A Gathering Of Stones

5

Since she’d be a drain, not an asset, in this part of their plan, Trithil Esmoon stayed behind; she’d keep busy packing the gear and shifting it into Danny’s room and covering for them if the S’sulan, the Inn’s Host, or anyone else developed an unhandy curiosity. Felsrawg and Simms stepped onto Danny’s pertiliar version of a flying carpet and crouched uneasily behind him as it rose and hovered in the thick damp darkness inside the room; it swung round, hovered some more, then it glided forward, sliding through the balcony door with a hair’s clearance on both sides. Trithil pulled the door closed and barred it again as the mattress curved up and around, then darted for the island called the Henanolee Heart.

The rain battered at them, the sled danced and shivered, dropped with sickening jerks and surged up again as the wind bucked under it, snatched at it, sucked air from around it, under it. The darkness was smothering, no stars, no moon, no lights anywhere around them. Danny crouched over the console, flying by the numbers; he was uneasy about the uncertainties involved, but there was nothing else he could do. When the counters showed the readings he’d been watching for, he slowed the sled until it inched along, hardly moving. Still he saw nothing, only the lines of rain a handspan in front of him, faintly visible in the flickering lights of the console. Wary of snags he crept closer and closer to the Henanolee, peering into the darkness ahead of him, straining to see the walls and the towers. Finally he made out the thickening in the darkness he was expecting; he took the sled up a meter and slid across the top of the curtain wall.

He brushed against the side of one of the towers, a few of its bricks shimmering ghostlike at the edges of the glimmer from the console, eased around that tower, slid past another and took the sled down until it hovered an annlength above the grass in the Meditation Garden at the center of the Henanolee. After another handful of minutes inching along past trees and shrubs and less identifiable obstacles, he found what he’d been looking for, a small open hermitage in a group of willows. He nudged the sled inside and relaxed when he saw that the rain didn’t penetrate the thick vines growing up the lath walls; he wasn’t too sure how well the liftsled would operate if it were sodden, his Reshaped circuits and crystals swimming in rainwater. He lowered the sled to the flags, shut down all drain from the powersinks except for the trickle required to keep the console lit. He wanted to see their faces, to make sure they knew what his limitations were; reminders never hurt, no matter how well your co-workers knew the drill. “We’re shielded,” he said, “Don’t move more than five paces from me unless I tell you to.”

Felsrawg snorted.

On the other hand, worrying at things could be counterproductive. “All right, forget it. Let’s go.” He touched off the console lights, got to his feet and followed the two thieves as they moved quickly and surely through the darkness; he was impressed, more than impressed as he tried to imitate them but kept getting switched across the face by wet branches and stumbling over unseen rocks and roots.

Felsrawg and Simms waited for him by the door they’d chosen as the best way into the Heart itself. When he joined them under the stubby overhang that kept the rain off the top steps, Felsrawg thrust her left hand at him; the skry rings were glowing faintly. “Wards. The knots are here, here and here.” She pointed to places on the wall, one on each side of the door, one below it; as she moved her hands, the rings pulsed rhythmically. “Sloppy, Laz. Old stuff. Want me to shut them down?” She patted her belt pouch. “I’ve got some smothers I’ve used ten years now without a smell of trouble.”

Danny Blue read the knots; Felsrawg was right, the wards were old and ragged, fading even as they stood there. He could untie and reset them between one breath and the next; the trouble was, he couldn’t know how they were linked into the witchtraps inside, if they were. “Simms? Any complications?”

“No.”

Terse, Danny thought. Hmm. Smothers are neutral things. Why not. “All right, Felsa, go ahead.”

She ran her hand carefully over the bricks and the stone threshold, pinning down the exact location of the knots. When she knew what she had to know, she formed three nubs of clay, slapped them in place, shoved a tiny crackle-sphere like a cooked glass marble into the soft clay; she worked so swiftly the three smothers were in with no discernible gap between the sets, zap, zap, zap. She ran her rings around the door, nodded with satisfaction when the stones didn’t even flicker.

Simms flattened his hand against the bricks. “Good job,” he murmured, “you want to take the lock or shall I?”

Felsrawg grinned at him. “Make yourself useful, little man.”