Yet the banality of it all was a sign of its own. The norren struck the wall, rested a moment, struck the wall, rested. Others knelt among the clouds of dust and swept up loose rocks. It seemed suddenly foreign, even monstrous, that Cassinder should
own
men the same way he owned their shovels and buckets. Not that Dante was alone in this thought. There were abolitionists wherever there were slaves. Its wrongness was simply obvious to him now in the same way his acceptance of it had been obvious earlier that day. The servants at Narashtovik's Sealed Citadel, were they slaves or paid hands? Dante had no idea. In the darkness, his cheeks flushed red.
He didn't speak much on the way back, which surely suited Cassinder fine. The midday sun was full but so lacking in warmth Dante could still see the foggy ghost of his own breath. The echoing halls of the house at Beckonridge were nearly as cool as the outdoors, but the fire in his sparse room had been kept stoked in his absence by able servants. The room was so hot his skin itched.
"What do you think?" Dante said, shedding his coat and stripping off his doublet.
"That you should do more pushups," Blays said.
"About the bow, dummy."
"That just maybe it's up in that tower he refused to let us see inside."
"I agree with you. Which makes me very scared."
Blays gestured at the squeaky-boarded floor. "How much longer can we depend on a nobleman's hospitality towards his own kind? Cassinder's the type of guy who wouldn't let the friends he doesn't have stay more than a few days."
Dante circled the room, as if the motion would unwind the contents of his head. "We'll move tomorrow night. That will give us another day to search and the clan to prepare. Get your stealing shoes on."
"Who says I ever take them off?"
Dante passed word of the decision to Mourn, who promised to deliver the message that night. Dante didn't tell Gala or Lira, the former because he didn't think she'd care one way or the other, and the latter because Lira's earnest loyalty (she'd done nothing but play the part of a servant since arriving at Beckonridge) and almost too-convenient method of meeting them on the river had Dante privately concerned she might not be who she said she was. Which was perhaps paranoid, given the broken leg and the starvation and all, but if her life-debt nonsense was as heartfelt as she claimed, she would happily follow them into the gall bladder of a firesquid. By contrast, accompanying them on a midnight break-in to a crumbling tower would be no trouble at all.
In the morning, a bleary-eyed Mourn told them word had been passed, with Orlen planning to raid the mine at 1 AM. In case the clan and Dante's party stayed separated, they'd reconvene at the
Boomer
. Dante and Blays spent the day pumping Cassinder's servants on the history and lore of Beckonridge, recruiting Mourn to do the same from his side of the social strata, hoping to induce a revelatory brag about the bow. In this way, they coaxed the majordomo into confessing the estate's purchase of the Clan of the Green Lake had come with the acquisition of a weapon of "no small power." When Dante pressed for details, the man implied in the politest and most deniable terms that Dante might be a lord, but he was still a
foreign
lord, and it was not the majordomo's place to reveal what might well be considered a secret of the state.
Still, besides being shot with the bow itself, it was the best confirmation Dante could have hoped for. He went to bed with the same childlike anticipation he'd once felt for Falmac's Eve. Much like that day of meat pies, fermented cider, and tiny wooden one-eyed idols, it would probably all be over before he knew it.
He met Blays in the hallway at midnight, or as close to it as he could reckon by the stars. Except for the sporadic crackle of fireplaces, the manor was silent and all but completely dark; the wall candles had burnt out or been put out, leaving the starlight to fight its way through windows that had iced over in the night. Dante crept down the spiral staircase, feeling the way with his feet. If they were intercepted by anyone with the courage and authority to question them, Blays' idea of a cover story was they were meeting with Lira in order to arrange a surprise feast for their host—a story which they would, through awkward phrasing and embarrassed glances, in turn imply to be a cover for your typical perverse aristocratic sex with the help—but by the time they met Lira in the servants' kitchen and its faded yet cloying scents of rendered fat and boiled beets, they hadn't seen another soul.
She led them into the biting night. The dirt road was frozen underfoot. Frost glittered from the weeds. Dante heard no baying of hounds, saw no sudden lighting of lanterns. Under starlight, they'd be nearly invisible. He kept the nether close. Its cold pulse mirrored his own. His breath swirled from his mouth, hanging in the damp air. Mourn and Gala waited for them beyond the first ridge, swords on hips.
