Trapped

I wondered why these women were working at 3:45 in the morning… but maybe Xavier kept his whole household on smugglers' hours. Work at night, sleep by day.

We passed the kitchen silently, drawing no attention from either woman. Next door was a pantry and next to that, windows covered with cheap curtains-probably the servants' quarters, with the curtains put up by the servants themselves to frustrate peeping toms.

Since I couldn't see anything in those rooms, I turned my eyes to the stables that paralleled the house across a gravel yard. Two four-horse coaches were parked in the open drive-shed; I wondered if Xavier had company, or if he'd simply purchased two carriages because they were cheaper by the pair.

Finally, we reached the back of the house: the side overlooking the lake. There was little to see but a great crinkled blackness beyond the edge of the bluffs. At the mouth of the harbor below, a small lighthouse lit the water around its footings, casting a few meters of dappled dimness. Apart from that, the only hints of light on the lake were brief reflections of stars, caught for fleeting instants on vagrant ripples. The rest of the vista was dark and cold.

In contrast, the rear of Nanticook House blazed with more lamps and hearth fires-just as many here as on the side facing the road. Yet the dining room was empty, the table bare. Beyond it was another drawing room, this one equipped with a bar: dozens of bottles on display, but no sign anyone ever drank from them. No hint that guests had ever pulled the chairs into a comfortable circle, or shoved furniture aside so there'd be room to throw darts.

I was beginning to think Warwick Xavier just didn't use the bottom floor of his house. Perhaps all life took place on the top story… yet there were no lights up there at all.

The next room looked equally ignorable. I was moving along when I nearly bumped into Dreamsinger-she'd stopped and was gazing inside, her eyes narrowed. Once more I glanced into the house but saw nothing of note; yet the Sorcery-Lord was staring as if enraptured.

I looked again at the house. Immediately my eyes shifted elsewhere: the lawn, the lake, the dark upper floor, any place but the room in front of me. Closing my eyes, I couldn't even picture what was in there-just that it was utterly uninteresting, not worth my attention.

Aha. This must be the "antiscrying field" Dreamsinger had mentioned while Twinned with Hump: an enchantment that made you believe the room was boring. Nanites inside my brain were playing games with my emotions and perceptions, perhaps raising my threshold of selective inattention whenever I looked in the room's direction-suppressing visual input so that it never reached my consciousness.

But Dreamsinger obviously could resist such trickery. She strode boldly forward, toward the room's windows. Assuming it had windows. Whenever I tried to look, my gaze slid off. It was better to watch the Sorcery-Lord herself, to train my eyes on her beautiful Hafsah derriere. That kept me moving ahead, despite a growing emotional force that pushed me away, crying, "Don't waste your time, there's nothing here!" Then I passed through some invisible boundary, the edge of the antiscrying field; and I could see Dreamsinger in front of me, reaching out, her hand touching window glass.

She whispered, "Boom."

The window exploded at Dreamsinger's touch, blasting shards of glass into the room. It was a big window; it had lots of glass.

The shards slashed like shrapnel into two brawny men who stood just inside. The men didn't have a chance: they went down under the barrage, blown off their feet, sliced by glass splinters. One man collided with a heavy chair, drove it forward half a meter, then toppled off sideways… striking the floor at an angle that shoved crystal daggers deeper into his flesh. Blood gushed from a severed artery-a fountain that lasted several seconds, then subsided to a pressureless drip.

The other man landed facedown on the carpet, slivers of glass protruding from his back like needles on a porcupine. He lifted his arm feebly, reaching blindly for nothing. Beneath his tattered clothes, bony spurs pushed weakly from the raised arm, then retracted again in defeat.

The spurs showed that Hump wasn't the only smuggler with pointy augmentation. Not that the spikes seemed to do much good. The man in front of us slumped unconscious and continued to bleed from a dozen lacerations.

Suddenly, I was grabbed from behind and thrown onto the muddy soil. "Idiot," Impervia whispered, pressing her body against my spine. I opened my mouth to protest but was drowned out by an eruption of gunfire from inside the house. Oops. I'd been so busy watching men die near the window, I'd never looked farther into the room. There must have been more guards inside, beyond the blast radius of the glass. Now they were shooting in our direction: shooting at Dreamsinger alone, since the Caryatid had hit the dirt beside Impervia and me.