Chapter 16 The Lumenfast Begins

The Lumenfast opened at sundown with a bell that everyone in Vessant heard through the floors of their houses. Ophira watched it from the Fifth Terrace, standing in the middle of a crowd that smelled of wine and lamp-oil and the first fried sweets of the season, and for a little while she forgot the job and simply looked, because the city had spent a decade getting ready for this and it showed. The terraces lit from the bottom up. The lamplighters of the First Terrace had strung their cords through every window and doorway, and when the first lamps caught, the whole terrace became a shelf of orange. Then the Second, gold. Then the Third, green and gold together, and the market stalls of Lantern Row glowing like a furnace through the shutters. Up the cliff, tier by tier, the light climbed, and in the Aureole the ward-chains began to sing, that low endless note, and at the top the archmages' lamps came on all together, and the city was a ladder of fire standing on end. The crowd below her made a sound she had never heard a city make. It was almost a grief, the way a crowd sounds when it is happy past the point of safety. "Nine days," Bettany said at her elbow, in a festival coat he had stolen that morning. "Nine nights of everybody drunk and nobody watching anything except the lights. He picked his decade well." It was true. On the tenth night the Lumenfast would close, but for nine nights the most carefully guarded building in Vessant was going to be surrounded by music and fire and ten thousand people who all had a reason to be somewhere they did not belong. They spent the first night of the festival doing nothing, which was the hardest thing Ophira had ever asked of a crew. "Doing nothing is how you lose your nerve," Skellick said. "Doing something on the first night is how you get remembered," Ophira said. "Every warden in the Aureole is fresh and every one of them is watching for the thing that happens on the first night. We go up on the second, when they're bored, and again on the fifth, when they're tired, and on the tenth night we'll be one more set of faces in a crowd of ten thousand." So on the first night they walked the terraces like everyone else. They bought fried sweets and watched the lamplighters and stood in the crowd at the foot of the Aureole while the archmages' lamps came on one by one, and Bettany won four silver at cards off a warden and gave two of it back, and Cadoc stood at the edge of the crowd with his hands in his pockets and looked up at the fourth tier for a long time without saying anything. Ophira watched him do it. She had watched all of them do something like it over the first night: the small private salute that a person makes to the place they are going to rob. Skellick kept looking at the ward-chains and counting under his breath. Bettany kept checking the crowd the way he checked a card table. And Cadoc looked up at the fourth tier and then looked at the ground, and it took her most of the evening to understand that he was not looking at the place where he would steal. He was looking at the place where he had spent six years being safe. They went up the Aureole on the second night, the four of them, separately, and the wardens standing the lower tiers did not look at them once, because on the second night of the Lumenfast a young man selling tokens and a woman carrying a tray and a thin sigil-scribe with grimy hands and a clerk in his own coat were the least interesting things in the world. Cadoc got them as far as the third tier, which was where his authority ended and where a different clerk had to sign for the fourth. Bettany got them across the cloister by starting a card game and losing it loudly eight times in a row, until a warden came to watch and then to play, and while the warden played, the crew went up the service stair. Skellick was the one she worried about most, and he was the one who surprised her. He had spent the day in a rented room above a bakery, doing the last of his cutting, and when he came down to the meeting point at dusk his hands were steady for the first time in two weeks. He carried a copper plate wrapped in oilcloth and he had a burin in his shoe and a length of wire in his sleeve, and he walked up the Aureole's outer stair at the exact pace of a man who belonged on it, and when a warden glanced at him he glanced back with the mild annoyance of a clerk who has been kept waiting. At the third tier he stopped at a votive stand and lit a lamp. It was a small thing to do and it bought him thirty seconds, and in those thirty seconds he read the ward-chain above his head, and when he turned away he had the next section of the lattice in his memory. Ophira watched him from twenty paces off and thought about the man who had told her, in an unlit room off the tanner's row, that he was done being careful. He had brought the psalms book. He had not said so, and she had not asked, but she had seen the corner of it in his coat when he leaned to light the lamp, and she understood that Skellick had brought the one honest thing he owned to the job, which either meant he intended to use it or that he intended to burn it when it was over. And Skellick got them to the door. They stood in the shadow of the fourth tier's colonnade, one tier below the Reliquary, and above them the Aureole's ward-chains sang, and the lamps of the Lumenfast hung in every window in Vessant, and Ophira looked at the black iron door through the colonnade arch and understood, the way she had understood once before, three years and a lifetime ago, that the whole plan had just become real. "Two nights from now, the Sealing," she said. "Tomorrow we watch, and we sleep, and we wait. And on the tenth night we walk up those stairs while the city is looking at the sky." "And we take the Key," Bettany said. "We take the Key," Ophira said. "And everything behind it." She turned to go, and that was when she saw the clerk standing at the far end of the colonnade, alone, watching them, and not calling out. Cadoc saw him too and went white. "That's Warden Uren's secretary," he whispered. "He knows us." The clerk looked at them for a long moment across the length of the colonnade, with the lamps of the Lumenfast burning behind his head, and then he turned and walked away, unhurried, into the Aureole. He did not raise an alarm. He did not so much as look back. They did not speak until they were down on the second tier and inside the crowd. Then Cadoc said, in a voice that had gone very thin, that he had once seen the secretary take a purse from an archmage's robing room and had never reported it, because reporting it would have meant writing down that he had seen it, and a clerk who writes down what he sees does not keep his job for long. "He's like me," Cadoc said. "He's like me, and he knows I'm like him." Ophira looked back up the stair at the lit tiers of the Aureole and did not answer, because she had begun to think that Warden Uren and his secretary were playing a longer game than any of them had understood, and that the only thing more dangerous than a door that knows your name is a man who can open it without being seen to. ---