The Fall of Ventaris (17 page)

The general seemed to stare forbiddingly down at her, but Duchess ignored his stony gaze and knelt, feeling around the base of the plinth as Darley had. Soon her questing fingers came upon a small square of stone that seemed to jut out slightly. She pressed hard and heard a click from inside the statue. She pushed and the general slid obligingly back to reveal stone steps descending into darkness. There was no sign of the girl.

Duchess hesitated, torn. Steel longed to explore the passage, but Silk reminded that she’d come here to unravel mysteries from her past and not to explore unknown tunnels. Still, there could be something valuable down there. She idly fingered a stub of candle in her pocket, debating with herself. She had no idea where that passage led or who might be lurking there. She didn’t fear Darley, of course, but she wondered if her Wharves boy might be below, perhaps with friends. And of course the last time she’d ventured under the city she’d sensed a presence more fearful than all the boys in the Wharves put together.

The open window above beckoned, and she reminded herself that the penny in her pocket was better than the florin in her future. The scholar’s tunnel wasn’t going anywhere, but the night was passing and Darley would be back before too long. Best to be about her business before she returned. With mixed relief and regret, she stepped behind the general and shoved until he was back in place.

As Duchess crossed the garden, she reflected that this night had just gotten
much
more interesting.

*
 
*
 
*

The thick ivy concealed a wooden trellis, which was surely why Darley climbed down from the third floor down rather than the second. To get to that trellis from her own window Darley would have had to traverse a ledge for about ten feet, and having dared a heart-stopping ledge walk of her own at the baron’s party, Duchess understood the reluctance.

Moving with Tyford-trained precision, Duchess pulled herself to the third-floor window and then waited, listening intently. All was quiet. Darley had considerately left the window wide open and Duchess slipped carefully inside. Only faint light trickled in from outside, so she decided to risk lighting the candle she’d stowed in her pocket. By its flickering light she saw what appeared an office or private library, outfitted with wooden shelves, overflowing with more books and scrolls than she’d seen in one place since she’d last visited in her father’s study. In the center of the room was a massive oaken table, covered with quills, inkpots, sheets of parchment and neat stacks of bound books, next to a large wooden rack, perfect for holding maps. She moved in for a closer look.

The mapmaker’s handwriting covered sheet after sheet of parchment in flowing lines and intricately drawn diagrams. He knew his trade. She found not just simple maps of the city and surrounding countryside, but figures detailing the relative elevation of everything from the harbor to the palace. She also found detailed drawing pictures of machinery – gearwork, pulleys, wooden platforms – each with the sigil of the imperial House drawn neatly in a corner of the parchment. She’d been weaned on her father’s library, but some of these complex charts, bursting with so many notes and numbers, made her head ache. Clearly, Ahmed had been correct about Savant Terence’s importance. Of course, the position of all the scholars had improved since the war...all but Marcus Kell’s, she reflected with a pang. Being back in a library made her remember him all the more clearly.

She shook her head, angry at the tears that had sprung to her eyes. She had come for information about the fate of the Freehold and not to indulge her sentimentality. She lacked the time to examine each scroll and ledger so she scanned the shelves for a clue that might help her narrow the search. Rolled, folded and bound paper stared mutely and unhelpfully back at her, and she cursed silently. She might spend hours perusing the contents of the shelves, and who knew when Darley would return? Turning back to the table, she let her eyes linger on the piles of maps and other drawings until a thought came to her. If Darley were using Domae tunnels, she could only have learned of them from her father’s work — in this very room, most likely. Yet there were no such maps to be seen, which meant Terence had a place for such sensitive information. Any place he stored such things as maps of long-forgotten tunnels might also contain a clue to the Freehold.

She swept her gaze over the room, looking now not for scrolls but secrets. She moved from shelf to shelf, testing to see if any held a hidden door or sliding panel, but each seemed firmly anchored to the wall behind. The floor was covered with a thick rug, which would have shown signs if any of the shelves swung open, but then she wondered if that rug itself might conceal a hidden compartment. She dared not try to shift the heavy oaken table — that would almost certainly wake the scholar sleeping below — but she quietly rolled back as much of the rug as she could, looking for anything that might reveal a trapdoor. All she found were smooth, polished wooden planks. She even moved from wall to wall, tapping gently for hollow spaces, but that was equally fruitless.

