At one point a shocked giggle and the sound of a book snapping closed made her look around. “What—”
Ciara was reading a book; specifically, Les Fleurs du Mal. “Luz!” she said, pressing a hand to one cheek. “This book . . . it must be on the Index!”
“It most certainly is,” she said, and her smile was wry behind the mask as she went on: “But remember what Mark Twain said.”
“What?” she asked, distracted.
“No young girl was ever ruined by a book,” Luz said. “Also, Monsieur Baudelaire wrote some very sad poetry there, if your French is good enough to see the finer points.”
“Ummmm . . . I’m not sure. I can’t speak it, you understand, and . . . well, I don’t recognize some of the words.”
“It’s great poetry about some very unhappy people,” Luz said. “Sinning, but not getting nearly as much fun out of it as they should. I doubt anyone fair-minded could consider it an advertisement or celebration!”
Ciara laughed at that, a little unwillingly. “Father Flandry did say once that envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn’t even give you momentary pleasure when you commit it.”
“You’d probably need to go through the Baudelaire with a dictionary and then hear someone read it aloud to get most of the benefit of it,” Luz said. “Reading poetry properly in another language is altogether more difficult than prose, and that’s hard. Just being fluent isn’t enough. It took me a long time to appreciate German poetry even though I had the language well enough to pass for a native. It all felt rather thin, until something clicked a couple of years ago.”
She looked at her watch again. A little after one o’clock and the wind rose to a wail . . .
“Lights out,” she said quietly; all the remaining electrics had gone out at the same time, leaving their own room in dimness relieved only by the low glow of the coals in the fireplace.
“That’ll be the branch.” Ciara nodded. “Good luck to you now, and I’ll keep the fire going!”
TWELVE
Schloss Rauenstein
Kingdom of Saxony, German Reich
SEPTEMBER 15TH, 1916(B)
Luz opened the window again with the air rifle slung over her shoulder. The middle of the silk rope went around the back of a heavy chair, and she went out into the hard rain and wind with a length in either hand to slide down the doubled line in a controlled fall, pushing off from the wall of the building with her feet and landing in a crouch as the flagstones of the court met the cord soles of her slippers. By the time she was on the ground even the tight-woven silk she wore was sopping, and the chill began to work its way inward, no more than forty degrees and dropping.
Now it’s a race against the clock and the cold, she thought as the rope fell and she coiled it again. Strength and agility and endurance are all downhill from here, and eventually Herr Böhm’s German sense of duty and industriousness will get the power back on.
The bulk of the old castle loomed to her right, with only a dim candle light or two waveringly visible through the night and rain . . . the same silhouette someone scouting it would have seen two hundred years ago, or five hundred, when the guards would have been carrying spears and crossbows, not Mausers and machine pistols.
Ah, modern war, she thought mordantly.
First, across the courtyard. She simply walked, firmly suppressing any impulse to dodge or skulk; everything she was wearing or carrying was dark and nonreflective, there weren’t any powerful lights to silhouette her, and so she was very unlikely to catch the eye. And if she did she’d be an indistinct figure in this hissing wet. Someone running or crouching would look like a spy or intruder. If you walked upright and briskly but not too fast, ninety-nine times out of a hundred people would simply assume you were part of the human landscape, with a perfect right to be there. It was a modification of the technique you used on a crowded street.
I’d probably be even less inconspicuous with an umbrella, some part of her thought whimsically. And I’m wearing trousers, so anyone would simply assume it’s a man.
She came to the corner of the curved main block of the castle and slipped the air rifle off her back and slid in one of the grapnel arrows—the prongs at the tip were heavily padded with coarse rubber, and spring-loaded to open once shot. A loop at the end of the silk rope clipped on just below the prongs, and she crouched to feel and make sure that the coil at her feet was free of tangles . . . and free of her feet, remembering a memorable training accident she’d seen where someone had inadvertently tried to shoot their own foot over a roof when it was caught in a loop. The silk was invisible beneath her fingers, black in blackness, like a tactile memory.
She stood and looked up. Rain spattered steadily into her eyes, interspersed with fierce gusts; that mattered less than it might have, because the wall faded into invisibility about ten feet up anyway, even though it was white-painted. She’d have to rely on trained memory, and on the grapnel not getting caught in a flurry of wind and twisting aside and landing on a sentry’s head. She raised the rifle to her shoulder, aimed up, corrected a little, waiting until the shoving pressure of the air slackened . . .
Bumpf-hiss.
The recoil knocked at her shoulder. The projectile vanished instantly; the coil of rope whickered upward smoothly, visible only as a quiver in the darkness. If she’d aimed too high, it would disappear over the roof and be hanging there tomorrow for someone to see and go:
Ach, so, a rope and grapnel! My God, what can this mean?
Too low and it would bounce off the wall and fall back . . . or smash into someone’s window, and the alarm would go up . . .
Goldilocks, I am counting on you now, mi pequeña ladrona! she thought. Not too hot, not too cold . . .
