The Healing Wars: Book III: Darkfall (11 page)

We crossed the too-high grass to the street, staying in the shadows again. At Beacon Walk we turned right, heading away from the Sanctuary, the only light on this isle that I’d seen so far. Well, aside from the patrol.

Zertanik’s town house was halfway between the Sanctuary and his pain merchant shop close to the League. A residential block for those with money but not wealthy enough to afford the aristocrats’ district or the terraces. Folks who had enough to be paranoid about holding on to it.

Most of the first-floor windows along the street were boarded up, a good thing for us. No allies lived in these buildings. A few gates were barred, heavy boards across them. No sounds of fighting, no sounds of any kind, really, just the soft tap of our footsteps on brick. My pace quickened the closer we got to the town house.

“There it is.” It was more overgrown than we’d left it, with trash in the courtyard like all the other buildings we’d passed. No lights shone in any of the windows. None were boarded up.

Danello hurried forward, but I caught his shoulder. “Easy. Anyone could be in there.”

He nodded and we moved slower, checking the shadows and the likely places someone might be hiding if they were guarding this building. The places
we’d
watched from when we were hiding here.

No sign of anyone. The front door wasn’t locked, and the entrance room looked as abandoned as the courtyard. Drawers and cabinets hung open, and it looked like everything worth having was gone.

We stepped farther inside, the occasional creaks sounding loud as screams. No doors opened, and I didn’t hear anyone moving around on the upper floors.

“Soek and I will search upstairs,” Danello said. “Quenji, Aylin, you take the bottom floor. Nya can guard the door with Tali.”

Tali was looking around, her eyes wide, her mouth open a little. Did she know this place? Did she remember? I sat on the stairs and talked to her, but she ignored me like she had all night. Like a good little soldier, she only listened when I gave an order. I wiped my eyes.

Danello and Soek returned shortly after Aylin and Quenji were done.

“There’s no one here,” Danello said. “It looks safe.”

“So we start searching?” Quenji asked.

Soek shrugged. “If there’s anything left to find.”

“Nya said the owner was a thief,” Quenji said. “Thieves hide stuff. I found jewels inside a table leg once.”

A fuzzy image popped into my mind, of bookshelves and something hidden behind them that made my skin itch. What
was
it? The image cleared. A small locked box I’d found hidden behind some books months ago when we were living in the town house. We’d been looking for valuables to sell, but the box had bothered me so much, I hadn’t wanted to open it.

“There might be something in the library,” I said.

“Let’s see if it’s still there,” Quenji said.

I nodding, praying it was and that it held some clue to helping Tali.

D
anello made a torch out of some ripped fabric and a broken table leg while Quenji found some flint in the kitchen. It took a few strikes of the flint to light the torch, but it gave us enough light to see by. I just hoped it wasn’t bright enough to be seen from the outside.

Tali had curled up in a chair, her eyes closed.

“I’ll stay here and watch her,” Aylin said softly. “Soek can guard the door.”

“No one gets in,” he said, hefting another table leg.

I smiled. “Thanks.” I hesitated, then turned back to Aylin. She’d almost drowned, and I hadn’t even said anything. What kind of friend
was
I? “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Shaky, lungs hurt a little, and I don’t want to go anywhere near water for a long time, but I’ll live.”

I hugged her, then hurried up the stairs. The library was in shambles like the rest of the town house, but the looters had ignored the bookshelves completely. The heavy tomes were dusty, but the same as we’d left them.

“Feel anything?” Danello asked.

I stepped closer to the shelves, my hand out. At a few feet away, my stomach started quivering, just like it always did when I was near glyphed pynvium. “Here.”

Danello handed Quenji the torch. He dragged the books away and set them on the floor in piles. The small box with the lock was still there, tucked in the alcove. My skin crawled, the sense of overwhelming wrongness just like before.

Danello took it. “Heavy. Could be the box, though. Do you sense anything else?”

“Not with that thing so close.”

He took it into the hall. “Better?”

The quivering stopped. “Yes, thanks.”

“See what you can find,” Danello said, setting the box down and coming back inside. “I’ll clear the rest of the books. If he hid one thing back there, he might have others.”

