Guilty Blood (8 page)

"But Lord Troidais—Rarentz—I'm afraid I didn't come to pay a social visit, either to you or Liscena. I've come to warn you of something that may be unbelievable, but true... and terrible."

∗ ∗ ∗

Rarentz dropped into the chair by the fire, brow knotted, jaw set. He looked upset. Less in the watery eyes and quivering lips sort of way and more in the shouting and drawing a knife manner. I prepared to leave hurriedly in case he was of the aristocratic school that had no qualms about shooting messengers.

When he spoke, he surprised me. "I'd assume you were lying but for two facts. First, I know your breeding and you were at least raised to be above that." He halted upon that point. It sounded like a slight, but I don't think he meant it that way. "Second, when Liscena came here, she had a knife like the one you described."

"A dagger? With a ruby pommel? The prince's dagger? Where is it!?" I scanned the room quickly for the rich, deadly looking device, the thing that the terrible Mr. Barttley told me had the power to murder a man and lock away his soul. When I hadn't found it at the mausoleum upon returning I'd assumed some grave tender had pinched it.

"It's gone." Rarentz said flatly.

"Gone? Where?" I persisted, sharpening the words so they didn't sound like a polite question. That dagger was the cork in the genie's bottle, and maybe with it I could recapture what I'd help unleash.

Rarentz looked at me sidelong with a bit of the indignation I expected from a typical nobleman. "The doctor I called on to see to Liscena. He saw it and was quite taken with it. Liscena had dropped it and cringed every time I brought it near, so I gave it to him in trade for his services. I don't... carry much coin these days, so it seemed a fair enough trade." He stressed the word "carry" in such a way that I caught his meaning. He was a pauper. A pauper with a big house, but that didn't look like it was going to be the case for much longer.

I sighed in frustration. "Who was the doctor and where can I find him?"

"Wait just a moment," Rarentz snapped, his civility expended. "You come here and tell me there's some monster coming to kill me and all you're interested in is some gaudy letter opener? What's your game in all this?"

"I don't have a game. But I'm responsible for this and am trying to set things right. That knife killed Prince Lieralt once and, if it has to come to that, maybe it can do it again." I came around the chair to look him in the face, needing him to see my sincerity and know this wasn't just some elaborate con. "If you tell me where the dagger is there might be a way we can still save your life."

∗ ∗ ∗

The beauty part of an entire city drowning in destitution is that all the same jobs get done, but just well enough to say they've happened, never as well as they would be were there the coin to do things right. Take locks, for instance. All the doors in Ardis have them, but no building constructed within the last decade has a good one. They're expensive things, and most folks either don't think about them or think one's as good as another. In the morning, the good owners of Omberbain's Auctioneers were going to realize they had thought wrong.

I can't say I picked the lock on the auction house's sturdy storage hall door. I would have, but it came off in my hand before I could do much more than jiggle a metal splinter in the keyhole. If a goddess was with me tonight, I was certainly glad it seemed to be Desna—especially after it seemed like I'd been Urgathoa's plaything the last several nights.

Rarentz's doctor hadn't wasted any time admiring the artistic value of the dagger he'd been paid with. The man had known gemstone when he saw it and was quick to sell. I doubt he got what the princely blade was truly worth, but I suspect it made the inconvenience of a house call well worth his time. In any case, it had ended up here at Omberbain's, and with the holes in my pockets there was only one way I was going to get it back.

Slipping inside, I closed the now latchless door behind me as best I could and slid along the wall in pitch-blackness. Even in the deep shadows I could tell the storeroom was big, my softest steps sounding hollowly on the stone floor. No light shone, but the night's less absolute dark slipped in through the ceiling's narrow skylights, outlining awkward stacks of crates along with the silhouettes of furniture, framed artwork, and less recognizable shapes. Gradually my eyes adjusted and I felt capable of moving without bungling into a pile of boxes or toppling some unsteady curio case. From what I'd already seen it seemed Omberbain's was too cheap to have a watchman, but there was no reason to attract any attention with suspicious noise. So I made my way carefully through the treasures and trash of Ardis's former princes.

