by Martha Wells
They reached a narrow stair that curved up the wall, vanishing into darkness at the edge of their lamplight. Crack shouldered past Nicholas to take the lead and Nicholas didn’t protest. Whether Crack had sensed something wrong or was merely being cautious, he had learned not to ignore the man’s instincts.
The stairs climbed about thirty feet up the wall, to a narrow landing with a wooden ironbound door. A small portal in the center revealed that it would open into a dark empty space of indeterminate size, lit only by the ghost of reflected light coming from a door or another stairwell on the far wall. Nicholas held the lamp steady so Cusard could work at the lock with his picks. As the door groaned and swung open, Crack stepped forward to take the lead again. Nicholas stopped him. "Is something wrong?"
Crack hesitated. The flicker of lamplight made it even harder than usual to read his expression. His face was sallow and the harsh lines around his mouth and eyes had been drawn there by pain and circumstance rather than age. He wasn’t much older than Nicholas’s thirty years, but he could have easily passed for twice that. "Maybe," he said finally. "Don’t feel right."
And that’s the most we’ll have out of him, Nicholas thought. He said, "Go on then, but remember, don’t kill anyone."
Crack acknowledged that with an annoyed wave and slipped through the door.
"Him and his feelings," Cusard said, glancing around the shadowed cellar and shivering theatrically. He was an older man, thin and with a roguish cast of feature that was misleading—he was the nicest thief that Nicholas had ever met. He was a confidence man by vocation and far more used to plying his trade in the busy streets than to practicing his cracksman’s skills underground. "It don’t half worry you, especially when he don’t have the words he needs to tell what he does think is wrong."
Nicholas absentmindedly agreed. He was wondering if Madeline and Reynard had managed to leave the house yet. If Madeline had been discovered interfering with the ward. . . . If Madeline had been discovered, we would surely know by now. He pushed the worry to the back of his mind; Madeline was quite capable of taking care of herself.
Crack appeared at the gap in the doorway, whispering, "All clear. Come on."
Nicholas turned his lamp down to a bare flicker of flame, handed it to Cusard, and slipped through the door.
Hesitating a moment for his eyes to adjust, he could see the room was vast and high-ceilinged, lined by huge rotund shapes. Old wooden tuns for wine, or possibly water, if the house had no well. Probably empty now. He moved forward, following the almost weightless scrape of Crack’s boots on the dusty stone. The faint light from the opposite end of the chamber came from a partly open door. He saw Crack’s shadow pass through the door without hesitating and hurried after him.
Reaching it, he stopped, frowning. The heavy lock on the thick plank door had been ripped out and hung by a few distended screws. What in blazes. . . . Nicholas wondered. It was certainly beyond Crack’s strength. Then he saw that the lock had been torn out from the other side, by someone or something already within the cellar room. The angle of the distended metal allowed no other conclusion. That is hardly encouraging.
Nicholas stepped through the door and found himself at their goal. A long low cellar, modernized with brick-lined walls and gas sconces. One sconce was still lit, revealing man-high vaults in the walls, each crammed with stacked crates, metal chests, or barrels. Except for the one only ten paces away, which was filled with the bulk of a heavy safe.
The single lamp also revealed Crack, standing and watching Nicholas thoughtfully, and the dead man stretched at his feet.
Nicholas raised an eyebrow and came further into the room. There were two other bodies sprawled on the stone flags just past the safe.
Crack said, "I didn’t do it."
"I know you didn’t." Engineering Crack’s escape from the Vienne prison had been one of the first acts of Nicholas’s adult criminal career; he knew Crack wouldn’t lie to him. Nicholas sat on his heels for a closer look at the first corpse. Startled, he realized the red effusion around the man’s head wasn’t merely blood but brain matter. The skull had been smashed in by a powerful blow. Behind him, Cusard swore in a low voice.
Exonerated, Crack crouched down to examine his find. The dead man’s suit was plain and dark, probably the uniform of a hired watchman, and the coat was streaked with blood and the filthy muck from the floor of the cellar. Crack pointed to the pistol still tucked into the man’s waistband and Nicholas asked, "Are they all like this?"
