Shadow Prowler (25 page)

That certainty was my undoing. As I landed one more time, I stopped to catch my breath and look up at the stars. I’m running out of time!

And then there was a mournful creaking sound under my feet. The kind of creak old doors make in abandoned houses. The roof started to shift under me, I flung my arms out, trying to keep my balance and not go tumbling down from the third floor onto the stone surface of the street, and at the same time I tried to jump away from the collapsing section of roof.

But I was too late.

The support fell away from under my feet, and I went flying down after it. There were glimpses of walls, dust rising from the collapsing roof, the starry sky.

And then there was darkness.

I
don’t think I lay there unconscious for very long. When I opened my eyes and looked up at the sky, the stars had hardly moved at all and the moon was still bright, not yet pale in anticipation of morning.

I groaned and tried to sit up. Surprisingly enough, none of my bones seemed to be broken. Naturally, I was highly delighted. If I’d broken my leg or—Sagot forbid—my back, I’d have been lying there waiting for the dawn to come.

I hadn’t fallen very far. The ceiling was very close—if I just stood up, reached out my hand, and jumped, I could reach it with my fingers. I seemed to be in some room on the third floor. The floor was supporting both me and the collapsed section of the roof, on the rubble of which I had made such a successful landing. If I’d gone on down through all the floors to the ground, the king would have been unlikely ever to see me again.

I got to my feet and cautiously moved my arms, still not believing that I wasn’t hurt. I had to get out of there; that child’s crying was having a bad effect on my nerves.

Stop!

What crying?

It felt like I was suddenly fastened to the floor with a single gigantic nail. I started feverishly trying to understand where the thought about a child’s cry had come from.

Yes, there was something there. Something on the very borderline of my consciousness as I was falling into the darkness. Something that had woken me, called me back from oblivion.

Crying. That familiar child’s crying.

As if in reply, and in confirmation of all the laws of universal beastliness and my own anxious fears, I heard a quiet sobbing in the dark corner of the room. Feeling rather far from my best, I nervously took out the magical trinket and held it out in front of me at arm’s length.

The old room had walls with peeling wallpaper, a scraped and battered wooden floor, and a little girl standing in the far corner, gazing at me with her green eyes.

She was no more than five years old. Golden hair in unruly curls, plump rosy cheeks with the traces of tears, rosebud lips, a dirty, torn little dress, bare feet, and a tattered plush toy—either a dog or a mouse—in her hands. A charming little child who could model for the frescoes in holy shrines.

Except that her still eyes were filled with the anticipation of a snake, the hatred of a wolf, and hunger of an ogre. And lying beside her was my glove, the one I had abandoned in the judge’s house.

The little girl sobbed.

Moving very, very slowly, I bent down to pick up my crossbow from where it was lying on the floor. At the precise moment when my fingers closed on the weapon, the little girl sobbed for the last time and then gave a quiet, malevolent laugh.

I froze. So we had met at last. This was the Jolly Weeper in person.

The eyes of the creature—I can’t carry on calling it a child—glinted, a wall of rotten air struck me in the face, and I went flying back against the opposite wall. The magical light started blinking and fading rapidly. It was swiftly getting dark in the room, with only those green eyes radiating light, hypnotizing me and suppressing my will, flooding my brain with a sticky mist of calmness.

“Don’t sleep! Shoot!” someone’s cool, imperious voice ordered, and the mist in my head began dissipating rapidly.

My ears were assaulted by a shriek of protest. The creature could feel that it was losing control over me. I could move again now and, taking my aim at those poisonous green eyes, I pressed both triggers of the crossbow almost simultaneously. The first, ordinary bolt stuck the laughing creature in the shoulder, spinning it halfway round, but it only gave a triumphant little chuckle and continued moving toward me without even pausing.

The magical bolt of fire followed its ordinary brother home and struck the creature in the chest.

A bright flash of fire liberated from its magical captivity, a rumbling sound, and a squeal of protest.

One . . . two . . . three . . . I took my hands away from my face and cautiously opened my eyes. The room was empty. The light from the magical trinket was gradually growing stronger, timidly illuminating the old room and the carnage that had been wrought in it.

The Jolly Weeper had disappeared; there wasn’t even any ash left behind. Either the fire had really destroyed it, or the vile creature had cleared off to somewhere a bit less hot. To be quite honest, it was all the same to me, as long as it was nowhere near me any longer.

“Thank you, Valder. You popped up at just the right moment,” I mumbled, but there was no reply.

Walking out of the room, I saw a wooden stairway leading downward. I had no more desire to travel across the ancient roofs. I had enough bruises already and I didn’t feel like tempting fate yet again.

I slipped out onto the Street of the Magicians. The final drops of time were draining away into the sand. One hour, or even less, and the horizon that was still dark would flare up in the bright flash of an irrepressible summer dawn.

I started moving faster, slipping through the shadows, forward—to where the narrow street broadened out into a small square.

I didn’t even notice how I got there. I simply stopped, enveloped in the cloak of shadow cast by an old two-story house with no roof. Opposite me there was another house, the final beacon of human habitation before the empty square.

And there ahead of me the appalling two-story stump of the old Tower of the Order stood in mute, agonizing reproach, alone and dead. The power of the Kronk-a-Mor had not spared it; there was nothing left of the structure’s former grandeur and elegance. The black blizzard had made short work of the once-beautiful creation of the magicians of the Order.

