From the corridor, a shout froze them all.
"Up! Above us!"
"Drop bulkheads five and eight! Be to it!"
"They found us!" Alarmed, Vaan grabbed Penelo and thrust her behind him.
Fran's ear flicked. "His earlier visitors, more like," she said calmly. "We should lie low for now."
"No." His resolution made, Balthier picked up a keycard from the desktop. "We'll use their confusion. We need to find Cid. Now."
With the keycard, Balthier opened locked bulkheads, leading them through the maze that was Draklor until Daina was so turned around she couldn't have found her way out again if she'd tried. A swarm of Imperial soldiers, searching for the unknown intruder, found and attacked them instead. Precious minutes ticked away to the sounds of sword on shield, gunfire, and the labored last breaths of the dying. The odor of ozone burned in Daina's nose as Imperial magi discharged fire and thunder magick in the narrow corridors, and Penelo and Fran answered with aero and water.
The military wasn't the only hindrance. Ashe, seeking a red bulkhead release, once opened a door on an infestation of crazed lab rats. Daina wasn't afraid of any beastie, but she shuddered to think about what had been done to the vermin to make their eyes glow like little red coals. They battled more soldiers and magi to gain control of the southern lift, which carried them higher within the building.
Daina exited the elevator behind Basch. He abruptly dropped into a fighting crouch, his focus snapping to the left-hand corridor and the thunder of booted feet rumbling from within. In an indistinct blur of twin scimitars, a large hume barreled at Basch as if he intended to perform a vivisection on the fly. The newcomer's swords sliced down; Daina's heart clawed its way into her throat and lodged there; Basch, in a magnificent display of reflexes, leaped backward. The scythe-like blades missed his stomach by inches.
The strange hume possessed excellent reflexes of his own. He spun in a circle with his momentum and kept coming, bringing one scimitar to bear in less than a second. He brought it down in a sweep that would have felled a tree, but Basch blocked it. The resulting crack made Daina fear for the bones in his arm. The two men struggled for a moment, neither gaining ground. The stranger raised his bald head.
"Ah! My apologies. You bear not the stench of Cid's lackeys," he said, sounding highly amused and not the least winded. His accent was richly Archadian, although Daina had never seen a hume of so dark a skin tone.
The strange hume was taller than Basch and twice as broad as Vaan, and he had not let up the pressure. Basch grunted under the strain. "And you are," he grated, pushing back, "our earlier visitor."
"Yes, a valuable man," a petulant male voice called from the top of a wide, darkened, half-moon staircase, "one I'd sooner not lose. Yet he knows too much!"
Basch and the stranger broke apart. Daina remembered that she should breathe. When the speaker ceased speaking, the dark stranger repositioned his scimitars and charged headlong up the stairs.
Fran raised a long finger and inscribed a glowing blue sigil on the air. The cure magick swooped toward Basch, briefly imbuing his features with an eldritch light. He grasped his forearm, twisting his wrist experimentally, and thanked her. Daina, Ashe, Penelo, and Vaan congregated around him, struggling with their shock. Basch, however, seemed ready to move on, unshaken by the case of mistaken identity and subsequent attempted murder, though it had been his. Of the same mind, Balthier led the way up the staircase.
Draklor's top floor was made up of one large rotunda, the dome's glistening windows open to the sky. Sunlight streamed in, hot and burnished. The dark-skinned man stood at the foot of a dais, glaring up at the hume on top of it.
Daina's eyes widened. This man looked like an older version of Balthier, although his hair was shot with gray and he was softer around the middle. A pair of spectacles pinched the bridge of his nose. He smiled, the same abyss-take-all smile Balthier sometimes adopted, but this man's was cruel, where the sky pirate only achieved mocking.
"Cid!" the large man bellowed. His foghorn voice filled the rotunda like steam about to blow the lid off a giant kettle. "You know deifacted nethicite brought down the Leviathan! How can you persist in this folly?"
"And you've come here to stop me?" Dr. Cid asked in a singsong. He cocked his head. "I'd fain see you try."
"Consider your bones, old man," Balthier called. "You're outmatched."
At first, Cid's smirk widened, but then antipathy wiped all mirth from his bearded face. "Pirate scum of the skies," he sneered at his son. "What brings you here?"
"Treasure," Balthier said easily. "What else would a pirate want? We'll take the Dusk Shard."
Fencing with words. A true Archadian skill. Cid copied his son's pose, his mellifluous tones. "You've come all this way for that trinket? I thought you above this."
Then, he did something strange. He looked over his shoulder as though he had heard someone call his name. "Hm? What's that?" Slowly, he turned back to them, his eyes gleaming behind his pince-nez. His face split in a toothy grin. "Ah," he breathed. He appraised Ashe, but it didn't quite sound like he was speaking to her, with pauses between each statement. "The princess of Dalmasca come to visit? . . . She's not entirely without merit. . . . A test of sorts for our princess?"
"You're a babbling fool," Ashe said, the first words she had spoken since they had entered Draklor. Daina shifted her grip on the iga blade, ready to leap in front of Ashe at the first hint of danger.
"A trial for Ashelia B'nargin Dalmasca!" Cid cried exultantly, throwing his arms out. "You lust for the stone's power, do you not?"
Ashe sharply sucked in her breath and opened her mouth to retort. Abruptly, the big, dark-skinned man stepped in front of her, blocking her view of Cid.
"Lend him not your ears, m'lady," he said in his deep voice. "He means to use you."
It seemed negotiations were at an end. Cid did not give an outward signal, but somehow, he made the first move.
Like a low-lying fog or approaching surf, twinkling Mist manifested and rolled toward the dais, tugging at Daina's ankles, her coat. From the walls, four mechanical rooks separated themselves and hovered around the rotunda. They circled ever faster, their high whining like that of monstrous mosquitoes. Daina, Ashe, Vaan, and Penelo backed into each other, braced by the shoulders of their friends. Daina watched the progression of the rooks, now spinning so fast they seemed like a glossair ring, formed of one solid piece. Dr. Cid lorded over it all, a manic grin exposing all of his teeth, his arms uplifted and thrown wide like a benevolent ruler inviting his people's cheers. The glow from the rooks threw crazy shadows over his face and up the walls.
"Manufacted nethicite! Like Bergan," Fran spat in distaste, ever sensitive to the vagaries of Mist. She drew an arrow.
"How could you do this?" Balthier asked, almost begged of his father. "How could you fall this far?"
