Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1) (24 page)

Amadeo’s response was a grunt of exertion as he clambered up to the next tier of scaffolding, gripping beams and cross-supports, his arms burning as he climbed.

The axman sighed and looked at the other two knights. “Well? You waiting on an invitation? Get up after him!”

Now it was a race. The knights sheathed their swords and started to climb. Amadeo tried not to look down, the hard cathedral floor growing farther and farther away with every straining inch. Soon he was fifteen feet up, then twenty, but the younger, more limber killers below were closing the gap fast.

Platforms of wooden planks spotted the scaffolding here and there, spots for the artisans to perch as they repaired the fading cathedral frescoes and patched the peeling plaster, but Amadeo refused the temptation to stop and rest. He ignored his burning lungs and aching arms and legs and pushed aside the stabbing twinge in his side as a mistimed jump yanked a muscle taut.

A gauntleted hand grabbed his ankle, yanking hard, almost making him lose his grip on the girders. His fingers clenched and the scaffolding seemed to lean, as if the entire groaning structure was about to come crashing down.

One of the knights grinned up at him. “Gotcha,” he said, giving Amadeo’s ankle another tug.

Amadeo kicked him in the face. Rotten teeth broke under his heel, and the man instinctively grabbed at his bloody mouth, losing his balance. He teetered backward, arms cartwheeling as he fell down to the cathedral floor. He hit a pew, and his back snapped against the maple with a sickly crack that echoed like a cannon-shot.

“You killed Dieter!” screamed the other knight, not far behind. “You bastard, you killed Dieter!”

Amadeo gritted his teeth and kept climbing.

He pulled himself up onto the top platform just as his arms gave out, quivering like useless jelly. Here, the workmen had been restoring one of the great windows, but their job was only halfway done. An empty stone arch looked out into the starry night sky. Amadeo held his breath as he stepped out onto the ledge.

Barely a foot wide, the ledge encircled the cathedral dome. A gust of cold wind shoved against Amadeo as he made his way across the slick stone, inch by careful inch. The back of the cathedral looked out over a sheer cliff and far below, just a murky snake shadow in the dark, lay the icy waters of the Gabler River where it widened to meet the sea.

“Where now, huh?” shouted the knight as he emerged onto the ledge, barely ten feet away. He drew his sword, holding it tight as he inched his way toward Amadeo. “
Where now
?”

Amadeo realized, with sudden and chilling certainty, that he only had two choices. Skewered on a murderer’s sword, or broken and drowned on the river rocks at the end of a very long fall.

Gardener
, he thought, clasping his hands before him,
if I must die tonight, so be it. I only ask that you extend your protection over Benignus and Livia. They are good and faithful and true, and deserving of your blessings in this hour of darkness. If I am not to be their protector, then send someone more worthy in my stead.

“What’s with the hands?” the knight demanded, edging ever closer. “Are you
praying
? What, you think the Gardener’s gonna come down and save you?”

Amadeo rested his hands at his sides. As a shrill wind washed over him, he felt strangely peaceful. He looked to the knight and shook his head.

“No,” he said.

Then he leaned forward, spread his arms, and let the wind take him as he fell from the ledge. Past the cathedral, past the cliff, past the city, down to the waiting darkness and a river grave.

The cardinal’s stables provided three strong steeds with dun coats and hooves that crackled like thunder along the old merchant road leading out of Lerautia. Dante led the way, veering off the worn and ancient stone at the first opportunity and guiding Mari and Werner down a dirt path. The Holy City fell away at their backs, but trouble wouldn’t be far behind.

As night fell, forest swallowed the dirt road whole. They had to slow down, picking their way through brambles and fallen trees. Eventually they swung down from their saddles and led the horses through, keeping careful hands on the reins.

“The road was better kept, last time I came this way,” Dante said, “but that was a long, long time ago. We’re almost there.”

“You still haven’t told us where ‘there’ is,” Werner said. He coughed into his sleeve.

“I smelled something foul as soon as Accorsi began questioning me, and it wasn’t his cologne. Didn’t think he’d go so far as to have me killed, but he was too eager to know about my father and too reluctant to explain why. My father was a cloth merchant and a man of means. Spent many fine years in the Holy City before commerce drew him to Mirenze. When the cardinal started badgering me about his time in Lerautia. I knew exactly where to look.”

The dirt road ended in a clearing. A hunting lodge stood under the starry night sky. The shingles on the roof were broken, the rough-hewn log walls rotting and mold-kissed, and a broken bay window leaned down from a steepled attic.

