Covenant's End (5 page)

At which point Olgun firmly decided that more important things than this conversation demanded his full attention.

Another tense moment, as Shins waited for Olgun's “all clear,” then slowly peeked over the parapet. This stretch of walkway, startlingly dark behind the focused lanterns, indeed looked and sounded empty. The young woman scrambled over and across, quite steady despite the rain-slicked stone and occasional puddle collected earlier that day, and rolled over the barrier on the opposite side. Only then, once more affixed to the wall as if glued, did she look around to get her bearings.

“What the hopping…?!”

At the base of the wall, more of those focused lanterns shone
into
Davillon, illuminating the approaching thoroughfares. Fewer than their counterparts above, a small group of guards stood watch inside the main gate, just as alert as the others, despite facing what should have been a safer direction.

“You're supposed to be able to do the impossible, yes?” Shins whispered finally. “So do it. Tell me one way this could possibly indicate anything
good
.”

Olgun, as she'd anticipated, had nothing.

“Figured. All right, try this one. What do you think the odds are that this
isn't
related to the Guild hunting for me? Because I don't think numbers actually go that low.”

Scurrying down the rest of the way and slipping unseen into the shadows across the road proved uncomplicated enough. Just as well, really, since Shins had proved utterly incapable of keeping her mind on the task. Even as she vanished into the winding streets, leaving the wall behind, she grumbled and fretted about the mysteries surrounding her, here in this city that was feeling ever more unfamiliar and ever less like home.

Perched on a window ledge that might well have given a cat pause—or at least required cat paws—Shins watched the small squad move on down the street below, their boot heels shouting a peculiar sort of
click-splash
with every step. She was only vaguely aware of chewing a lock of her hair, a habit she thought she'd shaken a year ago.

“How many patrols is that?”

Olgun indicated there had been six.

“Really?” Shins began idly peeling splinters off the edge of the rough wood beneath her. “Feels like twice that.” But then, six was still three or four more than she'd have expected to see in the brief span since she'd entered the city.

Peering from inside the mouths of alleys or from atop small, rundown buildings, Shins hadn't really gotten a good look at any of them until the fourth such group. Up to that point, she'd been intensely curious as to how the Guard could possibly field so many soldiers at once, especially given how many were stationed atop or along the wall.

Then that fourth patrol had passed directly beneath a streetlamp,
answering the thief's question and presenting her with a whole new host of worries.

The light shone, not on the black and silver of the Guard, but on tabards of sky-blue and white, colors Shins recognized immediately as belonging to House Poumer.

Private armsmen. The city government had either called upon house soldiers to assist in keeping the peace, or the Houses had elected to do so and the city had been powerless to prevent them. Either way, it explained the extra manpower but raised a whole legion of additional questions that Shins would really rather not have considered.

Plus, the last time she'd dealt with private house guards, back in the Outer Hespelene, it had not proved a pleasant experience.

“Olgun, what the happy hens is going on here?” And then, “Yes, I
am
going to keep asking. And you're the one with knowledge of the ages, so you tell me. How many ways
are
there to say ‘I don't know'?”

Only when the patrol had been lost to sight for a good few minutes did she descend to the street, making her way deeper into the neighborhood. The place deteriorated with every additional step. Staircases sagged; garbage grew thick along the roadway; cobblestones became ever more sporadic, finally giving way to hard-packed dirt; and the air gradually yielded to what certainly smelled like the various internal gasses of a dog's back end.

It didn't turn her stomach any less than it would someone else's, but it was a familiar, homey sort of nausea.

Not that her destination was really “home,” but it'd do in a pinch.

Widdershins had very seriously considered heading straight for the Flippant Witch.
That
was home, so far as she was concerned, and she was greatly anxious to see old friends. Ultimately, it was vanity that got in her way. She'd been traveling for a very long time, and her clothes were near to demanding that she pay rent. Better to wash up and change first, lest Robin and the others mistake her for a vagrant or perhaps something from beyond the grave.

She'd let many of them go after taking up ownership of the Flippant Witch, but Shins still maintained a few boltholes throughout Davillon: cheap, rundown flats where she could store funds and equipment or spend a few nights where nobody would know to look for her. It was one of those—not directly on her route to the Witch, but only moderately out of the way—that she approached now.

When she reached the building, her eyes only lightly stinging from the local miasma, it looked much as it always had. The external staircase sagged a bit more than it used to, maybe, and even more of the windows were boarded up, but otherwise little had changed. The façade was just as grimy as ever, but that was fine; Shins was pretty sure it was load-bearing dirt, anyway.

The framework creaked alarmingly with every step she took—and that was
with
Olgun's assistance!—but Shins reached the third floor without incident. She pushed through the outer door, which was connected to only a single hinge, and that more by sentiment than genuine attachment, and entered a hallway made almost entirely of rickety. The cobwebs, she was sure, were primarily for the ambiance, as most spiders had too much self-respect to live here.

“Be it ever so horrible…” Shins began, before a flicker of someone else's curiosity stopped her. “What?”

Then again, “What? No, nothing. How can you smell
anything
over all the garbage and apathy? Ugh. I guess you'd better give me a hand, then. Or a nostril. How would you even describe helping someone to smell something? Has anyone before us ever even
needed
to describe helping someone to smell so
ghaaaaooourghthkt!
”

Said noise was, most probably, caused by the letters attempting to flee Widdershins's head. The stench of the building, the neighborhood, the streets, had been bad enough already. Now, after she'd felt the familiar tingle of her partner's power, it flooded her nose, her mouth, her lungs. She felt as though she'd just tried to inhale an athlete's armpit. Through a used diaper.

