The Gentleman Bastard Series (20 page)

Tall cylinders of ruby-colored glass shed alchemical light onto the wispy threads of mist that curled and wavered below the knees of their horses; the center of the bridge was fifty feet above the water, and the usual night fog reached no higher. The red lamps swayed gently within their black iron frames as the muggy Hangman’s Breeze spun them, and the two Gentlemen Bastards rode down into the Alcegrante with that eerie light surrounding them like a bloody aura.

“Hold there! State your name and business!”

At the point where the bridge met the Angevine’s north shore there was a low wooden shack with oil-paper windows, through which a pale white glow emanated. A single figure stood beside it, his yellow tabard turned to orange in the light of the bridge lamps. The speaker’s words might have been bold, but his voice was young and a little uncertain.

Locke smiled; the Alcegrante guard shacks always held two yellowjackets, but at this one the more senior had clearly sent his less-hardened partner out into the fog to do the actual work. So much the better—Locke pulled his precious sigil-wallet out of his black cloak as his horse cantered down beside the guard station.

“My name is immaterial.” Locke flipped the wallet open to allow the round-faced young city watchman a glimpse of the sigil by the light of his guard station. “My business is that of His Grace, Duke Nicovante.”

“I … I see, sir.”

“I never came this way. We did not speak. Be sure that your fellow watchman understands this as well.”

The yellowjacket bowed and took a quick step backward, as though afraid to stay too close. Locke smiled. Black-cloaked riders on black horses, looming out of darkness and mist … It was easy to laugh at such conceits in full daylight. But night had a way of lending weight to phantasms.

If Coin-Kisser’s Row was where Camorr’s money was put to use, the Alcegrante district was where it was put to rest. It was four connected
islands, each a sort of tiered hill sloping up to the base of the plateau that held the Five Towers; old money and new money mingled crazy-quilt fashion here in mazes of manor houses and private gardens. Here the merchants and money-changers and ship-brokers looked down comfortably on the rest of the city; here the lesser nobility looked up covetously at the towers of the Five Families who ruled all.

Carriages clattered past from time to time, their black lacquered wooden cabins trailing bobbing lanterns and banners proclaiming the arms of whoever traveled within. Some of these were guarded by teams of armed outriders in slashed doublets and polished breastplates—this year’s fashion for rented thugs. A few teams of horses wore harnesses spotted with miniature alchemical lights; these appeared at a distance looking like chains of fireflies bobbing in the mist.

Don Salvara’s manor was a four-story pillared rectangle, several centuries old and sagging a bit under the weight of its years, for it had been built entirely by human hands. It was a sort of island unto itself at the heart of the Isla Durona, westernmost neighborhood of the Alcegrante; surrounded on all sides by a twelve-foot stone wall and enclosed by thick gardens. It shared no party walls with neighboring manors. Amber lights burned behind the barred windows on the third floor.

Locke and Calo quietly dismounted in the alley adjacent to the manor’s northern wall. Several long nights of careful reconnaissance by Locke and Bug had revealed the easiest routes over the alley wall and up the side of the Salvara manor. Dressed as they were, hidden by mist and darkness, they would be effectively invisible as soon as they could hop the outer wall and get off the street.

A moment of fortunate stillness fell upon them as Calo tied the horses to a weathered wooden post beside the garden wall; not a soul was in sight. Calo stroked his horse’s thin mane.

“Hoist a glass or two in memory of us if we don’t come back, love.”

Locke put his back against the base of the wall and cupped his hands. Calo set a foot in this makeshift stirrup and leapt upward, propelled by the mingled strength of his legs and Locke’s arms. When he’d hoisted himself quietly and carefully atop the wall, he reached back down with both arms to hoist Locke up. The Sanza twin was as wiry as Locke was slender, and the operation went smoothly. In seconds they were both down in the wet, fragrant darkness of the garden, crouched motionless, listening.

The doors on the ground floor were all protected from within by intricate clockwork failsafes and steel bars—they simply could not be picked.
But the rooftop … well, those who weren’t yet important enough to live with the constant threat of assassination often placed an inordinate degree of faith in high walls.

