The Paravel Embassy had started with two squads of watchmen outside. The sergeants after some discussion, decided to pass the buck up the chain, and requested the duty lieutenant along with another squad so they could keep watch over the whole compound in shifts.
The Lieutenant listened to the situation in full, and then-
Called the Captain, who wasn't on duty, but arrived and promptly decided that three squads wasn't enough, and called for a pair of gyros to land and standby.
Amid the thrum of thopter engines, he talked to his subordinate, stroking his moustache.
He'd been interrupted in the middle of washing and waxing it earlier, so it had the unfortunate effect of making it look as though a piece of modern art had been attached to his face.
Lieutenant Thornson focused on staying impassive, as he was fairly certain that saying anything about the facial disaster would result in a termination of his future promotion prospects.
"Thornson. I don't think the boys really handled anything wrong here... except of course allowing the women to escape protective custody. But with a second look at these charges, It's fairly clear that they're the result of someone playing for time."
"We can't ignore them though."
"Indeed we cannot."
"So do we pressure the embassy?"
"No. It'd be framed as one country using the watch as leverage over another.... Ah!"
"Sir?"
"Thornson. I believe this has just gotten political. Which means it's no longer our department.
Get on the Skyline and inform the Baliff's office that the arrest needs to be carried out by local security forces as it has exigent circumstances which infringe on watch regulations on impartiality."
"Which regulations should I say sir?"
"Watch Interactions between International and Local Law in the context of situational enforcement."
"Page reference?"
"I don't think they need that."
"Each of the three volumes is well over two thousand pages long Sir."
"I really hadn't noticed Thornson. Do send that message promptly."
"Understood Sir."
From well outside the watch cordon, another set of eyes looked on. Frantic whispers were carried out, and snap judgements were made.
Three striders, two gyro's and a dozen watchmen.
During the next shift change, that meant there would be less than 8 people in the local Watch HQ.
When levvying the charges against Arlene and Harper, they'd included requests for examination of relevant items of evidence, including among others, a 'fist sized rock used during an assault in the Lumiere Riots'.
The Watch had denied the requests pending the apprehension of the suspect and the appointment of a council for the defence.
However, that had been exactly what the agents had been looking for.
They'd been denied.
Not told there was no such item, but, denied.
The Dragon's Stone was still in the evidence locker.
"Get out the paired bottles." Ascot gave the order as he furiously scratched out his report.
The main safehouse for Gastielle had several means of communication, in order from most reliable to least reliable they were, couriers, messenger birds, coded telegraphs (For the desperate, since the message would be logged and kept for some months after transmission at the public office) and magic. The latter would come in two forms. Paired papers which would reflect any letters written on their twin. Naturally it was exorbitantly expensive, and worse, without a wizard capable of making it in their own country, it had to be imported. The other form, were the Bottles. Gastielle had had four of them hidden away and they were both better and worse than Sympathetic Paper.
The wide necked green glass bottles would shatter when the cork was inserted and the contents would appear in any paired bottle- which then had to be smashed to extract the contents. So you could send a much longer message and even small items with them, but they were expensive, consumable and once you sent your message, a whole other pair of bottles had to be destroyed if you wanted a response.
Gastielle's agents looked at their leader as he took the remaining two bottles in hand.
Assaulting the watch house would be tough even with craftsmen. But if they drew off a even a few more of the remaining officers during the coming shift change, they could probably almost manage a bloodless snatch and grab.
Ascot would rather he didn't have this particular window of opportunity, since he'd be responsible if things went sideways, but, it was clear what he'd be expected to do right now.
In his report he stated his intentions, saying, that if the assault was to be given the go-ahead, they should send a message within the next 10 minutes, otherwise they'd stand by and wait for reinforcements.
He also summarised the current situation, the location of Arlene, now designated as a secondary target and added that in the event that the watch had forced her to empty her bag, she would hold little value, but if they determined if they couldn't find that evidence logged during the attack- she would once again be considered a priority target. Having compressed his observations and intention into as brief a report as he could, he stuffed it into the bottle, and inserted the cork.
Sitting back with a sigh, he felt as if a weight had been lifted. He no longer had to make a call. Someone else would, and based on that, they'd make their attack.
Five seconds passed, and he realised that something was wrong.
The bottle was intact.
His blood turned to ice.
