Shadow of the Father (35 page)

Sinch didn’t stop. He had made his way into a sweets store, where a middle-aged fox leaned on his stone counter. “Morning, sir,” he said. “What can I interest you in?”

Sinch gestured behind him, staying as far from the counter as he could. “My friends would like a sample,” he said, trying to keep his voice low. “Outhouse?”

“Certainly.” The fox reached under his counter and came up holding a tray. Maxon was already at the door of the store. “Right back there.”

“My thanks.” Sinch bobbed the fake head and hurried to the back of the store. Behind him, he heard Maxon telling the storekeeper that he was
not
interested in samples. He pushed the back door open and rushed into the sunlight.

The outhouse stood down the street, a communal one that Sinch could smell from fifty feet away. Traffic was sparser here in the street behind the shops, as most foxes were either hurrying toward the outhouse or away from it. It occurred to Sinch, belatedly, that he might have been better off remaining on the better-trafficked main thoroughfare, but it was too late for that now. He hurried toward the outhouse, looking around for any other foxes with cloaks to confuse pursuit, but there weren’t even any with covered heads. The warmth of the morning was already enough to keep cloaks and hats in wardrobes; Sinch was panting in the heavy cloak under the disguise.

He had no way of seeing where Maxon was behind him. All he could do was keep moving ahead as fast as he could. The costume was heavy on his shoulders, but he couldn’t take it off. Running through the crowd as a mouse would be even worse. Fortunately, he knew Maxon probably couldn’t run very fast.

He jogged around one fox and light flooded his eyes. The hood of the cloak had fallen back, exposing him to the sun and exposing “Kishin” to everyone around him. He cast wildly around for a place to hide while he replaced the hood, but just as he’d spotted a shadowy corner and moved in that direction, he found himself face to face with an elderly vixen.

The cloak hid his face from her, but she wasn’t looking down. She was looking straight ahead, into the glass eyes of the dead fox head. He moved out of her way as fast as he could, but a moment later he heard a piercing scream, and the bustle of heightened activity behind him.

As he ran, screams trailed behind him as “Kishin” fixed each fox with a dead stare and then moved on. Sinch would have to disassemble the whole costume, without someone to help him simply fix the hood. He couldn’t reach up there by himself. The shadowy corner he’d spotted just didn’t have enough cover. He stumbled on past it, staring at the street beyond. Angry yells punctuated the screaming now, the noise behind him loud. And there, ahead of him…

At the top of a small rise, a building with a round cupola, over which rose the five-pointed symbol of Canis. A church! It was a church of Canis, but it was still a church, still a sanctuary.

A paw grabbed at his cloak from behind. He pulled away from it, almost losing his balance in the process. His momentum carried him into a building, with a jarring thump, but somehow his legs kept him driving forward. Another paw grabbed at his cloak, pulling the fabric tight against his paws. He lost his grip on the cloak and felt it slip away, pulling the harness and the fox head with it.

They teetered unsteadily atop his head and shoulders. He tried to steady himself, but was moving forward too quickly. The straps threatened to pull him over backwards. There was nothing he could do but slide his arms out of them and jump forward.

“A mouse!” someone shouted. “By Canis’s fur…” The fox sounded about to be sick. More screams, higher-pitched now, chased Sinch up the hill. Unencumbered, Sinch sprinted forward. No paws touched him before he reached the church door. He turned as he pulled it open.

A small band of six foxes ran up the street toward the church.

Behind them, a crowd had gathered around the disassembled “Kishin.”

Further back, at the base of the street, Maxon, holding his leg, hobbled forward. His eyes blazed at Sinch, but whatever he was yelling was lost in the noise of the crowd. Sinch gave the steward a cheerful wave, and slipped inside the church.

The noise died down almost immediately, and disappeared altogether when the door swung shut. They would probably come in very soon. He padded quickly along the inside wall, looking up.

