Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [83]
NOW, TEN YEARS INTO HIS CAREER, and widely recognized (among those in the know) as the boldest thief in the city, Peter crouched in the shadows and felt Frost’s reassuring weight across his back. At exactly the stroke of three in the morning, precisely as it had been arranged, he spied a door come open in the side of the Bishop’s residence. A man in guard’s livery stepped out of the building, looked once to the left and once to the right, and then went back inside, but leaving the door cracked open just a sliver. It was the signal Peter had been waiting for.
Quick as a wealthy man’s prayer, he made his way down from his high perch and across the street, keeping to the deepest shadows at all times. Over the wall he went, confident from his earlier observations that there’d be no guards on the other side to greet him. Then he crept forward to find the side door open, unlocked and unguarded. Our ever-reliable Master of Bribes did his duty again, Peter thought, happy that his dear friend Carl was an important part of this job. Silently, he closed and locked the door behind him. Then, moving out of the lighted hallway, into the shadows of a recessed alcove, he reached inside his vest for a small bottle that had been provided to him by a potion maker well known to the Brotherhood. It was an expensive potion he carried, and usually only used in the most dire of emergencies, but the king had agreed that this time, owing to the hasty planning of tonight’s touch, its expenditure was well justified.
When he opened the bottle, the liquid inside would blossom from it in the form of a mist that would spread out into every nook and cranny of the building, quickly putting all within it into a deep and dreamless sleep. Peter would be immune, having already sipped the antidote up on the rooftop across the way. But then, just as he was about to pull the stopper, something stayed his hand. The air already smelled of sticky, burned cloves, mixed with an underlying odor of rancid meat, which is exactly the odor his potion would cause.
Someone had already released a sleeping mist, he realized. And it was done only seconds ago, or else the smell would have dissipated by now.
Doubly on his guard, already half-determined to abandon the job as too risky, Peter crept down the hallway, letting the smaller of his two daggers fall silently into his hand as he went. He quickly found the guard who’d unlocked the door for him. The man was fast asleep in the mansion’s small mage-room, having extinguished, as he’d promised to do, the night’s spell-candle, which insured there would be no active security or warding spells to interfere with Peter’s work.
Having been thoroughly briefed by the Brotherhood’s Master Caser, who’d uncovered detailed designs for its construction in the city archives, Peter knew his way around the building, as if he’d lived here all his life. He could have closed his eyes and found his way to the Bishop’s luxurious second floor bedroom. But for all their careful preparation, no one anticipated having to deal with a second intruder — one who seemed as schooled in the Brotherhood’s methods as Peter was.
As he proceeded through the house, Peter encountered one sleeping guard after another, as he’d planned all along. But he’d never suspected someone might do the job for him. He went upstairs, using the smaller servants’ stairway in the back of the house. As he turned the corner, where the narrow flight of stairs doubled back on itself midway through the ascent, he thought he saw a shadow flit out of the doorway above. He hurried faster, as fast as he could move and still remain relatively silent. He emerged onto the second floor hallway just in time to see a vaguely human shape duck into the very bedroom he was headed for. He rushed down to the open doorway, but paused at its threshold. The bedroom