The Orb of Cairado

Chapter Two

D ESPITE SINZHARO’S promise, Ulcetha thought it unlikely that anything more would come of Mara’s inexplicable bequest. Mara had been intensely private—he had loved secrets and mysteries and puzzles—and he had liked to keep the various pieces of his life quite separate from one another. So it seemed most probable that this was some piece of Mara’s life that he had never gotten around to telling Ulcetha about.

But two days later, Sinzharo was on his doorstep again. She said, “I thought of something,” without bothering with a greeting.

“Hello, Sinzharo,” Ulcetha said. “What did you think of?”

“What if it isn’t the map you’re supposed to have at all? What if it’s the book?”

“The book the map is from, you mean?”

“Yes! He couldn’t put the book in an envelope that would fit in his desk, so he tore the map out.”

“Why not just write the name of the book on a piece of paper?” Ulcetha objected.

“I don’t know. But you know how secretive Mara was. Perhaps he wanted to be sure that nobody going through his things would know what the map was for.” She again seemed unresentful of the implication that Mara had suspected her of prying.

“Well, he succeeded in that,” said Ulcetha.

“But we agreed it must have come from a book he owned. Do you want to come look at them? There aren’t very many.”

Ulcetha found himself unexpectedly touched by Sinzharo’s restraint: she could easily have looked through the books by herself. It wouldn’t have taken her long to figure out which of them, if any, was missing a map.

“Let me get my shoes,” he said.

Mara and Sinzharo had lived, and Sinzharo still did live, in a five-room flat on Bruncavar Avenue, four blocks from Ulcetha’s palace apartment. Although Mara and Ulcetha’s habit had been to meet at the Roan Mare in Ribbons, Ulcetha had been here once or twice; he remembered the bookshelves along one wall of the long front room, which held vases of flowers and a variety of trinkets Mara had brought back from his travels, but also a surprising number of books for an unscholarly household. Most of them were books Sinzharo had inherited from her father, who had been a literary scholar at the University, but there had been a few that Mara had picked up here and there. Most of those were, in fact, the sort of books that would have maps in them, and for a moment Ulcetha thought he was going to have to sit on the floor and go through each of them looking for torn edges. But comparison with the map showed that three books were too large and five books were too small, and that left only a thin book bound in blue leather; the title was in Pencharnin, but he recognized the word Chadevan. He slid the book out of the bookcase, and when he opened it, it flopped open to the middle, where something had clearly been torn out. He put the book down on the end table and got out the map again. The map was the right size, the paper was the right color, and when he tried, the ragged edge of the map lined up perfectly with the ragged edge of paper left in the book.

“I don’t know that that gets us much farther,” he said to Sinzharo.

“He wanted you to have that book,” Sinzharo said.

“Yes, but why ?”

“Mara could have answered that,” she said. “I can’t. In any event, you are welcome to the book, and I am glad to have the riddle solved.”

But the riddle isn’t solved , Ulcetha protested, but only to himself. He thanked Sinzharo for the book and walked home again.

He took his shoes off at the door and then sat cross-legged on the divan that served as his bed—and seating for guests, if he had ever had any guests—and contemplated the Pencharnin book.

He and Mara had never discussed the Chadevan Sea that he could recall. He had not known Mara owned this book. As far as he knew, Mara had not been able to read Pencharnin, and he was fairly confident he would have known. So what in the name of all that was holy…

He flipped through the book, noting illustrations and several other maps, and guessed it had to be a travelers’ guide of some sort. Not that that helped him. He looked at the pages on either side of the torn-out map, but aside from the word “Vershaleen,” he saw nothing that he recognized. “This is ridiculous, Mara,” he said aloud.

He looked at the flyleaf, where Mara’s name was neatly written. He looked at the endpapers: nothing except, at the back, a printed list that he thought had to be other books in this series of travelers’ guides. Finally, in desperation (and because in truth he had nothing better to do until seven o’clock, when he was meeting Osmin Delbrathin for dinner), he began paging through, looking for marks or marginalia or anything that might offer a hint as to why Mara had so cryptically pointed him at this book.

He found it three pages after the torn-out map. He didn’t even recognize it at first, seeing it so radically out of context, but after several moments of staring blankly at the random-looking combination of letters and numbers, he realized it was an index number for the Library Harcenada, the Harceneise.

And then he stared at it in, if possible, even blanker bewilderment. What could Mara have possibly had to do with the Harceneise? Why had he written an index number in this Pencharneise travelers’ guide and gone to such peculiar lengths to lead Ulcetha to it?

