“So?”
“So, let’s see if it’ll do something to that metal.”
“We’re here.” Crit shrugged, trying to ignore the implications. Kama wasn’t the finder. Kama had appropriated this thing from someone, for her own purposes- And she’d heard about it through some informer of whom Crit was totally ignorant. Nothing was going to work right in Sanctuary unless they all started pulling together. But what he wanted to do to Kama right then wouldn’t facilitate anything of the sort.
She shrugged, too, added a sour twist of her thin lips, and bent to the door. He didn’t dare look away to watch, but he heard her tap bronze against bronze. And curse. And tap again, and chortle.
“So?” he said when she stood up and carefully put the talisman back in her belt.
“So, do we want to be polite, now that the lock’s no problem?”
He took one hand away from the crossbow and, balancing it on his hip, felt for the lock. It was gooey. He brought his fingers to his lips and smelled White Foal mud, rank with rot. He swore and asked her to explain herself.
“I heard,” she said, “it might be something like this. That’s all.”
“Great.” He spat over his shoulder. “Next time you ‘hear’ of some- thing like this, you come to me with it.”
“I did.”
“Beforehand,” he said, just as there was a scuffling sound and then a dragging noise behind the door and he and Kama jumped back in unison.
The door opened like a casket’s top. And there, behind it, stood some- thing very much like Tasfalen, the popinjay noble who’d been missing so long. “Yessss,” said the noble in an entirely horrible voice, a voice that seemed not to have been used for a thousand years.