The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 25.2

He crouched beneath the grate of a storm drain, drips of muddy water from an unexpected rain falling into his hair. Above him, blocking out the sky above the grate, was the private residence of Wadleg Orban, Sheriff of Oridos.

There will be a key, Kantaris had told him, though it may not look like one. A key that unlocks a door that will unlock all of this.

All of this. All of what, Thijis had wanted to ask? All of it for you, or all of it for me? The old man's motives did not appear to include Irik Thijis, which begged the question of why Irik Thijis was helping him. There was nothing in it for him, anymore, nothing except getting himself hurt or killed—again. So why do any of this? It was a question he'd asked himself almost hourly since his flight off of the Horn. Or even before, if he was honest.

Because he had to, came the answer, as it always did. Because what else would he do? Because Irik Thijis did not call off the pursuit, even—even when the trail is cold and perilous. He smiled. A line from an old Black Hunter pulp.

"How ironical," he said, sick of the dank, foul air of the sewers. He missed his hat. He missed the custom hand-cannon he'd lost to Tolvaj's thugs more. The thing Kantaris had given him to replace it was a dense mass on his right thigh, strapped into a leather and brass holster with all the subtlety of a suit of armor.

Something is happening, and it's happening now, the old man had said, handing him the weapon. You'll need more than some back-alley special. Thijis had bridled at the insult to his taste in firearms, but then Kantaris had showed him what the weapon could do. Caerans had appeared silently to clean up the remains of the life-sized marble statue the Black Hunter had casually demolished by way of a demonstration, and Thijis had accepted the sidearm without further comment.

He thought momentarily about lighting another cigarette, but knew he would just be wasting time. Everything in him wanted to procrastinate. There was something ominous about this day. No shit. Because centuries' old mystical powers and almost dying several times in a row isn't enough on its own to warrant calling this a bad fucking week.

Grimacing, he hauled himself up the greasy ladder, which was almost rotted through with rust and disuse. It was almost time.

The grate itself was supposed to lift off, but it clearly hadn't been opened in decades, which was obviously why it was useful, so he should hardly be surprised. Nonetheless, it would have been nice of the old bastard to have loaned him a pry bar.

He was becoming thoroughly soaked, and even more thoroughly impatient, by the time he budged it. He eased the heavy, blackened cover up above his head, only to almost drop it on himself when the scrape of a boot echoed out over the courtyard above.

After a slow count of thirty, he eased the grate up again, noting with relief that the boot in question was a good fifty yards away from him, and the guard it was attached to appeared to be facing the other direction. The courtyard was high-walled, and every scrape and ping and drip became an echo. A pair of gas lanterns lit the space poorly from the corners of the high wall.

One guard. Certainly not beyond his abilities. And Thijis was far from inexperienced with either fists or firearms. But there was a rather large and noticeable difference between protecting yourself against the odd, foreseeable back-alley scrape and infiltrating a walled manse by cold-cocking an unsuspecting man. Kantaris had encouraged him to be ruthless. Don't hesitate. These men are not police, not anymore. His meaning had been clear.

Nonetheless, Thijis had no intention of spilling any more blood than was necessary. Except for Tolvaj. He could stand to lose a pint or two.

Clenching his teeth, he eased the grate onto the cobblestones of the courtyard, just enough that he could slip out. He felt his arms straining. There was no real stealth as he climbed the last few rungs of the ladder. He came out of the sewer more like a lumbering forge-hand than a shadow, his boots ringing and stamping on the rungs and then the cobbles, his throat tight with certain anticipation that the man near the house would turn any moment and make a hole in him.

He did turn, eventually, when Thijis had just gotten within arms' reach, when the sound of his approach was too loud to be covered up by the ambient sounds of the city at night, which creeped over even these private walls like a sickness.

He was a boy, of course, not yet twenty if he was a day. His gasp was sudden and shockingly loud, a harsh, sucking sound in the echo chamber of the square courtyard. Irik slapped a hand over his mouth and stuck the muzzle of the gun Kantaris had given him into the boy's ribs. He hesitated, then, only bringing down the heavy stock of the strange cannon onto the boy's head when his arm began creeping for the knife sheathed at his belt.

"Fuck," Thijis whispered. He didn't know if he addressed himself or the night.

The back of the house was a sort of colonnade, with multiple doors leading out into the courtyard, as if it had originally been designed as an enclosed garden. A dozen slender columns supported narrow arches, the pale stone carved by a master's hand. After dragging the unfortunate boy into the shadows of the colonnade, where he would be out of the glare of the gas lamps that lit the courtyard, Thijis tried the nearest door handle, a scroll of tarnished silver.

The door hardware looked delicate at first glance, but a soft jibble revealed that it was all too solid, and the door itself was solid oak, as if in deliberate contrast to the environment: the place begged for mullioned glass, and topiaries, and a fountain. The oak and cobbles seemed out of place, jammed in, a crude modern intrusion into an elegant space from a more civilized time.

He'd lost his lockpicks to Tolvaj's twin thugs, but the Hunter had given him something else. Slipping it out of his jacket pocket, Thijis glanced skeptically at the slim shard of bronze. The key, as Kantaris referred to it—a key to open a door to find another key—had the lines of an instrument designed either for surgery or torture. A sort of faceted needle, of heavy gauge, with a small weighted handle that fit in the palm, the business end bore a rather benign looking orb in place of the expected hook or blade. Set in a fitted brass cup and bezel at the end of the shaft was a tiny sphere of elekstone, the amber crystal glimmering faintly in the warm gaslight.

Slipping it into the keyhole, Thijis felt the elekstone make contact with the lock's inner workings. A barely detectable crackling sensation, like static discharge, and then he was turning the handle and slipping inside the darkened mansion, trying not to breathe.

The darkness inside was almost complete; Kantaris had been right. The master was not at home. Which somehow didn't make him feel any safer. He waited a moment to let his eyes adjust. Then, slipping the strange lockpick back into his coat, he walked carefully toward the only source of illumination he could see: a faint glow coming from beneath a doorway deeper inside the house.

He was glad to feel his shoes on deep carpet, which made it much easier to approach the inner door quietly. He squatted briefly to see if he could see anything in the gap between the door bottom and the floor, but it was too narrow. There was no sound from the other side. After a moment's hesitation, he rose and opened the door.

Thijis was in the middle of trying to decide whether it had been incompetence on his part or simple bad luck that had resulted in him interrupting three heavily armed men in the midst of their supper when a fourth entered the room, mid-sentence, his low-class cockney voice ringing out like a bell in the close silence. The new arrival was the first to notice Thijis, whose right hand had found the stock of the hand cannon entirely of its own volition.

"Fucking hell," said the guard, dropping a half-opened tin of beans onto the floor with a heavy thud.

Thijis had time to smile nervously. Then everything happened at once.

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