Mickey Zucker Reichert - Shadows Realm (32 page)

Taziar rose, in awe of Harriman’s thoroughness despite his need to struggle against it.
The stronger the enemy, the better the fight. If Harriman wants me free, I’ll get myself arrested. And, if the guards won’t do it, well, sometimes a man has to do these things for himself.

Aware Harriman might still want him prisoner, Taziar kept to the main thoroughfares where the underground’s spies were less likely to prowl. He traveled northward, between the puddled shadows of gables and spires. Through occasional breaks between buildings, Taziar could see that the edge of the sun had scarcely crested the horizon, touching the eastern skyline with glazed semicircles of color. Aside from the merchants, the majority of the townsfolk remained in slumber. Like their baron, most of Cullinsberg’s citizens worshiped Aga’arin. By tradition, Aga’arin’s followers abandoned routine on his High Holy Day. Instead, they slept until the sessions of prayer which began at high morning on the temple grounds.

Taziar ignored the scattered merchants, trusting his instincts to protect him while he dug knowledge from memory. The layout of the baron’s keep was common information, spread throughout the underground as much from curiosity as necessity. No thief ever attempted to rob more than the main corridors near the entrance; those had become appropriately free of grandeur as a result. Since the mansion sported no other inlet, the baron kept his sentries clustered there to prevent any but guards and royalty from penetrating the deeper areas of his keep; there was always enough of the most faithful on duty to prevent a mass bribe. Other routes existed to allow Baron Dietrich and his family an escape in case of emergency, but the underground had discovered that these opened only from the inside and were just as carefully warded.

From rumors in the underground, Taziar had learned that the boulders composing the castle walls had been cut square and polished to shiny smoothness. Between blocks, the builders had layered mortar with an artist’s eye for perfection. More than once, friends and strangers had tried to commission the Shadow Climber to obtain items which were in the baron’s possession, but Taziar had never found the reasons compelling enough to justify the thefts. The insistence that only the Shadow Climber could scale the castle walls took all challenge from the undertaking; since every member of the underground seemed certain he could succeed, Taziar felt no urge to prove it. He was too busy accomplishing the impossible.

Accompanied only by his own thoughts, Taziar shambled through the streets, uncontested, and soon arrived at the cleared stretch of ground separating the town proper from the wall that enclosed the baron’s keep. Tucked into the shadow of a mud-chinked log cottage, Taziar studied the keep from its western side. Lantern light bobbed through windows in the lowest stories, but the upper levels and corner towers remained dark, black arrows silhouetted against the twilit sky.

From remembered description, Taziar located the baron’s balcony, which jutted from the fifth floor toward the southern tower. Curtains swirled and flapped in the wind. As they moved, Taziar caught interrupted glimpses of morning’s scattered glow sparkling off glasswork. Taziar’s position accorded him a flattened view of the southern side of the keep and the seventh story window from which he had escaped the corridor outside the baron’s dungeon by plummeting into the moat.
With all my injuries, I would have drowned, too, if Moonbear hadn’t pulled me from the water.
Taziar grimaced, recalling that the barbarian prince was also responsible for turning his controlled climb down the wall into a crazed fall.
He meant well. Even so, I’ve no desire to repeat the maneuver nor force it upon anyone else. And I won’t have to so long as Astryd brings the rope.

The other windows remained mysteries to Taziar. As a member of the underground, he had found the floor plan to the baron’s keep so readily available it seemed a waste of time, effort, and brain space for him to memorize it. And, though Taziar hated to begin a caper with less than complete knowledge, he doubted he would need to identify the maze of rooms and passageways defining the baron’s keep. The object he sought was on the baron’s person.
And right now, I can find the baron’s person, almost certainly, in the baron’s bed.

More accustomed to working beneath the unrevealing crescent he called the “thieves’ moon,” Taziar wanted to start while the sun was still low in the sky. Afraid to tarry too long, he crossed the plain and huddled in the block of shadow cast by the keep and its surrounding wall. Once there, he shinnied up the blocked granite of the wall.