“Fox End,” Dante said, looking up at the house with a strange, cold reverence. “My father’s retreat. He’d come here to escape the world. And his family. He only brought me here once, on my seventeenth birthday. It was the first time we’d spoken in over a year. He told me that when he was gone, all this
grandeur
would be mine. And that one day, I would return and find my destiny here.”

Werner shook his head at the ruin. “I assume it wasn’t a dump back then. So what did you find, when you came back?”

“I never did. In fact, I’d pushed the conversation out of my mind until the good cardinal jogged my memory. My father had been drinking so he was more maudlin than usual when he said it, and I chalked it up to a feeble attempt at impressing me.”

“He said your destiny was here, and you never bothered to take a look?”

Dante put his hands on his hips. He stared up at the ruined lodge.

“I wanted
nothing
from him. It’s not uncommon for a man of a certain age and certain wealth to take a mistress, but my father was…rampant and indiscreet. Everyone knew about his philandering, the dalliances with noble wives, the whores he’d bring out here for his little holidays. The gossip slid right off his back. No, the shame landed on my mother. And on my brothers. And on me. He’d only married my mother for her dowry in the first place. Seed money for his professional ambitions.”

“He dishonored your name,” Mari said, nodding like she understood.

“When he died,” Dante said, “I sold his business, his properties, everything that carried his stink. I made my own way in the world. I never did sell Fox End, though. I think it pleased me in some petty way, the idea of his pride and joy going to rot.”

Werner shrugged and led his horse over to a splintered hitching post, tying off the reins. “Well, let’s see what he left for you.”

The front door might have been painted nightingale blue once, but the pigment had faded to the color of spoiled milk. The wood warped in its frame, bulging out and wedged fast on its rusted hinges. Werner stood back, took a two-step run, and slammed his boot against the door as hard as he could. It jolted but didn’t give.

“Here,” Mari said, leading the way to a side window. She turned her face and smashed it open with one of her batons, knocking out the shards of broken glass from the pane until it was safe to swing a leg over the sill and climb inside. Dante saw Werner grit his teeth in pain as he followed, shifting his weight between his feet, but he didn’t say anything.

Cobwebs thick as silken veils draped the gloomy parlor. The stench of mildew hung in the air, mildew and animal rot. Dante made his way through the dark to a table, blowing dust from an antique oil lamp. He rummaged in his belt pouch for a thin flask of oil. Soon the lamp ignited, casting a baleful yellow glow across the forgotten lodge. Trash filled the once-grand hearth, choking it shut, and the rotten corpses of rats lay strewn across the broad floorboards.

“My legacy,” Dante said.

They rummaged through the cupboards, sending fat black roaches scurrying from the light, and found a second lantern. Werner carried this one with them as they cautiously climbed the creaking staircase to the second floor. A board snapped under Dante’s foot and he tumbled back, off-balance. Mari quickly caught him, grabbing his arm and shoulder, holding him steady.

Once he caught his breath, they made their way to the bedrooms. The lantern’s glow strobed through open doorways, across broken four-poster beds and once-expensive quilts reduced to rotten tatters. Beady red eyes glared out from the guts of a savaged mattress, and the chittering of rats followed their footsteps.

“If there ever was anything here,” Werner said as he poked the tip of his staff into a pile of debris, “the vermin got to it first. Let’s hope your father left you something rats don’t eat. Like a pile of gold bars, maybe.”

At the end of the hall, a rickety ladder led up to the attic trapdoor. Werner gave it a dubious look, but Dante didn’t hesitate. One slow rung at a time, resting his full weight on each step before reaching for the next, he climbed up and gave the trapdoor a shove. It lifted, swinging up and over, and fell on its hinges with a dusty
boom
that shook the lodge. He reached down, and Mari passed the lantern up to his outstretched hand.

The lantern’s light fell over rotten crates and cobweb curtains. Still Dante pressed deeper into the attic, squinting at the shadows, as the others climbed up behind him. The warped floorboards groaned under their feet, buckling, threatening to snap.

“Not safe up here,” Mari murmured. Dante peered around, holding the lantern out before him, then froze. Something caught his eye, a glint of tarnished brass in the dark.

It was a steamer trunk, shoved against one wall and almost out of sight amid the debris. The leather straps that once bound it were rotten, the brass clasps dangling from threads or lying scattered in the dust, but it was still better kept than anything else in the lodge. Dante crouched down on one knee, running a finger across its lacquered lid.

“I remember this,” he said. “My father kept curios in here. Keepsakes. The chest was in his office for years, until one day it wasn’t. I didn’t care to ask where he’d moved it to.”

Hinges squealed as he pushed up the lid. Dante’s heart sank.

“Empty,” he said.

Nothing waited for him in the chest’s wooden heart, not so much as a speck of dust.
Some legacy
, he thought.