She had just decided to search the rest of the house when her eye fell upon the bookcase furthest to the left. Like the others it was piled with books and papers, but it now seemed to her that there was an empty space on each shelf, in the same place, one above the other. She moved closer to investigate, holding up her candle for a better view. The gaps were a bit too regular to be chance, she decided, and so she peered into the back of the bookcase in search of a hidden lever or button. There was none, but as she leaned in to look she noticed that there were narrow grooves in the surface of each shelf, she saw....perfect for fingers?

She set down the candle and reached for a shelf above her, feeling with her fingers for the groove she guessed was there and finding it. She set her foot on a lower shelf and began to climb as if the bookcase were a ladder. The shelves ended a few feet short of the ceiling, and when she reached the top she saw a rung mounted atop the case. “Here’s where you hold on,” Duchess muttered to herself, “while you open up...” It was too dark to see much, so she felt blindly around for the wall behind the case. Her fingers scrabbled over wood, and she probed until she felt a small ring, barely wider than her finger. She tugged and was gratified when a panel slid to the left.

Feeling triumphant, she retrieved her candle so she might see what she was doing. Climbing a bookcase with a lit candle wasn’t easy, but no harder than hanging from a wall for an hour with a cranky old thief looking on critically. She set the candle atop the case and saw that behind the panel was a small, metal safe, but instead of the keyhole she’d hoped to find she saw instead a series of levers, slides and dials, all gleaming dully in the candlelight.

She cursed again. A gods-damned puzzle lock. Tyford had not yet taught her much about them, and she’d not thought to find one here. If there were ways to tickle them open she did not know them, and in any case she’d need to be a far better thief to fiddle with such a thing while hanging from a bookshelf. The damned safe might as well be guarded by Teranon himself.

Her heart sinking, she closed the little wooden door and climbed slowly back to the floor. She ran her hands through her hair, trying to marshal her thoughts. If patience was a thief’s sword, hers was getting blunter by the moment. She needed a different weapon. If there were maps of the Domae tunnels in that safe, Darley must have seen them, which meant she had somehow figured out the combination. Perhaps there was something in the girl’s room that might help. She didn’t want to risk heading downstairs, but it was either that or turn away empty-handed. She stepped away from table and moved quietly to the door. She saw a wooden staircase leading down, and her mind flashed to something Tyford had told her.

“The real reason I trust stone? It doesn’t speak. Wood’s just as bad as a fucking guard dog. One wrong step on an old stair and before you know it the whole house’s up and screaming for the blackarms.” Tackling the stairs in the mapmaker’s house, she had to admit the grasping old bastard had a point. Carefully testing each step as she went, she found the guard dog halfway down, but eased up before it could bark too loudly. She stretched her leg to the next lowest riser, found it sound, and continued along.

The second floor hallway was unremarkable, with two doors and a staircase leading to the ground floor. A window at the far end, set with clear glass, admitted just enough light to see by. She carefully shielded her candle as she went, listening at the doors. She paused at the first. There was no light to be seen around the cracks, but from behind came a steady snoring. The second door must be Darley’s.

After another careful listen she slipped inside. The room was furnished in a surprisingly simple fashion: a featherbed that had seen better days, a small table with a rather splintery chair, a chest pushed up against the wall, and a large, battered wardrobe. A glass lamp flickered on the table. The window looked out over the garden, as she had guessed. She carefully crossed the room, alert for more guard dogs, all the while getting clearer on the situation in the savant’s home. Although Scholars District was not nearly as prestigious as Garden, the homes here had once belonged solely to the minor nobility, and this one must have cost a small fortune. The mapmaker probably spent his entire salary simply keeping himself and his daughter under this roof. Just her luck to have broken into the poorest house in the district.

She bit her lip in frustration. Her investigation into the Freehold aside, some part of her had entertained hopes of stealing enough from Savant Terence to pay off Antony. From what she had seen thus far, she’d have to lift the entire contents of the house to mollify the redcap.

