“And?”
“And I’ve had a sergeant or two say I might find a place with the abbey armor, and another fellow said the watch has openings, and like that. But Mike, he had a nibble from someone saying a certain high-up person has occasional very-well-paid work for people who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.”
Mike lifted his mug and muttered around it, “So I asks, hands, or something else? And the guy gives me a look and says, so if it was something else? And I say, I’d hafta know what, because I don’t mind doin’ to, but I don’t want to be done to. Like that. He said he’d be in touch.”
“So then,” Pecky said, “Mike gave me the nod, and I followed the guy to see who he talked to, which was a certain bunch of men in the watch. Altogether, there’s about twenty of ’em. All single. They all live in one of the dormitories, and I said to myself, well, now, their living together makes it a lot easier to know who’s involved with ’em.”
“And?”
“And it’s just them. All of ’em. We can’t find any one of ’em who isn’t.”
“So me’n Clive, we’ve been gettin’ acquainted with this one and that one,” said Willum. “I hear from each and every one, prior’s a man who pays well.”
“Don’t push it,” said Precious Wind. “Let them come to you. And don’t worry if they don’t come to you. The prior may have a change in plans.” She gave them one of her rare and radiant smiles, toasted them with her mug, set it down, and left them.
Black Mike switched his empty mug for her full one and drank it down. “We’ll do that, lady,” he said to no one in particular. Sometimes he dreamed about Precious Wind. He was not enough of a fool to attempt making any such dream come true.
Precious Wind made a showy bustle, going hither and thither at the abbey, telling people she was departing soon. Off to the southlands. Off to find a ship from Merhaven. Going to return to her native land. Farewell, good people. And so on. Meantime, she was concentrating on leaving no loose ends. In making a mental inventory of everything she had done, heard, thought, and planned, she came at last to the large wooden crate that had been secreted in the bottom of the dray. Bartelmy showed her where the dray was, where the crate was, and she found the corner that had held the ideogram with a hole gnawed neatly through it. Xulai’s furry friend could well have done the gnawing.
“She’s with Abasio,” said Precious Wind to herself. “He rescued her. If she had had the thing with her and had read the instructions, she obviously wouldn’t have needed rescuing. The thing would have brought her back on the wings of the wind. So, she didn’t have it. The thing isn’t in our quarters so she didn’t leave it here. Abasio left the abbey before she did, which means he could have had it before he left. If he didn’t unwrap it and read the instructions—which I’m fairly sure he would not have done, as it was hers, not his—he wouldn’t carry it around. So, he’d leave it in his wagon.”
She wandered restlessly through a cloistered arm of the abbey, staring at the fountain at its center. The dyer’s wagon was more than merely distinctive. It was unmistakable. If anyone, Bear, for instance, saw that wagon in Merhaven . . . If one of the duchess’s spies saw it . . . well, the duchess had never seen the dyer’s wagon in the same group as Xulai. Abasio had had better sense than that. Nonetheless, both Xulai and the wagon had come from the same direction and might be linked in the duchess’s mind, so chances were very good that Abasio and Xulai had left the wagon behind. If they hadn’t thought to take the package with them, which was very possible considering that Xulai might have had a hard time during her abduction and Abasio was thinking about her, rather than anything else, then the thing might still be . . . in the wagon.
So where was the wagon? Abasio had reached the tower in time to rescue Xulai and, possibly, probably, kill Jenger. This meant he had not been more than a day’s journey away, which meant he had taken the wagon less than a day’s journey south of the abbey. This indicated he had not been far off the road where he had hidden the wagon and waited for Xulai.
Precious Wind went to the library and, in the absence of her friend, Wordswell, asked one of the other librarians to provide her with a map of the surrounding countryside. There were several. She spent the afternoon pondering them. Farms were shown. Dwellings were shown. Ruins were shown. She drew a careful mental arc, one day’s ride, from the Vulture Tower south, not far from the road. Included in that arc were half a dozen farms, a few ruins. One, in particular, caught her eye.
“What does it mean if there’s a little triangle by the name?” she asked.
“Means the family died out,” said the young woman who was helping her. “Some of the farms and mines and things around here were leased by the abbey to certain families, oh, generations ago. So long as the family wanted to go on, the abbey let the leases alone. They were always leases whereby the family paid in crops or wood or metal ore or something, not money. But if the family died out, we would note it on the maps and in the books. It meant in future we could include that land or whatever in the abbey plans.”
“This shows a house,” said Precious
