“A hacksaw-” he began, already turning to the door.
“Wait.” He turned back. “You are an honorable man, and I will take your word in this as in the other. Go, lock the door behind you lest another come. Best you be able to say you do know not how I escaped.”
Karlyn-Tan gave the Mercenary a deep bow, and turned to the door. “One thing is certain,” Parno said. They had waited until the middle of the second watch to make their attempt on the door. He gritted his teeth and coaxed the bent-and-folded wire he had inserted into the lock a little to the right. Stupid lock was blooded stiff. And using his left hand was not making a hard job easier. Trial had shown, however, that left-handed or no, he was still better at lockpicking than the other three. He closed his eyes the better to feel the mechanism. “What I’d like to know,” he said through his teeth, “is how much the little Dove knew when we were looking after her on the road and making sure she wasn’t eaten by Cloud People.”
“Your coming was not just coincidence, you think?” Thionan said.
“Perhaps,” Parno jerked his head and young Hernyn eased in beside him. “Hold this just where I have it, my Brother.” Parno waited until the young man had slipped his hand into position and grasped the wire before moving his own hand away. The cracked bone made his right arm throb. “But it’s certain they were ready for us. Perhaps the little Dove’s an innocent bystander. And the letter we never saw a love note. It’s just that I’d like to know before I cut her throat.” Parno thought of Mar white-faced and vomiting after Dhulyn had cut young Clarys’ throat. It had taken days for that big-eyed look of apprehension to fade from the girl’s face. She had looked at Dhulyn the way one looks when one realizes that the house dog one cuddled in the evening was really trained to kill strangers who came uninvited. Had that pallor and those sidelong glances been no more than a performance? Or was it just that the girl had found it was one thing to act as lure, and another to travel with killers?
“The Lady Mar-eMar’s really a member of the House,” Fanryn said. She crouched on the floor near Parno, her back braced against the wall. “That much you may believe. They’ve been sending for cousins and second cousins and even more distant relatives since last planting season. Some stay, some go forth again.” She handed Parno the wire she’d finished bending for him. She’d been the one who’d helped him off with his boots. The pattern of beading around the boot tops still looked intact, but some of the beads were gone, worked into the dirt floor, and the wires which had held them on were picking the lock of the cell door.
A dull click, and the Brothers smiled at one another in satisfaction. Parno and Hernyn eased the door open a fingerwidth, and they all fell silent, listening. They quieted their breathing, waited with trained patience for one thousand heartbeats, before Parno slowly twisted the picks out of the lock. “There we are, my lords and ladies,” Parno looked around at the three faces grinning back at him. “Off you go, Hernyn, and mind you don’t get caught. In Battle, my Brother.”
“Or in Death.” Hernyn gave Parno a grin of his own and snaked himself out of the door on his belly. Parno relocked the door. Always easier to relock than to unlock. A twist to the old proverb Dhulyn was always quoting, “easier in than out.” Too bad she hadn’t remembered it before they’d come into this place.
“He’ll be all right.” Parno hoped his words did not sound like a question. It was not something he could have said while the youngster was still in the room. Fanryn, Hernyn, and Thionan had matched fingers for the job and the boy had won.
“Oh, blood, yes,” Thionan snickered. “He’s new in the Brotherhood, but that makes him old for outsiders. You or I might see him, Parno; Fanryn here knows his smell and could track him by that alone. But none of these people will see him.” She tossed her head at the corridor on the other side of the door. “We used to go roaming at night-blood, during the day sometimes, and none of us were ever seen.”
Parno nodded. He would rather have gone himself, of course, but there was no way to convince the others in view of his injury. No way to explain the map in his head, if it came to that. And these three had more than maps in their heads. In their time in the House, they had been over the whole edifice several times, they’d told him. And it was from Brothers like these, Parno knew, that the maps he and Dhulyn were shown had come. They knew where every member of the household slept, and with whom, and what many of them looked like in their sleep. They knew where the chamber pots were kept and how often they were emptied; where the Tenebroso kept her jeweled gloves, and what kind of sweetmeats the tame Scholar kept under his bed.
Most important, they knew of the places that a prisoner like Dhulyn Wolfshead-someone who had to be kept secret from the rest of the household-might be hidden. According to Thionan, there were three small rooms that, going by their placement within the maze of Tenebro House, were without windows and had only one door. Thionan knew of at least one other visitor who had been kept in the room she considered most likely.
“Look there first,” she’d said to Hernyn. “You know the place I mean. Around to the left and down the short flight of stairs beyond the Kir’s suite. Across from the hallway that goes nowhere.”
“That’s not the place to start,” Fanryn had said, shaking her head. “You want to check that chamber next to the Kir’s suite first, the one he and the Scholar use for a workroom.” When the other three waited for her to go on she shrugged. “That’s where they question people. He should make sure she’s not there before looking for her cell.”
Hernyn had looked at Parno and waited for the older man’s nod. No one thought it odd that the man who knew the least about the House should be the one to decide. Even if he had not been Senior, Parno was Dhulyn’s Partner, the only one who could speak for her.
Parno sat propped on one of the cots while Thionan quickly put together what spare clothing and blankets they had between them to look like Hernyn was asleep on the other cot. They’d need all their luck and the bad lighting to fool anyone for long, Parno thought.
“How’s this look?” Thionan flopped herself on the cot along with the make-believe Brother and drew a length of twisted tunic around her own waist. Parno squinted, then began to laugh. By the Caids it did look like Thionan was sharing the cot with someone else. She rolled back up to a seated position and bowed her acknowledgment of Parno’s tribute.
“What shall we do to pass the time?” Parno said. “I’m no Scholar, but I know a good many tales, or I can sing.”
“A song by all means,” Fanryn said, leaning back and shutting her eyes with a smile.
Dhulyn stood ignoring the passage of precious minutes, waiting with a cat’s patience for the sound of footsteps in the hall to move away. When she’d heard them approaching, she’d ducked into the nearest open door and found herself unmistakably in the anteroom of the Tenebroso’s chambers. Two sleeping women, wearing the silken sleeping shifts and loose hairnets of senior lady pages, with heavier but no less finely woven robes across the foot of each bed, explained the absence of any other guards. Handmaidens or dressers would be sleeping elsewhere-these women would be nurses and companions, as well as bodyguards. Though the one to the left was too rolled up in her bedding to come to anyone’s quick assistance, Dhulyn thought, her lip curling slightly.
Still, here in the heart of the House, surrounded by her people, the Tenebroso was evidently thought sufficiently well-guarded. And so she would have been, from any intruder other than a Mercenary Brother.
Not that Dhulyn wished to intrude upon her. She stood not quite in front of the closed door, the well-oiled hinges at her back. She tried not to think about time passing slowly and inexorably by. She tried only to listen to the breathing of the two women with her in the softly lit room, until she was sure they breathed at the same moment, as people who sleep together over long periods of time often do. If she needed to-and then the footsteps of the guards outside stopped in front of the door at her back.