“What have you done, Zemmel!” Valder groaned.

Yes, an appalling catastrophe had taken place here, and I certainly didn’t envy those who had been nearby when the raging elements had broken free of control. There wasn’t a single stone left on the square, it was absolutely bare, surrounded by the skeletons of houses and flooded by the light of the setting moon, like some meadow in a fairy tale.

The tower had once had not just three, but many floors, and when the explosion happened, the debris should have been scattered right across the square. But it wasn’t there. The square was clean and empty. As if the rubble had just evaporated.

“How long are we going to go on standing here? Time’s wasting.” The sudden sound of a voice from the dense darkness of the house across the road startled me out of my mournful thoughts. I stared across the road in amazement.

The words had obviously been spoken by a living man, not some insubstantial phantom.

“Calm down, Shnyg. Or do you want to end up like good old Rostgish?” a repulsive, squeaky voice replied.

“Calm down Shnyg, calm down Shnyg,” the first voice grumbled. “It was Rostgish’s own fault. He let his guard down and let a dead man get his teeth into him. Let’s get those plans then cut and run.”

“Just how do you suggest we get into that damned tower? We have to think the whole business through, or we won’t get out of this alive.”

“You do the thinking, Nightingale,” Shnyg said angrily. “Morning’s already on the way, it’s time to get out of here.”

“Shut up, will you! I’m thinking,” Nightingale barked, and Shnyg shut up.

Right. I know those names. The two master thieves Shnyg and Nightingale work for the guild, and that means they work for the slimebag Markun.

They’re not such bad lads, really, but their work’s a bit sloppy.

And I knew Rostgish, too, may he rest in the light. He appeared in Avendoom a couple of years ago and attached himself to this pair. Not a master thief. He drank too much. Those must have been his remains that I came across on the Street of the Sleepy Cat.

I wonder what in the name of Darkness they want in the Forbidden Territory?

“Have you got the plan?” Nightingale hissed.

His shrill, squeaky voice was painful to hear, but the thieves didn’t seem to think there was any need to hide, and they made enough noise for the whole street to hear. “The one we got from the Royal Library? Here it is. Light it up.”

“What with?” Nightingale muttered. “That damned Rostgish had all the lights.”

Aha! So they were the ones that the old man Bolt was talking about. “Gray and untalkative.” Shnyg and Rostgish must have gone to the library. The old man would have remembered Nightingale.

They’d stuck some important gent’s ring under Bolt’s nose, hadn’t they? Ah, I never thought to ask the old man about the ring, I thought it was all a senile old fool’s imaginings. I’ll have to go back and have a proper heart-to-heart talk with him. So who was it that sent them?

“We have to get those cursed maps or whatever else before that skunk gets there ahead of us.”

“What are you so nervous about?” asked Nightingale, as calm and rational as ever. “Harold won’t try sticking his nose in here any time soon.”

“That Harold has really got up everyone’s nose. Markun boils over at the very mention of his name, and the client said we should do away with him if it came to it. And the individual our client serves—which means that we do, too—is beginning to express his dissatisfaction.”

“Do away with him?” Nightingale said with a nasal snigger. “Have you completely lost your wits, Shnyg? That lad might look feeble and skinny, but I’ve no intention of tangling with Harold. We do the job, hand over the Commission, take the money, and clear off to warmer parts. For the high life beyond the mountains. No one will ever find us there. We don’t want to be hanging about with the Darkness.”

“Do you think it’s that easy to get away from the Master?” a mocking voice asked, and I shuddered.

I would have known that voice anywhere, out of a thousand. It had changed a lot, lost that lifeless, dead tone, but I still recognized it. It was the voice of the same being that had spoken with the duke and then killed him. That winged creature of the night.

“Don’t even think about trying to run. You will only go when he lets you go, little man. You are faithful to the Master, aren’t you?”

“I am faithful.” Nightingale’s voice sounded hoarse and frightened. “We are faithful.”

“Yes, yes, Your Grace, we are faithful to the Master,” Shnyg confirmed in an ingratiating tone.

There was a quiet laugh of satisfaction in the darkness, and I thought I glimpsed a brief flash of golden eyes.

“Clever little men,” the creature drawled. “Get the maps and destroy them, and then you can clear out of here to anywhere you want.” There was a note of undisguised contempt in the emissary’s voice.

“B-b-but, Your Grace . . . ,” said Shnyg, clearly very surprised. “The client said to bring the papers to him. We can’t just—”

Shnyg broke off his tirade and started wheezing for some reason, and his partner gasped out loud in fright.

“The Master is not used to hearing ‘we can’t.’ He needs servants who can! Those who are incapable of carrying out an elementary assignment are not worthy to serve him; they are useless!”

Shnyg’s wheezing became a charming gurgling.

“May I be allowed to remark that Shnyg did not at all wish to seem to be useless!” Nightingale started keening. “We’ll go and get those papers right now!”

I heard the sound of a body hitting the ground and Shnyg wheezing in relief as he tried to force some air back into his lungs.

“You know that your client also serves the Master, and the Master says that the maps of Hrad Spein must be destroyed, otherwise they might fall into the hands of the king and his attendants. Tell that to the fool whom you call your client. He may be rich, but that does not mean he can think he is a link of Borg. Let him remember the deceased Duke Patin.”