor. The Gauntlets of Endkiu and empty burlap bag lay on the floor just below it.
Wherever the palace’s gold and gems and valuables were kept, it was in some other room. Fortunately, they didn’t need any of that. Vit patted the pocket of their coat where the checks were safely tucked.
“All right,” they said with a deep breath. They hoisted themself up to kneel atop the display case and opened the lid. The halo gazed back, undisturbed.
It was absurd—that the halo should be right there, so close, the lock and latch disabled and the immensely-thick layers of stone and steel and glass all bypassed, that by all appearances Vit only had to reach out and grab it… and yet it was still so far away.
The skip snare lay like a sleeping snake along the felt-lined bottom of the hollow, a chain of gold so thin and delicate it might’ve been woven from Vit’s own spider silk or the fibers shucked from an ear of corn. It looked like nothing, but Vit had been seeing it in their nightmares all week. It all came down to this moment.
They breathed a long, shaking sigh.
“Let me see,” said the king. Vit picked him up and showed him the interior.
The king sucked in a small breath. “Set me just inside the case,” he said. “There along the corner, up on my end, there should be just enough room beside the snare.”
“Why?”
“Well I’m not useless. I can try to help while you work. I’m bound to the brick, yes, but there’s also a… like a magical field just around the brick, an aura, you might call it, that’s also me. It allows me a small area of influence. I can help try to delay the snare, to hold it back.”
Vit furrowed their brow. “You haven’t mentioned that.”
“No? Well, of course I knew I’d be here with you as well. But come on, then—we don’t have much time, we have to hurry. Place me just there. Don’t touch me to the snare by accident—or the halo.”
Carefully, Vit lowered the king into the spot he’d indicated and withdrew their hand. The skip snare didn’t move.
Quietly, in a whisper so low Vit couldn’t even make out the words, the king began muttering. It sounded like an incantation, a musical hum. The skip snare glowed faintly.
Vit wrung their hands. Right—time to do this.
They created strands of web as fine as they could spin them—a wisp and nothing more, like the idea of a thread that hadn’t committed to taking a proper shape. They held their breath as they flicked the first one down into the case; it connected to the skip snare.
The snare did not react.
Exhaling, Vit glued the opposite end to the glass. They spun another thread, and another, attaching them to the snare and drawing the far ends outwards, binding the snare to the walls all around, to the velvet and the cushion at the floor of the interior. It wasn’t much—it was barely enough to see—but it was all they could risk. They couldn’t afford to trip the snare—to spring it now, teleport the halo away to who-knows-where. But they needed to hold it open with whatever minute amount of tension they could.
It wouldn’t keep the snare from snapping shut. The king had said that wasn’t possible—at least not with any tools they possessed. Even bolting a skip snare down with iron shackles wouldn’t keep it open; it would shear through the metal, cutting through it like a knife through a rotten vegetable. No, there was no sense in trying to pin it back—Vit just needed to create as much of a delay as possible. The slightest fraction of a second could be the difference between success and failure.
And with the handkerchief to trick and further delay the snare, making it believe it was David reaching inside, and with Vit’s nimble fingers that the king had selected specifically for this duty, they were counting on the factors taking that last line of defense from insurmountable to narrowly but successfully surmountable.
“How’s it going in there?” Vit asked the king, wiping sweat from their brow as they spun another dozen hair’s breadth threads and added them to the growing web. It was taking shape now—like a cloud settling around the skip snare, holding it back.
“Good,” answered the king after a moment. “And your work looks excellent. I knew your talents would manage it.”
Vit added a few more bits of web. Then they paused to look down at their handiwork.
“No time like the present,” said the king. “Come on, the guards will be here to check the vault at any moment.”
Vit nodded. They pulled the bloody handkerchief from their pocket.
Fashioning it into a makeshift glove—wrapped around their thumb, index, and middle fingers, the blood at their fingertips—Vit held their hand above the case.
This was it, then. Succeed, and the halo was theirs. All that would be left to do was escape through the secret tunnels, the easy part. Fail, and…
No, they couldn’t. Fail, and the halo would be whisked away to some secret location unknown—whisked far out of their reach.
“Come on,” said the king, peering nervously through the glass at the vault door.
“Right,” said Vit. Another steadying breath. They did their best to tune out the chatter of the others in their ear, focusing on the moment, the task at hand.
They lowered the handkerchief-wrapped fingers slowly.
“No, you must be quick,” said the king. “You have to outpace the snare. Quick, confident motions. Otherwise you will lose it!”
“Right, right,” said Vit, wiping their face again. “I can do this. We can do this.”
They reached down. Their fingers touched the tallest prong of the halo. Seized it. Lifted.
Fh-fwhing-g-g! The skip snare sprang like a scorpion’s stinger, fast and ready, still one moment and alive the next.
The cord of gold leaped and constricted, a loop shrinking as it zipped up, up, swallowing all that lay within. It moved; Vit moved.
And in that race, the skip snare won. The halo, heavy and present beneath Vit’s fingertips, vanished at once, leaving nothing but empty air.
In that moment, Vit knew just how David had felt that evening, seeing his crown there one minute and then an empty case the next, the thing he depended on gone and in its place only disbelief and dread. Vit stared down at the empty cushion, the wisps of torn spider silk like the carcass of a cocoon discarded, and the skip snare—closed, still, sated, a tiny ball of gold thread where the halo had rested half a second before.