She nodded. “She’s the one I’d have expected to toddle into the wrong room, you know. She was always running away, exploring, and trying to find new places and taking things apart to see how they worked.”
I nodded. “What happened to her?”
“Her mother died during the Interregnum.”
Okay, so, there it was. Just what Tethia had said. Hit a big drum, light a big torch, make a big splash in the pond. I still had no idea what it meant, but it was important. I wasn’t going to figure this thing out until I knew what that meant.
Maybe it had something to do with the place being a “platform.”
Maybe her mother had been in charge of filling the pantry, and that’s why there was no food, and Tethia had starved to death.
Maybe, with all the time weirdness, Tethia’s mother had died during the Interregnum, and then time twisted itself around so she was never born.
Maybe it had something to do with Devera.
One thing, though: I was starting to feel a little sorry for Zhayin. Wife dies during the Interregnum, daughter dies from something mysterious, son gets turned into some kind of hideous thing that has to be locked up. Poor bastard couldn’t catch a break with a break bucket during a break storm. T-A-L-T-O-S.
I looked around for something to scowl at that wasn’t an old dry-nurse. To kill time while I figured out the best way to get information from her, I walked around the room, looking into corners, opening the door to a linen closet.
“Nice mirror,” I said. “I see it’s right by where the crib was. Did she like looking at herself?”
She nodded.
I still didn’t have anything. Well, I suppose I could try just asking. I cleared my throat. “Odelpho, could you explain why whenever I ask how Tethia died, the only answer I get is about her mother?”
For a moment she looked like she didn’t understand the question. Then she said, “M’lord? Who else have you asked? If you don’t mind?”
I hesitated, then, “Tethia,” I said.
Her eyes got big and she started shaking. “Where?” she whispered.
“I’m not sure how to describe it. The front room? Kind of long, overlooks the ocean-sea, tables, chairs?”
“Of course,” she said, as if to herself. Her eyes lost focus. Then she looked at me again. “Please, how was she?”
“She seemed all right. Maybe a little confused, but so was I.”
“She didn’t seem”—she groped for the word—“sad?”
I thought about it. “Maybe a little. But mostly it seemed like she wasn’t exactly there. It was more like, I don’t know, she personified the room? Does that make sense?”
“Oh, I know that,” she said, as if I’d tried to explain what a candle snuffer was for. “After all, she—” She broke off and flushed a little.
“She what?” I said.
She shook her head and looked down. There were tears on her cheeks.
“What is it?” I asked. My best soothing voice isn’t very soothing, but I did what I could.
“I’ve been here for all of it,” she said.
“All of—?”
“I mean, since before the building of Precipice Manor, when we lived in the old castle.”
I nodded, and waited. When she didn’t go on, I said, “This was during the Interregnum?”
She nodded. “Oh, yes. My lord worked in the capital before the Disaster. He was consulted on many projects, both new and reconstructions.”
“There was a lot of reconstruction work?”
She gave me a funny look, then I could see the “Oh, you’re an Easterner” moment of revelation, and she said, “Dragaera City was very, very old. Nothing lasts forever, especially then. The Imperial Palace itself was always being rebuilt or repaired.”
“What do you mean, especially then?”
That look again, and: “Preservation spells didn’t become easier until after the Interregnum. M’lord,” she added, suddenly realizing that she’d been forgetting her courtesies.
“Oh, of course,” I said. Then I added, “We Easterners are always younger than we look,” because she was already thinking it.
She nodded, a little embarrassed and at a loss for words.
I said, “I saw the award he got for designing some building. I don’t remember what.”
“The new Silver Exchange. It was beautiful. It looked like a silver needle, and all around it were balconets and bay windows. It was beautiful. My lord’s city house was in sight of it, just past the Tsalmoth Wing of the Palace, and I would it see every day on the way to the park with—” She broke off and looked down.
“Everyone here is so cheerful I almost can’t stand it.”
“Shut up.”
“And it was then, before the Interregnum, that he started on Precipice Manor?” I managed to say it without rolling my eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “No. Well—it wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?”
She looked down. “I shouldn’t say any more, m’lord.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” I said, going for the silky-smooth nice-guy tone. I’m not so good at that, though I’m better at it than I used to be.
No good; she just shook her head. All right, then. I wasn’t going to let this go. There was something there, and if it wasn’t important, I was a Teckla. All right, let’s hit it from another angle.
“You were alive during Adron’s Disaster, weren’t you? It must have been horrible.”
She nodded.
“What did it feel like?”
She shook her head. “I can’t describe it.” She looked to be telling the truth, but more important, there were no signs that talking about it made her nervous, which meant I wasn’t getting any closer to my answer. “You know that it created a Sea of Amorphia, just like the big one? Did you know that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hard to believe. And then the Interregnum. I can’t imagine what it must have been like.”
“It was hard,” she said. “Although we were luckier than some—we had everything we needed nearby.”
