Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,10

walls swelled up on either side of her, white and towering and indifferent—Michiel on the left, Dandolo on the right. Behind those walls were the merchant house enclaves—commonly called “campos”—where the merchant houses ran their clutch of neighborhoods like their own little kingdoms.

Clinging to the bases of the walls was a tall, rambling stretch of ramshackle wooden tenements and rookery buildings and crooked chimneys, an improvised, makeshift, smoky tangle of soaking warrens stuffed between the two campo walls like a raft trapped between two converging ships.

Foundryside. The closest thing Sancia had to a home.

She passed through an alley, and was greeted by a familiar scene. Firebaskets sparked and hissed at the street corners ahead. A taverna on her left was still thriving even at this hour, its old yellow windows glimmering with candlelight, cackles and curses spilling through the drapes across the entrance. Weeds and vines and rogue nut trees tumbled out of the flooded alleys as if launching an ambush. Three old women on a balcony above watched her passage, all picking at a wooden plate, upon which sat the remains of a striper—a large, ugly water bug that turned a rather pretty, striped violet pattern when boiled.

The scene was familiar, but it didn’t make her any more relaxed. The Tevanni Commons were Sancia’s home, but her neighbors were just as ruthless and dangerous as any merchant house guard.

She took back passageways to her rookery building, and slipped in through a side door. She walked down the hallway to her rooms, felt the door with a bare index finger, then the floorboards. They told her nothing unusual—it seemed things hadn’t been tampered with.

She unlocked all six of the locks on the door, walked in, and locked it again. Then she crouched and listened, her bare index finger stuck to the floorboards.

She waited ten minutes. The throbbing in her head slowly returned. But she had to be sure.

When nothing came, she lit a candle—she was tired of using her talents to see—crossed her room, and opened the shutters of her windows, just a crack. Then she stood there and watched the streets.

* * *

For two hours, Sancia stared out the tiny crack at the street below. She knew she had good reason to be paranoid—she’d not only just pulled off a twenty-thousand-duvot job, she’d also just burned down the damned Tevanni waterfront. She wasn’t sure which was worse.

If someone had happened to look up at Sancia’s window and catch a glimpse of her, they likely would’ve been struck by the sight. She was a young girl, barely older than twenty, but she’d already lived more than most people ever would, and you could see it in her face. Her dark skin was weather-beaten and hard, the face of someone for whom starvation was a frequent occurrence. She was short but muscular, with bulky shoulders and thighs, and her hands were calloused and hard as iron—all consequences of her occupation. She sported a lopsided, self-applied haircut, and a lurid, jagged scar ran along her right temple, approaching close to her right eye, whose whites were slightly muddier than those of the left.

People did not like it when Sancia looked at them too hard. It made them nervous.

After two hours of watching, Sancia felt satisfied. She closed her shutters, locked them, and went to her closet and removed the false floor. It always discomfited her to open up the floor there—the Commons had no banks or treasuries, so the whole of her life’s savings was squirreled away in that dank niche.

She took the pine box out of her thieving rig, held it in her bare hands, and looked at it.

Now that she’d had some time to recover—the screaming pain in her skull had subsided into a dull ache—she could tell right away what was odd about the box, and it bloomed clear in her mind, the shape and space of the box congealing in her thoughts like wax chambers in a beehive.

The box had a false bottom in it—a secret compartment. And inside the false bottom, Sancia’s talents told her, was something small and wrapped in linen.

She paused, thinking about this.

Twenty thousand duvots? For this thing?

But then, it was not for her to think about. Her purpose had been to get the box, and nothing more. Sark had been very clear about that. And Sancia was well favored by their clients because she always did as she was asked—no more, no less. In three days, she’d hand the box off