Lost Covenant: A Widdershins Adventure (24 page)

Finally, with an awkward twist that threatened to send her toppling from the window before she was able to find a grip on the wall outside, she managed—barely—to wriggle through, Cyrille squeezed up into the upper right corner, Shins the lower left.

For a moment, she protruded from the wall, a tired and wobbly flagpole, the extra weight on her back threatening to drag her over and down. Way, way down. The wind couldn't possibly have grown so much stronger and so much colder than it had been earlier, but it felt as though the world was attempting to blow her out like a candle.

Crevices between bricks, gaps in the mortar, cracks in the stone. To Widdershins's fingers and toes, these were normally as good as a ladder, or even better. Not only climbing, but scurrying side to side to make a cockroach envious, even hanging upside down, there wasn't much she couldn't do—wasn't much she hadn't done—with Olgun's aid.

Normally, however, she wasn't trying to balance a dead weight, heavier than she was, hanging from her shoulders by a single strap around his own.

Every muscle in her body burned, trembled, partly with strain, partly with the full power Olgun could muster. He couldn't manage it long; already, she felt exhaustion seeping through her, and recognized that not all of it was hers. Then again, she couldn't handle it long, either.
Everything
throbbed.

Tentatively, hesitantly, she let herself hang lower, supporting herself on her fingers and one foot, seeking purchase with the other. She hadn't climbed anything this slowly, this fearfully, since she'd scaled the cracked and dilapidated fountain near her parents’ apartment.

That had been only a few weeks before the fire.

Right, because
that
was the most comforting thought to have in her head right now….

The tip of a boot slid into a cranny that few other people would have even seen. Stiff, tense fingers forced themselves free of one brick to clamp tight around the next. Her jaws clenched, the winds whipped her hair across her face. Cyrille groaned and seemed to slip with every move, nearly jerking her from the wall. Her progress was parceled out in increments of pain, rather than distance. Her whole body trembled, hard enough to send bits of old mortar sifting out from beneath raw and cracking fingertips.

All of it on instinct, for after the first yard or so, her mind had room for only a single idea, over and over, repeating like the call of a dying bird.

I'm not going to make it. Oh, gods, I'm not going to make it….

An inch. A foot. The tiniest of footholds, the most precarious of grips. Jaws, fingers, gut clenched tight enough to crush rock. Her ears rang; her vision was swallowed whole by the wall before her. No world, no up or even down. No thought, no memory—even, finally, no fear, perhaps no Widdershins at all. Just rote, instinctive need. Over and over, an endless, desperate repetition, its purpose long forgotten.

An inch. A foot. The tiniest of footholds, the most precarious of grips.

An inch. A foot.

A window.

At first, Shins panicked. She didn't even recognize it for what it was, only that it interrupted the routine that had become the entirety
of her existence. The shock almost cost her a handhold, and infinite seconds passed in a mad scramble before she felt even remotely secure, more until she'd gotten Cyrille to cease swaying.

Panic again, when it all came back to her. Given how difficult it'd been to maneuver the two of them out…
How the frogs do I get us in through the window?!

The answer, eventually, proved to be even more awkward than earlier. Shins managed to climb below the window then back up, planting her elbows on the frame and slowly tugging and wriggling until Cyrille slithered off her back into the room. The harness dragged her with him, which proved helpful, and threatened to cut into her arms and shoulders, which was rather less so.

The result, however, was a final desperate skitter, and then Shins followed her companion into the room—and flopped to the floor beside him, equally limp.

She had never, in her life, been so exhausted, so worn. Stars danced across the ceiling, and she was too tired even to try blinking them away. Gods, even seeing or listening sounded exhausting!

It came over her slowly, flowing through her body; she felt warm, almost buoyant. The pain faded, the fatigue dulled, though it still chewed on, a spiritual pack of wolves. For long moments she lay still, giving herself, and Olgun, as long to recover as she could.

She felt better, and she was grateful for it—but not as much better as she'd have hoped.

“How long can we keep this up?” she asked softly.

Olgun's reply was confident, reassuring—and also so deathly tired that she briefly felt his exhaustion overwhelm her own.

