I wondered why these women were working at 3:45 in the morning… but maybe Xavier kept his whole household on smugglers' hours. Work at night, sleep by day.
We passed the kitchen silently, drawing no attention from either woman. Next door was a pantry and next to that, windows covered with cheap curtains-probably the servants' quarters, with the curtains put up by the servants themselves to frustrate peeping toms.
Since I couldn't see anything in those rooms, I turned my eyes to the stables that paralleled the house across a gravel yard. Two four-horse coaches were parked in the open drive-shed; I wondered if Xavier had company, or if he'd simply purchased two carriages because they were cheaper by the pair.
Finally, we reached the back of the house: the side overlooking the lake. There was little to see but a great crinkled blackness beyond the edge of the bluffs. At the mouth of the harbor below, a small lighthouse lit the water around its footings, casting a few meters of dappled dimness. Apart from that, the only hints of light on the lake were brief reflections of stars, caught for fleeting instants on vagrant ripples. The rest of the vista was dark and cold.
In contrast, the rear of Nanticook House blazed with more lamps and hearth fires-just as many here as on the side facing the road. Yet the dining room was empty, the table bare. Beyond it was another drawing room, this one equipped with a bar: dozens of bottles on display, but no sign anyone ever drank from them. No hint that guests had ever pulled the chairs into a comfortable circle, or shoved furniture aside so there'd be room to throw darts.
I was beginning to think Warwick Xavier just didn't use the bottom floor of his house. Perhaps all life took place on the top story… yet there were no lights up there at all.
The next room looked equally ignorable. I was moving along when I nearly bumped into Dreamsinger-she'd stopped and was gazing inside, her eyes narrowed. Once more I glanced into the house but saw nothing of note; yet the Sorcery-Lord was staring as if enraptured.
I looked again at the house. Immediately my eyes shifted elsewhere: the lawn, the lake, the dark upper floor, any place but the room in front of me. Closing my eyes, I couldn't even picture what was in there-just that it was utterly uninteresting, not worth my attention.
Aha. This must be the "antiscrying field" Dreamsinger had mentioned while Twinned with Hump: an enchantment that made you believe the room was boring. Nanites inside my brain were playing games with my emotions and perceptions, perhaps raising my threshold of selective inattention whenever I looked in the room's direction-suppressing visual input so that it never reached my consciousness.
But Dreamsinger obviously could resist such trickery. She strode boldly forward, toward the room's windows. Assuming it had windows. Whenever I tried to look, my gaze slid off. It was better to watch the Sorcery-Lord herself, to train my eyes on her beautiful Hafsah derriere. That kept me moving ahead, despite a growing emotional force that pushed me away, crying, "Don't waste your time, there's nothing here!" Then I passed through some invisible boundary, the edge of the antiscrying field; and I could see Dreamsinger in front of me, reaching out, her hand touching window glass.
She whispered, "Boom."
The window exploded at Dreamsinger's touch, blasting shards of glass into the room. It was a big window; it had lots of glass.
The shards slashed like shrapnel into two brawny men who stood just inside. The men didn't have a chance: they went down under the barrage, blown off their feet, sliced by glass splinters. One man collided with a heavy chair, drove it forward half a meter, then toppled off sideways… striking the floor at an angle that shoved crystal daggers deeper into his flesh. Blood gushed from a severed artery-a fountain that lasted several seconds, then subsided to a pressureless drip.
The other man landed facedown on the carpet, slivers of glass protruding from his back like needles on a porcupine. He lifted his arm feebly, reaching blindly for nothing. Beneath his tattered clothes, bony spurs pushed weakly from the raised arm, then retracted again in defeat.
The spurs showed that Hump wasn't the only smuggler with pointy augmentation. Not that the spikes seemed to do much good. The man in front of us slumped unconscious and continued to bleed from a dozen lacerations.
Suddenly, I was grabbed from behind and thrown onto the muddy soil. "Idiot," Impervia whispered, pressing her body against my spine. I opened my mouth to protest but was drowned out by an eruption of gunfire from inside the house. Oops. I'd been so busy watching men die near the window, I'd never looked farther into the room. There must have been more guards inside, beyond the blast radius of the glass. Now they were shooting in our direction: shooting at Dreamsinger alone, since the Caryatid had hit the dirt beside Impervia and me.
The Sorcery-Lord made no effort to remove herself from the fire zone. As the shots continued, she stepped over the low windowsill and into the room itself. Bullets zinged through the air; a few passed through Dreamsinger's crimson cloak, tearing several holes in it before the cloak was ripped to rags… but the majority of shots were directly on target, plowing straight into Dreamsinger's body.
The bullets had no effect; they never quite made contact.
A violet glow had sprung up around the Spark Lord's outline, like a fringe of indigo fire. Each time a shot hit the glow, the bullet was met with violet flame-a blazing hot flame that dissolved the chunk of lead into spittles of molten metal. Stinking smoke filled the air as drops of liquefied lead fell to the floor… but none of it touched Dreamsinger. She just stood with a placid smile, waiting for the barrage to end.
Lying on top of me, Impervia whispered, "That glow around her… is it sorcery?"
"No," the Caryatid replied. "I've heard it called a force field. Projected by her armor."
"She's wearing armor?" I asked.
"What do you think she's wearing, idiot?" That was Impervia again.
"She's wearing Kaylan's Chameleon. Total coverage. I can't see a square millimeter of who she really is."
"Vanity, vanity," Impervia murmured. She shifted her body slightly against my back. "So, uhh, Phil… what do you see?"
I didn't answer.
The shooting dwindled to an anticlimax of prissy little clicks: firing pins hitting on empty chambers. A woman inside the house growled, "For God's sake, assholes, give it up. Xavier, will you please call off your dogs?"
A grunting sigh. "You heard her." An old man's gristly voice. "Stand down… but reload."
Both the man and the woman spoke with accents: something Central European. Teaching at the academy, I'd heard lots of accents from my students-but those accents were all upper class. The people in Nanticook House sounded rougher… more ragged and throaty.
"Warwick Xavier?" Dreamsinger asked.
"You know who I am," the man answered. A statement, not a question.
"She's a Spark," said the unknown woman inside. "She knows everyone." A pause. "Judging by the crimson armor, you're the female Sorcery-Lord. Serpent's Kiss."
"Serpent's Kiss was my predecessor. I'm Dreamsinger."
"Ach, such a fancy name," said Xavier. "Fine women, always so pretentious."
Impervia slid off me. On hands and knees she peered over the windowsill, into the room beyond. The Caryatid and I joined her-like the comic relief in a Shakespeare play, the three of us poking our noses up in the background while more important characters played the main action downstage.
Xavier stood beside the unknown woman at the far end of the room. He was white-haired, big-eared, stoop-shouldered, an imposing jowly man who might be as old as seventy, dressed in formal black-and-white; she was black-haired, fierce-eyed, sharp-boned, an imposing skeleton-thin woman in her early thirties, wearing gray silk pants and shirt, cut so loosely they seemed tailored for someone four inches taller and thirty pounds heavier. If Warwick Xavier was the Smuggler King, this woman might be his Queen or Crown Princess… either a wife half his age or his daughter. Maybe even granddaughter. Or perhaps she was his heir-apparent, ruthless in her own right and ready to take over as soon as the king showed weakness.