The maid squirmed, clearly irritated at being shoved around so. Her pinched gaze fell upon Pelkaia’s hands. Saw the lack of weapon in them. Her eyes widened, her lips pressed together in anger. Her head reared back, smacking Coss in the nose. Pelkaia lunged forward, but the maid twisted away.
“He-elp!” she screamed, cupping one hand around her mouth while she hiked her skirts with the other and bolted swift as a monsoon wind down the steps. Her first cry was drowned out by the great clash of the alarm bells, but Pelkaia could see her gather her breath for another roar.
“By the pits,” Coss growled, covering his nose with one hand. A thin, bloody trickle rolled over his lips.
“Help!” Mallie screeched high enough to make Pelkaia cringe. The maid was already a great many flights below them, her voice echoing up through the shaft of spiraling stone steps.
“Forget her,” Pelkaia said as she grabbed Coss’s arm and urged him forward. “We can’t be far, and we must be quick.”
He grunted, smeared the blood from his nose across the back of his wrist, and followed her at a sprint down the steps. Pelkaia leaned forward into her gait, urging her tired body to fly down the stones.
“Here!” Coss grabbed her arm, thick fingers digging into her flesh as she jerked to a halt. Not bothering to explain, he lunged for the next door and flung it open – Pelkaia caught only a brief glimpse of the number three carved into the old wood – and dragged her through.
The hallway was narrow, the runner-rug thin and the air redolent with warm soap smells. A single door stood at the end of it, painted a sunny yellow. Waiting.
They surged forward. Pelkaia’s breath burned over her lips, down her throat, doing little to ease the ache in her chest. Coss flung the door open and they barreled through. The walkway was narrow, but sturdy. It lead to a dark building, to a twin yellow door. Despite the angry lash of the sea winds, the laundry building radiated the faint scent of grit soap and lilacs. Shouts sounded behind them, distant, but growing near.
Pelkaia stumbled, boot catching on a board, and twisted just in time to land hard on her side instead of pitching over the three-story drop to the road below. She gasped as the jar of the fall shuddered through her, enhancing the ache of her already tired body. Her bone-braces could do little against a fall at full speed. Coss’s hands were already upon her, lifting, searching for breaks.
As she staggered to her feet she looked back, glancing at the sky instinctively. Her heart missed a beat.
“Pell, what is it?” Concern and fear mingled on his dirt-smudged face. He followed her eye-line, saw the familiar – if obscured – shape of their ship docked against the watchtower.
“What the…” He rubbed his cheeks as if he could massage away the sight.
Pelkaia let out a strangled laugh. “That’s what I get, working with Honding. He’s here. That daft-headed man came for us. Come on. Let’s go get ourselves arrested again.”
She wiped the sweat from her face with the bottom of her shirt, then rearranged her mask to the one she had worn when they had been arrested. Through all their fleeing, she had lost a few bits of the mask. It lay thin and patchy against her skin. Fine for fooling an overworked watcher, but no good for close scrutiny.
“Coss, I hate to ask, but…”
He took one look at her face and grimaced. “I see the problem. Give me a moment.”
Steadying himself with the handrail, he stared straight at a piece of empty air between them. Her skin tingled as he accessed his sel-sense, focused on the very rawest edge of his sensitivity. While he could see the minute particles of sel drifting in the air at all times, he could also, when matters were desperate, reach out and wrench some of those bits and pieces together – force them to gel into something large enough for another, less fine-tuned, sensitive to use.
He grunted. A little pearl shimmered between them and began to rise. Pelkaia snapped out her senses and captured the new glob of sel, adding it to the thin parts of her mask, trying to ignore the paleness in Coss’s cheeks, the slight shiver in the muscles of his arms.
“How is it?”
Coss gave her a tight nod, too tired to waste breath on speech. It would do. He brushed the hair from her forehead, securing it behind her ear, and she ignored the warmth of his touch as she turned back to the station-house. She could not afford to be distracted. Not when Detan Honding waited for her on the other side of that garish, yellow door.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The watch-captain proved fleeter on his feet than Detan had imagined. Panting, he half ran, half stumbled down the stairs after the man. Laella and Tibs pulled ahead to nip at the watch-captain’s heels, drawing a glare from Detan. Rude of them to leave him behind. Short bursts from the captain’s whistle echoed throughout the stairwell, bouncing off the wooden paneling and piercing his ears. Combined with the steady clang of the alarm bells, Detan feared his head would explode.
“Is that really necessary?” he yelled.
A toot of whistles answered the watch-captain’s call from down below. Detan grimaced, understanding. There was no other way for the watchers to communicate amongst themselves as long as those infernal bells thumped along.
“They’ve been spotted in the service stairs!” the captain cried, and Detan rolled his eyes. Of course that’s the way they’d gone – he’d insisted as much before the captain had gone tearing off down the main stairwell. Bloody incompetent lot, these Petrastad watchers. Too simple in their thinking. What he wouldn’t give for Ripka to be the watch-captain here, today. At least she was a pleasure to fence with. This cockerel posturing was going to drain his patience, fast.
Blasted Pelkaia. Should have lounged around waiting for rescue, brushing her hair and singing to little birds, or whatever it was damsels in distress did while the knights got run off their feet in the old stories.
The captain wrenched a door open and they jumbled out after him, zigzagging through the maze of corridors that made up the watchtower. There was a certain freedom in having no idea where you were or where you were going. He figured that, at the very least, no one could blame him if they took a wrong turn, and that was fine by him. Detan was getting right sick of shouldering the blame around here.
They reached a darkened alcove, and the captain paused to wrench a lantern from the wall. While they waited for him to wick the light up, Detan grabbed Tibs’s arm and pulled him close to whisper.
“New plan; talk over Laella if you have to. Blasted girl is too honest.”
“You have a plan?”
“I will by the time we find ’em.”
Tibs cracked a grin and pulled away, tearing off after the hustling captain. Detan groaned. If Pelkaia didn’t have the facilities aboard the Larkspur to give him a long, hot bath after this, he was going to insist they turn right back around and drop him at the Salt Baths in Aransa. To the pits with Thratia and her bastard army. The pain in his knees was worse than her trying to kill him.
Cursing under his breath with every thudding step, he forced himself to hurry along, counting on the others to do any finding that needed to be done. He let his mind wander, seeking ahead of their current predicament, trying to see his way through to how in the pits he was going to wiggle Pelkaia and her first mate away from the watchers’ hands now that she’d gone and embarrassed them by escaping.
Shouldn’t be too hard. He could twist their escape around, make it look like the watchers weren’t capable of holding onto a high-value prisoner. It’d be a risk to insult the captain, sure, but Laella’d already gone ahead and stuck her foot down that muddy path, so he might as well roll along with it.