Patch led the way to a stomped, frozen-mud trail that curved through thigh-deep snow to the back of the mansion. The path ended at a service door someone propped open by shoving it into a snowdrift. He peeked around the edge, his patch whirling, then entered a hallway that had a kitchen and a vacant room opposite each other. He flashed his handheld tech light into both; broken boxes and a scattering of cracked red rock sat in the storeroom, while the kitchen had a stove and counters, but no pans, plates, utensils, or any other cookware.
“Smell that?” Jhor asked, sweeping his light across the muddy floorboards. “Honey pepper. I wonder how long the khentauree crates were here, for the scent to be that strong.”
Lapis wondered how many meals at the Night Market contained the spice, because a similar odor permeated the establishment. Apparently it was safe to eat, but she disliked consuming something that preserved metal. She needed to ask about it, the next time she ordered food there.
The hall was longer than she anticipated, with no windows or other doors, and as cold as the exterior. Blue flower wallpaper, a staple in rural mansions, sat above the dented wooden wainscotting, intact but faded with age. Tarnished sconces with flower-petal bases and stamens that formed a cage sat above their heads, and while a couple retained melted candles, none were lit.
The corridor led to a dining room with low chandeliers but no tables, chairs or sideboard, and heavy, patched drapes blocked the windows. Scuff marks disturbed the layer of dust on the wooden floor and trailed out the right-hand, arched doorway.
“Does Seeza use this mansion just for storage?” Lapis whispered.
“While her family owns a few places scattered throughout Jiy, I’m not certain this is one of them.” Patch shook his head, his light zipping around. “This mansion is so high up the mountain, it should be prime real estate for Gall’s suck-ups. Her father rents out places like this to visiting rural lords for exorbitant prices, all so they can pretend to have more metgal than they do. I can’t believe he’d leave one vacant and in this condition, even if they needed a place to store contraband.”
Narrow stairs rested just beyond the doorway straight ahead, and they cautiously proceeded up. The dust lay thick on the edges of the treads but was absent from the middle, and the railing held no powder, so someone had run their hand up it to keep balance, and recently enough the stuff had not resettled.
Patch paused on the landing, then turned left. Lapis glanced at the window opposite them; no curtains, just frosty panes that glowed orange. She hastened after her partner, disturbed; what had the battle lit on fire? Not the building? She breathed deeply; no smoke, and no explosion. Yet.
How did she continue to get into these situations?
Someone had wadded up the carpet runner and shoved it against the bottom of the wall; dust liberally coated the top, so it had been that way for a while. Random doors stood open, rectangular imprints on the wallpaper between them. Paintings must have hung there, but had long ago vanished. The sconces had taller, unlit candles, and wax leaking down the sides.
The suites were empty, with dry-mud footprints and new scratch marks leading in and out. What had they stored up there? Crates? Why cart them up to the second floor rather than leave them at ground level?
Patch paused at the last door on the right; a faint whirring came from within. He tried the knob; locked. A flare of orange came from the windows near the landing, and the panes rattled. With an annoyed grumble, her partner dug out his picks, and while not as quick as Brander or Rin, popped the lock in a few breaths.
He gripped the knob, stepped to the side, and shoved the door open. It clattered against the wall, and Lapis held her breath; the whirring, loud enough to make her ears ache, did not stop. He peeked around the corner.
“Sanna sent us,” he called.
“Humans,” came the gritty answer.
Patch entered; Lapis motioned for Jhor to follow, then brought up the rear, her skin prickling with unease.
Tables with various khentauree parts sat against the walls, many hooked up to glowing contraptions by multiple wires. A head of a similar size to Noisy rested on a metal platform, the panel across his forehead open, wires attached to blinking squares. The tech lights were the only source of illumination; candle wax had leaked over the sconces and liberally coated the dust-free floor beneath them, leaving nothing but a pudgy stub behind.
She gasped and recoiled as her partner’s light stopped on a crumpled man in a dingy brown lab coat lying below the head, facing the wall. Frozen blood trailed from a slash in his back and pooled beneath him, wide enough that if the strike had not ended him, the loss would have. Patch shuffled around the knocked-over chair and nudged him, but he did not rock.
“Frozen solid,” he murmured. She slapped a hand over her mouth; she had viewed frozen bodies before—every Grey Streets resident had—but the fact someone ended him from behind, and he did not look to have noticed, nauseated her. Who did so? Seeza’s people? Why? If her family owned the place, didn’t that mean this man had worked for her?