Taziar’s elevated position accorded him a perfect view of the keep and its courtyard. Young oak and hickory dotted lush grasses tipped with autumn’s brown. Carved from stone blocks or twisted from wrought iron, benches were set at the western and eastern sides of the trees to catch the daily shade or sun. The moat spoiled the grandeur of the scene. Its waters shivered in the breezes, an oily black halo near the base of the keep.

Taziar took in the layout at a glance and turned his attention to the sentries who paced through the twilit gloom. Their movements appeared crisp; apparently their shift had just begun. Even so, Taziar found their patterns indecipherable. He had managed to identify two guards who might cross the straight tract he hoped to take to the baron’s window, when a scraping sound on the wall startled him. Taziar flattened to the summit, eyes probing the haze. The noises grew louder, transforming to the unmistakable sound of footsteps on granite. A man became visible walking atop the wall, a colorless, dark shape etched against the dawn.

Taziar scuttled over the edge, climbing partway down the wall toward the courtyard. Something sharp jabbed his back.
A spear?
Taziar froze. When no challenge followed, he rolled his eyes, easing his head around until he saw a spreading oak, its branches stretched to the wall, one pressed into his cloak. Taziar loosed a pent up breath which earned him another poke from the limb. The slap of the wall guard’s footsteps passed directly overhead then faded as the man’s vigil took him beyond Taziar’s hearing.

When I watched from town, I didn’t even see the sentry on the wall.
Gently, Taziar began extracting himself from the hold of the oak. A branch creaked as he moved. He cringed and further slowed his progress.
That’s because I couldn’t spend all the time I needed to study things. The only way I could have missed him is if there’s only one sentry on the wall.
Taziar pulled himself free of a twig. It broke with a faint snap. Suppressing a curse, Taziar gazed into the courtyard. Apparently oblivious, the nearest sentry continued his march.
Stupid place for a tree, this close to the wall.
Taziar guessed it had been planted as a seed or sapling.
Probably no one considered its branches might eventually grow over the walls and provide access to enemies or that its roots might disrupt the structure of the wall.
Looking down, Taziar saw a haphazard pile of sawed off branches and knew he echoed someone else’s concerns. Within the week, this tree would sit in pieces, a neatly stacked pile of seasoning hardwood.

The strain of sideways movement tore at the calluses on Taziar’s fingers. He finished his descent, toe groping the dirt for a landing place clear of debris. Finding one, he lowered his feet to the ground and turned toward the castle. Again, he examined the sentries, and, this time, their pattern became obvious to him. They paced in overlapping, cloverleaf figures; the arcs had thrown him off track. But now that Taziar had deciphered their motions, he doubted he would have any difficulty pacing his own activity between them.
Simple.
Sudden realization ruined Taziar’s assessment and killed the joy of certain triumph before it even had a chance to rise.
Except for the moat.

Taziar ducked behind the disarray of branches, hidden from the guards as his thoughts raced. He knew he could swim the brackish waters, but his plan required him to remain dry and only reasonably disheveled.
Somehow, I have to cross over it.
He dug through his pockets while he considered options.
This early, the drawbridge will be up. It’s too wide to jump.
Taziar’s fingers skipped over crumbs, splinters, and lint. He discovered his utility knife in his right hip pocket along with a striker and a block of flint. The left held only the sailor’s sewing needle he had used to rescue Astryd from a locked berth on the ferry boat the day he met her. He had left his other possessions with Silme and Astryd in anticipation of losing everything to the guards. Now he wished he had at least brought his sword.

Stymied, Taziar picked idly at the bark of a tree branch. Thoughts distant, he glanced down at his fingers and suddenly felt stupid.
The logs.
He looked into the courtyard, watching a sentry complete an arc before him. Selecting a timber heavy enough to serve as a bridge, Taziar tugged. Wood shifted with a muffled thunk. Taziar bit his lip, immediately abandoning his efforts. He chose a different log, examining its length to make certain no other branches lay on top of it. He hefted an end. The sweet, cloying odor of wood lice wafted to him, and he realized the log would prove too heavy for him to do anything more than drag it. Unwilling to risk the sound of rustling grass and the ponderous clumsiness the log would lend to his gait, he chose a thinner limb. Uncertain whether it would serve his purposes, he tucked it beneath his arm, timed a sprint between the sentries’ routes, and positioned the branch across the surface of the moat.