This church was smaller than any he’d been in back in Divalia, but still larger than a house. The fading frescoes around the upper tier of windows, depicting Canis as a fox, were a good thirty feet over his head, with the top of the dome, inset with the five-pointed star of Canis, another thirty feet over that. There were seats for perhaps fifty foxes, facing a single altar with a small silver circle of Gaia over top of a prominent silver symbol of Canis. The proportions bothered him a little, but only in the back of his head. To either side of the rows of seats, a small chapel was set into the wall. Sinch headed toward the chapel to the right, praying it would be empty. Coming around the side of it, he saw nobody on the bench, nobody reading the large book on the altar. He ducked around the corner and flattened himself against the wall just as the door of the church opened again.

“Spread out,” someone said. “Get to the back door first.”

Behind the alter which held the book, a worn curtain covered the back of the alter. Sinch looked down at the open book, which was thinner than the book of Gaia he was familiar with. Words on the page caught his eye: “…with all that ye do. For the cub steps in the path of the mother, and the shadow of the father falls across the path of the cub…” He didn’t have time to read more. Someone was coming along the aisle outside, slowly, no doubt looking down all the pews.

If this church were like the ones in Divalia… he offered up a short prayer to Rodenta and pushed aside the curtain at the back of the alcove. There was just enough space between it and the wall for him to fit and pull the curtain back across. But he wouldn’t be able to hide here, not if people searched the church. They would come into the alcove and smell him. He felt a moment of panic at the solid-looking stone wall and floor, and then remembered a lesson from his training. His paws skimmed the stones all along the wall as quietly as he could, looking for loose mortar between them. Behind him, he could hear foxes moving through the church, respectful but determined. They would be here at the chapel within a few minutes.

One of the stones shifted under his paw, a large one at waist level. He pushed and met resistance, but when he worked his fingers around the edge of the stone, it pivoted toward him with a scraping noise that echoed in the small chapel. And there in the space behind it was a narrow stair, leading down.

He climbed in quickly, head first. The inside of the stone, filthy with dirt and spiderwebs, had a crude handle carved into it that allowed him to pull it closed. He padded as quietly as he could down the stairs. He’d bought himself a few minutes, maybe more, depending on how assiduously the foxes searched and how common the knowledge of this passage was. All churches in Divalia had a crypt, the entrance concealed to varying degrees, many of them forgotten except by thieves. In the old Rodenta churches, bodies were stored in crypts to keep them safe from predators, but he hadn’t been sure a church of Canis would also have one. This one felt as though it hadn’t been trodden in several lifetimes.

The only problem was, he was trapped in here. According to Balinni’s map, there was not an entrance from the church into the sewer, and most crypts only had the one entrance. They often had places to hide, even if people did remember them. One thief, Sinch heard, had hidden three whole days in a crypt while the priest himself searched nearby without finding him, the ancient stones and the smell of mold hiding him completely.

Sinch made his way down the stone stairs into the chill of the cellar by feel. At the base of the stairs, the wall disappeared. His paw plunged into the space beyond and encountered bones. He jerked it back and stood perfectly still, listening for noise from above and absorbing the smell of must and mold while his eyes strained to adjust to the pitch darkness.

The bones meant that the gap in the wall was a mensa, a shelf built to put bodies to rest. Likely there were three: one at ground level, on at waist level, and one above his head, reserved for the most important burials. So this had been a functional crypt, unlike some of the ones in Divalia that were only ever used to store wine. Nobody had followed him down here, so probably the current residents had forgotten about it, since the Panbestian Church favored burials in churchyards and sacred ground rather than in underground rooms. He wondered how long it had been since anyone had been down here. There were no fresh smell of any sort, not foxes, not mice, not even wild mice. His paws found reliefs on the walls, and he spent a moment tracing them, trying to puzzle out the pattern in his head.

It would be nice to have a little more light to see the carvings. And to see whether there was another exit. Hesitantly, he walked along the wall again, but this time, when the wall went away, he didn’t probe the empty spaces. As much as his whiskers twitched at the thought of what these foxes might have been buried with, valuables that wouldn’t be missed by anyone, his first priority was to get out and find Yilon.

There were no other stairs. By the time he’d made a complete circuit of the crypt and investigated the crumbling columns in the center, he thought the foxes searching the church would have given up. He hoped so. Just pushing the stone aside to check would make enough noise to give him away, if anyone were within earshot.

He placed his paw on the stone. One more minute, he told himself. Just one more.

