“There’s an old chalk mine here,” he said, pointing out a wavering line to the east of the main building. “These are underground tunnels that no one’s used for years. The duchess’s wine cellar is a new addition and was built right on top of this tunnel.”
“OK,” Tanya said, leaning in, getting interested in spite of herself. “So if I move this alabaster marble, you can just climb up. But then how do you get from here”—this time she put her finger on the cellar—“to the duchess’s bedroom all the way up here?” She moved her finger to the north tower. “How do you do that without anyone seeing you?”
Riley grinned lasciviously. “Don’t worry about the duchess. She’ll be occupied.”
“Ugh.” Tanya shuddered. “Fine. But, what about servants? Guards?”
Riley looked in front of him and nodded. Tanya followed his gaze to where Jana was methodically pulling the sharp edges off of her toenails, one by one.
“I can be quiet,” Riley said. “And if worse comes to worst, I have her.”
Tanya didn’t ask any more questions.
Uncle Tommy raised his head from his desk and, removing his glasses to polish them on the flannel of his blazer, peered at her through squinted eyes. “Have fun, children,” he told them. “Bring me back something pretty.”
Chapter
10
Tanya was frog-marched to the stables. “Why do I have to actually be there when you steal the thing?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at Jana. “What am I supposed to do that I couldn’t do from the relative comfort of my tent?”
Jana yawned. But Riley stopped so short that Tanya crashed into his back.
“What do you know about breaking and entering?” he asked.
“Um, nothing, thank you very much.”
Riley turned around and fold his arms across his chest.
“Well, I know everything,” he told her. “I know how to pick locks, I know how to drug guards, I know how to scale walls. I’ve been doing it over half my life. I learned to burgle before I learned to read. But what I don’t know is this aetherical magic-y stuff, except for the fact that nobody really knows it. In thieving, something always manages to jam up the works. If that something in this job is your quill, I’m going to know it’s happening. And that means I need the quill with me. And that means I need you with me.”
The silence was only broken by Jana’s burp.
“You all right, Jaybird?” asked Riley, not breaking the eye contact that he had established with Tanya. Tanya forced her eyelids to go wide, refusing to look away first—if she was being honest, not wanting to. She respected what she saw.
“I’m still starving,” Jana groaned, striding past them and bumping into Tanya’s shoulder, finally startling her into looking away. “I want to stop by the kitchen, even if all I do is shove a handful of sugar in my mouth.”
“I swear Jana, if this job gets screwed up because you’ve upset your precious stomach—”
“Stretch your abilities and relax, Riley,” she snapped, swinging onto the back of a black charger with the grace of an acrobat. “I’ll just grab a snack from one of the guys, then.” She angled the horse out of its stall and rode toward the nearest campfire, the one tended by jolly, bearded men—brothers or cousins or something. All Jana had to do was hold out her hand and scowl; they laughed and filled it with some kind of preserved donut that had been reheated by the flames and smelled of chili and pomegranate.
Riley focused on the tack shelf on the right, so for the first time Tanya had a clear glimpse of the golden mare.
She was in bad shape.
She hadn’t been mistreated. That much was clear from the shining fleece of her coat and the full bag of hot mash within easy reach. There was adequate hay and a warm-looking blanket on the floor of her stall.
Tanya took a step toward the mare. She startled at the noise and turned from side to side, dazed.
“What’s happened to her?” Tanya whispered, reaching out.
Riley stood next to her, frowning. “She hasn’t stopped trying to escape for one second since I put her here. And I had to give her three times the normal dose of tranquilizers just to get her calm enough to get to camp. She hasn’t slept, hasn’t eaten; she’s barely drunk any water. She’s exhausted herself. I don’t know what to do with her.”
The mare was tied around the neck to a bolt in the ground, much the way Tanya had been restrained in her tent. Her hooves and calves were scratched and bruised, with little rivulets of dried blood tangling the rough hairs. Her chest was covered in bruises and her eyes were bloodshot.
