The Last Page (59 page)

“What is it?”

Caliph exhaled: something between a grumble and a sigh.
What is it!
Are you blind? Isca Castle has been attacked! I’ve been betrayed! People are dead!

Out loud he said, “Are all . . .” he wanted to put it more delicately but gave up, “Shr
dnae Witches trained in . . . subterfuge?”

Sena held her breath, wondering what he would say next if she answered either way. Finally, she said distinctly, “I am.”

Caliph let out a sigh of relief. “Then there’s something I want you to do.”

Sena hung in the blackness of a narrow corridor, wedged against the lofty ceiling. Legs spread. One foot braced on either wall. At five-foot-ten her legs were barely long enough to achieve the feat. She looked down at the tiled floor twelve feet below.

A gas lamp in a stone recess flooded the bottom half of the passageway in capricious opal light. Her stamina was extraordinary but by the time the sentry finally arrived at the door opposite the gas lamp her legs were quivering.

Sena watched him knock at the door. He waited, scratched his ass, muttered something she couldn’t make out.

The door was thick. It muffled any sound from within. Sena bit her lower lip and concentrated on maintaining her position.

After a few seconds the door opened.

David Thacker peered out from a dimly lit room. The sight of the sentry discomposed him sufficiently to qualify in Sena’s mind as a confession of guilt. He tried to cover his dismay with a yawn.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” asked David. Sena could tell he was not accustomed to lying.

“Nothing, sir.” The guard had straightened. “There’s someone at the gates for you. We told them it was after curfew but they insisted. What with the craziness tonight we can’t open the gate. You’ll have to take a boat across the moat. You can meet ’em in the Cracked Agate just across the square.”

“What?” David was obviously skeptical. “Was it a man or a woman?”

“Man,” said the guard. “I guess. I wasn’t actually there when they came calling. Just delivering the message, sir. The High King happened to be at the gate, I guess. Said you were a friend and it would be okay.”

Sena watched terror welter under David’s cheeks, ripple behind his eyes and vanish.

There was no visitor of course. Caliph had dreamt it up to lure David Thacker away from his room. But by the look on his face, Sena guessed a
man that fit the guard’s ambiguous description did in fact exist—a man that might (in David’s mind) have actually come to call.

“Let me get my cloak.”

“I guess your visitor said it was urgent,” the guard replied.

David froze midstep, half in and half out of the room. The fear in his eyes had turned to absolute horror. “Did he?”

He reached around the corner and pulled a thin summer cloak after him. He put it on quickly and patted himself, checking for essentials. He locked the door and tugged the handle twice before shambling timorously down the hall after the guard.

Sena waited. Her legs were at the end of their endurance. She listened carefully. Only when she was certain did she snap her legs shut and distill, soundlessly to the tile floor.

The guards made regular rounds even here among the guest suites that honeycombed the castle’s west wing. She had to work fast.

Caliph had warned her that David Thacker had been granted a request to change out his lock. He was supposed to have given a copy of the key to Gadriel, which he had never done.

Sena had already palmed a torsion wrench and two different picks. She set one in her mouth, biting the tang like the stem of a rose while she slipped both the wrench and a snake pick into the keyway.

As her mind adjusted to the lock, she drew the pick, feeling it pop past the pins. She noted the stiffness of the springs and counted them without applying any torque to the wrench. There were five.

She began to work.

When she gave it clockwise torque the lock stopped dead, counterclockwise she felt it mush. She pulled the torsion wrench down ever so slightly.

It was like fucking, just the right amount of tenderness and force.

Pin two set first. She heard it rattle, felt it give against the snake. She upped the torque and felt pin three go next. Obviously the holes had not been bored straight.

There were guards just around the end of the hall. She could see their shadows reaching monstrously from the flicker of a torch. They weren’t talking much and she couldn’t risk scrubbing the lock. They weren’t in on the deception and if they heard, despite her status as the High King’s mistress, it would be a bust.

Pins four and five went together under the double tips of the snake. Almost there. Pin one came last. Or did it? She tried the wrench. The plug refused to spin.

“Yella by
n.”

She had false set one of the pairs.

At the end of the hall the voices picked up. The shadows leapt as the men began to move. Sena’s heart did not skip. Her self-confidence was growing.

She withdrew her tools from the lock, jumped, jumped again off the wall and in such manner attained a remarkable height. Again her legs spanned the corridor.

