Dog in the Dark

Chapter Twenty-two

By midmorning the follow day, Dänvârfij made one change in the watch rotation. Rhysís remained atop a warehouse and watching the port, while Eywodan and Tavithê held the Bashair. But Fréthfâre’s pain had grown worse in the night, so Dänvârfij had sent Én’nish to the inn. She took Én’nish’s place watching the hotel from a nearby rooftop.

As yet nothing useful had been learned regarding the Cloud Queen’s length of stay. This made Dänvârfij anxious. Her quarry could be packing to leave even now, and she could not let them escape to open waters. Worry had plagued her since dawn as she tried to formulate alternatives.

Én’nish had not exaggerated about the hotel; it was a fortress. While watching the guards and the barred windows, Dänvârfij toyed with the notion of direct infiltration.

No, it was still better to set a trap for their quarry in the ...

The hotel’s front door opened.

A tall, cloaked figure emerged. Male, judging by height—excessive height for a human—he stepped out past the guards. Even though he was heavily cloaked, his movements were unmistakable.

Dänvârfij tilted her head to one side as she watched Brot’ân’duivé walk up the street.

If she could kill him now, Magiere and Léshil would be more vulnerable. This thought faded as quickly as it formed.

She could not take Brot’ân’duivé alone. Such an act would likely end in her death and leave her purpose unfulfilled. It was better to learn where he went and why, which might lead to solutions for getting their quarry into the open. She rose slightly, preparing to follow.

Brot’ân’duivé was walking the wrong way.

Dänvârfij had expected him to head toward the port. She stared in puzzlement as he moved inland. What other purpose could he have in this lawless human city? After letting him get one cross street ahead, she leaped silently to the next rooftop. A greimasg’äh could sense pursuit more easily than most, and she could not allow him to become aware of her.

He turned right down the next side street.

Dänvârfij dropped off the roof into a cutway and hurried for the back alley to which it connected. She peered around the corner to the alley’s intersection with the side street, and she watched every passerby crossing the far view.

Brot’ân’duivé never appeared, and her throat went dry.

On instinct, waiting, she looked back up the cutway. There was no sign of his having doubled back. She almost bolted down the alley toward the side street, but that would put her in the open in trying to find him. Instead, she spidered up a rear wall onto the rooftops and scanned the city in all directions.

Even if he had scaled a building to a roof along his way, it might mean she had been noticed. She saw no one in the heights. Could he have entered a building?

Crawling low to the rooftop’s edge, she looked down upon the side street lined with small dwellings—no shops or eateries. The other possibility was the alley along the backs of the buildings on the street’s far side. An unwanted fear washed over her.

Following this greimasg’äh into a shadowed place was unwise. It occurred to her that no matter what, the traitor would assume he might be trailed—it was in him both by his nature and training. He might have gone inland simply to throw off any hidden pursuit. There was only one way to be certain, and it was a blind choice.

Dänvârfij continued along the rooftops until she was forced to take to the streets, and then she raced for the port. If she could not find him, the others needed to be warned.

A greimasg’äh, now their enemy, was on the move.

Crouched in the far alley’s shadows, Brot’ân’duivé pulled a hidden bundle from under his arm and took off his heavy dun-colored cloak.

Earlier that morning, Mechaela had allowed him to go through a surprisingly large array of clothing “abandoned” by patrons over the years. He had borrowed a few things, including a bright cerulean cloak of light wool, more garish than he normally would have desired. The owner had been quite tall for a human, and so the cloak’s hem reached Brot’ân’duivé’s shins—adequate enough. He had also borrowed a pair of cream-colored suede boots, useless for anything besides fashion.

In most ports the vivid blue would have called attention to him—but not here. This harbor was a cacophony of wild attire from many lands, and he would blend even more easily than he would in anmaglâhk garb.

Wrapping his own boots inside the dun cloak, he pulled the cerulean cloak’s hood low over his eyes and stepped into the street. He kept his knees bent, adopting an affected slouch to minimize his notable height. At best he would be half a head shorter. That was all he could manage in his hurry, as he took a roundabout way toward the harbor’s southern end.

Brot’ân’duivé already knew he had been followed out of Delilah’s.

A change of clothing, stature, and gait might throw off pursuit once he mingled among the locals. As he neared the waterfront, the number of people in the streets multiplied. He slipped among them and shadowed a pair of overdressed gentry accompanied by heavily armed escorts. Peering from under the hood, he watched the rooftops and knew exactly where he would have placed sentries—if he had been in charge of hunting himself.

The barest hint of a figure wearing dark blue rose slightly over the crest of a warehouse roof.

It was sensible to assume that his enemies had abandoned their attire for disguises as well. What mattered was that the team was here in Drist. Their presence was no longer a guess.

He carefully repeated checks as he walked, but the figure in dark blue did not rise any higher. He briefly lost sight of it until his angle improved when he reached the waterfront’s southern end. The figure still had not moved, which meant whoever was there had not left to report in.

He had not been spotted as yet.

Brot’ân’duivé slowed amid the dodging masses of dockworkers, the finely dressed, and those selling goods off their backs or begging on the boardwalks. Among the flowing crowds, he drifted to the waterfront’s edge and stepped down along the stairs to below.

The Bell Tower was docked at the third pier’s end. He needed a place to vanish with a decent vantage point. Once on a floating walkway, he quickened his pace and then stopped among the shoreward pilings of the fourth pier. With a good view of the third pier above, he unrolled his dun-colored cloak and pulled it over the cerulean one.

He swung around a tall pier post and onto a low beam between it and the next one outward in the water. Flattening against that support, he looked to the massive ship marked as the Bell Tower. It was a good distance away, but he saw all movement along its rail, its ramp, and the pier.