"Thaumometer!" His cry was met with no question, but immediate action as an agent pulled a device from his belt and tossed it to Ascot. It looked like a cross between a sextant and a monocular, with a pistol grip.
The agent leader caught it one handed and cranking the dial, peered through the lens.
There was a ghostly web around the room, the threads trailing away and twisting together into a thick misty cable.
The leader, in an impressive display of dexterity for a man who'd had his shoulder dislocated less than three days previously, vaulted the desk and dashing to the nearest window, unhooked the boards covering it and threw it open.
-And ducked.
He hadn't seen the shot. He hadn't even thought that far. Instincts honed from years of fieldcraft had his knees bending before he'd even finished opening it.
But the agent following him was caught in the shoulder. An exit wound the size of half a fist appeared at the same time the rifle's retort echoed through the dusk.
Carson rolled the unfortunate agent aside and started administering first aid, while Ascot wisely decided to roll sideways, avoiding the second shot that punched through the wall below the window-frame.
"We were too damn active! We've been Made!"
"Watch?" Carson asked impartially, tearing open the clothes of the unfortunate and pushing a bit into his mouth.
"No. It was Astrid."
Astrid was a medium sized nation to the south of their home country and the southwest of the principality they were currently in. So, it didn't take a genius to figure out that they too would have local agents.
Or that, activity by a national rival might get noticed and provoke a response.
"That a suspicion or a fact?" Carson had a medical kit slid to him by another agent and he liberally poured troll oil onto the gaping wound in the man's shoulder.
"We were hit by an artificial wizard. Paravel doesn't use them, the locals can't make them and we didn't do it.
I doubt any other countries have more than a token presence here. It was Astrid."
"Hang on boss. His shoulder-blade's shattered . I'll need to use some fixit."
Carson took out a potion of repair and pushing away the jelly-like congealed blood that the troll oil had formed on the surface, uncovered a fragment of bone and let a drop fall onto it.
Repair potions are made for fixing objects. Non-magical, non-living objects.
The agent bit into the leather stuffed into his mouth, as he felt the first reason why one shouldn't use it to fix a bone- the pain of fragments travelling to reform into a whole more excruciating than the initial shock of the bullet.
Carson sighed as the second reason became apparent. The shoulder bone had reformed out of alignment.
"Boss." the muffled screams of his patient underlined his words, "What do we do now."
"I don't know. Astrid surely can't have as many assets in town as we do right now."
Ascot had taken a handmirror and tied it to a broomhandle. Carefully, he poked it up to try and get a reflection of the scene outside the window-
The mirror shattered.
A second shot punched through the wall underneath the window, at exactly the same height as the first.
"I think it might be aerial golem."
He tried waving the broken broom-mirror in front of the window again. After five seconds, two more shots. The same pattern.
Ascot dashed to the window, and peered out through the thaumometer.
He could see the slowly cooling trail that the Astrid agent had left over the rooftops- and also in the sky, a blaze of orange radiance.
He ducked back inside.
"It's still watching. We could shoot it down the next time it reloads."
"Leader. I think we need to pull out. It's not keyed to street level."
Ascot and Carson contemplated their options.
"Hang on a tick." One of the other agents who'd been checking the other windows commented, "This place is going to get found by the watch soon, with all this going on. Now that their agent is gone, shouldn't we send another message?"
"To do what? We can't get our assets into town any faster. Even if we had a method to teleport them here, they're already en route."
"I was thinking more along the line of assaulting the embassy if Astrid attacks the Watchhouse. Less risk and we'd still get the girl."
"Less Risk?"
"We have 30 minutes to the shift change. 5 minutes since we just got bushwhacked. They can put our plan into practice if they hustle, and they might, and then if anything happens blame it on us."
"So?"
"25 minutes from now we leak to the Watchmen at the embassy cordon that the Watchhouse is being attacked by elements from Astrid. If they actually are, we'll screw them. If they aren't, who cares."
"The embassy isn't a soft target."
"We can hit it though. Square building, three floors."
The proposal wormed it's way into Carson and Ascot's brains.
A map of the city and another of the embassy was produced.
"We have charges cached here. Embassy guards are on the first floor mostly. Square building, internal courtyard, three floors. We use the hooks to climb up, and set charges on the exterior here, and here, where the internal stairwells are, and then breach the building. Twenty rooms on the upper floor, we have eight men to clear, two securing the escape. In and out, six minutes."
