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“Not many.”
Malden saw that up ahead a zigzagging set of stairs had been carved through the wall, which at this point was nearly thirty feet high. The stairs ended at a solitary dock, but there were no boats at it. All the same, he held his tongue until they were well past.
“And the way you held my gaze? I could not look away, even with that great mountain of a man coming up behind me. Surely that was wizardry.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. There was no guile in her eyes.
“You charmed me,” he said, looking over his shoulder, intending to take her to task for enchanting him. Yet she looked as puzzled as he. “You used some spell.”
“You give me too much credit. I know no such incantation.”
Yet of course it had to be a spell she’d cast on him. Didn’t it? What else could have explained his sudden interest in her eyes, her hair? What explanation would satisfy the facts, other than that she had ensorcelled him?
Malden had grown up in the company of harlots, and knew well the ways of physical love. He’d often heard them talk of the other kind, of romance and true love. They’d even talked of the fabled love-at-first-sight, though most had considered it a myth. He himself had never considered he might feel that way about another human being, much less an enchantress covered in tattoos.
So it must have been magic. There was no other possibility. Was there?
He decided to talk of anything but, rather than continue in that line of thought.
“You intrigue me, Cythera. You seem a lady of quality, yet you associate with the likes of Bikker.”
“He’s not so bad. Honest, in his way.”
“He’s a ruffian. Cheerful, perhaps, but uncouth. I don’t think you chose his company. You work with him because you were ordered to do so. I think you both work for someone else. Someone who wants my services, who—”
“Who shall remain nameless.”
“Very well. Though the number of citizens who could afford your services must be small.”
“Not every wage is paid in coin.”
It was a funny kind of thing to say, and it birthed all manner of questions in Malden’s mind. But it was clear it pained her to speak of it, so he let it go. He had another thing to ask her about anyway.
“Those tattoos on your face and your arms—”
“They are not tattoos.” Her voice grew sharp when she said it.
“The designs, then. Did I really see them move?”
“Yes. They are never still.”
“What artist paints them? What kind of pigment does he use?”
Cythera sighed. “No artist. No paints. They are a curse. Or rather, they were imposed on me as a gift by my mother. Or perhaps she meant to curse another.”
“Your mother was a sorceress? I can believe that, for you certainly enchanted me.” There it was again. That thought he couldn’t explain.
She seemed unwilling to discuss it herself. “You’ll hold that scoundrel tongue of yours, if you know what’s good for you. My mother was never a sorceress. And she still lives. She is a witch.”
“Naturally,” Malden said.
Cythera sighed. “Must you always be so glib?”
“It’s part of my charm.”
“Oh, you have charm? I hadn’t noticed.” But she was smiling.
“You wound me to the heart,” he said. “But it’s all right. We’ll find some way you can make it up to me. When this is over, what say you we both—”
“Stop,” she said, interrupting his half-serious attempt at courting. “Ship your oars.”
He did as she said. “Is this the place? Have we really come so far?”
“Conversation makes any night fly. Yes—look. There is the pipe I was told to seek out. This is exactly the right spot.”
The pipe in question stuck directly out of the wall. Filthy water drained from its end in a constant trickle. It was big enough around for a man to climb through, if it hadn’t been closed by an iron grating. Such a man would have been a fool, of course, for the pipe led nowhere but into the dungeons of the Burgrave.
Malden looked up—and up. The gentle cambered wall above him rose no less than one hundred and fifty feet into the air. Straight to the top of Castle Hill. Up there, far, far in the air, was the Burgrave’s palace.
Malden knew one thing for certain. On Cutbill’s secret protection list, the Burgrave’s name did not appear. The Burgrave, of course, had his own garrison of troops for protection and did not need the aid of the master of thieves.
Malden had never been given a reason why he could not break into the house of the ultimate ruler of the Free City of Ness and pilfer his most prized possession. Most likely this was because no one had ever thought him so stupid as to try it.
At least not until Bikker and Cythera had come along.
“When you reach the top, do not scamper over the parapets directly,” Cythera whispered. “Remember—Bikker will create a diversion in the courtyard. The guards up there will rush to investigate. That is your only chance to get in unseen. Move quickly, though not so quickly you fall prey to a trap. Recover the … the item we asked for, then come back here as fast as you can. Do not take anything else. It is critical that you do not leave any evidence you were there, or create any suspicion that the thing is gone.”
He was very aware she would not say aloud what it was she wanted, not now when they were so close to it. He filed that away under the myriad things about her he found curious and interesting.
“Start your climb now. I’ll make sure Bikker knows when to do his part.”
