7th of Eylestre

Something woke me. Or, rather, nothing woke me. My sleepeasy draft had worn off, so I was simply awake. No warning, no sliding into it, just pop hello.

I stared up at my bedroom ceiling, my tired body bartering with my brain, begging for a few more hours sleep. Too late. My brain was up and racing.

With a weary sigh I threw the covers off, flopped my feet over the side of the bed and sat up. Then I groped around in the dark till I found something to pull on over my night clothes and padded down the hallway, through the kitchen and into the washroom.

I had finished tending to necessities and was about to go rummage for something to eat, then stopped, squinting into the back room.

A sliver of light glimmered along the bottom of the door to the tunnels. The wall sconces were still lit.

Someone else was up.

Probably Orrelian. The man never seemed to sleep.

If I had to be awake, I might as well find something to do. Company would be nice. I pulled the ancient metal fire door all the way open and stepped out into the cool of the tunnel, my bare footsteps silent on the gritty concrete floor as I made the trek around the corner to the gigantic storage hangar we had turned into a sparring ring, obstacle course, and strategy room.

I paused in the doorway.

It wasn't Orrelian.

A single oil lantern cast its warm glow over the map table, illuminating Arramy's face and gilding his hair a rich gold as he stared down at a group of sylvos arranged in neat lines on the table in front of him.

He was alone. With the finished sylvographs.

"What are you doing?"

The question was out of my mouth before I could stop it, flying across the distance between us like a verbal slap, suspicion ringing harsh in the silence of the hangar.

His eyes met mine. Then Arramy sat back in his chair, one eyebrow rising, that chilly gaze flicking from my head down to my feet, then back up. "I couldn't sleep," he said, simply. "What are you doing?"

I glanced down, abruptly aware that I was standing there in my summer linen night shorts and what had turned out to be one of NaVarre's long-sleeved silk shirts. The emerald green one, with the faint blue stripes. It reached nearly to my knees, and probably made me look like a child. Blast. Face warm, I pulled the shirt closer around myself, crossed my arms over my chest and managed a shrug. "I couldn't sleep either."

Arramy was watching me. Waiting.

"Are those from tonight?" I asked.

He nodded. Once.

I nodded too, then came all the way in. "Mind if I take a look?"

He shook his head, but it hadn't really been a question. I was already halfway to the table, moving swiftly, the thought that he might have been up to something blazing at the back of my mind.

All twenty of the sylvos I had takenof the little black ledger from the safe were there, as well as the rubbing from the blotter. If he was up to something, it wasn't immediately obvious. Nothing looked tampered with.

Casting a sidelong look at him, I picked up one of the sylvos.

Familiar rows of letters and numbers marched down an image of a ledger page; two letters, then a number. Some rows had only one pair. Some had four or five, spilling down into another row.

"They're coordinates," Arramy supplied. "The first letter is the latitude, second letter is longitude."

"So what are the numbers? This one here has only one digit."

"It's a quadrant reference." He leaned his rump against the map table and picked up another one of the sylvos. "The letters tell you which quadrant. The quadrants are divided into squares, and the number tells you which square. I'm guessing Razhan and his lieutenants have duplicate maps... and they aren't official city maps."

I frowned. "How can you tell?"

For answer he aimed a tired glance at the map table.

The edge of a map peeked out from under all the sylvos, pinned beneath the glass top of the map table. Judging from the number of red Xs on the glass, he had already plotted the coordinates, then wiped them off, then replotted them on a different axis.

I glanced around, taking in the collection of other map tubes propped up against the slate boards. This could very possibly take weeks to figure out. Unless... "Common factors," I whispered. "One of my father's codes used a common factor. I had to look for a single symbol or letter that was repeated from one word to the next and start solving from there. So... what is the coordinate that comes up most often?"

Arramy gave me a searching look, then his eyes narrowed, his gaze moving to a middle distance as he tsked his tongue against his teeth. Then he turned, plucked a red marking stick from the pen tray and began going over the sylvos, jotting down each coordinate on a bare patch of glass, tallying how many times that coordinate was mentioned.

I found another marking stick and picked another page of the ledger.

A few minutes later we had met in the middle.

"So... is RF67 Razhan's manor, and RC8 his warehouse... or...?" I asked slowly.

Arramy shuffled the sylvos out of the way and hunted over the streets of Northside. He made a mark on what had to be Razhan's warehouse, then began adjusting the latitude and longitude lines under the glass until RF was lined up with that mark. Then he found the RC quadrant and lifted a doubtful eyebrow.

RC8 was on an empty stretch of bank across the river on the Tetton side.

He tried again with the next heavily used coordinate and got what was probably a grain field south of Vreis. Another point landed smack in the center of the forest north of Razhan's estate.

While Arramy worked, I began wandering around the map table, looking at it from different angles.

