Стивен Браст: Tiassa

“How long are we going to sit here this time, Boss?”

“About as long as last time.”

I guess I should explain my thinking here. First of all, Devera needed my help; I wasn’t going to turn her down. Also, well, I was curious, and I knew there were all sorts of things going on around me that I didn’t understand, but I did have some theories. For one thing, I was pretty sure there was necromancy at work in the place. If you aren’t familiar with it, necromancy is magic that has to do with death, which involves places that can’t be reached by means of normal travel. The Necromancer herself once explained that death was only a passage to such a place. She might be wrong, but until I had evidence to the contrary, I was going to assume she knew her stuff. For one thing, she came from a place like that. For another, well, she’s called the Necromancer, right?

And the bread indicated something—the smell had been there in the kitchen, but there was no sign of anyone having made it. No sign of fish in the coldbox. Nothing at all, in fact, in the pantry, the coldbox, or the kitchen. Except apples. Why were there apples? That was at least as odd as the other stuff.

I didn’t want to just sit there, but I also wasn’t comfortable about just aimlessly running around the place. I thought about finding Zhayin and putting a knife or maybe Lady Teldra to his throat, and politely asking for a few straightforward answers to some simple questions. But not yet. Not until I had some idea of what sort of forces he might have available. I don’t like to threaten someone and then discover that he’s got the edge on me. I’ve had that happen a couple of times. It’s embarrassing.

I finished up the bread, the fish, and the wine. Loiosh and Rocza shared the longbeans, because they always taste like soap to me no matter how they’re prepared. Wherever the food came from, and whatever it indicated, it was better than not eating. Except the beans—not eating was better than the beans.

“I wonder if the wine cellar is empty, too,” said Loiosh. It took me a moment to realize he was being serious. But either way, what would it tell me? Besides, I doubted that I’d have more luck finding it than anything else.

On impulse, or something like it, I got up, left the room, and went back toward the front doors—just to see whether the doors I’d seen before were still there, or if everything had moved while I wasn’t looking, like one of those castles in an Eastern folk tale. No, they were still there, which was some relief. I turned around, went past the doors I knew, and took the hallway to my right that led to the empty kitchen, then kept walking. At the end of the hall, where I’d met Discaru, I turned left, under some sort of vague notion of going from one corner of the structure, the “platform,” to the opposite corner.

Ahead of me, a pair of doors stood open. I went through like there was nothing to worry about, and in fact there wasn’t—it was a very large ballroom with a high ceiling, strategically placed cabinets with bottles and glasses, a stage at the far end, freestanding full-size mirrors in each corner, and two curving stairways leading up that looked like they were made of white marble.

I got closer, and yes, they were marble. I ascended, and found myself on a balcony that wrapped all the way around the ballroom. I wondered what it would be like to be up here when the floor was full of dancers and the room full of music. Cawti would have said something about how many Easterner or Teckla families could be fed for the price of one of the gowns or doublets.

I silently snorted—I had now, it seemed, reached the point of having imaginary conversations with her over imaginary entertainments.

There were doors in each corner on this floor. The two that were above the entrance were large and ornate; the others were smaller. Which way to go? The aristocrat, or the servant? I went through the nearest door because it was the nearest.

“At last!” said Loiosh. “After all our searching, we have found the treasure—”

“Shut up.”

A mop, a bucket, two brooms, a dustpan, and a shelf full of jars of liquids and powders of various colors, as well as a few piles of rags. And the oddest place you could come up with to put a closet like that. It made no sense, which meant that, like everything else, I just couldn’t see it. I was annoyed.

I closed the closet and headed for the other servants’ door. I guess I expected it to be pretty much the same, but this one opened to a long, narrow corridor, doors on the left every twenty feet or so. I walked past them. They were probably servants’ quarters, and while I didn’t have any problem sneaking around Zhayin’s manor and poking my nose into private places, for some reason walking into a servant’s room seemed a little excessive.

The door at the far end was locked. I studied the lock, removed my set of picks, and spent a lot longer than Kiera would have getting it. To the left, I doubt Kiera gets the same sense of satisfaction I do from hearing that “click.” I put my stuff away, opened the door, and stepped through.

It was a neat, tidy little study—a bookshelf with books, a desk with papers, a pedestal for larger books, and a tall, slanting table with clips around the edges. On the desk was a fist-size clear ball of a sort I’d seen in Morrolan’s study, and against the corner was a short, black, polished stick topped with a smaller version of the clear ball. Another corner held several cylinders, about three feet in length and perhaps half a foot in diameter. In addition to books, the shelves held several tablets of paper, some of them very large. And yeah, you guessed it: a mirror. A small one, wedged into a corner of the floor, pointing out and up. It was slightly convex, which may have meant something, I don’t know.

“Boss? What if you broke the mirror?”

“I know. I’ve been thinking about it.”

“And?”

“Not yet.”

This was the first place I’d found that made it look like someone lived here—with the exception, of course, of the room Zhayin was occupying. I went in and, without touching anything, looked stuff over. There was a blue ceramic jar on the desk, containing more pencils than I’d ever seen in one place, and a truly lovely quill holder, inkstand, and sand jar all done in turquoise set with mother-of-pearl. There was also a matched pair of fountain pens, which proved that Zhayin embraced modern technology.

I glanced over the books. There were a few on sorcery and several on necromancy, but most of them had titles like, Strength Considerations for the More Common Steel Alloys with Updated Formulae for Stress Calculations and Observations of the Effect of Water Pressure on Various Granite Structures Considered over Time. None of them looked like they’d be a lot of fun to read. Loiosh waited patiently, Rocza remaining on the floor in the doorway to give me warning if anyone should approach.

I might have learned more if I’d wanted to open the drawers of the desk, or take the books down from the shelf, but sorcerers have the nasty habit of setting traps on such things—traps I couldn’t detect while the amulet I wore was keeping me blind to sorcery.

The last thing I did was check for secret doors or movable walls or whatever, just because the room seemed like an odd size and in an odd place compared to the rest of what I’d seen. I didn’t find anything, and I decided that was enough. Rocza resumed her place on my shoulder as I closed the door and, with some effort, locked it behind me. It’s funny how often they’re harder to close than they were to open. And there’s no thrill in succeeding, either.