“It’s as good as done, then. And what about their inn?”
“The Tumblehome, yes. Send one person and one person only. I have a pair of old informants on the staff; one of them thinks he’s reporting to the yellowjackets, and one thinks she’s working for the capa. I’ll pass the names along. For now, I just want to find out if they’re still there, at the Bowsprit Suite. If they are, you can place a few of your men there dressed as staff. Observation only, for the time being.”
“Very well.” Reynart rose from his chair and brushed crumbs from his breeches. “And the noose? Assuming you get your wish, where and when would you like to draw it tight?”
“Going after the Thorn has always been like trying to grab fish with bare hands,” she replied. “I’ll want him sewn up somewhere, someplace where escape will be impossible, cut off from his friends, and entirely surrounded by ours.”
“By ours? How…? Oh. Oh. Raven’s Reach!”
“Yes. Very good, Stephen. The Day of Changes, just a week and a half from now. The duke’s midsummer feast. Five hundred feet in the air, surrounded by the peers of Camorr and a hundred guards. I’ll instruct Doña Sofia to invite this Lukas Fehrwight to dine with the duke, as a guest of the Salvaras.”
“Assuming he doesn’t suspect a trap…”
“I think it’s just the sort of gesture he’d appreciate. I think our mysterious friend’s audacity is going to be what finally arranges our direct introduction. I shall have Sofia feign financial distress; she can tell Fehrwight that the last few thousand crowns won’t be forthcoming until after the festival. A double-baited hook, his greed hand in hand with his vanity. I daresay he’ll relish the temptation.”
“Shall I pull everyone in for it?”
“Of course.” Doña Vorchenza sipped her wine and smiled slowly. “I want a Midnighter to take his coat; I want Midnighters serving him before the meal. If he uses a chamber pot, I want a Midnighter to close it for him afterward. We’ll take him atop Raven’s Reach; then we’ll watch the ground to see who runs, and where they run to.”
“Anything else?”
“No. Get to it, Stephen. Come back and let me have your report in a few hours. I’ll still be up… I’m expecting messages from the Floating Grave once Barsavi’s funeral procession gets back. In the meantime, I’ll send old Nicovante a note about what we suspect.”
“Your servant, m’lady.” Reynart bowed briefly and then departed the solarium, his strides long and rapid.
Before the heavy door had even slammed shut, Doña Vorchenza was up and moving toward a small scrivener’s desk tucked into an alcove to the left of the door. There she withdrew a half-sheet of parchment, scribbled a few hasty lines, folded it, and closed the fold with a small dollop of blue wax from a paper tube. The stuff was alchemical, hardening after a few moments of exposure to air. She preferred to allow no sources of open flame into this room, with its many decades of carefully collected and indexed records.
Within the desk was a signet ring that Doña Vorchenza never wore outside her solarium; on that ring was a sigil that appeared nowhere on the crest of the Vorchenza family. She pressed the ring into the stiffening blue wax and then withdrew it with a slight popping noise.
When she passed it down the dumbwaiter, one of her night attendants would immediately run to the northeastern cage platform of her tower and have himself cranked over to Raven’s Reach via cable car. There, he would place the message directly into the old duke’s hands, even if Nicovante had retired to his bedchamber.
Such was the custom with every note that was sealed in blue with nothing but the stylized sigil of a spider for its credentials.
INTERLUDE
The Schoolmaster of Roses
“No, this is my heart. Strike. Strike. Now here. Strike.”
Cold gray water poured down on the House of Glass Roses; Camorr’s winter rain, pooled an inch deep beneath the feet of Jean Tannen and Don Maranzalla. Water ran in rivulets and threads down the face of every rose in the garden; it ran in small rivers into Jean Tannen’s eyes as he struck out with his rapier again and again at the stuffed leather target the Don held on the end of a stick, little larger than a big man’s fist.
“Strike, here. And here. No, too low. That’s the liver. Kill me now, not a minute from now. I might have another thrust left in me. Up! Up at the heart, under the ribs. Better.”
Gray-white light exploded within the swirling clouds overhead, rippling like fire glimpsed through smoke. The thunder came a moment later, booming and reverberating, the sound of the gods throwing a tantrum. Jean could barely imagine what it must be like atop the Five Towers, now just a series of hazy gray columns lost in the sky behind Don Maranzalla’s right shoulder.
“Enough, Jean, enough. You’re passing fair with a pigsticker; I want you to be familiar with it at need. But it’s time to see what else you have a flair for.” Don Maranzalla, who was wrapped up inside a much-abused brown oilcloak, splashed through the water to a large wooden box. “You won’t be able to haul a long blade around, in your circles. Fetch me the woundman.”
Jean hurried through the twisting glass maze, toward the small room that led back down into the tower. He respected the roses still-only a fool would not-but he was quite used to their presence now. They no longer seemed to loom and flash at him like hungry things; they were just an obstacle to keep one’s fingers away from.
The woundman, stashed in the little dry room at the top of the staircase, was a padded leather dummy in the shape of a man’s head, torso, and arms, standing upon an iron pole. Bearing this awkwardly over his right shoulder, Jean stepped back out in the driving rain and returned to the center of the Garden Without Fragrance. The woundman scraped the glass walls several times, but the roses had no taste for empty leather flesh.
Don Maranzalla had opened the wooden chest and was rummaging around in it; Jean set the woundman up in the center of the courtyard. The metal rod slid into a hole bored down through the stone and locked there with a twist, briefly pushing up a little fountain of water.
“Here’s something ugly,” said the don, swinging a four-foot length of chain wrapped in very fine leather-likely kid. “It’s called a bailiff’s lash; wrapped up so it doesn’t rattle. If you look close, it’s got little hooks at either end, so you can hitch it around your waist like a belt. Easy to conceal under heavier clothes…though you might eventually need one a bit longer, to fit around yourself.” The don stepped forward confidently and let one end of the padded chain whip toward the woundman’s head; it rebounded off the leather with a loud, wet whack.
Jean amused himself for a few minutes by laying into the woundman while Don Maranzalla watched. Mumbling to himself, the don then took the padded chain away and offered Jean a pair of matched blades. They were about a foot long, one-sided, with broad and curving cutting edges. The hilts were attached to heavy handguards, which were studded with small brass spikes.
“Nasty little bitches, these things. Generally known as thieves’ teeth. No subtlety to them; you can stab, hack, or just plain punch. Those little brass nubs can scrape a man’s face off, and those guards’ll stop most anything short of a charging bull. Have at it.”
Jean’s showing with the blades was even better than his outing with the lash; Maranzalla clapped approvingly. “That’s right, up through the stomach, under the ribs. Put a foot of steel there and tickle a man’s heart with it, and you’ve just won the argument, son.”