“Oh, Mara,” he said, torn between frustration and laughter, and feeling hollowed out with grief, “what is this?” It was exactly the sort of thing that happened in the adventure novels both of them guiltily loved. And Mara liked complicated things, like pocket-watches. So Ulcetha could imagine Mara setting up a paper chase like this just because he could, for the sheer joy of doing it. It was in fact the only explanation that made sense.

After a while he organized himself. There were two lines of questioning here. First, what was the index number pointing to? Second, why had Mara written it in this book? The second, he thought, might be more answerable when he knew the answer to the first, which helpfully prioritized them. But finding the answer to the first was going to be more than slightly tricky.

Once upon a time, as a scholar second-class of the University of Cairado, Ulcetha had been in the Harceneise almost daily, and he knew the key to the index numbers. The first three letters told you which of the Library’s five towers the book was in, the first number was the floor of the tower, the second set of letters the bookcase, the second number the shelf, and the third number in parenthesis was where the book came in the sequence of books on the shelf. It was a remarkably efficient system and it worked, he knew, almost all the time. But a book misplaced might never be found again. Allegedly, it never happened—the Library’s small army of shelvers were rigorously trained—but Ulcetha knew better than to believe that.

And how easy, he thought, to hide a book! Put it on the wrong shelf in the wrong tower, and no one but you would ever know where it was. And if you wrote down the actual location, as for instance in a Pencharneise travelers’ guide, you could retrieve it whenever you wanted to. If, of course, you had borrowing privileges at the Library, which Ulcetha no longer did and Mara never had.

Over the next week, as it became steadily less likely that Edrehasivar VII would start his reign with a purge, Ulcetha thought about that index number on and off. He had never been able to resist a puzzle—which Mara, an inveterate lover of puzzles, had known perfectly well—and he was deeply frustrated, once again, that his deal with Sevara only got him into the Harceneise once a week, and then only into the Reading Room.

Sevara was a captain of shelvers. It had been common knowledge in the Department that Sevara was amenable to making “special arrangements” with anyone who could pay generously enough, so it had not been difficult, when Ulcetha started working for Salathgarad, to come to an agreement. Once a week, Sevara left the outside door to the Reading Room unlocked, giving Ulcetha access to the card catalogues, and every week he left a neat stack of the books Ulcetha had requested the week before. He did not unlock the door to the stacks, and nothing would induce him to. Ulcetha knew because he’d tried.

Ulcetha could simply add Mara’s index number to his list for the week, but without knowing exactly what was waiting at PLU 3 AP 2 (49) he was loath to do so. It would be very like Mara to have put something there that wasn’t a book at all. He needed to get into the stacks, and there was no way to do that that would not bring him face-to-face with a shelver or a librarian, and most likely sooner rather than later.

Unless he broke in at night.

This was a foolish idea, and he tried to scoff at it, but it kept recurring. There were windows on the ground floor that were big enough to climb through; they were kept locked, but the more he thought about it, the more he thought he was willing to break a window to solve this puzzle.

He would need a light, but that was easy enough. He had a small adjustable lantern that only needed to be washed and filled. He did that while arguing with himself that this was a stupid thing even to be contemplating ; if he was caught, he would probably be thrown in the river (that being a far simpler way of dealing with criminals than putting them in prison—and if he was put in prison, he would almost certainly die of one of the pestilential fevers that haunted the Goremet before his case even went before a judiciar), and everyone who had known him at the University would say, “See, there? Once a thief, always a thief.”

And yet he could not leave the puzzle alone.

He found an old black and plum scarf to cover his hair. His mourning coat was shabby, but certainly black enough for these purposes. He knew that real thieves—those with enough elven blood to be pale skinned—used grease or mud or soot to darken their faces and hands, but he wasn’t quite sure when he was supposed to do that (before he left his apartment? thereby demonstrating to everyone who saw him on the streets that he intended to do something illegal?) and in the end decided not to.

He was in fact still arguing with himself about whether he was going to do this insane thing at all when, at midnight, he put on the mourning coat, put the black and plum scarf in his pocket, and carefully locked his apartment door behind him as he left. Ulcetha, this is madness! But he was doing it anyway.

