poisoning her would be about the least efficient way for them to go about it. She sat at the table and ate and drank, more like a gobbling duck than a well-bred Duchess, ignoring the silver cutlery and darting her eyes all the while toward the door.
The Duchess decided the wine was certainly a bad idea, but then tasted it and found it good. She drank all that as well, certainly too fast. The moment Claudja set down her empty glass, the polite tapping sounded again from the door, startling her into falling off her chair.
She scrambled up and grabbed the knife off the tray, then less certainly took the fork as well. She held both as weapons though they seemed even more ridiculous than had the boots, and backed into her corner behind the tub before calling for entry.
The door opened and this time a whole line of little spiny devils floated in, each pair with a steaming wooden bucket between them. The dozen devils looked at her and paused in the air, then slowly moved closer to the tub, all of them in unison.
Claudja squeaked and ran out from behind the tub, tried to vault the bed but did not fully clear its width and tumbled off the far side. Water splashed and she peeked over the dusty coverlet to watch wide-eyed as the two lines of devils filled the tub with steaming, clear water, passing full buckets forward and empty buckets back. They all bowed again in the air, hovering on wings that were moving nowhere near enough to actually be keeping them aloft, and then they began to withdraw.
“Wait,” Claudja stood up before the last had gone. “Where is the man I was brought here with?”
Her only answer was the closing door, and the snap of the lock.
Claudja moved over near the tub, which she had to admit looked wonderful. There was a brick of soap on the towel rack, and suddenly the dust and grime covering every inch of her seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. Every muscle was sore and aching. She supposed it was entirely possible the devils just wanted her clean before they cooked and ate her, but a lady of the Duchess’s standing should not after all appear at dinner in her present state.
Claudja undressed, left the silverware within reach on the towel rack, and slipped into the warm water with a groan she could not conceal. She was still just lying there a few minutes later, head thrown back and eyes closed, when the door opened and two of the little devils darted into the room. One snatched the dusty cover off the bed while the other grabbed Claudja’s pile of clothes, and the two were gone so fast that the door was shut and locked before Claudja shouted and threw the fork after them.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The party did not find a barracks building of a familiar kind in which to spend their third night in Vod’Adia, for by then they were in a very different place within the Sable City.
They had followed the route through the streets that Deskata and the Westerners had plotted from the roof of tower, heading to the right for one long block at the next intersection, then left until they were beyond the wall around the noble district. They then zigzagged several blocks south and west until emerging shortly before dark on the edge of the vast open area surrounding the great palace with its nine towers, standing on a leveled hill in the middle of the sprawling city.
In Zeb’s humble opinion, the place looked ever-so-much more terrifying from the ground. From a height and a distance the towers and long galleries had a wheel-spoke symmetry, but from the ground the whole place was a looming black pile of crenellated battlements and shuttered windows, behind which Zeb was not alone in thinking he saw the occasional moving light.
The plan however was not to go into the place, and Zeb was happy for that much. The party could not be sure they had beaten the legionnaires, Phin, and the Duchess to the middle of the city, but if they had not than the game was probably over already. They carefully explored a three-story house on a corner facing the open expanse of bare ground on the palace’s north side, and occupied the place once it proved empty. There was a sort of short tower on the roof that would have been called a widow’s perch in a port town, from which they could watch the ends of four separate roads giving into the area, counting the one they had come in on themselves. In all likelihood the legionnaires would come from the north along one of them, if they made it this far.
If a day or two went by without sighting their quarry, something would surely have to change for if nothing else the party would be out of food and water by then. Zeb did not want to think that far into the future when every day in Vod’Adia had become a violent trial, and the fact that no one else brought it up told him that the others felt the same.
The group ate their rations cold in the evening, for any smoke from a fire would surely have been seen from the palace. Amatesu went up to the widow’s perch to keep watch as the daylight faded, lying under a blanket to remain concealed. The others slept in the interior rooms of the house where candles could safely be lit, or kept watch from the open windows on the third floor, sitting in rooms they left dark.
Zeb sat a half-shift in a corner room with John Deskata after nightfall, the world outside once again completely black. John nevertheless sat on the floor before an open window, staring at the dark pile of the palace where an occasional light now indisputably winked in a window. Zeb tried to strike up a conversation a few times as he had yet to exchange three words with the man in as many days. He was met with total silence. John went away after his half-shift, and Zeb crossed his fingers in the dark.
“Zeb?” Tilda whispered a short time later from the doorway, and he smiled.
“In here.”
He did not hear the Miilarkian Guilder step in, but was aware of her presence just the same.
“Is there any furniture in here?” she asked.
“Not a stick.”
Tilda moved around the wall, trailing a hand until she came to a window and settled down before it. Zeb heard only the rattle of her bow against the bare floor.
“Anything moving out there?”
“Not a stick.”
They sat quietly for a while.
“Cold,” Tilda said.
“Look, if you want to cuddle, you can just say so.”
Zeb heard her let a breath out through her nose.
“Ah, Zebulon. Whatever is to be done with you?”
Zeb tried to get a read on her voice, but didn’t hear enough of it. Not angry, but not quite encouraging. He needed to hear her say more.
“Say Tilda, can I ask you a question? About your friend?”
“About Claudja?”
“No. John Deskata.”
“Oh,” Tilda said flatly. “We are not really friends.”
Zeb was listening hard, though not out the window, but he thought he heard something from that direction for a moment. He turned to look outside but there was only inky blackness. There was only a faint smudge in the starless sky from where the moon would be, for the silvery light scarcely penetrated the gray dome of mist above.
“Is that because he thought you were an assassin sent to kill him?” he asked.
Tilda made no response for a few seconds, and Zeb thought he should perhaps not have started down this road. But if he just kept pitching random woo at her, Tilda was either going to get tired of it or else expect him to step up further with something more. She carried an awful lot of daggers if Zeb read her signals the wrong way. Even apart from that, something about John had been weighing on Zeb since they had first entered the Sable City.
“You were in the inn, in Camp Town,” Tilda finally said. “The morning John Deskata told me… everything.”
“I was,” Zeb said. “I didn’t get any of the Miilarkian, but the two of you said a lot in Codian. Great Houses and exiles, dead fathers and captains. Then of course there’s the ring that turned John’s eyes green.”