“That long, huh?” Widdershins groaned all the way to her feet. A quick look revealed yet
another
empty room (at this point, she more than half assumed the entire tower was decades out of use), and whole constellations of footprints in the dust. The Crows had been here already, searched and moved on. Good.

Widdershins tottered over to Cyrille, knelt beside him, and began lightly slapping his cheeks.

“What the
hell
!”

He all but burst into waking, shoving Shins away from him hard before rolling over to vomit copiously into the corner. Shins herself landed on her rear end a few feet away, wincing at both the sting and the growing acrid miasma.

“What is
wrong
with you?!” His voice was rough, gravelly, but more than intelligible. “I said I didn't want—!”

“Oh, shut it! You're alive! I know you're alive, because you're making way too much noise for a nice, peaceful corpse. You wouldn't be if you'd stayed. You're welcome, by the way. No big deal. It wasn't
the
hardest thing I've ever done, just somewhere in the top one!”

“You had no right!”

“Right?! So I should have just left you—”

From the window, a third fusillade of gunfire sounded from atop the wall.

“Pick this up later?” she asked softly.

“Yeah.”

With the Crows scouring the upper levels of the tower—after all, the two fugitives couldn't
possibly
have gotten past them!—Shins and Cyrille had no difficulty in returning once more to the second floor and the balcony overlooking the banquet hall.

The box of flintlock balls still sat on the table—but only the box. Apparently, the multiple reloads had exhausted its contents.

Maline stood beside it, his breathing a bit heavy; apparently he'd only just come from the long staircase himself. Most of the hostages Shins could see were either stone-faced or weeping openly. Surely, by now, none of them had the slightest doubt what fate probably awaited them.

“That food just doesn't smell as appetizing as it did,” Cyrille noted. Widdershins turned his way, blinked twice, and went back to studying the room.

Once again, after a few moments, Josce showed up with a box, placing it upon the table and collecting the old one, then conversing briefly with Maline.

“I'm going,” Widdershins hissed.

“Going?”

“Staring at Maline until he decides to drag another group upstairs isn't going to tell us anything. So I need to follow Josce, yes?”

“You mean we do,” Cyrille corrected.

“No. You don't have the stealth for—”

“I can be sneaky. And I'm not letting you go alone.” He crossed his arms, a gesture that was probably intended to convey determination but just made him appear melodramatic.

“We don't have time to argue this!”

“Precisely.”

Aaargh!
“Fine! You stay at least half a corridor behind me, and you do
not
move up until I signal you to! Understand?”

“Yes.”

Grumble.

Pauvril's plethora of stairs made it quick and easy for them to return to the first floor some distance away, then make a quick return to the banquet hall. A side passage, branching off the main corridor that led from the grand chamber back into the depths of the castle, provided a nice, shadowed vantage point. Widdershins had all but vanished in the gloom; she watched a couple of the Crows, along with Josce—carrying his empty box—stroll past without so much as a glance in her direction.

She gave them a slow count of ten and then slipped out to follow, waving for Cyrille to follow her in kind.

The sounds of the banquet hall faded, as did the lingering smell of the kitchen beside it. Josce led them through a major corridor, and then a far smaller one, moving ever farther into the rearmost confines of Pauvril. Shins stopped seeing staircases after a time and realized
they must have moved beyond the upper levels, to a portion of the keep with only a single floor.

And then she stopped, whispering bitterly to herself and Olgun both, when she realized this might be as far as she'd get.

Her quarry had entered a room with three unevenly spaced exits, essentially a lowercase “y” with a broad chamber at the intersection. It wasn't that they'd lost her; she could see and hear signs of movement from the rightmost of the two branches. No, it was that almost half a dozen members of the Thousand Crows waited in that room, standing sentry, and showed no sign of planning to leave anytime soon.

“Trouble,” Cyrille guessed when she came back to meet him, rather than waving him forward. It clearly wasn't a question.

“Guard Crows,” she muttered.

“A lot?”

“Too many for my comfort. Even if we could put them down, it only takes one to sound an alert. Frogs and figs! Let's get back a ways and think about this.”