"The clan will move soon," Mourn said. "Don't expect subtlety."
Blays snorted. "You guys are seven feet tall and weigh as much as a statue of yourselves. I don't think you do
anything
subtly."
"This isn't just a rescue," Gala said. "It's vengeance."
"Good," Dante said. "Then Cassinder's soldiers will be too busy dying to notice we're stumbling around in their tower stealing their things."
He could see it already, a fingerlike silhouette rising from the opposite rim of the valley. He wanted to run to it, but maintained a brisk walk instead. The tower arrived soon enough. Standing beneath its hundred-foot rise of white stone, Dante could feel every ounce of its weight. Its very star-cast shadow pressed on him, simultaneously holding him down and compelling him onward. He pulled the door's huge iron ring; the door didn't budge.
"What would you do without me." Blays knelt beside the lock, an outrageously huge pad that could be repurposed as an anvil at a moment's notice.
"I'd ask Mourn to smash the lock right off," Dante said. "I assumed picking it would make less noise, but I forgot that would leave your mouth as free as ever."
Blays unfolded a leather case of narrow metal prods, hooks, and squiggle-tipped wires. When they'd first met, Blays had been a devoted student of the school of "bash it once, and if that doesn't work, bash it harder," but over the last year or two he'd taken to practicing methods that left locks, knobs, and hinges intact, recognizing that much of their work in the Norren Territories was the kind that must be denied rather than gloated about. His interest in the skill had doubled at a party in Narashtovik at Duke Abbedon's manor which Dante's position on the Council forced them to attend. On hearing the Abbedon kept his best wines beside his own bed, Blays went upstairs, trailed by a young lady he'd been after all night. The duke's bedroom bore not one but three locks, but Blays had them off in seconds, so impressing the lady that it took no kits or tools whatsoever to pry her from her dress then and there.
Beneath the white tower, Blays set to his task with uncommon sobriety, methodically wiggling a number of thin rods into the lock's keyhole, squinting into the empty night as he poked and worried the tools about its raspy interior, guided by touch and sounds far too arcane for Dante to differentiate. Exhausting one pick, Blays swapped it out for another and leveraged a third thicker tool into the tumblers and latches lurking inside.
"I don't think this is happening," he said after a couple minutes of jiggling and prying. "I guess we'll just have to forget the bow, renounce our beliefs, and return home to retire as farmers." Blays reached down for an L-shaped rod with a crooked little tooth at its end, inserted it into the pad, and torqued his wrist. The lock squeaked. Rust flaked onto Blays' hand. He slipped the opened pad from its loops and dropped it in the grass. "Oh. I forgot I'm the greatest."
"Congratulations, you have the skills of an eight-year-old orphan." Dante stepped into the darkness and lit a candle with a flicker of nether. The others crowded in beside him, accepting candles of their own. A wooden ceiling hung some twelve feet overhead, penetrated by a staircase that ascended into darkness above. At its other end, it descended through the floor to an even deeper blackness below. Melted remnants of candles sat on the floor. Burnt-out torches rested in wall sconces. The ground floor was bare except for a large wooden plank to bar the door and a few sacks of what was, judging from the mice droppings, likely to be grain.
"I could only find the rope," Mourn said, extracting it from his pack. "I hope it's enough to get past the upper stairs."
Dante tipped back his head, peering into the drafty heights. "I doubt there's anything wrong with the stairs at all. That was just a cover to keep us out."
"Still, it's a depressing thought to come hundreds of miles and wind up ten feet out of reach of the object of your desire. I don't know what I'd do. Jump from one of the windows, I bet."
"Me too, but only because of the shame of lacking basic problem-solving skills. Get moving."
Dante led the way up the steps. The stairwell was so tight Mourn and Gala not only had to duck, they had to turn their shoulders, too, filling Dante's head with nightmare scenarios of one of them slipping and getting so thoroughly lodged between the steps that those above them on the stairs would be trapped, left to starve to death—or forced to burrow their way to freedom through a mass of hair and blood. After a complete turn, the stairs opened into to a round, plank-floored room. Drafts blew in through the arrowslits, disturbing Dante's candle. This room was largely empty, too, besides a few rotting chairs blanketed with cobwebs and an old set of dishes which weren't glazed but had instead acquired a fine finish of dirt.
