by Kate Novak
Cat called out, “Come in.”
Giogi opened the door. “It’s cold in here,” he noted stiffly.
“I was looking out the window. Did you find Birdie?”
“No,” Giogi replied curtly.
“Perhaps she’ll come home by evening. You treated her well,” Cat said gently.
Giogi shrugged without comment. He laid the furs on the bed. “It’s colder today than it was yesterday, so I brought these for you to wear. I’ll let you get back to your studying,” he said, backing out of the room and closing the door behind him. His manner was as cold as the room.
So, the kind-hearted Wyvernspur can snub people, too, when his pride is wounded, Olive thought.
Giogi went down the hall to the room beside Cat’s. He entered the room, leaving the door open behind him. Olive could see him rummaging through a chest at the foot of the bed.
It would be a bad thing to be discovered up here, Olive realized. Time to return to the parlor while I have the chance.
The halfling slipped past Giogi’s open door and hurried down the stairs, though not without regret. I should have taken a peek to see who or what Thomas was feeding in the attic, she thought as she let herself into the parlor and closed the door very softly behind her. My nerves aren’t what they once were.
She paced about the room. In my younger days, I’d have cased every room in this house and stolen three resalable things before breakfast, she chided herself. Being prosperous takes all the fun out of life. Now all I do is eavesdrop and worry that I’m going to be discovered. That’s the problem with respectability—you always worry about losing it. Paladins must be nervous wrecks, she thought with an amused snort.
A bowl of dried fruit and nuts drew her attention. Food. That will help steady me. Olive lifted the bowl from the coffee table and carried it over to the fireside with the footstool. She cracked some nuts and picked out the meats, stacking the shells and meats in piles to represent good and bad as she weighed Cat’s recent actions.
She contacted Flattery again, which was bad, the halfling thought, dropping a shell to her left. Probably stupid, too, Olive added, starting a pile with dried apricots for stupid actions.
Dropping a nut meat into a pile at her right, Olive thought, She did show more spine and grill him for more information, which was good. She gave away our day’s itinerary, which was bad. She didn’t say a word about Jade or me. That was good, unless she’s playing both sides against the middle. Olive dropped another apricot in the stupid pile.
She could be thinking of me as our ace in the hole. Maybe she’s superstitious about halfling luck. Olive started a pile for Cat’s smart decisions with dried figs.
She didn’t tell Flattery we were planning to come after him. Good and smart. Is she hoping we’ll kill him for her? Is she planning on lending a hand when the time comes? In the short run, is she going to do as Flattery bids and use Giogi to test for traps in Drone’s lab, and will she try to convince us not to visit the Temple of Selune?
Olive looked down at the piles of food. “She’s one mixed-up mage,” the halfling muttered. She tossed the nut shells into the fire and watched them burn while she munched on her remaining piles.
There was a knock on the door, and Thomas came in, carrying her cloak and gloves. “The carriage has arrived, ma’am,” he announced.
Olive laid the fruit-and-nut bowl aside and accepted Thomas’s help with her cloak, then joined Giogi and Cat in the front hall. The door stood open. Every bush and tree branch glittered in the sunlight and dropped globs of water and shards of glassy ice to the ground beneath it. A white carriage with four white horses stood waiting outside the front gate.
Giogi escorted the two women out and handed them into the carriage. As he checked the horses’ tack and harnesses, Olive settled beside Cat and whispered, “Have you got it on you?”
Wordlessly Cat drew the silk-wrapped amulet halfway out of her pocket and slipped it back out of sight.
“Smart girl. Have a fig,” the halfling offered.
“All set?” Giogi asked as he hopped up in the driver’s seat.
We may never be that, Olive thought, but she called out that they were.
Giogi clucked at the horses, and the carriage moved forward. None of the party noticed the sleeve of a robe clear the frost from the attic window or a pair of piercing blue eyes watching them move out of the courtyard and onto the street.
Drone’s Lab
Giogi drove the carriage through the heart of town and then south into the countryside. Since the nobleman sat outside the carriage, making normal conversation with him impossible, and Cat sat looking out the window, lost in her own thoughts, Olive napped for the length of the half-hour trip. Cat nudged her awake as they drove through the front gate of Castle Redstone.
