House of Shadows(45)
Taudde silently uncorked one of the bottles on the shelf in front of him and sniffed at its contents. Something sharp, astringent… familiar. He identified the smell after a moment: a cleaning solution used to remove glues and waxes from a craftsman’s hands. He put the cork back in the bottle and set the bottle back on the shelf, then picked up a second bottle. This one contained a heavily viscous oil used to cure certain kinds of reeds and light woods. He hesitated over this bottle, but then put it back and selected a third.
There were mysterious scraping sounds, wood against wood, which after a moment Taudde identified as the sound of shutters being opened… It occurred to him, belatedly, that he had forgotten to close the shutters over the window above the table. He cursed inwardly, listening to the approaching steps. And the pause in those steps. The man had just noticed the open shutters, Taudde surmised. Either the proprietor was asking himself how he’d managed to forget to close them the previous evening, or else he was asking himself whether he’d forgotten. Probably he was also noticing the smell of burning lamp oil; possibly he was even reaching out to touch the lamp and confirm that it was still hot from recent burning… Who knew what else Taudde had altered and then forgotten, which the shop proprietor would instantly notice?
Taudde uncapped the third bottle. The scent of this one’s contents was heady and strong: rosemary oil, used to keep the skin of an instrumentalist’s hands supple. Perfect. Taudde splashed the oil generously across two wooden blanks, set them alight with his candlelighter as the scent of rosemary rose around him, and threw both blanks high over the shelves toward the back of the shop.
The clatter and alarmed gasp that resulted was gratifying, but Taudde did not stay to listen. It wouldn’t take the man long at all to put out the fires; unlike the curing oil, rosemary oil wouldn’t burn with any great vigor. He ducked low around the other end of the shelves and sprinted for the door.
It was locked. Taudde, not expecting this, was momentarily too startled to do anything but jerk on the handle. Ominous sounds behind him indicated the shop’s proprietor might already have dealt with the little fires and be heading through the clutter toward the front of the shop. Taudde found his flute in his hand. The temptation to simply use sorcery to slip across distance and out of peril was overwhelming.
But if he used sorcery here, and the shop’s proprietor realized it—and if the man knew his own stock well enough to guess what Taudde had made—he might even be perceptive enough to put the pieces together after Taudde’s pipes were put to the use for which he’d made them. The risk was impossible, but the heavy door wasn’t going to yield to any simple blow, either. From a table near the door, Taudde swept up the heavy brass statue of a rearing horse, spun back toward the door, took the one long step required, and slammed the statue end-on directly against the lock. He hid a short, whistled, precisely calculated melodic phrase in the crash the statue made as it struck the door, and the lock shattered. One more blow and the door was open, and Taudde was through it on that instant and sprinting down the wide street.
Twenty feet, thirty, forty and he could at last cut sideways down a different street—he threw a look over his shoulder as he ran and glimpsed the proprietor just emerging from his shop. Not likely the man had gotten much of a look at Taudde—he thought—and in the wide, empty streets of the early-morning Paliante, he now had the space he needed for proper sorcery. Though hardly the breath he needed to play himself out of the Paliante and across Lonne, straight back into the safety of his rented house. Relative safety. Taudde played the merest whisper of inattention and invisibility as he slipped past Nala and Benne and up the stairs into his own room. Then, shivering, he dropped his flute into its pocket, closed his shutters against the brilliance of the morning, and collapsed to sit on the floor next to his bed. For a while, he did nothing but sit there, his head tilted back against the mattress and his eyes closed. Then, eventually, he took out the two sets of twin pipes he’d made—at such unexpected hazard, and carrying worse hazard within their seeming innocence—and laid them out on the floor next to his knee.
The pipes were beautiful. A fine example of the bard’s craft. Taudde had made too many sets of pipes to recall, but he couldn’t remember when he’d made better. But he could see the death they carried within their craftsmanship, and he could hardly stand to look at them.
CHAPTER 7
Stepping out of darkness, stepping into remembered light, Nemienne found herself in the middle of the long gallery that ran along the back of her father’s house. She turned in a bewildered circle, for that first moment not trusting that she had come home. Her eyes were dazzled by the light that filled the gallery from the eight lanterns that hung on hooks from the ceiling.