A breeze ruffled the stagnant waters into white curls. Leaves skittered across the surface like tiny boats, many caught and anchored in a dense layer of algae. Lit by the diffuse glow of lanterns refracted through the windows of the keep, the branch seemed no thicker than Taziar’s wrists and fragile as a stem. But the pattern of the guards did not leave him time for hesitation. He stepped onto the wood. It sagged beneath his weight, but it held, and he crossed with nothing worse than damp boots. He eased the limb into the water. The risk of a splash seemed less worrisome than the guards finding his makeshift overpass. If things went according to plan, he would have no need to escape in the same fashion.

The log slid silently into the water and sank, disrupting the slime in a line that marked its passage. Taziar turned his attention to the wall. The sun still had not passed over the keep to light its western side, but dawn light sheened from the glassy surface of stone. Taziar’s heart fell into the familiar cadence that welcomed the coming challenge. He savored the natural elation accompanying it. In the depths of his mind, the memory stirred that he had promised to abandon all emotion, but to ignore the excitement inspired by years of addiction to danger seemed as impossible as a thirsty man refusing water or a man spurning sex an instant before the climax.

Taziar never hesitated. He explored the smoothed surfaces with his fingers, and he discovered tiny flaws in the mortaring that another man might dismiss. To Taziar, they were handholds. He wedged small fingertips into the impressions, hauled his feet into a minuscule cleft and reached for another grip.

Taziar climbed with a careless and practiced strength. Attuned to sounds of discovery, he could spare no attention to his climb. Instead, he relied on the same instincts a swordsman taps when a potential killing stroke comes at him faster than thought. Taziar kept his rhythm steady, a continual cycle of hunting crevices, grasping what his trained fingers deemed solid, and hauling his body along the polished surface of stone. He counted stories by windows, their sills like giants’ ledges compared with the stone pocks and mortaring imperfections that served as his other holds.

Absorbed in the pattern of movement, Taziar did not notice the baron’s balcony until its shadow fell over him. He heaved upward from a toehold, caught a grip on the supporting bars of a railing painted black to protect it from the elements. He examined the outcropping through the striped view the balustrade allowed. A wooden chair overlooked the courtyard, its seat cushioned with pillows, its feet, handrests, and back intricately crafted and wound through with gold filigree. Yet, despite the elegance, the legs were chipped and the fabric on the upright showed signs of wear.

A favorite chair
, Taziar surmised.
Probably too old for the throne room. Rather than repair it, Baron Dietrich had it placed here where courtiers and visitors would never see it.
The thought ignited anger as swiftly as fire set to dry shavings.
The man blithely executed his guard captain on contrived evidence after more than a decade of meritorious service, yet he remains loyal to a piece of furniture.
The logic defied Taziar and brought all morality under question.
I wanted to smother emotion and vulnerability for a cause. Yet to let Harriman change what I am is little different than letting him kill me. It’s Harriman against me and all my sentimental weaknesses and strengths. I’ll best him or die in the attempt.
Taziar channeled his concentration back to the balcony, but one idea seeped through before he could banish it.
I hope I have the opportunity to apologize to Astryd.

Beyond the chair, curtains rippled, revealing a glass door. Through the thick, uneven surface, Taziar caught a warped glimpse of another set of curtains just inside. Soothed by the double barrier, Taziar hooked his arm over the top of the rail and pulled himself to the balcony. Time was running short. He would have to move quickly to catch the baron still asleep. Soundlessly skirting the chair as he crossed the balcony, Taziar grasped the door latch and twisted. It resisted his touch.

Taziar hissed his frustration. A closer study of the handle revealed a keyhole beneath it. The locksmith’s tools he had described to Silme and Astryd would have proved useful now, but Taziar did not waste time wishing. Retrieving the sewing needle from his pocket, he slid the tip into the hole. He felt the raspy vibrations as the end eased over the mechanism and the jolt as it fell into the groove. He pinned it in place and turned it, rewarded by the click of the lock opening. Gingerly, he inched the door ajar. Silence met him. He spun the needle again, heard the answering snap as the mechanism was thrown back into locked position. Simply shutting the door would restore it to its former, secure state.