Fresh, chilly air brushed Fiona’s cheeks, reminding her that she hadn’t been outside in three days. Sebastian and Holt were already heading down the shallow steps toward the colonnade, and she followed them, wishing she’d thought to have them bring her shoes. The stone was like sandpaper on her bare feet, rough and cold.
The pillars of the colonnade towered over her as she passed through their moonlight shadows, pale in the dim light and stippled with color from the tiny lights outlining their bases. It was hard to imagine them being made by human artisans, they were so big and bulged so oddly. She glanced back at the temple, which was dark and still. The fairy spires she’d barely had time to notice in their mad sprint for the doors looked more like spikes in a giant crown now, as if some creature had put his head down for a nap and might wake at any moment. She trotted a few steps to catch up with Sebastian. This was not the time for fanciful thoughts.
The steep ramp at the end of the colonnade was brightly lit by lamps on wrought iron posts twice as tall as Fiona, their blue glass turning the light ghostlike. Fiona wondered how they reached the Devices to repair or replace them. Her white linen clothes glowed in the lamplight, and Sebastian and Holt’s brown garb had a purplish tinge to it. Sebastian gestured, and they set off down the ramp.
Now that they weren’t racing against time, Fiona could appreciate the view of Haizea visible from the ramp, which followed the curve of the island’s shore. The city glittered like broken glass, colored shards strewn across the landscape, with the Kepa a silvery ribbon barely visible below. Movement still threaded along the wide streets across the river despite the hour, men and women carrying out their nocturnal business. How many of them intended crime, like they did? Probably anyone who did was skulking in the shadowed places and not strolling along the well-lit streets.
Where they were, streets opened off the ramp at intervals, and Sebastian took the third one, staying close to the side of the road. The buildings all looked the same, tall white structures rising to spires outlined by hundreds, thousands of light Devices. Blank façades rose a hundred feet in the air, windowless and unmarked except for the faint outlines of doors set flush into the walls. Fiona crept along after Sebastian, listening for the sound of anyone who might accost them. Their own footsteps—or, rather, Sebastian and Holt’s boots—echoed faintly off the white buildings.
Sebastian stopped abruptly, holding up a hand, and Fiona nearly piled into Holt’s lean back. They’d stopped at the corner of one of the buildings, and Fiona rested her hand on its smooth marble surface that gleamed blue in the light from the lamps. Faint streaks ran like cracks across it, though she couldn’t imagine anything more solid. Then she heard it—the distant sound of footsteps, quiet but unmistakable. Sebastian peered around the corner. He made a gesture; two guards. Fiona realized she was holding her breath and let it out slowly. The sound died away. Sebastian gestured again, and they moved forward, more slowly this time, around the corner and onto a new street.
“We have to be careful,” he whispered, unnecessarily as far as Fiona was concerned. “Heaven only knows how many of those guards are around. There’s nowhere to hide on these streets, have you noticed?”
“Nowhere to hide, no porticos, no public parks. And no one about except for us and the guards. It can’t be that late.”
“I suggest we leave the speculation for later,” Holt said. Sebastian nodded.
They had to dodge two more pairs of guards, one of which they only avoided by crouching low in a shadow barely big enough to fit all three of them. Fiona felt horribly exposed in her white clothes. Even in the shadows, she felt she stood out by a mile. But there were no shouts of “stop!” or cries of alarm. It was dreamlike, the kind of dream where you can will things to happen or not, and Fiona felt irrationally as if she were keeping the guards at bay simply through force of will. She made herself focus on the present. What was keeping them safe was sheer luck and, possibly, the guards’ belief that no one would dare breach the grounds of the Jaixante.
A few minutes later, Sebastian stopped at a building that looked the same as all the others. Its door was barely visible as a crack in the marble façade. “Holt?” Sebastian said.
Holt stepped up and laid his enormous hand flat against the door’s surface. Fiona turned around and scanned the street. Now would be the worst possible time for someone to appear, wanting to know what they were doing. She heard something scrape across the stone with a skree that set her teeth on edge and her nerves jangling. “Sorry,” Holt said, and there was another scrape, less shrill.
“So what is it they do to criminals in Veribold?” Sebastian said.
“Is that really something you want to know right now?”
“Surprisingly, it’s at the top of my mind.”
“Well, I’d rather not think about it, if you don’t mind.”
“So it’s not pleasant.”
“I can’t imagine criminal sentences ever are. But no, it’s not pleasant.”
Another scrape, a click, and then the sound of stone grinding against stone. “We’re in, sir,” Holt said.
