Chapter 36 Eye of the Storm
~ DONAVYN ~
I woke with a start, senses screaming, to a room in silence and the near-darkness of early dawn. Bren remained asleep, curled up with her knees high. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up and my heart pounded in my ears.
Slowly, making no sound, I reached across under the blankets to slip a hand over Bren’s mouth in case she spoke and when she stopped breathing and went still, I sent, ‘Something’s wrong. Something woke me. I don’t know what yet. Get dressed and—’
We both heard the tiniest click in the sitting room.
I rolled off Bren sliding my hand under the pillow to grasp the sheathed knife I always left there, while she slipped out from under the covers without making a sound and hunched below the level of the bed.
I didn’t bother with clothing, but slipped the blade free and started towards our door, keeping myself flat to the wall, ears tingling, listening for any clue about where our intruder was in the room.
Bren popped up a moment later in nothing but her favorite shirt of mine that hung almost to her knees, the sleeves rolled high on her forearms, and a blade in her hand as well.
‘You get behind the door. If he comes for me when I open it, let it bounce off you so he doesn’t know you’re there. I’ll try to pull him in so you can get behind him, but otherwise you wait until I’ve got him engaged. Don’t reveal yourself until you can get that blade between his ribs.’
‘Got it.’
I always left our bedroom door unlatched in case I had to sneak out in the night so I wouldn’t wake her. But I’d locked the suite last night when her brothers left. For someone to be in here they had to have picked it.
I slinked up to the door, putting one eye to the crack to peer through, searching for the position of our intruder—a thief, or an assassin? We’d both remained silent. I prayed they didn’t realize we were awake.
Turning slowly to view different areas of the room beyond, I tensed when a tall, male shadow hurried across the floor on silent feet—how the fuck did this guy move so quickly without making a sound?
Raising a hand in the signal for her to stay still, so Bren would know I’d seen him, I curled the fingers of my free hand over the edge of the door, preparing to swing it open while his back was to me—praying it would be silent and give me that much more time to sneak up behind him—only to freeze with the door mere inches open, when the intruder struck a match and lit the candle above the mantle of the fireplace to light the room—and see Voski’s form set aglow.
“Well, shit,” I muttered, sighing out the tension. “It’s Voski.”
I threw the door wide as he turned. His eyes widening when he took in the sight of me, naked and furious, in the doorway, one hand clawed to hold it open, the other grasping a blade.
“Next time, we use a signal,” I growled.
Voski scratched the back of his neck. “Sorry, sir, I thought the light would reassure you, but this couldn’t wait. I got the codes.”
I blinked, my heart still trying to pound out of my chest. “You… what?”
Voski smiled grimly. “Bren was right. Our friend took a very early morning trip to the city. Our brother watched for me. It took some time—he had traps set on his hiding places, so he’d know if he was searched.
I think I left them intact. But… the point is…
I got it. I copied everything he’d saved.
I thought you’d want to know right away. ”
“Of course we do!” Bren hushed, pushing out of the room under my arm… still in just my thin sleep shirt. Voski’s eyes went round, then he found a reason to turn back to the mantle, fumbling to light another taper to carry to other candles in the room.
I caught Bren’s elbow and she turned, frowning. “What—”
“I think we should both dress,” I said through my teeth.
Her eyes widened, then she rolled her lips like she was hiding a smile. “Right. Of course.”
A minute later, the sitting room blazing with light because Voski had lit the lanterns as well, we sat around the low table between the chairs and couch, pouring over the notes, all of us frowning.
Voski, wisely anticipating that stolen material would quickly be missed, had taken paper and pencils into the room with him—but that meant he’d had to trace everything he found.
Which must have taken some time, because there were now several pieces of paper, and a very twitchy Furyknight in front of me.
“What have you learned in the process?” I asked him, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
“I’ve learned that our friend still struggles with letters and numbers.
All of this should have been memorized, then burned.
If he told you he’d kept nothing except old, coded messages that couldn’t help anyone, I think he lied.
It’s possible they didn’t find his notes, I suppose.
He hides it all well—I might not have found it if I hadn’t seen him check the spot. ”
I nodded. “But the codes themselves?”
