The Alabaster Staff - Edward Bolme [88]
She stood up, regarded her handiwork skeptically, and mentally committed herself to her task.
Kicking off her boots and grabbing her dagger, she glided to her door and cracked it open. No one was in the hall-her room being on the interior side of the short hallway toward the front of the building-so she slid out and shut the door behind her.
The halls were dark but for the guards' lanterns and the light spilling from the odd open door. Silent as a shadow, she ascended the stairs to the third floor. As she reached the top, she heard no footsteps, so she lay low and peered just over the top stair, trusting her dark hair to conceal her. It was early in the shift, and the guard in the hallway was having an amiable conversation with his partner across the middle hall. Glancing to the doors, she saw that the near door, the one that Ahegi had entered earlier, had light pouring out from under it, while the next one down looked dark. She rose and moved carefully to the second door, and, though her steps were inaudible, she kept her posture nonchalant in case the guard caught sight of her.
She tried the latch carefully. It moved, but the door was barred shut. She hoped Ahegi's suite had the same drop-bar door lock that her room did. Pulling her dagger, she slid it between the door and the jamb, thankful for such a thin blade. Her heart pounded with fear and excitement, so hard that it made her hand tremble. She winced in fear that Ahegi might have some more sinister lock on the door, one that would bring down great noise or fearsome magic. When she lifted the latch, it felt too heavy for a throw bar the size of the one in her room.
Committed to her task and afraid of her ability to restore the door to its former position blindly, she persevered. Once the bar had cleared its mooring, she swung the door open slowly, holding her dagger in place to keep the bar elevated. The hinge creaked ever so slightly, so she stopped. She had just enough room to squeeze through.
Sticking her head through, she saw that her instinct had been right. There was an additional trap: a pair of magically inscribed glass spheres dangled from a piece of twine tossed over the loose end of the throw bar. She wriggled her dagger down the bar, keeping it elevated, until she was able to slip the blade between the strands of twine. Then, in one fluid motion, she thrust the dagger forward until the hilt of her weapon caught the string and pulled the stones off the latch. The twine dropped a few inches and landed safely on the unsharpened base of her blade, just above the hand guard.
She slid into the room and inspected the latch. Unlike the throw bar in her room, that one had been modified to revolve freely around a single bolt. If she had let the bar drop once it had cleared its mooring, it would have swung down and dropped the two rune-inscribed orbs on the floor, and, in all likelihood, Ahegi alone knew what that would have done to her.
Holding the glass balls aloft with her dagger-for she feared that any contact with the floor might activate their magic-she scanned the room. Faint trickles of reflected light from the guard's lantern shone from the door behind her, and light also spilled from beneath the door leading to the other portion of Ahegi's suite. It wasn't much, but it was enough to see the furniture in the room.
She took the note she'd prepared and tossed it on his bed, then undid the latch that held the window secure. She withdrew from the room, replacing the spheres on the bar and using her dagger to lift the bar back into place as she shut the door. She could hardly breathe for fear of jinxing herself, but she was almost finished. She stepped backward to the stairwell, wide eyes glued to the hall guard as he joked coarsely with his compatriot.
Once safely behind the curve of the stairwell, she drew a deep breath