The Last Page (70 page)

She moved efficiently.

She sifted through the drawers of several desks, checked the closet and the space beneath the bed. There was plenty of room for just one man—most of which had gone to waste.

Dormer windows spilled Lewlym’s purple light like brandy across barren spacious sections of the floor. Knots in the wood made faces in the grain, grinning stupidly at her.

Three contiguous rooms comprised the suite, linked by six-paneled doors. Having searched the first two chambers thoroughly, Sena tried and found the last door locked.

She shot the beam of her torch into the keyway and saw something that disturbed her. A set of pressure-sensitive wards. Although the correct key wouldn’t disturb them, her torsion wrench and rake undoubtedly would. What the wards might trigger, Sena couldn’t tell.

She decided there were other ways to get around the door and opened a nearby window.

The ledge was tricky. Overhung and pinched by the dormer eaves, at first there seemed nowhere to go. Sena stepped out, boots scraping on pigeon shit and stone.

The wind was warm and full, like a membranous balloon against her body. She clicked her torch off and stowed it in a utility belt around her waist.

Gripping the sandwich of boards and shingles that composed the eave, she leaned out into the night, seven stories off the ground.

Nearly level with the castle walls, she could see faint black figures
floating along the parapets across a gulf of moonlit air. Some carried flecks of light. All of them carried crossbows.

Looking more like a gruelock than a woman, Sena launched her body from the ledge. Her thighs and knees swung up like a grapnel and hit the steep shingles of the roof. Below the eave, her torso jackknifed. Her body held the edge of the roof like a vise between her belly and her legs.

She nearly lost her balance, went nose-first toward the ground, but her hips anchored her on the gable’s gritty slope.

Impossibly she clung, gasping. Her center of gravity skewed. She should have skidded down the shingles or plunged to her death. But her movement had been quick and for an acrobat, energy equaled mass: weight that pulled her through the rotation of the move.

Dark and indistinct, she unfolded along the gable’s edge, a blemish of blackness curling into stone and wood.

Once she had pushed herself to safety she drifted above the roof’s smooth lines toward the adjacent gable—the one whose window granted access to Zane Vhortghast’s final room.

Her silhouette balled, extruded and swung like taffy into the murky triangle of shadow beneath the second gable’s crest. The guards on the parapet trundled on, undisturbed.

Once more hidden from their sight, Sena knelt beside the pane. She couldn’t see inside the room. She had glass-cutting tools in her belt but she noticed something even more useful hanging like a mud wasp’s nest in the apex of the eave where a family of swallows had secured a little home.

She stretched and groped delicately about the warm gauzy interior until her fingers discovered life. She took two chicks from the nest, one she buckled gently into a pouch on her belt. The other she decapitated with her sickle knife, wincing slightly at the murder.

She squeezed. Blood poured from its open neck as from a tiny sponge. The holojoules sang and Sena whispered, hemofurtum, syllables that bent the fabric of the glass. She moved through the window, into the room, leaving only a vestigial blemish where the glazing closed behind her. Luck was on her side. Gr
-ner Shie’s influence had not altered her formula in the least.

This was Vhortghast’s study.

She clicked her torch and found a cache of money stacked atop a desk. The drawers contained documents pertaining to various matters insignificant to her task.

After fifteen minutes she heaved a sigh and stopped to rest.

The room was clean.

She clicked off her torch. Lights had come up in the other room, a sheet of fulgurate yellow shot under the door and across the floor.

She could hear muted voices and the distinct clunk of someone shutting the apartment’s front door.

“. . . not bad . . . better at the Crowing Bistro in Nevergreen . . .” A man’s voice percolated through the wood, muffled and nearly unintelligible.

A second man’s voice sounded spirited but tired.

“. . . that what . . . nobody . . . awful.”

Sena crept to the corner of Zane’s considerable desk. A pillar of darkness filled the center of the yellow light streaming under the door. Someone on the other side was fumbling with a set of keys.

“I . . . ever . . . profusion of ungodliness. It’s a fucking shame.” The lock turned, the door opened and a figure hewn from backlit darkness stood facing Sena’s hiding spot, talking as if to her. Sena heard the baby bird in her pouch make a faint tentative scratch.

“Anyway,” the man was saying, “with progeny like that what can you expect? He’s like a,” he paused, searching dramatically for words, “like a . . . libelous milk-livered cheese curd.”

The second voice came from behind the first man, out of Sena’s sight.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Libelous?”

The first man spread his hands as though appalled by his companion’s stupidity. “Libelous . . . it means you talk shit about somebody. You know, like libel, like they take you to court over. You’re supposed to be a criminal!”

“Yeah, I don’t enjoy this aspect of the job . . . unlike you. I’ve got a wife—”

“My condolences.”

The man in the doorway reached inside and groped around the wall.

Sena heard a slow hiss and then a pop as a single gas lamp lit. Ensconced on the wall near the door, it cast enough light to jeopardize Sena’s position and she eased back into the dark, peering through a crack between a wastebasket and the desk. For the first time she could see most of the room as one unified tapestry of texture and shape.

