He heard the faint breath of Sheera’s laughter. “Where on earth did Gilden get that feather tippet?” she whispered. “That’s the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen, but it must have cost somebody fifty crowns!”
Strident and foul, Gilden’s voice carried up to them in a startlingly accurate rendering of a by-no-means carefully bred courtesan’s tones. “The bastard said something about burning the records—that all his Highness’ troops wouldn’t do him a speck of good without records.”
Sheera whispered, “The Records Office is in the northeast corner of the palace. Derroug’s quarters are at the southwest.”
“Right.” Moving carefully, Sun Wolf slid down the sharp slant of the roof, edged around a lead gargoyle, and lowered himself down to the oak spar of a decorated beam end that thrust itself out into space, a dozen feet above the dark slot of the alley that separated counting house from barracks wall. The gap was negligible, though the landing was narrow—eighteen inches at the top of the parapet. In this corner of the old defense works that had once surrounded this part of the grounds, the stonework looked neglected and treacherous. He jumped, out and down, his body flexing compactly as it hit the top of the crenelations, and he sprang neatly down to the catwalk a few feet below.
He looked back up to the roof. Sheera had the sense to keep moving, smoothly and swiftly, once she broke cover. The windy darkness of the night was such that everything seemed to be moving—it would have been difficult to distinguish the movement as human. Since his ordeal in the pit, Sun Wolf was aware that he could see clearly now in darkness—he thought that his sense of direction, always excellent, had improved as well. In the shadows, he could see Sheera’s face, tense and watchful, as she reached the edge of the roof. She lowered herself over, her feet feeling competently for the beam, her blackened arms momentarily silhouetted against the paler plaster of the house.
A cat-leap, and she was beside him. Silently, she scanned the dark bulk of the palace before them, then pointed southwest.
Thanks to the alarm, the barracks were empty. They descended from the wall by the turret stair of the guardhouse itself, ducking through the stable wing that Sheera knew, from her acquaintance with Drypettis, ran the length of the west side of the grounds, merging with the kitchens on the southwest corner. As they dodged along the walls, in the darkness Sun Wolf could sense the restlessness of the horses in their stalls, excited by the winds and by the far-off turmoil from other quarters of the palace. At the first opportunity, he drew Sheera through the postern of the carriage house and thence up a ladder to the lofts that ran continuously over the long rows of boxes. Twice they heard the voices of grooms and sleepy, grouchy stableboys below them, but no one associated the uneasiness of the animals with anything but the wind.
Certainly the guards, running here and there throughout the rest of the palace grounds in search of unspecified anarchists out to burn the Records Office, never thought to look for them among the governor’s cattle.
From the loft, they climbed to the roof of the kitchens and over the tall, ridged backbone of the rooftree. Lights milled distantly, clustering around the tall, foursquare shapes of the northern administrative wing. To their left lay the south wall of the palace enclosure, hiding the Grand Canal behind its marble-faced stone; the lights of the great houses on the other side glittered few and faint at this hour, and their reflections thrown by the waters rippled over the stone lacework like moire silk.
Something was moving about in the dark space of the kitchen gardens. Dogs? the Wolf wondered. But in that case, there would be barking. Still, the noise was animal, not human.
From where he lay flattened on the slanted roof, he could make out the little postern and water stairs, through which Gilden, Wilarne, and Eo had said they’d entered, and the empty catwalk above it.
He heard quick, slipping movement on the tiles, and then warm flesh stretched out beside him. Sheera whispered, “Can we cross the garden without being seen?”
“There’s something down there,” the Wolf replied, barely above a breath. “Animals, I think—hunting cats or dogs.” He edged sideways, keeping his head below the final, crowning ridge of the kitchen roof, a sharp friezework of saints and gargoyles, green with age where they were not crusted into unrecognizable lumps of white by long communion with the palace pigeons. The tiles were warmer under his bare flesh as he slipped around a great cluster of chimney pots and raised his head again.
“There,” he murmured. “The covered walkway from the kitchens into the state dining room. You said yourself, the times you’ve eaten with the governor, the food arrived three-quarters cold.”
