by Martha Wells
Nicholas knew little about this particular area, though he was far too familiar with its immediate neighbor Riverside. He stepped around the corner, moving casually down the street toward the only source of light—a small brandy house operating out of what appeared to be the old stable of another Great House, long ago torn down for tenements.
The front wall was open to the street, revealing a high-raftered interior packed with people, noise, and smoke. Outside a few regulars were loitering and an old man was serving patrons who didn’t care to fight their way in from an open barrel.
"It’s a penny for a drink, unless you don’t got your own cup, then it’s two," he said wearily, as Nicholas sat down on an overturned trough.
"It’s two," Nicholas answered, tossing the coins over. The old man caught them and passed him a cup.
He took a cautious sip and managed not to wince. It burned all the way down his throat, with a faint aftertaste of kerosene. It brought back a host of disagreeable memories, of the one tiny room he and his mother had occupied in a tenement unpleasantly similar to those throwing their shadows over the street now.
The old man was still watching him. The only other patrons nearby were passed out entirely, huddled up against the wall of the old stable or staring vacantly into space. Nicholas was in no mood to fence. He said, "Whose house is that?"
"I saw you watching it." The old man grinned, caught Nicholas’s expression, and added hastily, "There’s nothing there. Just old people. Nothing to steal."
"Their name?"
"Valent. It’s Valent House, or it used to be. Just old people live there."
Nicholas tossed him another penny and stood. He started to dump the brandy in the street but instead handed it off to the most conscious of the huddled figures and walked away.
He went to the opposite corner which intersected a street where late night coach and wagon traffic still travelled and several raucous establishments spilled customers into the gutters. He went down it a short distance until he found an alley that led between two high, featureless brick walls back in the direction of Valent House.
He followed it with difficulty, finding his way past one dead end and two other intersecting passages, and finally came out into a carriage court that had been orphaned by the demolition of its original owner: none of the structures crowding close around opened on it and it was piled high with rubbish. There were windows looking down on it but all were closed or darkened; this entire side of the street seemed completely deserted. Nicholas fought his way through debris, bruising his shin on a broken dog-cart axle in the process, and reached the far wall.
He climbed it in a shower of loose bits of mortar and looked over the top into a dingy little court that had once been a garden, now choked with weeds and long abandoned. Looking up, he saw the outline of gables against the dark sky and knew this was the back of Valent House. The windows in the upper floors were all securely boarded shut and there were, of course, none in the ground floor and only a single door to allow access. He struggled over the top of the wall and dropped softly down into the remains of a flower bed. The shadow of the house blotted out much of the moonlight and he had to feel for the steps and then the door. He tried the handle cautiously and found it securely locked and far too solid to force. He cursed it silently and stood back to look up at the house again. There was not a hint of light or sound from within, but these walls were thick, and one or a few people, moving quietly and with hand lamps, would not be noticeable from outside.
More searching turned up an alley that led off the garden court and back to the street at the front of the house. There seemed no other ground floor entrances but the garden door and the front, which he was not quite fool enough to try.
Nicholas had prepared tonight to pose as a manservant, not act as a housebreaker. He needed to send a message to Cusard. This meant a walk back to Riverside and his older haunts, where he could find a reliable messenger among the street boys who worked for the old thief.
He made his way back to the noisy side street with some difficulty and paused at the corner, to look toward Valent House again. Octave might think the night’s work was over, but Nicholas knew it was just beginning.
In a thieves’ kitchen in Riverside, Nicholas found a street boy who worked occasionally for Lamane and who could take a message to Cusard. It would be an hour at least until Cusard could receive it and respond, so he used the time to walk back up to Saints Procession Boulevard where there was an office of the Martine-Viendo Wire which stayed open all night, mainly for the convenience of the foreign embassies in the district that began across the street. There he sent a telegram to be delivered to Madeline at Coldcourt.
Both messages were cryptic and not readily to be understood by anyone who might intercept them. The message to Madeline had said only "E’s storeroom— ascertain security of inventory." He might have waited on that until he could do it himself, but he was impatient and if Octave had found a way to get to Edouard’s research without alerting them, he wanted to know as soon as possible.
He caught a hire cabriolet on the boulevard and took it as far back down to Gabard Lane as the driver was willing to go and walked the rest of the way. He waited on the upper corner, comfortably out of sight of the street where Valent House lay, stamping his feet against the cold. He would have liked to keep watch on the house but wasn’t so dead to common sense as that—Octave would be suspicious at best after the performance on the riverbank.
Fortunately there were few prostitutes working this street and most were easily fended off. The district seemed to be quieting a little as the night wore on, but he had to keep moving to avoid suspicion. The ostler’s wagon with Cusard on the box was a welcome sight. Even more welcome were Reynard and Crack, who climbed down as soon as the wagon was reined in at the curb.
"How did you make it here?" Nicholas asked.
"After I found your note, I made my excuses and got the hell away," Reynard explained. He had changed out of his evening clothes and with the somewhat battered greatcoat he wore, looked sufficiently enough like someone who would be riding in an ostler’s wagon in this part of the city. "We went to the warehouse to see if you’d gone back there and met Cusard." He glanced around the street. "Lovely neighborhood."