She was about to turn back in disgust when she found the stash hidden at the bottom of the wardrobe.

The clothing was far finer than she would have expected in such a modest setting: silks and satins and damasks, all hidden under dresses of wool and modest linen. There was jewelry as well, pendants and brooches and, most eye-catching, a small green opal on a golden chain. Since these things had been hidden, she assumed the mapmaker had not bought them, and it seemed unlikely that the Wharves boy Darley was sneaking out to see had done so. Where had the girl gotten it all?

Her hands itched to empty the cache. Surely Jana would know how to fetch the best price for the silks, and she from Hector she could get a good price for the jewelry...
 

And fetch perhaps a few florin for the whole of it.
If
she were lucky, and
if
her fence didn’t cheat her, and
if
she weren’t caught hauling all of this out the third story window.

The third
if
was enough. Her solution to the problem of Antony was not to be found amongst Darley’s treasures. But Darley’s midnight wanderings, and the tunnels, and the half-Ulari boy...there was a story there, and a secret.

She almost closed the stash empty-handed. If Darley kept this hidden, she could hardly tell her father that it had been plundered. And she need not take it
all
. Now that she thought on it, perhaps she did not need a full twenty florin...

The smaller the piece, the longer before Darley realized anything was missing. She slipped the opal neatly into her pocket and closed the secret panel and the wardrobe.

She wasn’t certain how long she’d been here, but it felt too long. Wharves was all the way across the city from Scholars, but there was no way to know if Darley were making the full trip or simply meeting her boy in the tunnels. She might be back any moment. Duchess eased the wardrobe shut, and then was back into the hallway and up to the third floor, carefully stepping over the noisiest of the steps.

Third bell was ringing and Duchess was safely ensconced once again behind Teranon when the general rumbled backwards. Darley climbed up into the garden, looking dusty and the worse for wear and possibly drunk. She staggered halfway across the yard, leaving the hidden stairway open behind her. Duchess shook her head. It seemed Terence would wake up to a surprise come morning. Before she could reach the house, Darley wheeled unsteadily around and weaved her way back to the general, whom she pulled back into place. Duchess made a bet with herself that Darley would pass out before she could reach the window. She watched, half-fearful and half-amused as the girl scrambled up the trellis much less adroitly than she’d come down. Just before she reached the top, Darley missed her grip and tottered on the edge of balance, and for a moment Duchess was certain she’d won her bet. Then the girl managed to swing herself up and slide clumsily through the open window. She waited for the sound of Darley thumping to the study floor, but it never came and the house slept on.

Duchess settled down with her back to Ternanon, who by now seemed an old friend. This was as safe a place as any to wait, and come dawn she would steal over the garden wall and out of the district. During the day the blackarms on the gate would likely assume she was a serving girl on her master’s errand and let her pass without challenge. She fingered the pendant in her pocket. Although she’d learned nothing of the Freehold, she’d come away with some loot.

And perhaps the most valuable thing she’d taken from the mapmaker’s house was the knowledge of what lay beneath it.

Chapter Eleven: A lesser resurrection

She sat in the barren earthen basement, a solitary candle her only companion, and waited for death to arrive.

She’d reached Ferroc’s and Nieces at sundown, footsore from yet another long walk across the city, to take possession of the key to the small cellar, as she’d been directed. The tailor had agreed to rent the room readily enough, as usual taking the coin and asking no questions. She wasn’t sure Ferroc would have been so accommodating to one who did not wear a cloak, but that was the power of the Grey.

The shop was closing when she arrived but the girl who’d answered her knock, easily no more than six, obviously knew why Duchess was there. “My aunt says if anything’s missing come the morning, it’ll be taken from your hide.” Duchess had blinked; the child had delivered the warning in the same sing-song lilt she might use in talking to her dolls. She’d handed over the key nonetheless, and Duchess had used it to open the wooden bulkhead doors at the rear of the shop. The entrance to the basement was not visible from the street, Duchess noted with approval, which was one of the reasons she’d selected it.