“To be dropped on gold plates to complete the chilling,” Sheera agreed, quietly amused. “Yes, I see. That lighted window above and to the left will be the anteroom to his bedchamber. That one there is the window that lights the end of the hall.”
“Good.” Booted toes feeling for breaks in the tiles, he eased himself backward down the slant of the roof. Below him, the stable courts were a maze of rooftrees and wells of darkness. Wind flickered over his skin, stirring the long wisps of his hair. The tiles, offensive with moss and droppings, were rough under his groping hands, still only partially healed. At the bottom of the roof, a sort of gutter ran the length of the kitchens, and he slipped along it, moving swiftly, to the peaked end of the building that overlooked the edge of the gardens on the canal side. The wind was stronger here, channeled by the walls; it carried on it the fish smell of the sea and the high salt flavor of the wind. Down below him, the gardens were a restless murmuration of skeletal trees and brown, wiry networks of hedge, an uneasy darkness broken by anomalous shufflings.
Bracing himself on the gutter, the Wolf worked loose a tile. The noise of the wind that streamed like cool water over his body covered the scraping sounds of his task—indeed, they almost covered the sounds of the voices. He heard a man curse and froze, flattening himself on the uneven darkness of the roof and praying that the mix of lampblack and grease that covered his body hadn’t scraped off in patches to show the paler flesh beneath.
From below, he heard a guard’s thorough, businesslike cursing. A second voice said, “Nothing out here.”
“Any sign of Kran?”
Evidently a head was shaken; the Wolf pressed his face to the filthy tiles, wondering how long it would be until one or the other of them looked up.
“Damned funny, him missing a match-up with the guard on the next beat like that...If them troublemakers came in from this side...”
“When they’re out to burn the Records Office? Not qualified likely. Good thing them two sluts got us word of it...”
“So why check the stables? Rot that sergeant’s eyes...”
Then, with a curious, almost atavistic sensation, Sun Wolf knew that it was within his power to prevent the guards from looking up. It was nothing he had ever experienced before, but it tugged at him; an overwhelming knowledge of a technique, a shifting of the mind and attention, that he could not even define to himself. It was as natural as slashing after a parry, as ingrained in him as footwork; yet it was nothing he had done or even conceived of doing before. It was akin to the way he had always been able to avoid people’s eyes—but never from a position of complete exposure.
Without moving, without even looking down, he consciously and deliberately prevented either of them from looking up, as if he drew that thought from their minds by some process he had never known of, except in his childhood dreams. Whether it was for this reason, or because the night was cold and windy and the men disgruntled, neither did look up.
“Let’s get on, mate, I’m poxy freezing. There’s nothing here.”
“Aye. Rot his eyes, anyway...”
A door closed. The Wolf lay for a moment on the windswept tiles, counting the retreat of their footfalls, until he was sure they were gone. Then he hefted the lump of loose tiles in his hand, leaned around the edge of the gable, and threw them down into the dark corner of garden beyond.
The tiles crashed noisily in the dry hedges below. The Wolf ducked back around the corner of the roof as more crashes answered, and whatever had been below—dogs or sentries—bounded to investigate. Hidden from them by the angle of the roof, he slid along the gutter and made his way, swift as a tomcat, up the slope to where Sheera lay. He could see movement flicker around the corner at the far end of the kitchens as he scrambled up beside her; in that short span of bought time, he half rose to climb over the uneven teeth of the roof ridge and down to the top of the walkway.
The walkway top was flat—a stupid thing, in as rainy a town as Mandrigyn. Probably leaks like a sieve all winter, he thought, crawling flat on his belly along it. A quick glance showed him Sheera directly behind, her body as grazed and filthy as his own; another quick glance showed him the gardens below, still empty. He addressed a brief request to his ancestors to keep them that way and scanned the available windows.
“Captain!” Sheera whispered.
He glanced back at her. The wind veered suddenly and he smelled smoke.