"I brought these." Cusard finished tying off his reins and pulled a leather satchel out from under the bench. He handed it down to Nicholas. "Everything there we might need. I checked it myself. Who’s staying with the wagon?"
"You are," Nicholas said, taking the satchel. "Did you remember the oil?"
"Of course I remembered the oil." Cusard was affronted at being left behind. "I’m the only official cracksman here and I taught you everything you know. It was a lie, the charge they laid against him." He gestured at Crack, who rolled his eyes in annoyance.
"I know that," Nicholas said with asperity. "I’ll work the doors myself. Someone has to wait with the wagon and he’ll have to keep sharp in this patch. You think on that." In another moment, Nicholas reflected, he would be speaking entirely in backstreet Vienne thieves’ cant. This night was bringing his past back to him in unpleasant detail.
"All right, all right, have your own way, that’s the young for you." Cusard gave in with poor grace. He handed Crack a dark lantern and Nicholas waited impatiently as it was lit.
"What happened to the coach?" Reynard asked as they started down the street.
"The driver realized I was on the back and I had to jump off and follow on foot." He led them to the corner and took Crack by the shoulder, pointing out the dark bulk of Valent House. "Octave drove into the carriage door of that house. See if you can tell if he’s still there."
Crack slipped around the corner. Nicholas leaned back against the wall, feeling through the contents of the satchel Cusard had brought him.
"Your note was incoherent, by the way," Reynard said, regarding him thoughtfully. "What did you see at the circle that I didn’t?"
"That item that you so adeptly forced him to reveal
."
"Yes?"
"Edouard’s last work. Did you ever know what it was?" Nicholas hadn’t known Reynard then and he was well aware his friend had had his own troubles at that time.
"Not really." Reynard shrugged. "I heard rumors, none of which made much sense."
Nicholas suspected Reynard was exercising tact, something he only did with close friends. The rumors at the time had been explicit and damning. "It was a mechanical device that would allow someone who had no sorcerous ability to direct sorcerous power, in a limited fashion."
"Ah. That would tend to explain some of the events at the circle, wouldn’t it?"
"Yes. It took the help of a sorcerer to make it work at first. That’s why Edouard and I lived at Lodun for so long. He worked on it with Arisilde for a time." He looked back at Reynard. "When one of the devices is completed, it’s in the form of a metal sphere, like the one Octave had."
"I see why you chased him over half the city. But how did he get his hands on Viller’s work? Didn’t the Crown have it destroyed?"
"We managed to get to Lodun before the Crown did. The University authorities weren’t amenable to having a scholar’s property seized, and their resistance gave me enough time to remove most of the important papers—" Nicholas realized he was saying far more than he had meant to. The conversation was moving away from the security of the bare facts of Edouard’s work and the events surrounding his trial and into the dangerous ground of his own actions, thoughts, and feelings at that nightmarish time. He looked away up the street and added only, "I couldn’t save anything from the workroom he kept in Vienne where he was arrested." In the last months of his life, Edouard had moved his experiments from Coldcourt to a hired studio on Breakwater Street in Vienne. It had been an odd thing for him to do, since previously he had worked only at his home or his quarters in Lodun. The Prosecution at the trial had made much of this, suggesting that Edouard was trying to hide his activities from his family and servants.
One morning Edouard had unlocked the studio to find a woman, very obviously and messily dead, on the table in his workroom. His reaction had been to run out into the street, shouting for help—not the act of a guilty man, as his counsel had pointed out. She had been a beggar woman who sold charms and flowers on the street and the Prosecution gave evidence that Edouard had been seen to give her money, suggesting this was how he had lured her into his rooms. Edouard was found guilty of trying to use her death to power his magical device and had been executed only a week later.
Nicholas had learned later that Inspector Ronsarde had never been happy with the case. Six months after Edouard’s death the Inspector had penetrated the deception and discovered that the woman had been murdered by a local thug named Ruebene. Ruebene had been killed when the Prefecture attempted to arrest him, leaving Edouard’s name cleared, but the Crown investigation had gone no further. Nicholas had taken up where Ronsarde left off, working for months until he found the link to Edouard’s old patron Count Montesq. The evidence was poor and since the chief witness was one of Montesq’s lower-class mistresses who had been present when the Count had hired Ruebene, and who was then dying of syphilis, he knew it would never go to court. Besides, Montesq couldn’t be accused of necromancy, only of hiring the death of a beggar.
Nicholas wanted him to suffer far more than that. He took a deep breath and made himself think of the present and not the past. "I don’t know how Octave could have gotten his hands on any of it. And I don’t think I can make myself believe he was able to duplicate Edouard’s work from his own inspiration."
"No," Reynard agreed. "He didn’t seem the inspired type, if you know what I mean. I think I detected an air of the professional confidence man about him."
"That wouldn’t surprise me." Reluctantly, Nicholas added, "And we have another worry. Ronsarde was at Gabrill House tonight."
Reynard was badly startled. "That’s not funny."
