The Alabaster Staff - Edward Bolme [40]
She pulled a match from her vest and struck it, using her body to shield its faint glow from the guards in the hall. She moved to the door to the room that had been marked on her map. It was a plain wooden door with a sign saying "Expeditionary Supplies." Just down the hall, Kehrsyn glimpsed the glint of a metal chain and padlock securing the next door. She smiled. On her map, the door was labeled "Treasure Room," and with a big lock announcing the presence of valuables just down the hall, why would anyone raid a simple door marked "Expeditionary Supplies"?
Hiding in the playground, Kehrsyn called it. It was a trick she had learned as a kid: If you look ordinary, no one sees you. When she'd been spotted stealing and had gotten a decent lead on her pursuit, she escaped her pursuers by joining a group of kids in their play. Those chasing her raced right past, searching for a frightened, fleeing little girl, not a happy girl with a big smile playing at crack-the-whip.
Kehrsyn, however, knew the ploy as well as those of Wing's Reach. She tested the door to the expeditionary supplies and found that, true to the disguise, it wasn't even locked. That had been her biggest fear, for she wasn't confident in her lockpicking skills.
She stepped in and closed the door behind her. A lamp hung from one wall, so she lit it and trimmed the wick to a mere glimmer. She looked around the room, searching for the necromantic wand. A badly weathered wooden case, Eileph had said. She poked behind sausages, wax-covered rounds of cheese, cooking tools, and coils of rope, until she found a plain, battered wooden box shoved to the rear of a bottom shelf and labeled "orc bitter tea." It looked like it was the same size as the open box illustrated in Eileph's drawings.
Rather than pull the box out, Kehrsyn decided to play it safe. She cleared the other items away from it, pulled her skirt-cowl up to cover her nose and mouth, and undid the latch with her dagger. A quartet of long needles, curved like cobra fangs, lanced out of their hidden recesses, scything through the air where Kehrsyn's hand would have been, had she been careless.
She pursed her lips. Clearly, that was where the disguise ended. Opening the box could be even more dangerous. She found a small bolt of cloth tucked next to the cooking supplies. She leaned the cloth against the box as a sort of shield, then reached the dagger around to the side and pried the lid open.
She heard a crack, a spatter, and a hiss. Acrid smoke wisped from the back side of the cloth. Kehrsyn pulled the cloth away, and saw some pungent liquid eating into the fabric. She shoved the cloth aside, held the lid of the box open with one hand, and used the dagger to pry the precious wand up from its crushed velvet bed. A razor sliced up from the side of the box, cutting right where her wrist would have been and nicking its own blade as it impacted her dagger.
Once she'd scooted the tail end of the staff out of the box, she cut herself a square of the cloth to protect her hand as she picked the treasure up.
"There now," she whispered. "That wasn't so bad, was it?"
Demok moved at a steady trot through the city, an easy run that he could maintain for hours, with a short, balanced stride perfect for crossing treacherous terrain. The closer he got to Wing's Reach, the more concerned he became about the lack of a trail left by the so-called messenger.
When he reached the building, the first thing he did was check the perimeter. Though the footprints on the steps had been smeared almost entirely out by the passing of Ahegi's entourage, he could still see the young woman's tracks beneath the new dusting of snow. When she'd come to deliver the message, she'd walked at an easy pace from the alley.
He noticed the twine tied to the shutter and followed its trail to spy a second set of tracks on the other