Free Dagger by David Drake

at the side to hand me this jack when I'm ready for it—
    " he fluffed his cloak open to display the tool
    "—
    and I don't want her in plain sight on the street, even though it means getting her up again."
    The sky had closed in above the passage between the two buildings. It was as dark as a narrow cave, and for the time being the air was as motionless as that of a cavern miles below the ground. Samlor found his location by subconscious memory of the six cautious paces which had brought him beneath the window when he could see it.
    54
    David Drake

DAGGER
    55
    He put down the jack and began the task of ascending the wall. The houses were built close enough to one another that the caravan master could brace himself against opposite walls, first with his hands and then by wedging his hobnails into narrow cracks in the masonry. He mounted to the second floor window like a frog swimming, his legs lifting him each time his arms had locked on a fresh hold.
    When Samlor's left palm touched the window ledge, he explored it by touch with all the care required of a possible trap with razor edges. Beneath him he heard his companions, Khamwas murmuring a response to Star's whine. He was glad he had the other man along on this business, not least because Khamwas could look after the child.
    The bars were set solidly into stone lintels, and they were just as tight together as Samlor had thought. There were glazed windows within, swung back in sashes and apparently hooked to keep breezes from banging them to and fro. There was no light in the room beyond, and utterly no sound. Samlor set both his feet against the wall of Setios' house and braced his back on the adjacent building. If he'd thought things through, he might have redoubled his cloak before he set his shoulders on the rough stone, but he'd be all right for the brief while he expected to cling here. The important thing was that his hands were free.
    "Khamwas," he called softly, "hand me up the jack. And don't let the handle fall out of it, right?"
    "Just a mo—
    oh," said the Napatan. "There. . . ."
    Samlor twisted his torso against the wall and reached down as far as he could with his left hand. He could not see Khamwas, but the scrunch of wood suggested that the Napatan had wedged his staff between the walls and was using the slant to raise himself, even though one of his hands was full of the heavy jack.
    "Hold it," Samlor whispered. His fingers brushed one of the crossholes by which the jack was turned. By squeezing down a fraction further, the caravan master managed to hook the rod between his index and middle fingers, though the strain on them and the web of his hand was agonizing.
    "There, you bitch!" he snarled at it as he lurched up against pain that he had to ignore for the instant before his right hand closed on the barrel of the jack and took the strain. Straightening up was difficult—
    at one angle, the chain
    closure of his cloak threatened to throttle him—
    but it felt so good not to have
    a tearing weight on his fingers that he could easily ignore lesser problems. He set the jack sideways on the window ledge, angling it so that the screw top touched a bar while the base was firmly against the^tone sash. The handle rotated the screw slightly before binding against the ledge. Samlor removed the handle, set the end into the other crosshole (offset ninety degrees from the first) and cranked the screw up another quarter turn. The base scrunched and the top gave an iron-to-iron squeak.
    The caravan master grinned and began pumping the screw higher. The bars protecting the window were sturdy, but Samlor's powerful arm muscles were multiplied by the handle's leverage and the shallow-pitched threads of the housejack. The combination would have torn apart the stone sash if that were necessary.
    It wasn't, but chips of cement spalled away before the bar set in it fractured. The jack slipped. Samlor swore and clamped it with the hand that had been resting on the barrel more