Tanya took another step. “You could let her go,” she said angrily. “You just needed the quill, you weren’t under orders to steal a horse, too!”
Riley shook his head. “I’m always under orders to steal valuable horses.”
Tanya put her hand on the mare’s neck. The mare threw it off with a snort, not even looking at her.
“So, you do know it’s me,” Tanya muttered. Raising her voice, she asked, “Can I ride her to the castle? I think she could use some exercise.”
“I’m sure she could. But I can’t trust either one of you not to run away, so you’re not getting your own horse.”
She turned and saw that Riley had kitted out his chestnut horse and was all the way on the back of the saddle.
“Thanks,” she said, folding her arms. “But I didn’t particularly like the last ride you took me on. I’ll ride with Jana.”
Already on horseback, Jana charged past them and raced into the woods. “Hurry up, slowpokes,” she called over her shoulder.
Tanya sighed and accepted Riley’s outstretched hand. He pulled the horse around and, with a click of his tongue, they hurtled after Jana.
Tanya briefly locked eyes with the miserable golden mare. The mare blinked her liquid black eyes at Tanya and looked away, as if to say, You’re useless, I’m done with you. Then they plunged into the woods and the mare disappeared from view.
The ground was slick with chunky, day-old mud, and the horse’s hooves squelched with each footfall. An acrid, wormy smell of fallen, decaying flowers tickled her nose.
They shot through that heady muck without conversation, and Tanya was almost on the verge of falling asleep when Riley pulled up the horse and jumped off.
“We’ll leave the horses here,” said Riley, keeping his voice low, pulling a sheaf of blank parchment out of his pocket. “The mine shaft is a quarter mile that way into the White.”
“Are we in the White now?” Tanya asked, lifting her head and curiously peering in the direction of Riley’s outstretched finger.
The thick greenery of the woods stopped abruptly at the edge of the White. One minute, the world was lush, fertile, and energized with the buzz of insects and birds. But the next, all signs of life stopped in their tracks.
The White was a vast expanse of cracked, pale clay, perfectly flat except for the occasional looming accumulations of salt or chalk, dirty glittering pyramids of raw material considered too low grade to sell, and the skeletons of rickety steel and wood machines crumbling into ruins.
The terrain was bleached beyond the suggestion of color, but, in the very center, in an oasis of dense shadow, was a castle surrounded by a circular stone wall.
Jana, holding a pair of bronze binoculars up to her eyes, stepped in front of Tanya. She frowned.
“Well,” she said. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”
Riley nodded casually, as if that was only to be expected. “Dealer’s choice,” he told her, handing the parchment over to Tanya, who stuck it in her belt.
“The duchess’s little two-seater carriage is gone, so we don’t have to worry about her. But . . . do we know who the Tomcat arranged to seduce her?”
Tanya snorted. The nobility could be so common.
Riley grimaced. “It was either going to be the Baron of Carrabon’s dopey second or some corps commander that he started a con on this week.”
“Yeah. He chose the corps
commander. And the corps commander brought his corps. And the corpsmen seem like they’re looking for something to do.”
“What?” Riley grabbed at the binoculars, but Jana held them out of his reach. He sighed. “Fine. I’ll take your word for it. It doesn’t change anything. We just. Stay. Quiet.”
Jana clapped him on the back. “We know. We can do quiet.” She looked at Tanya.
Tanya frowned. “I’ve never actually tried to be quiet,” she said truthfully. “I’m usually as loud as I can be, to make sure nobody forgets to tip or that I don’t walk in on someone naked.” Jana giggled and Riley glared. “But yeah,” she went on. “I can be quiet. How hard can it be?”
Riley just shook his head, did a final check on the horses’ restraints, and headed out into the White.
Jana was about to follow when Tanya stopped her. “Can I borrow your binoculars?” Remembering her reaction to Riley’s grab, Tanya used her politest voice.
