Page 71 of Sword Dance

Crouching by the first window, Varazda pointed down the line and back at Damiskos: which window is yours? Damiskos pointed at the third window, hoping that he remembered Aradne’s diagram of the house well enough. It was too dark now to consult it. Varazda nodded and gestured “forward.”

He’d really taken to the hand signals, Damiskos thought with amusement. I must remember to tease him about it later.

They crawled along the roof close to the wall, moving slowly and carefully for fear of dislodging a loose tile; Aradne had warned them that this roof was in bad repair. It sloped at a gentle angle away from the main house wall, and was easy enough to traverse except for that consideration. They passed under the lit window, pressing themselves as low as possible. None of the voices that Damiskos could hear from below were familiar. It sounded like a game of dice in progress. The fishermen, possibly.

They reached the third, dark window and stopped beneath it. Damiskos levered himself up to push experimentally at the shutters. They were latched from inside. Varazda sat up next to Damiskos, drew one of his swords, and offered it. Damiskos mouthed “Thank you” and used the thin bronze blade to lift the latch and let it drop to the side. He smiled at Varazda in the dark as he returned the sword.

It was odd to be on a night mission—behind enemy lines, so to speak—with a fellow you wanted to kiss all the time.

Damiskos pushed the shutters open and looked into the room. A little faint light slanted in through the window above the door, which opened onto the atrium, and he could see that it was indeed his room. The bed was directly under the window where they sat. He turned and signalled to Varazda that he would go in and Varazda should wait here. Varazda touched his arm to stop him, pointed to himself, and pointed up at the wall of the house.

Damiskos followed the gesture, looking up at the thick trunk of a vine twining up the wall to the second-storey windows. He shook his head.

Varazda raised his eyebrows: why did Damiskos think it was a bad idea?

It wasn’t a bad idea; it was a good way of getting into the upstairs rooms, one they hadn’t thought of because they hadn’t known the vines would make the wall scalable at this point. But it would require them to split up. There was no way Damiskos could make it up that wall, and Varazda had to know that.

Damiskos reached through the window to rap his knuckles on the shutter, and gestured upward. What if the windows above were closed? Varazda laid his hand on the hilt of one of his swords. Shrugged. Yes, he probably could unlatch a window with his sword while hanging one-handed onto a vine, Damiskos thought. He craned his neck to look up at the window above them, the one Varazda could most easily reach from the vine. It did appear to be shuttered, but there was no light showing between the louvres.

Varazda tapped his shoulder and made a complicated but clear series of gestures to indicate that Damiskos should go up through the house and meet him upstairs. It would give Varazda a chance to begin searching the students’ rooms before they went to set the signal for the postal ship. Damiskos didn’t particularly like it, but he wasn’t going to prevent Varazda from taking the most effective route to the second storey just because he himself couldn’t manage it. He nodded.

As a compromise for his own peace of mind, he lay on the roof waiting while Varazda climbed nimbly up the vine, braced himself with one foot on the window ledge, drew his sword to flick the latch open, and pushed the shutters noiselessly inward. He slid the sword neatly back through his sash, caught the top of the window to swing himself fully over from the vine to the windowsill, and crouching there, poised as a cat, looked down at Damiskos, and blew him a kiss.

A moment later, Damiskos had collected himself enough to swing over the edge of his own window and drop down onto his bed.

The room had been cursorily turned over; his portable shrine lay on the floor, the ashes of the last burnt offering spilled over the tiles. His saddlebags had been dragged out of his closet and opened, but they had not found either his sword or his hunting bow, hidden at the very back of the top shelf.

He tucked the shrine and its statue into the bag along with the bow, quiver, and the bundle of kitchen knives, tied the bags shut, and buckled on his sword belt. Then he got up on the bed again to heft the saddlebags out the window, letting them down gently onto the roof outside.

Getting down from the bed, he crossed quietly to the room door and listened at it for a cautious interval. There were no sounds from the atrium, not even faint rustles or soft footfalls. He remembered that sounds from outside had been clearly audible in this room, no doubt because of the connecting window. He eased the door open and slipped out into the empty atrium.

There were no lights burning here, but the door to the room where he thought he had heard the fishermen stood open, and lamplight spilled out. It lay between him and the foot of the stairs, but the atrium beyond was deeply shadowed. He pulled the door gently closed behind him and started around the long way, creeping close to the walls to stay in the darkness as much as possible.

He passed the open archway of the anteroom to the library, which he thought was where they had seen the second light burning from outside, but here he could hear no voices, and the inner door was closed. He paused at the opening to the passage out into the garden, looking cautiously around the corner. There was no one in the portico, so he ventured a quick detour down the passage. Hiding behind a column, he looked out into the garden.

Torches flickered in the summer dining room, and he could see students lounging on the couches and hear raised voices. Someone was pouring wine, but whether it was one of the turncoat porters or someone else, he had no idea.

He slunk back the way he had come. Through the half-open folding doors of the winter dining room he could see a chaos of uncleared dishes and broken wine-cups. There were articles of clothing on the floor in the atrium, and a statue had been toppled from its pedestal and lay in pieces on the tiles. The pool in the middle of the atrium smelled faintly of urine.

He reached the bottom of the stairs without incident, but someone had broken some crockery on the first few steps, and he barely avoided stepping on the fragments in the dark. He felt around for a clear space on the step with the toe of one boot, and unluckily a number of shards fell off the edge of the step to the floor with loud chinks.

“What was that?” demanded someone in the lit room beside the stairs.

“A cat or something,” said another voice, blurred with drink. “Aw, come on, leave it!”

“If it’s one of those students creeping about, though … ” A third voice. “I don’t trust any of ’em.”

“Or the damn slaves getting out of the cellar. I told you we should’ve cut and run a long time ago.”

There was more cursing and unintelligible, raised voices. This time Damiskos was sure there were at least five of them. He had retreated around the corner into the passage leading to the front door, hand on the pommel of his sword, but no one emerged from the room, and presently they seemed to have gone back to their game of dice. He crept out again. Armed, he liked his chances against five fishermen well enough, but they were civilians; they would have to mount a very determined attack before he would think himself justified in killing any of them, and he would prefer it didn’t come to that.

The stairs had a railing with an upper and lower rail on their open side. He grasped the hand-rail, stepped up onto the lower rail, and managed to pull himself clumsily up past the crockery-strewn steps. After that the rest of the flight was easy.

He reached the gallery at the top that ran around three sides of the atrium, giving access to the upstairs bedrooms. Looking down, he established which room was directly above his, and went to its door. He wished they had thought to arrange some signal so that he wouldn’t have to surprise Varazda, but at this point it couldn’t be helped. He eased the door open a crack, relieved to find it wasn’t locked, and looked in.

The room was a fantastic mess, with clothes, books, and dirty dishes on the floor, and two large sea chests under the window. Varazda was up to his elbows in one of them. Damiskos tapped lightly on the door to get his attention, and he looked round, wide-eyed and wary, before his face broke into a smile. He held up one hand, and in the moonlight from the window Damiskos could see the bundle of small, tightly-rolled parchment scrolls that he held.

Chapter 18