The Emperor's Mirror

by Emily Holloway

  “There are a lot of secrets around here,” Tallis said. Brannon just looked uncomfortable. Tallis tried to stay casual. “Could I see it some evening? It must be beautiful. I’ve seen drawings of the old temples.”

  “Didn’t I just say it was a secret?” Brannon asked.

  “So are these chests,” Tallis said, gesturing at them. “Or at least, what’s in them is.”

  “Those weren’t big secrets, though.”

  “I suppose not.”

  There was a long, awkward silence.

  “I want the chest back, too,” Brannon finally said, studying the origami dragon. “I wish Elder would stop lying to you.”

  “I do, too,” Tallis said. “But I’ll try my best to get it back for you anyway.”

  “Why would it help for you to see where he took it from?” Brannon asked.

  Tallis noted the use of the word ‘he’ in that sentence and tried to not gape. It was the first clue he’d had that anyone, let alone Brannon himself, might have witnessed the theft. Since he doubted that Brannon had intended to give that away, he forced himself to leave it alone for the moment. “Because I might be able to track the magic of the person that took it. Or learn the feel of the magic that was already on it. Sometimes things like that will leave an echo of sorts where they used to be.”

  Brannon rubbed one hand over his hair. “Don’t know why I care,” he muttered. “It’s not like it’s mine.”

  “This is your home,” Tallis said gently. “No one likes strangers taking things from their home.”

  Brannon heaved a sigh. “I’ll have to think about it,” he muttered.

  Tallis rewarded the boy with a warm smile. “Thank you.”

  Brannon flushed to the tips of his ears, and although his muttered reply hardly sounded complimentary, there was no mistaking the pleased smile he made when he thought Tallis wasn’t looking.

  * * *

  Chapter Five

  Calessa waited until the entire temple had been silent for over two hours before she left her room to have a look around. Their earlier search had been no more than a cursory sweep to try to locate magical objects within the temple, and had not garnered much result.

  Using a variety of spells to make sure no one noticed her, she crept back downstairs, cursing in irritation as she went. She wished that Sienna had stayed instead; this kind of thing was more Sienna’s specialty than hers. If she wanted to spy, she did it by acting, not by sneaking.

  The temple was mostly silent and dark, the few flickering lanterns only adding to the gloom of the place. She glared at the shadowy pews as if they were the cause for her annoyance and made her way up onto the altar. There wasn’t much there; it was basically just a podium that Emory could stand behind.

  Beneath the altar there was some incense in a plain wooden box. She sniffed it and wrinkled her nose; it seemed normal enough, if a bit pungent. She decided that the temple itself was just a big, useless room, and went on to explore other corners of the building.

  The second floor had some guest rooms and some storage, nothing very interesting. When she reached the top floor, however, she stopped at the top of the staircase. During their tour, Owain had explained that the top floor contained Emory’s private chambers, and he had allowed them to briefly examine the set of rooms. Now, however, there were several warding spells across the small landing. If she ventured much further, she would trip them. She could hear raised voices from the other side of the door. One was definitely Owain’s, and she decided to wait and listen before attempting to bypass the wards. The landing was almost completely dark, lit only by the thin stripe of light that came from underneath the door. Calessa felt her heart thudding unpleasantly against her ribcage and she tried to settle her nerves.

  “No,” Owain said, “I won’t do it.”

  There was an answering rumble, but Emory was speaking too low for Calessa to catch the words.

  “Look, you cold-blooded bastard, it may make perfect sense to you, but I still won’t do it. I couldn’t anyway.”

  Another answer.

  Owain was sarcastic. “I’m thrilled you have such faith in my abilities.”

  A pause. Calessa couldn’t hear any response, and she grit her teeth in aggravation.

  “I’m sorry that I can’t lie as well as you can,” Owain answered irritably, raising his voice again. “And that wasn’t a compliment! Don’t look at me like that.”

  Calessa cursed underneath her breath. She studied the warding spells and decided she didn’t want to risk crossing them, and instead chose to chance using a spell to enhance her own hearing.

