The Dragon Round (Dragon #1)(96)
Near the top Ject realizes the rats are keeping to the lower floors. Ravis notices this too. “That’s a good sign, I suppose.”
Ject says, “It’s a bad day when finding a dragon is good.”
“A what?” the seneschal says. “So much to do. So much. You can find your own way.” He bobs down the stairs.
Indeed, how dramatic it would be to find the dragon here, Ject thinks. They’d call it the Dragon Tower ever after, and war would be forestalled.
Of course he would have to do something about the dragon before it did something about them, and that would be dramatic enough to elevate him above Herse. How could a nimble hip compete with a dragon slayer? How could a liar compete with a new Hero of Hanosh? And Herse would have been so close to getting his war too. The wave rises, the wave falls.
“Load your weapons,” Ject says. The crossbows make an eerie straining in the echoing stairs.
The stairs open at last on a foyer outside the old council chamber. The bare windows are wider here because the walls are thinner than below, and, being higher, they’re letting in more of the morning. The stained glass, red, gold, and blue, burnishes the room. Dark wooden benches blanketed in dust warm themselves in the sunlight. Between the spiral staircases, a door leads to a widow’s walk. Opposite it, the brass doors to the council chamber have bas reliefs that, like the mosaics in the tile floor, depict images of Hanosh at the founding of the League, the ruins of war rebuilt with the promise of prosperity for all.
“You don’t see its like anymore,” Ject says, “that art. Too many flourishes. Too much light.” Too many smiles, Eles once said of the style. No market for it now. Art should be plain and prudent, properly flat. The doors and floor do feel aggressively showy to Ject, like a na?f made up to seem older.
Ravis unlocks the chamber doors, but the hinges are frozen. It takes four guards to pull the doors wide enough for Ject to look in. Canvas shrouds the banc and the pews and tables arrayed before it. They’re covered with droppings and littered with dried rat guts and bones. Dust sparkles in the light coming through the stained glass.
Ject hears a tap from the center of the room, an area walled off by canvas. He holds his hand up. The guards form two lines behind him. The tap comes again. Ject points and stands aside. His men enter with crossbows drawn, one line curling left, the other right. At the head of the left line Ravis sights his crossbow over the pew nearest the sound, then waves Ject to him.
A body lies in a pool of blood, its legs bent along new joints, its face smashed. Nonetheless, Ject says, “That’s Skite.” He carefully digs a house shield from the body’s pocket to confirm this. “Why was he up here?”
“Up there,” Ravis says, pointing. “He must have fallen.”
Ject looks at the top of the dome and notes the dark stain outlining the trapdoor to the cupola. A drop of blood falls from it and taps the pool around Skite.
“I think I know where we’ll find Chelson’s other men,” Ject says.
Last night, Ject thinks, their only mission would have been finding Chelson’s daughter. Could they have tracked her here? Was her abductor also the tower thief? Did he drive off the ravens? He couldn’t have come through the main doors, though. They were locked and stiff. He looks toward the servants’ stairs and notices the door is slightly ajar. That’s how he came and went. Ject’s heart sinks. Well, he thinks, if there’s no dragon, at least he can catch the bad guy and maybe rescue the princess.
“Let’s take a less direct route,” Ject says. “The widow’s walk.” Ject looks from the door outside near the servants’ stairs toward the one leading outside from the foyer, and that’s when he sees the shadowy face staring at them through a window near the latter.
Peeking through the cracked door from the servants’ stairs, Herse watches Ject’s men open the brass doors across the old council chamber. They check the body as he had been doing a moment ago before hearing them approach and hiding.
He was not surprised it’s Skite. Herse heard about Tristaban’s abduction last night from a friend in the guard. Chelson’s men must have tracked the abductor here. He can’t imagine why here, but why he fell is obvious. The stairs and catwalk are very defensible. And it would be easy to slip in the dark, especially if pushed from above.
Ject looks at the servants’ stairs, Herse slides into the darkness, then Ject races with his men back to the foyer. Herse would have been leery of climbing to the trapdoor, but as the guards pour onto the widow’s walk, their distraction makes that approach less complicated. He loads his crossbow and holds the dirk along the stock. If the girl is up there, he could save the day.
As he slips past the servants’ stairs door, he notices that the bar for the door beside it, which leads to the widow’s walk, is lying on the floor. Wanting to protect his rear, Herse replaces the bar.
3
* * *
Earlier, after Skite fell, Jeryon flew down the servants’ stairs to hide Derc’s body more thoroughly. By candlelight he stuffed him into the cesspit with a broom and replaced the seat.
He wiped up the blood in the hallway with a rag and water from the kitchen then cleaned up the broken jar and dried the floor. Having covered his tracks, he browsed the pantries for some breakfast. As famished as he was he knew he was really just killing time. He couldn’t bring himself to return to the cupola. He only admitted this to himself when he heard footsteps on the stoop. He doused the candle and went up the kitchen stairs, but as he reached the door to the service hallway, the tower’s backdoor was unlocked.