Even a Merovingen gaming house was quite happy to sell a note. Or two. A little purchase no Boregy banker could have made, but a slightly raffish Boregy adherent might, without rousing alarms. Even a foreigner-Boregy might look to investments, of the slightly seedy sort his small allowance and duelist's resources made reasonable.
So the gambling house would reckon.
Rosenblum to diNero, diNero to a list involving inspections of cargoes, and the corresponding warehousing records, including Megarys. And all those waivers and variances, with names attached.
The Justiciary could be very rough in questioning, once it got on the track of evidence.
Even where it regarded high names.
And God knew, only those who knew what the connections were, knew how to doctor this list. If it was doctored. If Rosenblum had known how. If someone had instructed Rosenblum how, Rosenblum would be a dead man before winter, as they covered their traces. And he had told Rosenblum that. He had told him if that started happening, Rosenblum had only one hope, and that was in going home to House Rosenblum, locking the doors, and admitting only a messenger who would give him a certain password… because his living to testify was desirable only to the side who wanted these papers.
He thought that Rosenblum understood that. It was worrisome that someone had been watching Rosenblum. But it was still possible that Rosenblum had run for home. Boregy had to have the papers. Boregy had to know what had happened. Boregy had to have the other gambling note, in case.
And have the papers yesterday, that was the damnable problem. By now Anastasi Kalugin might well be moving to find out why Thomas Mondragon had betrayed him and to whom. Or moving, having decided in his own mind that Thomas Mondragon was about to betray him: Anastasi had everything to lose if Mondragon talked, and the Thomas Mondragons of the world were always replaceable.
"What d' they say?" Jones asked.
"You don't want to know. But I think they're real enough." Cough "That part doesn't matter. Boregy can still use them."
"Ye let me ran 'em t' Boregy. I c'n make it fine."
"No."
"Well, you ain't in no shape."
He ran a hand through his hair and let his head back on the pillows, trying to think.
"Look, I can do 'er. No problem."
"Jones, —I'm a day late. With men who get panicky when people don't keep their schedules. I don't want you out there alone. I don't want you in this apartment. God, I don't know where's safe. Look, I want you to go downstairs, get Tommy to run over to Grand, up to Boregy, get Boregy to send the launch down. I can take the papers over. In person."
"Ye think it ain't likely Anastasi heard about the fracas over on Archangel? Ain't heard how ser Constancy Rosenblum got kicked into the canal?"
"God." His head was throbbing. He noticed the pain finally. He was not thinking down all the tracks. He knew he was not. Focus kept coming and going.
"I figure," Jones said, "he knows damn well you made pickup today, not yesterday."
"Damn noisy. Everything was damn noisy."
"Well, that ain't bad."
"It ain't bad—except the papers haven't gotten to Boregy, dammit, and by now Tatiana and Iosef and Magruder and Rosenblum and every other damn interest in town know somebody just made a delivery here. Who was it?"
"Student name of Justus. Same that saved Denny's skin. Raj come back to him—"
He thought that was what he had heard from the hallway. Strangers in this thing gave him cold chills. He entertained the lightning-flicker of a suspicion that Raj was in deep trouble, the papers a ploy, the student a decoy, everything set up by their enemies. But there was the reality of the papers in his lap to tell him that somehow, someway, St. Murfy had worked on their side.
Or a resourceful kid had handled himself like a professional in this, which was just about as likely as the Angel's personal intervention—handled himself like a professional until he had run into ambush and then found a way to leverage a perfect stranger into risking his neck. If the student had known.
But the student must have known—having fended the attack off Denny—that Raj was not in any ordinary kind of bind.
Damn, he distrusted charity. It all led in circles. It scared hell out of him. But there were the papers. Which meant that every assassin of every faction in Merovingen might have marked the boys, the student—it was the one thing Raj might not have thought of. It was a shadow-war. And someone was always watching.
Watching—for something to leave again.
