The Orb of Cairado

Chapter Five

U PON LEARNING that both the Orish Veltavan and the Orb of Cairado had been found, the Department of History lost its collective mind. Students and scholars went racing back to the Cleth Valley with mules and baskets and miles of rope to systematically remove the treasure from the treasury (and Osmer Aidrina, finally, from the Jade Room); two scholars second-class nearly came to blows over who was going to study the regalia of the prince of Cairado first; Osmer Harcenar and Osmer Ledmenar so far forgot themselves as to gloat in public; and, possibly of interest to no one but himself, Ulcetha Zhorvena was reinstated as a scholar second-class.

There was no ceremony about it. Trenevar went with him to Osmer Harcenar’s workroom, which was large and chilly and very tidy, where Osmer Harcenar looked up from the book he was reading and said, “ Really, Trenevar?”

Ulcetha felt small and cold.

But Trenevar was undaunted. “Mer Zhorvena was of great assistance to me in finding the Orb. And I believe him when he says he did not steal the Orish Veltavan.”

Osmer Harcenar raised his eyebrows. “What wonder-tale did he tell you? That he found it on the street?”

“Mer Zhorvena?”

This was the part Ulcetha had been dreading the most: having to tell the story to Osmer Harcenar. But there was no way around it; Osmer Harcenar might or might not believe him, but he certainly would not believe there was any innocent explanation if Ulcetha refused to talk. So he explained again, trying to tell the story coherently and not leave anything out. He was fairly sure he didn’t succeed.

Osmer Harcenar stared at him thoughtfully, saying nothing. Ulcetha looked away, ears twitching wildly. He had never been able to meet Osmer Harcenar’s stare. Five years of writing fake provenances had done nothing to help with that.

Trenevar said again, “He has been of great assistance to me.”

Osmer Harcenar stared at him; Trenevar met his stare steadily. It was Osmer Harcenar who looked away first. “What is it you want, Trenevar?”

Trenevar said, “I agreed that if Mer Zhorvena helped me find the Orb, I would help him get reinstated. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.”

Osmer Harcenar made a noise that might have been a laugh. “You have brought great acclaim to the Department, Trenevar, but that does not mean you own it.”

“Without Mer Zhorvena’s help, I would not have found the Orb.”

“Of course not. He had the Orish Veltavan.”

“I believe that he did not. If he’d stolen it, I don’t believe he would have waited five years to pretend to find it. Five years is a long time, Harcenar.”

“Are you suggesting he’s done his penance?” Osmer Harcenar asked dryly.

“No, because I don’t believe he’s done anything wrong. And I think he’s earned reinstatement, no matter what you think he did. I also think you owe me a favor. I could have gone straight to the museum.”

The rivalry between the Department of History and the Museum of Cairado was long-standing, bitter, and (Ulcetha thought) deeply pointless. But Osmer Harcenar’s loathing of Osmer Ensivar, the director of the museum, was quite real. He said, “Oh all right, Trenevar, if it will make you happy.” Which was hardly an enthusiastic welcome back, but Ulcetha would take it.

A week later, dressed in his absolute best clothes and with his hair pulled sternly back, Ulcetha went with Trenevar and Osmer Harcenar to the University Senate. His heart was pounding so hard he could barely think, and the Senate chamber, with its steeply-pitched rows of desks, did not make things any better. It was like being at the bottom of a well, if a well could look at you.

He came prepared to tell his dreadful story again, but in the event it was not necessary. When their turn came in the Senate agenda, Osmer Harcenar stood up and said, “Mer Zhorvena petitions for reinstatement as a scholar second-class of the Department of History. Osmer Trenevar and I vouch for him.”

The Senate President asked for discussion.

Someone near the top of the well said, “Isn’t Mer Zhorvena the one who was thrown out for stealing artifacts?”

“Yes,” said Osmer Harcenar, “but we are satisfied that he was falsely accused.”

“After all this time?” said someone else. “It’s been years.”