The thought of the Breath of Loki went through her mind; only now those poisonous green flowers were opening over New York as she had seen it from the observation gallery of the San Juan Hill. The vast morning or evening crowds looking up, and then the green blossoms of poison, and the screams . . . millions screaming . . . and the invisible torrent pouring down into the subways . . .
A tense moment, and then the rope stopped with a quarter of the coil still on the ground. She waited, pumping at the lever of the air reservoir, but the shaft and grapnel didn’t fall back to thud at her feet . . . or on her head, which would be impossible to dodge in time with the rain covering all faint sounds.
¡Ay! The fearsome Black Chamber secret operative, found dead of exposure in the morning with a grapnel sticking out of her head . . .
Nothing. She slung the air rifle and gave a slow pull at the knotted silk cord; not a tug, you did that when you wanted to get something to come loose. Luz wanted the prongs at the end of this to catch. Catch in something nice and sturdy that wouldn’t tear loose halfway up, or leave a big pale easily seen mark tomorrow.
In fact, I want that . . . ¡Con mucha pasión!
The slack came off the cord as she drew it in. A stronger pull held no sense of give beyond the slight natural elasticity of wet silk; then she hauled with all her strength and let her weight come onto the cord, with no sense of movement. The rope hung straight down, clearing the wall by about a yard, doubtless the distance the eaves overhung far above. She slung the last of the coil from the ground over her shoulder and pulled herself upward, bringing her legs up and crimping the rope between her crossed ankles. The knots weren’t big enough to stand on, but they did simplify the inchworm progress; legs up, straighten the knees to push the body upward too, slide the hands up, repeat. All done reasonably quickly, but smoothly and not so fast that she’d start rocking from side to side.
Which would be the best possible way to get the grapnel free of whatever it’s caught on.
Ten feet up she paused to loop the slack into the coil over her shoulder, moving quietly and extending a hand occasionally to the wall to damp down the natural tendency to sway in th
e wind, even though the bulk of the castle blocked most of the storm bearing down from the north. It wouldn’t do to leave a loop of the rope right where someone walking by would . . .
Below her, the iron heel plates of jackboots clicked on the flagstones of the courtyard; they were practical footwear, except when they announced here am I, a German soldier, coming to kill you, Hoch! Hoch! every time you took a step. There was just enough light from the hooded lantern one man carried to catch the gleam of wet helmets and rain capes; and a hint of other things . . . perhaps a bayonet. Luckily most of the illumination went straight out ahead.
“Scheisse,” a voice said quietly. “They march us here, they march us there, we go to fight the stupid Russians, the stubborn English, the tricky Frenchies, and always it is raining. And cold. Everything but cold rain and stinking mud has been canceled for the duration wherever we go. The war has created a whole world of wet and mud and rats, and then they march us here into the middle of Germany doing make-work where nothing can happen and there is still cold rain.”
He said mir gangat instead of wir gehen for we go, she thought, while remaining absolutely motionless . . . though the loop of the rope was only two feet over their heads, and it was still moving as gusts of wind caught it. Must be a Swabian. Which is totally useless information but at least my ear is still in.
“They haven’t marched us into the middle of Germany, they’ve marched us into Saxony,” his friend said in the same schwäbisch. “Marched us up the arsehole of Germany.”
“Arsehole of the universe, and there’s still cold rain, like everywhere else.”
“Nei, nei, Baba,” his companion said, equally softly, barely audible under the rain even directly below her. “At Verdun it was snowing. Poland was heat and dust. And here, there is no mud.”
“At Verdun the shells from the French seventy-fives fell thick as raindrops and it was snowing and there was mud,” the first man said.
They both chuckled, the sound of their voices trailing off into the background whistle and hiss of the storm as they switched to discussing women—specifically, the differences in the size of the breasts of Polish and French girls and which was better.
Luz let out a long breath softly and closed her eyes for a moment, making her arms stop trembling. Then she brought up her feet again, crossed her ankles on the rope, pushed . . .
A muted light grew, flickering behind wet glass. The rope ran beside a window and she arched her body so that as little as possible would cross in front of the glass. From the inside the candle’s light would make the outside darker still and she would be black against black, but motion might pull the eye. Slowly, slowly . . .
The man inside was seated at a table with his back to her, smoking a cigarette and writing, his head crop-haired on a thick bull neck, his jacket off and suspenders showing on broad sloping shoulders as his hand went out to dip the pen and returned to the paper. A framed photograph was propped up on the table before him, and the candle on a saucer before it, almost as if it were a shrine; she thought it held a picture of a woman holding a child. Then she was past the window, resting for a moment with her toes on a sill just above it, coiling up more of the rope.
The rain was harder if anything, leaching away the warmth of her body’s core, like blood flowing from a wound.
I’m a tropical bird, she thought. I really do not want to leave my bones in this country of pale troll people and wolves and snow. No va a ser más fácil si espero, so let’s go, mi corazón, and if I make it I’ll try to stick to places that grow pomegranates and oranges.
The thought of her family’s house in Santa Barbara was bitter, warm nights with the moon on the Pacific and the scent of Cashmere Bouquet flowers thick and sweet below her bedroom window, and she suppressed it with an effort of will. Another spell of climbing, and then her reaching hand hit something. It was too dark to see what—it was too dark to see her own hand in front of her face, though admittedly she had a black glove on it. Luz flogged her memory and saw the mental map of the Schloss and where she probably was.