As I reached the other end, my gaze fell on the rubbing of the desk blotter. There were a few words here and there, bits and pieces of the letter Razhan must have been writing while I was under the couch. A signature. Some numbers.

Under the words, though, lay a pattern of faint, hashmarked lines, a pale suggestion against the dark blue of the rubbing chalk. I frowned. Whatever they were, they had been scribed frequently enough at one point to stay on the blotter.

Something about the lines caught at me more than Razhan's recent scribblings.

Arramy stopped marking coordinates and let out a frustrated breath through his nose. He was about to start readjusting the latitudes and longitudes again when I burst out with, "Wait." I looked at him, then lifted the rubbing. "Rails."

For a moment he glared at the rubbing. Then those grey eyes rose to meet mine, liquid pewter in the lantern light. He didn't look away as I came around to his side of the table and spread the tissue-thin paper out on the glass in front of him. My cheeks went warm, something unraveling in my middle when he didn't break that unnerving study of my face while I pointed at the patterns in the lines, my voice gone oddly raspy. "See... how these are grouped here... and you could almost put the river right here...."

He hadn't moved, and I had to tilt my head back to look up at him again.

An unreadable expression etched his face. For a moment, a strange, nameless tension stretched between us. A muscle flickered briefly in his jaw. Then, slowly, he took the rubbing paper from me and slid it beneath the glass of the map table.

Drawing a breath, I took a step back, watching as he adjusted the table's backlights and the rubbing became a translucent overlay. It wasn't perfect, but it matched up in too many places to be a coincidence. There was a line running straight in from the northeast to the X above Razhan's estate before curving west toward Lodes, and another tracking from there down to an unmarked point on the river. None of the lines crossed the water, but one stretched in from the east and met the X on the Tetton riverbank, and another came up from the south to that X in the farmland. The warehouse and the manor sat squarely in the middle of it all like a pair of spiders at the heart of a sprawling, disjointed web

"Well, that explains a few things," Arramy said quietly. "A private rail."

I bit my lower lip. "Should we go wake Orrelian? He'll want to see this."

Arramy shook his head. "It'll keep for a few more hours. Let him sleep." A sardonic grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Someone has to." He picked up his red marking stick and bent over the table.

"What are you going to do?" 

"Plot the rest of these," he muttered, marking another X on the glass. Then he glanced at me. "You should get some more sleep yourself, while you can."

I crossed my arms over my chest, upper lip curling in a sneer. "Trust me, there isn't enough sleepeasy in the world to make that happen." And I am not going to just lie there in the dark... thinking...

Arramy regarded me for a second longer, then went back to plotting coordinates.

The supply hangar fell quiet.

After a moment, I grabbed my box of locks from the workbench and padded over to the overstuffed armchair Marin had brought from the apartment so she could observe in comfort while I stumbled through her obstacle courses. I flopped into the spongy old cushions, dug my lockpicks and blindfold out of the box, and started practicing on a Tarman Tri-Level bolt lock.

I had just finished popping the second tumbler into its slot when Arramy's rough brogue broke the silence.

"He's alive... NaVarre. He's out there, somewhere." Then he cleared his throat.

I squinted inside the fabric of my blindfold, then lowered the bolt and tugged Cog's handkerchief up onto my forehead, brow gathered as I gave Arramy a searching stare. "How can you possibly know that?"

He jerked a shoulder. "Bit of an educated guess. He's been gone long enough that... ah... it's probably safe to say he's been captured. But he knows too much, so they'll keep him alive as long as he doesn't give them what they want. If he breaks, they won't have any reason to keep him anymore... They'll make sure we know he's dead. Use it as a demoralizing tactic. So... since his body hasn't turned up yet, he's, ah... he's no doubt still alive." Arramy broke off abruptly and closed his eyes, wincing slightly. Then he went on with, "I ah... I just thought... Maybe it was keeping you awake." He shut his mouth in a firm line, teeth tight together, and went back to marking another coordinate.

Incredulous, I followed all of that, eyes wide, lips pursed, head tilted. When he stopped, I blinked. "And... That was supposed to make me feel better?"

He went still, his gaze flying to NaVarre's green shirt, then up to my face before shifting quickly away again. "Aye... well... I don't have his fine way with words." He looked down at the red marking stick in his hands. "You two spent so much time together, you, ah... You must miss him."

I scratched absently at the side of my head. "A little," I muttered. It wasn't a lie. I missed NaVarre the Pirate. It was proving more difficult to miss the man who left me inside a building he was planning to blow up – about as difficult as forgiving the man who told the Coventry that my father had booked passage on the Galvania. There was a dichotomy, there, a split between the good and the bad. Holding the two in my head at the same time wasn't always easy to do.

My throat ached.

I swallowed hard and pulled my blindfold back down.