The lock to the spymaster’s quarters was much more difficult to pick than David Thacker’s had been. It didn’t have a master key and there were several serrated drivers that tended to false set.
Sena took her time, knowing that the spymaster had been sent across town. She managed to have it open in under a minute and a half.
The spymaster lived in an attic suite atop a cluster of town houses in the bailey’s western quarter. Because of this, Sena had the option of going in through one of many windows. But in the end she opted for the front door since it afforded her protection from the parapets and the eyes of several hundred sentinels on their rounds.
Sena found it difficult to tell why she was here—doing this again. Maybe there was a twinge of guilt. Maybe she enjoyed the danger. Her motives were like the obscure shapes that now surrounded her.
She shut the door behind her with a quiet clunk and set about her task. A chemiostatic torch flared in her hand. She flicked its lime-colored beam across walls devoid of personality. Shapes appeared in fractions, disembodied textures in a hollow tenantless abyss. Here the fabric of a chair. There a spot of wood or porcelain or the crooked shadow of a light fixture, flexing like a pedipalp.
She moved efficiently.
She sifted through the drawers of several desks, checked the closet and the space beneath the bed. There was plenty of room for just one man—most of which had gone to waste.
Dormer windows spilled Lewlym’s purple light like brandy across barren spacious sections of the floor. Knots in the wood made faces in the grain, grinning stupidly at her.
Three contiguous rooms comprised the suite, linked by six-paneled doors. Having searched the first two chambers thoroughly, Sena tried and found the last door locked.
She shot the beam of her torch into the keyway and saw something that disturbed her. A set of pressure- sensitive wards. Although the correct key wouldn’t disturb them, her torsion wrench and rake undoubtedly would. What the wards might trigger, Sena couldn’t tell.
She decided there were other ways to get around the door and opened a nearby window.
The ledge was tricky. Overhung and pinched by the dormer eaves, at first there seemed nowhere to go. Sena stepped out, boots scraping on pigeon shit and stone.
The wind was warm and full, like a membranous balloon against her body. She clicked her torch off and stowed it in a utility belt around her waist.
Gripping the sandwich of boards and shingles that composed the eave, she leaned out into the night, seven stories off the ground.
Nearly level with the castle walls, she could see faint black figures floating along the parapets across a gulf of moonlit air. Some carried flecks of light. All of them carried crossbows.
Looking more like a gruelock than a woman, Sena launched her body from the ledge. Her thighs and knees swung up like a grapnel and hit the steep shingles of the roof. Below the eave, her torso jackknifed. Her body held the edge of the roof like a vise between her belly and her legs.
She nearly lost her balance, went nose-first toward the ground, but her hips anchored her on the gable’s gritty slope.
Impossibly she clung, gasping. Her center of gravity skewed. She should have skidded down the shingles or plunged to her death. But her movement had been quick and for an acrobat, energy equaled mass: weight that pulled her through the rotation of the move.
Dark and indistinct, she unfolded along the gable’s edge, a blemish of blackness curling into stone and wood.
Once she had pushed herself to safety she drifted above the roof’s smooth lines toward the adjacent gable— the one whose window granted access to Zane Vhortghast’s final room.
Her silhouette balled, extruded and swung like taffy into the murky triangle of shadow beneath the second gable’s crest. The guards on the parapet trundled on, undisturbed.
Once more hidden from their sight, Sena knelt beside the pane. She couldn’t see inside the room. She had glass-cutting tools in her belt but she noticed something even more useful hanging like a mud wasp’s nest in the apex of the eave where a family of swallows had secured a little home.
She stretched and groped delicately about the warm gauzy interior until her fingers discovered life. She took two chicks from the nest, one she buckled gently into a pouch on her belt. The other she decapitated with her sickle knife, wincing slightly at the murder.
She squeezed. Blood poured from its open neck as from a tiny sponge. The holojoules sang and Sena whispered, hemofurtum, syllables that bent the fabric of the glass. She moved through the window, into the room, leaving only a vestigial blemish where the glazing closed behind her. Luck was on her side. Gr
-ner Shie’s influence had not altered her formula in the least.
This was Vhortghast’s study.
She clicked her torch and found a cache of money stacked atop a desk. The drawers contained documents pertaining to various matters insignificant to her task.
After fifteen minutes she heaved a sigh and stopped to rest.
The room was clean.
She clicked off her torch. Lights had come up in the other room, a sheet of fulgurate yellow shot under the door and across the floor.
She could hear muted voices and the distinct clunk of someone shutting the apartment’s front door.
“. . . not bad . . . better at the Crowing Bistro in Nevergreen . . .” A man’s voice percolated through the wood, muffled and nearly unintelligible.
A second man’s voice sounded spirited but tired.
“. . . that what . . . nobody . . . awful.”
Sena crept to the corner of Zane’s considerable desk. A pillar of darkness filled the center of the yellow light streaming under the door. Someone on the other side was fumbling with a set of keys.
“I . . . ever . . . profusion of ungodliness. It’s a fucking shame.” The lock turned, the door opened and a figure hewn from backlit darkness stood facing Sena’s hiding spot, talking as if to her. Sena heard the baby bird in her pouch make a faint tentative scratch.
“Anyway,” the man was saying, “with progeny like that what can you expect? He’s like a,” he paused, searching dramatically for words, “like a . . . libelous milk-livered cheese curd.”
The second voice came from behind the first man, out of Sena’s sight.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Libelous?”
The first man spread his hands as though appalled by his companion’s stupidity. “Libelous . . . it means you talk shit about somebody. You know, like libel, like they take you to court over. You’re supposed to be a criminal!”
“Yeah, I don’t enjoy this aspect of the job . . . unlike you. I’ve got a wife—”
“My condolences.”
The man in the doorway reached inside and groped around the wall.
Sena heard a slow hiss and then a pop as a single gas lamp lit. Ensconced on the wall near the door, it cast enough light to jeopardize Sena’s position and she eased back into the dark, peering through a crack between a wastebasket and the desk. For the first time she could see most of the room as one unified tapestry of texture and shape.
Bookcases lined the walls. Several stuffed chairs and a potted plant occupied space on a tapestry rug before the windows. It was sparse like the outer rooms, lacking a certain believable quality, as though it had been staged.
“Just hurry up, will you? Ol’ Zane’s dust-bugger is probably getting antsy. Southern piece of gorabi shit!”
“Hey, shut up!”
Sena’s heart skipped a beat as he said it, thinking he might have heard the sudden fit of tiny scratching in her pouch. The additional light and voices were agitating the chick. “You obviously haven’t been around long enough to know Mr. Silent’s just like Vhorty. They both like to catch you off guard.”
Sena saw the man’s eyes pause and scrutinize the room. When he seemed satisfied that the study was indeed empty he continued.
“If you’re smart, which you’re not, you won’t say anything derogatory . . . ever.”
“There you go again with the words. Didn’t you just call the boss a cheese curd?”