"Someone will come here," he said, "looking for these papers."
"Who?"
"Make a list. Half the damn town's on it." He had a mental flash of the roof over on Hagen, the walks and bridges around Petrescu, as a battlefield of spies, littered with detritus, one faction and the other trying for position, and winced. Of himself outright throwing up the window and yelling at all and sundry that he was throwing them the damn papers and they could swim for them. But he was wandering. His face was hot again and his focus kept coming and going. This was the mind trying to think its way through a maze of cross and double cross. "If we just stay put, someone's going to come. If they try shooting their way in, that brings the blacklegs.…" "Which is Tatiana's bullylads."
"Damn!" He shut his eyes and figured the best thing was to go down there, himself, be the target, take the hit. But that left Jones. Who knew too much for Anastasi to let her alone. And the boys. Everyone. It kept coming back to himself and Jones, making the run to Boregy. Best chance they had.
"Look, I c'n make it."
"Boregy won't like the racket. If you live to get there."
"I c'n do it," a higher voice said. Jones twisted around and he flattened his knees and looked in consternation at the urchin who put his head in the door—listening on hands and knees, he had been. Denny scrambled up and stood in plain view. "I c'n go right over the roofs."
"Out of the question," Mondragon said.
"Ain't no problem," Denny said, and fished in his back pocket. Pulled out a folding grapple and a wad of cord. "I do 'er all th' time."
"Why, ye little thief!" Jones exclaimed. "That's a filch's line!"
Denny shuffled and put the evidence behind him with a little wince. "I ain't no filch, I'm a runner!"
"Come here," Mondragon said, folding up the papers. "Come here." As Denny hesitated. Denny came, with a wary look at Jones, still with the grapple behind him.
"As happens," Mondragon said, "a thief would be more useful."
Denny winced and lifted a shoulder. "Well, if I was, I could do it, couldn't I, get right over to Boregy—"
"There's likely men on Hagen's roof."
"Yey. Blacklegs've laid traps too, but they ain't never caught us."
"You little sneak," Jones said. And: "I'll go with 'im." Denny looked her up and down and sneered. "You're too big. You couldn't keep up. No way."
"Denny," Mondragon said. "They'll shoot at you."
"They done that before too." Denny pointed straight up, looked toward the imagined roof. "Ye got a little tower up there. Got a lock-door. Tower down t' the other end. They got this beam ties Petrescu up with Vaitan, 'bout that crack on the north side—"
"You know it all the way to Boregy?"
"Sure." Denny gave his hair a toss, grinned as it fell back into his eyes. Mean-looking and impish as any canal-brat. "What table ye want me t' lay them papers on?"
"Listen. They're going to have Boregy watched."
"Boregy's got a lot of windows. Ye mind if I break one?"
"I don't mind."
Denny's eyes lit.
Vega Boregy lifted the teacup, perusing the market reports, meticulously penned by the House copyist, and sipped.
Something in Boregy exploded, with a racketing clank of massive shards of glass hitting the ground, that sound unduplicatable and unmistakable in timbre, which sent Vega Boregy's heart to a lurching double-beat, the teacup banging onto the table in a puddle, and the market reports sliding every which way
as Boregy headed for the drawer and grabbed a pistol.
Retainers and poleboatmen and every member of the house who remembered the Sword attack up the watergate-stairs, that had rendered the elder Boregy an invalid and killed two of the Family and wounded a dozen of the staff—were headed toward the sound with guns and swords and knives and every other weapon at hand: when Vega Boregy came into the great dining room he had a half dozen retainers in front of him and a dozen more behind—
—to face black night and a free-blowing wind through the ruin of the great hall window, tall as three men. Shards of glass were everywhere, the whole central pane having come down and showered over the polished dining table, the chairs, the tesselated floor.
"Did they get in?" his chief of security yelled. "Search the halls! Fan out! Ware of gas!"
