The Orb of Cairado

Chapter Four

P RINCESS PAVI?N’S Gate was the main gate in the Second Wall of the city, beautifully set with ceramic tiles. There was, Ulcetha knew from Csecoro, whose research specialty was the reign of Princess Pavi?n’s husband Prince Armetha, an entire small industry of ceramicists—supported mainly by the municipal government—devoted to maintaining those tiles and replacing them as inevitably needed. He was not in a mood to appreciate it, having just tacked his notice to Salathgarad’s door and well and truly burned his bridges, but the gate was exquisite in the early morning sun, its azure and scarlet traceries contrasting vividly against the white tiles.

He found Trenevar, who was standing at the north side of the gate next to a hitching post, and three horses, two saddled and one carrying whatever supplies Trenevar had deemed necessary. He was wearing an ostentatiously plain green coat with green cloth buttons. Ulcetha, who had ended up wearing his mourning coat, as being the plainest he had and also the one he would regret least if it was torn or otherwise damaged, felt a little less ridiculous.

“Oh, good, Zhorvena. Good morning,” said Trenevar. “Is that valise all you have?”

“Yes,” Ulcetha said. It had taken considerable effort to pare his necessities down to what would fit in one valise, but he had done it. Trenevar took the valise and secured it behind the saddle of the dun horse.

“I assume,” Trenevar said, trying to make it sound like a joke but obviously deadly serious, “that you remembered the Orish Veltavan?”

“I did,” said Ulcetha. He patted his coat lightly over the inner pocket. “I have it safe.”

‘Good,” Trenevar said; his smile made him look even more disconcertingly like Csecoro. “Then I think we’re ready to go.”

Happily, there was a mounting block beside the post, and happily the dun horse was willing to stand at it while Ulcetha hauled himself awkwardly into the saddle.

“Not a horseman?” Trenevar said, this time sounding genuinely amused.

“Not very much,” said Ulcetha.

“Well, Patraca is very placid and will be well-content to follow Albeva, so you should not have any trouble.” Trenevar mounted the chestnut horse—Albeva—easily and they moved into the flow of westward traffic out the gate.

Ulcetha had taken some riding lessons—Osmer Bevanar, his mentor, had insisted on it when Ulcetha earned his third class honors—so he was not helpless on top of a horse, but he was neither graceful nor self-assured and was burningly aware of it. He tried to remember how to sit, how to position his feet in the stirrups, how to hold the reins, a frantic cascade of half-remembered instructions, while his horse, as promised, followed Trenevar’s . Ulcetha’s weight-shifting caused him to stop once, in almost visible confusion, but he was happy to start again.

They made slow progress at first, having to contend with the rest of the traffic on the Great West Road, which had once led, not only to the Summer Palace at Cleth, but to the city of Vasthorno, which had once been magnificent but was razed to the ground for attempting to defy Edrevenivar. The Great West Road now led to a number of villages and artisans’ cooperatives and split north and south at the Pilzhalo crossroads to run to Choharo (north) and Sevezho (south), and was still the busiest road in Cairado, if you did not count the rivers.

It took them three days to reach Obaro—three nights of sleeping on sagging mattresses in roadside hotels—and another day to make the hike up into the hills. They reached the Cleth Valley near sundown; there was nothing here any longer except the ruin of the Summer Palace. The locals considered the ruin bad luck and claimed it harbored pestilence, which all of the Department scholars said was nonsense. Osmer Aidrina had excavated the site of the Summer Palace for twenty years before he disappeared, and he had never shown the slightest sign of illness—but he had had to hire his workers from Pilzhalo. No one from Obaro would have anything to do with it.

They found Osmer Aidrina’s campsite, which everyone who came to the Cleth Valley used. They watered their horses in the aqueduct that ran alongside the ruins, carrying water from the hills above Cleth down to Obaro—a project of Prince Rinava’s great-great-great-grandfather. Trenevar had brought grain for the horses, and the grass was lush, since there were no sheep or cattle to graze on it. Trenevar produced a ground cloth, and he and Ulcetha sat on it and ate some of the provisions Trenevar had brought—in addition to beef jerky and dried currants, he had tins of sardines and crackers to eat them on. It was warm enough not to need a fire. Ulcetha imitated Trenevar in folding his coat up to make a pillow, and although Trenevar seemed to drop off to sleep immediately, Ulcetha lay awake for a long time, staring up at the stars and turning the Orish Veltavan over and over in his hands.

