“Pardon me,” Fiona said, bowing, trying to duck under his arm. He stepped back and blocked her again, the oaf.
“You don’t understand. I’m talking about a commission.” She tried to step over his leg, failed. “Look here,” the man said again.
Her skirts would have hampered a kick, but there was a nerve complex just under the nose and another beneath the ear: she hit them both with the edge of her hands, striking with all her strength; the man blinked and, suddenly nerveless, fell against the opposite wall, which let her dash past him and hurl herself bodily against her door.
Fiona didn’t weigh much, but she was moving fast and the little hasp broke with a small metallic squeal of surprise. She tumbled in, picking herself up just in time to see someone’s backside disappearing out of the window. Too late to kick it, alas, but after she rose from the floor she picked up her empty water jug and loosed it at the two grey men who had just slid down the rope to the street below. It missed, and by the time she had the chamberpot elevated and ready to let fly they were well out of range. She darted back to the corridor but the lookout was also gone, replaced instead by a staring bourgeois couple whose quiet afternoon was so unaccountably disturbed by a brawl in the corridor, and by the voice of the landlady, calling out her questions as she moved her vast, arthritic bulk up the stair.
“Thieves,” Fiona said briefly, undoing her hood and stripping it back off her head. The bourgeois couple looked at each other, communicating silently. She walked back into her room, aware only now of the hammering of her heart, the lungs gasping for air. She looked at the room: nothing missing, no damage. Someone had been at the lock of the chest again, but of course failed to open it. There was a small grapnel stuck in her windowsill, its cord dangling to the street. The man in the corridor had called out his warning and delayed her just long enough for the others to make their escape.
The landlady arrived, and things were made clearer. The three had arrived that morning, asked for a room on this same floor, paid in advance. That, the fact that only one room was entered, and the sophistication of their plans, made it plain that the thieves had been professionals, and had meant only to acquire the secrets of Fiona the Conjuror.
Fiona collapsed on her narrow bed and leaned back against the wall, trying to lower her heartbeat, restore her mind to a state of calm. She waved off the repeated apologies of the landlady and urged the good woman not to call the militia. The thieves were well away by now, to be sure. Just keep an eye out for them in the future.
Now that Fiona had time to think, she didn’t want them caught: that would mean execution or slavery in the mines. She didn’t want to be the cause of another’s death or misery — not again — particularly since these folk were obviously hired for the a job.
By whom? she wondered. Had those Brodaini-on-the-barge carried tales to their superiors? Were the servants of the Abessu-Denorru screening her before her appearance at the fête? That oligarch princeling, desiring revenge? Perhaps, she thought, some local conjuror was jealous and wanted to look at her tricks.
Even though it was unlikely, that was the story she’d use. “One of my professional rivals,” she said. “Trying to puzzle out my illusions. Happens all the time. I’m sorry about the door and the pitcher: I’ll replace both.”
The landlady pooh-poohed the offer of payment and went to call her husband to replace the door hasp. From the corridor she could hear the bourgeois couple shuffling back to their suite.
Who? she wondered.
And decided it didn’t matter. The point was that she was attracting attention.
And that meant she was doing her job.
CHAPTER 6
“May your vengeance be always appropriate, bro-demmin,” Cascan said. “A curious matter, if I may...?”
Tegestu looked at him sourly, a fetid taste in his mouth. He had just returned from the inter-kamlissi duel between the boys from Tosta and Dantu, and a pointless butchery it had been. The two had hacked at each other for what seemed hours — no art, no grace, no intelligence, just two terrified fools drunk with nerves and obstinacy. They were both in the infirmary, where they’d lie useless for weeks. Perhaps they’d each lose a limb or two: rhomphia produced hideous wounds. The distasteful sight had left a sourness in Tegestu’s heart: he hated a public demonstration of idiocy, and could only be thankful his own clan had not been involved.
“Aye, ban-demmin?” Tegestu said testily. Cascan, his mobile face cast carefully in a simulation of neutrality, simply bowed.
“If this is inconvenient, bro-demmin... “ he began, but Tegestu cut him off with a shake of the head.
“Speak, Cascan,” he said, and then added, “if it’s important.” The spy’s plots-within-plots were not, at the moment, to his taste.
“Perhaps it’s not,” Cascan admitted. “It involves that conjuror woman I told you about, Fiona — the outlander?”
“I recall the report,” Tegestu said. “What of her?”
“Obedient to your will, I had three of my men endeavor to search her room while she was out. There was also a young woman watching her performance in the Square of the Lancers, ready to alert our people if she showed sign of packing up her equipment and returning to her room.’’
Through Cascan’s careful mask Tegestu detected a trace of apology, and decided to cut straight to the source. “It went wrong?” he asked.
“My sorrows, bro-demmin, it did,” Cascan said, bowing again.
“Will we have to get our people out of prison?” Tegestu asked. Going to Necias on a matter like this was a humiliation he did not desire.
“Nay,” Cascan said, seeming a bit startled at the idea, and at Tegestu’s sharpness. “Our people all got away. But how the thing went wrong is what is curious.”
Tegestu tried to control his impatience. Cascan was trying to intrigue him, but what he most wanted now was to get out of his armor and take a warm bath to wash the smell of butchery off him. Those boys had been a disgrace. Even now, at his age, he could have carved either one of them like a slab of beef.
“Accompany me to the Blue Scroll Chamber,” he said finally, bowing to the necessity. “I hope you have time for tea.”
“I am honored, bro-demmin,” Cascan said. They walked across the courtyard, Cascan staying a pace behind as was proper, narrating as he went. “The woman had a pair of trunks and a satchel. The satchel was mostly empty, but apparently she’d carried food in it, as there was some bread there, and dried meat wrapped in a kind of nose paper. One of the trunks contained nothing but clothing and a box of modest jewelry — no weapons, no false bottoms, nothing suspicious.
“But the other trunk, bro-demmin, that was the curious thing — to begin with, it had some kind of outlander lock that our folk hadn’t encountered before. Couldn’t cope with it.”
“Has their training been neglected, ban-demmin?” Tegestu asked. He let Cascan chew on the question while he received the salutes of the cathruni at the postern and walked with long, impatient strides to the Blue Scroll Chamber. It was a small room, built as a library, its shelves lined both with scrolls and bound volumes. At one end, beneath a shrine to the household gods, rested the Blue Scroll, an epic of verse concerning an ancient war, a thousand years before, in which the Pranoth clan had been involved. This particular copy was eight hundred years old, was dedicated to the Pranoth ancestors, and was of sufficient demmin in and of itself to be considered a major religious relic. Tegestu bowed deeply to the scroll, then rang for servants and sat on a stool, his ankles crossed in front of him. Cascan bowed respectfully to the Blue Scroll — not being a Pranoth, the relic did not have as great status with him — and sat down, facing Tegestu, on a stool.