Thief's Covenant (A Widdershins Adventure) (5 page)

To those who dwelt outside the law, within the slums and poor districts, and among the population of the so-called Finders' Guild, she was neither Madeleine nor Adrienne. She was Widdershins, a simple street-thief like a thousand others. Tonight, Madeleine had done her part admirably; now it was Widdershins's turn to take over.

Two blocks south of Doumerge Estates, sandwiched between a large bakery and a winery, lay a narrow alleyway that was nigh invisible in the late hours. Filled with refuse from both establishments, emptied once a week by underpaid city workers, it was ignored by those few who noticed it at all.

At the moment, however, it boasted an abnormally large human population: that is, one. Madeleine edged her way down the alley, away from the boulevard. Knees bent, back pressed tightly against the winery, feet pushing against the opposite bricks, she passed above the reeking filth. Her gown lay in her lap, clasped tightly in her left arm; she wore, now, a bodysuit of supple black fabrics and leathers that had lain hidden beneath the forest-green velvet. At the end of the alleyway, she reached out, straining to grasp the pack she'd stashed earlier that evening. Though her entire weight shifted and she feared she'd dislodged herself from her precarious perch, her fingers brushed against the satchel. She quickly grabbed it and yanked it up.

Still without setting foot on the cobblestones, her nose wrinkled against the stench of refuse, she stuffed the gown roughly into the bag and removed a second, smaller bundle. This prize, carefully unwrapped, revealed deerskin gauntlets, hood, thin shoes of black leather, and a belt whose pouches and pockets contained, among other things, a candle stub, a one-handed tinderbox, a tiny hammer and chisel, and the finest set of skeleton keys and wire picks available in any market, black or otherwise. Finally, her tool of last resort: a rapier, blade blackened with carbon and ink, the basket-hilt removed so that the weapon could hang flat against her back.

The dark-colored sack in which her tools had been wrapped, she folded tightly and jammed through her belt. The larger pack—stuffed with the gown, jewelry, and everything else that identified Madeleine Valois—would remain ensconced at the end of the alley.

A few quick breaths to steady herself, and she reached over her head to grab the overhang. She tightened her fists and pulled her legs away from the far wall, lifting them smoothly up, her weight supported only by her hold on the roof. Her stomach muscles, though toned through years of practice, still screamed in agony as first her feet, then her knees, cleared the roof over her head and curled over. A final heave, arms straining, and she lay on her stomach at the edge of the winery's roof.

For a few minutes—more than a few, if truth be known—she simply lay, gasping as she regained her composure. She quirked her lips in annoyance at the question she felt from her divine passenger.

“Maybe, but this way was quicker,” she whispered.

Olgun's response was amused, and more than a little teasing.

“No, I did
not
do that just to prove I could!” she snapped at him.

Some emotions were more easily translated into words than others. The one he projected now was definitely the equivalent of, “Yeah, right.”

Grumbling, Widdershins rose to her feet—ignoring the twinges in her abdomen—and moved across the rooftops. A step to this roof, a leap to that, a quick scamper up a nearby wall…. Perhaps a quarter of an hour later, she settled on a building across a wide lane from the gates of the Doumerge Estates.

The boulevard was the border between two worlds. Behind, the square, squat buildings of the district's shops. They, like most of the city's newer construction, were of cheap stone or haphazardly painted wood, all business. Before her, a row of manors. Sloped roofs, ornate cornices and buttresses, fluted gutters and snarling gargoyles, all in marble or whitewashed stone, all old enough to have acquired an arrogance utterly independent of those who dwelt within. The straight lines and angles of poverty facing off against the graceful arches of wealth.

Widdershins had dwelt in both, and wasn't certain she was entirely comfortable in either. Crouching atop the flat roof, melding into the shadows, she settled in for what would surely be a long and boring wait.

Long
and
boring
, as it turned out, were ridiculously optimistic.
Endless
and
mind-numbing
would have proved more accurate. The hours lazily meandered by, and the impulsive thief found herself near to bursting with the strain of waiting. Finally, as the moon rowed her way across the sea of night, the manor finally began to excrete its guests in sporadic fits and spurts. The stars wheeled their courses across the nighttime firmament; bats and nightbirds flapped past overhead; cats fought in nearby alleys, hissing and spitting all the while; and time plodded toward morning.

Not long before dawn, when she felt she could take it no longer, the lanterns in the upper-story windows flickered and died, suggesting that Baron Weasel-face had finally retired to his burrow for badly needed (and blatantly ineffectual) beauty sleep. The downstairs lights continued to burn, no doubt for servants who, having stood and watched as rich people grew fat on fancy foods, were now compelled to clean up after the satin-wrapped and brocaded swine.

“Hsst!” she hissed, her throat vaguely hoarse from the yelling that had passed for conversation during the baron's party. “Olgun! Wake up!”

Her mind was filled with a sense of self-righteous—and vaguely drowsy—protest.

“Sure you weren't,” she needled at him. “You were just practicing snoring, so you'd be sure to get it right later on, yes?”

Olgun's response very strongly resembled an indignant snort.

“Whatever. It's time.”

She cocked her head in response to an unvoiced question.

“Of course I'd rather wait a bit longer,” she lied, actually fidgeting foot to foot. “But the night's not just old, it's getting arthritic. We
have
to go now.”

The faint scrabbling of loose shale shifting as she set foot on the roadway was the only sound of her swift and graceful descent. Had anyone been watching the wide boulevard in the faint light of the street lamps, he'd have seen nothing more than a quick wink of blackness, a wisp of shadow, no more alarming than a running tomcat and dismissed just as readily.

