Chapter Nineteen #4
The papers on the desk are arranged far more neatly than anywhere else in the room, and there’s little dust here. I glance at a ledger on the right side: quantities of ingredients collected during the most recent harvest.
At least I’m in the right year.
I’m sorting through the papers beneath it, looking for anything with a royal seal or Cyrus’s name, when something comes crashing down from overhead.
“You alright?” says Taran. “I can’t see you.”
“I’m fine. You obliterated a jar of dried leaves.”
“It’s a nightmare up here.”
I expect the guards to come charging in to see if we’re alright, but they must be accustomed to a lot of banging and crashing in this room because they leave us alone.
“Anything?” I call after I don’t hear him moving for a while.
“It’s pointed over towards Dalven. Near Adria’s camp. But the palace would be clearly visible from here as well.”
“I don’t like that.”
“Me neither. But it must weigh five hundred pounds. I’ll have to send someone else to come and get it.”
“An earth-born, maybe.” That’s probably how they got it up there in the first place.
“Do you have anything?” Taran says as he starts climbing down.
“Not really.” None of the papers I’m looking at seem to contain any damning information about the Guild’s activities, but I didn’t really expect them to.
Why would the acting Guild Mistress or the former Guild Mistress keep anything that would get them in trouble here when they could just slip it into any of the thousands of books in the room?
But then something occurs to me: people are lazy. I open the drawers of the desk. More papers, ink, quills, letter openers. I feel around for hidden compartments like on my brother’s desk, but I feel no give, no slot to slip a finger in to reveal a false bottom.
I stand back and look at the desk. It’s made of a nice Nithyrian wood, quite similar to the reddish kind of cedar Ronan prefers, only the lacquer is a bit darker.
And it’s thick. The top of the desk is much thicker than is typical.
It must have cost a small fortune, although judging by the amount of priceless items in the room, the Guild has been spending its fortune indiscriminately.
The top is too thick, I realize. I knock on the wood, and the sound is hollow. Either the carpenter was having a weird day, or there’s a secret compartment somewhere in the top.
I feel around under the desk until my fingers catch on a keyhole. “Found something.” I reach into my pocket and remove my wrench and rake, picking the lock as Taran approaches.
“Anything in these papers?”
“No idea. Take a look.”
The lock is trickier than ordinary. One of the pins truly does not want to stay in place, but after several failed attempts, I finally manage it.
I pull down, and a stack of papers falls out onto my head. “Here we go.” I pass half of the stack up to Taran to read. “Bolts of silk? Linen thread? This looks like it’s just a tailor’s receipt.”
“These are strange as well. Pigments for painting, I think. It could be coded.”
“Better take it all.”
We’ve been gone a long time now, but I hate to leave this room without giving it a more thorough search.
By the time we return here, anything they don’t want us to see may have been moved, if it wasn’t moved already.
“There’s one more desk like this I want to check.
” It looks similar enough that it probably has the same compartment.
Taran follows me over to the other desk. It’s over to the far side of the room, and it takes us quite a bit of time to navigate the maze of the floor, but we do finally reach it. I’m grasping underneath it when I feel something familiar.
“Ronan,” I say. I meet Taran’s blue eyes, his expression troubled.
“Nearby?”
I shake my head. “Not in the tower yet. He’s in the main building below.” He feels like he’s still a good distance away from us, but I usually can’t feel him from this far. Maybe something is affecting my magic. “We need to go.”
“What’s he feeling?”
“Annoyed. Worried. Pretty much what you’d expect.”
I feel under the desk quickly but don’t immediately find a matching keyhole, so I abandon the search. I follow Taran out into the tower’s stairway, thanking the guards, and then I take the lead once we’re back in the main building.
“This way,” I say, leading us through an archway into a narrow corridor. It isn’t the way we came before with the apprentice, but I’m hopeful that they’ve just continued the tour without us and aren’t searching the entire Guild for us yet.
The narrow hallway opens into a much larger corridor, this one filled with alchemists coming and going in their brown robes. The air smells of honey and cinnamon—the dining hall serving breakfast must be nearby.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” asks Taran.
We do seem to still be firmly in the living areas of the Guild. But I can feel Ronan as clearly as ever. He’s not moving, so they must have stopped to talk about something.
Or maybe he’s having a snack.
“I’m certain,” I say as I lead us through the dining hall and into another long corridor and then up a set of stairs. “We’re close now.”
This part of the Guild looks different from the halls we’ve just walked through. It’s constructed not of white limestone but instead from the same pinkish stone of the palace, and the floors are considerably less worn than those we’ve just been walking on.
There are also far fewer guards here. “Where do you think we are?” I ask Taran just as he places a hand on my shoulder to stop me in my tracks.
I look to where he’s pointing: a simple wooden door at the end of the hall.
The door is guarded not by Royal Guards or any guards of Selara at all, but by a pair of alchemists themselves.
It’s engraved with many of the same symbols as the Guild Mistress’s chambers, but there’s one additional symbol right in the middle that anyone would recognize: a circle with a dot in the center.
The alchemical symbol for gold.
“The gold-refining rooms.”
Taran nods at me with a pained expression. “You think Ronan is in there? They would never have let him in. They never let anyone in. You’re certain he doesn’t feel in distress?”
“He’s not in there,” I say. “And he’s not in distress. He’s down that staircase.” I point halfway down the hall, a long way from the gold door, and Taran relaxes.
We turn down the stairs and find ourselves in yet another hallway, this one seemingly underground, given that we were just on the ground floor, but it’s better lit than I would have expected.
Better lit and empty.
I stop Taran, my hand on his chest. “He’s here. He should be right here.” Is he hiding? Can his illusions make him invisible? “Ronan?”
Taran draws his sword. “Sir?”
We both feel our way around the hallway, careful not to run into anything, but there’s absolutely nothing there.
“Taran, I can feel him. Right here. He’s bored, getting a little angry. Do you think it’s the Guild magic interfering somehow?”
“It must be. We should go back to the entry hall and wait there.”
I follow him, but my eyes catch on something. Or not something, but rather the lack of it.
“This torch is wrong,” I tell Taran, pointing to the way the nearest torch is casting light in the hall. “Can you see it? The shadows. They aren’t lying the way they’re meant to.”
It’s subtle, but although the torch looks just like the other torches in the hallway, the light it’s giving off is different somehow. The color isn’t quite the same. It’s bluer, almost like daylight, and the shadows it casts land at strange angles, too distant from it somehow.
“It looks like a torch to me,” says Taran.
“Put it out for me, would you?”
Taran flexes his hand and produces a ball of water, then he drops it on the torch.
It doesn’t extinguish. The water doesn’t touch it at all.
I approach it, extending my hand towards it cautiously. It’s hot, so the flame is real and not an illusion, but there’s something even stranger about it. “This is what I’m feeling. This torch. It feels like Ronan. So much like Ronan, if it weren’t for the size of it, I’d swear it is Ronan.”
“If he’s here, in some kind of secret passage—” says Taran, feeling along the wall for a hidden mechanism of some kind.
“Let me try something.”
I reach out with my shadows, and a tendril sprouts from my chest just as though Ronan were with me. “What the fuck.” I guide the tendril up to the flame and snuff it out.
And then I lose my godsdamn mind.