A Sword from Red Ice

Quill had appeared to appreciate the sympathy regardless, "Well I'll be off for now. You have the use of all the space right up to the icehouse door. Only time anyone comes down here is to pick ice so when you hear footsteps move sharpish and lock yourselves in the big stockroom at the back. Night warden's the only one besides yourself who has the key."

The big stockroom had turned out to be the best room out of the lot of them. It was situated against the Quartercourts' exterior western wall and although it was low-ceilinged like the other cellars, two wind shafts provided light from the ground-level windows in the room over head. If you stood just underneath the shafts, which Crope was currently doing, you could look up and see the sky through iron bars. Sometimes Crope saw flashes of people's feet and legs as they hurried down the street. Once he'd looked up and seen a raven tapping against the bars.

It was good to be able to keep Town Dog here. The small room at the top of Quill's townhouse had not been big enough for master, servant and dog, so Town Dog had had to go and stay with Quill. Crope had missed the busy little creature with her offwhite coat and stubby tail. She'd followed him around a town he'd once visited far to the east of here, and when he'd had to leave in a bit of a hurry—owing to an unfortunate incident concerning the removal of a support beam from a tavern—she'd trotted through the gates, right on his heels. Town Dog had been with him ever since. She'd even been with him the night he'd gone to the pointy tower to free his lord.

She hadn't been allowed in this room at first, of course. His lord slept here, in the best, driest and airiest spot, his mattress raised off the floor by a wooden pallet and separated from the damp wall by a nailed-up sheepskin. Grope had been nervous about how his lord would react to the dog for he had no memory of Sarahs treating any animal beside his horse with kindness, Plus, Town Dog was an energetic scrap of dog-ness, disinclined to sit and with a tendency to smell. Deciding it was best to keep them apart. Crope had made a point of keeping the stockroom door shut so that Town Dog couldn't gain access to his lord. This had meant that Town Dog spent a lot of time at the door, scratching, digging and mewling suspiciously like a cat. Grope had been mortified. How would his lord ever sleep? Measures had to be taken, and Crope had begun to leash Town Dog to one of the many iron rings that lay rusting against the cellars' walls. Then a strange thing had happened.

Every night in the darkest and quietest hours before dawn, Crope slipped out of the Quartercourts to walk the streets. He knew what he risked, yet he could not stop himself. For seventeen years he had been chained inside the mines and he had a hardness in him now that would not bow to anyone in matters of his freedom. Going outside each night was his sign to himself that he was a free man and that his comings and goings were his own.

As a precaution against detection he had taken to wearing the special cloak Quill had commissioned from the tailor who created clothing for the Surlord's secret intelligencers known as darkcloaks. Gray for day. Brown for sundown. Falling all the way to his feet, it was longer than he liked in a cloak, and its wool was unaccountably itchy, but if it could help him steal across the main courtyard in Mask Fortress without raising an alarm it probably wouldn't do any harm to wear it on his outings around the Quartercourts. Crope had an inkling that it made him more … shadowy than he normally was. Not invisible or anything fancy like that, just a tiny bit more difficult to see, like a brown lizard on a brown wall.

He didn't like to put the hood up—itchy arms were one thing, itchy ears quite another—but forced himself to do so during those tricky moments leaving and returning to the Quartercourts. Ingress and egress, that's what Quill would have called it The thief knew many fine and impressive-sounding words. To leave the Quartercourts, Crope had to open the door to the ice house where big blue blocks of lake ice were stored between bales of hay and pass through to the other side. Next he had to climb the steps to the servants' level that was used by the Quartcrcourts staff in the daytime to service the finely dressed lords. This was the tricky part, for sometimes potboys and scrubbers would hide from the night warden during his rounds so they could stay in the courts overnight.