Something was off, though. He leaned closer, tilted his head, and tried to figure out why the chest seemed strange to him. Something about its dimensions he couldn’t put a finger on.

“Well, it was worth a look,” Werner said. “We should go. We didn’t exactly cover our horses’ tracks, and it won’t be hard to follow our trail—”

“A moment,” Dante said. His heart started to pound as he realized what was wrong: the inside of the chest was too shallow. The bottom, on the inside, was at least three inches higher than the bottom on the outside. He reached in and felt around the seams, fingers pressing against rough wooden joins, trying to find a catch.

With a click, the bottom lid pivoted inward, then rose up on a concealed hinge.

“A secret compartment?” Mari said, leaning over his shoulder to look.

His father hadn’t left bars of gold behind. He’d left him letters. Yellowed sheets of folded parchment, envelopes still bearing crumpled bits of sealing wax on their torn flaps. Fistfuls of letters, some in his father’s careless hand and some written with a more feminine curve. Dante picked one up at random and was starting to read when a voice bellowed from outside the lodge.

“
Werner! Werner Holst, you get your treacherous ass out here and parley like a man!
”

Werner and Mari darted to the broken bay window. Butcherman Sykes stood alone on the weed-tangled lawn below, holding up a guttering torch to push back the dark.

“To the side!” Werner whispered harshly and quickly moved away from the window. “Lydda and Pig Iron’ll be with him, and Lydda’s a crack shot with a crossbow. Don’t give her a line of sight.”

Mari followed his lead. They flanked the window, craning their necks to see as much of the forest clearing as they dared.

“Sorry, Sykes,” Werner shouted down. “We went to a lot of trouble to keep this man’s head firmly attached to his shoulders, and we’d like to keep it that way. Call it professionalism.”

“You’re a fine one to talk of professionalism! Your job was done, and you took your pay, Werner. He’s our bounty now. I’ll make you a deal, for old times’ sake. Send Uccello out. We’ll take him and leave, and that’ll be the end of it.”

Under their feet, somewhere in the lodge, a stray floorboard creaked. Mari pointed downward and mouthed, “One’s in the house.” Werner nodded grimly.

“Can’t do that,” Werner called back. “The cardinal duped us. Can’t let him get away with that. It’s a matter of reputation, you understand.”

“Reputation, my arse! It’s that Terrai bitch, bound around your neck like an anchor. She doesn’t even know, does she?”

“Shut up, Sykes!” Werner’s gaze flicked between Mari and the window’s edge as his face reddened.

“Hey, Renault! You up there? Bet he never told you what he did in the war.”

Mari blinked. “War? What’s he talking about?”

“Nothing, he’s lying,” Werner stammered.

“Holst the Harrier,” Sykes shouted, “the Terror of Blue Creek. Oh, yeah, we were mates then, tight as drumskin. Comrades-in-arms while we were carving our bloody way across Belle Terre. Did you know, Renault, that your partner there had a necklace of Terrai ears? I won’t make excuses. It was just the sort of thing that made sense after a few months on the front lines.”

Mari stared into Werner’s eyes. Her mouth fell open, but she didn’t say a word.

“
Shut up, Sykes!
” Werner bellowed.

“Hey, Renault,” Sykes shouted, laughing. “Your mommy and daddy died in the war, didn’t they? Who knows, maybe it was Werner there who did the deed. What do you say, old buddy? Did you make that poor girl an orphan? If it wasn’t you, it was somebody just like you.”

“He’s just—he’s just trying to confuse you,” Werner said, but Dante could hear the desperation in his voice. From the dawning look of horror on her face, so did Mari.

“We’ll take care of him for you, Renault. Just leave the lodge. Walk away and leave Werner and the bounty to us. We’ve got no scores to settle with you.”

Something shifted behind Mari’s eyes. Her lips tightened, her shoulders slid back.

“I am a knight aspirant of the Order of the Autumn Lance,” she shouted down, her voice hard as a diamond, “and Dante Uccello is under my protection. So long as I draw breath, my honor and my weapons will shield him. Take him if you dare!”

Silence.

Then, sounding halfway between bewildered and amused, Sykes shouted back, “See, Werner? This is what you get when you team up with lunatics. All right, Lydda, smoke ’em out.”

A crossbow bolt whistled through the air, streaking through the broken window. Its tip, dipped in pitch and lit aflame, trailed sparks like tiny fireflies. The bolt slammed into a ceiling beam, and the flame danced across the dry wood in all directions, reaching out for fuel with ravenous, licking tongues.

“Mari, listen—” Werner started to say.

She drew her batons and turned on her heel.

“Survive now, talk later,” she hissed.