The following floors were just as barren. The tower's furnishings, in fact, gave every indication it had been in disuse for years now, if not decades, and that the last owners to put it to use had employed it as the watchtower/fortress it had clearly been built as.
Then, some eighty feet up, the steps became a blank black space. Dante shoved his hands against the close walls, swearing, bracing himself against a vision of the fumbling body that would push him over the broken steps.
"Hold it!" His voice echoed up and down. Blays nudged him, peering over his shoulder at the spot where the steps disappeared, a void that stretched beyond the curve of the staircase. Vestigial lumps of stone projected from the walls along the missing steps' former path, but these were just a few fingers wide and obviously crumbly even by the meek candlelight.
"No problem," Blays said. "Mourn, get up here and throw me."
"What?" Dante said.
Blays gestured at the yawning gap. "He throws me, I land on the other side, we all praise my name."
"You can't even see the other side."
"Are you suggesting it's not there?"
"I'm suggesting you will fall and break whatever parts of yourself you land on."
"I'll cling to the wall. Like a handsome raccoon."
"Raccoons, known worldwide for their proverbial jumping ability." Dante pointed at the cracked stone jutting from where the stairs had set into the wall. "At least try that before your leap of faith."
Blays crouched down, forcing Dante back a step, and leaned forward to test the jagged stone remnants with his fingertips. Parts were wide enough for a firm toehold, perhaps for a whole shoe, but in long gaps the broken steps were flush with the sheer wall. Dust and sand sifted down into the darkness, sprinkling on the stairs a spiral below.
"I don't know about this," Blays said.
"Two seconds ago you were ready to send yourself smashing straight to hell."
"Yeah, but that would have been over in a second. All this creeping along, waiting for the ledge to crumble underneath me...it seems kind of stupid."
"I'll do it," Lira said from behind them.
"You're not doing anything." Dante looked in vain for a fly or spider he could kill, restore to unlife with the nether, and use to scout the stairs ahead. "If you want to be helpful, start composing Blays' eulogy."
"Remember to include a line about how I'm 6'9"." Blays ran his hand down his mouth. "All right. We tie the rope around my waist. I try to scootch along the side here. Mourn holds tight to the free end of the rope while Gala sets up below to catch me if I fall."
"Meanwhile, Lira and I will shut our eyes and pray." Dante stepped away from the broken steps, pressing his back against the wall. "Let's do this."
It took a full minute of awkward shuffling, retreating, and bumping around before Gala made it to the full turn below where Blays might fall and before Blays and Mourn got in position on the lower edge of the gap. Dante took up beside Gala and sent a small white light up to the broken steps directly above them, eyeballing exactly how much of the staircase was missing. Even from below, it wasn't easy to tell—the missing portion was a good twelve feet overhead, and the tight spiral quickly stole the ascending steps from view, making it more than possible there was another broken stretch further up—but he guessed some eight horizontal feet of stairs were missing. He anchored the white light above the ledge where Blays would cross, then slipped downstairs past Gala, keeping the nether close at hand in case of a fall. The whole stairwell smelled of fresh sweat and the sweet wax of burning candles.
"All set?" he called.
"I still think I should jump," Blays echoed.
"If you fall, use your last thought to pretend that's what you did."
"Make sure your head's out of the way. I don't want to get impaled."
Leather scuffed stone. Blays grunted. His leg extended into view, tapping down on the cracked ledge. Dust speckled into Dante's eyes; he turned away, blinking hard. His light above flickered.
"Lyle's balls!" Blays yelled. "Let's wait until the next time before we try this in the dark, huh?"
"Just trying to add to your legend." Dante redoubled his focus, restoring the full glare of the white light. Blays clung to the wall, palms spread, his feet turned sideways for maximum surface area along the narrow, irregular, rising ledge. A rope trailed between his waist and Mourn, who'd installed himself at the lower edge of the gap, his feet and shoulders braced against the walls. Blays took a minor step forward, dragging his back foot after. Inch by inch, he struggled on, pausing regularly to strengthen his toeholds and dig his fingertips into the crannies between stones, grimacing, panting hollowly over the ticking sound of falling grit.