Shadow of the Father (29 page)

“Not very well, if there are thieves all over the place.”

“My mother says Lady Dewanne wouldn’t let them do all the things they wanted to.”

Yilon peered out into the square again. It was completely empty.

“Like what?”

“Oh, they wanted to go back into the Warren. My mother says that was a disaster when Kishin did it, but they thought they could do it more effectively.”

“Kill all the mice,” Yilon muttered. “Probably wishes he could do them all personally, like Valix…” He stared into the emptiness of the plaza, replaying the conversation in his head. His fur prickled. “Does Maxon know about all the houses your family owns?”

“He might,” Dinah said. “Like I told you, he’s very… oh. But he can’t know…”

“We told him,” Yilon said, turning to her. “We told him that Sinch’s friend is at your house.”

They stared at each other for only another second before running out of the alcove. “What if they’re still waiting for us?” Dinah said.

“He’s after Sinch,” Yilon barked back. “Which way?”

“This is fastest.” The deserted streets echoed with their footsteps. Dinah took him past Market Street and up a steep hill. The sling bounced against her waist as they ran. “He wouldn’t go to that house first. He’d go to the big one.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“Can your friend take care of himself?”

Yilon again felt the tight embrace, Sinch clinging to him in the top room. “Normally, I’d say yes. But he was tired, and under a great deal of strain today. Does Colian fight?”

She panted laughter. “Only with fur tangles.”

He recognized the path she was taking several streets away. Any pleasure he might have in the familiarity he was acquiring with the town was lost in the urgency to make sure Sinch was safe. His paws were sore, but he didn’t let up. “Around here, right? Then right at the end of his block?”

“Yes.” He thought to leave her behind, but even as he sped up, she kept pace with him. They passed two startled foxes without pausing, but saw no other life until the familiar three-story house came into view.

Yilon reached the door first. He threw it open, leapt for the first stair, and pounded up. Colian came out onto the second floor landing just as Yilon ran by. “Good Gaia,” he said. “Did you forget something terribly important?”

By the time he finished talking, Yilon was most of the way to the third floor, covering two steps at a time. He shoved open the door to the bedroom and ran inside. Sinch’s smell was strong in the room, but not strong enough. Even before he reached the bed and pressed his paws to the still-warm sheets, he knew the mouse was gone.

Dinah had stopped at the second floor landing, talking to Colian there. Both foxes looked up as Yilon descended, reading the answer in his flattened ears before even beginning the question. He stood two steps above them. “Did anyone come in?” he asked Colian. The nurse shook his head. “No. I heard the door open, then heard Min talking.”

“Min! Where is he?” Yilon looked past Colian. “I don’t know, that’s what I was starting to tell you. By the time I had settled our patient enough that I could leave, Min had gone. I supposed your friend was still sleeping, but I confess I didn’t check.”

“So she’s still here?” Yilon gestured toward the second floor room. “Yes, and just a few moments ago, her fever appeared to break. At least, she is much cooler to the touch. I would not celebrate her recovery just yet, but I believe she will live to see another sunrise.”

“That’s only three hours,” Dinah pointed out. “Not much confidence.” Yilon sagged back against the wall. “If only she were awake,” he said, “she might know something about where Sinch is taking Maxon.” Colian’s ears perked. “Did I not mention? She woke up when her fever broke. She’s awake now.”

 
The fog of sleep lifted slowly from Sinch. He was aware of voices arguing outside, and for a moment thought his mother and sisters were arguing again. But the voices were lower-pitched, with longer nasal tones, and as he struggled awake, he recognized them as foxes. “Yilon?” he murmured.

He must have been tired. Usually he came awake quickly. He sat up in the bed and shook his head to try and clear it. The voices were getting closer, and now he heard one say, “Sir, you should not…” and the other respond, “Leave me alone! This is important business.”

