He turned right down the next side street.
Dänvârfij dropped off the roof into a cutway and hurried for the back alley to which it connected. She peered around the corner to the alley’s intersection with the side street, and she watched every passerby crossing the far view.
Brot’ân’duivé never appeared, and her throat went dry.
On instinct, waiting, she looked back up the cutway. There was no sign of his having doubled back. She almost bolted down the alley toward the side street, but that would put her in the open in trying to find him. Instead, she spidered up a rear wall onto the rooftops and scanned the city in all directions.
Even if he had scaled a building to a roof along his way, it might mean she had been noticed. She saw no one in the heights. Could he have entered a building?
Crawling low to the rooftop’s edge, she looked down upon the side street lined with small dwellings—no shops or eateries. The other possibility was the alley along the backs of the buildings on the street’s far side. An unwanted fear washed over her.
Following this greimasg’äh into a shadowed place was unwise. It occurred to her that no matter what, the traitor would assume he might be trailed—it was in him both by his nature and training. He might have gone inland simply to throw off any hidden pursuit. There was only one way to be certain, and it was a blind choice.
Dänvârfij continued along the rooftops until she was forced to take to the streets, and then she raced for the port. If she could not find him, the others needed to be warned.
A greimasg’äh, now their enemy, was on the move.
Crouched in the far alley’s shadows, Brot’ân’duivé pulled a hidden bundle from under his arm and took off his heavy dun-colored cloak.
Earlier that morning, Mechaela had allowed him to go through a surprisingly large array of clothing “abandoned” by patrons over the years. He had borrowed a few things, including a bright cerulean cloak of light wool, more garish than he normally would have desired. The owner had been quite tall for a human, and so the cloak’s hem reached Brot’ân’duivé’s shins—adequate enough. He had also borrowed a pair of cream-colored suede boots, useless for anything besides fashion.
In most ports the vivid blue would have called attention to him—but not here. This harbor was a cacophony of wild attire from many lands, and he would blend even more easily than he would in anmaglâhk garb.
Wrapping his own boots inside the dun cloak, he pulled the cerulean cloak’s hood low over his eyes and stepped into the street. He kept his knees bent, adopting an affected slouch to minimize his notable height. At best he would be half a head shorter. That was all he could manage in his hurry, as he took a roundabout way toward the harbor’s southern end.
Brot’ân’duivé already knew he had been followed out of Delilah’s.
A change of clothing, stature, and gait might throw off pursuit once he mingled among the locals. As he neared the waterfront, the number of people in the streets multiplied. He slipped among them and shadowed a pair of overdressed gentry accompanied by heavily armed escorts. Peering from under the hood, he watched the rooftops and knew exactly where he would have placed sentries—if he had been in charge of hunting himself.
The barest hint of a figure wearing dark blue rose slightly over the crest of a warehouse roof.
It was sensible to assume that his enemies had abandoned their attire for disguises as well. What mattered was that the team was here in Drist. Their presence was no longer a guess.
He carefully repeated checks as he walked, but the figure in dark blue did not rise any higher. He briefly lost sight of it until his angle improved when he reached the waterfront’s southern end. The figure still had not moved, which meant whoever was there had not left to report in.
He had not been spotted as yet.
Brot’ân’duivé slowed amid the dodging masses of dockworkers, the finely dressed, and those selling goods off their backs or begging on the boardwalks. Among the flowing crowds, he drifted to the waterfront’s edge and stepped down along the stairs to below.
The Bell Tower was docked at the third pier’s end. He needed a place to vanish with a decent vantage point. Once on a floating walkway, he quickened his pace and then stopped among the shoreward pilings of the fourth pier. With a good view of the third pier above, he unrolled his dun-colored cloak and pulled it over the cerulean one.
He swung around a tall pier post and onto a low beam between it and the next one outward in the water. Flattening against that support, he looked to the massive ship marked as the Bell Tower. It was a good distance away, but he saw all movement along its rail, its ramp, and the pier.
Brot’ân’duivé stilled mind and body and let shadow take him once he had set his purpose deep within himself. With his gaze locked upon that vessel, all that he would see and hear would fall into the back of his mind, beyond conscious thought.
Sometime during the morning, a dog wandered down the walkway and passed into the periphery of his sight. He did not look directly at it ... did not move ... did not think. The dog never paused, and the click of its claws continued until even that faded from his stilled awareness. He continued taking in all movements and changes upon the Bell Tower until a thought rose to break him loose from shadow.
He refocused his gaze.
Dänvârfij descended the ramp of a much smaller ship on the second pier and stood brazenly in the open, staring toward ... the Cloud Queen. Dressed in breeches and a dark vest, she no longer wore the forest gray of the anmaglâhk, but it was she.
This could be no coincidence. She and her team not only knew the vessel on which Magiere traveled, but their own ship had docked only a few vessels away. He could not have anticipated this last detail.
Dänvârfij turned and walked toward the waterfront.
Brot’ân’duivé decided to keep this information to himself, as he was uncertain how he would use it. Though he pretended to assist in Léshil’s foolish pursuit, he still hoped to put an end to it.
There were four to five armed men always walking the deck of the Bell Tower. Separate from the other crew, those appeared to have no other purpose but the vessel’s—the cargo’s—safekeeping. Léshil and Magiere would not be able to board by the ship’s ramp, not even under a ruse. The moment they tried, they would be stopped and unable to fight their way past.
Skiffs had come and gone below the piers. Some were tied off nearer the lower walkway. He had seen a few other ways to board the vessel, but he would not suggest such. He had enough—more than he would tell—to make the chance of infiltration sound rationally hopeless.
Stepping back onto the walkway, he stripped off the dun cloak to wrap it around his boots again. Up the stairs, he slipped in among the shifting, noisy masses, but he paused a final time upon the waterfront. He looked from the Cloud Queen to the Bell Tower ... and to the smaller ship that Dänvârfij had left.
A new strategy, wrapped around Léshil’s present fixation, began to form.
Most Aged Father’s team of loyalists and fanatics were far from home. Brot’ân’duivé saw a way to add to the number who would not return.
The fewer the better, and as he followed Magiere to an orb, he could then freely watch for the time and place to put Léshil to his destined purpose. That purpose had been foreseen by lost Eillean, prepared through a mother’s sacrifice by Cuirin’nên’a, and marked by the ancestors with a name.
Leshiârelaohk.
Dänvârfij wasted no time in hurrying back toward the three-story hotel with barred windows. After contacting Rhysís and Eywodan, she had been relieved, though troubled, that no one had spotted the traitor. Perhaps he had been playing decoy. A similar ruse had been used to steal away Magiere and her companions in Calm Seatt. By the time Dänvârfij reached a vantage point to look up at the hotel, her anxiety faded.