"So," The Masked told her, "do I."
He headed along the ridgepole. "Like it or not, we've plunged ourselves into the heart of this feud. If Mereirs and Telcanors both see us as having taken sides, and try to employ or manipulate us, we'd best play along. Doing some manipulating of our own, rather than remaining the bewildered, beset 'played.'"
"A noble and wise resolve," Tantaerra observed, joining him in a decorative but useless cupola that had no way down into the building beneath it, "but just how will we manage that? Or have you secret powers you haven't shared with me yet? Behind that mask, you don't happen to be one of the General Lords of Molthune, do you? Or something worse?"
Even in his own ears, The Masked's reply sounded rather bitter. "Something worse."
Luraumadar, the mask contributed helpfully, in the back of his mind.
"A rather powerless something worse, unfortunately," he added.
His halfling patron eyed him thoughtfully, obviously wondering what he meant, but said only, "I'd like to know more about that, masked man, but …later."
"Agreed," The Masked replied tersely, heading back along the ridgepole.
It was almost comical, how quickly startled faces disappeared from behind nearby windows. He hoped the Braganzans who lived in those houses were as sick of Mereirs and Telcanors bursting in to climb their stairs and peer out of windows as he would have been.
He and Tantaerra dropped down onto a heavily laden stonemason's cart and rode it for several blocks, just to irritate their pursuing spies. The Masked never caught sight of a certain pair of brown eyes among their observers, but he knew better than to assume the man from the temple roof in Halidon had been taken care of by the Telcanors last night. That sort of foe was never so easily gotten rid of.
The light was fading fast now.
"Do we pay Thaener's a late-night visit to do our washing?" Tantaerra asked, as they crossed yet another roof, this one adorned with silently screaming carved stone gargoyles.
"No. Someone will be waiting for us, well armed and in force."
They discussed various possible lairs for spending the night, and agreed on the best refuge-a tall, many-floored open skeleton of an unfinished building that had enclosed stairwells they might be able to barricade the tops of.
The Masked startled a cart-vendor by dropping down, apparently from the sky, to buy buns filled with cheese and spicy meats, to eat after dark.
Then they made for their chosen refuge, by as roundabout a way as they dared take in the gathering gloom.
It seemed deserted and ideal, as they huddled in dark silence, ate, and then settled down. The Masked never knew just when he dropped off to sleep.
∗ ∗ ∗
Luraumadar, the mask said urgently.
The Masked came awake out of a dark dream of finding himself in a vast, cold, soap-scummed bath with Tantaerra floating to the surface right beside him-drowned, dead, and staring at him reproachfully, her face frozen in her last despairing scream.
He blinked in the night-gloom, chilled and sweating, but relieved to find he'd been dreaming.
Relief that ended all too abruptly.
Tantaerra was trembling against him, and for good reason. As they lay together on the bare, unfinished floor, sword points gleamed down at them on all sides.
More than a dozen.
Splendidly armored men had somehow silently reached their rooftop and ringed them. One stood forth from his fellows, looming above The Masked and Tantaerra like a mighty statue in plate armor. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and what could be seen of his face in his magnificently crested helm was hard and cruel.
"Yield me your weapons," he commanded, reaching down an empty gauntleted hand.
Tantaerra gave him her first dagger with a hard throw, right at his face.
She was too close to miss, too close for him to move or strike it aside in time, too-
That gauntleted hand snatched the whirling dagger out of the air, then tightened around it. There was a sudden, shrieking snap from within that great fist.
The armored giant took a step forward, his armored fingers opened, and the shards of the halfling's broken dagger rained down into her disbelieving face.
Then he bent and took hold of their shoulders. His grip was like iron, grinding at The Masked's bones.
"Come, fools," this fearsome man announced coldly. "Your presence is required by a lord of Telcanor."
Chapter Eight
Tantaerra tried not to whimper. She was cold-thanks to being carried dangling and naked through the night, by cold metal gauntlets-and felt bruised all over. Every act of resistance had been rewarded by a hard, metal-shod punch to a joint, until she'd hurt too much to struggle. The Telcanors had stripped them then and there in that unfinished building, taking every last thing from them-except, she'd seen through tears of shame and pain, that The Masked must have somehow managed to get one of his fleshy masks in place, because when she managed to catch glimpses of him, he had a normal-seeming face, with a nose and cheeks and eyebrows instead of a melted ruin.
All else was gone, even the lockpicks and little knives in her hair. Naked before the gods, as some priests said. Bared and weaponless, in this chilly stone city of empty mansions and half-built future mansions …
They'd been carried-or, in The Masked's case, dragged-a long way through the sleeping streets of Braganza from where they'd been captured, ducking aside hastily from time to time to avoid Watchguard patrols. The patrols carried so many lanterns that Tantaerra was beginning to think that this was perhaps the point: to give large lurking bands of men and women plenty of warning to keep clear, so patrols would face a minimum of fighting and dying.
Whenever Watchswords were within earshot, the cruelly tight grip on her shoulders or neck became a stranglehold around her throat, quelling any shrieks or calls for help she might have been moved to make.
They'd crossed most of Braganza, she thought dazedly, as they turned through a tall, wide doorway at last. Guards stood aside and heavy bronze doors swung ponderously open, the cobbles beneath their striding captors' boots giving way to polished tiles. Huge low lamps-great castles of shaped glass and dangling ornaments, such as graced many high Canorate ceilings, only here their lowest teardrops were about the height of a short man's waist off the floor-blazed ruddily in a room paneled in dark woods and adorned with weapons hung on the walls. Walls that lofted up far beyond the highest spot she could twist around to see.
So this was either a palace, or a soaring city mansion indeed.
They left the lamplight and its countless ruby reflections behind, their captors hastening deeper into the vast building. More tall double doors, and more gleaming-armored guards, then a wide, curving stair of shallow steps that looked like smokeshot white marble, climbing and curving around to the left, a long way up, to a hallway floored in sheets of bright-burnished copper.
The warriors' boots hissed and slid on the polished metal as they strode down a dim and high-ceilinged passage to another set of stairs, this one narrow and steep and straight, with soft wine-red cloth underfoot. Then another hallway ascended to pair of huge high doors, which parted under the hands of formidable plate-armored guards to reveal a grand upper room that at last seemed to lack any additional stairs.
They had reached the top of this mansion, Tantaerra saw. The domed ceiling above had a great oval opening in its center, an intricate many-paned skylight that was all curlicues, brackets, and gilded glass. Rose-hued light flooded down on its edges from four directions, coming from lamps on half-seen roof spires that thrust up into the night sky.