The Wyvernspurs’ ancestral home was an imposing edifice, but Olive always thought castles ostentatious, and red sandstone buildings made her think of rust. She could see why Giogi chose to live in a townhouse in Immersea. Even Cat shuddered when she saw the castle.
A servant ushered them into the parlor, where Gaylyn lay knitting, alone on the couch. “Giogi, you’ve brought company. How wonderful,” the young woman said, peering intently at Olive and Cat. “Don’t I know you? Olive Ruskettle the bard, isn’t it? What a delightful surprise. Everyone was so pleased with your performance at the wedding reception. We were disappointed that you had to leave early. Aren’t you Alias?” she asked Cat.
“She’s, um, a relative of Alias’s,” Giogi explained. “Gaylyn, allow me to present Cat of Ordulin, a mage. Mistress Cat, this is my Cousin Frefford’s wife, Gaylyn.”
Cat curtsied and whispered a hello.
“You’ll excuse me for not rising, I hope.”
“Of course,” Olive replied. “We’ve all heard your good news. How is your little girl, Lady Gaylyn?”
“If I ever see her again, I’ll let you know,” Gaylyn said, laughing. “Amberlee’s Great-grandauntie Dorath stole her away the moment she was born and has spent all her time since then doting on the child. Actually, you’ve just missed her. Aunt Dorath brought her down here for breakfast, and when Amberlee was finished, her Aunt Dorath took her away to sleep in the nursery so I could entertain without waking her,” Gaylyn explained.
“Please, sit down,” the new mother encouraged them. “You must be freezing from your ride. There’s a pot of tea over there,” Gaylyn said, pointing to a silver tea set desperately in need of polishing. “Giogi, since we ladies outnumber you, you may do the honors.”
Giogi filled and handed out teacups. Gaylyn passed a plate of cookies around. “It’s lucky you’re here, actually. Freffie has been so busy looking for someone who might be a lost member of the family. He spent all night questioning people at the inns—merchants, mercenaries, adventurers, farmers, fishermen, and now he has to deliver some packages for the memorial service tonight for Uncle Drone. He’s up in the tower.”
She fixed Giogi with the bright green eyes that had ensnared his cousin. “You wouldn’t mind running the packages up to the Temple of Selune for him, would you, so I could get a little more of his attention?”
“Of course,” Giogi agreed. “I was going there later, anyway. But I thought Julia was handling the arrangements for the memorial service.”
“She was, but she twisted her ankle while walking in the ice last night, so she’s out of commission. Aunt Dorath was beside herself, claiming how the curse had found another victim.”
“That must have put her in a foul mood. Julia, I mean.”
Gaylyn laughed. “Silly boy. It’s been the luckiest break she’s had all year. There’s nothing like an ankle injury. No one can say you’re malingering, because its so gruesome-looking, but you can cover it up with your petticoat and still look marvelous for all the suitors who come to wait on you hand and foot.”
“Julia has suitors?” Giogi asked with mild surprise.
“Well, only one, but that’s all she wants. She’s in heaven righ
t now. Sudacar couldn’t have found a better excuse to fuss over her unless she’d been kidnapped by a dragon.”
“Samtavan Sudacar is Julia’s suitor?” Giogi asked, astonished.
“Who else? Sudacar is so commanding. Of course, Steele isn’t keen on it, because Sudacar doesn’t come from forty generations of nobility and isn’t rich. Just between you and me—I shouldn’t be saying this to outsiders,” she whispered to Olive and Cat, “but Steele is acting like an old poop. He just wants to keep Julia under his thumb, because he’ll never get a nice girl to do things for him if he doesn’t sweeten himself up.”
She has Steele’s number, all right, Olive thought.
Giogi tried to imagine Sudacar fussing over Julia, and Julia being pleased about it. No one has that much imagination, he thought and shook his head. “Gaylyn, I’m afraid we’ve really come on business,” he said.
