She went for her spear again, only to realize the “guards” were in fact ancient suits of armor. Bronze cuirasses, helms and greaves probably robbed from the ruins of the old palace on Ithaka. Webs had gathered inside the helms like sagging faces.
Scowling, she paced across the landing, eyeing the two doors ahead. One had to be the Cyclops’s strongroom. Most on the island said he slept on his gold, but this was the next closest thing. Edging to the leftmost door, she twisted the handle slowly. With a clunk, it relaxed and the door whined as it floated open. The noise sent a thousand cold-footed rats scampering through Kassandra’s guts. She held her breath for a moment… but nobody outside had heard the noise. Relieved, she peered into the room. Nothing—just stark, stone walls, unpainted or plastered, and a plain wooden floor. Not a jot of furniture except for a shabby old cupboard on the right-hand wall. Its doors were missing and it was empty.
Stepping to her right, she gently turned the handle of the second door. It opened silently to reveal a vision of gold. A finger of sunlight shone in through a narrow oculus in the ceiling. Dust motes floated lazily in the gilt light, illuminating a trove of plunder: ivory chests of coins and charms; a bench laid out with silver circlets, tokens and cups too; a shelf bedecked with lapis lazuli stones of the most mesmerizing blue. Opals, sardonyx, emeralds, necklaces of amethyst beads. An ornamental war bow chased with electrum. And there, to the rear of the chamber, just where the shaft of sunlight became dark shadow again, sat the eye. She licked her dry lips. It rested on a cedarwood plinth, fixed so as to stare at her with its golden pupil. This was the greatest treasure of them all, more valuable than a pocketful or even a sackful of coins or gems. All she had to do was step across the room, past the other riches… and take it.
Take it!
She took a step forward, then halted. It was the slightest of sensations that stopped her: a smell of something incongruous. Behind the odor of metal and polish a scent of… death, decay. Her eyes rolled left and right. The stonework just inside the left edge of the doorway was scarred, as if a mason had been chipping at it to make a grid of dots. The right edge of the doorway was clad in cedar wood, not stone. Her eyes narrowed. Dropping to her haunches, she held out her bow and reached over the threshold of the room carefully. With a gentle dunt, she pressed the bow’s tip down upon the first floorboard inside the room.
With a whoosh, the cedar panels to the right of the doorway suddenly exploded with movement and a gust of disturbed air. She fell back, snatching her bow to her chest as a mass hurtled across the doorway and crashed against the stone on the left with a metallic clank and a shower of sparks. As she rose, she beheld the contraption: a bed of iron spikes, the full height of the door, that would have ripped her apart had she set foot on that floorboard. She stared at the forlorn corpse of Skamandrios, entangled in the spikes. He was more skeleton than flesh, just leathery rags of skin dangling from the bones. A spike had pierced his temple, another his neck, several his chest and limbs. “At least it was quick for you, Shadow,” she said flatly.
The trap was wedged in place and the way into the strongroom blocked. She stepped back, vexed, then heard the dull chatter of two guards outside, drawing closer to the villa.
“The sun grows strong. I’ll tend to the horses in the stable, you lock up the villa,” one said to the other. “Master will be back tonight and he’ll not be happy if the rooms aren’t cool enough for him.”
A moment later, she heard their footsteps on the lower floor and the steady clunk and click of doors and windows being closed over and locked.
No time, Kassandra realized, her breath quickening. She had to get out, but she could not leave without getting the eye. She closed the door to hide the sprung trap, then looked all around the upper landing. No other way into the strongroom. She thought of the oculus on the ceiling—perhaps she could climb up onto the roof and drop into the chamber that way? No, the opening was too small even for a child to fit through. Her thoughts spun in a thousand different directions until they settled on the first room again. Why would a rich, power-hungry thug like the Cyclops have a bare room in his villa? she mused, glancing around to confirm that every other part of the place—upstairs at least—was bedecked with trophies and finery. She came before the first room’s open door and tapped her way in with her bow. No traps. Inside, she turned to face the wall shared with the strongroom and eyed the shabby, doorless cupboard with suspicion. Placing a hand on either side of it, she edged it as quietly as she could to one side and stared at the wooden hatch it revealed. Heart surging with anticipation, she twisted the handle and crawled inside the golden room, wracked with suspicion that every movement might bring a hidden blade scything down upon her or send her toppling into a concealed pit of spikes. But there was nothing more. She reached out to pluck the obsidian eye from the plinth, feeling the cold weight of it in her hand, knowing that it would pay off her troubles and Markos’s. As she moved back out onto the landing and toward the bedchamber and the climb back down the ivy, elation began to swell in the pit of her stomach, and then she heard a sigh.
“Just the bedchamber and that’s the upstairs done,” the guard mumbled to himself through the opening in an old leather helm that covered most of his face.
She pressed her back to the wall, hugging the shadows, watching as the guard ambled into the bedchamber before she could. She heard a clatter of shutters being closed then a thick clunk of a locking chain. The guard emerged from the chamber again and wandered back downstairs.
She paced along behind him like his shadow, creeping down the stairs in time with him to disguise her footsteps, edging up to the main entrance as he did. If he locked it while she was still inside… Her stomach twisted as she imagined a fourth head on the marble mantel upstairs.
Just then, the guard dropped his keys. As he stooped to pick them up, Kassandra took a further step. The boards creaked, the guard bristled, then leapt up and around in one motion. His face curled into a baleful sneer as he swung his ax level, his lips parting to shout for his comrades. The cry never came as Kassandra grabbed and threw the small knife tucked into the lip of her bracer in one stroke. It flew straight and pierced the man’s throat. He fell, pink foam bubbling from the wound. Kassandra caught his body to reduce the noise. She eyed the man for a moment, his keys, his garb, the door, the way to freedom.
The watcher stared as the guard ambled from the villa and strolled across the grounds, draped in a black cloak. He heard a few words being exchanged as the guard said something to the other posted at the gateway of the outer walls, before the guard continued on out into the countryside. A thrill of anticipation crawled through him: she was everything, everything they hoped she might be. He craned forward from his vantage point like a crow, unblinking.
Kassandra heard her own breath crash like waves within the confines of the visored leather helm. Worse, the guard she had killed and taken it from had clearly been munching on raw garlic for a year, going by the stink. She did all she could to walk in a carefree—almost bored—manner, away from the Cyclops’s estate and off into the brush, patting the flat of the stolen guard ax upon her palm. Her excuse had been simple: “I’m going to scout around outside. I’m sure I saw something out there while I was on the villa’s top floor.” The other sentry at the gate had been too weary from the midday heat to pick up on her questionable attempt at a low, gruff voice.