Thief's Covenant (A Widdershins Adventure) (11 page)

NOW
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In a rattling, bumping, shuddering, jostling carriage on the roads beyond Davillon, an elderly and normally distinguished voice complained for the umpteenth time, “Tell me again, Maurice, exactly what they've gotten me into.”

Maurice—Brother Maurice, to be proper about it—smiled broadly. He leaned back in his insufficiently padded seat, his blond-tonsured head bobbing with the rocking of the heavy coach, and folded his hands inside the brown sleeves of his robe.

“Nothing at all, Your Eminence. There's absolutely nothing of any importance regarding your visit to Davillon. This is all just an elaborate scheme of the Church to force you into weeks of uncomfortable, rear-bruising travel in this abominable contraption, all for the amusement of your superiors and subordinates alike.”

“Ah,” the older passenger said. “Just as I suspected. Then why have you rebelled against this great Church conspiracy to inform me of it?”

“Well, after all, Your Eminence, I'm suffering too.”

“The fickleness of youth,” the high official lamented sadly. “Why, I remember the days when suffering for one's faith was considered noble.”

“I believe that I'm sufficiently noble already, Your Eminence. I fear that if I spend too many more days with my backside being pounded into pulp by this carriage I shall be more noble than the king himself, and then I shall have to be executed for treason against the crown.”

“I'm sure the Church will protect you, Maurice. You must have done
something
for her over the years.”

The young monk of the Order of Saint Bertrand, dedicated entirely to attending the needs of High Church officials, could only laugh. The other man chuckled softly in turn and resumed gazing at the tree-bedecked countryside. He couldn't see much of it through the window of the ornate carriage that was, as Maurice complained, bruising its inhabitants to within an inch of their lives. Traveling in luxury, indeed!

William de Laurent, archbishop of Chevareaux, was getting on in years, despite his every effort to intimidate those years into keeping their distance. His hair was thin and gray, his face marred by more than its share of crevices and chasms, but his grip was strong, his gaze and his mind both sharp. His black robes of office draped him in a flowing aura, and the silver-forged Eternal Eye, supreme symbol of the High Church representing all 147 gods of the Hallowed Pact, hung about his neck. His shepherd's-crook staff of office leaned beside him.

He grimaced sourly as his limited view of the countryside was blocked by one of the outriders and began instead to contemplate his destination. The official purpose of his visit was a tour of Davillon, an inspection to identify any issues that needed correcting before a new bishop could be appointed, and to best determine which of the various candidates was most appropriate. That alone would have proved tedious enough; William looked ahead to the months of interaction with the city's aristocracy with, if not actual dread, then at least dread's distant cousin. The archbishop was a kindly old man, but he did not suffer fools—gladly or otherwise—and the nobility of Galice, he often felt, consisted of nothing but.

Essential a duty as it might be, though, it was also merely an excuse, a curtain behind which the Church might hide the true purpose of his visit.

The gods of the Pact smiled on their own, and the most faithful of Galice benefited from their divine influence. Oh, nothing the common man would recognize as “magic,” none of the ancient sorceries of myth or fairy tale. But coincidence often placed them in the vicinity of momentous events. Fortune smiled upon them and frowned mightily upon those who opposed them. And sometimes, when the moon and the stars and the winds were right, they received warnings: dreams and omens, never clear but always urgent.

And William de Laurent had sensed…something. Something stirring in the dark, while the world slumbered in blissful ignorance. Something in Davillon.

William de Laurent unconsciously clenched his fists, stared out the window at the passing scenery, and prayed.

“I'm tellin' you, she came this way!” The pockmarked fellow's voice was nasal, atonal, nearly as ugly as the face from which it emerged. The fact that his nose had recently been broken, and was likely to heal as crooked as a peg-legged usurer, probably had something to do with it.

“Sure.” The other man, with the scar and the scraggly beard, idly (but
very
carefully) scratched at a bug bite on his neck with the edge of a curved blade. “She's just hiding behind the rats.” He kicked a chunk of refuse, watched it bounce off the alleyway's nearest wall. It left a cluster of roaches where it hit, all of which swiftly darted off into the shadows.

“Damn it, she was here!”

Scarface shook his head. “You let me know what Brock says when you tell him we lost her.”

“Me?! Why do I—?”

“Because you're the one who lost her.”

“I didn't lose her!” The first thug scowled. “Look, she could still be here, right now. There's doorways—”

“Shallow. You see anyone hiding in ‘em?”

