She kept the whole party out in the gardens for as long as she could, aware that she was giving her team plenty of time to scout the interior. At length, however, the Baron would not be dissuaded from leading her inside. The autumnal weather was just too chilly, alas, for her to propose tea in the gardens, and she was obliged to allow herself to be led into a drawing-room on the first floor. This, too, was appallingly golden, and she seated herself in a gold-upholstered chair with a sigh, arranging her fine lavender velvet skirts around herself with ostentatious fastidiousness.
This sigh of hers had been audible, she realised with dismay, as the Baron turned a questioning look upon her. ‘Never say that my fair Fenella finds something amiss!’ he cried, with lively dismay. ‘If one single thing in my humble house is not to her taste, she must say so at once, and it shall be rectified instantly.’
A man who referred to a lady of his interest in the third person ought to be shot, Serena thought savagely. She yawned theatrically and sagged back into her seat, disclaiming, ‘Oh! No, my lord, how could I possibly object to such charming arrangements? In truth, I am a little tired. I attended a party yesterday eve, and I was coaxed into remaining later than was strictly wise.’
‘I am overcome with regret!’ he declared extravagantly. ‘I should have been present to attend you, Fenella. Under my guidance, you could not have overstrained yourself.’
Fabian’s lip curled visibly, and Serena hurriedly exclaimed, ‘How good you are! But I can take care of myself, you know.’
‘Evidently not!’ returned the Baron with a fatuous smile. ‘For here before me is the proof, in the shape of a wilting damsel.’
Serena’s increasingly murderous reflections were mercifully interrupted at this moment, by the entrance of a blindingly red-and-gold clad employee bearing a golden tray of cakes which he laid upon the tea table. Another followed and set beside it a second golden tray full of sandwiches, and yet another set an (inevitably) golden teapot in the centre, together with matching cups. Serena took advantage of the Baron’s momentary distraction to gaze around herself, taking note of the number of cabinets that lined the walls. They were all filled with assorted objects, and she hoped that Egg, Teyo or Jisp had managed to examine this room before their party had occupied it.
No, she realised a moment later, for surely that was the lively little person of Jisp darting along the skirting-board. Or perhaps it was Teyo. The lizard, whichever it was, scrambled up the wall and disappeared over the top of the nearest cabinet. Serena, heart thumping a little at this audaciousness, hoped fervently that the Baron had not noticed.
He was too busy pouring tea. Serena was appalled to observe that even the steaming beverage which splashed fragrantly into the dainty cups was gold. He was definitely getting worse. She would have to throw that golden silk ball gown away, she thought regretfully; it was something of a favourite, but after today she would never be able to look a golden object in the face again.
She was further alarmed to note that the Baron’s attention had turned to his antiques, and that the notion of showing them to his guests had entered his head. A moment ago she might have been delighted at so perfect an opportunity to hunt for the key herself. Now that they had a lizardly visitor, she wasn’t so sure.
Fabian had not observed their tiny guest, she swiftly concluded, for he accepted the Baron’s offer with alacrity, casting a swift, meaningful look in her direction. As Lord Bastavere, he was at his stateliest, and she felt that even the egotistical Baron Anserval was a little bit impressed by his lordship’s demeanour. Not that he required very much encouragement. Scarcely giving his guests time to finish their tea, he was up and offering Lady Fenella his arm.
A thought occurred to Serena; a ploy which, if she could pull it off, might both salvage the situation and secure them a considerable advantage. She smiled her charming best at the Baron, accepted his arm with every apparent pleasure, and proclaimed, ‘How discerning a collector you are, my lord! Truly, I have never seen so fine an array as is displayed in this room.’
The Baron, caught between a swelling satisfaction and a lowering chagrin, made a comical picture. Gratified he could not help being at this high praise, but nor could he resist pointing out: ‘In this room! My dear lady, you must be aware that this is but a fraction of the whole.’
‘Oh!’ she replied, blinking. ‘To be sure. Now that you put me in mind of it, I do recall some one or two things in the hall, and perhaps the library.’
‘Mere nothings! Trifles! My exhibits run the length and breadth of this humble house, in point of fact, though I need not scruple to entrust you, Lady Fenella, with the truth. I do not keep my finest pieces on public display. How could I? They must be constantly guarded from the predations of the greedy and envious.’ He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper and added, ‘What would you say if I told you that there are secret rooms in this house?’
Serena regretted, for a brief, sharp instant, that the only way to handle such an ignorant fool as the Baron was to pretend to even greater vacuity. It grew wearing. She composed her face into an expression of suitable surprise, and exclaimed.
The Baron was satisfied. ‘Very cunning, is it not? My acquisitions come under constant scrutiny, and if I did not take all possible pains to protect my treasures, I daresay I should lose them all. The very best and rarest are safely tucked away, and so I have no apprehensions.’ His chest swelled with satisfaction as he made these fine pronouncements, and he nodded his own approval to himself. ‘I daresay your lord and ladyship would like to see them?’ he added.
Finally. Serena, relieved that she would not have to coquette her way into these “secret” rooms, smiled her perfect approbation of this plan. ‘What a great treat!’ she declared. ‘How I long to see these rarest of treasures.’
