Covenant's End by Ari Marmell Read Free Book Online Page A

was humoring her, but she decided it'd do.
    The horse would be fine, if perhaps somewhat mortified. Either they'd find some kin to the owner, if the torn harness gave them enough to go on, or they'd take it for use by the city. Probably the latter. Shins didn't have any particular attachment to the animal, but she was still inordinately proud of having saved it.
    So, what next? Shins was fairly certain that any search the guards subjected her to wouldn't be as—invasive—as the horse's. Nevertheless, they were clearly on higher alert, more meticulous about visitors, than she'd ever known them to be, and she wasn't keen on the notion of being interrogated in general, or in trying to explain her professional tools in particular. And that was assuming none of the guards recognized her. Widdershins wasn't precisely one of Davillon's most notorious criminals, but she was a known Finder, and she'd lost her only real friend in the Guard when—
    No. Don't think of that right now.
    Well, there really was only one option. If she wasn't willing to risk the procedure for passing through the wall, she'd just have to go over it. Not as though it'd be the first time.
    â€œAw, come on,” she said to Olgun's surge of protest. “What's the worst that could happen?”
    When his reply took the form of an image in which Widdershins was blasted clear off the wall by a volley of musket-fire, she merely grumbled something even the god could neither hear nor interpret, and wandered back down the road to wait for nightfall.

    Heavily wooded as the region was, the grounds surrounding Davillon were largely flat and empty. What few trees remained all stood alone, or at most tiny copses, providing no hiding spot or significant cover for any attacking force. Not that Davillon had faced an attacking force since the nation of Galice was born, but one never knew.
    During the day, approaching unobserved was quite impossible, assuming the sentries were semiconscious and had remembered to bring at least one eye with them that morning. At night…well, thanks to whatever had the place on such high alert, it was barely possible.
    Men and women of the Guard walked the walls, stood by every gate, watching for any sign of movement, any conspicuous shape, in the shadows. Enormous lanterns stood at strategic intervals at both the top and the base of the wall. Contained within a mirrored shell, essentially a vertical bowl, they shed their illumination in only a single direction, a beam rather than an aura. These slowly rotated, sweeping back and forth across the open terrain. The arc of each lantern overlapped with the next, ensuring that no stretch of earth remained in darkness for more than a minute or so. In her youngerthieving years, Shins had heard rumors that the Guard possessed such capability, but the equipment hadn't been used in generations.
    Until now.
    Of course, those defenses and that system had been designed to detect approaching enemies—plural. A single figure, clad in dark hues to match the gloom, possessed of any real speed and halfway decent luck, could pass between the shifting beams with little difficulty.
    â€œYou know,” Shins sub-vocalized as she leaned against the great stone wall, listening to the steps and the voices above, “if they'd just randomize the lights a bit, not run them through those same arcs all the time, they might just…what? No, I don't want them to catch us ! I meant for, you know, other people! Dangerous ones! It's definitely a problem they should fix… later .
    â€œWell, yeah,” she continued as fingers and toes found purchase that most people would never have seen, let alone been able to use. Her ascent was swift and silent, not much louder than a caterpillar making the same journey. “I do think the laws should only apply to other people. I mean, you know that I can be trusted, but we don't know that about anyone else, do we? Frankly, with all I've done for this