I walked slowly around the room, running my hand over shelves, checking drawers that had been yanked out and tossed on the floor. No quivers. Not even a flinch.

Whoomp.

Danello cried out a heartbeat before the prickling of fine sand blew across my skin.

“Danello!” I ran to his side, fighting the instinct to draw away his pain the instant my hands touched him. He was woozy, but conscious.

“I’m okay, no need to heal me,” he said, groaning. “Hands sting a bit, that’s all.”

“What did you touch?”

“The books. I was reaching for them, but I wasn’t really looking at them.”

“That flash is a good sign,” Quenji said, grinning. “You don’t ward things unless they’re worth a lot. Danello, see if anything else flashes.”

He grimaced. “I think it’s your turn to check.”

I scanned the books above where Danello had collapsed. One spine poked out a finger width from the rest of the books. Dark leather, worn binding, the title so faded I couldn’t make out any words. Thin blue strips of pynvium ran along the edges of the spine, looking like decorations. Until you touched them.

“Step back.” I reached out and ran my finger down the spine.

Whoomp.

Sharp pain washed over me, stronger than the typical muted flash. I pulled the book off the shelf. No flash this time.

The entire front edge was covered with a leather flap, with locks at both the top and bottom corners. “It’s locked.”

“Forget valuable,” Danello said. “Whatever is inside there has to be important.”

“Let’s see what it is.” I set the book down on the floor and motioned Quenji over. “Don’t open it, just unlock it. Odds are something else will flash.”

Quenji gulped but started on the lock anyway. It took him longer than any other lock I’d seen him pick, but he eventually got it unlocked. He stepped back and ducked around the corner. “Your turn.”

“I think he has the right idea,” said Danello, joining him in the hall. “That hurt before.”

“Yeah.” I braced myself and lifted the cover. No flash. But the pages were filled with enchanting glyphs and notes and drawings that made my fingers itch. And my heart race. “It’s some kind of enchanter’s book,” I called over my shoulder.

“Worth anything?” said Quenji.

“To me, everything. This might tell us how to fix Tali.”

“How?” Danello asked.

“I don’t know, but there must be something in here that says how the kragstun works.”

“Do you read enchanter?”

“No, I don’t.” My hopes sank, then rose again. “But Onderaan does.”

Three days until he was supposed to meet us at Analov Park.

“Keep searching,” I said. “Maybe’s there more here.”

“Told you,” said Quenji, rubbing his hands together. “Thieves hide stuff.”

We opened every drawer, looked behind every book, looked
in
every book, but found nothing else in the library. I went to the next room, running my hand over everything again, but no quivers and no pynvium.

“Bedroom next,” Danello said, pushing open the door. The room had been searched already, long before we got here. Drawers were empty, chairs were knocked over, nothing left on the tables. Even the bedding was gone.

My stomach clenched when I walked in, but not from any glyphed pynvium. This had been Zertanik’s bedroom. I’d killed the man who used to sleep here.

“Let’s get this over with.” I moved quickly, checking the places that might hold hidden compartments like Quenji said. I stepped into the closet, which was as big as my old room over at Millie’s Boardinghouse.

My stomach quivered. “Check the floor. My toes are tingling.”

Danello felt around the edge near the baseboards. A knot in the wood had a hole in the center, and he stuck his finger into it. One section of the floor pulled up.

“Another hiding place,” he said.

Two bags and one long box sat in a compartment about six inches deep and two feet square. The box was locked.

Danello picked up a bag. It clinked. He looked inside and sighed. “Only jewels,” he said.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Quenji grabbed the bag from his hand and poured gems into his palm. “Look at all this! We could live like aristocrats with these.”

Shame we hadn’t found those back when we were living here. That one bag alone would have been enough to get every last one of us out of Geveg and someplace safe. I sighed. I’d been a fool not to search the town house before. To avoid rooms I really hadn’t wanted to go into. If I had, maybe we’d have escaped in time and Tali wouldn’t have … been changed.

“Nya?” Danello rubbed my shoulder. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. Quenji, unlock the box, then stand back again, just in case.”