* * *

His sleep was thin and uncomfortable, and he dreamed about the Harceneise burning down.

* * *

In the morning, after a slightly odd breakfast of sardines and crackers, and after Trenevar had watered the horses, they started for the Below-palace. The hills around the Cleth Valley were riddled with caves, and there were entrances to the cave system everywhere, but the Moraclada’s entrance, and the one that Trenevar thought matched up with the Orish Veltavan, was actually in the ruins of the Summer Palace. Osmer Aidrina had found it less than a month before the Orish Veltavan was stolen.

Ulcetha had seen drawings of the Summer Palace; it had been a slightly absurd five-tiered cake of a building, with colonnades on every level to catch whatever breezes there might be. When it had burned, all of those colonnades had fallen in, creating a pile of rubble and ashes the size of four city blocks and in places nearly all of those five tiers tall. The wonder, as someone had remarked at the time, was not that it took Osmer Aidrina twenty years to find the Orish Veltavan; the wonder was that he found it at all.

Ulcetha followed Trenevar carefully along one of the paths cleared by Osmer Aidrina and his workmen until they came to a set of stone stairs that plunged down into the darkness beneath the ruin.

“This is the first descent,” said Trenevar. He had a coil of rope slung over his shoulder, and both he and Ulcetha were carrying lanterns tied around their waists, which they now lit. “If you look at the Orish Veltavan, you’ll see that that first spiral of wire down to the diamond matches it perfectly.”

Ulcetha looked at the Orish Veltavan and looked at the stairs; it was hard to translate one against the other, but he thought he saw what Trenevar (and Osmer Aidrina before him) meant. Certainly he could see nothing that disproved the idea. “All right,” he said.

They descended the stairs carefully. Someone had rigged a kind of hand rail out of rope, and Ulcetha blessed them for it. The stairs were steep and uneven and polished smooth with generations of feet, and it would be all too easy to slip and break an ankle.

At the base of the stairs, Trenevar said, “This is the Antechamber.”

“And you say it’s the diamond,” Ulcetha said.

“Yes.”

The Antechamber was a small, perfectly squared room, its walls carved with lilies and hibiscus, with exits leading in three directions, all sloping down. Ulcetha held up the Orish Veltavan and tried to orient it correctly to the stairs. “Then you think the next room is the topaz?”

“Yes. Which way?”

“Left, I mean north,” Ulcetha said and tried to sound more certain than he felt.

They took the left-hand exit and descended by a smooth path to another chamber, also perfectly squared. This one was carved with a pattern of hexagons.

“The ruby is next,” said Trenevar.

“East,” said Ulcetha, “but I’m not sure how we’re going to follow it, since it goes east, then straight down, then west.”

“You’ll see,” Trenevar said.

They went east until they came to a square hole in the floor, large enough to admit a person, although you could skirt around it and keep going east if you wanted to. There were the remains of hinges on one side, suggesting there had once been a trapdoor here. Someone had sunk an iron ring into the stone on the side opposite the hinges, and there was a rope tied to it. “Like this,” Trenevar said, and climbed agilely down the rope.

Grimly, Ulcetha followed him, although he was well aware he was not agile. The climb was not as bad as it could have been, though, since it was not through empty space, but along one wall of an elegantly fluted chimney. At the bottom, Trenevar said, “Good, good. Where next? Back to the west, correct?”

He had gotten out his compass, which was about the same size as a pocket-watch. Ulcetha looked at the compass and then at the Orish Veltavan and tried to visualize the one laid over the other, with only middling success. But finally he said, “Yes. We want to go west. But what about the rope?”

“What about it?”

“Why was it there?”

“It was Aidrina’s rope, but no one wanted to untie it, in case poor Aidrina found his way back to it.”

“Oh,” said Ulcetha and failed to prevent himself imagining the horror of finding your way back through the dark to the place a rope was supposed to be, and no rope being there.

“Come on,” Trenevar said impatiently.

And since the last thing Ulcetha wanted was to be left alone down here in the dark, he followed Trenevar.

* * *

They traced the path of the Orish Veltavan, jewel by jewel, beautifully carved room by beautifully carved room, carefully chalking arrows as they went to be sure they could find their way back, since every doorway in every room seemed to lead to more beautifully carved rooms. The Moraclada had had a house at Cleth for at least a millennium and all the time and money they needed to make the caves beneath their house (as it grew from a house to a mansion to a palace) into an elaborate, perfectly polished maze. Their artisans had not reached all of the cave system in the hills around Cleth, but the Below-palace was much much larger than the structure Prince Rinava had burned down.

