Casket of Souls

corridor after them, club at the ready. “Get out of here, the pair of you, before you get your heads stove in!”
    Other men were emerging from other rooms, some of them armed. Micum and Alec beat an ignominious retreat back to the street, but with the knowledge that the old woman had eluded them.
    “Go on, git!” the man shouted down from his room, shaking his fist. “I’ll have the bluecoats on you!”
    “Damnation!” Micum muttered as they hurried off the way they’d come. “Seregil isn’t going to like this.”
    As they rounded the corner behind the house they verynearly collided with the man himself, who was carrying a basket containing a few bruised pears and pippins.
    Seregil noted their expressions and Micum’s torn garment. “I take it things didn’t go well.”
    “I doubt she was in there in the first place,” Alec growled. The man with the pipe who’d given them directions was nowhere in sight.
    “Did you see a blond man with a bandaged head, by any chance?” Seregil asked.
    “Yes. He told us—” Alec gave him a rueful look. “Blond hair! Damn, do you think he was a raven?”
    “He was someone who didn’t want to linger,” Seregil told him. “I was at the back of the building, trying to find my man, who’d slipped down this direction, and saw One Eye climbing out of an upstairs window and up the back stair to the roof like a scalded cat. By the time I got up there he’d disappeared among the chimney pots and gables. I cast around but couldn’t find any sign of him.”
    “And the masked swordsman?” asked Micum.
    “My guess is he’s not only the guardian, but the lookout. It’s no wonder they scarper off so quickly. They’re certainly good at evading the quarantines here, too.”
    “What about the old woman?” Alec asked impatiently. “If she didn’t crawl out a window, where did she go?”
    “She’s most likely still in there.” Seregil hefted his basket on one hip.
    “And where did you get those?” asked Alec.
    “I made a street seller very happy. Stay here. I’ll go take a look. You keep an eye on the back of the house.” With that, Seregil sauntered off around the corner, calling out his wares.
    He was gone a long time, but when he returned Alec knew at a glance that he’d been as unsuccessful as they’d been at anything but selling fruit. He had a smudge of dirt beside his nose and a few cobwebs caught on his hat brim.
    “Well?” Micum asked.
    Seregil sighed and tossed the basket away. “I’ve had the life story of half the tenants, but no word of the woman and no one will own up to knowing anything about the ravens. Ieven managed to sneak up in the attic and down into the cellar, but there’s no sign of her.”
    “Damn!” Alec growled. “Could she have gotten out the back without you seeing her?”
    “I don’t think so. This is a blind alley, so I’d have met her coming out. Unless she went over the roof, too. Pretty spry for an old girl. And cunning. I’m developing a certain grudging admiration for these people. They’re tricky, these ravens, and they’re smart.”
    They wandered among the tenements and markets for the rest of the afternoon, and returned to the Stag and Otter in defeat.
    “We don’t even know how many of them there are,” Micum said from the bedroom as he washed his face and changed clothes.
    Still in his woman’s kit, Seregil sat in one of the hearth armchairs, tapping one foot restlessly against the ash shovel. “We’ve heard of a young, one-legged man, seen a blond beggar, and seen the old man and woman. She interests me the most, with all those things on her belt.”
    “I still feel like a fool for being taken in,” Alec said glumly. “And we paid the bastard to gull us, too.”
    Micum ruffled Alec’s hair as he joined them in the sitting room. “Worth it, to have another of them to recognize. And this is the closest we’ve gotten to them so far.”
    Seregil slid from his chair suddenly and rummaged under the couch until he found a large rolled city map tied up with a green ribbon. Blowing the dust off it, he carried it to the table and unrolled it, weighting the edges down with books already lying around on the table and chairs.
    As the others watched he placed pennies on the Lower City, the southeast section of the Ring, the slums north of the Temple Precinct, the Street of Lights, and the warren of twisting streets behind the inn.
    “See the pattern?” he asked. “They get pushed out of one area by