The smell of woody incense filled the air. The interior of the foreign trade office was completely lightless except for what little came in through the door, and when Holt shut the door, even that was gone. “Wait,” Sebastian said, and a few seconds later there was a click and soft white light emerged from a small cubical Device in his left hand. He handed one to Fiona and another to Holt. “Stay by the door, just in case,” Sebastian told Holt.
Fiona turned her Device on and looked around. They were in some kind of reception area, its tall ceiling vanishing out of the range of the light. Large square cushions, purple and green, lay on the floor instead of chairs. Beautiful woven fabric depicting men and women dancing covered the walls, interrupted by a couple of doors and a hallway leading off into darkness. A five-foot-tall counter made an arc across one corner of the room. Fiona went to the tall counter, behind which were a basin-chair and a cabinet with three deep drawers. The cabinet was filled with blank printed forms and, in the bottom drawer, a box of colored ink in jars and a tray full of stamps in backwards Veriboldan script.
“This is as far as I got,” Sebastian said. He pointed off down the dark hallway. “The person who gave me the watch came out of the third door on the right, but I don’t know if that means anything. We need to find which of these offices belongs to Gizane.”
Fiona waded through the cushions and went down the hall. “No names, just titles,” she said. “What is Gizane?”
“I don’t know her title. She’s responsible for overseeing trade between Tremontane and Veribold.”
Fiona ran her fingers over the first name plaque she came to. The curly Veriboldan script was only lightly incised on the brass plate, making it even harder for her to read. CHIEF COMPTROLLER, she read, shook her head, and moved on. Her slowness was driving even her crazy, but this was still faster than searching every office one by one.
It was the last office on the left. MINISTER OF FOREIGN TRADE. “This one,” she told Sebastian, who’d been hovering over her shoulder. Sebastian tested the knob, then pushed the door open.
“Already open,” he said.
Sebastian and Fiona looked at each other. “That’s ominous,” Fiona said.
“No one knows we’re here,” Sebastian said. “No one knows what we’re after. She just doesn’t lock her door.”
“Gizane’s not in Haizea. Why would she leave her door open while she’s out of the country?”
“Let’s just see what we can find, all right? And worry about the rest later.”
Gizane’s office was surprisingly small—or maybe it wasn’t so surprising, if she spent most of her time elsewhere. Fiona had no doubt her personal quarters were far more luxurious. There was a mahogany desk, Tremontanan, not Veriboldan, and a padded rolling chair to match. Five cabinets stacked with books, scroll cases, and loose sheets of paper lined the wall opposite the desk. Framed artwork, mostly oils of Eskandelic landscapes, hung on every wall, like little windows on a distant world. The smell of incense was stronger here, and Fiona traced it to an ornate burner on the corner of the desk. She flipped it open and prodded the stick of incense. Cold. So no one had been in here for a while.
Sebastian eyed the cabinets with dismay. “We’re never going to find it,” he said.
“I doubt she keeps her blackmail materials in with her other paperwork,” Fiona said. “Didn’t you say she probably has a plan to expose your family if she turns up suspiciously dead? In order for that to work, she’d have to keep it separate from the rest of her files—she has five cabinets, for heaven’s sake, who’s going to work through all of those for the sake of carrying out a dead woman’s vengeance?”
“That’s true.” Sebastian removed one of the paintings from the wall. “Help me check these. It’s cliché, I know, but a safe in the wall…I prefer to think of it as ‘traditional.’”
Gizane, however, wasn’t traditional; there was nothing but wall behind all the paintings. “Now what?” Sebastian said.
“See if those cabinets are made to move. I’ll check the desk.” Fiona removed every drawer, carefully examining their undersides and tapping the bottoms for false panels. Nothing. “It might not be here,” she said.
“She told my parents she’d sent it to Veribold and not to bother trying to find it,” Sebastian said, sounding short of breath. He had both hands on one of the cabinets and was trying to shift it, with no results. “She might have been lying.”
“Let’s not give up yet. I meant, look for a button or lever or something that makes them move.”
“I did. There’s no sign that they’ve shifted position in the last twenty years.”
Fiona sat in the chair and regarded the desk. It stared back at her, smirking. The secret had to be there. Somewhere. There was a carved border all around the edge of the desk’s top, tiny apples and pears. Suppose one of them was a button? Too obvious, and too easy to accidentally press. But if there were a secret panel or button or something, it would be convenient to anyone sitting in the desk.