Two sentries stepped chuckling into the intersection thirty feet away. For a moment they glanced down the long empty hallway where David Thacker’s door was one of many.

To them, the corridor was empty. They stopped for a moment, sharing some coarse anecdote before shuffling on their way.

Sena dropped from her split position, hidden by perspective against the darkness of the ceiling. Once again, she began to work the lock.

Pin two crossed the sheer line first. She flicked it with the pick and heard it rattle. Yes. It had set correctly. Pin three went next but different than before. She increased torque and scrubbed. Four, five and one set and the plug turned.

That is, it turned one-hundred-eighty degrees and stopped. In an amateur mistake, she had forgotten to place the flat of her pick in the bottom of the keyway. Pin three had a spacer. It had dropped out. She traded the snake for the hooked rake in her mouth. Carefully she fished the spacer from the lock, catching it in her palm.

David’s key was not likely to work when he came back. He would know someone had been in his room. Sena bit her lip in frustration. Oh well, there was nothing for it now but to go on. She turned the wrench, spun the plug, hit three-sixty and the bolt popped back.

The door opened.

Papers littered the room beyond. Segments of a novel, bits of poetry and pages from a play scattered across a desk, a bed and the floor.

A writer, Sena mused. A coiled radiator on one wall could have offered heat from the boilers if the season had been later, but the metal pipes were cold. A wardrobe, a desk and a bed did a good job of limiting walking room.

Sena stepped carefully, making sure she disturbed nothing.

David had been gone nearly ten minutes now. She checked her pocket watch under its own green glow. Unfortunately she didn’t really know what to look for.

Caliph had told her what he had seen and how he suspected his old friend from Desdae had let the creatures in from the sewers.

A key then,
thought Sena.
That’s where I’ll start.

She went through the pockets of every garment in the room. Empty.

There was, however, a locked coffer in the bottom of the wardrobe squatting beside several pairs of shoes. It was padlocked which was good since she had three different skeleton keys that fit most warded locks made in the north. She got it on her first try and flipped the lid.

Inside were several disturbing things.

One was a letter.

Mr. Thacker,

A writer with vices seems such a stereotypical tragedy. I couldn’t help but notice your name in the
Herald
as one of several artists come to stay at Isca Castle. Nor could I help noticing your name on the ledger of a truly unsavory bordello in Ghoul Court just the other evening. One should generally use an alias whenever blackmail could be an issue.

I propose we meet, unless your qaam-dihet habits are something you wouldn’t mind your longtime friend Caliph Howl finding out about.

Yours truly,
Peter Lark

The note had been crumpled as if its owner meant to throw it away and then changed his mind, smoothed it out and tucked it in the box.

Beside the note was a little brown pouch, a bloody scalpel and a stained sponge. As Sena had supposed, when she checked the pouch several lumps of deep crimson material rolled into her palm. They were vaguely cohesive like brown sugar.

A small effigy carved from polished black stone rested beside the paraphernalia. Shaped like a stylized ink spatter, it gleamed, bulbous at the center with exaggerated pseudopodia radiating out. Rather two-dimensional and disk-like, a single grotesque eye had been graven on its bulging middle.

Sena’s skin went cold. It was the icon of the W
llin Droul. Ten to one odds David Thacker also bore the Mark. Sena had no wish to touch the horrible little carving.

Several other items demanded scrutiny. A key (likely capable of opening the garden sewer grates from what Sena knew of keys), four rows of gold gryphs stacked in columns ten coins high apiece (which she was tempted instinctively to take but left alone), and finally another letter: this one from Chancellor Eaton dated in the spring of this year.

What it said was both gracious and embarrassing. Sena felt herself flush. Apparently David Thacker had graduated without a degree.

The coffer was the mother lode of dirty laundry, a treasure trove of bones. Sena almost felt humiliated for David Thacker (it was more than enough, way, way more than enough to destroy him) until she remembered the black icon and the key and the forty-two men and women killed in the siege.

She shut the box and locked it and tucked it under her arm. She had what she needed. She headed for the door.

Caliph’s plan had two outcomes depending on what Sena found. If she found nothing, she was supposed to leave the room undisturbed, return to the guest bedroom where they were temporarily staying and report. But if she found evidence, she was to remove it and bring it to Caliph who would then assess it and determine whether or not to order David Thacker’s arrest.

There were no protocols for policing the Hold. Within the castle, the High King’s word was absolute.