Crack nodded. "Except one’s had his throat torn out."
"Someone’s been before us!" Cusard whispered.
"Safe ain’t touched," Crack disagreed. "No sign of anyone. Got something else to show you, though."
Nicholas pulled off his glove to touch the back of the dead man’s neck, then wiped his hand on his trousers. The body was cold, but the cellar air was damp and chill, so it really meant little. He didn’t hesitate. "Cusard, begin on the safe, if you please. And don’t disturb the bodies." He got to his feet to follow Crack.
Cusard stared. "We going on with it then?"
"We didn’t come all this way for naught," Nicholas said, and followed Crack to the other end of the cellar.
Nicholas took one of the lamps, though he didn’t turn the flame up; Crack didn’t seem to need the light. Finding his way unerringly, he went to the end of the long cellar, passing all the boxes and bales that contained the stored wealth of the Mondollot family, and rounded a corner.
Nicholas’s eyes were well-adjusted to the dark and he saw the faint light ahead. Not pure yellow firelight, or greasy gaslight, but a dim white radiance, almost like moonglow. It came from an arched doorway, cut into a wall that was formed of old cut stone. There had been a door barring it once, a heavy wooden door of oak that had hardened over time to the strength of iron, that was now torn off its hinges. Nicholas tried to shift it; it was as heavy as stone. "In here," Crack said, and Nicholas stepped through the arch.
The radiance came from ghost-lichen growing in the groined ceiling. There was just enough of it to illuminate a small chamber, empty except for a long stone slab. Nicholas turned the flame of the lamp up slowly, exposing more of the room. The walls were slick with moisture and the air stale. He moved to the slab and ran his hand across the top, examining the result on his gloved fingers. The stone there was relatively free of dust and the oily moisture, yet the sides of the slab were as dirty as the walls and floor.
He lifted the lamp and bent down, trying to get a better angle. Yes, there was something here. Its outline was roughly square. Oblong. A box, perhaps, he thought. Coffin-sized, at least.
He glanced up at Crack, who was watching intently. Nicholas said, "Someone entered the cellar, by a route yet undetermined, stumbled on the guards, or was stumbled on by them, possibly when he broke the lock on the older cellar to search it. Our intruder killed to prevent discovery, which is usually the act of a desperate and foolish person." It was Nicholas’s belief that murder was almost always the result of poor planning. There were so many ways of making people do what you wanted other than killing them. "Then he found this room, broke down the door with a rather disturbing degree of strength, removed something that had lain here undisturbed for years, and retired, probably the same way he entered."
Crack nodded, satisfied. "He ain’t here no more. I’ll go bank on that."
"It’s a pity." And now it was doubly important to leave no trace of their presence. If I’m going to be hanged for murder, I’d prefer it to be a murder I actually committed. Nicholas consulted his watch in the lamplight, then tucked it away again. "Cusard should be almost finished with the safe. You go back for the others and start moving the goods out. I want to look around here a little more." There were six other men waiting up in the tunnel, whose help was necessary if they were to transport the gold quickly. Crack, Cusard, and Lamane, who was Cusard’s second in command, were the only ones who knew him as Nicholas Valiarde. To Mother Hebra and the others hired
only for this job, he was Donatien, a shadowy figure of the Vienne underworld who paid well for this sort of work and punished indiscretion just as thoroughly.
Crack nodded and stepped to the door. Hesitating, he said again, "I’ll go bank he’s not here no more. . . ."
"But you would appreciate it if I exercised the strictest caution," Nicholas finished for him. "Thank you."