Something about that second voice spurred him out of the bed, to throw the window open. He could hear claws on the stairs now, an irregular footstep. Someone limping up to the third floor.

He connected the limp to the voice, and then he was awake, scrabbling desperately at the window sill to pull himself up and through. Halfway through, he reached around to the other side to see if there were a ledge he could cling to, but nothing was within arm’s reach. No help for it, he thought. He pushed himself the rest of the way through, swung around, and pulled the shutters closed as best he could with one paw while hanging by the other.

“Where is he?” Maxon’s voice demanded. “I can smell him.” Sinch lowered himself all the way down, and, thank Rodenta, his hind paws felt brick below them. Softly, he let himself drop, just as the shutters rattled. The other fox, whom Sinch thought was Min, said, “We’re three floors up. You think he jumped to his death?”

“I’ll have to use the other one,” Maxon said, and then the shutters closed. Sinch heard the snick of the latch.

He wasn’t in Maxon’s clutches, but it was hard to see any other benefits of his situation. He saw that the ledge he was standing on ran all the way around the building, never coming closer than five feet from the adjacent one on this side, and that on was only two stories tall, so it would be at least a six or seven-foot drop to that roof. He could probably make the leap, but what then? If he followed the ledge around the front of the building, he’d be visible to the street, so he edged carefully around the back.

This side of the building, shielded from moonlight, was darker. No other method of escape suggested itself here, not even another building five feet away: the back of the building faced onto an open patio with an outhouse whose odor nearly overwhelmed a small garden. But the ledge circled the house, and there were no windows on this side to expose him, so he continued around, only once nearly losing his balance when a brick he grabbed shifted under his paw. Fortunately, the temperate air was mostly still, so there were no gusts of wind to be careful of.

As he approached the corner, he became aware of another scent. More accurately, it was the absence of a smell, as if the breeze had been generated out of nothing. His whiskers tingled. Down in the sewers, it had been hard to notice that the Shadows masked their scent. Up here, where few smells reached the third story, the curious sharpness of the masking agent was easier to notice. He crept to the corner and cautiously peered around.

The ledge, as far as he could see, was empty all the way to the street. On this side, though, the roof sloped downward at a sharper angle. Clearly, any room on this side of the third floor was no more than a storage area. The edge of the roof was a very climbable three feet above the ledge, should Sinch see a need to get up there. He saw no sign of any Shadow on this side of the building, even after careful perusal of the deepest dark patches, but that didn’t stop the tingling in his whiskers. When he looked across at the adjacent building on this side, which was three stories tall, he saw several dark spaces that could hide a Shadow.

His paw slid to his waist. The reassuring hardness of his knife fit nicely into his fingers. If there were a Shadow over there, it meant they were still watching Valix, no matter what their message to Sinch had been. That could mean she was still in danger. And it was still his fault.

Running footsteps echoed in the street, getting closer. Sinch perked his ear until he heard them getting closer, and then he craned his neck around the corner to see. The first fox was visible for only a fraction of a second, but he was sure it was Yilon. The one following him was the vixen. Was she chasing him? Hard to tell, but she was very close behind him. He heard the door swing open and then shut. Slowly, he worked one hind paw around the corner of the building.

A piece of the shadow across the way came hurtling toward him.

If he hadn’t caught the motion out of the corner of his eye, he might have fallen. The shape landed on the ledge, seeming to stick to the building, and a black-furred muzzle grinned at him. “Thought it was you.”

Sinch thought his heart would break through the brick it was pounding against. “Dagger?”

“Hah. I am The Frost That Bites The Tail. And it doesn’t matter how well you creep around walls. Whisper isn’t going to let you in. Fox lover.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Shh.” He pointed downward. “We were going to finish the job, as revenge. But there’s a noble in there I don’t recognize, and a vixen who’s a noble too. That’d be good retaliation for tonight’s raid, don’t you think?”