“I know,” Gaylyn said with a sigh. “I was just pretending otherwise. I know it’s awful about the spur and Uncle Drone, but it’s hard for me to be gloomy, what with Amberlee and all. Uncle Drone wouldn’t mind. You know, right after Uncle Drone died, I dreamt of his spirit while I was sleeping with little Amberlee lying beside me. In my dream, Uncle Drone appeared by my bed and bent over the baby. He tickled her under her chin and made funny faces at her. Then he disappeared. I know it was his spirit, because he was dead by then, but not even being dead stopped him from playing with his new niece.”
Olive smiled at the young woman’s fanciful notion.
“That sounds like Uncle Drone’s spirit,” Giogi agreed. “Gaylyn, we need to look over things in Uncle Drone’s lab. I was hoping he might have written something in his journal about the theft of the spur. We’ll be looking through his magic, too, in case there’s something there we can use.”
“Oh, dear. It’s a good idea, but Aunt Dorath has forbidden it. Steele wanted to do it yesterday. She told him it was too dangerous and sent him off on other duties. She’s probably right, you know.”
“Yes. That’s why I brought Mistress Cat and Mistress Olive along as advisors.”
“Well, in that case.” Gaylyn stopped for a moment, tilting her head like a child considering some mischief. “You might want to sneak up the back stairs, so you don’t disturb Aunt Dorath in the nursery. I kept a catalog for Drone. It’s a lovely pink book with pressed flowers on the cover, and it’s on his desk.”
“You cataloged his magic?” Cat asked. “Have you studied magic?”
“Oh, no,” Gaylyn said, laughing again. “My father was a sage, though. I used to catalog all his things for him. When I helped Uncle Drone, he was always around to keep me from anything chancy. You will be careful, won’t you, Mistress Cat?”
Cat nodded.
“You know, you really are much prettier than your relative,” Gaylyn complimented the mage. “I like the way you’ve done your hair.” Cat flushed and bowed her head.
“We should get started,” Giogi muttered, obviously annoyed with Gaylyn’s admiration of the mage.
Apparently, Olive realized, it’s going to be a long time before he forgives Cat for suggesting he would abandon her.
They took their leave of Gaylyn and left the parlor. Giogi led them through a maze of hallways and stairways. They headed in every conceivable direction, including up and down.
“Are you sure we aren’t lost?” Olive asked.
“Oh, no,” Giogi said. “After my mother died, I lived here at Redstone. There are simpler routes, but I thought, as long as we’re avoiding disturbing Aunt Dorath, we may as well try avoiding disturbing Steele, too.”
“Why did you move back to town?” Olive asked.
“Well, town is so much more interesting than the country. The inns and the adventurers passing through and—”
“And not needing to avoid disturbing Aunt Dorath,” Cat suggested with a smile.
“Aunt Dorath isn’t that bad,” Giogi snapped at the mage.
Olive groaned inwardly. Loyalty to your family is fine, Giogi, my boy, she thought, but you don’t want to get tetchy with our mage just before you start going through your uncle’s magic.
Anxious to stem any flood of bad feeling, and remembering something Giogi had said to his burro, Birdie, about his family interfering in his life, Olive volunteered an observation of her own. “Everyone needs to make his own life for himself, though,” she said aloud. “Cyrrollalee knows, I loved my mother, but she never understood why I chose music over merchandising, so I hit the road. The people who love us the most have more trouble accepting that we’re different from them than strangers do.”
“That’s true,” Giogi agreed as he opened a rusty door. Olive noticed that, despite the rust, the hinges were well oiled. A cool, dry darkness lay beyond the door.
Giogi drew the finder’s stone from his boot and held it out in front of him. It illuminated a long, low tunnel. Giogi and Cat were both forced to stoop to get through, though Olive could walk upright. The tunnel ran into a round room no more than ten feet in diameter but several stories high, more like a chimney than a room. Centered in the room was a steep, tightly spiraled iron staircase rising into the blackness above.
Loviatar’s Lackeys, Olive groaned inwardly. What possesses humans to construct such torture devices? “You two go on ahead. I’ll catch up,” she said.
“We can’t leave you behind,” Giogi objected. “It’s too dark.”
“Not for me,” Olive said, massaging a calf muscle. “I can see just fine in the dark.”