Hence the need for the Orish Veltavan.

The farther they went, the more Ulcetha began, cautiously at first and then with increasing conviction, to believe that Trenevar (and Osmer Aidrina) was correct, and the jewels were the map through the Below-palace.

In the room that corresponded to a jade chip, Trenevar, in the lead, came to a halt so suddenly that Ulcetha crashed into him, nearly sending them both sprawling.

“What…” said Ulcetha, grabbing to make sure his glasses stayed on his face.

“ That ,” said Trenevar, pointing with an unsteady hand.

That , when Ulcetha looked, was unmistakably a dead body. Equally unmistakably, it had been here for a long time—though not long enough to be, for instance, the last prince of Cairado.

“Is that?—”

“Aidrina!” said Trenevar, in what was nearly a shriek.

“Other people have gotten lost in the caves,” Ulcetha said, even though he was sure Trenevar was right.

“No, look at the hair,” Trenevar said, in a slightly calmer voice. “Nobody else wore first-class ribbons so old they’d faded to pink. It has to be Aidrina.”

Ulcetha looked—and then looked again, his stomach contracting into a hard knot. “Is that…is that a knife ?”

“A knife ?” Trenevar said, his voice rising toward a shriek again.

“Someone murdered Osmer Aidrina,” Ulcetha said blankly. The idea made no sense; Osmer Aidrina had been the most harmless of people—even his workmen liked him.

Trenevar swallowed hard and said, “He certainly didn’t stick that knife in his own back.”

“But why ?”

“I don’t know,” Trenevar said.

They stared at the body silently for some time.

“What do we do?” Ulcetha asked finally. “I mean, we can’t leave him here.”

“Are you suggesting we turn back now ?”

“No,” Ulcetha said, although he thought maybe he should have been. “I meant on the way back. But I don’t see how we can get him up the rope without him…falling apart.”

“Let’s save that problem for later,” said Trenevar. “Aidrina won’t mind waiting a little longer, and we’re nearly to the end.”

“Yes,” Ulcetha said and looked at the Orish Veltavan, although he almost didn’t need to, he’d looked at it so often in the past four hours. “Go north.”

They had to step over Osmer Aidrina, and Ulcetha muttered, “Sorry,” as he did so. It was a closer view than he’d wanted of the knife hilt jutting up from the middle of Osmer Aidrina’s back.

“It shows that we’re on the right track,” Trenevar said. “Aidrina was pretty sure he knew the path, that last time.”

“It would be a ghastly coincidence,” Ulcetha agreed, “if Osmer Aidrina just happened to die in a room that was also part of the solution to the maze.”

And then they came to the wall.

Trenevar had been leading quite confidently—he, after all, had been down in the Below-palace before, searching with Aidrina for the Moraclada treasure and the Orb of Cairado—and at first he said, “You must be wrong.”

“I’m not wrong,” Ulcetha said, handing him the Orish Veltavan. “The wire goes that way,” and he jerked his thumb at the wall, which was carved in the honeycomb pattern the Moraclada seemed to have liked best.

Trenevar looked at the Orish Veltavan, looked at the pearl that marked their current location, and looked at the wall. “Could we have made a wrong turn earlier?”

“We’ve been very careful,” Ulcetha said. “I mean, yes, we could have, but I really don’t think we did.”

“Could the Orish Veltavan have gotten twisted somehow?”

Ulcetha considered that. “I suppose it’s possible , but it’s pretty stiff wire, and I can’t imagine anyone not being careful with it.”

“Your imagination may not be good enough,” Trenevar said dryly.

“Still,” said Ulcetha. “Don’t you think we’d be able to tell?”

“I suppose,” said Trenevar. “What if we tried the rooms to either side?”

“There’s been nothing in any of the rooms to show they matched up with the Orish Veltavan,” Ulcetha said. “It seems unlikely they’d change that pattern now.”

They both stood silently for some time, looking at the wall.

“Could it be a terrible joke?” Ulcetha said. “Could Prince Rinava have meant it for Edrevenivar?”

“Meaning that it’s supposed to lead here?” Trenevar thought that over. “But then why are there jewels after the pearl? Why not just lead us to the wall and dump us?”

“Could it be…” Ulcetha could feel his face heat. “Could there be a secret door?”

“A secret door?”

“I know it’s stupid,” Ulcetha said hastily. “I read too many adventure novels.”