Before the horrific fetor could reach her gut, an event that could only have resulted in the addition of yet another foul odor to the hall, Olgun narrowed the scope of his “nasal assistance.” Just as he'd aided her in the past in focusing in one particular sound or sight, so now did he sweep aside any extraneous scent, if only briefly. Widdershins slowly straightened, sniffing like a curious kitten.

“Yeah, something definitely doesn't belong here. It's almost…I'm not sure. Floral?”

Tentative agreement from her partner.

Whatever that scent wafted from, it wasn't in the hallway proper. The bouquet was such that, even over the other lingering odors, Shins wouldn't have needed Olgun's help to detect it if it were.

Inside one of the rooms, then.

She crept by a few of them, past doors that were no more than uneven slabs of half-rotted wood, nailed to makeshift hinges, until she arrived at one in particular. One that hung just a few inches open, when she
knew
she'd securely latched it last time she was here.

Shins was angered at the invasion of her sanctum, confused as to how anyone might have found it, but she wasn't at all
surprised
. Soon as she realized something was out of place in one of the apartments, she knew which it would be.

Rapier unsheathed and at the ready, Olgun's senses reaching out to warn her of any threat she might miss, Shins nudged the door open a hair more and slipped inside.

Basically a room and a half, the flat was largely open, with only a smattering of furniture. It was the perfume that hit her first. And it
was
perfume, that scent; she could tell, now that it was stronger, more direct. Too much and too spread out to be the lingering traces of someone who'd passed through, or even the result of a spill. No, this strong, this evenly spread—someone had very deliberately sprinkled perfume across the place.

So what did you not want anyone outside to smell, you motherless frogs?

No enemies by the door or lurking in the shadows with a pistol, and a quick Olgun-enhanced glance revealed no tripwires or other booby traps. Safe from any immediate danger—probably—Shins crossed the room, heading for the nook in which her bed, chests, and various accoutrements awaited.

No ambush. No trap. So far as she could tell, no theft, and anyway, the only stuff worth stealing was carefully hidden away. So what the—?

Shins smacked a palm to her mouth to keep from shouting aloud. There was someone—some
thing
!—in the bed.

Unwilling to give the intruder more time to react, Shins turned her startled jump into a forward leap, coming down beside the mattress. Her rapier was already winging outward when Olgun's cry of alarm actually registered. She couldn't quite cut her thrust short, but she did manage to twist her wrist aside, so the blade punched into the filthy pillow rather than the…

She gawped downward, leaning on the rapier's pommel, her throat working silently.

A corpse. Someone had intruded into Shins's apartment—well, one of them—for apparently no other purpose than to lay a corpse atop her mattress, head propped on pillow and blankets tucked neatly under its chin.

“Well, we…. It's about time to buy a new set of linens anyway, yes? Or steal. Yeah, maybe steal a set.”

Olgun allowed her to go on, and Widdershins was grateful that he pretended not to notice the tremor in her voice.

She'd been around corpses before, far too often—had even made some herself—but rarely any that were this
mature
. Clearly the perfume had been intended to ensure nobody discovered the body early; the floral scent might have been odd, but a rotting cadaver would eventually attract attention even in this rundown pustule of a building.

But it was almost unnecessary. The body smelled more of dirt and dust than decay; whoever this poor guy might be, he'd clearly been dead for well over a year. Little remained but shriveled, parchment skin coating brittle bones. He'd been someone of means, or of import; that the skin remained relatively whole suggested the use of preservatives and embalming agents that simply weren't affordable to any but the aristocracy. Even had she lacked that hint, Shins could tell—as badly decomposed as they were—that the burial clothes had been of the highest quality.

“I don't get any of this,” she confessed to her god, turning her back on the bed and its vile occupant. “I mean, it's some kind of threat. That much is obvious, yes? But what? And…”

Olgun tugged at her awareness, trying to get her attention, but in her preoccupation she shrugged it off without noticing.

“…from who? Most of the people I've pissed off would just try to hit me with something heavy. Or set me on fire. Or…”

The god was all but waving his arms and shouting now, which was impressive for an entity without limbs or voice.

“…hit me with something on fire. And for pastry's sake,
how
? How did they find this place?! How did they know—?”

A crackle of power raced through the air around Widdershins as Olgun literally dragged her attention over to the bed. It was, as best she might have described, like he had threaded a hook through her senses—not her eyes, but her
sight and hearing themselves
—and yanked her around by them.

“
Ow!
Dogs grommet, Olgun, what are you—?! What? No, I think I've gotten as close to that corpse as I'm going…. Oh, for…
fine
!”

Grumbling furiously, as much to distract herself from the fear and revulsion, Shins moved to the bedside and leaned over, studying the body far more intently than she preferred.

“All right, I'm here. It's…” Something tiny and black, with far too many legs, skittered out from a rent in the leathery skin and
vanished behind the bed. “Show me what you think is so hopping important,” Widdershins demanded through clenched teeth and a sudden sweat, “or I am walking out of here.”

With a startling gentleness, given his earlier insistence, Olgun guided her focus to the head.

It meant nothing to her, initially. The rictus grin and gaping sockets were utterly unrecognizable as whoever this might once have been. The face, if face it could still be called, meant nothing.