Half an hour after I’d admitted to myself that I had to try, I was sliding down the leaded roof into an oddly shaped little valley made by the nearby intersections of several roof segments. As long as I stayed low, the various bits of steeply slanting lead would hide me from the watchers on the ground.
The sun was up by then, but not yet so high I could see it over the rooftops. The thought of making noise still made me nervous, but I really needed to let my familiar know where we stood. I also needed to give him the option of talking me out of my insane little plan since I hadn’t been able to drop my shroud and consult with him before. Now I released my hold on Triss, and, an instant later, a small dragon’s shadow lay beside me on the leads. I spilled the story to date in the ghost of a whisper.
“What do you think?” I asked finally. “This is our last chance to give this up and slip away clean.”
“I owe Maylien as much as you do. She saved you for me as much as she saved me for you.”
I suppressed an urge to tell him that balance didn’t come out even, not with the current Aral on one side of the scales anyway. I didn’t think he’d appreciate the sentiment, not even in jest.
Instead, I drew a knife and placed its edge against the lead of the roof, and said, “Then we go in.”
Triss nodded, and the familiar cold-silk feeling of his presence slid up my body and down my arm to the knife’s edge. It took less than a minute to slice open three sides of a square, allowing me to pry up a flap of lead and expose the underlying planks. I didn’t want them tumbling noisily to the floor of the attic below, so I was more careful now, working between two joists and lifting the boards out as I cut them free. Another few minutes, and I was able to poke my head through the narrow gap and take a quick look around.
The attic ranged in height from next to nothing at the edges to over twelve feet at the nearest visible peak. It was also a maze, mirroring the tangled structure of the roofs above. The detritus of generations of owners lay strewn around, all of it covered in dust and the various leavings of the house’s less official residents. Without moving, I could see clear evidence of slinks, pigeons, rats, and nipperkins.
The roof hung within a few feet of the attic floor here, which allowed me to collect the planks and, with Triss’s aid, lever the flap shut behind me. The whole process was quiet and fast but not silent. There was nothing I could do about that except tuck the fresh-cut planks as far back under the eaves as possible and move fast. That, plus the size and cluttered nature of the attic and the closing of the flap, would conceal my point of entrance even from a dedicated searcher. Hopefully for long enough.
“Triss, can you scout around and see what options we have for getting downstairs?”
“Of course.” The near-total darkness of the attic allowed Triss the freedom to thin himself out and expand to many times his normal area, sliding along the floor’s surface and encompassing the space within himself.
“There are two small trapdoors,” he said, when he returned a few seconds later. “There’s also a main stair down to what’s probably the servants’ wing, and a second, narrower stair going who knows where. More importantly, I found a good-sized gap that opens into the top of one of the interior walls. It’s covered by a trunk that’s nailed to the floor.”
“False bottom in the trunk.”
“Almost certainly.”
“Nice! I haven’t seen that trick in ages.”
A lot of great houses had secret passages or rooms. Some provided hidey-holes for goods or people. Many opened into escape routes or provided access to nearby chambers for clandestine affairs. Others had been put in for purposes of spying on the guests, or murdering them in their beds. All of them were an assassin’s friend.
“Guide me to the trunk.”
Triss shifted so that I could feel his presence as a pair of invisible hands on my shoulders. He steered me swiftly through the darkness to the trunk. It was a huge thing of oak and rusted iron, with a couple of giant splits at the corners. The no-doubt carefully-thought-out combination made it look too heavy to bother moving and too ruined to sell. Opening the lid revealed a mess of moth-eaten old wool that seemed to cry out for mice and rats to come and make a nest of it.
“Triss?”
Shadow gloved my hands as I reached into the tangle, groping for . . . there! A few inches under the surface, I found an iron loop. Pulling on it pivoted the shallow tray full of wool up and out of the way, revealing a dark opening.
Sliding a leg over the lip of the trunk, I felt around with my foot until I found the top of a wooden ladder leading down into the wall. Another iron loop pulled the tray back into place above me, while a long rod connected to the trunk’s hinges quietly closed the lid. The ladder descended perhaps twelve feet to a wide plank set loosely across the deep floor joists. Pulling my tiny thieveslight from the trick bag, I shined the dull red beam around. I was in a narrow space between the walls, with a dead end a few feet to my left and a narrow passage heading away on my right.
Every couple of yards a gap between planks opened down into the joists, where more boards had been mounted just above the ceilings of the rooms below, allowing a person to crawl down and into those ceilings. At a guess, some of those would cross-connect to other passages in the walls. It made for a pretty typical network of the spying and murdering sort.
“Triss, can you slip around through the walls and see if there’s any light or sound coming from anywhere close at hand?”
The shadow of a dragon appeared on the wall, and Triss nodded once before extending himself like a snake, slithering down into the depths of one of the floor gaps. Almost as soon as Triss had gone, he returned. Shaking his head, he tried another. On the fourth attempt I felt a sudden tug along the thread of shadow linking us. He’d found something. Closing up my lamp, I bent and slipped into the gap, scraping my still-healing back against the bottom of the wall as I did so.
Fuck, but that hurt! Clenching my jaw to keep from swearing aloud, I started crawling. It was hard on my much-abused body, harder than all the climbing and roof jumping had been earlier. Maybe because climbing and roof jumping were a part of my regular routine even as a jack.
I passed under a second overhead passage and into another ceiling before I saw daylight shining up through a gap just beyond the next wall. It was coming around the edges of a tiny wooden slide affixed to the floor. When I moved it, I could see about three-quarters of a large room that might once have been an audience chamber of some sort. Judging by the angle and the restrictions on my view, the peephole was hidden in the crown molding, an observation the professional side of my brain made and filed away independently of the emotional side, which had an entirely different and more intense focus.