"Do they have any craftsmen on payroll?"
Someone leafed through a stack of notes clipped to one corner of the map.
"Chance is low. Supply intake says guards, compliment of at least twenty, fifteen support staff, the ambassadors family, and probably 2-3 agents on rotation from their local safehouses."
"... Carson, did you get that down?"
"Written. Bottle it?"
"Yes."
Glass shattered.
"Suit up gentlemen."
Near the watch-house, a set of cloaked figures watched as a distressed woman entered and came away with two Watchmen in tow. And then as another watchman was send running- the expected request to call in some off-shift officers as they were down to 6 men.
5 now.
The agents, assembled a metal, snap together frame and pressed it onto the street beside the watch-house.
A shimmering curtain of blackness washed over the interior of the frame, until it became a clear window in the street, a passageway walled by starry blackness and opening onto the stonework of the boiler-room below the watch station below.
Two agents leapt into the gap.
Another started counting, and pressed a black cylinder against the outer wall of the watch-house.
Walking around the exterior, he pressed several more into the walls and nodded to a colleague.
The interior of the building began to fill with a viscous, cloying mist.
A few minutes later, two agents effortlessly leapt the four odd meters from the floor of the boiler room to the surface.
One produced a bag and handsigned to his fellows.
Bright white light flooded the area.
A Strider had risen over a nearby roof, and trained it's searchlight on the agents.
The glass lenses of their gasmasks, their cloaks and the magical tunnel currently still bored into the pavement, all were thrown into harsh relief.
On the other side of town, Arlene had just stepped out of Camo's room with Nikita.
"Sorry to put you to all the trouble, only to not go with your arrangements."
"It's okay. Camo may be strange, but, if she'd listen to us, we would've asked her to take you anyway. Thanks for offering to explain to the Ambassador."
"How does it work?"
"Well, no doubt you noticed that the room was bigger on the inside?"
"Yes. I have eyes."
"Ha. So I don't pretend to understand this, but according to her, the room isn't really here. It's located somewhere else, which is both very close and extremely far away from everywhere at the same time. Which makes zero sense, but in practice, she can make an entrance almost anywhere."
"How long have you two-"
"A few years. Well longer. You'll se
Twin explosions rocked the building and a symphony of breaking glass followed.
Nikita hesitate and then grabbed Arlene and pushed her back towards Camo's room.
As they reached the door, the other rooms along the corridor opened up, and men stepped out amidst gunfire and screams.
The intruders looked at them and saw a male engineer and a female embassy official, neither of whom matched their description of the target.
One of the intruders, armed with a flechelette gun took the initiative to unleash a burst of metal slivers at Nikita, half a dozen silvery spines embedding themselves into her as she pushed Arlene inside. More projectiles slammed into the door and her legs as she fell inside and Arlene pulled it shut behind her.
Another embassy staff member was dragged over by an agent. The staff member pointed to the door Arlene and Nikita had disappeared into- and was promptly shot by the agent.
The team formed up on the door and-
They breached. Into a mostly, empty room.
Mostly.
There was no furniture. The floor was bare and covered in dust. But there was a set of pipes coming from the floor at the rooms centre.
Pipes supplying a steam-charging station of the kind used for combat automata. Cheaper than Golems, with less magic, more technology, and potentially.... A lot of firepower.
Red eyes lit up on the machine.
"This is a restricted area. Present Embassy credentials, Level Orange. You have 5 seconds to Comply. Noncompliance to be met with Lethal Force."
The agents paused, for just a moment, reflexively searching for a hatch or trapdoor that their quarry would've escaped through.
Without a word, despite less than 5 seconds having passed, the automata started firing. If it had an expression, it would've been one of Malicious Glee.
Two men got cut down before they could move. They were left behind as the rest dove out of the room.
The machine fluidly unhooked itself from the charging station and stalked into the corridor, searching left, and then right for prey- and catching the movement of the fleeing men.
It moved forwards and stumbled, something stuck to the bottom of one of it's large rectangular feet.
A glob of white, claylike stuff was bathed in red light as it examined it. And the metal pencil-length rod stabbed into it.
In the night, a great orange flower bloomed in part of Gastielle.