Thief's Covenant (A Widdershins Adventure) Read Online Free PDF Page B

minutes—more than a few, if truth be known—she simply lay, gasping as she regained her composure. She quirked her lips in annoyance at the question she felt from her divine passenger.
    “Maybe, but this way was quicker,” she whispered.
    Olgun's response was amused, and more than a little teasing.
    “No, I did not do that just to prove I could!” she snapped at him.
    Some emotions were more easily translated into words than others. The one he projected now was definitely the equivalent of, “Yeah, right.”
    Grumbling, Widdershins rose to her feet—ignoring the twinges in her abdomen—and moved across the rooftops. A step to this roof, a leap to that, a quick scamper up a nearby wall…. Perhaps a quarter of an hour later, she settled on a building across a wide lane from the gates of the Doumerge Estates.
    The boulevard was the border between two worlds. Behind, the square, squat buildings of the district's shops. They, like most of the city's newer construction, were of cheap stone or haphazardly painted wood, all business. Before her, a row of manors. Sloped roofs, ornate cornices and buttresses, fluted gutters and snarling gargoyles, all in marble or whitewashed stone, all old enough to have acquired an arrogance utterly independent of those who dwelt within. The straight lines and angles of poverty facing off against the graceful arches of wealth.
    Widdershins had dwelt in both, and wasn't certain she was entirely comfortable in either. Crouching atop the flat roof, melding into the shadows, she settled in for what would surely be a long and boring wait.

     
    Long and boring , as it turned out, were ridiculously optimistic. Endless and mind-numbing would have proved more accurate. The hours lazily meandered by, and the impulsive thief found herself near to bursting with the strain of waiting. Finally, as the moon rowed her way across the sea of night, the manor finally began to excrete its guests in sporadic fits and spurts. The stars wheeled their courses across the nighttime firmament; bats and nightbirds flapped past overhead; cats fought in nearby alleys, hissing and spitting all the while; and time plodded toward morning.
    Not long before dawn, when she felt she could take it no longer, the lanterns in the upper-story windows flickered and died, suggesting that Baron Weasel-face had finally retired to his burrow for badly needed (and blatantly ineffectual) beauty sleep. The downstairs lights continued to burn, no doubt for servants who, having stood and watched as rich people grew fat on fancy foods, were now compelled to clean up after the satin-wrapped and brocaded swine.
    “Hsst!” she hissed, her throat vaguely hoarse from the yelling that had passed for conversation during the baron's party. “Olgun! Wake up!”
    Her mind was filled with a sense of self-righteous—and vaguely drowsy—protest.
    “Sure you weren't,” she needled at him. “You were just practicing snoring, so you'd be sure to get it right later on, yes?”
    Olgun's response very strongly resembled an indignant snort.
    “Whatever. It's time.”
    She cocked her head in response to an unvoiced question.
    “Of course I'd rather wait a bit longer,” she lied, actually fidgeting foot to foot. “But the night's not just old, it's getting arthritic. We have to go now.”
    The faint scrabbling of loose shale shifting as she set foot on the roadway was the only sound of her swift and graceful descent. Had anyone been watching the wide boulevard in the faint light of the street lamps, he'd have seen nothing more than a quick wink of blackness, a wisp of shadow, no more alarming than a running tomcat and dismissed just as readily.
    The polished stone wall surrounding the Doumerge property was near ten feet tall, and impressively smooth. No cracks or seams provided even the most infinitesimal handhold. A rope and grapple might have provided a solution, but Widdershins, who preferred to work light, carried no such thing.
    She never needed