A chill spread through Sinch’s body. Frost was watching him keenly, and though the black mouse affected nonchalance as best one could while clinging to a brick wall three stories up, Sinch didn’t miss the right paw held ready near the waist. He wished he could reach for his knife, but that would be too obvious at this point, and he wasn’t certain enough of his balance. He knew a few things he could do without the knife, though he had never practiced fighting high above the ground. “Why do you have to retaliate?” he said. “If you retaliate, they’ll just retaliate back, won’t they?”

“You don’t know anything about it,” Frost said. “They expect us to fight back. What would you have us do, let them walk all over us?”

“If you’d just let them alone…”

“No fox is friend to no mouse,” Frost recited. “But you don’t believe that, do you? You’d get on your knees and suck their sheath if one of them asked, wouldn’t you? Bend over and let yourself be used, and ask for more? Anything with a red coat. Just like all the other little plant-eaters.”

Sinch opened his mouth to protest, but Frost went on. “You want us to stop fighting, to stop stirring up trouble. You don’t want any part of what we do. But without us, things would be worse. Without us, the Warren would be a charred pile of rubble and you and your friends would all be living in holes in the mountains, tithing all your goods to the blood-coats and living off scrub grass. We are the shadow they fear. We are the reason they respect mice.”

“You’re monsters,” Sinch said without thinking.

Frost’s eyes glittered. “Monsters, perhaps. At least we fight for our dignity, and for yours.”

“Rodenta teaches us to kill only as a last resort,” Sinch said desperately.

The other mouse grinned widely at that. “We have very different teachers.”

The motion of his arm was so fast, Sinch didn’t evade it completely. The black dagger caught his tunic, nicking the skin beneath. Jerking away, he nearly lost his balance on the ledge, scrabbling at the brick with his fingers for any sort of hold. The rough stone caught on his pads, helping him regain his balance as Frost lunged at him again. This time, Sinch was ready, balancing on his toes as he hurried away from the corner as fast as he dared.

Frost didn’t pursue him. Maybe gone was as good as dead, if Sinch left him alone. But as much as Sinch wanted to flee this nightmare, he couldn’t. He thought of Yilon inside the house, of the black dagger coming in through the window, and he steeled his resolve.

When he made it back to the corner, Frost was nowhere on the third story ledge. Sinch crouched as low as he could, almost lying down so that he could lower his head to look down to the second story. A flash of motion swept past his eye, and he felt a sting in his ear. He jerked his head back up, clinging to the rough stone.

So Frost was on the second story, getting into position outside the window where Yilon was. What now? He thought back to his training. What would your opponent expect you to do? Do the opposite. As if it were that easy. The only thing he could imagine Frost expecting him to do was run away. But if not, then what? He was clearly prepared for Sinch to drop down and attack him. But what if… what if…

Sinch retreated along the ledge, looking for the loose piece of brick. He found it and worked it loose, then crept carefully back until he was at the corner again, lying flat on the ledge. He listened carefully, but couldn’t hear any activity from below. What he did hear was Yilon’s voice: “How did you and Sinch find yourselves among the Shadows?”

Hearing Yilon flooded Sinch with panic. That meant he was near the window, and within range of Frost. If the window on that side was where he remembered it, just opposite the third floor room, and if Frost was somewhere near it, even now lifting his black dagger…

He swung his arm down and let the brick fly, in an arc parallel to the wall of the building. He heard a soft thud and then a scrabbling against brick. Quickly, he looked down and saw Frost standing dazed on the second-floor ledge, just regaining his balance. Sinch scampered as quickly as he could along the ledge on his level until he judged he was past Frost, then swung down.

He seemed to fall through air for an eternity. He spent most of it trying not to think about how far down the ground was. His hind paws found the ledge; his body automatically pressed forward against the wall until his weight was centered over brick and not empty air. It only took two or three seconds for him to turn his head toward Frost, but that was enough time for the black mouse to swing his knife, catching Sinch in a long gash on his unprotected right arm.