Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(11)

“You wouldn’t.”

“Watch me.”

“In or out of costume?”

“It’s not a costume.”

“I’m not up on the preferred nomenclature. What am I supposed to call your creepy addictive hive mind symbiont?”

“It’s less addictive now,” she said. “And it works by grace of Goddess. Goddesses aren’t creepy, by definition.”

“How many goddesses have you met?”

“Shut up.”

“We have a few back home in Dhisthra might change your mind is all I’m saying.”

“The one I do know’s more than enough for me. Maybe too much.”

“Fair enough.” He returned his attention to his book. “The goddesses I’m talking about might find you tasty, anyway.”

Her badge chilled. She reached beneath her shirt collar and touched the icon of Justice hanging there. Moonsilver flowed over her mind like a high wave on a north shore beach, and receded, leaving the world darker until it dried. She listened to the hum of distant voices. “Pursuit team just checked in,” she said, interpreting for his benefit. “Maura Varg’s in transit with the funds. You identify her, we go in, take them all at once.”

“I know the plan.”

For a few minutes, neither of them spoke. Raz turned pages.

“Speaking of creepy,” she said.

“What?”

“Every few seconds I realize I’m the only one here who’s breathing.”

“Lifer sentiment doesn’t become you, Cat. Watch out or I’ll report you to the Association for the Advancement of Undead Peoples.”

“Stuff it.”

He raised one eyebrow and grinned, baring the tips of fangs.

Cat checked the window again. A driverless carriage rolled to the curb and a woman stepped out: tall and weathered, with a thick neck and a sailor’s broad gait, as if she expected the land to betray her at any moment. She wore canvas slacks, leather boots, a shirt patched and repaired with sailcloth, and bore a curved blade through the red sash around her midsection. The only part of the ensemble that did not fit the pirate queen image was the immaculate brown leather briefcase, which cost, Cat ventured, around six hundred thaums. She wondered if the case’s ornaments were gold, decided they were, and ratcheted the value up to an even thousand.

“She’s not even trying to make this hard,” she said. “That’s Varg?” She slid forward on the seat so Raz could check out the window. His body didn’t heat the surrounding air; the long, lean muscles of his flank pressed cold against her back.

He peeked through the shade. He hissed as light struck him—dropped the curtain and rolled back into his seat, digging the heels of his hands into his eyelids. “Godsdamn. Why don’t you people do business at night like normal?”

“Is that her?”

“Yeah. That’s Maura.”

Cat returned to the window. “Looks like a tough customer. How did you two meet, again?”

“Business, way back. She tried to kill me once; I ate her partner.”

“Really?”

“I was young, and we were both sailing for someone I’d rather forget. She was only a privateer in those days. She’s always been vicious, but I never thought she’d stoop to the indenture trade.”

“We’ll stop that.”

“You’d better. There are people in her hold.”

Maura Varg entered the shop and traded salutes with the man behind the register. He released something he was holding beneath the counter—tension in his shoulder and biceps was right for a blade, though maybe a shocklance or blasting rod or crossbow—stepped out front, walked past Varg, and flipped the OPEN sign in the window to CLOSED.

Varg drummed her fingers on the briefcase. Not a woman who liked waiting, Cat thought. Not a woman who liked much of anything on land. Such prejudice tended to go with the piratical territory.

The cashier took a skeleton key from his pocket, slid it into a crack in the drywall, and turned. A door opened where a door hadn’t been seconds before.

One could quibble with mystery plays on many points. Cat’s fellow Suits scorned them for a host of small inaccuracies: steel doesn’t break that way, no one holds a crossbow like that, how did they reload so fast, no officer in their right mind would go into that house alone. Small details of procedure and weaponry didn’t bother Cat much, but the plays got hidden doors wrong every single time. The young bride in “Reynardine” opens the secret passage to find a luxurious staircase, warning inscription in gold on the arch above, rich, plush, and above all clean.

Real hidden passages, now, were by definition places people didn’t look, where you never had to entertain company. You entered them only when you needed something from the space beyond, and you didn’t linger. Real hidden passages, in Cat’s experience, looked more like disused dry-goods cellars.

So she wasn’t surprised when the new door opened onto a shabby stairwell made from warped unfinished wood. Black smears marred the plaster wall.

Maura Varg jutted her chin out and up by way of a nod, and climbed the hidden stairs. The cashier closed the door behind her, removed and pocketed the key, and patted the drywall where the door had been.

Cat clutched her badge again and spoke through it to Blacksuits in and out of uniform. “Varg is upstairs. The key’s in the cashier’s left apron pocket.”