‘Are they so very fine?’ said Lord Bastavere, with a harsh laugh. ‘They cannot rival the collections of, say, the Iving Gallery, or the Irbel National Museum?’
The Baron, bridling, returned that it most certainly could, and Serena blessed her brother in her heart. Nothing would now stop the Baron from showing them every part of his vaunted collections, and though the prospect was a stultifying one, she felt some hope that they would be able to locate the key before Halavere showed up.
The problem of Jisp — or Teyo — had slipped her mind in the midst of these manoeuvrings, but before they had reached the door she was horrified to observe a tiny, lithe form scurrying beneath her skirt. Moments later she felt the dubious and unsettling sensation of many sticky toes and a scaled little body worming its way up her ankle. The creature clung to her leg and remained there as she walked with the Baron and Fabian through the wide hallways of the house. She hoped it was Jisp under there.
Blessing the lucky chance which had led her to don particularly voluminous drawers that morning, Serena tried to ignore the clinging pressure about her lower leg and chattered in the liveliest fashion all the way through the house to the centre, near the main staircase. Here they paused, and the Baron, with an expression of enormous pride, activated some mechanism that lay concealed behind a revolting painting of pink-faced infants that adorned a secluded corner of the hallway. A previously hidden door swung smoothly open. Behind it, Serena observed a staircase leading down into the depths beneath the house.
The Baron advanced to the top of the stairs and clapped his hands loudly three times. Lights instantly began to flicker to life below, revealing the considerable extent of the stairs. Serena was impressed in spite of herself. The Baron certainly spared no expense, either in hiding his treasures or in impressing his guests. That light set-up alone must have cost a fortune. She allowed herself to be conducted down the stairs on her host’s arm, leaving Lord Bastavere to wander along behind.
At the bottom, a long corridor stretched away with several doors set into it. Serena stared at them in some dismay. Surely they did not all lead to galleries full of antiques? Her comfortable notion that they might secure the key before Halavere even
arrived began to fade, and doubts returned.
The Baron was already opening the first door, and she was soon called to precede him inside. She noticed, with further astonishment, that he did not use a key to access this room. The locking mechanism was altogether different, and involved the pressing of a series of buttons in some kind of sequence. It was not at all reminiscent of anything she had seen before, which raised interesting, and not wholly encouraging, possibilities. Exchanging a brief glance with her brother as she went inside, she concluded that he was as mystified by it as she. She made a mental note to pursue this subject later, for before her stretched a vast hallway well-lit by hundreds of floating light-globes. The walls were lined with cabinet after cabinet, and long glass-topped display cases occupied the centre of the room. A swift glance revealed all manner of curiosities stashed behind those glass panes, from statuettes and books to hair ornaments, tea cups and jewellery.
There must be many hundreds of objects down here, she realised with a sinking heart. Maybe thousands. And if every other room in the Baron’s cellar contained a similar quantity of goods, how in the world could they identify which one was of interest to Halavere? Even if the thing was so obliging as to resemble a classic key in shape and structure, it could take forever to find it among all this nonsense.
But she had Fabian to help her — and Jisp, or possibly Teyo. Her passenger clambered back down her leg as she formed this thought and slipped away. Serena caught a glimpse of a tiny scaly body scuttling speedily away, and hastily averted her gaze in case her host happened to look.
The Baron began his tour near the door, and Serena quickly realised that he intended to recount the full history of each cabinet. Worse, he did so with an air of decided pedantry, one hand clutched possessively over hers as it rested upon his arm. Despairing, she tried once or twice to hurry the tour along a little more quickly, or at least to interrupt the lengthy flow he was working himself into, but with little success. Lord Bastavere, with typical arrogance, rolled his eyes and wandered off. The Baron paid little notice.
Serena was not left to agonise for long in this state of wretched frustration. Her irksome guide had just launched with gusto into an account of the provenance of a tiny painting featuring two nymphs portrayed in spectacularly lurid colours, when a short gust of wind sent her skirts billowing. With this unexpected sensation came the sound of somebody jumping softly down onto the floor from a height of, perhaps, two or three feet. Startled — for nothing her brother could possibly be doing would explain either the wind or the noise — she turned.
A stranger stood in the middle of the room, directly between a long case displaying tarnished timepieces and an even larger case bearing a heavy load of old coins. The woman was tall, with statuesque posture and dark eyes. She wore close-fitting green trousers, a plain cream cotton shirt, thick leather gloves and a purposeful expression. Her pure-white hair was bound up in a style of severe practicality, ruthlessly pinned down and wholly unadorned. She was not at all old, judging from the smoothness of her skin, so she must be of Lokant heritage.
But she was not Dame Halavere.
‘What’s this?’ demanded the Baron. ‘I sincerely hope this woman is an acquaintance of yours, Fenella!’
