Nils waited several slow minutes, then pulled cautiously. The hook moved a few handspans, then grabbed. He pulled harder; it seemed firmly set. Leaning back, he began to climb.
He reached the top without difficulty. The wall was about two meters wide between embrasured parapets. While he coiled his rope, he looked around. Open stairs led down into the courtyard from each back corner. The bailiffs manor was a tee-shaped building, itself a minor fortress. The stem of the tee was single-storied and had a number of slot-like windows. A scan of the sleeping minds inside identified it as the barracks, the two-storied crossbar was the manor itself. Its windows were larger, its roof a balustraded garden.
To human eyes, none of it would have been visible from the wall on so dense and dark night.
Cat-quiet, he went to the vacated northwest corner, down the stairs and into the courtyard. It too was largely
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garden, with fruit trees and flowerbeds. Swift and silent, e crossed it to a door at the base of the tee, and up the several steps to stand outside it. Carefully he raised the latch, but the door didn’t give to his pressure.
Without hesitating, he slipped quietly to the ground again and around the west side of the house to the front. He sensed a guard inside, seated and sleeping beside the door. Carefully carefully he raised the heavy latch. Carefully he pulled, then pushed; the door remained firm, as if barred inside.
Lips compressed, Nils frowned, then continued around the house. On the east side there was a second-floor balcony with a low balustrade, and double doors ajar. Inside was a faint light, as if a candle burned there, or a small lamp. Also inside, he sensed, was the man he sought, asleep beside the smith’s daughter, and no apparent way to reach him except with the grapple. He didn’t hesitate. Uncoiling the rope, he swung and then tossed it.
In itself it made little noise, but the sleeping cat it struck and knocked from the balustrade squalled once indignantly, and raced inside, through the open doors and under the mosquito curtain.
Nils froze, his short hairs rigid at the sound. Upstairs the bailiff stirred, grunted in his sleep and rolled over. His young wife sat stiffly upright beside him, then got up. She listened hard, Nils listening with her. He felt her relax and lie back down, but wide awake now, wondering what could have frightened her cat so. An owl perhaps? As a girl she’d had a cat, and an owl had killed it in the night, killed and skinned and eaten it beneath the plum tree.
Gently Nils drew on the rope. The grapple moved scarce inches before it caught, but the young wife’s senses had been sharpened by the cat’s alarming squall. Thus she heard the slight scraping, and stiffened again in her bed, scalp tight, nerves tingling.
It occurred to Nils that he might better have thrown his grapple onto the roof, almost anywhere along the
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building. He’d have avoided the disturbance, and had the wall to brace his feet against for climbing. It would have been simple to let himself down to the balcony from there. As it was, he had a wakened woman at the top, and a free hang to climb up. But with his grapple engaged, he was committed.
Meanwhile the darkness was changing, just a little. The half moon, he realized, must be edging above the bordering mountain ridge, casting its first rays across the heavy overcast. Within minutes, visibility for human eyes would improve enough to endanger him. He’d be exposed then to the guard at the southeast corner.
He waited only seconds while the bailiffs wife began to relax. Then he reached up and began to climb. Even for his muscles it wasn’t easy. Lean as he’d become, he still weighed 114 kilos, and the rope was slender—a centimeter and a half thick—offering little to grip on. It took him a grim half minute to reach the top and hoist his upper body onto the railing. Where he found himself looking into candle flame, and the eyes of the bailiffs wife, peering at him through the mosquito curtain! In his efforting, he hadn’t sensed her getting out of bed, coming to the doorway to investigate the faint sound she’d heard—his effortful breathing.