As a man adept at the starting of fires, he recognized it as new smoke, the first springing of a really commendable blaze. Looking, he saw it rolling in a formidable column from the north end of the palace, streaming in huge, white-edged billows in the wind. Voices were shouting, feet racing; everyone who had been turned out for the original alarm was dashing toward the fire, and everyone who had not was following close behind.
Gilden and Wilarne were nothing if not thorough.
Scrambling to the nearest window sill, Sun Wolf drove his boot through the glass.
It was, as Sheera had said, the end window of a long corridor, dimly lighted with lamps of amber glass and muffled by carpets of blue Islands work and iridescent silk. He ducked through the nearest door into an antechamber, searching for the way into the bedroom; then a noise behind him in the hall made him swing around. He saw Sheera, frozen in the act of following him into the doorway, black and filthy as a demon from one of the dirtier pits of Hell; and before her in the hall, his crippled body clothed in a lavish robe of crimson brocade and miniver and his prim face wearing an expression of profound and startled astonishment, was Derroug Dru himself.
For one instant, they faced each other; from the tenebrous antechamber, Sun Wolf saw the jump of the governor’s chest and the leap of breath in his throat as he inhaled to shout for the guards...
He never made a sound. Sheera was taller than he and heavier; training day after day to the point of exhaustion had made her lightning-fast. For all his power to bend others to his will, Derroug was a cripple. Sun Wolf saw the dagger in Sheera’s hand but doubted that Derroug ever did. She caught the body and was dragging it into the anteroom, even as blood sprayed from the slashed arteries of the throat. The room stank of it, sharp and metallic above the suffocating weight of balsam incense. Her hands glistened in the faint reflection of the corridor lamps.
“Throw something over him,” Sun Wolf whispered as she pushed the door to behind her. “That cuts our time—pray Tisa really is here and we don’t have to go hunt for her.”
As Sheera bundled the body into a corner, he was already crossing the anteroom to the bolted door on the other side. He slammed back the bolts and stepped through. “Tisa...”
Something hit his shoulders and the back of his knee; cold and slim, an arm locked across his windpipe, and small hands knotted below the corner of his jaw in a strangle. Reflex took over. He rolled his shoulders forward, ducked, and threw. Incredibly light weight went sailing over his head, to slam like a soaked blanket into the deep furs of the floor.
Under the softness of the carpets was hard tile, and a thin little sob was wrenched from her, but Tisa was rolling to her feet as he caught her wrists. She’d kept her head clear of the impact, but tears of terror and pain streamed down her face. Then she saw who he was and turned her face away, ashamed that he should see her weep.
It was no time, the Wolf thought, to be a warrior—especially if one was fifteen and the victim of a powerful and cruel man. He gathered her into his arms. She was shaking with silent terror, burying her small, pointed face in the grimy muscle of his hard chest. Sheera stood silent in the doorway, her hands red to the elbows, watching as he stroked Tisa’s disheveled ivory hair and murmured to her as a father might to a child frightened by a nightmare.
“He’s dead,” he said softly. “It’s all right. We’ve come to get you out, and he’s dead and won’t come after you.”
The girl stammered, “Mother...”
“Your mum’s out burning down the other side of the palace,” the Wolf said, in the same comforting accents. “She’s fine—”
Tisa raised her head, her cheek all smutched with blacking, green moss stains, and bird droppings. “Are you kidding me?” she asked, laughter and suspicion fighting through her tears.
The Wolf made wide eyes at her. “No,” he said. “Did you think I was?”
She wiped her eyes and swallowed hard. “I’m not crying,” she explained, after a moment.
“No,” he agreed. “I’m sorry I hurt you, Tisa.”
“You didn’t hurt me.” Her voice was shaky; the breath had been very soundly knocked out of her, if nothing else.
“Well, you damned near strangled me,” he returned gruffly. “You think you can swim?”
She nodded. She was wearing, he now saw, a kind of loose white robe, clearly given to her by Derroug. It was slightly too large for her and sewn over with white sequins and elaborate swirls of milky, opalescent beads. Against it, he saw her transformed, no longer a coltish girl, but a half-opened bud of womanhood. Her eyelids were stained dark with fatigue and terror, her hair pale against the silk, almost as light as Starhawk’s in the shimmer of the bedroom lamp. The gown was cut so as to reveal half her young bosom. Before taking her post to attack, she’d prosaically pinned the robe with a ruby stickpin that glowed beneath her collarbone like a huge bead of blood.