Fiona stretched her arms underneath again and closed her eyes, feeling for the anomaly. “You think you’re smarter than the rest of the world,” she murmured, “but you’re just a petty—blackmailer.” The fingers of her right hand brushed a rough spot. She pushed on it, heard a click, and the top of the desk popped open half an inch.
“Sweet heaven,” Sebastian breathed, and then he pulled the top open further. It only opened three inches, but it was enough for Fiona to reach inside. She pulled out a round, tightly fastened scroll case, its waxy leather clearly waterproof, then a flat portfolio like Sebastian’s.
“There’s more. A lot more,” she said, bringing out two more scroll cases and a folder tied with black ribbon.
“Let me look,” Sebastian said, holding out his hand. Fiona began handing things to him. There were five scroll cases in all, two portfolios, the ribbon-tied folder, and a fist-sized velvet sack that rattled when she lifted it.
“What should we do with the rest?” Fiona said.
“I hate leaving them,” said Sebastian, prying the tight cap off the first scroll case, “but I don’t feel obligated to find their owners and return them.”
“We could keep Gizane from blackmailing them further.”
“I don’t think her losing the material would matter. As far as her victims are concerned, she’d still have it. She could lie to them forever.” Sebastian shook the contents of the first scroll case into his hand, a sheaf of tightly rolled paper, and spread it out. “It’s not this one.”
Fiona opened the bag and shook some of its contents into her hand. They were round chips of white ceramic roughly twice the size of her thumbnail that made a sound like raindrops striking metal when they struck each other. Each tile had a strange symbol incised on one side in which ink or paint had pooled, purple or orange or red or green, colors that were dim in the low light. “I wonder what these are for,” she mused. She poured them back into the bag.
A loud thump came from the reception area, then the sounds of a scuffle. “Holt?” Sebastian called. There was a wordless grunt, then silence. Sebastian rushed out of the room. Fiona followed him, her hands full of scroll cases.
Holt had just lowered a still bundle to the ground. The man was dressed in black and his face except for the eyes was covered. His clothes were loose and tattered, though the tattering was unusually regular. Fiona thought they were made that way on purpose. A Jaixante guard.
“He did not anticipate my presence at the door,” Holt said. He didn’t sound the least bit winded. “What concerns me is that his partner was not with him. I cannot guess where the man might be.”
“Take everything,” Sebastian said, handing off a few of his burdens to Holt. “We’ll look at it later. We need to find a back way out of this place.”
Fiona stowed a scroll case and the rattling sack inside her shirt. One of the doors off the reception area turned out to be a hallway, headed away from the front door, and she followed Sebastian and Holt down the passage. It was gray and utilitarian, uncarpeted, smelled faintly of mildew, and its low ceiling sagged in places from water damage. It was hard to reconcile this stinking, depressing hall with the beauty of the Jaixante, though it did make the Veriboldans seem more human.
The hall dead-ended in a blank wall, or at least it looked like a blank wall to Fiona. Holt, however, went down on one knee and brought out his lock picks. When she looked closer, she could again see the outline of a door, and hinges painted gray to match the surrounding walls. Sebastian put a hand on hers and clicked off her light Device, then turned off his own. “No light when the door opens. Damn, but I wish there were windows. What is wrong with these people, that they don’t have windows?”
“They have windows, just not at ground level,” Fiona said, thinking of her cell.
“Even so. Veriboldans are strange. All right, maybe just the noble Veriboldans. I can’t wait to be home again.”
Fiona said nothing. Planning too far ahead when there might be guards waiting to snatch you seemed like asking for trouble. Or was it just that she no longer had a home to return to? She closed her eyes in the dimness made by Holt’s light, focused on the keyhole. Wrong time for those kinds of thoughts. Possibly there was never a right time.
The lock clicked. Holt turned off his light and Fiona shivered at the darkness that surrounded them. She could feel Sebastian standing near her, the body heat he gave off, and she knew where all the walls were; there was no need for nervousness. Then a slim line of pale light appeared, stretching to outline the door. “Careful,” Holt said, and pulled the door open all the way.
They stepped into an alley between buildings, featureless and blank like white canyons surrounding a dry riverbed of concrete. The half-moon rode higher in the sky, casting more faint shadows that were overcome by the blue light of the lanterns. “Do we leave now?” Fiona said.
“We go back to the Irantzen Temple and pretend we never left,” Sebastian said. “And then—”
A shrill whistle split the silent air, echoing off the walls until it sounded like a dozen screams. Down at the far end of the alley, a man in dark clothes that fluttered around him like malevolent moths ran at them, alternating blows on his whistle with shouts of “Intruders!”
“Run,” Sebastian said, and they sped away down the alley.