“New evidence came to light,” Osmer Harcenar said, utterly unruffled.

Ulcetha expected them to demand details, but the Senate agenda was long, and the President’s patience short. He said, “Further questions?” and barely waited a beat before continuing, “Vote, please. Do we accept the reinstatement of Mer Ulcetha Zhorvena?”

The Senate voted by means of a square plaque at each desk with one face painted green and one face painted red. Turning the green face toward the President meant yes; the red face meant no. The Senate secretary (who was a staff member rather than himself a scholar) would count the reds against the greens and announce the result. It was cumbersome but meant that no senator could know how the other senators voted, which, at least in theory, kept anyone from voting simply to be with the majority.

Harcenar climbed the stairs to his own desk; Ulcetha carefully did not look to see how he voted.

The secretary seemed to take forever to count the vote, but that was partly the way Ulcetha’s heart was pounding so hard he thought he might be sick. The University was all he had ever wanted, from the time he was old enough to want anything, and being without it had been like slowly starving to death while everyone around him feasted.

Finally, finally , the secretary said, “Yes, 23, No, 19. Yes has it.”

He had no one to celebrate with—he had friends who would welcome him back, but they were also friends who had been happy to scapegoat him when the Orish Veltavan disappeared, and he discovered that he did not want to share this with Adrivar or Tesena. He certainly had no desire ever to speak to Osmer Bevanar again. He went alone to the Cat and Carpenter, where he discovered that he did not actually want to get drunk. He’d done that often enough trying to escape the shame and anger and grief?—yes, grief—of being thrown out of the Department, and it had never helped, merely leaving him with spectacular hangovers to take to Salathgarad’s office in the morning.

He did celebrate enough to buy a glass of Crivoli wine instead of the house Romaki he usually contented himself with, and its sharp sweetness tasted most definitely like success.

* * *

He had not lost the knack of braiding the blue ribbons into his hair, nor had he forgotten his ambition of trading them for the red ribbons of a scholar first-class. That meant returning to the Department, with all that that entailed. Everyone welcomed him back. No one apologized for throwing him out (except the elderly Osmer Sazamar, whom he had never known well). By dint of showing up in Osmer Harcenar’s workroom daily, Ulcetha extracted from him a letter directing the Library Harcenada to restore his reading privileges. Likewise a letter to the University Treasurer about his stipend. With those two things restored, Ulcetha almost felt like a real scholar of the University again. But he found he was more interested in the question of who had murdered Osmer Bruna Aidrina than he was in the question of whether the prince of Cairado had held his scepter in his left hand or his right.

He was also interested in the question of who had stolen the Orish Veltavan to begin with—a question no one else was asking, since they all believed it had been him. It was possible that someone not in the Department had murdered Osmer Aidrina, although he thought it very unlikely, but only a member of the Department could have stolen the Orish Veltavan, and the more he thought about it, the more he suspected that those two people—the murderer and the thief—had been the same person.

But he could not figure out why anyone would murder Osmer Aidrina, nor why anyone would steal the Orish Veltavan only to hide it. It almost seemed like someone wanted to keep people out of the Below-palace, but why anyone would want that—except maybe the revenant of the last prince of Cairado, and it couldn’t be that, since he had burned to ashes five hundred years ago—he found himself unable to imagine.

But knowing that the murderer/thief was a member of the Department made him wary of the people who welcomed him back.

* * *

The members of Dach’osmin Bruncavin’s salon were delighted for him, even more delighted when he said he did not want to give the salon up, although he had to promise them he would not try to publish anything based on the research he had done in their family archives—there would be no way to hide the fact that he had had access to archives that, so far as the heads of households knew, he did not have permission to see, and that would lead to a variety of disasters. Ulcetha imagined the conversations he would end up having with Osmer Narlezar, Osmer Garmozhar, and Osmer Delbrathar, and was all too happy to comply.

