Bared Blade (25 page)

Up and over, and down and drop, and I was in. The ducal estate was huge, second only to the palace complex itself in scope, just as the Duchess of Tien was second only to the king in practical authority. At the moment, she was also second or third in the succession, depending on how you counted things.

Among the many outbuildings that dotted the acres of manicured groves and formal gardens of the estate were several dedicated to various functions of the city watch, which held the duchess as its ultimate commander and liege lady. Temporarily reasserting control over Triss, I moved quickly from the wall into the shadows of a large and carefully kept stand of bamboo. As I slipped deeper into the estate, I made sure to stay under the trees as much as possible, avoiding the numerous groundskeepers and the several small groups of household guards that I passed along the way.

At one point, I walked through a stand of flowering pears, and after that I had stolen fruit to munch on. After all the
energy and nima I’d expended to escape the ambush at the Nonesuch, I was hungry enough to ignore the fact that the fruit was still well short of ripe. Eventually, I arrived at my destination, a suite of offices and meeting rooms ceded to the watch on a more or less permanent basis.

The duchess rented them the building so that she had a place she could confer with her officers without having to leave the bounds of her estate or allow the cruder functions of the watch to impinge on her residence. Conveniently for me, the goal of reducing the visual presence of the watch on the estate included planting a dense silverthorn hedge around the building to help hide it from delicate noble eyes. Once I slipped into the space between the planting and the wall, I was thoroughly masked from the broader estate, and could almost have let Triss slip back into dragon shape.

All of the city’s watch captains kept offices there, as did several of their more important lieutenants. I peered in the window of Fei’s first floor office, the largest of the lot, just in case, but was unsurprised to find it dark and empty. That wasn’t why I’d come. Assuming a low crouch I moved carefully along the outside wall, peering through basement windows into the closet-sized offices assigned to minor officers until I found what I was looking for. It was child’s play to slip the lock and wriggle through the window—no one breaks
into
a watch office. Especially not one that’s in the center of a guarded estate and only intermittently in use.

Once we were safely inside, Triss slid down off my skin, puddling briefly on the floor before reassuming his dragon form and taking up a position covering the door. He flicked his wings back and forth angrily. Since it was impossible for him to really communicate with me in shroud form, this was the first chance we’d had to talk since the attack at the Nonesuch. He was obviously upset about it.

“Care to tell me what the plan is?” the little dragon growled quietly. “Or is that too much to ask from my bond-mate?”

“I’m sorry, Triss. Truly. I didn’t have one at first, not beyond getting away. Then, when I started to look at next
steps, the situation was such that I couldn’t have talked to you no matter how much I might have wanted to. Being underwater limits one’s conversational options, I have to say.”

Triss stopped fussing with his wings and cocked his head at me quizzically. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that was the second attempt at a joke in as many days.” Then he shook himself. “But don’t think that’s going to get you off the hook, my friend. What are we doing on the Duchess of Tien’s estate?”

“We need to free Vala and Stel,” I said. “That means finding out who took them. There was an Elite presence at the Nonesuch, if only a small one, and they started whistling up the watch the second I slipped the net. That implies official ties for the snatch, and that means that we were set up, though I’m not yet sure whether it was Fei or Zishin. Which, in turn, means I need to have a word with one or both of them. I don’t know where Zishin lives, and if it was Fei, she’s smart enough not to go home.”

“I can see that, but I’m not making the jump to why it’s a good idea to break into the estate of the Duchess of Tien.”

“If it’s Fei, she’s going to be holed up in her office and surrounded by a sea of Stingers. Since my face is up on wanted posters all over this city, I figured that I’d do best to gather up some protective camouflage before trying to sneak into watch central.”

“Which brings us into this room right here why?”

I pointed at a little silk pillow tucked unobtrusively on a high shelf above the door.

“Still not following you.”

“The lieutenant who belongs to this office keeps a real pillow here, and an expensive one by the look of it. The only reason to do that is if he occasionally sleeps here, and not just naps. Which means…” I opened the little cabinet behind the desk and reached inside to pull a neatly folded watch uniform off the shelf.