"I’m not joking. He was in the garden, watching the circle. I spotted him as I was leaving. He saw me, too, of course, but not close enough to recognize, considering it’s been years since he’s seen me without a disguise of some sort." Nicholas had avoided contact with Ronsarde after the trial, at first because he had been planning to kill him, later because he was building the Donatien persona.
"Damn." Reynard folded his arms. "That could complicate everything enormously."
"I’m well aware of that." Nicholas’s expression was sour. "If he realizes you’re connected with Donatien, that’s going to give him the answers to more than a few mysteries." Reynard had been the inside man for several of their early jewel robberies, when they had needed operating funds for the campaigns against Montesq. "But at the moment he has no reason to suspect Donatien’s involvement."
Reynard wasn’t ready to let it drop. "But what if he saw the sphere? He’ll recognize it just as you did. That will give him every reason to suspect the involvement of a member of the Viller family. And if he connects you with Donatien. . . ."
"We have to assume he did see it, and did know it for Edouard’s work. He could be led straight to us." The walls of the tenements around them seemed to be closing in and Nicholas told himself this was shadow and imagination. He took another look toward Valent House and saw Crack coming back up the street. "We’ll just have to get to Octave first, and remove the evidence."
Reynard shrugged philosophically, apparently satisfied with letting the problem rest there. Nicholas wished he could be so sanguine.
Reaching them, Crack said, "There’s an alley with slatted windows looking into the stable. No horses, no coach. Been there recently, though."
Nicholas swore, resisting the urge to kick the foundation of the nearest wall. "He knows we’re after him. I don’t know if he realized it was me on the coach, but he knows someone is after him."
"He’s cautious." Reynard scratched his beard thoughtfully. "The house is still worth looking at."
Nicholas agreed. Nothing was keeping him out of that house. "Yes, he had to leave in a hurry, if he wasn’t just visiting someone. There may be something left behind. Let’s try that door I found earlier."
They went down the quiet street, keeping a wary eye on the brandy house in the old stable, the only possible source of interference. But the patrons who had crowded it earlier seemed to have retired and even the old man serving from the barrel had retreated inside. Several bundled forms were still stretched out on the walk in front but they seemed dead to the world and disinclined to interfere.
They reached the corner of the house and turned down the narrow alley that led directly to the garden court, Crack in the lead. As they made their way across the dry overgrown grass, Reynard swore softly and stopped to scrape something off his boot.
Nicholas followed Crack up the steps to the door he had tried earlier and in the muted light of the dark lantern examined it cautiously. It was solid mahogany and barely weathered at all. "New," he whispered. "And in the last month."
Crack nodded agreement, taking the lantern as Nicholas fished a leather tool case out of the satchel. He selected a bit and fitted it to a small steel brace, then knelt on the step to work near the keyhole.
Frequent application from a small bottle of oil kept the drilling reasonably quiet. He could hear nothing but their own breathing and an occasional fidget from Reynard. The house might have been empty.
It took almost thirty separate holes and the better part of an hour before Nicholas could wrench out the lock and push the heavy door open.
Crack handed back the lantern and slipped in first, Nicholas and Reynard following. The air smelled of damp and rats and something even more foul, as though meat had spoiled and been left to rot somewhere inside.
They crept down a short hall, the lantern illuminating fragments of rooms, the wire mesh meat safe of a servery, once-white tiles coated with dust and filth, an open and empty coal bin. Crack pushed silently through a door at the end of the hall, then leaned back to motion Nicholas to shut the slide on the lanter
n entirely. He complied, then followed his henchman through the door, Reynard behind him.
They were in the central foyer. Some light was entering through the cracked glass windows above the deep shadow of the front entrance and Nicholas could tell that this had once been a very fine house. The staircase had a grand elegant sweep, splitting into two midway up its length to lead into the separate wings. Torn and rotting fabric that had once been draperies still clung to the walls and paper and paint had peeled away in the damp. If people were living here, as the old man had said, they must carve out a miserable existence in one or two rooms, probably on the ground floor. The rest of the place was like a tomb.
Crack whispered, "No one’s here. No one alive."
Nicholas glanced at him in surprise, supposing he was succumbing to a heretofore unexpressed religious streak. Then Reynard said softly, "You smell it too, hey? I can’t tell where it’s coming from; seems to be everywhere."
"Smell what?" Nicholas asked, puzzled. "The rats?"
Reynard’s mouth twisted, not in amusement. "You’ve never spent a long period of time in a war—or a prison. That’s not rats."
Nicholas accepted the statement without argument; he was beginning to realize just what it was they might find here. He said, "Crack, look for the cellar door. We’ll search this floor first."
Crack vanished into the gloom and Nicholas and Reynard turned toward the doors off the entrance hall. The first had been a reception room. Nicholas raised the slide again and lifted the lantern, revealing spiderwebs like lace stretching from the ornate cornice and floral frieze out to the broken remnants of the chandeliers. The carpet had been worn to rags and he could clearly see that it and the heavy layer of dust on the floor had been recently disturbed. What was once a fine table still stood in the center of the room, its surface long ruined by damp, but not as heavily covered in filth as it should have been.