The two thieves went up the north face of the manor house, slowly and carefully, wedging hands and feet firmly into chinks in the warm, slick stone. The first and second floors were dark and quiet; the light on the third floor was on the opposite side of the building. Hearts hammering with excitement, they hauled themselves up until they were just beneath the parapet of the roof, where they paused for a long interval, straining to catch at any sound from within the manor that would hint at discovery.

The moons were stuffed away behind gauzy gray clouds; on their left the city was an arc of blurred jewel-lights shining through mist, and above them the impossible heights of the Five Towers stood like black shadows before the sky. The threads of light that burned on their parapets and in their windows enhanced rather than reduced their aura of menace. Staring up at them from near the ground was a sure recipe for vertigo.

Locke was the first over the parapet. Peering intently by the faint light falling from above, he planted his feet on a white-tiled pathway in the center of the roof and kept them there. He was surrounded on either side by the dark shapes of bushes, blossoms, small trees, and vines—the roof was rich with the scent of vegetation and night soil. The street-level garden was a mundane affair, if well tended;
this
was the Doña Sofia’s private botanical preserve.

Most alchemical botanists, in Locke’s experience, were enthusiasts of bizarre poisons. He made sure his hood and cloak were cinched tight around him, and pulled his black neck-cloth up over his lower face.

Soft-stepping along the white path, Locke and Calo threaded their way through Sofia’s garden, more carefully than if they had been walking between streams of lamp oil with their cloaks on fire. At the garden’s center was a roof hatch with a simple tumbler lock; Calo listened carefully at this door for two minutes with his favorite picks poised in his hands. Charming the lock took less than ten seconds.

The fourth floor: Doña Sofia’s workshop, a place where the two intruders wanted even less to stumble or linger than they had in her garden. Quiet as guilty husbands coming home from a late night of drinking, they stole through the dark rooms of laboratory apparatus and potted plants, scampering for the narrow stone stairs that led downward to a side passage on the third floor.

The operations of the Salvara household were well known to the
Gentlemen Bastards; the don and doña kept their private chambers on the third floor, across the hall from the don’s study. The second floor was the solar, a reception and dining hall that went mostly disused when the couple had no friends over to entertain. The first floor held the kitchen, several parlors, and the servants’ quarters. In addition to Conté, the Salvaras kept a pair of middle-aged housekeepers, a cook, and a young boy who served as a messenger and scullion. All of them would be asleep on the first floor; none of them posed even a fraction of the threat that Conté did.

This was the part of the scheme that couldn’t be planned with any precision—they had to locate the old soldier and deal with him before they could have their intended conversation with Don Salvara.

Footsteps echoed from somewhere else on the floor; Locke, in the lead, crouched low and peeked around the left-hand corner. It turned out he was looking down the long passage that divided the third floor in half lengthwise; Don Salvara had left the door to his study open and was vanishing into the bedchamber. That door he closed firmly behind him—and a moment later the sound of a metal lock echoed down the hall.

“Serendipity,” whispered Locke. “I suspect he’ll be busy for quite some time in there. Light’s still on in his study, so we know he’s coming back out.… Let’s get the hard part over with.”

Locke and Calo slipped down the hallway, sweating now, but barely letting their heavy cloaks flutter as they moved. The long passage was tastefully decorated with hanging tapestries and shallow wall sconces in which tiny glow-glasses shed no more light than that of smoldering coals. Behind the heavy doors to the Salvaras’ chambers, someone laughed.

The stairwell at the far end of the passage was wide and circular; steps of white marble inset with mosaic-tile maps of Camorr spiralled down into the solar. Here Calo grabbed Locke by one sleeve, put a finger to his lips, and jerked his head downward.

“Listen,” he murmured.

Clang, clang … footsteps … clang, clang.

This sequence of noises was repeated several times, growing slightly louder each time. Locke grinned at Calo. Someone was pacing the solar, methodically checking the locks and the iron bars guarding each window. At this time of the night, there was only one man in the house who’d be doing such a thing.