“It’s not stupid,” Trenevar said. “It’s just the sort of thing the Moraclada would do. And it makes more sense than the idea that Prince Rinava went to such extraordinary lengths for…for nothing. He meant the Orish Veltavan to go to his son, not to Edrevenivar.”

“Why did he not destroy the Orish Veltavan, then, when his son died?”

“I imagine he was too busy burning the Summer Palace down.”

“Why wasn’t it destroyed in the fire? Did Osmer Aidrina ever say where he found it?”

“It had been hidden beneath a flagstone. Aidrina knew of the hiding place because I found a mention of it in Rinava’s oldest daughter’s diary. So it was absolutely, perfectly safe for five hundred years, until Aidrina finally moved enough rubble to uncover the correct flagstone. But all the Moraclada loved hiding places and secret passages, so a secret door is just the sort of thing they would do.”

Like Mara , Ulcetha thought and shivered. “Just a second,” he said. He quickly checked the room to the north and the room to the south. “Both of those rooms have blank east walls, too. So there’s room.”

“The question then becomes: how do we open it?”

“There must be a catch somewhere,” Ulcetha said. “Maybe one of the honeycombs?”

“Maybe,” Trenevar said. His ears looked daunted, but he gamely started pushing hexagons, none of which budged. Ulcetha looked at the wall, looked at the other walls, looked thoughtfully at the floor. Most of the floors in the Below-palace were simple stone, smoothed and dressed, but not elaborated on. This floor, though, had been tiled with more hexagons, and why tile , Ulcetha thought, when you could simply have carved?

He crouched down and prodded at the tiles thoughtfully.

“Do you think…” Trenevar said.

“Maybe. I mean, it could be.” He stood up, thought for a moment, and then estimated where the middle of the floor was. That tile, when he prodded it, moved. He was able to lift it, like the lid of a box. Beneath it was a wire bent into a hook. That seemed self-evident; Ulcetha pulled it.

It took some force, but he finally heard a click, and the room’s blank wall rotated outward maybe half an inch.

Trenevar was quick to pull it further out. Behind it, they found an arched doorway, identical to the doorways in the other three walls, and they stepped through into the next room, which was a chip of lapis lazuli. Its walls were garlanded with high-relief roses.

“Which way?” said Trenevar.

“Straight ahead,” said Ulcetha. “East.”

Between the rose quartz chip and the tourmaline chip, they had to crawl through a passage so low they could not even stay up on their hands and knees. Ulcetha was simultaneously glad he’d worn his oldest coat and terrified that the rock above them would shift and squash them into paté.

The tourmaline chip room was lavish with gilt and tourmalines, the fanciest room by far that they had found. “We must be close,” said Trenevar. “Which way?”

“South,” said Ulcetha. The path to the south curled back around the tourmaline room, and then curled even more tightly to the north until the path of jewels ended in a sapphire. In the cave, the path ended in a door.

It was a door that had been crafted with considerable care, just as the cave opening had been crafted with considerable care to take a door. The two fit together smoothly, without hinges on this side, a heavy wooden door (and how had they even gotten it down here?) and a smooth stone wall.

Trenevar tried the door, because someone had to, and it was locked.

“Now what?” said Ulcetha.

“Now?” said Trenevar. “Have some jerky and let’s think about it.”

“It’s a locked door,” Ulcetha said, accepting the strip of jerky Trenevar held out to him. “There isn’t much to think about.”

“Don’t be defeatist, Zhorvena,” said Trenevar.

Ulcetha bit down on the jerky instead of saying he wasn’t being defeatist, and they were both silent for a while.

Finally, Trenevar, who had been examining the door, said, “This is a very peculiar looking keyhole.”

Ulcetha joined him and had to agree. “It looks like it would fit the Orish Veltavan,” he said, “but you couldn’t turn it. The metal wouldn’t hold up.”

“Maybe you don’t turn it,” Trenevar said. “Here, let’s try.”

Ulcetha lined up the Orish Veltavan with the keyhole. He had to try three times before he got the right orientation, but then it slid in perfectly. He felt the tiny chunk as the gem chips each hit something in the lock. “Now what? I’m not going to try turning it.”

“No, don’t,” said Trenevar. “Push. Gently.”

Ulcetha pushed, very gently; there was a heavy click somewhere deep in the lock, and the door began to swing open.

“Yes!” Trenevar started forward.

“Wait!” Ulcetha yanked him back, so hard that he threw them both off balance and they ended in an untidy and painful heap on the floor.

