Night's Haunting Read online

  Finally satisfied, Swinherd cast a quick glance at Lucius, who nodded in assent, and then carefully climbed the ladder to the roof. As soon as his foot left the last rung of the ladder, Lucius sprang onto it, and proceeded to follow.

  "Larken? Where the dogs got to?"

  The voice from the other end of the path caught Lucius with alarm, and he instantly went rigid, trying to make himself as invisible as possible. Another voice sounded to Lucius' left, coming from somewhere near a coach house a few dozen yards away.

  "They're round here," it said. "Acting crazy."

  "For the love of God..." protested the first voice and heavy footsteps, accompanied by the unmistakable chink of mail armour, grew louder as a mercenary came down the path. As he came into view Lucius recalled the old thief adage: if you can see them, they can see you.

  Taking a quick breath, Lucius reached within his mind's eye to find the threads of magical energies running through his consciousness. He had been able to tap this sorcerous power for many years now, but his recent training allowed him to gather the threads he needed and wield them almost as a reflex.

  Selecting the darkest of the threads, he mentally pulled, breaking it away from the others, and imagined it wrapping itself around his body, the magic twisting and writhing under his direction. To any observer, Lucius' form would seem to shimmer and distort before growing fainter, as if he was being stretched into the nearby shadows. To the mercenary, his mind on the important matter of his employer's dogs, Lucius was no more than an indistinct shadow at the corner of his eye. With the garden full of such shadows, he paid it no more attention than he did the rest, and carried on, oblivious to the thief's presence.

  Waiting until the guard had disappeared behind the coach house, Lucius started up the pole ladder again, letting the magical darkness slowly uncoil itself. Once on the roof, he directed Swinherd to the rear of the mansion, where they had agreed they would gain entry. He was about to follow but glanced across at Ambrose, who was still at the edge of the roof, holding the rope that trailed off the edge down to the bay window below. Lucius frowned at that, as he was sure Ambrose would have reached the roof long before he and Swinherd had. He should be inside by now.

  Casting a rueful look at Swinherd as the younger man disappeared over the roofline, Lucius padded quietly to Ambrose, a knot starting to grow in his stomach at the thought of his plan unravelling so soon.

  Seeing Lucius approach him, Ambrose exhaled in relief.

  "Something's wrong," he said, and Lucius had to stifle a groan. "Got the tug from Grayling, but it's gone all quiet now."

  Rubbing his forehead in frustration as much as thought, Lucius made a quick decision. He was determined that his plan would stay more or less intact.

  "Okay, I'll go down," he said to Ambrose. "Once I'm in, you go over the top with Swinherd. You remember everything about the entry from the back?"

  Ambrose nodded. Both teams had been briefed well on one another's roles, in case of any last minute changes.

  Following Grayling's descent, Lucius scaled down the rope quickly as Ambrose once again braced himself against the weight. Scanning the bay as he went down, Lucius saw nothing out of the ordinary. As he drew level with the window, he peered inside and saw the black, slender form of the female thief, standing in the corridor, utterly rigid. He put his head through the open window and glanced up and down the corridor, trying to see if perhaps a squad of mercenaries held her at crossbow point. There was nothing.

  "Grayling. What's wrong?"

  "Thank God it's you. Filcher's floor. Heard it crack as soon as I put a foot down."

  "Is the chair secure?" Lucius asked, indicating the furniture in the centre of the bay.

  "I think so, yes."

  Hooking a foot inside the bay, Lucius entered the mansion, and perched himself on the chair, before tugging on the rope twice to let Ambrose know he was now free to follow Swinherd around the back of the mansion.

  He glanced at Grayling, impressed with both her composure and stillness. Other thieves might have panicked at discovering they were standing on a filcher's floor, but Grayling remained stock still. That was when the floor must have shifted, as she put her full weight on to it; the flexible floorboards designed to crush glass and ring chimes mounted underneath. They were carefully built so even a tentative footstep could trigger the trap.

  They were lucky, for Grayling had frozen the moment she knew what was happening, and her quick reactions had probably saved all of them.

  "Alright, you're safe now - this will probably get a bit cold, so be ready."

  Grayling slowly and gently nodded her assent, as Lucius reached down with his right hand, his left holding the back of the chair to support his weight. Again, the threads of magic leapt to the forefront of his mind, and he twisted them around, conjuring their potency as he made their power manifest.

  Eyes widening slightly in amazement, Grayling watched as a fine mist grew around her foot and then spread up and down the entire length of the corridor in seconds, forming a carpet an inch thick. Looking over her shoulder at Lucius, she saw him frown in concentration then shiver as he lowered his hand to the floor, his fingers turning pale blue as he allowed the magic to flow through him. She had witnessed his shadowmagic before, but he never used it at the guildhouse and she was awestruck every time.

  As he touched the filcher's floor, there was a tiny crackle of energy as the mist around his fingers dissipated, frozen to the wooden boards of the corridor by the extreme magical cold. This effect radiated out from Lucius, spreading down the corridor, causing Grayling to gasp at the cold as it numbed her foot. Within a few heartbeats, the mist had completely disappeared, leaving behind a fine sheen on the floor, freezing it still.