The polished stone wall surrounding the Doumerge property was near ten feet tall, and impressively smooth. No cracks or seams provided even the most infinitesimal handhold. A rope and grapple might have provided a solution, but Widdershins, who preferred to work light, carried no such thing.

She never needed one.

“Olgun?” she prodded, breaking into a dash as she neared the barrier. “Would you be so kind…?”

As she drew within a few feet of the wall, her boot came down on something that simply wasn't there, an invisible step or perhaps the interlaced fingers of unseen hands. With Olgun's boost, she cleared the wall entirely, tucking in tight to avoid the short but wicked spikes that topped it.

The shock upon landing was considerable, though she tumbled into a forward roll to absorb as much momentum as she could. Half kneeling in the baron's dew-coated grass, she gingerly tested both ankles, both knees; as often as she'd done this, she was convinced each time that she'd injured something. Only when each and every joint proved fully mobile and free of pain did she rise and take in her surroundings.

Large, flowering bushes of diverse hue decorated the property at random intervals that someone had probably thought were tasteful. A few trees grasped gently at the stars above, while sculptures and fountains of stone dotted the estate. Even in the dark, Widdershins could see two satyrs, a naked nymph, and a urinating cherub. The entire place emitted a sickly sweet scent, as though the combination of so many flowering plants and blossoms brought out the worst in each. No wonder Doumerge always appeared faintly ill.

It all just oozed excess. Widdershins felt her mouth curl in a faint sneer at what Baron Doumerge was—what she herself had almost become, a lifetime ago.

“Olgun?” she asked, her tone again little more than a breath. “Dogs?”

A pause, an answer.

“Ah. And do you think you should maybe do something about that?”

Self-satisfied gloating.

“You already did.” It wasn't a question.

Another affirmative.

Widdershins sighed. “I hope you didn't hurt them.”

Olgun sent a flash of horror running through her, so strong that she felt herself shudder.

“All right, I'm sorry!” she hissed. “I know you like dogs. I know you wouldn't hurt them! I wasn't thinking!”

The god sniffed haughtily.

“Look, I said I was sorry! Let's move on already, yes? We're running out of night.”

At an easy jog, flitting from shadow to shadow, Widdershins crossed the property. She passed, on the way, a large brown hunting hound wearing a spiked collar. The dog sniffed once in her direction, wrinkled its nose with a slight yelp, and ignored her.

One of these days
, she thought to herself,
I'm going to ask Olgun exactly what it is that he does to them—or what it is he makes me smell like to them!

And with no more difficulty than that, she was at the wall of the manor. Dropping to her belly, Widdershins wormed her way below the first-floor windows. It'd be embarrassing to come this far just to be discovered by some lovelorn servant staring out at the stars. Only when she'd reached a stretch of wall unbroken by glass did she return to her feet.

Each mortared spot between the bricks was a rung, the entire wall a ladder placed solely for her own convenience. In less time than it takes to tell, she was ten feet above the ground, sidling sideways toward the nearest darkened window.

She took a moment to curse the craftsmen's guilds for making glass so much cheaper in recent years—this would have been much simpler in the days of open panes or oilcloth-covered windows—before her questing fingers produced a thin length of wire from her pouch. She inserted it between the window and the pane with one hand, clinging to her perilous perch with the other. Within seconds, she felt resistance, heard the faint clack as the strip fetched up against the window latch. It required a few tries, but finally the tiny metal hook lifted from its eyelet and fell away with a tiny ping.

In a span of seconds, the wire was back in her pouch and Widdershins was inside the darkened room.

That was the good news. The bad was that she'd just come to the end of any real knowledge she possessed about the manor's layout, as she'd never found the opportunity to examine the second floor.

“Keep your eyes and ears—or whatever—open,” she told Olgun in her inaudible whisper.

After listening for a full minute, ensuring that her own heartbeat was the only sound in the room, she took the tinderbox from her pouch, along with a candle stub, and struck sparks until the wick caught. Keeping her back to the window, she quickly examined the small chamber.

Between the comfortably padded chair, the heavy mahogany writing desk liberally dusted with sundry scraps of parchment, and the overburdened bookcase that skulked dejectedly against the far wall, she knew this must be Doumerge's study. Moved by a sudden sense of idle curiosity that could just as easily have come from her or her empathic ally, the thief-turned-aristocrat-turned-thief leafed hurriedly through the nearest stack of writings. It contained little of any real interest: various calculations on the worth of this product or that market; some letters of identification, presumably for servants running errands in the baron's name; and a few attempts at romantic epic poetry so teeth-gratingly, mind-numbingly, soul-shrivelingly awful that it might have doubled as a form of interrogation. With a quiet “Bleah!” of disgust, Widdershins dropped the parchment back into place and moved to the door, as though afraid that the verses might leap off the page and pursue her screaming down the hall.

Her hand was on the latch when Olgun yelped a warning. Unable to repress a startled gasp, Widdershins fell back, instinct alone keeping her soundless as a snowfall as she snuffed the light of her candle and vanished, an insubstantial phantom, into the darkened study.

Muffled footsteps trod slowly down the hallway, pausing once for a brief instant by the study. Widdershins modulated her breathing, as motionless as the statues in the garden, until the footfalls resumed and slowly faded away.

“Thanks,” she whispered to her unseen guardian. “Though you didn't have to yell.”

Olgun's reply was more than a little perturbed.

“Yes, I
should
have been paying more attention!” she admitted, her voice rising slightly. “I made a mistake. It happens. I've already thanked you! What more do you—what? I did
so
mean it! All right, fine! See if I thank
you
again anytime soon!” Widdershins pressed her ear to the door, making absolutely certain this time. “Condescending creep,” she muttered as her gloved hands once more worked the catch. “Thinks he's so much better, just because he happens to be a god….”