Maylien! She sported a number of minor cuts and a really spectacular black eye, but she was alive. She sat sullenly against the far wall, not far from the filthy eastern windows that provided the light. She wore a loose shirt and something midway between a split skirt and pair of bloused pants, similar to a noble’s dueling clothes, but in coarse peasant fabrics. It was not all that different from what I was wearing, actually.
She had chains on her wrists and ankles. And she wore the most murderous expression I’d seen on any woman’s face since Siri had missed her shot at the High Khan of Avars after we’d gone through a week of maneuvering to set up the kill. The khan had died old and in his sleep—bastard.
Maybe ten feet to Maylien’s left a man sat with his feet up on a scarred oak table. He had one hand hooked through the loop on the end of a rope pull. The rope, in turn, ran across the table, connecting to the release on a very heavy steel blade suspended between two wooden tracks. I recognized the design as having been stolen from the Sylvani Empire’s latest device for making beheading more efficient.
Underneath the blade sat a small wicker cage holding something gray and fluffy. I couldn’t tell what it was from that angle, but judging by the way it kept pacing and growling, it was very, very angry.
“They’re threatening her familiar to keep her under control!” Triss hissed in my ear, his voice aseethe with rage. “We’ve got to do something!”
“Sst!” I made an angry chopping motion, signaling him to shut up.
He did because it was the smart thing to do. But the way he kept sliding back and forth across my back like an agitated snake told me everything I needed to know about his continued fury. I felt the exact same way. Threatening a familiar was the usual way you controlled a mage. We’d both seen it dozens of times in the past, but after our own recent imprisonment, it struck a lot closer to home. The man with the rope didn’t know it yet, but he was about to meet the lords of judgment.
The cleanest way to come at the problem would have been to back up about two rooms and find a quiet way down to the lower floor. Then sneak around to nail him with a shadow-sharp thrust through the wall he was leaning against. Done properly, it would kill him so quickly he’d never have a chance to even think about tugging on that rope. But clean took time we really didn’t have.
Not when Devin might come back at any moment. Not with a small army waiting to attack the house, likewise at any moment. And especially not with that bastard holding a rope he could pull at any moment. No, I needed to do this quick and dirty and I needed to find some way to pin that rope down for a bit.
A spell-guided throwing knife might have served, but there was no way to get that to work through the peephole. Likewise an arrow if I’d had a bow and room to draw it. I had a few blowdarts in my pouch, but the broken-down blowgun was stowed with the bulk of my gear in a chimney on top of the Ismere Club.
Come on, Aral. Think! There must be something.
But my mind kept going around in the same circle: knife, arrow, dart, knife, arrow . . . Wait a moment. Could I . . . ?
“Triss,” I breathed in a voice lighter than any whisper. “Do you think you could make yourself into a tube for a blowdart? I need to pin that rope.”
Triss froze on my back, digging his claws in lightly.
After a moment he replied just as quietly, “Maybe.” Then, more confidently, “Yes. Yes, I could.”
The rest of the plan fell together in my head. Quick and dirty to be sure, but also reasonably likely to succeed. I slid the peephole closed and neatly laid my tools out on the planks around me. First, my swords, about a handspan behind the peephole with the hilts toward the hole. Next, a long steel blowdart, one of six in my trick bag. After that, I very carefully reversed my position so that the bulk of my body lay above the audience chamber. Finally, I told Triss what I wanted him to do. As soon as he nodded in agreement, we began.
Opening the peephole once again, I took a quick look to make sure nothing had changed. Then I rose as high as the constricted space would allow and set the blowdart between my teeth. It was instantly surrounded by a hollow tube of night that ran from my lips down and through the peephole. Without looking—it was Triss’s job to make sure it hit the target—I blew as hard as I could. As soon as the dart left the gun, I reached for my swords.
In that same instant, Triss shifted back to dragon form and pressed himself flat along the boards beneath me, pushing hard. Just as he had when he freed me from Lok’s dungeon, he slowly forced his wings forward while contracting down to a pinpoint. Then I was falling through a dragon-shaped hole in the ceiling, my swords in my hands. I landed on my feet and let myself tumble backward into a roll. Spinning as I came upright again, I leaped forward to chop the guard’s hand off at the wrist before he could free the rope from the dart temporarily pinning it to the table.
The guard clutched at his hand and started screaming, but not for long. I silenced him with a thrust of my second sword. As I started to tug the chopping blade free of the table, Maylien shrieked an unfamiliar word in a voice both louder and more frightened than the guard’s.
I turned to find her pointing back over my shoulder toward the hanging blade, and I knew without looking there must have been a second guard concealed in the peephole’s blind spot. I left one sword stuck in the table as I pivoted on the ball of my foot and dove, sliding on my belly across the floor toward the falling blade. The distance was short, but so was time.
All I could do was punch the little wicker cage hard with my empty hand and hope I’d gotten there fast enough. The cage bounced away in the instant before the falling blade dropped into the space it had just occupied. I should have lost a hand then. Would have, too, if Triss hadn’t managed to catch the blade in the inches before it could hit the floor.
That took all his strength and focus, at least for a few seconds. But even with Triss intervening, the blade pinned my wrist, leaving me dreadfully exposed. Trying hard not to imagine the feeling of the guard’s weapon driving deep into my back, I slid my sword under the edge of the bigger blade and used it as a lever.
As soon as I freed my hand, I started rolling, aiming toward the place I’d last seen the guard who had, very obligingly, not yet stabbed me in the back. That probably had something to do with his shrieks and the squalling and hissing of Maylien’s familiar, all of which came from the same direction. But I really hadn’t had time to look.