Fortune's Light - Michael Jan Friedman [82]
Lyneea seemed different, too. Softer, more vulnerable. As if she wasn’t quite awake enough yet to be as hard-boiled as she would have liked.
Slowly but surely the signal took them away from the heart of the city. Away from the shops and the hotels and the taverns into the residential neighborhoods, which became more and more well-to-do as they progressed.
And finally it led them here—to this eight-foot-high stone wall that blocked their passage.
Riker stood before it, Teller’s homing device nestled in the palm of his gloved hand. Snow was falling; a couple of fat flakes hit the tiny digital display and clung there, turned ruby red by the illumination.
He touched the device’s lowermost plate with the forefinger of his other hand. The thing started beeping again, a little louder than the last time they’d activated it.
Lyneea nodded. “This is where it wants us to go, all right.”
The human considered the barrier. He could see shards of broken glass embedded in the concrete at the top of it. A primitive but effective way of ensuring privacy.
He grunted. “Who would go to the trouble of putting up a wall here?”
“Who indeed,” added Lyneea, “but a madraga?”
“Then this is part of an estate,” said Riker.
“So it would seem. And only one madraga has holdings in this part of town.” She looked at him. “Terrin.”
He nodded. Now that he knew who owned the place, he began to recognize the grounds. He’d been here before, of course, though he’d never approached the estate from this side.
“That’s interesting,” he said, “considering Terrin’s the madraga that Criathis is merging with.”
Lyneea nodded. “Your friend hid the seal under the noses of the people most likely to be offended by its absence.”
“But why would he do that?”
His partner shrugged. “We can only speculate. Perhaps he just appreciated the irony. Perhaps he planned to expose the seal’s location at some point, thereby making it look as if Terrin had stolen it, and ensuring that the merger would never go through.” She bit her lip. “At any rate, an interested third party, such as Madraga Rhurig, wouldn’t really have cared if it had the thing in its possession—only that Criathis didn’t have it. Conlon could have been paid just to hide it until the merger fell apart.”
Riker pondered the possibilities. “Good point,” he told her. He regarded the wall. “But there will be plenty of time to sort this out after we recover Fortune’s Light.”
“Agreed. Can you make it over the wall?”
“With a little help.” He slipped his arm out of the sling.
“You’ve got it.”
Planting herself by the base of the barrier, Lyneea bent down to give the human a step up. He took advantage of it, balancing on her back before finding a space relatively free of glass shards and clambering up as best he could. Once again he remarked inwardly on her deceptive sturdiness.
“Up?” asked Lyneea.
“Up,” he answered. “Need a hand?”
“No.”
His offer refused, he slithered down the far side of the wall. The snow had drifted deeper here; it was up to the tops of his boots. He replaced the sling.
A moment later Lyneea joined him. She landed like a cat, gracefully.
They looked out on the rolling fields that constituted the grounds of the estate. The place was pristine, beautiful, interrupted only by a few tall, stately trees. In the distance there was a stone house, not all that big but classically intricate in its design.
It brought back memories.
“Let’s try the device again,” said his partner.
Riker activated it, expecting to hear the beeping. There wasn’t any. But a change had come over the digital display. It now showed only three numerals: seven, four, and three.
“What’s the matter?” asked Lyneea. “Don’t tell me the damned thing’s broken.”
“I’m not sure,” he told her, “but I think it switched over to another mode—automatically.” He looked around. “Maybe because we’ve gotten within a certain radius of the transmitter.”
He took a few steps away from the wall, and the three became a two. Another few steps,