“How about a kiss for luck, before I go?” Malden asked.
Cythera laughed.
“From me, such a kiss would token anything but good luck. Quickly, now!”
Malden carefully stood up in the back of the boat. He waited for Cythera to brace herself, both her oars in the water to steady the tiny craft. Then he took a quick step and jumped at the wall, his hands out and fingers spread to find whatever purchase was there.
It was not difficult. The bricks were sturdy, but the mortar between them had crumbled away over time. His fingers fit easily between each row of bricks, so that it was like grabbing at the rungs of a ladder.
Once she saw him dangling from the wall like a lizard, Cythera bent to her oars and got her boat moving away from the wall. Malden didn’t waste time watching where she went. Instead he started to climb, hand over hand.
Straight up.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Malden had learned to climb almost from the time he could walk.
He was not so unusual in that—every child in Ness learned to climb, since so much of the city was on a hillside. The streets were so winding and switch-backed that often the fastest way from one house to another was to go over the house in between rather than around. It was easy enough to move around up on the rooftops, in a city where the streets were so narrow and the second floors of houses almost came together over the alleys. There were places in Ness where if a woman left a pie cooling on a second-story windowsill, the man across the street could reach through his own window and help himself to it. Even small children could jump from one house to another with little danger of falling. A relatively nimble child could run from one end of the Stink to the other across the rooftops without having to do more than occasionally hop. There were few enough opportunities to play in the crowded streets, so children often headed upward to find space for their games.
Malden had shown a real talent for climbing at an early age. He’d had no fear of heights and a love of clean, fresh air, so the tops of the city proved his natural element. His few friends always dared him to climb to the top of a steeple or dance atop a high chimney. Later, when he turned to crime for his livelihood, he found that a man who could run across the rooftops was a man rarely caught by the watch. So he trained himself to climb faster and jump farther than anyone else.
This climb was like many he’d made before, he told himself. It didn’t matter what was up top—hanging on and not looking down were all it would really take.
The wall of Castle Hill leaned away from him, so instead of a sheer surface it was like a very steep slope. Only a few of the bricks had crumbled with time, though many were cracked. It was not so hard a climb, or rather, it would not have been, if it weren’t so long. Taking his time, choosing every handhold carefully, pausing now and again to rest, all kept Malden from falling, but nothing could keep the cramp out of his fingers forever. He looked always for features of the wall to aid him, and found a few. Here and there a dripping pipe emerged from the bricks. On occasion he passed a narrow window, wider than an arrow slit but never so big he could have fit through. These allowed him good spots to stand and massage his hands, to ready them for further climbing. Such spots were far apart and few in number, but they helped. They even gave him a chance to free his hands long enough to take a drink of wine from the flask he kept on his belt.
By the time he was sixty feet up in the air, however, his hands were pained claws. Another ten feet and he could no longer feel his fingertips. The whole front of his tunic was stained with brick dust, and sweat had begun to pour down the back of his neck.
At seventy-five feet up he had a new peril to worry about. Across the river’s channel, the opposite wall gave out—the hill was lower over there, and topped with a strip of parkland thick with chestnut and oak trees called the Royal Ditch. Lanterns hung from some of the lower branches, tended by the proprietors of the gambling houses and expensive taverns that lined the Goshawk Road there. He could hear music playing and occasional bursts of raucous laughter carried across by the wind. Should anyone there chance to look over, toward Castle Hill, he would be quite visible—and he had no doubt they would sound some alarm. The Free City of Ness was eight hundred years old and had never been properly sacked by invaders, but there was always a first time.
He had his cloak turned inside out, to show its paler side. It was like a hawthorn leaf in color, a deep forest green on one side, a lighter sage green on the other. The lighter hue would make him harder to spot against the wall, but still, when he moved he would certainly give himself away.
There was nothing for it, however. He would have to trust to luck that no one would chance to look across the water.
His luck was with him in that, at least.
Starting at eighty feet up the wall had been carved by ancient hands. A row of human figures was sculpted into the brick, each of them twelve feet tall so they could be seen easily from the Royal Ditch. Malden had seen them often from that not-so-distant vantage, but they looked smaller at the time. They represented the direct male descendants of Juring Tarness, the first Burgrave of the Free City of Ness. Each of them had been Burgrave in his turn. They were crude images at best, and the artists who carved them had made one foolish choice in their designs. The Burgraves were depicted each in full armor, their heads hooded with chain mail and square helmets mounted with the crown of the Burgravate. As a result it was almost impossible to tell them apart. One had a mustache, another a full beard—perhaps such facial hair had been fashionable in their day. Malden had never cared to learn their names or the dates of their respective reigns. He did not care to learn them now, though he was grateful to them for one simple reason: the carvings were even easier to climb than had been the bare bricks. He made a silent apology to the ancient Burgrave whose shoulder he trod upon, and made for the top without pausing.