She was as light as a flower in his hands as he lifted her to her feet. Her eyes lighted on Sheera and widened at the sight of the blood.
Sun Wolf whispered, “Let’s go. They’ll be looking for him, now that the fire’s started.”
As they slipped back through the anteroom and out the window, Tisa breathed, “What happened to your voice, Captain? And I thought...”
“Not now.”
Obediently, she gathered handfuls of her voluminous skirts and followed Sheera down onto the roof of the walkway. Even to his sharper eyes, the gardens below looked deserted. He could see, vague against the deeper dark of the shadowed wall, the shape of the postern gate.
“Wait here till I signal,” he said softly. “A whistle like a nightjar. Then keep to the shadows along the wall. If it’s locked, we’ll have to go up the steps to the parapet and dive.”
Sheera gauged the height of the wall. “Thank God it’s the Grand Canal. It’s the deepest one in the city.”
Sun Wolf slithered down the side of the walkway and into the gardens below.
The overcast was growing thicker with the night winds that fanned the blaze on the north end of the palace. The din was audible over the moaning of the wind. It should keep them all busy for at least another hour, he calculated and began to move, slowly and cautiously, along the wall toward the inky wells of shadow that lay between him and the gate.
The blackness here was almost absolute; a month ago he would have been able to see nothing. As it was, he was aware of shapes and details with a sense that he was not altogether certain was sight—an effect of the anzid, he guessed, as well as that curious ability to prevent people from looking at him.
That would come in handy, he thought. Come to think of it, he realized he had used it twice before tonight—when he’d evaded Sheera almost unthinkingly in the narrow confines of the potting room, and earlier this evening, when he had first come down the stairs to hear the war council in the orangery. The professional in him toyed with ways of developing that strange talent; but deep within him, a tug of
primitive excitement shivered in his bones, as it had done when he had first known that he could see demons and others could not.
The postern was unguarded, but locked. He glanced around the blackness under the gate arch and found the narrow stair to the parapet above. The garden behind him still appeared deserted, but a tension, a premonition of danger, had begun to prickle at the nape of his neck. The brush and hedges seemed to rustle too much, and the wind, laden with smoke and shouting, seemed somehow to carry the scent of evil to his nostrils. He whistled softly, like a nightjar, and saw swift movement near the covered walk, then the flash of Tisa’s almost luminous white gown.
They were halfway across the garden when something else moved, from around the corner of the kitchen building.
The things were armored like men, but weaponless. From where he stood at the bottom of the parapet stair, the Wolf could see that they walked steadily, oblivious to the darkness that made the fugitive women’s steps so halting and slow. They moved so softly that he wasn’t sure Sheera and Tisa were aware of them, but his own sharpened vision showed them clearly to him. There were four, wearing the fouled liveries of Derroug’s guards, their eyeless heads swinging as if they also could see in darkness.
They were nuuwa.
Realization hit him, and horrible enlightenment, as if pieces of some huge and ghastly puzzle had fallen into place. Rage and utter loathing swept over him, such as he had never felt toward anyone or anything before. The nuuwa began to lope. Sheera swung around, hearing the steps on the grass, but her eyes were unable to pierce the utter darkness.
Sun Wolf bellowed, “Run for it! Here!”
His sword whined from its sheath. Unquestioning, the women ran, Tisa stripping out of her billowing white robe as it caught on the dead limbs of a thorn hedge. They ran blindly, stumbling, blundering through soft earth and gray tangles of vine and hedge, and the nuuwa plunged soundlessly after. He yelled again, a half-voiceless croaking that was answered by wild commotion in the windows of the palace behind them. Tisa hit the stairs first, with Sheera a few strides behind. The nuuwa were hard on their heels, running sightlessly with the drool glistening on those gaping, deformed mouths.
The Ladies of Mandrigyn Page 24