“I’ve never seen these before, sir.”
I met eyes with the man, shocked. “None of them?”
“None,” he affirmed.
I took a moment to let that sink in.
Bren looked back and forth between us. “That’s significant?” she asked quietly.
I nodded and let my gaze fall back to the scribbles, words, and phrases in front of me.
“Yes, very,” I said darkly. “The Shadowfang code is standard so we can signal each other, even if we cross paths on different missions—it’s entirely possible that a member, or even a team might develop something between themselves in the field, but for reports and intelligence, it’s crucial to use coding that can be interpreted correctly back home. ”
“And between Furyknights,” Voski added with a strange look at me.
He cleared his throat and turned back to Bren.
“If someone in the field is hurt or goes missing, or needs to communicate with their allies… everyone needs to know so they can decode any messages left to warn them. The only reason to make a new code is to obscure information from other Shadowfang.”
“Or because you don’t trust them and think you need to communicate without their interference,” I muttered.
Voski met my gaze. “Or because whoever is receiving your missives wants them hidden from everyone, including your team.”
I nodded. It could be any of those reasons. Or all of them.
Shit.
Then I saw it… a scribble, as if a word had been crossed out. Except it looked precisely like one of the scribbles I’d read as a correction on the message we intercepted from Ruin.
My heartrate picked up again.
“Bren, go write down the message we intercepted. Quickly. Everything you remember—including the mistakes if you can.”
She shot to her feet, hurrying to the desk at the side of the sitting room and leaned over it, hurriedly, dipping the pen in ink and scribbling, while I went back to the codes.
A heavy weight of dread crept up my spine as I flipped through pages, scanning each and asking Voski questions which only served to make me even more certain what I was seeing, and even more frustrated that I hadn’t noticed it in the message we’d intercepted earlier.
Fuck. Fuck.
I felt Voski’s eyes on the side of my face, and knew he’d be thinking exactly what I was—that we’d missed a huge clue in the earlier work, and now we’d be scrambling. Because looking at these pages, it was evident those scribbles hadn’t been errors at all.
Ruin wasn’t suffering struggle with his letters. He hadn’t hurried. Those mistakes had been signals. Indications of how to read the words around them.
And we hadn’t fucking memorized that part.
Please, God, let Benji intercept the message Ruin sent this morning. We needed a new, untouched example. Something we could be certain of. Because one thing was sure: We couldn’t be certain any of the words or statements on that first message had meant anything they’d actually said.
“At least I was right about the locations being reversed,” I muttered grimly.
Voski nodded and pulled one of the papers out of the pile under the one I scanned. “They do it with the major cities as well—we’ll need to watch for that, because the flips aren’t the same. While Draeventhall does refer to Vosgaarde, Vosgaarde City actually refers to Emberholt and… well, you see.”
I did see. And while I was thrilled that Ruin was stupid enough to keep a key written down, and Voski had uncovered it, it didn’t change a damn thing about the hard place we found ourselves in.
Bren trotted back to me and laid her paper, ink still wet, on the table.
She dropped to the couch next to me, thigh to thigh, leaning over the pages, all of us looking and pointing to different places on the note—frustrated because neither Bren nor I had memorized the corrections.
“I think that cross-out was in the previous paragraph,” I said, shaking my head. “But I can’t be sure.”
“I know that there was a scribble on this side, because I got ink on my hand when I flattened the page.”
“But did it align with the end of the paragraph about social fractures, or the beginning of the reference to the merchant?”
Bren slumped. “I’m not sure.”
And neither was I. I couldn’t be sure her placement was even remotely correct. I’d been so eager to parse out the words, it had never occurred to me that Ruin’s errors weren’t errors at all.
We scanned codes and familiarized ourselves with the differences in the scribbles and cross-outs and what they meant.
Some heralded a reversal in meaning. Others changed the status of the person or society to which a sentence referred.
Still others indicated a statement laid a false trail and should be ignored.
And another that confirmed the content as truth.
And all of them so minutely different, so carefully precise, there was no way foggy memories could be sure to give us clues. Any statement could be utterly true, utterly false, or reversing truth, and without knowing the precise markings on the paper, we’d never know which was which.
Shit!