All right, I crossed the courtyard and went up the south-facing wall of the old section of the castle, just over from that bay-window part. There’s a pitched roof and a chimney on top of that. And then there’s the section where the half-timbered buildings were built on top of the original castle.
That meant the grapnel had hooked somewhere above, along the roof ridge or the chimney. The roof was too steep to crawl up unsupported, and the rope would be lying flat against its slope. She supported most of her weight where her ankles crossed on the rope and felt along the edge of the roof. No metal guttering, and the roof was at an eighty-degree angle, slippery slate that felt as if it was splotched with moss.
Luz pulled upward as hard as she could on the rope, until her arms shook. Then her feet came up, crossed on a knot . . . an explosion of effort, mentally pouring strength into the muscles of her thighs, and her feet must not slip now of all times . . .
With a soft grunt of effort she propelled herself upward and forward and half her body lay on the slates, with everything from the hips down dangling over the sixty-foot drop to bare stone below. Slid one hand up the rope, underneath, between it and the roof. The other. Then pull again, pain in her arms, biceps, triceps, her teeth bared behind the mask. Squirming forward, elbows scrabbling for traction . . .
Must not pull the rope upward away from the roof. That’d unseat the grapnel and it’s a long way down. Keep the pull parallel, straight against the slope.
Panting and shuddering she lay on the roof, with her limbs splayed to make as much friction as she could on the dismayingly frictionless surface of the wet mossy stone. Even the rows of slates were irregular, sloping across the surface of the roof and varying in size; the only consistent thing was that they were slate, held on to the sarking beams beneath with little copper nails, and that each overlapped the one below.
And they are all wet and cold and slippery.
Then upward inch by inch, the rope her lifeline against the lurches backward that threatened with every movement; it was like trying to climb up the side of a giant witch’s hat while someone poured endless buckets of ice water over her. At last her hand touched something else; brickwork, square, faintly and blessedly warm. The grapnel was next, jammed between the ridgeline of the roof and the chimney’s rectangle. She closed her eyes—it made only the slightest difference—and thought about the lines of the roofs as she came erect and hugged the wet brick.
They had no pretense of regularity either; like most domestic architecture before the Age of Reason they’d just slapped on another bit at any angle that was convenient without bothering about symmetry.
Sí. This one has a kink, and then the ridge turns at right angles . . . nearly at right angles . . . along the roof of that single-story half-timbered section. That runs into that thing like a big black wooden shed on top of that rectangular stone part that’s a little higher. That has an eaves section below the windows to catch the fall from the roof and direct it outward. Go along that, and at the end the roof of the shed-thing is within reach. If I can just get along that section of roof—it isn’t nearly as steep as this—there’s another section of roof run out to the north face of the tower, sort of like an abutment.
“How I hate you, Colonel Nicolai,” Luz murmured. “And here is another reason for it.”
Working by feel she freed the grapnel and collapsed the prongs and tucked it away, then left the rope with a coil around the chimney stack, and the air rifle braced within it; she could retrieve it on the way back. She pressed her hands to the brick between her body and the chimney and rested against it for a minute by the count; she was going to need every little bit of suppleness she could coax into her fingers. Speed was essential now too, but only as fast as she could go and still do everything perfectly.
Then she turned and stood, her feet feeling outward in the darkness, the flexibl
e cord soles gripping as well as anything could on the rounded tile of the roof ridge. One long breath, another, and she walked forward. Ten paces, stop and feel forward for the kink in the roof, turn left and a heart-stopping lurch when she nearly unbalanced as a foot slipped. She went down into a crouch and slapped both hands on the curved tile that topped the ridge of the roof, then blew out her breath and the shakiness that accompanied the flash of terror with it.
If this is what it’s like to be blind, I sincerely hope I die before I lose my vision.
Along the longer section of roof ridge, feet toes-out like walking a tightrope—though at least it didn’t sway as much as those did. The Chamber used circus acrobats as instructors sometimes, which had been fun, both for what they taught and because they’d been interesting people with fascinating stories to tell. By way of compensation for the extra stability underfoot she didn’t have a balancing pole in her hands, it was raining buckets, and the wind was only mostly predictable—sometimes back gusts caught at her when she’d started leaning into it.
Plus there’s no net.
She did the last ten yards in a half crouch, shuffling in small steps that put her left foot forward each time. Her hand was outstretched. It ran into a steady drizzle of cold water, about like that from a half-on domestic tap over a sink, and she halted.
Now that she knew the building was there she could half see, halfsense its presence looming in the dark, and hear the steady drum of rain on the slates of its roof. The short section of sloping roof below the windows was nearly awash; this particular addition on top of the thick stone of the old castle wasn’t even half-timbering, but outright wood planking. Oak planking, black with age, and wide—whenever it had been built, they’d cut old-growth trees to saw for this sheathing. She remembered from her careful study of the Schloss in daytime that there were four small windows, one at either end of the flat end of the structure and two in the middle.
Black Chamber Page 26