  Lucius let go of the breath he had been holding and looked up at Grayling, smiling. Gingerly, he took a foot off the chair and set it down on the floor, gradually adding his full weight. The boards he rested on remained inflexible and no alarms sounded.

  "It's okay, you can move now," he said. "Just be careful not to slip on the ice."

  Grayling was tentative in her movements at first, but quickly gained confidence in the solidity of the floor. She stooped to massage her thighs, and then straightened to stretch her back, both having suffered cramp from being held immobile for too long.

  "We ready?" Grayling asked.

  Lucius looked down the corridor to his right, and beckoned Grayling along. The libraries of the guildhouse had borne much fruit for this mission, including detailed plans for the entire house. The thieves' guild had many such plans for buildings across the city, acquired with either great expense or great skill from the architects that had built them, over many years. These plans had formed the basis of many raids in the past, and were a valuable resource.

  The members of both teams had memorised the mansion's floor plans, and their methods of entry had been built around them. They could not be sure de Lille or some past resident had not changed the interior, of course, as indeed the flicher's floor indicated, but the main structural design should have remained more or less intact. Both Lucius and Grayling already knew they were on the right floor; now they just needed to head deeper into the mansion, where a small set of windowless interior rooms suggested the prime location for both de Lille's personal quarters and his most treasured belongings.

  Counting doors as he padded down the icy corridor, Lucius finally stopped at one, and listened. He felt Grayling tap him gently on the shoulder and, turning around, saw she was indicating that she go first. His first reaction was to refuse, but he quickly reflected on her agility and the bodysuit she wore, designed purely for stealth, then nodded.

  Slowly, and with painstaking care, Grayling twisted the door's handle, gauging whether it was locked or not. It wasn't and, with equally measured pace, she quietly opened it, ready to halt her actions immediately if the door should squeal on its hinges or someone should be present on the other side.

  She turned back to Lucius, held up two fi
ngers, then one. She then made an "o" with finger and thumb, and finally held up her hand, palm facing him.

  Lucius nodded. Two guards, about ten yards away, in front of a door.

  Reaching down to his belt, Lucius produced a pouch whose end was sealed but had a wick poking up through the fabric. Not wanting to spend time with a flint and steel, he willed the forces of magic to his bidding, and touched the wick with his finger. Instantly, a flame took to it and it fizzed - an almost trivial spell for Lucius now, though he remembered a time when he had trouble controlling effects so small.

  He passed the pouch to Grayling, who took great care not to inhale the smoke streaming from it. Sliding the door open a fraction wider, she flicked the pouch down the corridor.

  Inside the short passageway, one of the mercenaries was alert enough to notice the pouch as it slid along the floor. He took a step back, but the pouch suddenly puffed open with a low gasp, coating both him and the other guard in a fine white powder. The powder quickly sank back to the floor, but by then they had both inhaled it. The alert guard suddenly found his senses dulled, as his hearing fled, and the walls of the passageway seemed to bend into one another. He saw a short black form pacing menacingly towards him, but his throat would not co-operate as he tried to shout an alarm. He managed to get his hand around the pommel of his sword as blackness overtook him, and he felt as though he were falling a long way.

  Entering the passageway, Lucius and Grayling saw the two guards succumb to the sleeping draught, slumping against the walls as they sank to the ground. Lucius winced as the mail armour of one scored a line in the plastered wall, causing a low grinding noise. Grayling, too, was concerned at the unintended noise, and they both froze on the spot as they listened intently, trying to detect any sign of alarm in the mansion.

  There was nothing.

  "Guards mean we are on the right track," whispered Grayling.

  "So does this door."

  Grayling had noted that the door seemed unusually elaborate when she had first seen it from the other end of the passageway, but she had put that down to a merchant's poor taste in interior decoration. As she looked now, she saw that the design was in fact an elaborate mechanism.

  The centre of the door was dominated by four short swords, built into large metal dials, each surrounded by strange glyphs and markers. Each dial was linked to the others by shafts of steel and, from there, thicker shafts were driven into the surrounding door frame and, presumably, extended some distance into the wall.

  Lucius sighed. He had heard of such doors before, though he had never seen one himself. Built by esteemed Vos craftsmen, such portals were used to secure the most valuable of possessions, and were rumoured to be only in the possession of the richest nobles and best-connected holy men. That de Lille had one made Lucius think he had underestimated the man's wealth by a significant degree.

  The swords and dials, Lucius saw, formed an elaborate combination lock, with each sword being turned to face a number of markers. So long as you knew which markers each sword should point to, the door could be opened within seconds. Lucius did not know, as his research for this mission had not even hinted that such a door might be present.

  "So, you wish you had stayed with Swinherd now?" whispered Grayling with a smile.

  Chapter Two

  Squinting down the wooden tube, Ambrose surveyed the doorway from the safety of the adjoining passage. Inside the tube, two mirrors had been precisely positioned so a thief looking at the mirror at the bottom end of the tube would actually see the world from the vantage of the one at the top. As the tube was a foot long, this made it an ideal tool for peering over walls or, in this case, around corners.