Crack vanished into the darkness and Nicholas stooped to examine the floor. The filth and moisture on the pitted stone revealed footmarks nicely. He found the tracks of his own boots, and Crack’s, noting that the first time his henchman had approached the room he had come only to the threshold. In the distance he could hear the others, muted exclamations as the new arrivals saw the dead men, the rumble of Crack’s voice, a restrained expression of triumph from everyone as Cusard opened the safe. But there were no footmarks left by their hypothetical intruder. Kneeling to make a more careful survey, and ruining the rough fabric of his workman’s coat and breeches against the slimy stone in the process, Nicholas found three scuffles he couldn’t positively attribute to either Crack or himself, but that was all. He sat up on his heels, annoyed. He was willing to swear his analysis of the room was correct. There was no mistaking that some object had been removed from the plinth, and recently.
Something that had lain in this room for years, in silence, with the ethereal glow of the ghost-lichen gently illuminating it.
He got to his feet, meaning to go back to the guards’ corpses and examine the floor around them more thoroughly, if the others hadn’t already obliterated any traces when carrying out the Duchess’s stock of gold.
He stepped past the ruined door and something caught his eye. He turned his head sharply toward the opposite end of the corridor, where it curved away from the vaults and into the older wine-cellars. Something white fluttered at the end of that corridor, distinct against the shadows. Nicholas turned up the lamp, drawing breath to shout for Crack—an instant later the breath was knocked out of him.
It moved toward him faster than thought and between the first glimpse of it and his next heartbeat it was on him. A tremendous blow struck him flat on his back and the creature was on top of him. Eyes, bulging because the flesh around them had withered away, stared at him in black hate out of a face gray as dead meat. It bared teeth like an animal’s, long and curving. It was wrapped in a once-white shroud, now filthy and tattered. Nicholas jammed his forearm up into its face, felt the teeth tearing through his sleeve. He had kept his grip on the lantern, though the glass had broken and the oil was burning his hand. He swung it toward the thing’s head with terror-inspired strength.
Whether it was the blow or the touch of burning oil, it shrieked and tore itself away. The oil had set the sleeve of Nicholas’s coat afire; he rolled over, crushing the flames out against the damp stone.
Crack, Cusard, and Lamane were suddenly clustered around him. Nicholas tried to speak, choked on the lungful of smoke he had inhaled, and finally gasped, "After him."
Crack bolted immediately down the dark corridor. Cusard and Lamane stared at Nicholas, then at each other. "Not you," Nicholas said to Cusard. "Take charge of the others. Get them out of here with the gold."
"Aye," Cusard said in relief and scrambled up to run back to the others. Lamane swore but helped Nicholas to his feet.
Cradling his burned left hand, Nicholas stumbled after Crack. Lamane had a lamp and a pistol; Crack had gone after the thing empty-handed and in the dark.
"Why are we following it?" Lamane whispered.
"We have to find out what it is."
"It’s a ghoul."
"It’s not a ghoul," Nicholas insisted. "It wasn’t human."
"Then it’s fay," Lamane muttered. "We need a sorcerer."
Vienne had been overrun by the Unseelie Court over a hundred years ago, in the time of Queen Ravenna, but as far as the superstitious minds of most city people were concerned, it might as well have happened yesterday. "If it’s a fay, you have iron," Nicholas said, indicating the pistol.
"That’s true," Lamane agreed, encouraged. "Fast as it was, though, it’s miles away by now."
Perhaps, Nicholas thought. Whether it had actually moved that quickly, or it had afflicted him with some sort of paralysis he couldn’t tell; his mind’s eye seemed to have captured an image of it careening off the corridor wall as it charged him, which might indicate that its movement toward him hadn’t been as instantaneous as it had seemed.
This was the lowest level of the Mondollot wine-cellars. The lamplight revealed cask after cask of old vintages, some covered by dust and cobwebs, others obviously newly tapped. Nicholas remembered that there was one of the largest balls of the fashionable season going on not too many feet above their heads, and while a large supply had undoubtedly already been hauled upstairs, servants could be sent for more casks at any moment. He could not afford to pursue this.
They found Crack waiting for them at the far wall, near a pile of broken bricks and stone. Nicholas took the lamp from Lamane and lifted it high. Something had torn its way through the wall, pushing out the older foundation stone and the brick veneer. The passage beyond was narrow, choked by dust and filth. Nicholas grimaced. From the smell it led straight to the sewer.