Knowing it to be a reasonable spot to hide, the pair backtracked to the same side passage in which they'd waited just a few moments before. At which point, they stood and looked at one another, constantly starting one suggestion or another, constantly stopping themselves when they spotted this or that flaw in this or that idea.

So wrapped up were they, neither of them noticed the growing commotion in the nearby banquet hall until they heard the resounding
slam
of the castle's main door. Both froze, listening intently—Widdershins far more effectively, thanks to Olgun's aid.

“There's more of them,” she whispered.

“More of who?”

“The Crows. The reeve gave in!”

Cyrille shrugged. “Didn't have much choice. Besides, they're still trapped here for—”

“Where's Maline?! Let me speak with Maline!” The shout was loud enough that even Cyrille heard it clearly. It was
certainly
loud enough for Widdershins to recognize the voice.

Not just the Thousand Crows, then. The reeve delivered Lazare Carnot, too.

“Evening, Lazare. Excuse me, Lord Carnot.” Shins could practically feel the oil on Maline's words from here.

“Explain to me,” the patriarch demanded, “how this mess happened!”

“Oh, that's easy. I made the mistake of trusting the promises of a spineless aristocrat.”

Widdershins scarcely even flinched when she heard the shot. She'd practically been expecting it.

“Carry him up and dump him with the next group,” Maline ordered his thugs. “No sense wasting a body.”

Now what does
that
mean?

“The rest of you,” he continued, “we need to speed this up. Start gathering the next group.”

Gods…

“They got what they wanted,” Cyrille whispered, shaking. “Why don't they
stop
?”

“There's more going on here, I told you that,” she replied, her tone distant.

“Shins, we
can't
let this go on!”

No. Gods help me, we can't.
“Olgun?”

She almost broke down and wept at the sorrow in his agreement.

“Come on,” she said dully, gesturing for Cyrille to follow.

“Where are we going?”

“To stop this,” she answered, wondering with an almost despairing calm how much of herself she might have just killed with her decision. “However we have to.”

When Widdershins again approached the chamber with three exits and five Crows, it looked as though nothing whatsoever had changed.

That was untrue. Widdershins had changed.

The young woman was no stranger to bloodshed. She'd taken lives; one of them earlier that same day. She had always regretted it, and it had always, always been her last resort.

When she hurled herself into that room that night, with all the speed Olgun could bestow, Widdershins set out to kill.

They'd been watching for trouble, of course; they stood guard, after all. But they hadn't anticipated it, and certainly not as fast as it appeared. Widdershins leapt, spun, her blade a flickering serpent's tongue of steel. Two of the thugs fell, dead or dying—one pierced through the heart, one with a slit-and-gaping throat—before they could so much as draw a weapon.

Shins didn't even attempt to stop and change direction. Three more steps carried her straight to the wall; a foot planted on it sent her hurtling back the other way. The third collapsed as she slammed into him, the wind knocked from lungs and the flintlock from his hands. Shins thrust herself off him with one leg, dropping—stretching, nearly diving—into an almost inhumanly extended lunge. Barely two inches of her blade punched through flesh and muscle, between ribs, but that was enough to puncture a second heart.

Four of the five sentries were down in less time than it took the Crow with his throat slashed to bleed out.

The last one standing, shaking and pale, had his flintlock out and aimed. Again, Shins couldn't afford to have Olgun trigger it;
the noise itself would ruin everything. So would the shout for help the Crow was even then preparing to utter, inhaling deeply through parted lips.

Shins tossed her rapier—to him, not at him. It sailed in a casual arc, coming at him blade up, handle in easy reach.

Puzzled instinct accomplished the rest.

His eyes flickered to the sword; his flintlock wavered as he reached with his free hand to catch the weapon. In that tiny flicker of distraction, Shins had crossed the distance between them, wrapped both her hands around the one he'd used to catch the sword, and shoved the tip of the weapon up and aside, slashing him just beneath his jaw.

She retrieved her blood-spattered rapier, then turned at the sound of a pained groan. Body rigid, she approached the one man she'd bowled over. He rolled over as she approached, staring at her in undiluted horror.

He was down. He was beaten. Gods, she could smell from paces away that he'd lost control of his bladder.