Bookcases lined the walls. Several stuffed chairs and a potted plant occupied space on a tapestry rug before the windows. It was sparse like the outer rooms, lacking a certain believable quality, as though it had been staged.

“Just hurry up, will you? Ol’ Zane’s dust-bugger is probably getting antsy. Southern piece of gorabi shit!”

“Hey, shut up!”

Sena’s heart skipped a beat as he said it, thinking he might have heard
the sudden fit of tiny scratching in her pouch. The additional light and voices were agitating the chick. “You obviously haven’t been around long enough to know Mr. Silent’s just like Vhorty. They both like to catch you off guard.”

Sena saw the man’s eyes pause and scrutinize the room. When he seemed satisfied that the study was indeed empty he continued.

“If you’re smart, which you’re not, you won’t say anything derogatory . . . ever.”

“There you go again with the words. Didn’t you just call the boss a cheese curd?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

The outer door opened and a third voice, a smoother voice with a southern accent, curled into the room.

“What’s taking?”

The man in the doorway found a new sense of urgency despite his nonchalant reply. “I’m hurrying. I’m hurrying. Sheesh. It ain’t like we’re going to meet her holiness at Hullmallow.” He walked into the room and headed for the desk.

Sena edged quickly backward, making very little sound. Rather than crawling underneath and cornering herself under a piece of furniture she kept the desk between herself and the man.

The outer door clunked again.

“Is he gone?”

Sena heard the other man’s smile. “No.”

The man in the study took the chair from behind the desk and rolled it across the floor to the bookshelves. He then used it as a stepladder to one of the shelves and from there stretched out and opened a square in the paneled ceiling.

Sena saw him fumble with some items before he took what he wanted from his pocket and stashed it in the ceiling. He closed the panel, jumped to the floor and brushed off the seat of the chair before rolling it back behind the desk.

Good. Now hurry along,
thought Sena.

But the man did not hurry. When he reached the doorway he stopped. There was a click from the outer chamber. A strange thunk and he slumped face-first into the doorway between the rooms.

The same click and subtle hiss preceded the sound of a second body falling to the floor—one that Sena could hear but not see. Then she heard the smooth voice with the southern accent speak in sardonic soliloquy, “Good night boys.”

Sena crept from the desk, realizing she had to get a glimpse of the unseen speaker in order to make sense of what had happened. She peeked out despite her instinct to remain hidden and locked eyes with a brown-skinned blond-haired Pandragon that she had seen once before in Mr. Vhortghast’s company.

Bad luck alone had allowed them to see each other across a landscape of murder. Sena hardly noticed the bodies.

Ngyumuh held a gas-powered crossbow in his hands. He aimed and fired in an instant. The quarrel burst through the corner of the desk creating a blossom of splintered wood, the tip of the bolt looking like a deadly metal pistil. Sena wheeled across the floor.

Ngyumuh’s bow auto-loaded from a clip into the gentle magnet of the groove; its tank of pressurized gas drew the string automatically on an internal gear beneath the lock plate. He leapt over one of the men he had killed and burst into the study, keen on Sena’s trail.

The light from the wall fixture flickered over the wooden floor. His eyes took in the body of an infant bird, fresh blood spattered across the boards. Something hazy blurred the bookshelf for an instant. Something out of focus slipped along the wall. Ngyumuh pivoted and fired.

The bolt lodged itself in the spine of a book, riving a dozen chapters of some classical tome. Then the trademark grip of the Shr
dnae Sisters encircled his neck from behind.

The sickle knife, sticky with birds’ blood, lightly scored his throat. Sena’s whisper sounded almost inside his ear.

“I’ll kill you with a twist.”

It had a strange sexual connotation that must have scared Ngyumuh. He set the bow on Mr. Vhortghast’s desk at her request and tried to keep from swallowing—an action that would certainly deepen his already oozing cut.

“Why did you kill those men?” she whispered.

Trained as the spymaster’s personal bodyguard, Ngyumuh must have also known what she was capable of. He tried to buy some time with words.

“What’s it to you?”

Sena pushed the handle of her sickle knife counterclockwise so the razor tip of the crescent made a sudden puncture wound beneath his left ear.

“I don’t ask questions twice and you don’t ask questions at all. Clear?”

Ngyumuh, despite his best efforts, swallowed and worsened the gradual filleting of his skin.

“Yes. Eh’ajyo ogwôg.
²²
”

“I speak Gnah Lug Lam, ngôd ilôm.
²³
” She cut him again.

Ngyumuh winced but finally gave himself completely to her fatal embrace. Even an elbow or sudden kick to her groin wouldn’t guarantee the encircling blade didn’t open his jugular as it left his throat. He had no choice but to capitulate.

“Yehw ikeslud ninglas-dey?
²⁴
” she hissed into his ear. “If I have to ask again—”