Jana tossed them at her with no hesitation. Tanya just barely caught them and looked at Jana, surprised.
The thief just smiled. “They’re not special,” she said. “I stole them on my way out of the Tomcat’s tent. I’ll return them later. I just like to teach Riley manners. You know, be a civilizing agent.” Laughing again, she followed Riley, slipping silently onto the tightly packed powder of the White.
Tanya put the binoculars to her eyes. She had never had the opportunity to examine a castle.
The castle’s marble terraces and towers glowed faintly in the moonlight. Warm golden light, steady and even, poured out of every window, illuminating lush gardens, dotted with improbably large lilies and wild, cascading trees. The mica-spackled wall that surrounded it extended to a private pathway in the back, leading out of the White altogether.
The duchess might live smack dab in the middle of the White, but she was doing everything in her power to forget it. Frowning, Tanya moved the binoculars to the right of her castle, toward the makeshift city the actual people of the White occupied: ramshackle wooden structures, iron walkways over mine shafts, and a few feeble attempts at what looked like potato plantings. She looked to the left and saw that village’s ugly twin. Then she looked back at the castle.
It shouldn’t have even been possible to have so much life blossoming in that wasteland—at least, it shouldn’t have been possible without the magic of the quill. But the quill was still safely tucked in the folds of Tanya’s shirt.
It should have taken magic, but instead it only took money.
Suddenly Tanya felt a lot less guilty about stealing a tiara.
A short, ferociously windy walk later, Riley stopped. “This is it,” he said, crouching down and jimmying open a circular ironbound slab of wood inset in the ground. With a grunt and a wince, he lifted the top edge with his fingertips and shoved it to the side, revealing about a foot of empty space.
The three of them looked into the hole.
“It’s dark in there,” commented Tanya.
“I have a lantern,” answered Riley, searching the hole’s perimeter with his hand.
“Do you also have a perfumed handkerchief?” asked Tanya, leaning in after him and sniffing. “It smells like rot.”
Riley’s hand stopped. He smiled and pulled up a ladder that must have once been wood, but now seemed more like barely solid mulch. “You’re not wrong,” he said with grim amusement. “That would be this.” He hooked it to the edge of the hole and looked at his companions, who both appeared skeptical. “What? I had to pick an entry point that would have absolutely no miners hanging around. This was it.”
Jana put her hand around the ladder’s edge and squeezed. She squealed and pulled back.
“What?” asked Tanya sharply, examining the ladder. “Bugs?”
Jana held up her hand and wiggled her fingers. “Sticky,” she explained.
Riley pulled a small lantern out of the leather bag strapped to his back and, carefully shielding it from the wind, lit the wick. “OK,” he said with a grin, clearly in his element. “Let’s go.”
Precariously, step by step, he disappeared down the hole.
Tanya looked at Jana. “After you.” Jana shook her head, her nose still wrinkled.
Tanya gulped and kneeled on the ground next to the ladder. Gripping the top rung—which was indeed sticky, in a dried-out extra-disgusting way, like some small beastie of the night had died on it—as tightly as she could, she stepped down into the black.
With great relief, her feet found the lower rungs of the ladder easily enough, although they were unreassuringly soft under her boots. But after a few moments of exploratory pressing, they seemed willing enough to hold her weight, and so Tanya climbed down steadily until she stepped on solid ground, let go of the ladder, and looked around the abandoned mine shaft.
Riley was about a yard into the tunnel, but the light from his lantern was enough for Tanya to make out her surroundings. A second later, Jana slid down the ladder with a whoosh, lit a match, and illuminated the rest.
In an odd way, the mine made Tanya feel as if she were home. The rough-cut, angular rock walls could have been one of the caves down by the islands to the south of Griffin’s Port. The dust she kicked up as she moved forward had the same look of what she inevitably tracked into the kitchen after every trip to the fish docks in the summer. But mostly it was the smell that did it. The briny, musty air of the salt mine was the claustrophobic cousin of the air she had breathed every day of her life.