‘I have never seen her before,’ Serena replied tightly. ‘Unless I am much mistaken, she is looking for something in particular.’ She realised, belatedly, that her role had slipped during this speech, but the Baron didn’t appear to notice. He strode off in the direction of the intruder, shouting imperatives and threats, all of which she ignored. Instead of ceasing her disgraceful intrusion and removing herself from this vicinity at once, or even of explaining instantly how she came to gain access to this place, the woman walked briskly to the other side of the room. Without pausing, she drew back her arm and delivered a swift, brutal punch to the glass front of one of the cabinets. The glass shattered, the woman reached forth and grabbed a single object — and vanished.
Fabian, dashing towards her with deadly purpose, was left standing stupidly on the spot she had so recently occupied. The Baron was shocked into silence, though alas, only briefly. He then responded with still greater vituperation, cursing all and sundry and demanding explanations of nobody in particular.
Serena merely stood, thinking. The woman was no Partial Lokant, that much was clear. She was a full blood, and powerful indeed. It was known that the pure Lokants — and, very occasionally, one or two of the part-bloods — could transport themselves over long distances in the blink of an eye, but it was not thought to be a flexible ability. It required major preparation beforehand in order to do it, and something like a waypoint had to be laid down by somebody; one did not simply transport oneself through doors, or past walls, or to any spot which had not been previously selected and (in some unfathomable way) prepared for the purpose. This much she understood.
But this woman had appeared in a very specific place, somewhere very private and virtually inaccessible. Could it be that somebody had placed a waypoint here, in this room? How had that been accomplished, and why? Somebody among the Lokants must already have known, some time since, that the Baron’s collection was likely to be of interest. But how had they marked the place, and how had the woman known exactly which cabinet to look in?
Most likely the Baron’s staff were not as supremely loyal as he thought; the woman must have had help from someone employed at the house. Damn, they had worked fast. Serena choked on a feeling of deep chagrin, for the job had failed utterly. If there were full Lokants involved, and such powerful ones as their erstwhile visitor, the job had never had any hope of success. All the efforts of the day and half the preceding night had been wasted.
Or perhaps not, entirely. She had not been close enough to see precisely what it was that the Lokant had taken from the cabinet, but Fabian probably had. She hoped that this one small thing, at the least, could be salvaged from an operation otherwise doomed to failure from the start.
There was nothing to be gained from remaining any longer. The Baron was no longer of any interest, and she was heartily tired of playing Lady Fenella. She swept from the room with Fabian close behind her, leaving the Baron loudly proclaiming his determination to register a formal complaint with the LHITB.
Chapter Five
Oliver Tullen’s offices were situated near the centre of Irbel’s capital city, Iving. It was a long way to go from the realm’s southern border with Nimdre, but Serena felt the importance of consulting him at once. She required his approval and advice regarding Iyamar, as soon as possible. Moreover, their surveillance of Halavere had ended in failure, and she was unsure how to proceed. The key, if it was a key, was probably stashed away in some far-off Lokant Library by now. It was impossible to follow; there were many Libraries, as far as anybody in the Seven knew, and they were situated way off-world. Nobody save another Lokant could hope to follow them there. A report would have to be submitted to the LHITB, and beyond that, Serena and her team were at a loose end.
She couldn’t even be certain that Halavere had had anything to do with the theft, in the end. True, she had met with a known Unspeakable and Baron Anserval’s address had changed hands, but there was no indication that she had been involved with the rest. Serena suspected that the Dame might have contacts with one or more Lokant Libraries. Perhaps they had used her — and, through her, the Unspeakables — to find the supposed key, and Halavere had merely passed on the information. Any such connection had to be reported, of course, and Halavere would have to be monitored. She hoped that Oliver would have more interesting work for Serena’s team.
She set out for Oliver’s office early in the morning, leaving Egg and Fabian behind. Iyamar had to be presented immediately, and she wanted Teyo’s company too. Since he was most likely to be volunteered for the task of training their new recruit’s draykon abilities, she wanted him to be present to discuss it with their boss.
They were only obliged to travel by nivven as far as the city of Trayce in south-eastern Irbel. Fr
om there, the overland railcar conveyed the three of them into Iving. It was a relatively new piece of infrastructure, of which Serena heartily approved. Not of an engineering turn of mind herself, she did not properly understand by what means the long metal carriages were conveyed along the rails that had been laid between Iving and Trayce — and other cities — less than ten years ago, but the speed they achieved far outstripped the capacity of even the liveliest nivven steed. Better still, their interiors were luxuriously equipped with well-padded chairs, allowing her to relax at her ease as she sped on her way to the capital.
Iyamar had clearly never experienced this mode of transport before. Her young face was touchingly filled with a mixture of awe and fascination, though she strove to hide it whenever she noticed Serena looking. She was far more interested in the workings of it than Serena, too, and peppered Teyo with questions, all of which he answered with his customary patience.
At length Iyamar fell silent, absorbed by the rapid passage of fields and hills outside the window as they sped along. Serena took the opportunity to ask Teyo a question she’d been postponing since the day before.
‘Yesterday,’ she murmured to him, keeping her voice low. ‘Tell me that was Jisp.’
He grinned at once, dashing Serena’s hopes, though he had the grace to look a little sheepish. ‘Erm, ‘fraid not,’ he said, with a trace at least of apology.
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