At least now he knew for certain that the last thing he needed to worry about was making a noise up here.
He grabbed the edge of the hatch and somersaulted over, slowly and deliberately, lowering himself down by the strength of his arms alone until his arms were extended full-length. His feet still dangled above the floor, so he waited for the moment when the chorus of snores overlapped, and let go, hoping the noise would cover the sound of his fall.
He landed with flexed knees, caught his balance bent over with his knuckles just touching the floor, and froze, waiting to see if there would be a reaction.
Not a sound to indicate that anyone had heard him.
Heh. Not gonna be hard figuring which rooms are empty! That had been a serious concern; he needed to find an empty room with a window, get into it, get the window unlocked and opened for his escape, because now that he was inside, he knew that there was no way he was going to get out the way he came in. If there had been a ladder to let down from the crawl space, that would have been ideal, but there wasn't.
By great good fortune, the room nearest the drainpipe he wanted to use was one of the empty ones — no thief could survive long who wasn't able to tell where he was inside a house in relation to the outside without ever being inside. Out of the breast of his tunic came one of his trusty bladders of oil, and he oiled the hinges to the dripping point by feel before he even tried to open the door.
There was a faint creak, but it was entirely smothered in snores; the door opened onto a completely barren room, not a stick of furniture in it. Moonlight shone in through the dirty window, finally giving him something to see by. After the absolute dark of the crawl space and the relative dark of the hallway, it seemed as bright as day.
Moving carefully with a care for creaking floorboards, he eased his way over to the window, and out came the oil again. When catches, locks, and hinges were all thoroughly saturated, he got the window open wide, checked to make sure he could reach the drainpipe from its sill, and left it that way. He did, however, close the door to the room most of the way, just in case one of the three snorers woke up and felt impelled to take a stroll. They were too dimwitted to think of an intruder, but they might take it into their heads to close the window, which would slow his retreat.
The servants' stair lay at the end of the hallway, and it was just the narrow sort of arrangement that Skif would have expected from the age of the house. In this part of the city, land was at a premium, so as little space as possible within a home was “wasted” on servants' amenities. But fortunately, whoever had built this stair had done so with an eye to silence in his servants, and had built it so sturdily that it probably wouldn't creak if a horse went down it.
Not even Londer's neglect could undo work that solid, not in the few years that Londer had owned the house anyway.
Down the stairs went Skif, and now he had to go on the memories of a very small child augmented by as much study of the house from outside as he had been able to manage. Londer's bedroom, as he recalled, and as study of the house seemed to indicate, was on the next floor down, overlooking the street. A curious choice, given that street noise was going to be something of a disturbance and would certainly be obtrusive early in the morning. But Londer wanted to see who was at his door before they were announced, and the other choice of master bedroom was over the kitchen and under the servants' rooms. Altogether a poor choice for someone who probably knew all about the snorers' chorus and didn't want it resonating down into his bedroom. Nor would he want the aromas of the cook's latest accident permeating his bedroom and lingering in the hangings.
He stifled another laugh as he felt his way down the stair, tread by tread.
He could only wonder what Londer had thought when he discovered the amazing snoring powers of all three of his servants.
This stair should come out beside the room just over the kitchen that Londer used for his guests. Important guests, of course, not people like his sister and her young son. They'd lived in one of the garret rooms, though Skif couldn't remember which one, since they hadn't lived there for long.
When he reached the landing, once again he stopped and listened. Aside from the now faint chorus from Snore Hall above, there was nothing.
He took a precautionary sniff of the air, for a room that was occupied had a much different scent than one that had been shut up for a while. If Uncle had a guest that Skif didn't know about, the guest became an unforeseen complication, a possible source of interference.
But the scent that came to his nose was of a room that had lain unused for a very long time; a touch of mildew, a great deal of dust. And when he emerged from the stair he found himself, as he had reckoned, in the dressing room to that unused guest suite.
The dressing room led directly to the corridor, and probably the reason that the stair came out into it at all was the very sensible one of convenience for the original master and builder of the house, who probably would have chosen this suite for himself. Water for baths would come straight up the stair from the kitchen in cans, to be poured into the bath in the dressing room. If the master was hungry and rang for service, his snack would be brought up in moments, freshly prepared.
This corridor was short; it ran between the old master suite to two other sets of rooms. It extended the
