He opened the catch on the window and pushed open the shutters that served this room instead of ironwork. Let Kalink presume that this was how his thief got in, and wonder how on earth he came up the wall from the yard, or down the wall from the steeply-pitched roof.

Now he returned to the maid’s room. He’d go out the way he came, but he had a trick to use on the kind of simple bar catches on that window. A loop of string on each of them let him pull them closed again once he’d closed the window behind him.

By now the moon was down, and there wasn’t a chance anyone could see him. In moments, he was down in the alley, running like a cat, heading for his next destination. He didn’t dare be caught in this outfit! There would be no doubt in anyone’s mind of what his business was!

But there was a remedy for that, too. Two streets over was that wonderfully handy cavity in Lord Orthallen’s wall, and that was where he’d left a set of breeches and a tunic. In the safety of the utter blackness, he pulled the bricks loose and extracted them. The hood of his shirt became a high collar, the scarf around his face and throat went around his waist beneath the tunic. He wiped the charcoal from his face with the inside of the tunic, and in very little time, a perfectly respectable young lad was strolling down the street with a bundle under his arm. He could be anyone’s page boy or young servant on any of a dozen errands, and he even passed patrols of the Nightwatch twice without any of them stopping or even looking at him.

If they had, they’d have found nothing worse than a bundle of gentleman’s underthings. And if he was asked, he’d mumble and hide his face and say he couldn’t rightly say, but his mistress had told him to take them quietly to a certain gentleman and there wasn’t anything else he could tell them.

The Watch would, of course, assume that the gentleman in question had been forced to make a hasty exit from a bedroom where he’d had no business being and had left the least important of his clothing behind. As it was no business of the Watch to oversee the morals of anyone, Skif would be sent on his way, perhaps with a laugh.

The closer he got to his destination, the more relaxed he felt. Already he was planning where to take the metal, how to show the two boys to pound the gold and silver into flat, indistinguishable sheets.