Behind it I saw a small bottle of brandy. My stomach cooed like a mating dove and cool beads of sweat broke out along my hairline as I imagined taking a long sweet drink.

“Are you all right?” asked Triss.

I nodded because I didn’t trust a mouth suddenly gone dust dry to get the right words out. My hands shook as I flipped the uniform open to check the fit. A little big, but not so much so as to draw suspicion. I focused on that. One nice thing about being only middling tall for a man and likewise of average build was that most clothes fit me. Add in that Tienese dress tended to the loose and flowing and I could almost always steal an appropriate outfit when needed.

“What do you think?” I asked Triss, when I could speak again.

“That’s pretty clever, actually,” said Triss. “You chose the offices here because they were not far out of the way and rarely in full use?”

“That and because the guards here are mostly on the outer perimeter, not in the building. You sound surprised.”

“I guess I’m still not used to you thinking like the old Aral. Not after spending so much time with the pickled version the last few years.” His voice was dry and acerbic.

“I’d like to say I don’t deserve that. But the fact that I’m absolutely dying to have a drink from the bottle of brandy that’s in there suggests that you might have a point. It’s funny, I can ignore it most of the time when I’ve got something else to keep my attention, but every time I see a bottle…”

“You can do this,” Triss said quietly but firmly. “I know you can. I shouldn’t have made that dig. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, Triss. I’ll take a hard truth over a pretty lie any day.”

There was a formal dress jacket of polished silk in the cabinet as well. But that would only draw unwanted attention where I was going, so I let it lie. I did take the broad-brimmed hat the watch sometimes wore in the summer, both for sun protection and because the shadows it made would help hide my face. Especially since I intended to have Triss give them a little hand. At other times when stealing clothes I’d left a couple of riels to pay for their replacement, but I didn’t bother this time. I didn’t owe the Stingers anything.

I quickly stripped out of my still damp clothes, wincing at the sting as I dragged the shirt over the fresh scabs and bruises on my face. The Elite had done a number on me there, though Vala thought it would heal without scarring after her spellwork.

Then I changed into the uniform. It felt wonderful to have fresh clean fabric against my skin. It was raw silk instead of the cotton of a duty uniform, but the rough texture of the fabric meant you’d have to look close to notice. The biggest problem was the badges on the upper arms. The paired fans of a ranking lieutenant would draw more attention than I wanted. But that could be fixed with a sharp knife and a bit of creative magic to replace them with a sergeant’s tripled swords. I’d have made myself a corporal or a private if I could have, but neither would ever wear a uniform as nice as mine.

I still had the problem of my double-draw sword rig and trick bag, both of which were profoundly nonstandard equipment, but I figured I could manage that by stealing a long tool sack from the groundskeepers. My wet clothes went into that as well since I didn’t want to leave behind anything that could be used by a tracker, magical or otherwise. The sack fell outside the realm of standard watch equipment, but everybody ends up hauling around an extra bag from time to time so I didn’t think it’d draw too much attention my way.

And I was right, though not for the reasons I’d expected. The Mufflers offices were normally very quiet, in keeping with their special mission. But today when I arrived at the little building on the Highside/Palace Quarter border, it looked like an overturned hornet’s nest. Gold and black watch uniforms buzzed around everywhere and a sort of haze of suppressed fury hung in the air, though I didn’t know why. I kept my head down and my hat pulled forward as I slipped through the crowd.

I’d expected to have to do a certain amount of fancy footwork both verbal and literal to get where I wanted to go, but nobody even noticed one more Stinger in the midst of that angry swarm. I was able to go right in the front door
and through to the small latrine off the front room without being challenged.

Under normal circumstances I’d have pulled up a few floorboards and slipped into the crawlspace beneath the offices. Like many of the newer buildings in Tien’s wealthy hillside neighborhoods, it had been designed with plenty of room for airflow beneath, both for summer cooling and winter heating using one of the hypocaust furnaces imported from the Sylvani Empire. The under-floor space provided the perfect route for moving about unseen if you ignored the potential problem of the Durkoth coming at you through the bedrock that lay only a few inches below the surface here. Not something I was willing to do after what had happened to Coalshovel and later at the Nonesuch.

