Vengeance of Dragons (Secret Texts) (32 page)

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Authors: Holly Lisle

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BOOK: Vengeance of Dragons (Secret Texts)
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Rounding the next corner, her heart slid up into her throat. Ten guards in green and silver had cordoned off the street, and were requiring identification papers before they would let anyone pass.
Kait’s falsified papers identified her as a black-haired Imumbarran trader named Chait-eveni Three-Fast, daughter of an Imumbarran stardancer mother and a Gyru-nalle trader father. She looked as purely Iberan as she was, and that dichotomy was going to cause her grief. She knew within the Galweigh districts, traveling with obviously falsified papers (or legitimate papers but an obviously falsified appearance) was a crime, punishable by imprisonment and hard labor. Within the Sabir district of the city . . . well, the Sabir district had a reputation for being a tougher, meaner place to make a mistake.
This was about her. Sometime in the last station, she’d made a mistake. Somehow, she’d allowed the spy to catch sight of her. Or he had planted a telltale on her. Or . . . what she’d done wrong didn’t matter as much as what she could do to get away.
Some workers came out of a warehouse to her left. They looked like she did—equally shabby, equally weary. Any animation they exhibited at leaving work dissolved when they saw the roadblock. The door swung slowly behind them, almost closing. But not completely. Kait could see that the latching mechanism had caught on the doorframe, keeping it from shutting all the way.
Her first lucky break.
She took a deep breath and ducked into the warehouse. She quietly pulled the door closed behind her. Pins tumbled into place as it locked itself. That didn’t bother her. Warehouse doors often required a key from the outside only.
But the darkness inside was nearly complete—she’d expected lights, movement, voices, some sign of life. The only smell in the air was dust, however, and the only sound that broke the silence was her breathing.
A crew had just walked out the door behind her. They’d been in the warehouse for a reason. If they shut the place down behind them, she should still find some sign that they’d been working earlier—stacks of goods, or a smell of life in the air, or
something
. She sighed, and the emptiness echoed her sigh back to her from all four directions.
She didn’t even hear any rats.
She looked around once her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Four walls rose up the height of five men, supporting a trussed ceiling; the walls to the left and right of her were unbroken by any window or door. The floor between those walls was completely bare. Directly across from her, though, a single door like the one behind her pierced the wall. No light showed underneath, but perhaps the door merely fit its frame well. All sorts of activity might be in progress on the other side.
She leaned her back against the door that led out to the street and pressed one ear to it. She heard shouting outside, and screaming. If they were truly looking for her and they didn’t find her among the people in the street, they would search the warehouses. This one held no hiding places. But perhaps the laborers had been working behind that other door. Perhaps there she would be able to find a hiding place.
She hurried across the bare floor and rested a hand on the other door, and offered a quick prayer to Nerin, who watched over his followers during his station, that the laborers had left it unlocked. Then she turned the handle. The door opened.
Quick thanks to Nerin.
More darkness, but now punctuated at intervals by distant light. She was in a long, curving corridor with tiny windows set high along the outside wall. The corridor ran both to her left, back up the hill toward the House, and right, down the hill and toward safety. She paused in the doorway, holding her breath, every sense straining for evidence that she was being pursued. The corridor was empty for a long distance in either direction. Perhaps entirely empty. She stepped into it, pulled the door shut behind her so that she would not make her trail obvious to anyone who might step into the warehouse, and turned right. She passed other doors on her right. She tried each, hoping one would open for her, but all were locked. She quickly reached a dead end—the place where the Sabir warehouse district ended and lower Calimekka resumed. If she could just get out through the wall . . . but it was stonework of high caliber, and thick. She stood about parallel with the place where the guards had set up their roadblock. The horrified realization grabbed her; she was standing in the corridor through which those guards had traveled to get ahead of her. More could come along at any time, or those could decide to go back.
The warehouse had been safer, if only marginally. She ran back the way she’d come, trying doors as she did. She didn’t remember which one had been the one she’d come out of, and in the dim light, they all looked the same.
It was only when she’d traveled twice as far up the hill as she’d gone down that she realized she’d passed her warehouse. The door had locked itself behind her. She was trapped in the corridor.
She wished the doors were lighter, or the locks were simpler. She felt certain she could have kicked a lighter door in. But she felt equally certain that the massive warehouse doors wouldn’t give way for her.
Which meant she could stay where she was, or she could head back toward Sabir House, hoping to find another warehouse with an open door before she ended up inside . . .
. . . the walls . . .
. . . of the House itself . . .
She stopped and smiled. She was an idiot. She’d wanted to get into the House. She’d fallen into her perfect opportunity to do so without being observed. The corridor was empty. Her Karnee senses picked up neither sound nor scent of anyone. If she just moved quickly enough, she ought to be able to get into the House through its service corridor without being caught. She broke into a lope, no longer wasting time checking warehouse doors.
The corridor switchbacked along with the warehouses it had been built to service. Kait stopped before every switchback to listen and smell ahead of her for danger. Her road stayed clear. Near the House, she passed sounds of activity within the warehouses to her left, but she didn’t check the doors to those, either. She had taken the offensive. She intended to keep it. The Sabirs wouldn’t look for her within their midst.
Finally she reached another termination to the corridor, but unlike the blank stone wall at the bottom of the hill, this wall was translucent, white with a hint of opalescence, smooth as good glass. The narrow, delicately etched white door set into it promised access to the Sabirs’ realm that lay beyond.
If
she could get through it. The door was, after all, of the Ancients’ make, and for all its apparent delicacy, created to survive both enemies and eons unscathed.
