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In a way, he was almost glad to be caught. Not glad enough to stop and let Lily Serrana kill him, but he certainly wasn’t sorry to have been stopped from killing Edwin. Now he would never have to know if he could have. He might have been able to if he had shoved in the knife instantly. But then he’d stood there, with the pillow in his other hand to smother the boy’s cries if he woke up, and all he could think about was his own son, asleep in their little apartment in Shieldworten Street.
He was angry at himself for accepting the assignment, and he was angry at Baron Broderick for giving it to him. There was no excuse for this sort of thing. It violated every rule of the game. He might have to seriously reevaluate his relationship with his employer after this. But first, of course, he had to escape.
Had Lily recognized him? Had Princess Elwyn? What about all those people up in the Palm Court? He’d been wearing his mask as he sprinted through, but there had been hundreds of guests, and at least one of them must have had enough of a glimpse to know who he was. This might be very bad, if his name were associated with a plot to kill the young king. That was treason, even if you had been ordered to do it by the man who was going to be the next king sooner or later.
Slipping into the shadows, he inched along between the water tanks, back against the cold, perspiring metal. Off to his right, the big central pump whirred and clanked, and a dense fog blotted out the safety lanterns overhead. He knew where he was going by touch, though. The one thing he had going for him was that he knew every inch of this castle, and the Immani woman didn’t.
He waited for several minutes, knife at the ready, but she didn’t come around the corner. Had she given up? There was no point in waiting here all night. He had to get back to Broderick and let him know what had happened. Moving lightly through the puddles, he jogged to the end of the corridor, and turned right toward the nearest stairwell.
And there she was, waiting for him ten yards away. He was so surprised he stumbled, and that saved his life, as her arrow flashed past and went skipping and sparking down the flagstones. He righted himself and made it through the door before she could nock another shaft. Holy Finster, she was a lot better than he’d expected.
“Courtesan, my ass!” he thought bitterly. She was clearly some sort of spy, exactly as he had suspected. Probably trained in all sorts of dark arts by the infamous Legate Faustinus. Earstien only knew what sort of sinister weapons she might have.
He ran up the stairs, twisting around and around until his chest burned and his legs felt like lead, and he honestly thought he was going to puke from dizziness. But he couldn’t stop. He could still hear her, running along behind him. Dammit all. Was that woman indestructible?
A decent girl, like Gwen, would have stopped a long time ago, saying, “Oh, goodness, I feel faint,” or something like that. But this girl—this girl was like some kind of demon from the Void.
He tried one door and found it locked. He found a second and nearly bowled over a huge party of housemaids with stacks of bedsheets. Back into the stairway, and he kept going up. Up, and up, and up, until his eyes throbbed, and lights flashed in his vision. No, wait. That was a window. There was lightning now, leaping from cloud to cloud. Bad night for a garden party. Not that it mattered to him.
One final door, and this one opened reluctantly, the hinges scraping and squealing. A burst of cool air hit his face, and in a quick flash of distant lightning, he saw that he had reached the roof. Rising high above him, glowing from within, was the giant glass dome. Off to his right, the roof broke up into clusters of dormer windows and towering chimneys. To his left was more of the same.
There were four ways down from where he stood: first, he could go back the way he had come; second, he could try his luck over that precipitous maze of angled roofs and chimney pots; third, he could jump right off the edge and end it all. And the fourth option....
Lily burst from the door, bow in hand.
“Stop right there!” she cried.
Lightning flashed again, and a few drops of rain splattered into his eyes.
She was standing right in front of the stairs, so that option was off the table. And those dormers looked none too sturdy. As for jumping to his death, he’d never been one to give up, even in the face of terrible odds. So he took the fourth option. He grabbed one of the steel crossbars that supported the glass of the dome, hoisted himself up, and began to climb.
***
SHE HAD A CLEAR SHOT at him; she could have hit him easily, even though she’d never been an especially good archer. But she stood there, jaw sagging in disbelief, as he scrambled up the glass dome, using the steel crossbars like a ladder.
Looking left and right, Lily decided, as he presumably had, that it would be suicidal to try threading her way among those chimneys and over those steep slate roofs. There was really no way forward, no way to continue her pursuit, except to follow him.
As drops of rain pelted her face, she stepped up to the dome, feeling the cold glass and looking out into the vast warm, dry space beyond. She didn’t dare let her eyes drop, but she could almost sense the yawning chasm below.
“Don’t look down,” she told herself. “Don’t look down.” She had to do this, because she owed it to Elwyn. And to Moira, too, but mostly to Elwyn.
She slung the bow on her back and grasped the first crossbar. It was cold and slick, but there was just enough of a lip—maybe two inches—to give her a good grip. “Oh, dear gods protect me,” she murmured. Then she started to climb. Fingers straining, one hand over the other, a couple toes finding the crossbars and pushing herself up. At first, she was nearly vertical, and her legs, already exhausted from the run up the stairs, quivered at the effort. But in a way, the steep angle was good, because on the rare occasions she forgot herself and looked through the glass, all she could see was the other side of the dome.