Brot’ân’duivé stilled mind and body and let shadow take him once he had set his purpose deep within himself. With his gaze locked upon that vessel, all that he would see and hear would fall into the back of his mind, beyond conscious thought.

Sometime during the morning, a dog wandered down the walkway and passed into the periphery of his sight. He did not look directly at it ... did not move ... did not think. The dog never paused, and the click of its claws continued until even that faded from his stilled awareness. He continued taking in all movements and changes upon the Bell Tower until a thought rose to break him loose from shadow.

He refocused his gaze.

Dänvârfij descended the ramp of a much smaller ship on the second pier and stood brazenly in the open, staring toward ... the Cloud Queen. Dressed in breeches and a dark vest, she no longer wore the forest gray of the anmaglâhk, but it was she.

This could be no coincidence. She and her team not only knew the vessel on which Magiere traveled, but their own ship had docked only a few vessels away. He could not have anticipated this last detail.

Dänvârfij turned and walked toward the waterfront.

Brot’ân’duivé decided to keep this information to himself, as he was uncertain how he would use it. Though he pretended to assist in Léshil’s foolish pursuit, he still hoped to put an end to it.

There were four to five armed men always walking the deck of the Bell Tower. Separate from the other crew, those appeared to have no other purpose but the vessel’s—the cargo’s—safekeeping. Léshil and Magiere would not be able to board by the ship’s ramp, not even under a ruse. The moment they tried, they would be stopped and unable to fight their way past.

Skiffs had come and gone below the piers. Some were tied off nearer the lower walkway. He had seen a few other ways to board the vessel, but he would not suggest such. He had enough—more than he would tell—to make the chance of infiltration sound rationally hopeless.

Stepping back onto the walkway, he stripped off the dun cloak to wrap it around his boots again. Up the stairs, he slipped in among the shifting, noisy masses, but he paused a final time upon the waterfront. He looked from the Cloud Queen to the Bell Tower ... and to the smaller ship that Dänvârfij had left.

A new strategy, wrapped around Léshil’s present fixation, began to form.

Most Aged Father’s team of loyalists and fanatics were far from home. Brot’ân’duivé saw a way to add to the number who would not return.

The fewer the better, and as he followed Magiere to an orb, he could then freely watch for the time and place to put Léshil to his destined purpose. That purpose had been foreseen by lost Eillean, prepared through a mother’s sacrifice by Cuirin’nên’a, and marked by the ancestors with a name.

Leshiârelaohk.

Dänvârfij wasted no time in hurrying back toward the three-story hotel with barred windows. After contacting Rhysís and Eywodan, she had been relieved, though troubled, that no one had spotted the traitor. Perhaps he had been playing decoy. A similar ruse had been used to steal away Magiere and her companions in Calm Seatt. By the time Dänvârfij reached a vantage point to look up at the hotel, her anxiety faded.

If Magiere and hers had booked passage on a ship all the way to the Suman Empire, she would not likely travel by land in leaving Drist. No, when she left this place, she would intend to board the Cloud Queen. So wherever else she or Léshil went in this city, to whatever purpose, did not matter ... except if it put them in easy reach.

Crouched on the roof, Dänvârfij noticed someone tall, but perhaps not tall enough, dressed in a bright cerulean cloak. The man stepped straight between the front guards and to the front door without challenge. In the last instant as the door closed, something changed, as if the man looked taller next to the door’s closing edge. Then he was gone from sight.

Dänvârfij knew such tricks of posture. She had no certainty, but if what she had glimpsed was true ...

She could never forget that the treacherous greimasg’äh was among the best of her caste. Where had he gone, if that had been he who had entered a moment ago? If he had slipped to the waterfront, then for what reason?

Dänvârfij lingered a moment in indecision before she fled back toward the filthy inn to speak with Fréthfâre. Contingencies needed to be prepared.

In the inn’s room, Én’nish sat listening to Dänvârfij report on Brot’ân’duivé’s possible deception.

Dänvârfij, for all her disrespect of Fréthfâre, seemed certain of her assumptions, and she was not given to groundless speculations. In this, excitement built within Én’nish as she listened.

“I agree this is a temporary stop for our quarry,” Fréthfâre said, sitting bent over in her chair. “They will not continue via land but—”

“They will return to the Cloud Queen,” Dänvârfij finished.

“From what you and Én’nish have described, this hotel where they stay is unbreachable.”

“It is.”

“Then the only option is to abandon the Bashair and take the Cloud Queen. We lay our trap for when our quarry returns to leave port.”

Dänvârfij hesitated, and then nodded. “Agreed, but that ship has a larger crew. Taking it may not—will not—be as certain or clean as taking the Bashair.”

“Of course,” Fréthfâre confirmed flatly. “And?”

After another long pause, Dänvârfij answered with equal coldness. “I will need Én’nish.”

“When do we move?” Én’nish asked too quickly.

“Near mid of night, when most of the crew is asleep,” Dänvârfij answered. “Though waiting that long troubles me. We do not know when the vessel’s captain plans to depart. The others must watch that ship as well for any sign.”

“Agreed,” Fréthfâre said.

For once she did not sound bitter in dealing with Dänvârfij’s overly cautious ways, not that Én’nish blamed the rightful, true Covârleasa for her bitterness. But she sounded pensive, as if she wished to take part in the night’s task.

“Go now,” Fréthfâre continued. “Prepare Rhysís, Eywodan, and Tavithê for infiltration. Tonight, kill the Bashair’s remaining crew, dispose of the bodies, and take the Cloud Queen.”

Anticipation of nightfall, and what would come, quickened Én’nish’s breaths.