What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

and thick. The high dark hulks and swaying masts of the ships that lay anchored there were mere shadows in the night, quiet and ghostlike.
    Treading carefully over the rough weathered planks of the open dock, Sebastian crept toward the waterfront doors. They bore no padlock, but then, they were normally barred from within anyway. Reaching out, he applied just enough pressure against the first panel to tell him what he had already guessed: these doors, too, were locked.
    He could hear the slap of water beneath him, for the warehouses here, as along so many of the basins and canals lining the river, were built over the water. There would be a trapdoor in the planked floor of the warehouse to give direct access to lighters and barges. A way of entry, perhaps, but one which would give too much of the advantage to the man waiting within. Sebastian needed to find some approach that would give him a visual advantage. He needed to come in from above.
    A second set of loading doors opened from the dock to the upper floor, where a stout beam thrusting out from the wall could be used to hoist goods. But the beam was bare now of both winch and pulley, and Sebastian had no rope to climb up to it. A nearby pile of crates virtually blocked the wharf ahead of him, but they were neither near enough to the door, nor high enough to enable him to reach it. He had to find another way in.
    Retracing his steps to the front of the warehouse, he scanned the building’s flat roofline. The warehouse beside it was older and larger, but of roughly the same height. Its door, like that of the Prosperity Trading Company, was padlocked.
    Sebastian retrieved one of the broken barrels from the alley. Even empty, the iron-banded oak weighed some forty or fifty pounds. Heaving it over his head, he brought the iron edge down on the padlock once, then again, smiling grimly as he felt the lock sheer away from the door, hasp and all.
    In the stillness of the fog-shrouded night, the resultant clatter sounded unnaturally loud. Sebastian paused, his breath coming in pants as he listened to the slosh of the incoming tide against the wharfs.
    Slipping between the heavy doors, he paused again, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. It was true he could cope better than most men with the darkness of the night. But his eyes still needed some light to see, and the dense fog obliterated all hint of moon and stars, even the reflected lights of the city around them.
    He inched his way across a floor crowded with crates and barrels that perfumed the air with the heavy scents of their contents: tea from India, sables from Russia, baled cotton from the Carolinas. A faint glow showed him a central well some eight to ten feet square, faintly lit from above by a grimy skylight and edged along one side by a steep, straight stair.
    He climbed the steps in a light-footed rush that brought him to an upper floor crowded, like the one below, with packing cases and bales. Overhead, the skylight showed only as a dark gray square against the black of the ceiling. There would be tools, he knew, kept here on the upper floor by the warehouse crew. Precious minutes ticked by as he searched, first at the top of the steps, then along the unrailed edge.
    He found them at last in a wooden crate left near the front wall. Tossing aside hammers, lengths of chain, and a coil of rope, he grasped a small pry bar, which he thrust into the waistband of his breeches. Then, by shifting some of the crates, he was able to climb within an arm’s reach of the skylight.
    Set into a large raised wooden frame, the skylight was made up of some half-dozen sections hinged so that they could be raised for ventilation. Feeling along the edge, Sebastian located the clasp of the section above his head and carefully eased it open.
    Thick with the smell of sulfur and coal smoke and the scents of the sea, the night swirled in around him. Grasping the edge of the frame, Sebastian levered himself up through the small square opening and onto the roof.
    He lay still for a moment, his breath showing white as he listened to the distant boom of fireworks lost in the night. Slowly, he rolled to his feet and crossed the slate expanse to drop lightly down onto the roof of the adjoining warehouse.
    Here, the skylight glowed with a faint golden light. But as he inched toward it, he saw that the glass was too clouded and grimy to show more than the vague shapes of the objects below. There was always a chance, he knew, that