The idea that Oriosans always do something for a reason began to bounce around inside Will’s skull. He started to wonder what purpose Nefrai-kesh would have for showing up at the trial. Sure, his appearance in the palace was likely to scare a lot of folks—Scrainwood first among them. But a better way to scare a lot of folks would have been for the sullanciri just to kill Scrainwood. Having Linchmere on the throne would have terrified everyone in Oriosa and well beyond its borders.
The sullanciri couldn’t actually have intended to come to give testimony. That made no sense whatsoever. Crow’s fate really didn’t matter, and if Chytrine wanted Crow dead, she could have sent the sullanciri into his cell. Making folks use the laws of a nation to kill an innocent man might strike some nobles as a horrible thing, but Will was fresh from war and knew that anything Scrainwood might have done to Crow would be, odds on, more pleasant than the sort of death found on a battlefield.
By the gods—/ should have seen it immediately! Will began to run through the streets, dodging carts, slipping in muddy slush, going down, splashing, getting up again, and continuing as fast as he could. He leaped over snowdrifts, ducked, and twisted through the middle of a snowball war and shoved slower people aside. Ignoring the cries of the few who went down, he sped on, ever faster, toward the Rampant Panther.
There was only one reason that Nefrai-kesh would risk showing up at the trial, and that was misdirection. If there was going to be any alarm sent up, it would summon all of the guards to the palace. And the false flag of truce makes folks believe he means no harm, but I don’t believe that at all. Putting Nefrai-kesh in the palace was a risk, but Chytrine would only undertake that risk for a greater gain, and there was only one thing in Meredo that she wanted that badly.
The ruby fragment of the DragonCrown!
Will burst through the inn’s door and bolted immediately for the stairs to the rooms. He held his left hand up beside his face, half in a wave, but mostly to hide the fact that he had no mask on. He hit the landing and doubled back to the second floor, then dashed along the corridor toward the last room on the right.
Time slowed for Will despite his haste. He studied the floor at that end of the corridor, for Kerrigan’s room was right across the hall from his own. Before leaving that morning he’d checked Kerrigan’s room and had placed a thread between the door and the jamb that would fall out if the door had been opened. More important, Will had used lampblack to darken a couple of knots in the wooden flooring. Had a boot brushed over them, the scuff marks would have showed clearly. Will had avoided them himself, and Resolute had been warned, so only a thief would run afoul of it.
Or Kerrigan, which would be a big help.
As he neared the door he picked the dark thread out against the blond wood. That allowed him a touch of relief, then he slowed and dropped to one knee to survey the knots. Two remained black as puddles of ink, but the third had changed. No streaks, as if anyone had stepped on it, but it had a big flat splash of grey in it.
Dust.
Will looked up at the short rafter running across the width of the corridor. The dust up there had to be thicker than the snow in the streets, and it was possible a cat had wandered along that beam, but Will wasn’t of a mind to be considering cats when a thief might be about. Glancing at the wall above the door, he saw a couple of faint marks, the origin of which he couldn’t imagine, but he knew they’d not been there earlier. Which meant someone was stealing his DragonCrown fragment.
Drawing his dagger, Will stepped to the door and opened it. The oil lamp behind him stabbed a wedge of yellow light into the tiny room that had housed Kerrigan. The thief’s line of sight was drawn upward, to the rafter’s continuation in the room, and the figure hunched and huddled in the lurid scarlet glow. What he saw sent two emotions through him, the first quickly being subsumed by the second.
The first emotion was pure elation as he saw that the trap he and Kerrigan had set had functioned far better than he could have hoped. To hide the DragonCrown fragment they searched the room and in that rafter found a rot-hollow right where the beam had been reinforced by two other pieces of lumber. Kerrigan had used magic to strengthen the beam, melding those two sections of wood into the original. At the same time he reshaped the hollow to fit the DragonCrown fragment snugly inside. At Will’s suggestion Kerrigan narrowed the hole a thief would reach through, so it would be too small to let him slip a hand back out when he had the gem in it.
Kerrigan had enhanced this situation further by casting another spell on the fragment that would make it as sticky as a spider’s web, guaranteeing that any thief who wanted to get away would have to leave his hand behind.
Worked like a charm.
The second emotion completely smothered his elation at success. Pure fear poured into Will as he saw what they’d caught. The creature had the bulk of a large dog or a small bear, and its body bristled with four-inch-long hairs on its bare body and head and legs, with a thick down covering its back. Its i shoulders were hunched as it tugged mightily to free its right hand, with its i legs bunched and pushing.
All eight of the legs!
With a moment’s retrospect Will realized he should have recognized the thing as a spider, for the body came in segments and the four pairs of legs from the middle looked like spider’s legs. The fact that the creature was huge beyond all imagining could have fooled him, but it wasn’t the deciding factor.
Aside from being blue, save for the bristles of black hair, what forced away the judgment was the human torso that rose from the creature’s middle. While the chest was smaller than it should have been for the arms and head, and while blue down did carpet that section of the body, it was unmistakably human.
Then the creature turned and looked at him with bubbled eyes and wickedly curved mandibles. The mouth parts worked and Will heard something that almost clicked and growled its way into a semblance of human speech. An angry hiss capped the remark and the creature gave another hard tug on the fragment.
“You’re caught now, thief!”
Will brought the dagger up to his ear and whipped it forward. Though entirely unbalanced for throwing, the dagger sped to its target. The hilt smashed the creature in the middle of the back, wrenched a clicked howl from its throat, then bounced back down onto Kerrigan’s bed.
Sprinting into the room, Will dove and grabbed for the dagger. As his right hand closed on the hilt, something grabbed his jacket right between his shoulder blades. Will twisted around to slash at whatever had him, and discovered the thing had shifted to the bottom of the rafter and had grabbed him with its left hand. Will cut at the arm, drawing blood, but failed to win his release.
The spider-thing hauled Will up and smashed his head against the rafter. Stars exploded, and Will must have blacked out for a moment, because when the world swam back into focus, he found his legs wrapped in webbing and the left arm holding him by the front of his jacket. Black blood oozed from the wound and began to soak into his clothing. It had an acrid scent akin to burning nutmeats.
The creature thrust its face to his and snarled. That close to it, Will caught some hint of familiarity that told him who his captor was. The realization shook him. The Azure Spider!