It didn’t help that she’d had two stale rolls and a finger’s length of dried fish for food in the last two days.
She trudged down the pathway to a servants’ entrance where a man and woman were talking. She didn’t look at either of them, just moved forward like she’d rather be doing something else, shifted by the man and in through the doorway.
“Hey!” the man said, which was a bad sign. He shouldn’t have noticed her at all. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Need my pan,” she said, and shrugged. She trundled into the shadows of the house and the man went back to his conversation. The hardest part was done. Once she’d passed into the space that the brotherhood commanded, the assumption would be that she belonged there. She made her steps slow and not particularly stealthy. Thieves were quick and quiet. She wasn’t a thief. She was just trying to get back her pan from the girl who’d borrowed it. It was only because she was low and small and unimportant that she walked quietly but with purpose, as though she knew where she was going and required neither help nor permission. She wasn’t trying to hide, just not to give offense. Inoffensive was, as far as Sammish saw it, another word for invisible.
She knew in general terms what she was looking for. The pale woman, her scarred chief servant, the temple they served, and the secure rooms—a pit, a jail, a barred room—where the boy prisoner might be held. But she wasn’t searching. She was just going to get her pan back, and it was always just a bit ahead and down another turn or two. She knew the way, even if the understanding changed with each corner and hallway. Sammish, bored and a little put upon over her panic, made her way through the brotherhood, committing every bit of it to memory and waiting for something interesting to catch her sharp and secret attention.
The Hansch girl came soon after, as if blown by the first gusts of storm. Ullin pointed her out as soon as she came around the corner, but he didn’t need to. Her cloak had its hood up to hide her face, and she walked with a bad actor’s version of casual ease. If she’d been on a pull, she’d have been caught by the guard before she’d had a chance to do anything. Alys imagined herself walking down the street toward her, killing her there before anyone could stop her. In her imagination, she felt the club come down on the girl’s skull, hard and soft at once. Instead, she bent down and pretended to be working something free of her boots as the girl went to the same low point in the wall that her lover had crossed. She actually stopped there, glancing up and down the street before she hoisted herself over.
“Not the smartest thing, is she?” Ullin said. “Taking her out before she can breed will be doing the world a favor.”
“How long do we wait?” Alys said, and then felt stupid for asking. It was something she should have known already. Darro would have.
Ullin shrugged. “The magistrates are going to take all day. They’ve got the place to themselves, more or less. But true love gets its skirts up quick, and I’d rather catch them distracted.”
“So, now?” Alys said. She didn’t feel right. Usually she could imagine Darro and then mimic him, but she felt bright and tense and nauseated. She couldn’t imagine her brother ever skating the edge of fear like this. Ullin rested his hand on the pommel of his blade. His eyes were as bright as a drunkard’s.
“Now,” he said.
Alys watched the street one direction, Ullin the other. When both looked clear, they stepped out of their niche, made their way across the street, and swung over the wall. Not running, but moving quick and smooth. Purpose didn’t draw eyes the way thrashing did.
The far side of the wall was a kitchen garden. Herb beds stood bare and empty, ready for planting. A black iron stove and a clay oven stood at the wall. Alys could hardly imagine the luxury of cooking in your own courtyard. Longhill’s relationship with fire would never have allowed it.
Ullin passed over to a red lacquered door that opened under his hand. He drew his sword. It was a little shorter than his forearm, and had no adornments. It looked brutal. She hefted her club. Ullin passed inside, and she followed.
The hallway within was stuccoed the warm yellow of summer sunlight made sullen by the low, angry sky. They moved down it quietly. The floor was smooth stone, and Alys rolled her feet heel to toe to keep her steps from tapping. She was sick with the fear of a servant opening a door or coming out in front of them, but the house was silent. It made sense. The disgraced son of the family had chosen this moment for his tryst because the place would be empty. The same things that covered his transgression would cover theirs.
The hall reached two sets of blue doors and a thin stairway leading up to what Alys assumed were the household’s family rooms. As Ullin put his hand to the nearer of the doors, gently lifting its latch, Alys saw something on the stairs. A smudge of dirt hardly longer than her thumb, but fresh and the same rich soil as the garden. For a moment, she hesitated. If Ullin led them the wrong way, they might run out of time. They’d have to try again another day. It wouldn’t even be her fault. The idea of leaving with the deed undone was almost worth having to do it all again. But only almost.
She put a hand on Ullin’s shoulder, and when he glanced back, she pointed up. He nodded, and carefully, they ascended.
She really did want her pan. That it didn’t exist, had never existed, didn’t matter. It was hers, and she had need of it, and she wanted it back. If anyone stopped her now, she wouldn’t even be lying. Magic knives and foreign wizards and stolen boys weren’t any business of hers. Just her pan.
Behind that, Sammish’s fear was starting to fade. She was in her element now, dull as dust and twice as common. In her mind, the brotherhood was coming together corridor by corridor, room by room, window by courtyard by stair. Here was a sculpture in marble of a chained god whose name she didn’t know. Here was a shuttered window that looked down over the street, its glass fogged by time and wear. Here was a door with a complex brass lock and a stool built into the wall at its side. Landmarks. She held the map in her mind, and drew it there.
And it was in that map that she began noticing something odd. Curved halls and straight but without doorways between them. They almost reminded her of the way the streets of Longhill had been built to tame the wind. She imagined it all had some religious significance. The part of her that wanted her pan back didn’t particularly care, but her secret self pricked up its ears and led her deeper in. She’d heard of temples built this way—open to the air, but also not.
The walls there were rosewood with lanterns that looked like tin and glass but were probably silver and crystal. Voices carried from behind her, but only in talk. Not alarm.
She made another turn and came into a wide, round room. Even if the altar stone hadn’t been there, she would have known it for a temple. Tapestries hung along the wall with images worked into them. Some seemed to be weird, near-human forms. Others were more like the drawings the university lecturers drew when they were talking about the relationships between numbers and shapes and music and stars. The floor was wood inlaid with curves of white stone that made interlocking circles and ellipses, and where the lines met, lanterns burned. She half expected to find a god sitting in the shadows and playing dice.
Instead, she found the boy.