The Box by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

away from the door, she began to drag the heavy Galtan dining table to bar the passage.
    “Desna laughs,” Kostin hissed between clenched teeth before joining Taldara with the table. Shouts and the sounds of rampage had grown closer, now coming from the stairwell.
    Behind them Aeventius was intoning a spell, uttering the strange language of magic as if he had been born to it. Kostin turned in time to see the flash of the wizard’s ring, and the unstoppering of a phial in his other hand. Bringing the phial to his lips, Aeventius sucked up the contents with a sharp intake of breath. Kostin knew from experience that the wizard had just eaten a live spider, and judging from the grimace on his friend’s face it had probably been a large one.
    “Come,” Aeventius said, before vaulting out of the window with the practiced ease of an acrobat.
    “You next,” Kostin said to Taldara. Behind them, the door boomed as if hit with a siege ram. “Go up.” She did not argue, following Aeventius through the window with more composure than Kostin would have ever expected. He scooped up the mage-locked box—was it really the cause of all this?—and climbed through the window just as the attic door splintered from its hinges, toppling the primitive barricade. The howls of the Shoanti spilled out into the night after him.
    The edge of the roof was within easy reach, and Kostin hoisted himself up one-handed, with Taldara’s aid. From the vantage of the slate roof he could see his building—of which his rented storefront and apartments comprised but a tenth—stretching away to north and south. To his right, across the alley, the old five-story Rope Works building blocked their sight of the landward portion of the city, but the convoluted tangle of warehouses, dockyards, taverns, and tenements that comprised the shoreward view dazzled with alternating patches of light and dark.
    The warm flicker of torches below stole his attention—some of the Shoanti, shouting and whooping like a pack of wild dogs, had run around into the alley to block any escape.
    Breathing deeply of the cool, sea-tanged night air, Kostin struck out northward, Aeventius and Taldara at his heels. Before him loomed the dark shape of the Rope Works as it veered sharply shoreward just at the end of his block. The roof upon which they ran was a black wedge against the lights of the Shore, as the lower city was called. Just above was another dark band, the Seacleft, the great cliff that bisected Magnimar, atop which blazed the lights of the Summit, the upper city, a bright knife-edge glow like a barrier between the commoners of the Shore and the glittering heavens above.
    A snarling yell announced that the Shoanti had followed them onto the roof.
    “I will go first, then you can throw over the box,” Aeventius said as they neared the narrowest space between the tenement and the Rope Works. They had practiced this escape route years ago, the leap over to the Rope Works and the quick climb to its abandoned top floor, but never had Kostin’s heart been hammering in his chest like this, or his limbs trembling.
    Unseen in the darkness, crossbow bolts whispered past.
    Aeventius jumped out over the alley and struck the stone face of the Rope Works hard, sliding a little before finding purchase on a scrollwork ledge. He twisted his body, clinging to the building with one hand, and Kostin tossed the box over so that it hit the wizard square in the chest. Aeventius clutched it reflexively, holding tight.
    Kostin turned to Taldara, intending to give a few words of encouragement, but the spry half-elf was already moving, leaping between buildings and flattening herself against the stones a bit higher up than Aeventius. Clearly she had been living a more exciting life than one spent writing travelogues and sketching artifacts since last he saw her—he only hoped he would get a chance to hear about it one day.
    With a wild shout, Kostin followed his friends across the gap,