Chapter Nineteen #3
“W-wait,” he says, backing away a step. He looks no older than about sixteen, and although he’s taller than me, he’s far too scrawny beneath his robe to have much of a chance against me in a fight, and he knows it.
“Please. I really don’t know anything; I just heard it when they were talking about it.
The man and the old Guild Mistress, back before the Great Festival. ”
“What man?”
“Old, grey hair. Mustache.”
“White robe?”
He nods.
Cyrus. “Pretend you’re looking for something on the floor as you’re talking to me.” I kneel with him. “What did they say? Quick, spit it out.”
“I don’t know. Something about the journals, about being careful who sees. He told her to ‘keep it hidden.’”
I wish Quinn weren’t mad at me because we’re going to need to do something about her father. It’s always the ones you most suspect. “Keep what hidden?”
“I don’t know! I swear I don’t know. I’m just an apprentice. I haven’t even been here a year yet.”
Damn, so there is something to be found here, but I don’t even know what it is. How the hell am I supposed to find it in the time it would take to find a missing ring?
I have to push him a little more. Sorry, kid. I absolutely don’t intend to hurt you, but lying to you will only strengthen me. “You have ten seconds to tell me where the Guild Mistress would hide something important in this place. Ten, nine, eight…”
“Oh gods, I don’t know. I don’t know! Please don’t hurt me.” He trembles, his face going pale. And then his eyes dart towards the dagger and the door.
Fuck, I’ve gone too far. He’s so scared, he’s going to run.
“Take a guess, and I won’t hurt you. I won’t tell anyone you told me.
” In reality, my conversation here hasn’t gone unnoticed, and they’re likely to question the boy even if I’m not successful.
But I’m sure Ronan can find him an apprenticeship in the palace if it comes down to it.
“Her chambers. It would be in her chambers.”
It seems unlikely to me that she’d hide something important enough that the Grand Vizier wanted it hidden in such an obvious place, but I won’t have time to search the entire building, and I’m certain that her chambers are currently unoccupied.
And if we’re caught, we can say we got lost trying to find our way around this place, which is certainly believable enough. “Lead the way.”
“I can’t. I don’t have access to them. No one does except the highest-ranking wardens.”
“But you know where they are.” He nods. “Then take me there, and you can get back to work. But when you do, you will not tell anyone what I asked you or what you told me. Believe me, you do not want to make an enemy of me.”
“Yes, ma’am. I won’t tell anyone, I swear it.”
I tilt my head at Taran, and he joins us as I follow the apprentice from the room.
I don’t ask the boy his name or offer mine, figuring he’d be better off not knowing it.
He leads us for a time in the direction Ronan and Hypatia were heading, which worries me, but eventually we turn off down a narrow corridor and climb a spiral staircase into one of the Guild’s pair of white towers.
We pass several floors of rooms, the central common areas occupied by young apprentices that give us little notice as we pass. “I take it we need to go higher to find the Guild Mistress’s chambers?”
Our young guide nods. “The higher you go, the higher the ranks.”
I groan, realizing the Guild Mistress’s chambers must be at the very top of the tower. There’s no good reason for us to be here. If we’re caught, I’m going to have to claim that I’m acting on Ronan’s orders and hope it doesn’t hurt his relationship with the Guild too much.
“I can’t go up there,” says the boy when I point him in the direction of the stairs. “Please, I took you this far. Can’t you just go on your own?”
There’s nothing more he can do for us at this point. He doesn’t have access himself, and if I do find something, I’d rather he doesn’t know about it anyway. “Go on,” I say, and he scurries back down the stairs as if he’s being chased.
“We could go back,” suggests Taran when we’re alone. “Find Ronan and tell him what we know. He can order Hypatia to help us find…whatever it is they’re hiding.”
I’ve thought of that, but it won’t work.
“If she knows about whatever Zara was hiding here, there’s no guarantee she won’t try to hide it herself.
I don’t trust her. We need to find it without them knowing we’re looking.
After what I just told that apprentice, they’ll be onto us.
We may not get another chance before they move it. ”
“We don’t even know what it is,” says Taran. “How are you going to find something when you don’t know what it is, what it does, why it was hidden, or if anyone alive even still cares about it?”
