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“Thank you so much for taking me on this adventure!” he exclaimed. “I know you said you would do it just for fun, but I still feel like I owe you something. A meal, if nothing else?”
“I’d take a meal,” Cody said, “but not tonight. I’ve got a job to get to in about an hour.”
“Some other time, then.”
“And I was glad to go,” Cody added. “Glad to see it again. Though it’s funny.”
“What is?”
“I thought it would be bigger. I thought itwasbigger, last time I was there.”
Pietro felt his heart stop, simply pause in its accelerated rhythm and crouch there, quivering in horror. “Really? How much bigger?”
Cody spread his arms in an inadequate attempt to convey a sense of space. “I thought it was more like a square last time. It’s like some of the walls are closing in.” He dropped his hands. “But that’s ridiculous. Isn’t it?”
So it hadn’t been Pietro’s imagination. It hadn’t been his faulty memory. The chamber really had shrunk in size. The walls really had moved closer. Over what period of time? Was it years or was it months? Were they still moving?
What would happen when they finally ground together, crushing the tool of the god between them?
How much time was left?
Chapter Nine:
Brandon
Brandon stood for a long time outside the mansion, just staring. It looked much like every other house on Council Row, with its clean lines, its gracious proportions, its self-contained secretiveness; there was no way to know from the outside what it might hide on the inside.
Not that that he had entered any of the other houses along this street, in this part of town. He’d just heard stories the other guards told about the times they had accompanied one of the priests on their visits to wealthy parishioners.Nothing much to look at on the outside, but inside it was like a flower market had exploded. Cordelan strike me dead if there weren’t plants growing on the ceiling. . . .Gold leaf on every wall and every pillar and every bannister, so bright in there I thought I might go blind. . . . Stark. Nothing but black and white tile anywhere you looked.
He had not, until he pulled this assignment, strayed too often into this part of town during his two years in Corcannon. He had been hired on by the temple guard within a week of arriving, a stroke of great fortune that had colored all his days. Good pay, good accommodations, and a ready-made cadre of companions. They teased him for being a country boy, but at least half of the other soldiers came from the more rural parts of Chibain and Marata. City men didn’t often sign up to be fighters. They wanted to better themselves in other ways.
Brandon had had plenty of interesting tasks since he’d been hired. Providing an honor guard for the high divine when he made public appearances, patrolling the temple complex at night to keep looters at bay, accompanying the purser when he visited the bank to withdraw funds to cover another week’s worth of operating expenses.
But this job would be like none of those. For one thing, it was a semi-permanent posting. He would be living here, in this house, for the next six months, along with two other temple guards who would be sharing the duty with him.
For another, he would be guarding a woman. A woman who rarely had visitors and never left the premises and could not be left unattended for a single minute.
The sergeant who made the assignment hadn’t been forthcoming with details, merely telling Brandon when and where to report. Brandon had ventured to ask a single question:Am I keeping this woman safe or am I keeping her a prisoner?And the sergeant had simply answered,Both.
Brandon had packed his gear and taken one of the chuggers to the northwestern edge of town, trying not to gawk at all the big houses as they went by. How much money would a man need to have in order to own a place like this? One year of upkeep would probably cost more than Brandon would make in a lifetime.
Six months of living in such a house would make a memory that could also be measured by a lifetime, Brandon thought.
Now that he had arrived at his destination, he took a long time just to get his bearings. The house sat on spacious grounds, maybe twice as big as the properties of most of the nearby houses. The lawn was not particularly well tended, being largely given over to shrubs and vines that were a few half-hearted pruning attempts from taking over. Like many of the other rich estates, it was enclosed by an ornamental iron fence; unlike the other borders, this one looked like it would actually keep an intruder out. The thick bars were too slick to easily grasp, too high to easily climb, too close together to permit even a child to squeeze through. They were also topped with sharp finials that could probably slice a man’s hand right open. Even so, Brandon thought, the fence wouldn’t be impossible to breach with the right tools; he was pretty sure he could make it over if he wanted to badly enough.
But a pampered rich woman without the proper training would probably find it an insurmountable barrier.
The tall gate was locked, as he had been warned, so he pulled on the rope that should set off a bell in the interior. A moment later, the heavily carved front door swung open to admit a stocky young woman dressed, like Brandon, in the dark blue livery of a temple guard. She was of average height and athletic build, and she moved with the lithe assurance of a dancer or a fighter. Her hair was a muddy brown and her skin the indeterminate color he had come to associate with someone of mixed heritage.
“You’re the new guard?” she said as she approached the gate.
He showed her the gold bracelet on his left wrist. It was stamped with the temple’s quatrefoil pattern, interrupted in four spots by the crossed swords that denoted his status as a soldier. Next to it he still wore his guild bracelet incised with another series of crossed blades.
The woman flashed her own jewelry, a matching temple cuff and a guild bracelet showing a higher rank. “I’m Finley,” she said.
“Brandon.”
She nodded. “That’s the name they told us.”