* * *

He pulled out the box where, resisting the urge to just burn them, he had carefully stored all his research materials and brought them back. His carrel in the Department’s main building (a sprawling collection of extensions and annexes surrounding what had once been a Thorobada mansion) had been reassigned, of course, but—mercifully—Osmer Harcenar had nothing to do with carrel assignment, and Ulcetha had been a member of the Department long enough to know that while it was officially Osmer Elivera’s job, the person who really did assign carrels was Osmer Elivera’s secretary, a University staff member named Vada Perina.

Mer Perina’s desk—for he did not have as much as an office to call his own—was in the University’s administration building, which had long ago been part of the same Thorobada compound as the Department. He looked up at Ulcetha’s approach, a tall, habitually sad-faced man with pale gray skin and goblin orange eyes. “Mer Zhorvena!” he said. “I have been hearing a great deal about you.”

“I hope none of it is too dreadful,” Ulcetha said, not joking.

“Enh,” said Mer Perina. “Many people do not believe that your finding of the Orish Veltavan was entirely innocent, but they are too happy about the Orb of Cairado to mind much.”

“Could be worse,” Ulcetha said with a sigh.

“For what it is worth, I never thought you were a thief. And since it is official that you are reinstated, people will stop talking before long.”

“As long as something else comes along,”

“Something else always does,” said Mer Perina. “But you must be here about your carrel.”

“I am hoping there is one empty, yes.”

“Oh yes,” said Mer Perina. “Your Department always has more carrels than scholars, which says more about the number of carrels that have been wedged into that building than it does about history scholars. Do you want one with a piece of window or one without?”

“With,” said Ulcetha, and that simply, it was done, and he was able to set himself up in an academic’s fortress of library books and quires of notes. His piece of window looked out into the branches of a colmerlon tree, which was excellent for staring at when thinking of the next word, and Ulcetha thought that if he ever did get first-class honors and have students to teach, the first thing he would tell them was not to alienate University staff.

His first Departmental meeting back was horrid—they spent a very long time debating the question of Ulcetha’s seniority: did he go back in the rankings where he had been when he was thrown out? Did the five years away count for or against him? Had he lost seniority entirely, putting him down at the bottom of the third-class scholars’ tier? Trenevar spoke up for him—which Ulcetha had not been expecting, that not being part of their deal—and he ended up only at the bottom of the second-class scholars’ tier, which was really the best he could hope for with Osmer Harcenar presiding. He was not nearly as exercised about seniority as he had been five years ago, since the only thing it really determined was where one got to sit at the Departmental table in the University’s vast dining hall. Well, and workroom space and teaching opportunities when one became a first-class scholar, but he would worry about that when he got there.

He had been afraid that his research notes would be foreign and unknowable, and at first they were.

Then—worse—they were boring.

The policies of Edrevenivar’s regents in the southern cities were all very well as a research topic, and there was certainly some value in comparing the regency of Olverhar in Cairado with Rasponar in Choharo, but the Ulcetha of five years ago had only been interested in how the regents’ decisions affected the municipal governments. Ulcetha now thought that horribly dry and horribly limited, when there were much more interesting questions begging to be asked. He’d dealt with the great riots in Cairado purely in terms of how Olverhar had responded to them, but now he was much more interested in what had caused them. What had driven the citizens of Cairado to the streets and why had the citizens of Choharo not joined them? Olverhar’s policies had really not differed so greatly from Rasponar’s, so what had happened in Cairado that did not happen in Choharo? Or, conversely, what had happened in Choharo that failed to happen in Cairado? And what did it look like if you threw in a comparison to Nesothar’s brutally repressive regime in Sevezho—so brutal that his own soldiers revolted. And they were successful where the citizens of Cairado were not. They hanged Nesothar from a renazbeth tree and put their own general, Trovimar, in his place. And Trovimar had been arguably the most successful of Edrevenivar’s regents; Sevezho had become a loyal part of Edrevenivar’s empire decades before either Cairado or Choharo. And that wasn’t a question of municipal government at all—or, at least, he no longer thought it was. Within a week, he had scrapped a half-written draft and started all over again.