But he could also still scream, if she let him.

Stiff as rigor mortis and mechanical as clockwork, Widdershins lifted her blade and ran the fallen man through.

For a long while she stood, sword extended, eyes empty. Slowly, even gracefully, she withdrew the blade, knelt to wipe it free of blood on the dead man's sleeve, and rose once more. With great deliberateness, she slid the weapon home in its sheath at her side.

Then, and only then, did she feel the wetness on her cheek. A tear she hadn't known she'd shed? A dribble of dead man's blood? It didn't matter which, really; once her thoughts turned down the path, she couldn't rein them back. She froze. She fought. And then she fell to the stone floor, knees pressed to her chest, bloody hands wrapped around them, and started to sob.

“Shins? Widdershins? You need to get up!” She heard and recognized each individual word, but couldn't seem to put them together
into any unified meaning. She felt her cheek grow warmer, wetter; still couldn't tell from blood or tears, still couldn't bring herself to care.

“Shins, please! We need you!”

Along with the words from without came a surge of emotion and imagery from within. The emotions were calm. Comforting. The images were anything but. She saw Brock, lying in an alley with the rest of the trash, herself fully prepared to end him then and there had she not been stopped. The servants of the twisted Apostle of Cevora, dying hideously, cursed by the idol of the Shrouded God—a curse Shins had manipulated them into unleashing. Herself, again, dueling a pair of Finders in the employ of Bishop Sicard, falsifying a supernatural threat that later turned very real; neither of the two had died that night, but Shins had always known that was a near thing.

Street fights in her youth. Duels with rival thieves. Her clash with Lisette Suvagne, which she'd walked away from neither knowing nor caring whether the taskmaster would survive.

None of it mattered. None of it made one iota of difference. Because in every single instance, either trouble had come to her, or she'd stumbled into a situation where she was truly down to her final option.

Never before in her life had she
set out
with murder as her objective—let alone the murder of
five
.

They were the enemy. They would have killed her, given half the chance. It wasn't for them that Widdershins wept.

She felt pressure on her shoulder and was only vaguely cognizant that it was a hand. “You had to, Shins,” Cyrille told her softly. “For everyone back there. For my family, for
me
.”

It sounded good. She wanted to believe it, even knew on some level it was true. It didn't help. Her heart refused to listen to anything her head had to say. The people she
might
save were abstract, unreal. The corpses around her,
those
were inalterable truth. She was cracked in two, pain bubbling up in an endless fountain. She shook, she cried, and she truly believed it might never, ever stop.

More images, and this time they
did
put an end to her tears—not in comfort, but in shock. As vividly as she'd ever experienced anything he'd shown her, she was back in his underground shrine. Back watching, helpless and terrified, as her fellow worshippers were ripped apart, over a score of people reduced to the scraps in an abattoir. It looked real, sounded real,
smelled
real. For an instant, she was once more the girl who had lost everything
twice
, who didn't understand what she and Olgun were to become for each other. A girl alone, utterly and completely.

“Why?” She didn't even know if she was speaking aloud, or just thinking, until she sensed a reply. “Why would you show me this?”

Olgun's reply, when it came, was a ripple across the image, warping like a melting mirror. When it steadied once more, she stared not at the corpses of friends those years ago, but the bodies slowly piling up at the foot of Castle Pauvril. More bodies began to appear on the heap in her vision, people she knew for a certainty hadn't yet been murdered, with Calanthe Delacroix atop the gruesome knoll.

The vision shifted, not warping this time, but rotating, coming around to show her the gathered citizens of Aubier, gaping helplessly at the growing carnage. By garb they were varied: soldier and servant, blacksmith and baker, craftsman and carpenter.

But their faces were, all of them, Widdershins herself.

Now she understood. Now they were real, as real to her as the men she'd killed. Nobody else would have to feel what she'd felt, not while she still breathed. And sure as
hens
not because she'd fallen apart over what, ultimately, she'd truly
had
to do.

Shins rolled over, clasped Cyrille's hand, and allowed him to pull her to her feet. She ran her own fingers across her cheek; tears only, not blood, thankfully.

