Wheeled bins of feathers (some white, some red and sticky) mingled with splintered wood and ceramic shards. The bins overflowed, waiting to be carted away while men and women on the night shift sorted through the rubbish.
Unfortunately, most of it had already been consigned to the trash.
“Where did you last have it?” asked Caliph.
“I put it in the rolltop,” said Sena, “right the—”
Her words died.
The desk was broken open and emptied but on its top, under the array of tiny useless drawers and slots, below the arced groove that until recently had held the interlocking slats that made its clutter presentably discreet, sat the red book.
Sena’s stomach flipped, then twisted like a wrung-out rag.
“Looks like it’s here,” Caliph deadpanned. “Maybe you missed it?”
Sena mumbled something barely intelligible.
“Yeah. I guess I did.” Her bloodless lips parted in astonishment. But she didn’t believe her own admission. She knew what she had seen even in the dim light.
Maybe one of the servants had found it under the bed or in a corner and replaced it. But how could they have known where it came from? How could they have known where it belonged?
She looked around. They were stacking everything worth salvaging in neat piles by the hearth.
When she asked, they affirmed that none of them had touched it.
“That’s where it was when I came in,” said a young man.
“Are you sure?”
“I guess so. I was the first in after the inspectors left.”
Somehow the news did not surprise her. She picked it up with nerveless fingers and took it with her as Caliph tugged her from the room.
They went to one of the guest bedrooms for the night. Caliph couldn’t sleep. He sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark.
Sena locked the C
srym T
in a chest at the foot of the bed. Despite the evening’s events, now that it was safe, she felt almost totally relaxed. She sidled up to him in the dark and wrapped her arms around him from behind. She could feel the heavy hot incubation of his thoughts, the sullen plotting going on inside.
“What is it?”
Caliph exhaled: something between a grumble and a sigh. What is it! Are you blind? Isca Castle has been attacked! I’ve been betrayed! People are dead!
Out loud he said, “Are all . . .” he wanted to put it more delicately but gave up, “Shr
dnae Witches trained in . . . subterfuge?”
Sena held her breath, wondering what he would say next if she answered either way. Finally, she said distinctly, “I am.”
Caliph let out a sigh of relief. “Then there’s something I want you to do.”
Sena hung in the blackness of a narrow corridor, wedged against the lofty ceiling. Legs spread. One foot braced on either wall. At five-foot-ten her legs were barely long enough to achieve the feat. She looked down at the tiled floor twelve feet below.
A gas lamp in a stone recess flooded the bottom half of the passageway in capricious opal light. Her stamina was extraordinary but by the time the sentry finally arrived at the door opposite the gas lamp her legs were quivering.
Sena watched him knock at the door. He waited, scratched his ass, muttered something she couldn’t make out.
The door was thick. It muffled any sound from within. Sena bit her lower lip and concentrated on maintaining her position.
After a few seconds the door opened.
David Thacker peered out from a dimly lit room. The sight of the sentry discomposed him sufficiently to qualify in Sena’s mind as a confession of guilt. He tried to cover his dismay with a yawn.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” asked David. Sena could tell he was not accustomed to lying.
“Nothing, sir.” The guard had straightened. “There’s someone at the gates for you. We told them it was after curfew but they insisted. What with the craziness tonight we can’t open the gate. You’ll have to take a boat across the moat. You can meet ’em in the Cracked Agate just across the square.”
“What?” David was obviously skeptical. “Was it a man or a woman?”
“Man,” said the guard. “I guess. I wasn’t actually there when they came calling. Just delivering the message, sir. The High King happened to be at the gate, I guess. Said you were a friend and it would be okay.”
Sena watched terror welter under David’s cheeks, ripple behind his eyes and vanish.
There was no visitor of course. Caliph had dreamt it up to lure David Thacker away from his room. But by the look on his face, Sena guessed a man that fit the guard’s ambiguous description did in fact exist—a man that might (in David’s mind) have actually come to call.
“Let me get my cloak.”
“I guess your visitor said it was urgent,” the guard replied.
David froze midstep, half in and half out of the room. The fear in his eyes had turned to absolute horror. “Did he?”
He reached around the corner and pulled a thin summer cloak after him. He put it on quickly and patted himself, checking for essentials. He locked the door and tugged the handle twice before shambling timorously down the hall after the guard.
Sena waited. Her legs were at the end of their endurance. She listened carefully. Only when she was certain did she snap her legs shut and distill, soundlessly to the tile floor.
The guards made regular rounds even here among the guest suites that honeycombed the castle’s west wing. She had to work fast.
Caliph had warned her that David Thacker had been granted a request to change out his lock. He was supposed to have given a copy of the key to Gadriel, which he had never done.
Sena had already palmed a torsion wrench and two different picks. She set one in her mouth, biting the tang like the stem of a rose while she slipped both the wrench and a snake pick into the keyway.
As her mind adjusted to the lock, she drew the pick, feeling it pop past the pins. She noted the stiffness of the springs and counted them without applying any torque to the wrench. There were five.
She began to work.
When she gave it clockwise torque the lock stopped dead, counterclockwise she felt it mush. She pulled the torsion wrench down ever so slightly.
It was like fucking, just the right amount of tenderness and force.
Pin two set first. She heard it rattle, felt it give against the snake. She upped the torque and felt pin three go next. Obviously the holes had not been bored straight.
There were guards just around the end of the hall. She could see their shadows reaching monstrously from the flicker of a torch. They weren’t talking much and she couldn’t risk scrubbing the lock. They weren’t in on the deception and if they heard, despite her status as the High King’s mistress, it would be a bust.
Pins four and five went together under the double tips of the snake. Almost there. Pin one came last. Or did it? She tried the wrench. The plug refused to spin.
“Yella by
n.”
She had false set one of the pairs.
At the end of the hall the voices picked up. The shadows leapt as the men began to move. Sena’s heart did not skip. Her self-confidence was growing.
She withdrew her tools from the lock, jumped, jumped again off the wall and in such manner attained a remarkable height. Again her legs spanned the corridor.
Two sentries stepped chuckling into the intersection thirty feet away. For a moment they glanced down the long empty hallway where David Thacker’s door was one of many.
To them, the corridor was empty. They stopped for a moment, sharing some coarse anecdote before shuffling on their way.