But that was all right. He would have to explain himself to the oversight committee in the fall, but by then he thought he might have enough of a draft to persuade them he was not simply failing to get any work done. And it was exciting to be doing research again, digging through the card catalogue at the Harceneise, filling out slips for books about Olverhar and Rasponar and Nesothar, wondering, though, whether the information he wanted was even in a book at all. Where did you look if you wanted to know about the motives of the sort of people historians didn’t write about? He thought of one possibility and visited the archives of the Vira’theileian, the Hall of Justice, where they were very startled to be asked for the depositions from the judicial hearings into the great riots of five hundred years ago.

“But you do have them?” Ulcetha said.

“Certainly we have them,” said the archivist, bristling. “But they are not on the shelves.”

“Where are they?”

“In the storage rooms beneath the Cairad’theileian. We don’t have room.”

Ulcetha considered the size of the Vira’theileian, which covered a full city block. The archivist saw the thought on his face and said, “The last two hundred years we keep here. Everything else goes to the Cairad’theileian.”

“Will they know where the depositions from the riots are?”

The archivist turned a laugh into a cough. “No, but they’ll let you look for them. The municipal government values its good relationship with the University. And it’s all in chronological order, so what you want should be possible, although it may take you some time.”

“Yes, it may,” Ulcetha said.

At the Cairad’theileian, they were more willing but less helpful and finally ended up simply giving him permission to go look.

The basements of the Cairad’theileian had gas lights and extremely good foundations—and since the original Cairad’theileian had burned down during the reign of Prince Ulpava, it was not on the peninsula and thus not nearly as prone to flooding—and Ulcetha still had a packet of sticks of chalk in his trouser pocket from the exploration of the Below-palace. He did not hesitate to draw arrows on the floor, and soon found himself also noting dates as he tried to figure out whether the rows of shelves should be read from east to west or north to south. He also kept a close eye on his pocket-watch (redeemed from the pawn shop, and it was ridiculous how much more he felt like himself with a pocketwatch again), since there were no windows and he knew his own propensity to lose track of time when pursuing an interesting question. At six o’clock, even though he had not found the records he wanted, he made himself follow his arrows back to the stairs.

“Did you have any luck?” said the archivist as he came out.

“I’ll come back,” said Ulcetha.

* * *

A week after Osmer Aidrina’s body was brought up out of the Below-palace, Osmer Sazamar, who was venerable enough not to care what Osmer Harcenar thought, petitioned a Witness for the Dead.

Her name was Steli?n Mirineth; she was middle-aged, round-faced, utterly harmless-looking. She came to the Department and asked questions in a soft, nonjudgmental voice, and Ulcetha could not tell what she was thinking.

He had to tell her about finding the body, which led, of course, to the question about what he and Trenevar were doing in the Below-palace—and he had to describe the Below-palace so that she would understand why calling it merely “caves” was wrong—which led to what seemed to be a genuinely baffled question about the Orish Veltavan. So Ulcetha explained about Prince Rinava.

“I don’t understand,” said Min Mirineth. “If he wanted the treasure hidden, why did he make a map?”

“He wanted the treasure hidden from Edrevenivar ,” Ulcetha said. “He most likely expected that in a decade or two, his son would be able to retrieve the Orish Veltavan and find the treasure. I don’t know what he thought would happen then. But his son died fighting Edrevenivar in Vasthorno, and Prince Rinava committed suicide and brought the Summer Palace down. So the Orish Veltavan stayed lost until Osmer Aidrina found it.”

“And then it was lost again.”

“I didn’t steal it.”

“I didn’t say you did. Do you have any idea who the real thief was?”

“I wish I did,” Ulcetha said. “But all I’ve ever been able to figure out was that it had to be someone in the Department. And someone who for some reason doesn’t want the Orb of Cairado to be found.”

“But you don’t know why.”

“Not a clue,” said Ulcetha.