She went body to body, collecting flintlocks. Only three remained ready to fire, the others having lost their powder as they were strewn
across the room. She handed one to Cyrille, jammed two in her belt, and nodded.

“We're not done,” was all she said.

Cyrille, failing utterly to repress a relieved grin, answered with, “We'd better get to it then.”

Widdershins matched his smile—and if it didn't
quite
reach her eyes, at least it was a heartfelt attempt—and started down the rightmost branch.

Which, in turn, led to no small amount of wandering aimlessly.

Pauvril wasn't huge, as castles went, but it wasn't exactly a house, either. These back sections consisted of far more hallways and small rooms than the front, which was mostly larger chambers. The dust back here wasn't remotely as thick, which would have made tracks hard to discover under even the best of circumstances—and as the two of them were forced to rely on Shins's tiny bull's-eye lantern, lest someone spot the light, these circumstances weren't even in the running for “best.” The occasional clank or clatter might have indicated the Crows’ location, but the echoing passages made pinpointing those sounds a futile endeavor.

They were on the verge of resuming their mutual recriminations when Widdershins paused, tilting her head and sniffing.

“Do you smell that?”

Cyrille scowled. “I smell musty stone and the oil from that damn lamp.”

“No, not those! The
other
smell!”

He, too, sniffed. “Nope. Nothing.”

“Oh, come
on
! Are you
blind
?!”

“Um…”

It was at this point that Olgun politely, yet smugly, pointed out
to Widdershins that perhaps she couldn't take
sole
credit for being able to detect the mild odor, and that—unlike her—Cyrille
didn't
have a god actively assisting.

“Oh.” A pause, then, “Well, it's this way.”

She set off with more certainty, now, choosing this route and that, until even Cyrille's mere mortal nostrils could detect the scent. “That's plaster,” he whispered. “Fresh, but not
too
fresh. Couple of days, maybe.”

A peculiar notion began to congeal in Shins's head, but it wasn't
quite
viscous enough yet for her to grasp.

She also had more immediate concerns.

“Noises ahead!” Cyrille hissed.

“I hear them.” And indeed, they clearly
were
ahead, now, not mere echoes bouncing around the halls. She doused the lamp, working her way ahead in the dark, her hand on the wall, Cyrille's on her shoulder.

One final fork in the passage, and it was clear they'd reached their destination. The sounds came from the left, now obvious as a mixture of voices and machinery. To the right, a trio of thugs sat around a crate they were using as a makeshift table. Two played some game of dice or other, occasionally bouncing a die off the oil lamp also sitting on the box, while the third watched.

All right, what's wrong with this portrait?

On a tripod beside the crate hung a large gong. The striking mallet leaned against the wall beside it. Obviously, an alarm of some sort, which might have made perfect sense, had the Crows not been guarding the terminus of a dead-end passage.

The notion Shins had been trying to grasp earlier, when her companion identified the scent as plaster, now rose up of its own accord to shake hands and introduce itself.

“A few yards back,” she whispered, “I felt a door as we passed. Go back to it, then come back and tell me if you see me silhouetted against their lamp.”

“Uh, why?”

“Because the door won't come to us, yes? Go!”

Grumbling, he went, hand trailing on the wall as hers had done. Just a bit later he was back. “I can, but just barely.”

“Barely will do.” She broke out the stolen flintlocks, making sure they were both still ready to shoot. She raised them, one in each fist, and settled in a runner's crouch.

“Go back to the door again, then watch me. I'm going to mark out a ten count. On ten—not before, not after,
on
—I want you to slam that door as hard as you can.”

To his credit, he understood immediately. “Can you make both shots from this distance
and
reach the third before he sounds the alarm?”

“Of course I can!”

“You're sure?”

“Of course I'm sure!”

“Are you lying to me?”

“Of course I am!”

Cyrille's grumble as he went back to the door seemed to be
exactly
the same as he'd grumbled earlier.

Shins braced herself, held one of the pistols out to the side, and began tapping the barrel against an imaginary table.

One…Two…

“Olgun? I'm not the
best
shot with these things….”

She felt the brush of something incorporeal across her hands.