“Were you close to Tethia’s mother?”
“Close, my lord? She was my mistress.”
“Right. Of course. Were you sad when she died?”
“I—” She seemed to be stumbling a little. “I didn’t learn of it right away.”
“Oh, so it didn’t happen here?”
“No, my lord.”
“Where, then?”
“It was … somewhere else.”
Bugger. What was the big secret? I hate secrets. Except mine. I like mine. But it did seem like I was getting closer. Push more? Push more.
“Where was it, Odelpho? Where did she die?”
The old woman gave a sort of sob, sank off the chair and onto her knees, and started clawing at her face. I stood there, frozen. I’d never seen that before. It took me a long time, seconds, before I got over to her, grabbed her wrists, and knelt down next to her, Loiosh and Rocza abandoning my shoulders for some convenient shelves. Her face was tilted down and there were long, bloody scratches on it and she was sobbing. I said things, I don’t know what. I don’t have much practice at being soothing, okay? It doesn’t come up a lot while you’re killing people for money or running for your life. I said her name, and some other crap that doesn’t mean anything, and after a while her wrists relaxed in my hands and she leaned forward, sobbing, and put her head on my shoulder. Verra.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you.”
“It’s all right,” I said. It was, in fact, anything but all right, but however I was going to get the information I wanted, it wasn’t going to be here and now.
After a while, I helped her back into her chair. She still kept her head down. In an effort to change the subject, I said, “Tell me something: where do you eat?”
She looked up. “My lord?”
“You, servants. Where do you take your meals?”
?
??In the kitchen, my lord,” she said, as if I were an idiot, and as if the, well, whatever had just happened hadn’t happened.
I said, “I saw the kitchen. There was no food there. And no table, for that matter.”
“They set up the table before meals.”
“They?”
“Cook and the butter boy and the pantry girl.”
“I didn’t see them.”
“Well, they must have been there. There’s always food at dinnertime.”
“All right,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
She frowned. “Are you hungry, m’lord? I could—”
“No, no. I was just curious. I’m fine.”
“Why would you lie like that, Boss?”
“Shut up, Loiosh.”
“Thank you for talking to me,” I said.
She bowed. “M’lord,” she said. Then, “May I ask you something?”
“Seems fair.”
“Forgive my impertinence, m’lord, but…”
“Go ahead.”
“Your hand. What happened to it?”
I glanced at it. “Oh, yes. I was born that way. Among my people it is a sign of high destiny to be born missing a finger.”
She looked doubtful, but nodded.
“Why do you ask?”
“There’s a tale about—I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s all right. I’m curious. About Easterners?”
She nodded. “That witches have to sacrifice a piece of their body to gain their powers.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry to disappoint, but no. At least, not that I’ve ever heard of. Maybe it’s metaphorical?”
“My lord?”
“Never mind. Thank you again for your help.”
“Of course, m’lord.”
I took a last look around the room, then sketched her a bow and stepped back into the hallway. It continued for a short distance to my right, or I could go left to where I might or might not be back where Zhayin was, no doubt still sitting in his little room with the portrait of himself looking disapproving.
I turned right. The door that was almost directly across the hall was different from the others: it looked heavy, made of some dark wood with intricate carvings: trees, birds, an animal that was probably a vallista. One of these times, I was going to open a door and something would come jumping out with sharp things pointed at me. I mentally shrugged and opened it.
Well, all right, the son of a bitch had a library after all. I’d been starting to doubt it. An odd place: right across from the nursery and next to a bedroom, but at least he had one.
I thought about shutting the door.
Here’s the thing about walking into a library: either you turn around and walk out again, or you figure to spend the next ten hours there. I don’t mean finding some book you’ve never heard of and “just opening it to read the first page,” although there’s that danger too. I mean there just isn’t anything useful to be learned in a library that doesn’t require a reasonably careful examination of what books are there. And they’re books. You have to, like, read the titles at least.
“Loiosh, how long since we’ve eaten anything?”
“A year. Maybe two.”
“That’s what I thought.”
I hesitated, and cursed under my breath. Maybe I could exercise some self-control. I went in.
It was a long room with shelves on the sides and in the back. At a guess, about six rooms of this size could fit into Morrolan’s library, but Morrolan was kind of crazy that way. And in other ways, but never mind. And while I’m no good at estimating numbers of books, as opposed to bottles of wine, there had to be thousands. One thing about the Dragaeran life-span is that it gives them a lot of time for reading. Out of habit, I looked for mirrors and counted three of them, in all corners except the one nearest the door, and all facing into the room.
