Demontech: Onslaught by David Sherman Read Free Book Online Page B

metal grating against stone.
    For a brief moment Spinner froze. At first he heard nothing. Then he spun around, holding his staff at the ready as he heard a slam and a grunt and the squeal of tortured metal behind him.
    Haft looked in through the bottom of the window. His arms were over the sill and hanging on tightly—it was obvious his body dangled outside. His face wore a silly grin. “The balcony broke,” he said.
    Spinner snorted. “I ought to leave you there.” But he held his staff one-handed and grabbed Haft’s outstretched hand with the other and pulled him in. He cautiously peered outside. No one was looking into the alleyway. The faux balcony dangled from one end, the other end torn completely from the wall. He closed the window and turned back to examine the room.
    It appeared to be some sort of office. It held a desk, a chair, and three high-topped clerk’s desks. Along the walls were shelves stuffed with ledgers and cabinets filled to bursting with papers. On one wall hung a map of New Bally. Various locations on the map were marked. The marks all seemed to indicate storehouses, merchants’ stores, and government buildings. The harbor was clearly drawn, with the docks and piers annotated. But other than indicating the routes of the highways, the map showed nothing of what lay beyond the city wall. There seemed to be nothing in the room that could help them get away.
    While Spinner examined the map, Haft put his ear to the door. When he didn’t hear anything beyond it, he tried to open it. It was locked. Spinner joined him at the door.
    “This is the only way out,” Haft said. He hefted his axe. “I’ll break it down.”
    “Stop!” Spinner put his hand on Haft’s arm before he could swing at the door. “If the door is locked, it might be warded by a banshee.”
    “The window wasn’t,” Haft answered, and again prepared to swing his axe.
    “That doesn’t mean the door isn’t.”
    Haft stepped back and looked at the walls all around the door. “No red-eye, no banshee,” he said.
    Spinner quickly looked around the room again, this time for the telltale red-eye. “You’re right,” he reluctantly acknowledged.
    Haft looked smug. It wasn’t often he spotted something important before Spinner did.
    With almost no backswing, Haft slammed his blade into the door frame next to the lock. A shattered chunk of the frame fell out. He calmly grasped the handle and pulled. The door opened easily. The locking mechanism clunked to the floor. No banshee wailed its alarm. With a flourish, he bowed Spinner through the open door.
    Spinner held his staff at the ready. He stepped halfway through the doorway and looked both ways. The door opened into a corridor that appeared to run the length of the building from front to back. No one was in evidence. He stood in the middle of the corridor and listened. He heard nothing from inside the building.
    “Let’s find a way to the roof,” he said.

 

CHAPTER
FOUR
    They glided silently through the building and up its stairs to the roof. The place felt eerily like it had been unpeopled for longer than human memory, though the lack of dust on the floor, except where it was caked thick in the corners, indicated it was occupied regularly and had been used recently. In the top floor of the building, ladder rungs built into the wall of a storage closet led them to a trapdoor in the ceiling.
    Spinner climbed up and unlatched the trap. He eased the door up, looked out, and found the flat roof he’d hoped for. He climbed through and motioned Haft to follow. Together, they lay flat and breathed a sigh of relief at the clear, unoppressive air of the roof. But they only rested for a few seconds.
    They looked about. A low wall stood above the front and two sides of the roof; the back had no barrier guarding against a sheer drop. To the back, toward the middle of the city, they could see roofs as high as or higher than the one they were on. Many of the roofs were flat. No