Page 72 of Sword Dance

“Those are the documents?” Damiskos whispered. He had been picturing something larger, somehow, more impressive-looking.

Varazda nodded. “It was as I suspected—there was a false bottom in one of the chests, and they were in there. I didn’t have time to pry it up when I was searching before. And I was trying to keep them from noticing their things had been searched, which made it take longer.”

Damiskos looked around at the clutter on the floor. “You’ve given up on that, I see.”

Varazda made a face that Damiskos thought he might have learned from his three-year-old daughter. He tucked the small scrolls away in his sash and gathered up an armload of debris from the floor to dump it back in the open chest.

“What? That’s what it was like when I came in.” He closed the chest, closed and latched the shutters, and gestured to Damiskos: let’s go.

Finally they turned to their principal reason for entering the villa: the raising of the signal flag from the tower in the north-east corner. They made their way around the gallery, still moving stealthily although Damiskos at least was convinced that the second storey of the villa was more or less empty. Varazda, walking in front, indulged in a couple more elegant, improvised hand signals, and Damiskos nudged him playfully in the small of the back, making him look round with an innocent shrug.

Damiskos had met men in the army who genuinely enjoyed danger, who were at their happiest when facing the enemy with the odds against them. He wasn’t really one of them himself, and he felt sure Varazda wasn’t at all. This heady mood of joking and teasing between them was something else, something specific that Damiskos couldn’t quite name. It might have threatened to be distracting, but instead he felt his instincts sharp and ready, his senses keen.

They found the narrow door in the corner of the gallery that led up to the tower. Varazda indicated that he would go up, and Damiskos nodded. He positioned himself behind the half-open door, where he could command a view of the gallery in either direction, and see part of the atrium below, without being too obviously visible himself. Varazda padded off up the stairs.

He hadn’t been gone more than a minute—not long enough to have found the signal flag and raised it—when he came flying back down the stairs and out the door. He beckoned Damiskos to follow him as he ran down the east side of the gallery, scanning the doors and picking one halfway along. He pushed at it, hard, but it was locked.

Damiskos didn’t know what this was about, but he didn’t need to. He stepped past Varazda to put his shoulder to the door and shoved sharply. The lock gave with a splintering crack, and the door swung open.

The room was lamplit, and Tyra was sitting on the bed with a comb in her hand, her hair loose over her shoulder. She froze, wild-eyed, and let out a startled scream.

“Shit!” Varazda cried. “I’m so sorry! I got the wrong door.” He grabbed Damiskos’s arm. “It must be that one.” He pointed to their left along the gallery. “It’s Eurydemos—he’s hanging out the window. Can you—”

“On it.” Damiskos made for the left-hand door while Varazda apologized again to Tyra.

It took Damiskos two tries to break down Eurydemos’s door, which must have had a stronger lock than Tyra’s. Charging inside, he saw that the bed, a delicate piece of furniture, had been pulled diagonal under the window and lifted at one corner by a torn sheet tied around its leg and stretching taut over the windowsill. He squeezed past the bed to assess the situation outside the window.

Eurydemos was dangling at the end of the hopelessly short length of sheet, holding on with one hand, legs thrashing feebly, tangled in his trailing mantle. He had evidently been trying to get to the top of a window below and to the right of his room, but he dangled several feet away from it, far enough above the rocky ground sloping away from the villa’s wall to be seriously hurt if he fell. The sheer, bone-headed idiocy of the man. Damiskos gritted his teeth.

“What was that?” he heard the fishermen calling from below. “Somebody screamed.”

Damiskos gave a tug on the sheet to get Eurydemos’s attention. “I’m going to pull you up,” he hissed. “Grab on with your other hand and turn toward the wall.”

The philosopher stared up at him with a mulish expression, and for a moment Damiskos was afraid he was going to let go and drop rather than allow himself to be pulled back into captivity. He wouldn’t be killed by the fall; he’d just break a limb or two, and then they’d have to deal with that, and oh, immortal gods.

“We’re going to get you out,” Damiskos said firmly, trying to sound reassuring rather than massively irritated.

Eurydemos grasped the torn sheet with both hands and made a pathetic attempt to twist around to face the wall. Damiskos hauled him up gingerly, wary of overtaxing the already fraying sheet. Eurydemos bumped and scraped against the wall, unable to get his feet out of the coils of his mantle to help his ascent.

What kind of imbecile climbed out a window wearing his mantle?

“I heard a crash,” one of the fishermen was saying from the atrium.

“Leave it—it’s not our business.”

“What if it’s the prisoners getting out?”

“They’re not our prisoners.”

“Do you think they know that? What if they attack us?”

Damiskos had just got Eurydemos over the windowsill and into the room when there was another crash, this one from the back of the house, in the portico or the garden, as if something large had fallen and shattered.

“What was that?” Eurydemos yelped.

“What was that?” the fishermen cried from below. “That was out back! Come on!”

Footsteps slapped on the tiles in the atrium as the fishermen ran toward the garden. Damiskos seized Eurydemos’s arm and dragged him, clutching his mantle, out the door into the gallery. At the same time, Varazda emerged with Tyra from an open door at the back of the house, above the portico. Damiskos hurried toward him with Eurydemos in tow.