The Shadowhand Covenant (20 page)

They paused. My hand uselessly pinned to my side, I dropped the dirk and used my shoulder to nudge it over to Reena. She abandoned her blowgun and grabbed my weapon. With one powerful swipe of her arm, she freed herself from the rag doll's clutches and me from the marionettes' strings.

Together, we crawled out from under the table. I pointed to the hall that led to the saw-blade kitchen. It was the only visible exit.

“We can't leave them,” she said, nodding at the dollhouse. But Maloch and Holm were nowhere to be seen. I could only guess that they'd gone into the house for shelter
once the toys had come to life.

“We can't help them if we're dead,” I said, pulling her arm toward the doorway.

Just as we ran for the exit, the jack-in-the-box lid shot open with a
sproing!
A massive toy spiderbat on a spring bounded from the box and landed at our feet. With the dollhouse to our backs, we were completely surrounded by the army of toys.

A flit of motion near the dollhouse caught my eye. I saw tiny Holm jumping up and down on the roof. He was pointing to Maloch, who was smearing something dark on the white shingles to spell
TOUCH THE HOUSE
.

At this point, spending the rest of my life as a tiny doll seemed better than being killed by the world's most vicious toys. I grabbed Reena's hand and yanked her toward the dollhouse. We fought off the toys as they tried to drag us to the ground. With a final jump, I reached out and touched the roof of the dollhouse.

My vision filled with blue sparks and the next thing I knew, I was dangling with one hand from the edge of the roof. Reena, holding tightly to my other hand, squirmed precariously below me. I felt two strong hands clamp around my
wrist. Slowly, Reena and I were pulled up to safety.

Lungs heaving, squatting on all fours, I looked up to thank Maloch for saving us. Instead, I met the eyes of my father.

“Bet it's a long time before you play with toys again,” Da said, a glint in his eye.

“The enemy of my enemy is my next likely target.”

—Ancient par-Goblin proverb

W
e scaled down the side of the dollhouse. Well, Da and Reena scaled. I made it halfway before I slipped and fell. Da was ready, though, and caught me before I hit the tabletop. Now that I was shrunken, the house seemed normal in size. The larger-than-life toys, on the other hand, were now monstrous. They circled the table menacingly. Clearly, they knew they couldn't attack without getting miniaturized.

“Da, what are you doing here?” I asked as he led Reena
and me inside the house.

The second I stepped inside, I was yanked into the vestibule and nearly choked by Ma's hug.

“We should be asking you the same thing,” Ma said. She sounded both worried about me and angry about my disobedience. “By the Seven! You're supposed to be with the Dowager.”

“Yes,” I said, as soon as I could breathe again. “Well, things got complicated.”

We all walked into the living room. Holm and Reena hugged while Maloch reclined in an overstuffed chair, hands behind his head.

“We tried to get your attention,” Maloch said to me. “Holm saw your parents in the window of the house—that's why he touched it. Your da had the idea to smear the food from our packs on the roof to spell out that message.”

Da sighed. “What a waste of perfectly good beetloaf,” he said. “But it worked.”

“Why are you here in the first place?” I asked. “You're supposed to be off finding the remaining Shadowhands.”

Ma and Da shared a look of deep concern. “That's what we did,” Ma said, sitting on a footstool. “We used the
information Maloch's da left for me to search for the last three Shadowhands. Both Alvar and Bennis were nowhere to be found. No one had seen them for days.”

“What about”—I searched my memory for the name of the third Shadowhand—“Dylis? Dylis Jareen? Did you find her?”

“And not a moment too soon.”

I jumped to hear a raspy voice behind me. Turning, I saw a Satyran woman sitting in a high-backed chair in the corner. She looked about Ma's age, with a few wisps of silver hair among the curls on her head and the whiskers of her beard. The mottled gray horns protruding from her forehead matched the cloven hooves that poked out from underneath the long, flowing mage robes. Her arms, hidden beneath the robes, were wrapped around her chest.

“I didn't think the Shadowhands allowed mages in,” I said.

Dylis Jareen smiled at me. It really wasn't a pleasant smile. It seemed pained and distant. She nodded down at the robes. “A disguise. I'd figured out what was happening to the Shadowhands and had gone into hiding. It was sheer luck your parents found me when they did. Lucky for me.
Otherwise, I might not be here.”

Da cleared his throat. “Yes, well, that's a story for another time. Maloch had just started to tell us why you're here, but he didn't get very far before the toys started attacking. So out with it.”

I took a deep breath, and between myself and Maloch and Reena and Holm—in his own peculiar way—we recounted the story of the past couple of weeks, from the kidnapping in Vengekeep to our fleeing Redvalor Castle in search of the Covenant. Ma's and Da's faces went from concern to fear to laughter and back to concern again. The whole time, the expression on Dylis's face barely changed. She showed no surprise, no emotion whatsoever. And sometimes when I looked over to her, I could almost feel her tiny black eyes peering through me.

When we finished our story, Da folded his hands behind his back and started pacing. “Well, it looks like we all hit upon the same idea: find the Covenant, find the traitor.”

“But why don't you have it yet?” Reena blurted out. She immediately looked down, realizing she'd been rude.

“It's a fair question,” I said playfully, trying to cover for the awkwardness. “Three skilled thieves. Two Shadowhands
who can deactivate the Dagger's defenses. You should have been in and out in no time.”

Ma agreed. “Yes, it should have been simple enough. But when we got here, we found we weren't alone.”

“We were attacked,” Da said. “Tall brutes in heavy coats. We never saw their faces. They just came at us, swords waving. It was all we could do to keep ahead of them.”

Ma gestured at Dylis. “It was Dylis's idea to come to this room. She activated the nursery hardglamour, and we touched the house so we could hide. We've been here for two days, hoping that whoever infiltrated the Dagger thinks we've left.”

