Moonshadow by Simon Higgins

Author:Simon Higgins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781864714883
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2011-11-15T13:01:01.873000+00:00

TWELVE

The prize

Once inside the roof cavity, Moon pressed an ear to the ceiling boards. He listened hard for sounds of life in the treasure room below. Nothing.

Moon drew the burglary tools from his leggings. Using the thin blades, he silently popped one wooden ceiling square and slid it to one side. He dangled his head through the opening, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light of the room. A candle in an iron holder burned in the centre of the polished hardwood floor. Another glowed between the only two pieces of furniture he could see: a fancy wooden Chinese chest and a much larger, plainer safe of rough black metal beside it. Each had built-in locks, each a large keyhole. They stood together under the room's only window, which was shuttered and bolted.

It all looked just as Grey Light Order intelligence had predicted. Moon sighed softly. It also looked too easy to be true.

He took the reinforced cord on the wooden spool from a pocket of his leggings. Moon unwound the cord, then lowered its weighted end slowly until it touched the floor. Controlling the line with feather-light pressure, he gently dragged the weight across one floor plank and onto the next. When it had crossed several polished boards, the weight stopped moving freely and Moon, sampling the cord's tension with his index finger, felt it snag. His eyes followed the cord down to the floor, hunting for whatever had trapped it. There it was, just as he had suspected, hiding in the shadows below the candles' glow.

A black wire cable, in fact several thin cables, crossed the floor a hand's width above the boards. They were designed to catch the feet of anyone moving from the reinforced sliding door to the window area. He hung upside down from the gap in the ceiling, turning his head, following the cables. At each end, they were connected to large bamboo chimes that hung in shadow. He set his jaw. There must be a guard – or several – just outside, ready to charge in at the slightest sound from those alarms.

Moonshadow retrieved his sensing cord, then pulled himself up and crept through the roof cavity until he was directly above the Chinese chest. He raised and discarded another wooden square. After judging the distance to the chest below, Moon lowered himself over it. He hung by his fingertips from the edge of the hole he'd made, checked the rest of the room again, then soundlessly dropped to the chest.

On most missions, he would put out the candles before striking, lowering the sensing cord's weight above their flames and running drops of water down the cord. In this particular situation, that light was an ally he needed. He needed to see the cables of the chime traps at all times. He needed to verify the plans before he fled with them, in case Silver Wolf was using a second ruse: dummy plans. At least he'd been prepared. Thanks to Badger, Moon knew exactly what to look for when he examined the documents, how to confirm their authenticity.

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