“You can? How extraordinary,” Giogi commented. “But are you sure you’ll be all right?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Very well. It’s just at the top of the stairs.”
With his long legs, Giogi clambered up the stairs two at a time. His boots sounded against the steps like a gong. Cat followed, taking one step at a time, but her feet moved quickly enough to keep up with the nobleman. Her boots tapped a noise like a cobbler’s hammer.
Olive waited until they were too far ahead to look back and witness the undignified methods a halfling had to resort to, to climb human stairs. With a sigh, she hiked her skirt up over her arm and began scaling the tower stairs, using both her hands and feet.
Olive climbed for a few minutes, then looked up. The light from Giogi’s finder’s stone had vanished. Presumably he and Cat had reached the top and turned some corner. But the stairs still reverberated under her hands with someone’s tread. Olive looked down.
A lamp glowed far below her. Who could that be? Olive wondered. Her dark vision had never been as reliable as that of other halflings, so she was unable to make out any details of a face or even clothing from a distance. She could rule out Gaylyn and Julia. It was unlikely to be Aunt Dorath. It has to be a servant, Steele, or Frefford, Olive concluded, unless the Wyvernspurs keep some monstrous guardian here, too. She began climbing more quickly.
At the top of the stairs was another rusty door, which Giogi had left standing open. Olive stepped through it and into Drone’s lab. She closed the door quietly behind her. There was a key in the lock, so she turned it. Whoever’s down there can knock if he wants to join us, she thought.
Olive had seen the labs of more than a few powerful wizards in her travels. They all shared one thing in common: clutter of mythic proportions. Telescopes and astrolabes stood in front of every window, even though the view at every window was blocked on the inside by potted herbs and on the outside by kudzu vine. On a large bench, a maze of alchemic equipment distilled the life out of a blackened muck. There was no bowl catching the final product—a green ichor that had burrowed a hole an inch deep into the bench’s granite surface. Notebooks full of internal anatomical charts of squirrels and rabbits and mice and rats and birds and fish covered pans containing the models from which the studies were drawn—all with their heads chewed away. Baskets of rock were stacked beside a kiln. Jars full of dead frogs and snakes and live caterpillars and ants and crickets and vials of potions filled an entire bookcase. There was
no telling what was in the locked cabinets. Saucers of water and bones and dried cheese and curdled milk lay beside a desk.
The finishing touch, of course, was the paper—paper littered every available flat surface. Stacks of tomes and notes and letters lay on the desk and improvised tables of old crates and sawhorses covered with planks. Folded paper animals roamed the mountains of paper. Charts pasted to the walls overlapped other charts pasted to the walls. Finally, a crisis in housing had occurred, and the paper stacks had migrated to the floors beside walls and beneath tables. To Olive’s astonishment, nothing littered the ceiling.
Drone’s lab was more spacious than most, about forty feet in diameter, and it took the halfling a minute to thread her way through the maze of equipment and junk before she found her companions. Giogi and Cat stood beside a desk, speaking to Frefford Wyvernspur. Giogi’s cousin held a silver urn, a sheet of paper, and a floor brush.
Freffie was saying, “I think you’re right. There is evidence that it might not have been something he summoned himself. A window pane was broken. Nothing out of the ordinary with that, considering Drone, but all the kudzu vine from the roof to the window was blighted and withered. Those piles of papers by his desk were scattered across the floor.”
“Any other signs of a struggle?” asked Cat.
Frefford gave a shrug, “With this mess, who could tell? I’d really better start heading down. Aunt Dorath is standing at the foot of the outer stairs, waiting for me. If I take too long, she’s liable to send a division of the purple dragoons up.
“It was so kind of you to offer Giogi your aid,” Frefford said as he bowed over Cat’s hand, “in bringing Steele down from the mausoleum.”
“It was nothing,” Cat muttered.
“I hope you’ve shown her your appreciation, Giogi,” Frefford said, his eyes still fixed on the beautiful mage.
“Yes,” Giogi replied flatly.
“Well, then,” Frefford said, not noticing his cousin’s frown, “I’ll have the things to take to the temple piled in your carriage before you leave. Be careful up here.”