But Vega Boregy crunched his way through the wreckage to the agent of the ruin, a single brick, a very substantial brick bound about with cord.
There was an envelope bound to it.
Addressed to him.
The awful part of it was, Denny mourned, that he could not see the end of the matter. He was busy running, among the chimneys and the flues and vents, down over the copper plates of the big gable, eeling his way over the lumpy ridge-cap, and down the other side, down the guttering to grab a tall chimney, swing round and over to White on the top of the covered bridge, flat as he could make himself, and shinnying along fast and light as one of Merovingen's multitudinous cats, far side of the slope, because if there were watchers who had seen that big window go, they were on White, and he was going right by them.
Just as slick as ever he had done it: he heard the uproar, heard the thief-bell tolling, the whole town in upset, and himself with a glorious view of the Signeury itself right across the Grand.
Alarm, alarm, alarm!
The big Signeury bell took it up, thundering its moral outrage.
And Denny drank it all in with a thrill of absolute and passionate delight.
Jones paced, paced the bedroom till she was aware she was doing it, back and forth so often her feet stopped being cold; and then forced herself to stand still, which felt stupid; and then to sit, which was damned near impossible, while Mondragon lay silent and followed her with his eyes, as if he would do much the same if he had the strength in him.
She imagined a sound in the all-too-silent apartment. She went upstairs again with the gun. She came down again and padded to the front and listened with her ear against the wall, then went back and paced the bedroom again till she knew she was driving Mondragon mad. Then she just stood where she was and shoved her hands into her pockets and confined her pacing to smaller, rocking movements. "Takes a while," she said.
But all the while she was thinking of that roof up there, and the way the kid had lit out the way Tom had told him, out that rooftop door like a shot, with a tumbling roll right to the cover of the chimney; and she had not bothered to see anything else. She had shut that door and thrown the deadbolts and listened for a long time, hearing running then. Light and quick.
She had dived right down and closed the trap that was Mondragon's second line of defense, bolted it, and come on down the stairs.
To pace and fret.
But of a sudden a thief-bell rang out somewhere far away, nothing unusual in Merovingen. And hard on that, the deep voice of a different bell.
"The Signeury," she said, her heart leaping up. She exchanged a look with Mondragon, listening, listening, as the pealing went on.
"Could be," he said. Then she knew how afraid Mondragon had been, because there was so much and such desperate hope in his eyes as he looked toward that wall. Like he could see through it all the way to Boregy.
She came and sat down by him and held onto his hand.
"It isn't over yet."
No. A very young boy had to get away. Had to take a devious route all the way over to Kass, where Raj was; pick up his brother and get over the roof-ways to Moghi's, to the shed where a couple of boys with a purseful of money and Mondragon's note: ("This should pay for them. —M.") would find shelter not even blacklegs could crack.
"Them out there," she said, with a jut of her jaw toward the canal, the general vicinity of Petrescu, where their enemies watched quietly, "I dunno if they're onto him, but they got to know something's happened up there."
"They'll know," Mondragon said. "They'll know real soon. Whatever's happened." "They going to hit us?"
Mondragon shook his head slowly, against the pillows, his eyes wandering to the other, the front wall, as if his thoughts were down on the canal, out there on the roofs. "No. Whoever's out there, they're professionals. If they lose, they lose. Revenge costs too much—generally. No. We'll smile at each other—in Boregy's drawingroom. Or when we meet on the walkways."
It was something like what he had said about Min and the Suleiman skip being down there on the canal: No. Too noisy. Too uncertain. You don't murder canalers wholesale in this town. They don't need a quarrel with the Trade.
She had halfway understood that. Even if they were foreign. Mondragon had understood it right well.
But the business about drawingrooms baffled her.
Waiting did.
