“No, you won’t,” Magiere whispered.
She never saw the driver’s face clearly. The instant his head whipped toward her voice, she braced her foot against a front wheel spoke and lunged upward, slamming her fist into the side of his head.
His head whipped the other way as he toppled, the force sliding his body across the bench. As he tumbled off the wagon’s far side, beyond Magiere’s sight, Osha arrived. He stood over the driver, looking down at the man, as she came around to join him.
Magiere snatched the back of the driver’s heavy canvas coat with one hand. Osha just stared at her. She ignored him and dragged the limp man to the side of the street and dropped him under a shop awning. Osha was still watching her as Leanâlhâm and Chap came out of the alley.
Chap began rumbling at her.
“Get ready,” Magiere told Leanâlhâm. She still didn’t want Leanâlhâm in the middle of all this, but events were now in motion.
Magiere headed to the wagon’s rear and pulled back the tarp covering the load. She expected to find crates of goods, food, perhaps blankets, or even bundles of paper and racks of ink for the sages. She found something else.
The wagon was piled with folds of heavy canvas tarps or tents, coils of rope, lanterns, and a few hand axes. The nearest cask smelled of salt pork or jerky. At that, she jerked a canvas sack open, expecting to find dried peas or beans, or even just potatoes. It was filled with iron spikes, each having a side hook for lashings.
She stared in puzzlement at the piled canvas again, hesitating as Leanâlhâm crept in beside her. Why would the guild go to such trouble to bring this stuff in under the cover of night? Why would they need these things at all? It made no sense.
“Quick,” Leanâlhâm whispered. “We must go.”
Magiere pulled the cask out, tossed it aside, and began shoving other items out of the way to make a space.
“Get in,” she said.
Leanâlhâm climbed into the little hole Magiere made for her. Every instinct in Magiere rushed up, telling her to pull the girl out of there.
“It is all right,” Leanâlhâm said, reading her face.
“You don’t do anything other than what Leesil told you,” Magiere answered harshly. “Once you’re back out, you dive for cover at the first sign of trouble. You let Osha handle anything until Chap and I catch up. Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” Leanâlhâm answered, nodding as she leaned back among the cargo.
Magiere pulled the tarp back into place and then paused as she grabbed its corner lashing. In only a blink, she jerked the cord with all her strength, and it snapped off short on the wagon wall’s edge. Whoever unloaded the wagon would only find it broken. Should Leanâlhâm be forced to hide again on the way out, at least the tarp couldn’t be tied down to hamper her.
Magiere rounded to the front as Osha climbed onto the wagon’s bench and took the reins. He looked down intently at her and then glanced over his shoulder to where Leanâlhâm hid.
“I ... I protect,” he said.
“You’d better,” Magiere answered, handing up his bow and quiver.
Osha stored his weapon under the bench at his feet, and Magiere stepped back, with Chap at her side.
“We’ll be watching for you,” she said.
Osha nodded, pulling his hood farther forward, and the wagon rolled off, heading for the loop of street around the guild’s castle, still blocks away.
Chap whined once in agitation. Magiere dropped a hand on his head, stroking his ears once.
“That was the easy part,” she said. “We’ll have plenty to do soon.”
Or so she hoped. Magiere tried not to think what might happen to any of them, including Leesil, if all of this didn’t go as he’d planned.
Chane, Shade, and Ore-Locks hid around the corner where Wall Shop Row met Old Procession Road. They were only a block from the guild’s bailey gate. Strangely, Chane was not even nervous.
They had gone over and over their plan. He was confident he would have Wynn out of the guild this very night. With that in mind, he unwrapped a bit of burlap that held something Ore-Locks had purchased for him that day.
Chane took out a small sandglass with a line drawn partway down around its upper half. He shook it briefly, until all the sand fell into the bottom, and then he set it down before Shade.
“As I said,” he told her. “When I turn this over, wait until the sand fills the bottom to the mark.”
She wrinkled a jowl in annoyance and huffed once.
Perhaps Chane had repeated this too often, and he looked to Ore-Locks. “Ready?”
Ore-Locks nodded, the tail of his bound red hair bobbing once.
Chane flipped the sandglass over. He turned quickly, running south along Wall Shop Row with Ore-Locks behind him. They left Shade alone with the sand already falling.
One block down, Chane swerved into a cutway between the buildings. He had already scouted this path two nights before. It was one of the only cutways where the backside of Wall Shop Row opened through the remaining sections of the “outer” bailey wall of the old guild castle.
There, at the cutway’s back mouth, Chane and Ore-Locks stopped and crouched low. They peered out and across the Old Bailey Road loop at the inner bailey wall, scanning its top in both directions for any signs of city guards walking their circuits.
Chane believed he had timed this correctly, but was not taking any chances.
“Clear,” he finally whispered, and scurried across and along the wall toward the bailey gate. When they reached the indented corner where the wall met the gate’s nearside barbican, they stopped and listened.
Chane heard the guard inside the portcullis shifting on his feet from a long night of standing.
“Remember to look for the glove,” Chane whispered.
“Of course,” Ore-Locks answered, sounding almost as annoyed as Shade.
Once Chane and Ore-Locks were inside the courtyard, there would be no further chance for second checks. The plan then was for Chane to enter the keep’s main building and make certain they had a clear path to the new library building at the back. With Captain Rodian in charge of guild security, there was no telling what safeguards he might have placed inside the main keep. Chane needed to check before Wynn was brought through there.
At the same time, Ore-Locks would go to Wynn’s room and bring her quietly out and through the main keep to meet Chane in the library. After that, escape was a simple matter of going out a third-floor window. Chane would help Wynn scale down the back of the bailey wall.
But they had also planned for failure. If, for any reason, Chane could not get to the library and could not risk crossing the courtyard again, he would simply toss a glove outside the keep’s main doors. If Ore-Locks spotted the glove in bringing out Wynn, he would have to try to take Wynn out by a secondary route.
Chane hoped that would not happen as he looked up the bailey wall and grimaced. Their only method for getting into the keep was another part he did not like.
“I will make it quick,” Ore-Locks whispered. “But getting through the keep’s own thick wall will be even less pleasant.”
Chane nodded, and he took Ore-Locks’s thick hand. There was an advantage to having a stonewalker on his side.
“Close your eyes if you have to,” Ore-Locks said.
Chane wrinkled his nose an instant before Ore-Locks heaved him forward.
Dänvârfij crouched with Én’nish on the rear of a rooftop where Wall Shop Row met Old Procession Road leading up to the bailey gate. She stared down in puzzlement.
“Who are they?” Én’nish whispered.
Dänvârfij shook her head.
They had been standing watch on the front of the small castle when a tall, pale human, a red-haired dwarf, and the black majay-hì had appeared up the mainway and crouched around a corner in hiding. The two men had run south out of sight along the row of shops. It was not long before they reappeared southward, scurried across the street that looped around the guild, and crouched in hiding next to the southern barbican of the bailey gate.