That didn't bode well. If the three of them had been hiding in the dollhouse for the past two days, then they couldn't have switched off the hardglamour in the kitchen. Which meant that whoever had attacked them was still at large.

“Speaking of which,” Da said, reaching for my pack, “we ran out of food yesterday. Do you mind?”

I quickly unpacked my supply of food, and Ma and Da dug in. I offered a slab of sanguibeast ribs to Dylis. The Satyran declined, pulling her robed arms closer to her body with a wince.

“So I'm just going to ask the obvious question,” Maloch said, folding his arms and looking right at Dylis. “If all the Shadowhands are gone except one, and we know that one of them was a traitor—”

“Choose your next words very carefully, Maloch Oxter,” Dylis said, her black eyes raking over Maloch. I caught a glint of light and looked down to see the tip of a dagger poking out the end of Dylis's long sleeve.

“Dylis isn't the traitor,” Ma said firmly. “We think the traitor may have faked his disappearance to throw off suspicion.”

“And that person would have gone to great lengths to throw everyone off the track,” Dylis said, her eyes never leaving Maloch. “They might even, say, leave behind evidence suggesting they'd uncovered a plot and were going in search of the missing Shadowhands themselves. . . .”

Maloch, face flushed, leaped to his feet. “My father is no traitor!”

“Enough!” Da said, hands raised. “We're here to help each other, and pointing fingers won't accomplish anything.”

Maloch slowly sat. He and Dylis continued to size each other up.

I tried to ease the tension. “Finding the traitor is one thing. We also need to find out who hired the Shadowhands in the first place.” I said to Dylis, “Do you have any ideas who it was?”

The Satyran gave a black look. “If I knew, I'd already be spitting on their corpse.”

Lovely.

“Dylis,” Ma said, placing her arm around my shoulders. “Would you mind telling your story to Jaxter? He's quite bright. He might see something that we've all missed.”

Dylis sat up and grimaced, pulling her arms in closer to her chest. She eyed me warily, then shot an untrusting look at Reena and Holm, both of whom immediately bristled.

I smiled weakly at the Sarosans. “Would you mind heading upstairs for a bit? This is strictly between thieves.” When both took deep breaths, I quickly added, “The faster we get things sorted, the faster we can get your parents out of Umbramore.”

That shut them up. The siblings collected their things, stormed out of the room, and stomped loudly upstairs. Dylis began.

“The Shadowhands,” she said in her raspy voice, “were
contacted several months ago through the usual means. . . .”

Contacting a cadre of highly secret thieves is about as hard as you'd imagine. It's not like they have a shop set up that you can just pop into. You have to know people. And those people have to know people. And if you're lucky, those people know people who know how to contact the Shadowhands. The Shadowhands had spies everywhere. It wouldn't be long before word got to them that someone was seeking their services and they made contact.

“I went to the meeting personally. Yab Oxter came along to watch my back, hiding in the shadows while I made the deal. . . .” She leered at Maloch, who stiffened at the mention of his father. “Our employer supplied us with detailed maps of all the royal vaults, a list of the items to be procured, and instructions on the precise day and time that the vaults would be at their most vulnerable.”

I thought about what the Dowager and I had discussed, and it still bothered me. How had the contact known exactly when the Provincial Guard would be called away from the duties of protecting the vaults? I kept thinking the answer to all our problems had something to do with that. But I
shrugged it off as Dylis continued her story.

“He paid us handsomely—six thousand silvernibs in advance, with a promise of another four thousand upon delivery of the items. I made the deal, then gathered the other Shadowhands to discuss the job. We quickly divided into teams of three and made off for the vaults. Just as our contact indicated, the Provincial Guard had left their posts on orders. A job that would have otherwise been nearly impossible, even for a Shadowhand, became one of the easiest ever. We all reunited at the Dagger with the four stolen items.”

I blinked. “I'm sorry?”

Dylis ignored my interruption. “We came back here with the four stolen items, then proceeded to Firesilk Falls. We found a large chest with the balance of our payment buried near the riverbank. We took the silvernibs and put the stolen relics—the orb, the gauntlets, the coronet, and the scepter—into the chest and buried it exactly where our employer instructed us. And that was that.”

Then the Satyran's face darkened, and she gave a snort. “Or that
should have been
that. Months later, I began to realize that my fellow Shadowhands were vanishing. I got an
urgent message from Yab to meet him at the Dagger. On my way, I was attacked, so I went into hiding until your parents found me.”

I watched her, trying to look sympathetic. Every gesture seemed to cause her pain, especially when she moved her arms. When she finished speaking, her eyes fell.

Ma looked at me brightly. “Any thoughts?”

I rubbed my hands together. “Maybe. I need to think it over a bit. Sleep on it.”

Da yawned. “Good idea. We could all do with some rest. Then we can get up early and plan a way to get to the Covenant.”

We gathered our belongings. Dylis grunted as she got to her feet. She leaned over slowly, her furry left hand snaking carefully from under her robe as she reached for the bag at her feet.

I stepped forward with a smile. “Here, let me get that for you.”

But before I could touch her bag, she scooped it up with a wince and held it tight to her body. “Thank you,” she said with a pained smile, “but I prefer to carry it myself.”

We all went upstairs. Reena and Holm had already
collapsed from exhaustion in one of the bedrooms. Dylis took one room, Ma and Da another, which left Maloch and me in the final bedroom. The walls were decorated with bright flowers. Frilly lace framed the canopy bed.

Once the door was closed, Maloch threw his bag in the corner and started pacing. “I can't believe she thinks my da is the traitor. I should have cut her just for suggesting it. I don't trust her.”