“Wha—” Trenevar started, but they both heard the unmistakable noise of a reveth-atha ( shinnnnng-thunk! ), and looking up, saw that the door had been carefully crafted in more ways than one.

“Thank you,” Trenevar said shakily after a long moment as Ulcetha tried and failed not to wonder how far through Trenevar’s body the blade would have gone starting from the top of the skull. “What made you…”

“Low tastes in literature,” said Ulcetha. “In adventure novels, doors to ancient treasures are always death-trapped.”

“I will remember not to sneer at adventure novels,” Trenevar said. “Do you think there are other traps?”

“I have no idea. Which I suppose means we had better be careful.”

“Yes,” Trenevar said, eyeing the reveth-atha in the doorway. “Yes, we had.”

* * *

The reveth-atha might not have been the only trap in the treasury of the princes of Cairado, but it was the only one that still worked. Of course, the treasury was only one room, and not a large one—here Ulcetha’s reading was at fault—containing six heavy wooden chests. They opened them one at a time, finding ingots of gold, pieces of the prince’s regalia, and finally, in the fourth chest, among a careless heap of rings and necklaces, a tarnished silver scepter crowned by a spherical star sapphire as big as an egg.

“The Orb of Cairado,” said Trenevar with immense, reverent satisfaction, and Ulcetha thought, I never have to see Salathgarad again .

* * *

With the reveth-atha blade in the way, the door to the treasury could no longer be closed, and there was no method that either Ulcetha or Trenevar could find of hoisting the blade back up.

“Not that one would ,” said Trenevar, although he said it uneasily. Their return to Cairado with the Orb would be the signal for every treasure-hunter in the city to swarm Cleth, and although they could close the secret door, which would provide some protection, Ulcetha was afraid that eventually the treasure-hunters would make it to the treasure.

Trenevar was clearly thinking the same thing. He said, “We’ll have to get the Department to send someone out here right away.”

“Doesn’t the treasure properly belong to the city?” said Ulcetha.

“It properly belongs to the descendants of the princes of Cairado,” said Trenevar, “and we’d need a genealogist to tell us who those descendants actually are, as opposed to those who claim to be. But Osmer Harcenar has as likely a claim as anyone, if it comes to that. And you could further make the argument that, since the Department will put everything in the Museum of Cairado, it is going to the city. Anyone in Cairado will be able to come and look at it, and that’s better than having it hidden away in a vault in the Cairad’theileian.”

“You have given the matter a great deal of thought,” said Ulcetha.

Trenevar shrugged. “I have been looking for the Orb of Cairado for a very long time.”

“What would you do if there was still a prince of Cairado?”

“Well, then, it would belong to him, and trying to say otherwise would get me thrown in the Goremet,” said Trenevar. “You’re making this difficult, Zhorvena, and it really isn’t. Not like the Barizheise Room in the Museum, where every year they get a petition from the Barizheise Museum of Culture asking for their artifacts back, and every year they send a petition to the Barizheise Museum of Culture, asking for our artifacts back, and nobody budges.”

Ulcetha winced a little and wondered if he’d flinch at the word “artifact” for the rest of his life. “All right. But there’s still the problem of Osmer Aidrina.”

“Yes,” said Trenevar, and some of the manic energy seemed to drain out of him. “The problem of Aidrina. We need, and I hate to say this, something to put him in. And we don’t have anything.”

“We can’t just leave him there.”

“Is that more disrespectful than picking him up and having him fall apart? Look, nothing’s going to happen to him in the time it will take us to go back to Cairado and send someone out here with a basket or something.”

“A basket ?” Ulcetha protested. “Shouldn’t he have a coffin?”

“A coffin will be no easier to get back to the surface. Harder, actually. And maybe I’m using the wrong word, but the Csaiveisei and the Uliseisei do have…well, baskets for transporting bodies in, bodies that are like Aidrina’s and have been discovered long after death. The Ulisothala will know.”

Ulcetha was not himself looking forward to touching Osmer Aidrina’s body, and he suspected that was making him a coward. He said, “Are you sure?—”

“Zhorvena. Aidrina was as pragmatic a person as you could hope to find. He won’t visit your dreams for letting someone who knows what they’re doing handle the body.”

“All right, all right!” Ulcetha said, giving in. “But if he does visit my dreams, I’m telling him it was your idea.”

“Yes,” Trenevar said, and his voice caught a little. “Entirely my idea.”