Quenji worked on the lock until it snicked, then joined Danello in the hall. I reached for the long box. Lifted the lid.

Whoomp.

I winced, the blown sand prickle stinging this time. Zertanik created strong enchantments, stronger than anything Papa had ever made. Zertanik might have been a thief and a traitor, but he was a talented enchanter for sure.

“What’s inside?”

“Glyphed pynvium. Long strips of it, about two inches wide, maybe a quarter inch thick. They look a little like rulers.” A single column of glyphs ran down the center.

“Are they weapons?” Danello called.

“I don’t know. We’d have to trigger them to find out, and they might only have one flash.” I pulled over the box from the bookshelf, my stomach doing flips. I took a deep breath and opened it.

Whoomp.

Same sting, same sharp pain. If I were a thief, I’d run the second I touched one of these things.

“It’s clear,” I said, reaching inside the box. Something the size and shape of a battlefield brick was wrapped in cloth. I unwrapped it as the boys gathered around.

“That looks expensive,” Quenji said.

A cylinder of ocean-blue pynvium sat in my hands, glyphs carved deep into four vertical strips of silvery-blue metal.

Kragstun.

“What is
that
for?” Danello whispered. Something about that cylinder made me want to be cautious, too. And run as fast as I could out the door and hide. I held the cloth carefully, not letting the cylinder touch my skin.

“I don’t know.” But I was sure it had something to do with the Duke and his weapons.

Zertanik had been working with the Duke to help create his pain-cycling device, and maybe more than just that. The Duke’s pynvium weapons had flashed several times—and they’d flashed hard. Had Zertanik made those? Had he made the pynvium armor? The lining?

I guess Vinnot hadn’t been the only one doing experiments.

I put the cylinder back in the box, feeling better the moment the lid closed. Zertanik probably hadn’t wanted anyone to find these things. Maybe not even the Duke. He was, after all, planning on robbing him. Selling his enchanted items would have no doubt made him more money than anything the Duke had been offering.

I slipped the boxes into a makeshift bag made from scraps of curtains and wondered if killing Zertanik hadn’t been a bad thing.

There was no way we were going swimming again, so getting back to the boat was going to be tricky.

“Is there another way around the bridge guards?” asked Aylin. She’d curled up on a chair next to Tali. Quenji sat on the arm, his hand in hers.

“Going around them is even more dangerous. The ones closer to the League will be the Duke’s men.”

“We could lure them away,” Quenji said, worried eyes on Aylin. “The pack used to do that to get into guarded windows.”

“A distraction?” she asked.

Quenji smiled. “Part of it. What good is getting rid of the guards if they catch you? You also gotta trick them.”

“We could try talking to them,” said Soek. “I know it sounds crazy, but what if they’re on our side?”

Danello nodded. “We wanted to make contact with someone in charge and warn them about the Duke. We’ll have to talk to someone to do that.”

Guilt washed over me. I’d forgotten about the army, the danger to Geveg. “If we’re going to try talking, should we wait until morning?”

“They’ll be more people on the streets,” said Quenji. “That could go either way for us.”

The clock tower chimed, deep bells ringing out one after other. Tali gasped and jerked awake, head swiveling, eyes panicked. She shrieked and lunged at Quenji, sitting above her on the arm of Aylin’s chair.

“Tali, no!”

She knocked him to the floor and pummeled him, swinging wildly. I grabbed one arm, Danello grabbed the other, and we dragged her off. Quenji scrambled away, his nose bleeding.

“Saints, what got into her?” he said. Aylin had both arms around him, watching Tali warily.

We held Tali down. She screamed, trying to get to me and Danello, flailing about with fists and feet.

“Shh, Tali, it’s okay, please be quiet or someone will hear you.”

Her shrieks bounced off the bare walls, sounding loud enough to wake every person on the isle.

“Tali,
quiet
!” I hummed a lullaby Mama used to sing to us, the one about clouds and fish that dreamed of flying. She fought us all through the first verse but settled down on the second. I started over, and finally her body went limp and she dropped back to the floor.

Danello let go of her, his hands hovering above her arms a few seconds before pulling away.

“Soek,” he said softly, “any movement outside?”