One hundred feet up and his hands were frozen in the shape of hooks. He jammed them again and again into the cracks between bricks and continued hauling himself upward. One hundred twenty feet and he felt like all his toes were broken from repeatedly pushing them into gaps too small to admit them.
One hundred thirty feet—and he heard a voice from above. Instantly he froze in place, pressing himself as close as possible to the bricks. Not twenty feet over his up-stretched arms a guard was walking patrol along the wall of the palace grounds. If they should look over the crenellations, if they looked down—
“Tell me if anyone’s coming,” the voice said. Clearly the owner of the voice must be speaking to someone.
“No, no, it’s clear,” a second voice said, proving Malden’s suspicion.
Then came a grunt, and a noise like chain mail rattling. And then something caught the moonlight as it fell past Malden at incredible speed.
He came very close to falling off the wall then and there. He was so desperately afraid of being hit by the jetsam from above that he pulled one hand free of the wall and swung away from his perch. A moment later he realized what was happening and cursed himself silently for his lack of forbearance.
A stream of foul-smelling liquid was coming down from on high, a stream that spread out and turned to mist a few dozen feet below his position. The guard was pissing over the side.
Malden’s lip curled in disgust. Was the man too lazy to find a privy? But there was nothing he could do but hold tight, and wait, and hope the wind didn’t change. He spared a quick glance down to make sure Cythera was well clear. He couldn’t see her little boat down there, though he was mightily impressed by how far down it was. He had no fear of heights, but it would take a man of far greater courage than himself to look down into that abyss and feel no vertigo.
When the guard had finished and moved on, Malden looked back up, toward the top of the wall. It was close now. One quick sprint and he would be on top. But his hands were so painfully cramped he knew he would arrive unable to use them for anything but climbing. He needed to rest a moment, to rub the blood back into his whitened fingers. He also needed to make sure he would not be seen when he reached the top. Looking around, he saw a window off to his left, no more than a dozen feet away. Moving carefully, as silently as a cat on a carpet, he shifted himself over in that direction. The window was broader than the others he’d seen, though it was also lined with iron bars. Still, it would make a great place to stand for a while. Just a few minutes, he promised himself. Just until he could feel something in the balls of his thumbs.
Yet as he approached the window he heard someone moving around inside. He had to freeze in place again and wait for the people there to go away. And that could have been when his luck ran out.
For exactly at that moment Bikker provided the promised distraction.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Croy hated subterfuge, but sometimes the direct approach was just not appropriate. For instance, when one needs to recover one’s property from a locked room inside the palace, and one is under an order of execution, it behooves one to act in a clandestine fashion.
So instead of marching up to the Burgrave’s door and asking politely, he had come to this. Masquerading as the lover of a lady-in-waiting, and then sneaking into the most secure room in the city.
“I have the key here, somewhere on my person,” Lady Hilde said, and placed a hand on the bodice of her gown. She seemed to be breathing very hard and her eyes were wide as she stared into Croy’s face. “It wasn’t easy to get, you know. I had to wait until the castellan fell asleep at his desk. Luckily for you he’s so old and decrepit, he didn’t wake up even when I took it from his belt. But now—where did I put it?”
He supposed she might be frightened. It was an understandable emotion. They were inside the Burgrave’s counting house, a place no one of any rank was permitted to enter after it was locked up for the night. Even by day only the castellan and the bailiff had keys to the place. It was so secure that the castellan hadn’t bothered posting guards out front—after all, anyone approaching it from the courtyard would have had to pass dozens of guards already.
Of course, if you had access to one of the Burgravine’s ladies-in-waiting, and she was willing to do you a favor, there weren’t a lot of places in Ness that were off-limits. Croy felt distinctly uneasy about what he was doing. This was very much counter to his moral code, and he was a man for whom ethics meant everything. Still, he was able to assuage his conscience a bit. He wasn’t hear to steal—he was no thief. He had only come here to recover that which belonged to him. That which he was pledged to honor and uphold, in fact: the sword he counted as his soul.
The counting house was built into the wall that surrounded the palace grounds, and had to be the most secure structure in the Free City, because it was where the Burgrave kept his gold when he wasn’t spending it. It was a vast trove, stuffed full of bags of coin, coffers overflowing with silver plate, great heaps of gems, and the jewelry of Ommen Tarness’s wife, the Burgravine.
