If not for the furtive glances at the heavily armed Ustars patrolling the village, the citizens could almost have been hurrying to beat the coming snowfall. But Roark von Graf knew better. The shoulders hunched as if awaiting the fall of an Ustari ax. The skirts clutched just so to muffle the jingling of the coins and avoid drawing the patrols’ attention. The silence, that cursed silence, which filled the streets. All were dead giveaways to Roark’s sharp eyes. These cheerful, friendly mountain folk didn’t fear snow—they were bred for cold nights and snow-filled days—they feared the fist of a merciless tyrant.
Roark sunk back into the shadows of the narrow alleyway as a pack of Ustars tromped past, fanged halberds in hand, snake-jawed helms all facing forward. Thick woolen cloaks emblazoned with the Tyrant King’s winged serpent whipped along behind them, protection from the cold, and one more testament to the fact that they did not belong among Korvo’s hardy people.
With all the noise they were making, passing undetected was almost too easy. Roark listened to the clank of the patrol’s heavy armor get farther away, then slipped across the street into the alley behind the butcher’s. The cold mitigated the stench of the day’s refuse, but not by much. Feral cats and a mangy stray dog looked up from the entrails, regarding him warily as he passed. A battle-scarred tomcat laid back what was left of its ears and yowled a warning to stay away from the food.
A bad omen if the Lyuko travelers who came through every year could be believed.
“This was my city before it was yours, Tom,” Roark murmured to the territorial old grouch as he passed. “And it’ll be mine again after tonight. All of bloody Traisbin will be free, and you won’t even have to thank me.”
The stench of rotting meat faded behind him as he followed the alley to its end. From there, a sharp left took him behind the motley collection of businesses that lined the street. No glow lit the windows of the dwellings over the businesses. No laughter, no children playing, no idle music or clinking of pots as food was prepared. Tonight was a night of silence, of fear, of anxious listening at the door for the sound of heavy Ustari boots thundering up the stairs.
Roark stopped in the shadows along the rear of a fabric store, searching the alleyway and darkened windows for spying eyes. No witnesses who could later relay his whereabouts to the Ustars.
As he ducked inside, a minor writ scrawled hastily at the bottom of the door caught his attention:
Shoulde any baring the wingd serpente of the Tyrante King cross this thresholde the shelfs of fabrik along the walls of this store shall colapse with a great combustione.
It was meant to sound the alarm if Ustars crossed the threshold, but it was done so badly that only someone displaying the winged serpent prominently would set it off, and then, the shelves which were supposed to collapse noisily—causing what the half-literate idiot who’d written it had probably meant to be a great commotion—would instead catch on fire, taking everyone inside the fabric store and half of the town with it.
Probably more of Albrecht’s work, that careless buffoon.
Shaking his head, Roark knelt inside and quickly rubbed the mess away with the palm of his hand. With his penknife, he carved a corrected writ into the wooden planks, adding a clause to make the carvings appear as nothing more than the scratches of a family pet begging to come inside. The moment he sealed it with the punctuation, the magick went into effect, the letters becoming incomprehensible canine scratches in the wood.
Before the Tyrant King came to power, only the nobles and wealthy in Traisbin could afford to send their children off to learn the magick of letters. Since then, only those children the tyrant handpicked to be groomed as mages for his armies were taught to read and write. The odds that a literate Ustar would happen upon the writ were nearly zero, but if one of the Tyrant King’s guards recognized it as writing, his forces would converge on the fabric shop and execute everyone inside, literate or not. Mages who didn’t bow to the Tyrant King often found themselves without a head to bow.
Potential village-destroying fire and bloody executions averted, Roark slid the penknife back into the hidden pocket inside his jerkin and eased the door closed.
As he walked through the empty store, Roark ran his fingers over the many textures of fabric. It was an old habit from childhood, back when he couldn’t believe so many different tactile sensations could exist in one place: smooth, coarse, knobbly, velvety, gauzy, woolen, ribbed, woven, embroidered, satiny. Korvo, being on one of the few roads that led through the mountains, was uniquely suited to sell goods from both sides of the continental divide—a fact his merchant-minded mother had once been quite proud of.
Behind the seller’s bench, Roark found a thick carpet pulled aside and a trapdoor leading down into the cellar. With a shake of his head, he banished the bittersweet memories and returned his mind to the matter at hand.
The stone stairs had worn uneven over the centuries, but he took them two and three at a time with the easy grace of a child of the mountains. The murmuring of voices carried into the dark corridor, ghostly whispers compared to the solid clunk of his boots on the stone. A line of jade light leaked from beneath a door up ahead.
Roark threw open the door, revealing the green-lit war room. Frightened gasps went up, hands grabbed frantically for maps, and chairs scraped away from the huge central table. Ancient tapestries flapped against the old stone walls, and the emerald burung fire burning in the sconces flickered before returning to full strength once more.
A dozen pairs of wide eyes settled on Roark’s lean form. Only a dozen. This was the T’verzet, the Rebel Council. The last unified resistance against the Tyrant King, Marek Konig Ustar. And they were cowering in a basement like kicked dogs.
“Graf, you nearly gave us a heart attack!” snapped Cambry, the elderly owner of the fabric store. The old man slammed the maps clutched in his hands back onto the table. “Shut that damn door!”
“Is it true?” Roark kicked the door closed behind him with a heel and strode farther into the room. “That he’s in Korvo? That he’s staying at the Graf Manor House—” He slammed his fist on the table, rattling the cloudy glass panes in the burung lamp at the center. “My manor house?”
Across the table, the scar-faced Albrecht snorted imperiously. “That house is as much yours as the Seat of Power is the Council of Ancients’.”
Roark raised an eyebrow and opened his mouth to point out Albrecht’s similar position in the von Herzog family’s former coastal holdings, but was cut off by an aged voice from his right.
“You walked the same streets as we did, Roark, you saw the patrols,” Morgana said, folding her gnarled, arthritic hands on the table before her. She twisted the opal ring on her thumb absently as she spoke; the fat gemstone was proof that she’d once sat on the true council, handing down decrees for the entirety of the country. “The caravan was supposed to travel on to Moseley, but they can’t get through the mountains with the blizzard coming in. They’re waiting here for the pass to clear.”
“This is it, then,” Roark said, excitement fluttering in his chest. “We couldn’t ask for a better chance. I know that manor better than anyone. All the back ways, all the ins and outs. I can get to him, kill him now before the weather clears and they move on—”