Chapter 378 - 378: The Stacks

The flour smell rolled out thick.

From the gap, a man's voice spoke at a normal volume, like he was standing in a storeroom and not inside a wall.

"You can leave the craftsman out here. She has done enough. The rest of you can come through. I oiled the latch in the annex, as I said I would. Guests should be asked."

Mesterica did not answer him.

She slashed the dark once to prove there was no neck in reach, then kicked the broken panel shut.

Erna nailed a slat across it hard enough to split the wood.

"Talk through that," Erna said at the board. "I'm not climbing in after you."

The voice laughed under the slat, still ordinary.

"You pointed the bell. That was the work. This is only the house noticing itself. Lord Rigel, your iron is cold because it already did what iron does. You can stop carrying it like a wound."

Rigel put his palm on the slat.

"Come out on this floor. Hands first. You get one chance to have a body."

"I have several."

Footsteps went away inside the wall, unhurried.

A second pair followed, lighter, then faded.

Rigel did not chase the second pair down a hole.

He had already made that mistake on a road.

Cynthia shut the dormitory window and locked it.

"We clear this floor and the next. Then we brick every false panel Erna marked. If we chase him in the wall he picks the split."

"Agreed," Mesterica said.

They swept the rest of the landing.

A privy.

A linen closet.

A narrow room with a cracked mirror and a washbasin ringed in dried film.

An adult woman sat on the privy floor with her skirts around her knees and her back to the wall.

She looked up when the lamp hit her.

Village age.

Work hands.

Eyes wet and furious in a human way.

"Don't," she said at once. "If I start asking about rooms, hit me. I told myself that before you opened the door. I used to scrub this floor. I came back this morning because I remembered the soap. Then I remembered too much else and I hid in here like a coward."

Rigel stopped in the doorway.

"Name."

"Tessa. Laundry. I stayed through the first month after the flag changed because someone still had to wash blood out of sheets. Then I walked out to Riverbend to see my sister. I came back knowing the annex latch sticks in damp weather. I should not know that. I have never been assigned that floor."

Cynthia crouched, not close enough to grab.

"Did anyone tell you to wait here."

"A man in the wall asked if the room had been aired. I didn't answer. I put my hands under my legs. That's all I've got. Please take me somewhere with no panels before I get polite."

That, at least, sounded like a person.

They hauled her up.

Mesterica searched her.

No knife.

No mark on the neck.

Adult, shaking, angry at herself.

Rigel sent her down with one complainer and a straight order.

"Yard office. Calden watches her mouth. If she smiles for no reason, she goes next to the quarry woman."

Tessa nodded too hard and went, gripping the rail like it might try to teach her something.

The upper floor of the stacks was quieter.

One more false panel.

Erna boarded it without comment.

No more voices.

The foot on the grit did not return.

Mesterica stood at the top window and looked at the bell frame in the north tower.

The wedges were still in.

The bronze had not turned.

"She lied," Mesterica said. "Or the aim was enough and the rest is noise."

"Both," Rigel said.

They started down.

On the second landing Erna stopped so suddenly Cynthia nearly walked into her.

"What."

Erna pointed at the laundry line.

The two smocks were gone.

The line still swung.

"They were there when we came up."

Mesterica moved first, blade out, checking the corners.

Empty.

The damp patch on the floor was new.

Rigel looked at the boarded wall.

The slat was still nailed.

The nails had beads of pale moisture on them, like the wood had started sweating.

"Down," he said. "We're not giving this stair another hour."

They came out into the court with the lamps still too many for the hour.

Calden had Tessa in the yard office.

The new courier sat against the other wall, awake, angry, still himself by the look of it.

Blade was in the doorway of the hall, on his feet, watching his daughter come back alive.

Cynthia lifted a hand so he would not ask how anyone slept.

Erna did not go to the ice and she did not go back to the chalk.

She caught Rigel's sleeve once they were under the west colonnade, out of the main line of sight, and shoved him into the shadow between two pillars.

"I am not doing another wall tonight," she said. "I am not holding another hole. I am not being discussed by a woman with a broken knee like I'm part of your kit. You want me on that tower tomorrow, you get this over with now so I can sleep without your hands still sitting on my nerves."

Rigel looked past her shoulder.

The court was not empty.

It was turned the other way.

"Here."

"Yes, here. I'm not walking into another room with panels so you can be discreet. Discreet is how that merchant talks."

He backed her to the pillar.

She yanked her own belt open before he could make it a process, work trousers shoved down just far enough, and grabbed a fistful of his coat.

"Don't you narrate. Don't you tell me I'm tight. Just do it and keep watch over my head if you're so worried about split lines."

He pushed her knee aside and shoved in.

She was already wet from the stair and angry about that, breath punching out against his throat.

No kiss.

Her eyes stayed open on the court over his shoulder.

"Faster," she said. "I can hear people. If someone turns this corner I will kill you first."

He gripped her hip and fucked her standing, short strokes because there was no room for anything else.

The pillar scraped her back through the shirt.

Erna bit his collar to keep the sound down, then spat the cloth out.

"Not the shoulder. I still need you looking like a lord in ten minutes."

"Then be quiet."

"Make me."

He clapped a hand over her mouth.

She let that exist for three thrusts, then dragged it off.

"I said I can keep my own noise down. I didn't say you get to gag me like the ice."

Her cunt clenched around him when he hit deep.

She swore into his jaw, one long filthy string, and came like that, standing, furious, one boot braced on the pillar base.

Rigel pulled out and finished on the stone beside her boot, not on her, not on the open court.

Erna yanked her trousers up and tied the belt with a hard jerk.

"That's the last time I do this in your castle. Next time you want a fight you can take it to a room I have already boarded."

"There won't be a room like that."

"Then there won't be a next time."

She said it like a price, not a vow, and walked back toward the chalk marks with her shirt tugged straight and her mouth still red.

Cynthia was waiting by the hall door.

She looked at them both, understood exactly as much as she wanted to, and did not waste time on it.

"Father wants you," she said. "The first courier asked for water and then asked whether the servant stacks faced the same way as the Marquis's west wing. Calden hit him. The man cried after, like a person. I don't know what that is worth."

Rigel wiped his hand on his coat.

"Worth a locked chair and no more water from anyone he can talk into kindness."

They went in.

Blade stood by the table with the sixth bottle still empty and the flask in reach.

His eyes were his.

His voice came out tired and direct.

"The watch on the north walk says the bell didn't turn. The watch on the stacks says a pair of laundry smocks walked off a line by themselves. I am done calling this remnants. Tomorrow you take the north tower apart from the yoke down, and if my city still has a servant passage after that, I will have the craftsman paid to close it with real brick this time, not paper."

Rigel nodded.

"At dawn. Same people. No post riders. No split."

Calden cleared his throat in the doorway.

"One more thing. Tessa from laundry asked me to write down a sentence before she forgot who wanted it written. She said, quote, the merchant wants the young lord to sleep in the annex tonight because the latch is oiled now. She told me to hit her after I wrote it. I did. She thanked me."

Mesterica's mouth went thin.

"Then nobody sleeps in the annex."

"Nobody sleeps in the annex," Blade said. "Put him in the gatehouse with two men who still complain. If the annex latch clicks by itself after midnight, let it. We are not opening that door to see if hospitality has learned our names."

Far above them, in the dark of the stacks, a wooden slat ticked once against a nail.

Not a bell.

Just a board testing whether it was still a board.

Rigel heard it and did not go back up.

"Dawn," he said again. "If it wants me in the annex tonight, that's the first reason not to go."