Calo knelt beside the balustrade, just to the left of the top of the staircase. Anyone coming up the spiral stairs would have to pass directly beneath this position. He reached inside his cloak and took out a folded
leather sack and a length of narrow-gauge rope woven from black silk; he then began to thread the silk line through and around the sack in some arcane fashion that Locke couldn’t follow. Locke knelt just behind Calo and kept one eye on the long passage they’d come down—a reappearance of the don was hardly likely yet, but the Benefactor was said to make colorful examples of incautious thieves.

Conté’s light, steady footsteps echoed on the staircase beneath them.

In a fair fight, the don’s man would almost certainly paint the walls with Locke and Calo’s blood, so it stood to reason that this fight would have to be as unfair as possible. At the moment the top of Conté’s bald head appeared beneath him, Calo reached out between the balustrade posts and let his crimper’s hood drop.

A crimper’s hood, for those who’ve never had the occasion to be kidnapped and sold into slavery in one of the cities on the Iron Sea, looks a bit like a tent as it flutters quickly downward, borne by weights sewn into its bottom edges. Air pushes its flaps outward just before it drops down around its target’s head and settles on his shoulders. Conté gave a startled jerk as Calo yanked the black silk cord, instantly cinching the hood closed around his neck.

Anyone with any real presence of mind could probably reach up and fumble such a hood loose in a matter of seconds, which is why the interior is inevitably painted with large amounts of some sweet-scented fuming narcotic, purchased from a black apothecary. Knowing the nature of the man they were attempting to subdue, Locke and Calo had spent nearly thirty crowns on the stuff Conté was breathing just now, and Locke fervently wished him much joy of it.

One panic-breath inside the airtight hood; that would be enough to drop any ordinary person in his or her tracks. But as Locke flew down the stairs to catch Conté’s body, he saw that the man was still somehow upright, clawing at the hood—disoriented and weakened, most definitely, but still awake. A quick rap on the solar plexus—that would open his mouth and speed the drug on its way. Locke stepped in to deliver the blow, wrapping one hand around Conté’s neck just beneath the crimper’s hood. This nearly blew the entire game.

Conté’s arms flashed up and broke Locke’s lackadaisical choke hold before it even began; the man’s left arm snaked out to entangle Locke’s right, and then Conté
punched
him—once, twice, three times; vicious jabs in his
own
stomach and solar plexus. With his guts an exploding constellation of pain, Locke sank down against his would-be victim, struggling for
balance. Conté brought his right knee up in a blow that should have knocked Locke’s teeth out of his ears at high speed, but the drug was finally, thankfully smothering the old soldier’s will to be ornery. The knee barely grazed Locke’s chin; instead, the booted foot attached to it caught him in the groin and knocked him backward. His head bounced against the hard marble of the stairs, somewhat cushioned by the cloth of his hood; Locke lay there, gasping for breath, still hanging awkwardly by one of the hooded man’s arms.

Calo appeared at that instant, having dropped the line that cinched his crimper’s hood and dashed down the stairs. He slipped one foot behind Conté’s increasingly wobbly legs and pushed the man down the stairs, holding him by the front of his doublet to keep the fall relatively quiet. Once Conté was head-down and prone, Calo punched him rather mercilessly between the legs—once, then again when the man’s legs twitched feebly, and then again, which yielded no response. The hood had finally done its work. With Conté temporarily disposed of, Calo turned to Locke and tried to help him to a sitting position, but Locke waved him off.

“What sort of state are you in?” Calo whispered.

“As though I’m with child, and the little bastard is trying to cut his way out with an axe.” Chest heaving, Locke tore his black mask down off his face, lest he vomit inside it and create an unconcealable mess.

While Locke gulped deep breaths and tried to control his shuddering, Calo crouched back down beside Conté and tore the hood off, briskly waving away the sickly-sweet aroma of the leather bag’s contents. He carefully folded the hood up, slipped it into his cloak, and then dragged Conté up a few steps.

“Calo.” Locke coughed. “My disguise—damaged?”

“Not that I can see. Looks like he didn’t do anything that shows, provided you can walk without a slouch. Stay here a moment.”

Calo slipped down to the foot of the stairs and took a peek around the darkened solar; soft city light fell through the barred windows, faintly illuminating a long table and a number of glass cases on the walls, holding plates and unidentifiable knickknacks. Not another soul was in sight, and not a sound could be heard from below.