Instead, I climbed up onto the bench and examined the narrow, bamboo-framed mulberry-paper panels separating the attic from the rooms below. The rough unbleached paper of the ceiling was another marker of a newer building, one expressly designed to be easily switched from one sort of use to another.

I much preferred older, more solid ceilings as did the thatchcutters and other shadowtraders who made illegal entrances via the roof. The mulberry paper was far too easy to rip, and it amplified any noise like a drumhead, but I had no other good choice. Sighing, I pushed up the panel closest to the wall, and poked my head into the space above. It felt like I’d opened the door on a fresh-filled drying oven, as hot damp air smacked me in the face.

I lifted my bag through, laying it carefully across a couple of rafters, then followed it up as quickly as I could manage. Pausing only long enough to have Triss reach down and open the latch on the latrine door, I reset the panel behind me. I had to hope no one would enter for the few minutes it took for the heat I’d just let in to dissipate. I didn’t want anyone wondering about that.

Sweat drenched me in seconds, though I hadn’t even started moving yet. If I wanted to get to Fei’s office, I was going to have to crawl on hands and knees along the rafters
with my sack slung awkwardly in front of me because the roof hung so low it nearly scraped my back. Working slowly and carefully despite the stifling heat I got moving. The bustle and buzz below would cover most of the noise of my passing, but too loud a creak or a slip that ripped one of the paper panels and I’d be fucked.

I had to pause repeatedly to mop the sweat off my face and out of my hair just to keep it from dripping and spattering on the paper panels below. It was a public building and not some noble’s fancy, so the panels were inferior paper, very rough and often stained, but the Mufflers were a lot sharper than your average watchman. One of them might actually notice a series of fresh wet spots drawing a slow line across the ceiling and decide to check on the problem with a woldo or some other spearlike object.

Normally, Triss would have caught the drops for me, but a dark shadow sliding along the translucent paper would make an even worse tell than the sweat, especially with the light coming up from below. After crawling for what felt like a thousand years and three hundred miles, I ended up over what I hoped was Fei’s office.

I’d only been there once before, and that very reluctantly, to collect a payoff for a small courier job I’d done for the captain. Then, she had occupied a big open room in the building’s back right corner which was where I was now. The relative quiet and dark of the room below was reassuring, suggesting closed windows and a place where even watchmen treaded lightly.

I lowered my head into the space between two rafters and lifted a ceiling panel a few inches, giving me a narrow view of part of the room. I recognized Fei’s desk. It was covered in a light scatter of writing paper, but the seat behind it held nothing. I lifted the panel higher, listening carefully all the while. Nothing. I poked my head down into the room and looked around. Empty.

I moved a couple of yards to my left and lifted out the panel directly above Fei’s desk. That allowed me to lower myself onto the raised top and avoid the noise of a drop to
the floor. A quick glance through Fei’s papers didn’t turn up anything useful, though I did notice there was nothing dated from the last two days in the scatter. Looking around, I spotted a small set of filing shelves. All the most recent reports and paperwork were stacked neatly on the top shelf, implying she hadn’t had a chance to look at them yet.

I was just deciding what to try next, when a faint courtesy knock sounded at the door. It was the sort of knock an underling makes when they know that no one is home, but don’t want to violate protocol in case they turn out to be wrong. The hinges were on this side of the door, so I stepped into the blind spot that would be created by its opening. I drew one of my swords and waited. A second knock followed, this one even fainter than the first. The door opened a heartbeat later.

A tall, slender man in the uniform of a watch corporal stepped into the room carrying an extra-large sheet of paper rolled up like a scroll. Corporal Anjir—I knew all the Mufflers by sight. As he started toward the file shelf, I pushed the door gently closed and raised my sword. The corporal froze as the latch clicked shut, but he didn’t turn around.