He told himself that then more times, and then finally pushed the stone as gently as he could. By working it slowly back and forth, he moved it as quietly as possible until he had a crack he could put his ear to.

The church was silent, empty of footsteps. He heard the low murmur of prayer, but no other sounds. Slowly, he worked the stone out, listened again for any disturbance, and then crept out. The curtain was still stretched across the space at the back of the alcove. Checking his surroundings at every turn, he made his way out of the church.

 
Yilon dreamed of standing under Menroc Falls in Vinton, but the falls had been suspended. As he looked, the cliff gave a low, shuddering groan and the water started falling. He couldn’t move. It cascaded over his face, dripping into his ears and eyes.

“Come on, get up.”

Water hit Yilon full in the face again, pouring into the ear that wasn’t squashed to the floor. He shook his head and sputtered, slowly becoming aware of the world around him: bright light piercing his eyelids, a throbbing pain on the side of his head, the smell of foxes and the acrid tang of blood, and a soft nasal whistle in front of him, as of a fox with a stuffy nose breathing quickly.

The high-pitched voice spoke again. “Didn’t hit you
that
hard. Delicate little thing. Not like him.” The wheezing grew louder. The voice came from right in front of him next. “Come on, eyes open. Look at me. That’s what you want. That’s why you broke in.”

Yilon lay on his side on the floor, his arms behind his back. When he tried to push himself upright, he found he couldn’t pull his wrists apart. His ankles, too, were fastened together with thick rope. His tail was kinked painfully beneath him, but he couldn’t manage to work it free.

He looked up at a short fox crouched next to him with a stone pitcher casually resting in one paw. The black fur of his lower forearms glistened wetly in the light as he set the pitcher on the floor. “There we are,” he said, and stood. One of his ears was partly missing, and his smile looked crooked.

Yilon blinked water from his eyes and flicked his ears. The water in them gave the world a faraway sound, as though someone else were speaking through the fox from far away. “Where… who are you?” he said through a mouth that felt stiff and sticky. Maybe the smell of blood was just from his own muzzle. He could taste it, now that he moved his tongue around.

“Silver Strad. Shreds.” The fox was about Yilon’s height. He wore a simple dark brown tunic fastened with a strap around the waist, and a dirty pair of short trousers that had once been white. With his right paw, he held a silver dagger, and it was the spatters of red all up and down the blade and handle that drew Yilon’s eyes. As he watched, a drop hanging from the point of the blade quivered and fell to the floor.

“Where’s Min?” Yilon demanded, with considerably more bravery than he felt.

Shreds waved the knife. “I didn’t ask his name. If you’re talking about the other thief who was skulking around, hee hee, he’s just over there.”

Yilon couldn’t make himself turn over to look where Shreds was pointing. The fox’s scent was strong and acrid up close, and nauseating in combination with the sour blood smell. The air in the room, stuffy and warm, made it hard to breathe. “If you’ve hurt him,” he said, even though it was an inane thing to say to the bloody knife.

“Hee hee,” Shreds said. “Hurt him? No, no, we’ve been playing, hee hee, greenstones. He lost.” He swung the knife back and forth. “I had a brother,” he continued. “We used to play greenstones.” His crooked ear flicked.

“When is your brother coming back?” screeched a voice from the hallway.

Shreds turned his head. “Shut up, Gran!’

“Where is Stewell?” she yelled. “There’s thieves about!”

“I know, Gran! I’ve got one in here now!”

The old vixen came shuffling into the room, carrying her tail in her arms and chewing at its tip. She eyed Yilon, and pointed a bony finger at him. “He said the lord was coming.”

Shreds pushed her quickly back. “Gran, hee hee, you’re not to come in here.” But she’d already looked over to the other corner of the room. She drew in a breath and started to scream.

“Oh,” Shreds said, and pushed harder. He turned to look over his shoulder at Yilon. “Don’t you, hee hee, go anywhere.”

Yilon watched them leave for the hallway, and struggled to free his wrists the moment Shreds was out of view. From the hallway, he heard the old vixen asking for Stewell again, her voice high and querulous. Shred’s responses were impatient and snappish, moving further down the hall.