Then the dome curved, slowly but surely, and she was crawling more than climbing. She kept telling herself not to look—to only keep her eyes focused at the figure of Sir William thirty feet ahead of her. But the rain started coming down in earnest, and one of her feet slipped. Her face smacked into a pane of glass. She opened her eyes in shock, and she was almost instantly paralyzed.
In all her life, she had never known she was really afraid of heights. Not until that moment. She looked straight down into the glow, through the branches of the giant palm trees, past the clustered balconies and windows, down and down and down to the ground floor, more than two hundred feet below. The party was still going on there, and the people looked so tiny. She clung to the crossbars with quivering fingers and wished with all her might that she was down there with them. Why had she come up here? What had she been thinking? One of the glass panels, slightly loose in its lead housing, shifted under her hand, and she whimpered.
Her first thought was to climb down the way she had come, but when she looked back past her feet, she couldn’t see the bottom anymore. She had gone too far over the curve of the dome, and it looked as if she was clinging to the edge of the world, with miles and miles of air below her.
“I’ve got to do this,” she thought. “If he can do it, then dammit, so can I.”
It didn’t get any easier after that, unfortunately. As the slope of the dome eased toward the horizontal, she found herself no longer crawling, but stepping uneasily from crossbar to crossbar. And all the while, that terrible void lay open below her. How strong was that glass? Would it hold her if she put all her weight on it?
“Oh, gods, let me get down from here.”
Then she was at the top, by a little ornamental cupola of brass, and she could see William only twenty feet ahead. “Stop!” she said, taking the bow off her back. “Stop and at least talk to me!”
He turned, balancing unsteadily on the crossbars, lit by the party lamps far below. “This is a bad place to have a conversation.”
And as if to prove his point, a massive bolt of lightning struck one of the towers. Sparks flew through the air, and Lily nearly lost her footing. Then the rain began pouring down in torrents, and William scrambled away.
The climb down was even worse. The rain cascaded over the steel and glass, making every step treacherous, and she had to go feet first, so she never knew if he might be waiting for her, right below, to slash her tendons and send her reeling to her death. Worst of all, she had to look down to see where to place her feet, and every damned time her eyes couldn’t help but fix on the floor of the Palm Court far below.
“If I fall through,” she thought bitterly, “I hope I land on Broderick. Or at least on Pellus.”
Lightning flashed again, and the wind picked up, and suddenly her legs, shaking from all the effort, simply gave out. She slipped, grabbed a bar, then slipped again as her fingers, too, betrayed her. She slid down the dome, knees and elbows bumping into almost every crossbar along the way.
Something soft broke her fall, and she rolled off it, moaning and rubbing her arms. Her head spun and she didn’t know if the lights she saw were from the lightning or from the impact. Then she heard someone else moan, and she looked over to see she had landed on top of Sir William.
Her bow, miraculously, was unbroken, and she drew on him from her knees, still not quite able to right herself. He didn’t look much better; he had his knife in his hand, but he was panting and wheezing with the effort of standing up.
“You were there to kill King Edwin, weren’t you?” she asked. “Who ordered you to do it?”
He didn’t answer. He looked at the knife in his hand with an expression of deepest loathing. “If you’re going to kill me,” he said. “Get on with it.”
“I can’t believe you would kill a child,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” he replied, his voice low and rasping. “It was a mistake. I’m a father myself, you know.”
“I do know. Sir Robert Tynsdale told me where you live: on Shieldworten Street above the forge of someone named Philip Rowley.”
“He...he told you that?”
“I’m guessing he’s told other people, too.”
He scowled. “Are you threatening my family?”
“No. I’m saying they’re in danger. But I’m guessing you already knew that.”
His shoulders sagged, and he tossed the knife away. “I know. You can kill me, but don’t touch them.”
Curious that an assassin should be so protective. But then again, Lily hadn’t had a real family since she was 12. The only people she truly cared about were Moira and Faustinus. And Elwyn, too, now. Would she die to protect them? Of course she would. She felt a grudging respect for William, at least until she recalled him standing over Edwin with a knife.
“Does your family know what it is that you do for Baron Broderick?”
“No.” His voice was barely audible over the rain and thunder. “I’ve always kept them out of it. Do you tell Senator Pellus everything you do?”
For a few moments, she considered shooting him, and then she realized there was a better option. They each had something the other needed. Slowly lowering her bow, she said, “What if we made a deal?”
“A deal?”
“Yes. What if you agreed to make sure your master doesn’t try to kill Edwin again, and I make sure Sir Robert and the Sigor people leave your family alone?”
He looked dubious. “And you can do that?”
“Well, I’m not sure. But let’s put it this way—if you hear that Baron Broderick is going to try to kill Edwin again, you let me know. Stop it or delay it if you can, but let me know. And if I hear that Tynsdale or the others are going after your family, then I’ll tell you, and I’ll do my best to stop them. Is that fair?”
He stepped over to the edge of the roof and looked down. For a few seconds, Lily honestly thought he would throw himself off.
But then he turned and nodded to her. “Fine. It’s a deal.”