Kait rested her hand on the smooth curve of the opening mechanism and pressed lightly. The mechanism recessed and the door slid open silently. She stepped into warm light that radiated from everywhere at once, and felt a brief pang of homesickness. The smooth, translucent white walls of an Ancients’ building rose around her, reminding her of her suite of rooms in Galweigh House. Home—lost but not forgotten. She pushed the wistfulness to the back of her mind and focused on her work. To her right, a staircase made of the same exquisite, indestructible stone-of-Ancients spiraled upward. While loitering beyond the gate, she had seen the top portion of an Ancients’ tower that stood just inside the walls of Sabir House. This had to be that tower. Excellent! She knew where she was. Beyond the stairs lay the only other door in the bottom floor of the tower, this one certainly leading out onto the grounds of the House itself. Or perhaps into the servants’ area, or the House storage rooms. No matter where it went, it led someplace she wanted to go.
She listened carefully at that door and heard only more silence. Again, excellent. Eager to be on her way, she gripped the curved mechanism and pressed. It failed to open. She tried it again, this time keeping her pressure on the mechanism light. The door was still locked.
She closed her eyes and swore softly but with great passion. She could go back the way she’d come, and go out through one of the occupied warehouses. But now, with the promise of Sabir House lying like an uncracked egg in front of her, the thought of merely escaping felt like failure.
Well, she could tell Dùghall about the warehouses and the corridor—perhaps he would think of some magical way to get past the tower and its locked door.
Frustrated, she retreated to the door through which she’d entered the tower, and pressed its opening mechanism.
It, too, was locked.
Nausea twisted her stomach and she felt lightheaded. She’d managed to trap herself. She took slow, deep breaths to ward off panic. She closed her eyes. She had seen only one window in the tower, and that had been all the way at the top. High up, terribly high up. High enough that she would kill herself if she leaped from it. But perhaps if she climbed the stairs, she would find a lower window facing inward, one she could safely jump out of. She could only hope.
The sound of footsteps and voices reached her ears. Men, coming toward the tower from the corridor. The guards? Perhaps.
She started to panic again, then relaxed. They would have the key that opened the tower door. They wouldn’t be looking for her. They would go out into the House, and she would find a way to follow them.
She slipped up the stairs and around the first complete arc of the spiral, out of sight.
Their voices grew louder, and finally she could make out what they were saying.
“. . . dasn’t seem right t’ me that she got away. I reckon had we kept on, we’d ’a found her.”
“The cap’n says quit, I’m for quitting. They’re after something freakish, you ask me, an’ I want nothing to do with it.”
“Nor I.” The door opened and the first of the guards entered. “They decided to let her go, I say all to the good. Tellin’ us she might have a weapon could kill us all with a stroke, then sendin’ us out without telling us
how
. Let someone else get the reward. I’ll take my little daughter’s hug when I walk through the door t’night an’ call myself a rich man.”
They started up the stairs.
Kait swallowed hard, suddenly and completely scared. They didn’t know about her and they weren’t coming after her, but she had no idea what lay above her. There might be no place to hide between where she stood and the top of the tower.
But there might be. She concentrated on that, and fled up the stairs, years of practice in sneaking through Galweigh House making her flight nearly soundless. The guards behind her covered her few scuffles and the sound of her breathing with their casual chatter and their heavy, thudding footsteps.
They were in no hurry and she was running, so she gained ground.
The ceiling neared, and she could see an archway ahead. She ran faster, trying to think of what she would do if there were already guards in the room. She lunged through the doorway in a state of near-terror.
It was empty.
Even better, it was clearly the guards’ destination. Uniforms hung from racks all around the room’s perimeter, and a lunch table stacked with papayas and melons and squashes sat in the center. She could see nowhere to hide in the room, but the stairs continued upward, with another ceiling overhead and a door, standing ajar, visible from the stair on which she stood.
With the guards’ voices ringing loudly behind her, she raced upward again.
She slid through the door, saw that no one was in the room with her, and pulled it almost closed. To keep it from closing completely—because her luck with closed doors had not been good that day—she grabbed a stick of wood from the wood bin and wedged it between the door and the frame.
Then she stood shaking, her forehead pressed against the cool, smooth stone-of-Ancients, and listened to the voices below her. The men were changing, gathering up their belongings and getting ready to go home for the day. They didn’t sound like they would be coming up that final flight of stairs. She turned, leaned her back against the door, and studied her hiding place. She was in the watchroom she’d seen from the ground. The top of the tower.
The wood bin sat to her immediate left. Left of that, a squat, ugly metal table hunkered between two arches, covered with a dark cloth held in place by lead weights at each corner. She frowned at the lumps beneath the cloth, curious about what might be there, but she didn’t investigate. The center of the room held a tall, long, heavy wood table edged with metal rings, upon which rested coiled rope, chains, locks, and balls of wrapped gauze. Beside the table were several chairs, none of them comfortable-looking; and in the eastern corner a brazier that had a fire going in it, though the fire was down to coals; and beside the brazier three buckets of water. The room itself was beautiful. Architecture with the Ancients’ unmistakable preference for simplicity and elegance. Arched doorways punctuated the walls at intervals, and through them she could see the delicate parapet that had looked so fragile and lovely from the ground below. A breeze blew through from the western arches, laden with the scents of jasmine and frangipani and freesia. The wind was cool, and that high up, blew hard. She could see why anyone using the tower would need to have a fire going.
The view through those arches was fantastic. The sun was beginning to drop below the mountains to the west, and the sky had turned orange and blood red around it, with streaks of violet stabbing into the red and deepening into rich blue when they reached the eastern edge of the sky. In minutes it would be dark. Already the city sparkled with lights, a million gems tossed onto a velvet cloak and glittering with inner fire.

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