Marie Brennan - Doppelganger

Her personal quarters had to be upstairs, then, as Mirage had expected. They headed for the narrow staircase that arced gracefully up from the sitting room.

When she was almost to the second floor, Mirage stopped.

She could feel Eclipse freeze behind her. “Don’t worry,” she said, speaking for the first time since they had entered the house. “I think I’ve found something, is all.”

She lifted her right foot very cautiously from the step it had just come to rest on. Reaching down with one gloved finger, she touched the nails that held the board in place. They showed patches of brighter metal as if they’d been hammered recently. And the board, when she pressed gently on it, gave beneath her hand.

Four steps in sequence showed the same. Mirage looked to Eclipse for confirmation; he nodded, and she stamped on the lowest one. It splintered beneath her foot without much force.

Eclipse moved up beside her and examined one of the fragments. “Termite damage.”

“But not accidental.” Not with those nails recently hammered in. Mirage glanced at the line of the staircase, calculating. “We were going slowly. Someone at normal speed, especially if they weighed enough—” She put one hand on the banister, heard it creak.

Eclipse bent to examine the near end of that section. “Some nails missing. This gives way, and she falls to her death. Or so our assassin friend hoped. He’s running a risk, though—Tari-nakana would have looked a little accident-prone, after the horse and then this.”

“But lucky for us, he didn’t have a chance to come back and replace the nails and the original boards.” Mirage broke out the other three damaged steps. She and Eclipse had to edge their way past the gap along the wall, but it was safer than risking that they might forget where the trap was. And the rest of the staircase was safe.

They found the upstairs destroyed.

No trap had gone off there; the chaos they found had been caused by someone searching Tari-nakana’s belongings. Whoever it was had been thorough, if not particularly methodical. Papers were strewn everywhere. Mirage and Eclipse picked their way through the mess, not disturbing anything yet. No part of the bedroom, bath, or study had remained untouched; even floorboards and pieces of wall had been torn out.

“Well,” Mirage said at last, “someone certainly didn’t care if we found this .”

“Must have happened recently, too,” Eclipse said. “Our contact would have mentioned it, otherwise.”

Mirage crouched to scan the scattered papers, then picked up a single sheet. Under it lay a small pile of ash. “Whoever it was already burned at least one thing.”

Eclipse glanced out the window at the rapidly lightening sky. “It’s almost dawn. I say we pull back to the woods. We can watch the house in turn and get some rest, then come back when it’s dark again and search this mess.”

Assuming there’s anything left to find . Mirage sighed, but her interest was piqued. Who was responsible for this destruction? The assassin? Or someone else?

“Agreed,” she said at last. “We’ll come back at dusk.”

Mirage took the first watch again, but this time she explored a bit. She never went far enough to miss anything that might happen at the house, but she did climb up to the valley’s lip, to where it ended abruptly in a crumbling cliff. From there she could see down into a lower, wider valley, more sparsely forested, with fields between patches of trees. Just before noon she saw figures out there, too far to be distinguished. She guessed them to be Cousins, farming the land.

Watching them drive a wagon across the valley, Mirage found herself grinning. People thought her one of those creatures? A tame pet of the witches? Not for all the money in the world. There was a reason she had chosen not to train at Cloudhawk or Stoneshadow. Mirage would no more want to be bound to a single employer than she would want to live her whole life in the same place.

The Cousins’ situation seemed even creepier. In her few encounters with them over the years, they’d hardly spoken. Maybe their reticence only applied in front of strangers, but still—where did they come from? There were a dozen popular answers to that, but no proof. Did the witches really build them out of twigs and hair? Or were they the revived bodies of dead witches? She’d never seen a male Cousin, any more than she’d seen a male witch; either they never had sons, or they kept them all hidden here, in their home domain. Maybe as one of her three boons, when she finished this commission, she could ask their employer. Despite trying to stay mostly away from witches, she was sometimes curious about them.

Not long after that she returned and woke Eclipse, then lay down to rest. Her sleep was even lighter than usual; her nerves were tight enough that it was all she could manage. She didn’t mind. This edge of excitement was what she had been lacking.

In the late afternoon Eclipse nudged her awake and offered her a meal of bread, raisins, and cold sausage. They ate in silence, then waited for the sun to set.

“I’m leaning toward Wolfstar,” Eclipse said as they waited.

Mirage nodded. “I am, too. The pattern seems like them, with things ‘accidentally’ failing—the banister, the step, the girth strap. A Stoneshadow would have used poison, I think.”

“You’re probably right. Which means we can tentatively take the domain rulers off the suspect list. They all have bonded assassins; they would have used them.”

“True enough. And a pity, too.” Eclipse raised an eyebrow, and she elaborated. “We know who employs Stone-shadows. So find the assassin, and you find the employer, and vice versa. It might have made things easier.”

“Yes. And there’s an unpleasantly large number of people left to suspect—pretty much any person or group of people who could afford to hire a Wolfstar.”

“On the other hand, it does make some things simpler.”

“Like what?”

“Repercussions. We can worry less about having to call Hunt on a Lord or Lady.”

Eclipse looked puzzled. “You did that before, didn’t you, with Kobach?”

“That was different. He was a usurper, and by the time I was hired all his allies had abandoned him. So that was less tricky. But we have no idea what the politics are here—why Tari-nakana was assassinated in the first place. I’m just as glad the employer is someone less influential than a Lord.”

“I don’t know about influential—there are some merchant consortia that have more clout than their supposed ‘rulers.’”

Mirage rose and dusted off her hands. “We’ll worry about that if we come to it. If we don’t start searching that mess, it’ll be a moot point. We won’t know who’s behind it anyway. Let’s go.”

Searching Tari-nakana’s private rooms was a frustrating task. Mirage was not certain what she was looking for, or even if there was anything to find; she knew all too well that whoever had ransacked the place had probably taken or destroyed everything important. Assuming they had found anything. Assuming there had been anything to find.

They split up the task; Mirage searched the bedroom and the bath, while Eclipse took the study. When they finished, they would switch and search again, each hoping to find something the other had missed the first time around.

It promised to be a long and tedious night.

Mirage checked the clothes first, examining them by the light of her shuttered thieves’ lantern, piling each garment into the corner as she finished with it. They had not been treated with anything as far as she could tell; perhaps the staircase had been the assassin’s last planned trick.

She headed for the bath next, looking again for assassin’s traps. She found nothing beyond a palatial setup powered by spells that provided heated, running water. Moral superiority and envy warred with one another in Mirage’s heart; envy won out. It would be nice to always have a hot bath. She frequently had to make do wife streams, snowmelt as often as not.