The warehouse wasn't what I'd expected. I'd imagined neat rows of chests, organized staging grounds for the next day's auctions, sub-areas for like inventory, and shelves of precisely tagged baubles. Instead: chaos. If there was any organization it existed entirely in some mad stock-master's mind. Crates dared each other to dangerous heights, stacks rising treacherously wherever there was space. The contents of entire estates were dropped wherever there might be room, piled in careless heaps. The shelves of baubles did exist, but packed with boxes of clutter and collections of junk. If these were Ardis's treasures the city might be worse off then even I realized.

But as the state of things dawned on me, all I could do was stare into the maze of shadows. How was I supposed to find a single dagger in all this? I cursed, then winced at hearing it echo back at me, but there was nothing for that either. Best to just get started. I wasn't keen on going through the auction house's entire inventory, but maybe there was a chance my luck hadn't run out for the night.

Weaving and worming my way across the cluttered work floor, I slipped amid the rows of smaller ephemera, of shelved books, stray decorations, and guady knickknacks. The gloom from the skylights hardly penetrated here, leaving me squinting at outlines in the dark. I felt like a blind woman, leaning close and scrutinizing every trifle, trying to tell a seashell from a soupspoon more by intuition than my dim impression of its silhouette. Then there were clusters amid the commonplace objects that baffled me utterly, weird amalgams of handles, piping, wire, and whatever else—tools for lunatics hidden in the dark. This wasn't going to work. I'd hoped to avoid it, hoped to seem somehow a little less sinister in my trespassing, but I was going to need actual light.

It wasn't hard to find a candle amid the junk heaps, and by way of a gentleman's flint lighter, I struck a light and restarted my inventory. Even though the tiny wavering flame felt like nothing more than a spark amid the vast room, it far from comforted me. I was instantly visible should anyone wander in, and with all the disarray, I wasn't even sure from which direction an investigator might come. All the more reason to make this fast.

I practically raced amid the shelves, scanning, checking, doing my best to upset the collections of junk as little as possible. More than once a bumped a rack or unbalanced heap clattered at my passing, the noise ringing clearly and echoing back. The groans and shifting of old furniture and whatever tiny things skittered back and forth from hidden dens elsewhere in the storehouse tormented me, all too often sounding like slow footsteps, or a creaking door, or any of a hundred other preludes to an arrest. My sense of urgency grew.

At one point I found a stand for canes filled with bent fencing foils, rusted cutlasses, swords tested only in showrooms, and other weapons of dubious quality and thought I might have found some semblance of order amid the confusion. Yet I was disappointed—no daggers. Turning the corner around a particularly packed row of shelves near the room's rear I made a strange sort of discovery. I found myself looking into a filthy, yellow window beaded with moisture and facing into the building. Shadows pushed up against the glass from beyond in formless shapes and web-like patterns, and for a moment I was baffled by what the auctioneers might be keeping hidden in the depths of their storeroom. A bit of cracked glass gave it away, a leafy tendril escaping to creep into the dusty warehouse. A sort of indoor greenhouse—or green-room, anyway—I supposed. I hadn't anticipated such a thing, but with the nobility's proclivity for elaborate gardens and exotic decorations I suppose it made a sort of sense. Dust and earth clung to a glass paned door leading inside, but doubting that even the unruly workers responsible for the mess around me would keep weapons in amid the flowers and shrubs, I turned back to my search.

The long creak of rusty door hinges caused every hair on my skin to bristle, and the echoing bang of the rear door slamming carelessly against the far wall jolted through me. Gods be damned, they actually did have a watchman! I huffed out the candle's flame and froze, trying to gauge from across the big room who had joined me.

"What the hell had a hold of me?"