  Ambrose could not remember exactly what the device was called, so he called it his jerriscope. As impressive as his jerriscope was, however, the doorway that blocked their progress was a great deal more elaborate.

  "Passage is clear, but we have a problem," he told Swinherd.

  Swinherd peered through the jerriscope, and whistled quietly.

  Before him, the width of the passage was blocked by a wall of glass. Set into the panes was a single door, with an exposed locking mechanism. As Swinherd broke from cover to better view the obstacle, he could see that the glass was as thick as his smallest finger.

  "Force the lock, you smash the glass," Ambrose said. "Clever. I would guess the glass has been stressed so the whole lot will come down. Very noisy."

  Swinherd snorted and reached for his belt, bringing up a small leather pack as he crouched down in front of the lock. He unrolled the pack on the floor, revealing a selection of finely crafted lockpicks, a collection that had cost him four months' income.

  "But there is a flaw," he whispered. "By setting the lock in glass, I can see half the mechanism. I'll be through this in less than a minute."

  Ambrose had already set his glass cutting cup to the door, just a few inches above the lock.

  "No," he said. "You are looking at a false mechanism, designed to lure a thief away from the tumblers. You'll think you have it, force the lock, and then break the glass. Look..."

  Frowning, Swinherd reconsidered the lock.

  "No, I don't think..."

  With a slight crack, Ambrose withdrew the cup, then popped the circle of glass free. Reaching inside, he pulled the latch, and carefully swung the glass door inwards.

  "Swinherd, my friend, you may be adapting to the locksmith's trade quickly, but you still have a lot to learn about being a thief."

  Before exploring the junction, Grayling flattened herself against the wall, using the back of her arm to wipe the sweat from her brow. Lucius had finally lost patience with the combination lock, and focussed fiery magics that had, eventually, melted the mechanisms, allowing him to pull the securing bars free, one by one. It had taken time, and Grayling thought the back draft of heat would boil her alive. Her hair was sodden, sweat ran freely down her face, and her bodysuit was growing more uncomfortable by the minute.

  For his part, Lucius seemed less affected by the heat, but the directed concentration of such powerful magic had left him breathless. Their prize was close, however, and the combination door seemed to be the last obstacle barring their way into de Lille's inner sanctum.

  On the original architectural plans they had studied before launching this assault, the small complex of three rooms and their adjoining corridors had lit up like a beacon. All interior rooms, with no windows, they were perfectly situated to house valuables - all approaches could be trapped or sealed, unless you could tunnel through walls.

  Along the corridor, mounted on wall brackets at regular intervals, were strange orbs, glowing with a yellowish light. Lucius had never seen such artefacts before, but he had heard of them. Crafted by the wizards of the Three Towers in Andon, also known as the League of Prestidigitation and Prestige, the orbs were magical, needing a simple touch by their owner to dull or brighten them. That de Lille could afford to light his entire inner domain with them was further testament to his wealth.

  Grayling tapped his arm.

  "Two more guards," she whispered, indicating one of the passageways leading from the junction. "The rest are clear."

  "We have our target then."

  "You have more sleep powder?"

  He shook his head. "No. This one we'll have to do the old-fashioned way."

  "I'll go first."

  "On your word."

  Slowly, Grayling drew her short sword from across her back, the scabbard lined with cloth so the weapon slid free without sound. Behind her, Lucius did the same, but also plucked a dagger from his belt. Grayling padded around the corner at speed, arrowing straight towards the mercenaries and the oaken door they guarded.

  Lucius' dagger flew over her shoulder to sink into the throat of one man, causing him to gag while blood flowed between his fingers as he fought to stem the flow. His cry of alarm was little more than a low gurgle.

  His partner was taken fully by surprise as Grayling charged him, her canvassed feet
making little noise as she quickly closed the distance. He managed to draw his sword and flail blindly, batting aside Grayling's disembowelling thrust by luck more than skill. Grayling winced as the swords met and a metallic clang rang clear, impossibly loud in the tight, quiet passageway.

  Changing grip on her weapon, she forced the guard's blade up, over their heads. Seeing the man begin to recover his wits, she jabbed a knee hard into his groin. Air exploded from his lungs, and her face was showered in the man's spittle. He bent low, allowing Grayling to smash her forehead into his nose. She heard the crack over the guard's moan of pain as he tried to draw breath. With one arm, Grayling pushed him back against the wall and rammed her sword into his stomach. He twitched as the weapon entered him, and Grayling clamped a hand over his mouth as she slowly laid him on the floor.

  She looked up at Lucius, who was casting anxious glances behind them.

  "Did that betray our entry?" she asked.

  "I can't hear anything," he said after a moment. "What about within?"

  Placing her ear to the door, Grayling concentrated, trying to pick up the slightest noise. There was nothing.

  She tried the door handle, and found it was locked.

  "You sure this is the right room?" she asked. "Wouldn't put it beyond our man to use a decoy."

  Lucius shook his head. "I thought about that. De Lille is paranoid, but everything we've seen here tonight suggests he likes his luxury. It's the largest room in this area. I can't see him at ease anywhere else."