The Hidden City

it, and we’d better not risk having some sentry up there hear the hook banging on the stones.’ He led them back along the alley to the cul-de-sac where the palace wall butted up against the imposing fortifications separating the compound from the rest of the city.
    ‘How high would you say it is?’ Kalten asked, squinting upward. It was strange to see Kalten’s face again after all the weeks it had been disguised. Sparhawk tentatively touched his own face and immediately recognized the familiar contours of his broken nose.
    ‘Thirty feet or so,’ Bevier replied softly to Kalten’s question.
    Mirtai was examining the angle formed by the joining of the two walls. ‘This won’t be very difficult,’ she whispered.
    ‘The whole structure’s poorly designed,’ Bevier agreed critically.
    ‘I’ll go up first,’ Talen said.
    ‘Don’t do anything foolish up there,’ Mirtai cautioned.
    ‘Trust me.’ He set his foot up on one of the protruding stones of the outer wall and reached for a hand-hold on the palace wall. He went up quickly.
    ‘We’ll check for sentries when we get up there,’ Mirtai quietly told the others. ‘Then we’ll drop a rope down to you.’ She reached up and began to follow the young thief up the angle between the two walls.
    Bevier leaned back and looked upward. ‘The moon’s all the way up now,’ he said.
    ‘Thinkest thou that it might reveal us?’ Xanetia asked him.
    ‘No, Anarae. We’ll be climbing the north side of the tower, so we’ll be in shadow the whole way to the top.’
    They waited tensely, craning their necks to watch the climbers creeping upward.
    ‘Somebody’s coming!’ Kalten hissed. ‘Up there—along the battlements!’
    The climbers stopped, pulling back into the shadows of the sharp angle between the two walls.
    ‘He’s got a torch,’ Kalten whispered. ‘If he holds it out over those battlements—’ he left it hanging.
    Sparhawk held his breath.
    ‘It’s all right now,’ Bevier said. ‘He’s going back.’
    ‘We might want to deal with him when we get up there,’ Kalten noted.
    ‘Not if we can avoid it,’ Sparhawk disagreed. ‘We don’t want somebody else to come looking for him.’
    Talen had reached the battlements. He clung to the rough stones for a moment, listening. Then he slipped over the top and out of sight. After several interminable moments, Mirtai followed him. Sparhawk and the others waited in the darkness. Then Mirtai’s rope came slithering down the wall.
    ‘Let’s go,’ Sparhawk said tensely. ‘One at a time.’
    The building-blocks were of rough, square-fractured basalt, and they protruded unevenly from the walls, making climbing much simpler than it appeared. Sparhawk didn’t even bother to use the rope. He reached the top and clambered over the battlements. ‘Do the sentries have any kind of set routine up here?’ he asked Mirtai.
    ‘It seems that each one has his own section of wall,’ she replied. ‘The one at this end doesn’t walk very fast. I’m guessing, but I’d say that it’ll be a quarter of an hour before he comes back.’
    ‘Is there any place where we can take cover before then?’
    ‘There’s a door in that first tower,’ Talen said, pointing at the squat structure rising at the end of the parapet. ‘It opens onto a stairwell.’
    ‘Have you taken a look at the back wall yet?’
    Talen nodded. ‘There’s no parapet along that side, but there’s a ledge a couple of feet wide where the outer wall joins the back of the palace. We’ll be able to make our way along that until we get on that central tower. Then we get to start climbing.’
    ‘Does the sentry look back there when he reaches this end of the parapet?’
    ‘He didn’t last time,’ Mirtai said.
    ‘Let’s look at that stairwell, then,’ Sparhawk decided. ‘As soon as the others are up, we’ll hide in there until the sentry reaches this end and starts back. That should give us a half-hour to crawl along that ledge to the central tower. Even if he looks around the corner next time, we should be out of the range of his torch by then.’
    ‘He’s right on top of these things, isn’t he?’ Talen said gaily to Mirtai.
    ‘What is this boy’s problem?’ Sparhawk demanded of the golden giantess.
    ‘There’s a certain kind of excitement involved in this, Dorlin’,’ Mirtai replied. ‘It sets the blood to pounding.’
    ‘Dorlin’?’
    ‘Professional joke, Sparhawk. You probably wouldn’t