He took a goblin ferry across the Athamara and walked to the Harceneise, looming great and black against the blackness of the sky. Sevara had shown him the trick of getting over the wall, that one loose brick that could be removed to make a perfect step, and once on the inside, he tied the scarf over his hair and adjusted his lantern from late-night stroll to wrong-doing , then carefully skirted the building to the base of the northeast tower and the lowest bank of windows.

He was not quite sure about how to break a window without telling everyone in earshot that someone was committing a crime at the Harceneise, and while he was thinking about it, he tried the windows. The fifth along wasn’t locked.

He shoved it all the way open, stood on tiptoe to set his lantern on the floor, and then heaved himself, not gracefully, over the windowsill. He kept from cursing aloud even as he half-fell into the building, then picked himself up, put the scarf back on his head, and, leaving the window open in case of a hasty exit, he opened the lantern an inch wider and began to look for the stairs.

The Harceneise was unsettling at night, although he wondered if he’d mind as much if he hadn’t just struggled in illicitly through a window. Even the rows of full bookcases—and a full bookcase was normally the friendliest object Ulcetha could imagine—looked distressingly unlike themselves in the lantern-light, as if they might at any moment prove to be haunted. He was glad to find the stairs, although there the darkness was even heavier.

He climbed to the third floor and there found his way from Bookcase AA to Bookcase AP. Second shelf counting from the top, and then across from 1 to 49…where there was a stout volume on the customs of the Neschonori region of Barizhan, index number properly pasted on its spine and all. He picked it up and opened it and nearly dropped it in shock.

Someone had taken this book on the Neschonori and hollowed it out, gluing the outer edges of all the pages together to form a box. And in the box was an object that Ulcetha immediately recognized, since he had been accused of stealing it five years ago and had never been able to prove his innocence.

It was called the Orish Veltavan. It had been discovered only five and a half years ago, by Osmer Bruna Aidrina, a scholar first-class of the University of Cairado, who spent most of his time in the Cleth Valley, excavating the Summer Palace and searching for the treasure hidden beneath it. People had laughed at Osmer Aidrina for years for pursuing this wonder-

tale treasure until he came back with the Orish Veltavan, which everyone had frankly thought was a myth.

The only problem was, although the stories agreed that the Orish Veltavan was the key to finding the Orb of Cairado, none of them said how. It had been the secret of the direct line of the House Moraclada and had died with Prince Rinava. And the object itself had not proved informative. Debate in the Department of History had been sharp and creative…until the Orish Veltavan disappeared.

Osmer Aidrina had aged twenty years overnight.

The entire Department had searched frantically, and the clearer it became that the Orish Veltavan was nowhere to be found, the more Ulcetha, who was at that time the custodian of the Department’s small and valuable collection of artifacts, came under suspicion, until finally, the Orish Veltavan apparently gone for good, Osmer Harcenar, the head of the Department, said he thought everyone would be happier if Ulcetha left.

Ulcetha had protested—for one, he hadn’t taken it, for another, if he had, wouldn’t it be better to try to make him give it back?—but Osmer Harcenar would not listen. Within a week, the entire city knew that Ulcetha Zhorvena had been thrown out of the University for stealing, and everyone he knew—except for Mara—stopped talking to him.

Had Mara known where it was the entire time? Was that why he alone had said, “I’m sure you didn’t do it”?

But Mara couldn’t have stolen it. The one thing that had been absolutely clear after all the searching was that the Orish Veltavan must have been taken by someone with a Department key, meaning a scholar third-class or above. Not Mara Lilana, who had never set foot on the University campus more than twice in his life.

None of it made any sense, and Ulcetha did not know what to do.

If he left the Orish Veltavan here and did nothing…no, that was the worst option, since it meant the Orish Veltavan stayed lost. If he took it and was caught with it—well, they already thought he was a thief. If he took it and went to…whom? Not Osmer Harcenar, who would never believe he was not a thief. He couldn’t take it to Osmer Aidrina because Osmer Aidrina had gone down into the Below-palace four years ago and never come back up. He flipped through a mental roster of scholars first-class: Osmer Elivera, Osmer Melorar, Osmer Ledmenar, Osmer Trenevar…Osmer Trenevar. He doubted any of the scholars first-class would listen to him if he tried to just show up in their workroom and say, “I found the Orish Veltavan hidden in the Harceneise.” But Osmer Trenevar might. Osmer Trenevar wanted to find the Orb of Cairado almost as much as Osmer Aidrina had. And with Osmer Trenevar, he had another avenue of approach to try. With Osmer Trenevar, he had Csecoro.