None of which was what Croy had come for. His swords had been taken from him when he was arrested, and brought here, placed with the most important relics and treasures of the Free City of Ness. Just behind the locked door he faced. Hilde had claimed she could get the key for him only if he brought her inside with him so she could see the treasures for herself. Lacking a better plan, he had agreed.
“I seem to be having trouble finding the key,” she told him. “Perhaps you can help me look?”
He knelt with his lamp and looked around the floor at her feet.
“No, you foolish man,” she said. “It’s somewhere in my dress.”
He opened his mouth to speak, and then found he could not close it again. Hilde was unlacing her corset. “Well? You were so handsome yesterday in Market Square, Croy. So dashing. It made my knees tremble. And other parts of me as well. Of course, it might just be that I haven’t had a man all year. My mistress keeps me so busy. Maybe if the Burgrave could perform better his own husbandly duties, I could slip away more often. Oh, no, that’s exactly where I want you,” she said, as he began to rise to his feet. She giggled and put a finger on his shoulder, pressing him back down to a kneeling posture.
“Milady,” he said, jumping up, “I fear I misheard you.”
Hilde rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those men who doesn’t know what to do with a naked woman.” She twitched her shoulders and her kirtle fell to the floor. Underneath it she was wearing nothing but a chemise and knee-length hose.
Croy blushed and averted his eyes. “Milady, I would never spurn, ah, true affection from your quarter, but … my heart belongs to another.”
“You’re … serious.”
He bowed his head and tried to keep his thoughts pure. It was not easy with Hilde’s underthings rustling so close to his face.
“Here,” she said, and pressed a long iron key into his hand. “Do what you have to, while I put all this back on. I have no idea how I’m going to lace up this corset without a big, strong man to help, but—oh, never mind.”
“Thank you,” Croy said, and quickly opened the locked door. Beyond was a tiny room with a barred window. For a split second he thought he saw a shoe outside the bars, but that was quite impossible—outside that window would be a sheer drop to the river Skrait, more than a hundred feet down. He turned to look around the room, expecting to have to search high and low for his swords.
In fact, they were the only things present. Where were the religious relics the Burgrave was required to parade through the streets every Ladymas? Where the city’s charter, for that matter? Perhaps they’d gone to the same place as the city’s gold reserves. The swords lay perfectly alone on a shelf below the window, two long blades in shagreen scabbards. They were all he’d brought with him when he returned to the Free City. He hung them in their proper places on his baldric and stepped back out of the room.
Hilde waited for him near the door, tapping her foot with impatience. “Come along,” she said. “I’ll take you through the kitchens so no one sees you. Though it would probably do my reputation some good to be seen in connection with you.”
“I’m a wanted criminal,” he protested.
“You don’t understand this city at all, do you?” she asked. “Surely you—”
A high-pitched scream of terror and pain split the darkness outside the door. Croy leaned over Hilde’s shoulder to look out into the courtyard just in time to see a man of the city watch come staggering through the main palace gate. A dark stain spread across his cloak-of-eyes as he clutched at an arrow sticking in his side. Before he’d taken a dozen steps he collapsed face first onto the flagstones.
A second scream followed close, and a guard toppled from the battlements of the palace wall. An arrow had pierced him through the neck.
“Murder!” someone shouted. “Murder!” And then an alarm bell started to ring, high-pitched and wild.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Malden listened to the clamor beyond the wall for only a moment, then scurried up over the last twenty feet of bricks faster than a spider. He slipped over the crenellations at the top of the wall and found himself on a broad walkway. No guards were in sight. He crept to the far side of the wall and peered through an embrasure, down into the courtyard.
Castle Hill was the residence of the Burgrave and the seat of his administrative functions. It was also a fortress, a keep designed to forestall any invading horde. Within its walls stood the garrison where the Burgrave’s personal retinue of soldiers lived, and the central Watch Hall from which the bailiff’s civic guardians were dispatched. Both these structures were alive with light now as men in various states of uniform dress came pouring out of their gates to fill the broad courtyard and parade ground. There was a great deal of shouting and confusion, and knots of watchmen in their cloaks-of-eyes were gathered around two bodies that lay lifeless in the grass. A klaxon bell rang with a deafening strident tone. Meanwhile, a detachment of soldiers were storming up and around the walls and towers on the far side of the hill, over where it looked down on Market Square. They were thrusting torches into every shadow, stabbing their iron swords into troughs and haylofts, looking for whoever had shot the two men with arrows.