But, still, salt air or not, it was a dark, low tunnel and an abandoned worksite at that. The uneven footing was lumpy and littered with dented eating utensils and shattered glass. Tanya made sure to pick her steps very carefully.
Riley led them through the shaft at a swift and steady pace, angling himself through a spot where the wall had collapsed under its own weight and partially blocked the path. Both Riley and Jana easily slipped through the narrow opening; it took Tanya a minute to maneuver after them. She tried to simply walk through as the other two had, but she eventually had to accept the inevitable, flattening her back against the wall and inhaling to raise her rib cage, attempting to get her stomach to recede.
“As if I haven’t already been subjected to enough indignity,” grumbled Tanya. With a final push, she tumbled out of the crevice, scraping her arm on the jagged edge.
“Ahhh.” Tanya sucked in her breath at the sting. She squinted down at her arm and was dismayed to see blood already blooming in a thick line. She quickly stopped to order the blood away with the quill, but found she didn’t have to write the order. The second the quill touched her skin, the blood zipped straight up her arm and into it.
Still looking down at her now-clean arm, she walked forward and again slammed straight into Riley.
“We’re here.” He pointed to the ceiling above them, smooth and white, with clean, orderly angles. “Do your thing, tavern maid.”
Tanya focused on the ceiling of marble and, as if answering a call, the quill woke up, sending little sparks of light skittering across the dim stone.
Tanya suddenly felt better. She might not be able to fit through a keyhole, but she seemed to know how to do this, and this was infinitely more useful—even if the use was burglary.
She sat down on the floor and pulled out the parchment Riley had given her. Licking the edge of the quill, she put it to the paper and started writing, the lines and words populating rapidly across the parchment.
Suddenly she frowned. “Wait. That can’t be right.”
“What’s wrong?” Riley was by her side immediately.
Tanya started to laugh. “Your duchess either got cheated or she cheaped out. Look,” she said, pointing at the diagram of the ceiling, the lines formed out of tiny bits of information. “It’s mostly marble, but not completely. The middle is filler—it’s a mishmash. There’s concrete, brick dust, compressed driftwood.” She stood up, still holding the quill and parchment, and examined the ceiling. “I can’t just remove the ceiling. At least not quickly.”
Riley’s throat bobbed up and down, like he was swallowing bile. “You’ve never disappointed him before,” he said, his voice quiet and gravelly. “It’s . . . unpleasant.”
Tanya looked at Jana, who was searching the walls, her knife clutched hard in her fist. Looking for a way out.
Jana, of all people, was scared. Tanya didn’t like seeing that.
So she’d have to make it work.
The ceiling was shot through with impurities, more filler than marble. She could remove each element one at the time, of course, but that would not only take forever, it would inevitably cause a wide array of junkoff. It was deeply inefficient.
That left the other option.
“Riley,” she said, touching the edge of her tongue to the quill. “I’m going to stick to the plan. I’m going to remove the marble. You might want to step back a little bit.”
She looked at the map. Moving with as light a hand as possible, so as to disturb as few elements as possible, she circled each instance of marble.
The mine shaft rumbled. Riley and Jana exchanged a glance and moved to the back of the alcove.
Tanya barely noticed because she suddenly realized that no one had told her where to put the marble. She scoured the landscape, trying to find a good spot, but they were in flatlands. There was no convenient cavern or mountain range in which to insert it. It would wreak havoc in the forest.
She sighed, cursing her inexperience in thievery—she really should have thought of this. But there was only one obvious answer. She braced herself and drew arrows from the circle directly into the walls of the mine shaft themselves.
It started slowly—just a slight vibration in the stone underneath her knees. But it spread outward and outward until her vision blurred and a faint but distinct and steady buzz, like a gathering swarm of bees, filled the air.
Wench Page 11