He has a point. “Admittedly, it’s not much to go on.” I sigh. Ronan asked me to come here to help him, and I don’t want to let him down. “What do you suggest?”
“We go back to the palace and ask Cyrus what he knows, since it’s clearly more than he’s admitted to so far.”
“Fine. But after we at least poke around in the Guild Mistress’s chambers. Even if we can’t find whatever Zara was hiding, it would be good to know if Hypatia is conspiring against Ronan.”
Taran hesitates, looking around the living quarters. “Alright, but let me lead.”
I nod to him and follow him up the stairs.
As expected, we pass several more guards as we climb to the tower’s higher floors, but they all recognize Taran and defer to his authority.
“Remind me to bring you along the next time I need to sneak around somewhere,” I say to him.
“Who needs to learn to pick locks when they just let you go anywhere you want?”
“There are places even here that I imagine I wouldn’t be allowed to go.”
“The gold-refining rooms.” Now that would be a good place to hide something.
Only the upper echelons of the Guild have access to those rooms at all.
From what Zara told me, the process is broken up so that none other than a handful of people at the very top know the entire thing.
Even many of the highest-ranking wardens only know a single step.
We’re nearly to the Guild Mistress’s chambers, but I’m wondering if we should abandon this search in favor of trying to find our way to one of the gold-refining rooms. But if we did, we’d have no way to enter them, and we’ve come this far.
“Halt. Who goes there?” comes a masculine voice from the top of the stairs.
“General Taran Orinsen and Sylvara of House Verran, on the God-King’s orders,” says Taran. His tone is bored rather than forceful, which I admit makes it sound much more authoritative. Nothing to see here. Everything is above board.
“Approach,” barks the voice. At the top of the staircase, unlike all the other landings, there’s a door carved with ornate symbols. Some resemble the carvings in the palace, while others are of a more astronomical nature. I’ve only seen their likes in one other place: the Great Library of Faros.
The pair of guards before the door bear the seal of the Royal Guard on their chainmail. These are palace guards, likely hand-selected for the job by Ronan.
“We weren’t told to expect you, General.” The other guard, a tall woman in her forties, gives us a thorough looking-over. She seems satisfied with what she finds. “Do you require admission into the Guild Mistress’s private chambers?”
“Yes,” says Taran. “And we require your discretion. No one is to know we were here.”
“Understood, sir,” says the male guard. “Proceed.”
I gawk at Taran as we enter unchallenged. “You are the perfect person for this job, do you know that? They didn’t even argue with you.”
“Technically, I’m their boss,” he says. “Although in practice, I usually let Commander Elia handle the day-to-day operations of the Royal Guards beyond the palace. My hands are full enough keeping an eye on Ronan.”
“I believe that,” I say with a smile.
That same smile fades quickly when I look around the room we’ve entered. “Oh, fucking hell.”
The chambers of the Guild Mistress are enormous.
Whereas the other floors had multiple rooms, this room takes up the entire floor of the tower, and it stretches up several stories all the way to the roof.
Shelves line every wall, much like the Great Library, but here they’re filled not only with books but with strange artifacts, glass containers in a variety of shapes and sizes, jars and bowls containing all sorts of strange ingredients: herbs, oddly colored fruits, and even a jar full of something suspiciously like human teeth.
There are ladders and stairways thrown up seemingly at random, many of those littered with papers and scrolls, some leading to nowhere at all.
My eye catches on something gleaming near a round window at the very top of the tower: a large golden spyglass.
“Do you suppose Zara watched Ronan getting dressed from up there?” I ask Taran.
He’s looking around the gigantic mess of a room in stunned silence, his hand drifting towards a vial of dark red blood. He spots the spyglass and frowns. “The palace would be visible from there.”
I was just joking, but now I’m somewhat disturbed. “How Zara communicated with Cyrus, maybe.”
Taran nods. “I’m going to check it out.”
“Great, I’ll just look…” Gods, where could I possibly look? I suspect from the way things are thrown about that the guards have already thoroughly searched this room, but even if they did, would they have known what they were looking for? I don’t even know what I’m looking for.
I do know where I’m going to hide something if I want no one to ever find it, though.
I follow a path through the debris on the floor to a desk near the center of the bottom of the room. Judging by the way the paths through the stacks of books and shelves converge, this might be the Guild Mistress’s most-used desk.