It had been days since he had seen any sign of them and he was beginning to grow frustrated with his lack of progress, particularly as this group was about broken: their leader was dead; Sallax, the traitor with an axe to grind, was either missing, found out, or killed, and Garec had at least a few cracked ribs, maybe even a punctured lung.
He muttered a curse, recalling the night he had been forced to choose between Garec and Steven. Jacrys had been huddled in the shadows behind the warehouse for over an aven waiting for the two so-called freedom fighters to return. Then when they came, their cloaks had been pulled closed and their hoods lifted to cover their heads. There had been rats, lots of the ugly little demons, scratching about at his feet – ironically, it had been the rodents that had given him the answer: the boots. Steven Taylor’s boots looked like nothing Jacrys had ever seen; it was easy to spot them, heavy with leather and silly crisscrossing bits of twine holding them together.
But the horsecock archer had been wearing them.
For days Jacrys had wondered why the two men had exchanged boots – were they a disguise? Or were the two men softies, sneaking away to exchange who knew what else? Yet again he felt anger welling at his wretched luck. If only he had chosen right, he could have killed the staff-wielding foreigner, then retrieving the stone would have been so much easier.
Now they were all missing and he had to brace himself for another futile day of asking questions and paying off Orindale whores, barmen and criminals for any information leading to the Ronans’ hiding place. He didn’t know how they had managed to make their way into the city, given the array of forces blockading Orindale from Falkan and Rona, but Jacrys was certain they had managed to spirit themselves past the Malakasian picket lines and that they were still in the city. With Garec injured, they would not have risked a retreat through enemy lines; it would have been too dangerous. They had to be inside city limits, and Jacrys would continue searching until he found them.
The one piece of good news was that the dark prince hadn’t appeared, even after the explosion at the old imperial palace and the unexpected sinking of the Prince Marek in Orindale Harbour. His carriage hadn’t been moved and there was no talk of anyone coming or going from the Falkan ancestral residence. The army remained entrenched and no one moved in or out of the city without attracting Malakasian scrutiny. Without Prince Malagon seeking him, Jacrys was free to move through Orindale as he pleased.
These things, considered together, gave Jacrys hope. ‘It’s just a matter of time,’ he said quietly. ‘I will get that key and the dark prince will owe me – well, whatever I wish.’ He chuckled, stood up and tossed a coin on the table, then stepped out into the brilliant morning sunlight.
He didn’t notice the young woman, white as a corpse, pay her own tab at the bar and unobtrusively follow him out.
DENVER
Freezing cold and sodden through, Steven broke into Howard Griffin’s house for the second time that day. He took a change of clothes and grimaced at how the older man’s jeans hung about his narrow hips for a moment before falling off like a collapsing circus tent. ‘This won’t do,’ he said, looking to find a pair that came within four inches of his waist size.
In the end, he decided it was quicker and easier to dry his own clothes and, stripping to his boxers, tumbled everything he had bought or stolen in the past three days, including Garec’s borrowed boots, into Howard’s clothes dryer and set the timer. Returning to the kitchen, he made two roast beef sandwiches, careful – despite his harrowing morning – to smell both the meat and the mayonnaise. With his mouth full, Steven gingerly slid aside the curtains of Howard’s kitchen window and waited for Nerak to show himself again.
Outside, Idaho Springs had come to a sudden, unexpected halt. Except for the intermittent wail of fire alarms, ambulances and police sirens, the town was silent. From Howard’s kitchen Steven could see Miner Street, and in the first fifteen minutes, he saw three police cruisers, two fire trucks, their lights ablaze, and the red pick-up their town fire marshal used when making inspections or running back and forth between Idaho Springs and the surrounding observation towers. All of the emergency vehicles had been going dangerously fast, as if the fire might somehow burn itself out if help didn’t arrive as quickly as possible. From somewhere east of Howard’s home, a hollow voice with too much reverb warbled out half-comprehensible instructions through twenty-five-year-old speakers mounted on lamp-posts and rooftops throughout the city.
That was it; no civilian vehicles passed. He spotted no SUVs loaded with school children, no tourist cars ornamented with three thousand dollars-worth of ski equipment, no big yellow buses hauling the middle school basketball team to Georgetown or Golden. He wasn’t really surprised; he knew what everyone in town would be doing. The fire fighters would either be battling the flames near the high school and the few homes and businesses on the south side of the creek, or they would be hustling to make their way across town to assist those who had been at the firehouse, gearing up for another Friday night of poker and college basketball.
Like voyeurs at a fatal traffic accident, the citizens of Idaho Springs were outside, lining the streets and sidewalks to watch, in stunned silence, as the hillside blaze made its way inexorably towards them. As he stared out of Howard’s kitchen window, Garec’s boots clumping and banging inside the clothes dryer, Steven felt a cold sense of dread begin to creep across his naked flesh. Blaming his time in the creek and the burgeoning lump on his head, he took a blanket from the back of the couch, wrapped it around his shoulders and returned to the window to watch as the fire, now several miles across and at least three miles deep, cast a false sunset over Idaho Springs. Deep orange smeared through the sky in broad strokes, seeping into warm violet, as forbidding as it was beautiful. If it had not been for the clouds of black and grey smoke roiling east towards Floyd Hill, Steven might have believed that the sun was setting in the south, somewhere behind the Mt Evans wilderness.
Outside, people were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, lining the streets. Some had taken to the rooftops to improve their view; others climbed up into truck beds or onto park benches for a better view of the devastation. They talked in whispers, because speaking in a normal tone was somehow inappropriate in the wake of such a disaster. They were standing silently, reverently watching as the fire claimed the hillside along Chicago Creek Road. It wasn’t the right season for this; the hills were wet with snow and there had not been a significant fire in January for as long as anyone could remember – yet a blaze of epic proportions threatened the canyon, threatened the entire city…
Twelve minutes after pushing the start button on Howard’s old dryer, the spell was broken. It started as a scream, a lone voice piercing the morning with what sounded like Sandy! or Mandy! – then slowly, like a rollercoaster starting down its initial hill, the people of Idaho Springs began to move, as if time had caught up with them, starting now to hurry, in an effort to retrieve the minutes they had lost. It was Friday and school was in session; there were nearly five hundred students at the high school across the river and the citizens of Idaho Springs, slapped awake from their twelve-minute reverie by the sound of someone screaming for Sandy or Mandy, began mobilising to get the children to safety.
Mayhem ensued and Steven decided that, dry or not, he would take advantage of the clamour to get into the bank. He dressed quickly, jammed half a sandwich into his mouth and the leftovers into his pocket next to Lessek’s key. He didn’t worry about the students; the path of the burning avalanche had followed him when he turned east to get across the Clear Creek bridge and although three exit routes would be blocked by the conflagration and cars were most likely exploding in the faculty lot, Steven’s lazy right turn would have left open a path from the school down to the river. Any student who had ever sneaked out of lunch to smoke would be able, like the Pied Smoker of Hamelin, to lead the others to safety through the streambed and north into town.