Page 46 of The Summer Pass

They really should have barred this gate. It was a serious lapse in security, even if they thought the enemy didn’t know the route up the mountainside to reach the postern. He hefted the heavy bar to try to replace it, forgetting for a moment that it had taken two of them to lift it before. It slipped in his hands and threatened to crash to the ground. He set it down, realizing that his arms were shaking with the effort.

He crouched in the shadow of the wall, trying to collect himself. He was pushing himself dangerously hard; he knew that. He was so tired. But Vanu’s family was in here somewhere, and Vanu didn’t know where they were or whether they were safe. Lill would allow himself to rest when he had found them, and not before.

The likeliest place for them to be was in the great house. Darma, the Boar of Hawakhurta, wasn’t in open rebellion against his former lord—he was trading on the prestige of having been part of Vanu’s inner circle, apparently—so he would probably entertain Vanu’s family with appropriate honour. He’d certainly want to keep them close, to keep an eye on them, maybe even use them as hostages if the need arose. So Lill made his way through the still-sleepy streets of the fortress to the dismal grey gathering place in front of the great house.

Here he considered his options. He could go straight up to the door and present himself to the guard as a messenger seeking Vanu’s family. Sometimes to proceed openly is safer than to use stealth, Master Moon reminded him. But he had heard how the Boar of Hawakhurta mistrusted Chiddang people, and there was no denying he looked Chiddang. He would go in through a window.

He circled around, through a foul-smelling little alley, to the back of the great house, where he had found the stairs leading to what he assumed was the dungeon. The buildings back here, between the house and the fortress wall, seemed to be granaries and storehouses, as at Umtúshta. There were no windows on the ground floor, but those one storey up looked accessible enough; they had no glass, and their wooden shutters stood open in the warm weather. The trick would be getting up there without being seen by the man guarding the dungeon stairs.

The guard yawned hugely and stretched, as if to remind Lill how tired he was himself, how stiff and sore his muscles. The guard began comprehensively scratching his crotch, and Lill looked away in disgust. His eyes fell on a ladder propped against the nearest granary, giving easy access to its roof. Thanks be to the Blue Heaven, or whatever they said.

He went up the ladder and across the sloping roof of the granary to the far corner, where he was as close as he could get to one of the windows on the back of the great house. He glanced down to check that the guard was still busy—he was—and jumped for the windowsill.

He barely made the jump. He scrabbled at the stone sill, hauled himself up, and tumbled awkwardly through the window into the room beyond. But all this made hardly any noise and provoked no reaction from the guard below.

He looked around the room where he had landed. Several people had spent the night here, to judge by the bedding on the floor, but the room was empty now, the door in the opposite wall ajar. He crossed to it and looked out onto a gallery that ran the length of a cavernous, gloomy hall. It reminded him of the great house at Umtúshta, except that it wasn’t half in ruins; but that didn’t improve it as much as you would expect.

He could hear voices from below, where the members of the household who were awake must be gathered. At the sound of stair-treads creaking, he shrank back out of sight in the doorway, but in another moment he saw Atari appear at the head of the stairs to the gallery. He couldn’t think of a better person to encounter on a stealth mission than a smart, plucky little girl who liked hide-and-seek and spoke sign language. So far, his luck was holding.

“My lord, we caught one of the assassins,” said the guard who had put his head in at the open front of Vanu’s tent.

Vanu swung his legs off the camp bed and was on his feet in one motion, all weariness forgotten.

“Which one?”

“The, uh, the big one. He says it was the little one who was really after you, and that he stopped him—the big one stopped the little one.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Vanu muttered. “Where is he?”

“The big one, my lord?”

“Yes, the big one—I know no one knows where the little one is.”

“He’s down the south side of camp where we—uh, well, where he turned himself in, matter of fact, my lord.”

Vanu knew he should say, “Bring him to me,” and sit and wait in a lordly manner, but he didn’t feel like it. Along with all the other things he’d been feeling since he learned about the attack on Manáshta, he’d been impatient. Since Artayarasha was captured, it had only gotten worse. He wanted to be doing something.

The captured assassin was sitting outside a tent on the edge of the camp, where he seemed to have made some friends already. Someone had given him a cup of beer and a dish of cold meat which he was eating hungrily. He was a young Hawakhaba man with short, straw-coloured hair. His injured leg had been neatly bandaged with his own sash.

The men around him scrambled up and started to drag the prisoner to his feet when Vanu arrived. Vanu motioned impatiently at them all to sit. He didn’t sit himself.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Deru from Khorutí, my lord.”

“Came here to kill me?”

“Yes, my lord—those were my orders. I’m—I was—in the Order of the Sworn Defenders. I was raised in it since I was twelve, me and my brother. But I’m Hawakhaba at heart, and I wasn’t really going to kill you. It was … my partner. He’s the one who … ”

Maybe it was the way Vanu was glaring at him that made the boy falter in his story. One of the men who’d heard it already was quick to come to his aid.

“He’s the really dangerous one, my lord—that’s what Deru here said. Moves like a shadow, never misses his target, strikes when you⁠—”

“Enough,” Vanu growled. He looked at the prisoner. “Did he tell you where he was going?”

“No, my lord.” He hesitated, glancing at the men around him. “He … he did say that you might not believe me, my lord. He said to tell you that he was the real assassin—which he, which I did—but that you might not believe me, so … ”

“Might not?” Vanu repeated furiously. “Fuck. If he knows that … ”