“Shit,” Jhor said with venom, hastening to the head. He glanced at the body, then dug into his pants pocket and withdrew a strip of leather. He knocked his hood back, smoothed his shoulder-length, brown hair and tied it in a tight tail before peering inside the opening. “ENZ?”
“Yes.” The voice held none of the expression that Ambercaast, Cloisters and Shivers khentauree possessed.
“I’m going to disconnect you. I’m assuming those asses downstairs had no idea how to do that, so left you here.”
“They were frightened,” they said.
“Yeah, you’re hooked up to an explosive.”
They were? Lapis looked at Patch; he raised an eyebrow and shrugged. Too late to back out, she supposed. They could not leave the head to suffer after making an appearance.
“Nasty work.” Jhor withdrew a metal tool with a curved head out of his inner coat pocket. “I’m going to detach the spink connection first, then work to the inner consuble. Some of this might feel odd.”
“It already feels odd.”
Patch snagged the body’s collar and tugged; the corpse did not move. Frozen to the floorboards; Lapis shoved her hand into her stomach, nausea welling. How long had he been dead? Why leave him there? Had they planned to come back for him later?
“I’ll work around him,” Jhor said, a tight fury to his words that caught her attention.
“You knew him.”
“He was a Dentherion army tech at Fort Baddach when I was deployed there. Nasty man, nasty anger, nasty research. He was too extreme, even for them, and they fired him. He swore revenge and lit the main research facility on fire—or that’s what we were told. There was a fire in the lead scientist’s lab, and I can believe he set it because payback drove his professional decisions. He was on the army’s most sought-after criminal list for a few years. They never caught him.”
“He escaped to Jiy?” Patch hmphed. “I’d have fled a lot further from Dentheria. Lanth, see if you can find any info while I check his pockets.”
Wincing, she withdrew the tech light she had yet to use, clicked it on, and examined the room. Several folders with schematics and other technical details sat on a table, but nothing else. She went back to the hall; if a man worked up there, he probably had another room for breaks. The one across from the lab had shuffle marks through the dust, so she tried the knob. It turned; a good sign. Huddling against the wall, she pushed the door open and waited; nothing happened other than the knob thumping against wood. She peeked around the frame.
Expecting a suite, surprise filled her as she studied a single bedroom the size of the lab. A narrow bedframe sat beneath a curtained window, the mattress tipped up and the fabric shredded, the quilted bedding strewn across the floor and covered with discarded, shiny clothing of nice but not fancy quality. The plain wardrobe stood open, nothing remaining inside. The functional nightstand had both drawers removed, a shattered drinking glass and candlesticks beneath it. Papers littered the floorboards; someone had not cared where they landed. The only item that remained untouched was the chest next to the wardrobe, dented but still closed. A black streak ran from the lock across the top of the flat top, so whoever attempted to get in failed.
Stepping inside, she inspected every corner. Food containers from the Bells’ riverside restaurants crowded the wastebasket, and open suitcases empty of contents sat in a pile next to it. A desk with the drawers removed and spilled, frozen ink had stained papers littering the writing surface.
“That’s a mess.”
She jumped, then whapped Patch in the gut; damn man, scaring her like that. He hugged her shoulders and bent down to flip pages over.
“Think anything’s left?” she asked.
“Probably not, but let’s hope they missed something.”
Most of the paper was blank. Some had imprints, as if the pressure applied to the page above them transferred below, and Patch took those. They dumped the garbage out; stuck to the bottom, dotted with frozen condiment stains, was a torn letter and envelope. Two addresses adorned the mail; one to a courier service in the Reeds, another from Trave. The ripped correspondence was to Ceven from Mareen, who stated in offended pride that she could simply not spend another metgal on him. He needed a real job, not a continued vacation in a forsaken backwater.
Another metgal? Forsaken backwater?
She signed it ‘your loving sister’, and Lapis had doubts about that.
Patch punched the innards of a fanny pack back inside, then held it to her; she shoved the bits inside. Good call; she refused to carry them in a pocket.
Her eyes drifted to the chest, but he shook his head. “I don’t have the equipment for a lock that’s trapped.”
Better alive than toasted.
“Jhor?” he called.
“Almost done.”
Crashing came from below, and stern shouts followed; someone must have taken shelter in the house.
They returned to the lab; the modder, humming to calm himself, removed the last of the wiring. He grabbed the head and joined them; Patch took the lead and ran on tiptoes down the hall. They reached the narrow stair as the screams of battling men echoed to them, and they scampered down with more haste than quiet. They breezed through the empty dining room, the hallway, zipped out the door and into the crisp cold of night.
Another, larger explosion came from the front, flames rising above the mansion and casting everything in orange.
They ran.