Mondragon held onto her hand, and squeezed it. While the Signeury bell fell quiet. "If Boregy gets the papers, they'll know, that's all. Publicity is what these people have to dread. It'll go all quiet again. Boregy will get the word to Anastasi. And Rosenblum. And Tatiana will regroup. That's the way it works. The boys hide out a day or two. Moghi won't let them out till it's safe. Then everything goes back to normal. If those papers got through. You aren't going out on the water tomorrow. Hear?"
"Huh," she said. "If that Denny got through, if he gets to Moghi's, I got somebody coming t' get t' Del. Del's going to take my skip down to Moghi's. Moghi'll keep 'er at tie. Like we was in the Room. I set it up with Denny."
He looked a little surprised. "Good," he said.
And in due time, there was a to-do out on the canal. A thumping on the water-stairs then. And a voice singing:
"There's a wheel that's moving fast through our time
And we've seen the track it made.
I believe you know where it has to go,
And the way that the game is played..."
* * *
"He made it, he made it, he made it," Jones cried. And hugged Mondragon hard.
Three days on, Mondragon got out of a hired poleboat and rang the bell at Boregy. He was still short of breath, still prone to chill, and carried no sword, first because it was daytime in a high-class neighborhood, and secondly because he reckoned he would be doing well just to walk. He had thought of taking the gun, highly illegal, but he had to surrender the cloak to Boregy servants, and Boregy was a nervous man. He went without, having told Jones to stay at Moghi's for the morning— ("Please, Jones. —Jones, shut up, don't fight me, just do this one thing for me. A few hours. Say I'm hiring you to sit, all right?")
In fact it was Jones' fretting and pacing that stirred him out earlier than he might have tried it. Sitting still was eating her gut out; and he had come finally to the conclusion that there might indeed be protection in waiting till he was solidly on his feet before putting in an appearance at Boregy's, in the case there was trouble waiting; but there was more percentage in letting Boregy see that he had come there as soon as he could physically make it.
Jones was fretting to get back onto the canals, there were two boys fretting in Moghi's shed, and if he was determined on one thing, it was that none of them were going to probe the way for him: if it was safe, he would find it out, he would feel out the temper of things uptown, and in the hightown, and if he was wrong in his estimation, Jones would take the boys and take the money he had left with her, everything he had, and get herself and them whatever safety his money could buy.
He hoped. God, she was stubborn. She had listened very quietly at the last, when he gave her the purse full of gold and forcibly wrapped her hand around it; and Jones listening quietly w
as either an uncommonly good sign or a very bad one.
He exchanged a pleasant good morning with the servant who answered the door, walked up to the main level, surrendered his cloak and scarf to the servants who met them there, and was advised ser Boregy was anxious to see him. In the dining room.
He walked in. And stopped at the sullen, angry figure of Vega Boregy, standing firmly in his path with hands behind him; at the instant realization that there was something very wrong with the dining room, something was obstructing the light—a large panel of wood instead of the glass—
Denny—
Oh, my… God…
"Good morning, Mondragon. You look surprised. What did you think you hit?"
He felt dizzy. He walked aside and sat down uninvited on a straight chair by the door. "I'm sorry. I'm truly sorry."
"We gave out that it was an assassination attempt. That we drove off the invaders. I appreciate your necessity to make it clear to Rosenblum's agents that the package had been delivered. We assume you were aiming for one of the side panels."
"M'ser, I—assure you that was the case. I'm mortally sorry." Coughing overtook him. He got his breath back.
"Now you bring us the local misery."
"I didn't plan to stay long." He stood up carefully. "I only wanted to be sure you did get the packet. That you understood my note. I've been—as you see—rather well done in by this stuff. I hope you'll tell our friend—I did everything I could, as soon as I could. I hope it was adequate."
Boregy's mouth made a thin line. His eyes raked Mondragon up and down. He went to the sideboard and poured two brandies, which action Mondragon followed with gathering hope. Brandy, Mondragon thought. And thought of a small ship and dark waters. And who sold it at the best prices in town. He took the glass from Boregy's hand, sipped and felt its fire on his raw throat.