“There's windows—”

“Boarded up.”

“What about…?” Pockmark gestured over and behind them. “Those steps?”

“Those rickety things?” They both turned, looking upward. “We'd have heard something if she'd been climbing those—”

And then they
did
hear something, all right: A few faint shrieks as bolts and wood separated, followed by a deafening clatter as the entire staircase broke away from the structure's walls. Boards and nails came crashing down from on high like a god's abandoned construction project, and Brock's two associates had just enough time to dread the pain that was coming their way before they found themselves bruised, battered, and buried.

Widdershins peered over the lip of the building, blinking the dust from her eyes, chin leaning prettily on one fist. In the other, she clasped the rapier that had, with Olgun's assistance, served right nicely as a prybar to loosen the bolts of the ramshackle staircase. “Got ‘em!” she crowed.

Then, her grin fading, “Well, no, I couldn't have collapsed the stairs without you. So, sure, I guess
we
got them, but…”

Another pause. “Yes, I
know
I couldn't have made the climb without them hearing me without your help either! What's your—? What? No, it
wasn't
‘you,' it was
we.
I was the one—
Oooh!”
Widdershins literally threw her hands in the air—managing through sheer luck to avoid sending her sword hurtling over the precipice—and stalked away from the edge. “You are
such
a glory hog! Just because I couldn't have done it without you does
not
mean you get the credit! What? I don't care! You're a god;
you
make it make sense!”

With astounding speed, she made her way down the building's other side (despite the lack of anything resembling stairs) and out into the street, still muttering the entire way. But even as her mouth continued the argument, such as it was, her mind was already moving on to other concerns. Concerns like “If I hadn't spotted them, that could have gone a lot worse for me.”

It was getting near time for Widdershins to make a few uncomfortable decisions.

The days had slid past as though someone had greased them, blurring one into the next as the archbishop's arrival drew nigh. Streets, alleys, and courtyards—some of which had lain beneath such thick layers of refuse that nobody of the current generation had ever seen the cobblestones—were swept out and scrubbed clean, the better to glint with pristine dishonesty as de Laurent rode past. The homeless and destitute who normally dwelt along these lanes were encouraged to move on. A number were arrested “on suspicion,” to be kept under lock and key—and out of sight—until the city gates clanged shut behind the departing backside of William de Laurent and his entourage, many weeks hence. Banners of House crests, guild icons, and a multitude of holy symbols dangled from walls and windows, or even bridged the gaps between buildings. Between the sundry colors spread throughout the streets and the untidy heaps of trash waiting to be carted away, Davillon was starting to resemble the playroom of a very large and very spoiled child.

Through it all crept Widdershins, her mind just as focused on the day of His Eminence's arrival, though for entirely different reasons. She performed a few small jobs in the interim, nothing spectacular, nothing to draw attention. The City Guard was on high alert; Lisette was looking for any excuse to have her drawn and quartered. (Pockmark and Scarface, as she'd thought of them since that day in the Flippant Witch, had only been the latest Finders she'd had to duck—though she hadn't felt the need to drop part of a building on any of the others.) It was, frankly, all she could do to gather sufficient funds to keep the damn guild off her back.

And off her friends'.

Despite her relatively light schedule, Widdershins hadn't found the time, in the week since the fight with Brock, to go back and visit Genevieve, to make sure she was all right.

No, that wasn't true. She'd not found the time because she hadn't looked. A part of her feared to go back, and it had taken her this long—and the recent encounter with Brock's cronies—to talk herself into it.

The crowds were heavy as always, the ambient sound thick enough to ladle into bowls and serve as a soup course, but Widdershins slipped gracefully through the temporary cracks in the wall of humanity. Making her way again through the colorful flag- and banner-strewn marketplace, which was slowly but surely beginning to resemble the leavings of a rainbow with digestive upset, she found herself once more on the steps of the Flippant Witch.

She'd awakened at the ungodly hour of noon, so the tavern wasn't open for patrons. On the other hand, she knew that Genevieve typically arrived early, to ensure that the place was suitable for human habitation when the doors opened for the ravening hordes of drunks and drunks-to-be.

On yet a third hand (she was starting to feel vaguely like an octopus), the fact that Genevieve was probably here didn't mean a blessed thing. Even assuming she wasn't deliberately avoiding Widdershins, she might well ignore
any
knocking at the door before business hours. Doubtless every day saw a few drunkards convinced that they were worthy of special consideration.