I do not wish to end up in an ugly engineer, she whined. Or a dolphin.
I don’t think he’s ugly. Sawed-off and tough-looking, sure. Pen chose not to look down to try to spot dolphins frolicking in the distant waters.
Ikos set about hauling on one pulley-rope after another, in some balanced pattern known only to himself. The swaying jerks of the girth at each yank did unpleasant things to Pen’s stomach. But, slowly and methodically, they began inching upward.
As they passed the window above Madame Gardiki’s room, Pen held his breath, but no awakening dedicats or acolytes tripped over to look through and take in the sunrise. And the man-rise. He could do things to disable their alarm cries like the Xarre mastiffs, but if it seemed an offense to him, it was possible the goddess would think so as well.
At least, Pen consoled himself, he had spared Madame Gardiki this ordeal. Unless she would have enjoyed it. From their few minutes of acquaintance, it was hard to know. She might have liked the part about seeing her elder son hard at work, and cleverly. Pen was pretty sure she wouldn’t have liked his risks.
Pen rotated toward the sea view, watching the thin red line of light start to glow behind the Cedonian mainland, eating up the steel gray. On any other occasion, the return of the sun would be a delight. Pen longed for an eclipse. The new moon was in the wrong place for it, alas.
The vertical progression lurched to a halt just under the balconies, and Ikos commenced a complicated dance with his pulleys of tightening three lines so as to loosen and ease the one in the rear from its joist, unhook and extend it forward, rehook it, and repeat. They moved north in the thinning shadows at an excruciating pace. Ikos, above him, was breathing heavily and sweating. Pen tried to estimate the distance and time left to make the end of the row, racing the advent of the sun like very anxious, very careful slugs.
The gaolers with breakfast would be a good long stretch getting through the door. First would come time wasted trying to extract the broken key, initially seeming an annoyance rather than an emergency, then more in futile attempts to unstick the lock. Some running back and forth to find the tools for the job, and wake the women in charge of them. The hinges had been on the inside, inaccessible, or he’d have rusted them as well. The planks were thick oak, which were going to need that ax. Or a battering ram. Only once they’d broken through could they know their prisoner was missing—or suicided—and set up a cry. The echoes of woodchopping would be Pen’s sign that he and Ikos had very little time left.
A red-gold sliver crested the distant hills, then became a crescent, a ball, and then too bright to look upon. The boundary of blue shadow on the slope below dropped like night’s floodwaters receding. From behind the thick walls of the Order, occasional light voices echoed, too muted to make out words. In some courtyard beyond the blue roofs, a choir of several voices began a hymn, echoing and eerie with the distance. No ax-blows yet.
Ikos, just above Pen, kept grimly working. Penric, reminded of his duties as a divine and otherwise feeling to be inert cargo, began praying. There was nothing in the least rote about his morning’s tally of the gods here, no.
Within Penric, Desdemona moaned. He could feel the chaos roiling within her, a growing pressure like a bad stomach about to heave up. My demon is seasick. The last thing in the world he needed was for her to begin vomiting unshaped disorder into the rigging that suspended them above a plummeting death. Or anywhere else nearby. He stared around like a frantic nurse looking for a bucket.
The most likely thing in sight was a trio of seagulls, rising with the morning breeze and cruising the balconies for scraps. He wondered if the ladies of the Order ever amused themselves throwing tidbits to them to be caught in midair. The pale scavenger birds were shore pests, considered sacred to the Bastard as the only god who would have them. Bastard’s vermin were always allowable sacrifices.
All right, Des, Pen thought in some exasperation. You may have one seagull. Just one.
A burst of gratitude and chaos caught a bird on the wing as it swooped above the balcony under which they were making their transit. With a loud pop, it exploded in a shower of feathers, blood and bones turning to dust as they fell in the white flutter. Pen winced.
That was a lot of chaos. Des must have really been in distress. Feel better now?
The response, had it been aloud, would have approximated the hostile noise one would expect from a friend bent over a ship’s rail who’d just delivered an offering to the sea.
Ikos stared up through the gaps in the boards with disconcerted expression, but any exclamation was caught by strong teeth biting his lip.
From inside the open door to the balcony, a startled female voice said, “What?”
Another more distant voice called, “Hekat, are you coming?”
“I’ll catch up in a moment. You go on ahead.”
The sound of a door closing. Pen and Ikos both froze as footsteps rapped out onto the balcony boards.
Pen caught sight of the blue tunic and skirt of an acolyte as the woman bent over to pick up a few blown feathers and roll them in her fingers. She looked up. She looked down.
Both men peered back through the board-gaps. Ikos tried a friendly smile. It just made him look like a bandit delighted with the prospect of cutting a throat.
Middle-aged acolyte. How many women named Hekat could there be in this order? Dozens, for all Pen know. She wasn’t an albino. But there might, unless he was fooling himself, be a faint echo of her brother in the fine frame of her face, much the way Ikos’s more robust bones echoed Nikys’s. Pen feared to attempt the delicate seizure of her vocal cords with Des in such disarray. As she opened her mouth to cry out, he was driven to take a different chance.
He tapped his lips twice, looked up into the brown eye he could see, and said clearly, “Surakos.”
Slowly, the mouth closed, though the stare intensified.
Ikos swiveled his head and glared at Pen in complete mystification. Pen held up a hand begging silence.
“What,” she breathed, “has Sura to do with this?” A wave of her hand encompassed the lunatic configuration of tackle and men hanging from her balcony joists.
“It would take about an hour to explain in full.” Which they surely did not have. “But I promise you, when he comes out for your birthday in the autumn, he’ll tell you everything. It should be safe for him to speak by then.”
There. The birthday visit was personal information that no one who did not know Bosha could be privy to. Would it be coin enough to buy her trust?
“Why is it unsafe now?”
At least he had her attention focused on her brother, and not on the intruders’ blasphemy. “Thasalon court politics.”
That eye-scrunch might be a wince. “Oh, gods,” she said, in a voice of loathing. “Not again.”
“He’ll be all right if you say nothing of what you’ve just seen. Except to the Lady of Spring. You can pray to your goddess. She might even speak for us.”
Now the eye grew indignant. “Do you expect me to believe you have some sort of, of holy dispensation for this?”
Pen knew they did, or at least Nikys had, but it seemed unwise to test the gods. Or the acolyte. “I make no claims. Sura can tell all.”
She sat with a thump, fingering her handful of feathers. “He’d better,” she muttered, and Pen knew they were safe. He motioned for Ikos to continue.
Ikos shot him a hot look that suggested Surakos wasn’t the only one who would be interrogated later. But he started working his pulleys and hooks again, and they recommenced their onward lurch.