The first thing to check in a library is the arrangement. I knew the first part right away: things Zhayin felt were most important were in his study. The books shelved here were everything else. The first thing I saw were novels, most of them historical. He seemed fascinated by the middle Eleventh Cycle: Issola, Tsalmoth, and Vallista reigns. To be clear, I mean contemporary novels set in that period, not written then; you’d need to be a scholar to read anything written that far back. I’d tried once, and couldn’t even figure out the alphabet. I kept going. My initial guess, that it was the Vallista reigns that fascinated him, was disproved by the next section, which were all books set in the late Fifteenth Cycle, in the Jhegaala and Athyra reigns—again, contemporary writers doing historical romances. A little more looking convinced me that he’d divided up his books according to the period where they were set; I couldn’t find any other division.
The other side of the room had more novels of different periods, and, finally, the non-fiction, which consisted of about as many books as were in his study, and with similar titles; also that many again devoted to necromancy. As I was scanning them, one title jumped out at me. It was a thick but short volume bound in cheap, cracked leather. The faded gold lettering on the spine said Bending Time and Space: Studies in the Halls of Judgment.
Well. Yes, that was certainly interesting.
I pulled it out and studied it a bit before I opened it. It certainly showed signs of having been read; all the corners were frayed, and the gilding on the edges had been almost entirely worn off. I tried a trick Kiera had once shown me, of holding it in my left hand and seeing where it naturally fell open to determine if there were any parts that he had read repeatedly, but it fell open to the first flyleaf; maybe you needed a special touch.
Ever been working carefully to figure something out, and then in an instant had a big piece of the puzzle fall into place in the time it took to draw a breath? That’s what happened when my eyes fell on a single sentence. It was written on the flyleaf in a fine, precise, artistic hand with an excellent quill, and it said, To Tethia, with love on Kieron’s Day, from Papa.
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered. Then I checked another half dozen books, and found Tethia’s name in another. Then I checked a few more and found something even more conclusive: another name had been crossed out, and Tethia’s had been written in. In this one, the handwriting was still precise but more artistic, with flourishes and long tails, an elegant use of the way the fountain pen can control the thickness of the line. No, I won’t set up as a handwriting expert, but you pick up a little bit of everything in this business.
I looked around the library again, as if seeing it for the first time. And reconsidered the bedroom I’d just been in, and how bedroom, library, and nursery were all together, as if this particular part of the manor had been set aside for first a child, then, when the child grew, her further needs. I chuckled at myself: I’d become so used to nothing in the place making sense that I hadn’t noticed when, just for a moment, something did.
It was Tethia’s bedroom, and this had been Tethia’s library.
Well, shave my eyebrows and call me a Discreet.
I kept the book in my hand while I went around the room again pulling books out and checking publication dates. I had to laboriously translate from different formats of pre-Interregnum dating systems, but after half an hour or so I was convinced: nothing in this library had been published after the Interregnum. Nearly all of the books were published late in the reign of Tortaalik, the last Emperor before the Interregnum.
There were four chairs scattered about just the way they should be: all of them looking comfortable, and none of them near enough to another for conversation. I took my treasure over to the nearest one and sat down. Rocza flapped furiously for a moment; I guess I’d sat down too abruptly.
“Sorry,” I told Loiosh.
I opened the book and started reading.
“Boss?”
“Hmm?”
“How long?”
“I’m just going to skim a bit, try to figure out who did what and how it worked.”
“I kn
ow. I mean, how long until I should bite your ear as a gentle reminder that we’re growing old. And hungry.”
Rocza flapped her wings, which I took as agreement with the hungry part.
“Give me about an hour.”
It didn’t take an hour; in fact, it didn’t take two minutes for me to get completely lost and to realize I understood nothing. Usually a book like this will have an introduction to explain the context and what the book hopes to teach, and these are often useful to those of us with no clue about the subject matter; but there wasn’t one. It started right in with an account of “an attempt to use Delmi’s Reclamation within the prescribed area” that resulted in “certain minor tremors detectable by water in glass” and “observable wavering of vision reminiscent of Pare’s Focus when attempted beyond the recommended distance.”
Well, now I knew that.
I skipped around in the book long enough to know that everything else made even less sense, and I was about to close it when my eye happened to catch the phrase “the Vestibule.” This was, in case you’ve forgotten, the place Devera had spoken of, where she had gone to see Darkness.
I read the sentence it was in, then the sentences around it, then more sentences around it, and knew as I much I had before I started. But I wasn’t prepared to call it coincidence just because I didn’t understand it.
I closed the book and tapped it with my thumb for a few seconds.
I got up and walked around the perimeter of the library to see if I could spot any breaks in the wall—libraries are obvious places for secret entrances because bookshelves are so good at concealing them. If there were any, the bookshelves were too good at concealing them. I sat down again and looked at the book. I opened it again to the page with the reference to the Vestibule, tried once again to make sense of it. If I understood anything, it had to do with reasons not to visit the Vestibule, and about being swallowed up, and I very, very much hoped it would have nothing to do with my problem. I swore and stood up. I put the book back where I’d found it, because I am a good person, then I took a last look around the library, and left.
10
WATERS BELOW THE GROUND