"Eh! Anyone in here?" the gruff voice echoed, a threat, not a question. I felt that suicide reflex squirm in my stomach, the sensation that dares you to leap from high places, challenge me to reply. Oh, so sorry sir, I must have gotten lost. Good evening to you.

Yeah, perhaps next time.

Instead, I slowly moved to the greenhouse door, careful now more than ever not to disrupt anything at my feet. I could hear the guardsman's footsteps, careless of the noise he was making, echoing with dull slow thuds. A beacon of light cut through the shelves around me. I was sure the clutter hid me that time, but I needed to get out of sight if I didn't want to test my ludicrous little lost girl routine.

The door to the greenhouse was a simple thing, with nothing more than a spring and a basic metal latch to keep it in place. It took all my restraint to resist yanking it open and darting inside, but I pulled it slowly, keeping the creek and agitated twangs of the spring as muffled as possible. As soon as it was open more than a crack, I squeezed inside and eased it shut behind me. There was no way to tell if the guard had heard any of it, but I didn't think the complaining metal had been any louder than his boot falls—at least, so I hoped.

The greenhouse's warm, heavy air made breathing uncomfortable, especially with the acrid combination of a thousand thick herb smells. The room had none of the skylights of the larger storeroom, leaving me in near total darkness, just able to pick out the leafy specters of dozens of withered tree and brush shapes. Somewhere amid the indoor jungle something rustled, something small and probably annoyed that I'd intruded upon its foraging.

I pressed my way deeper into the room, terrified of shattering some unseen planter or overturning a box of hidden tools, trying to hunker down amid the thickest decorative bushes. My camouflage felt weak at best, and while I was sure it would disguise me should someone merely glance through the murky glass, there was no way it would stand under direct scrutiny. I tried to make myself small, hunching against the rear wall. This seemed to alarm whatever scavenged in the shadows even more, and perhaps its family from the panicked sounds of the rustling nearby. I had other concerns than rats, though.

The beam of light sliced through the greenhouse, tainted yellow by the filthy glass. I could hear the guard's ominous footsteps from beyond. I imagined that I could tell his purpose from his steps, that he sounded like he was still unsure and not striding with intent. I filched as a stray leaf—or worse, maybe a rodent—brushed my ankle in the dark. Biting down on the inside of my cheek, I refused the impulse to jerk away and investigate. Just a few minutes more and I'd be out of here, and if I kept calm, maybe not in the grip of some two-copper lot watcher.

Then it grabbed me. Not a rat. Whatever it was had hands, rough, strong hands that were instantly on my ankles, pulling on my claves, and tugging upon my belt. Too many hands even, small but tenacious with their many tight grips. I stared into the dark furiously as I squirmed, unable to see what had me. Instantly I forgot the precariousness of my situation and thrashed, kicking out, but feeling only the rustle of leaves and the snapping of twigs under my boots. What the Hells had a hold of me!

I managed not to give voice to my rising panic or the stream of curses coursing through my mind. Conflicting fears vied for priority, one demanding silence lest I be discovered, the other seeking only escape from whatever had me.

The latter won. I'd gladly take a few nights in jail over being dragged off in the clutches of whatever was trying to claim me.

Rolling onto my back and kicking both legs up something came loose, and I was able to squirm a little ways from my attacker. The whole greenhouse seemed to be shaking, and around me I could just make out leaves and some thorny bush that had toppled over me, disguising even the barest hint of the thing with a hundred hands. Then it was back at my feet, pulling away at my right boot. I slammed down hard with the heel of my left and I felt something crack, but that was all. Nothing cried out, nothing relented, still it grabbed and grasped, relentlessly climbing my body, seemingly seeking my throat.

Some part of me screamed as light fell upon me outside, hazy through the glass, but enough to give me a glimpse of what had me. Confusion mingled with panic as all I saw was a toppled vine, a thick, winding creeper covered in broad leaves, fallen across much of my legs. What kind of fool was I to get so tangled in some common root?