"That’s where he came in." Crack offered his opinion. "And that’s where he went out."
"Ghouls in the sewers," Nicholas muttered. "Perhaps I should complain to the aldermen." He shook his head. He had wasted enough time on this already. "Come, gentlemen, we have a small fortune waiting for us."
Still inwardly cursing, Madeline took a different stairway down to the second floor. They had planned this for months; it was incredible that someone else would scheme to enter Mondollot House on the same night. No, she thought suddenly. Not incredible. On every other night this place was guarded like the fortress it was. But tonight hundreds of people would be allowed in and she couldn’t be the only one who knew of a good forger. This was an ideal time for a robbery and someone else had seized the opportunity.
She reached the ballroom and forced herself to calmly stroll along the periphery, scanning the dancers and the men gathered along the walls for Reynard. He would expect her back by now and be where she could easily find him. He wouldn’t have joined a card game or. . . . Left, she thought, with a wry twist of her mouth. Unless he had to. Unless he got into a fistfight with a certain young lieutenant and was asked to leave. He would not be able to insist on waiting for her, not knowing where she was in the house or if she had finished with the ward. Damn. But with the ward gone, it would be possible to slip out unnoticed, if she could get down to the first floor. . . .
Madeline saw the Duchess of Mondollot then, a distinguished and lovely matron in pearls and a gown of cream satin, heading directly toward her. She stepped behind the inadequate shelter of a tall flower-filled vase and in desperation shielded her face with her fan, pretending to be screening herself from the lecherous view of an innocent group of older gentlemen standing across from her.
But the Duchess passed Madeline without a glance, and in her relief she found herself closely studying the man trailing in the older woman’s wake.
He was odd enough to catch anyone’s attention in this company. His dark beard was unkempt and though his evening dress was of fine quality it was disarrayed, as if he cared nothing for appearances. And why come to the Duchess of Mondollot’s ball, if one cared nothing for appearances? He was shorter than Madeline and his skin appeared pale and unhealthy even for late winter. His eyes glanced over her as he hurried after the Duchess, and they were wild, and perhaps a little mad.
There was something about him that clearly said "underworld," though in the criminal, not the mythological sense, and Madeline found herself turning to follow him without closely considering her motives.
The Duchess strode down the hall, accompanied also, Madeline now had leisure to notice, by a younger woman whom Madeline knew was a niece and by a tall footman. The Duchess turned into one of the salons
and the others followed; Madeline moved past, careful not to glance in after them, her eyes fixed further down the hall as if she were expecting to meet someone. She reached the next closed door, grasped the handle and swung it opened confidently, ready to be apologetic and flustered if it was already occupied.
It was empty, though a fire burned on the hearth and a firescreen was in place, shielding the couches and chairs gathered near it in readiness for ball guests who desired private conversation or other amusements. Madeline closed the door behind her carefully and locked it. All these rooms on this side of the corridor were part of a long suite of salons and there were connecting panel doors to the room the Duchess had entered.
The doors were of light wood, meant to swing open wide and interconnect the rooms for large evening gatherings. Madeline knelt beside them, her satin and gauze skirts whispering, and with utmost care, eased the latch open.
She was careful not to push the door and the air in the room swung it open just enough to give her a view of the other room’s carpet, and a thin slice of tulip-bordered wallpaper and carved wainscotting.
The Duchess was saying, "It’s an unusual request."
"Mine is an unusual profession." That must be the odd man. His voice made Madeline grimace in distaste; it was insinuating and suggestive somehow, and reminded her of a barker at a thousand-veils peep show. No wonder the Duchess had called her niece and a footman to accompany her.
"I’ve dealt with spiritualists before," the Duchess continued, "though you seem to think I have not. None required a lock of the departed one’s hair to seek contact."
Madeline felt a flicker of disappointment. Spiritualism and speaking to the dead were all the rage among the nobility and the monied classes now, though in years past it would have been feared as necromancy. It certainly explained the man’s strange demeanor.