  “Shut up, Emory. You know what look I mean.”

  She reached out and touched the wall, closing her eyes and murmuring under her breath. When she finished the incantation, she could hear both their voices, but had lost track of the argument.

  “Who was that earlier?” Owain asked. He had lost some of his steam, and now sounded merely unhappy instead of angry. From this, Calessa concluded that Emory had won the argument, whatever it had been.

  “Who?”

  “That man who visited. The oh-so-mysterious one with the hood and cloak.”

  “Just a friend,” Emory said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Owain just sighed. “Look,” he said, “I know that you’re not going to tell me anything. I don’t know why I even ask anymore. But are you sure that letting her stay here is a good idea? She’s a Warder, Emory, and that means she’s not an idiot. She’s not going to fall for your little sermons again.”

  “No, but it does give us an advantage,” Emory said. “If she’s here, at least we know where she is.”

  “What about the other two?”

  “I imagine they’ve gone back to wherever they came from.”

  Owain started to lose his cool. “I don’t see how you can be so blasé about this,” he snapped. “Your fake God isn’t going to help you if you get in trouble with the Warders.”

  “I wouldn’t expect him to,” Emory said.

  “Then what have you got up your sleeve?”

  “Much,” Emory said, “as usual.”

  There was a long pause. The silence itself somehow managed to convey Owain’s disgust. Calessa heard the sound of a chair being moved, and then Emory’s voice again, very quiet. “Owain. Do you trust me?”

  “Yes,” Owain said with another sigh.

  “Then don’t worry.”

  Another long pause. A footstep.

  “Don’t touch me,” Owain said. “You know I hate it when you do that.”

  “When I do what, exactly?”

  A sigh.

  “I really hate you,” Owain said.

  Silence.

  Calessa waited for a few long minutes, but whatever they were doing, it wasn’t talking. Her ears were burning, a painful effect of the magic, so she cancelled her spell and went back to her room. She decided to send a quick message to the others before getting some sleep.

  She got out a piece of paper and wrote in an elegant hand. ‘Still safe. Haven’t found anything here. Ungodly services, no pun intended, start before dawn. Fortunately, I am not required to attend. Far more going on here than Emory’s letting on. Owain seems nice, but also seems rather pathetic. Mysterious stranger. Incense quite smelly. Will report more later.’

  She put her quill away and quickly folded the paper into a small bird. She whispered some magic into it, then let it out the window, and it sped away into the darkness.

  * * *

  Tallis had just gotten out of bed when there was a knock on his door the next morning. He answered it dressed and ready to go. Sienna looked tired and irritable; the latter was nothing new for Sienna but the former was. Apparently oblivious to her rumpled appearance, she forewent a ‘good morning’ and opened with, “You look like you didn’t get much sleep.”

  “I didn’t, but it was worth it,” Tallis said. “My little visitor came by again last night.”

  “Is he dead?” Sienna asked, amused.

/>   Tallis rolled his eyes. “No. I don’t know how the brothers or the Elder even dreamed that I would fall for that.”

  “The Elder does not strike me as particularly intelligent,” Sienna pointed out.

  “True enough,” Tallis agreed with a laugh. He grinned at Sienna and asked, “Would you like to sneak around with me while everyone else is off at morning services? There’s something I want to show you.”

  “Sure. I’m always up for a good sneak.”

  “We’re going back to the supposed scene of the crime,” Tallis told her. “I’ll let you decide how much we should sneak.”

  “I don’t think we’re not allowed to be there,” Sienna said. “It would be natural enough to want another look. Let’s just look purposeful.” She strode out of the room without another word, and Tallis hastened to follow. Since his legs were much longer than hers, he caught up quickly and they reached the room in just a few minutes. It seemed like a much shorter trip than the one he had taken through the tunnels. He traced the relevant glyphs on the door and pressed his palm against it, opening it silently.

  “So what’s the big excitement?” Sienna asked, glancing around and noting that the chests had been shifted slightly. “Other than that some things have been moved around a bit.”

  “That was me and Brannon, last night,” Tallis explained. “Although I thought we put everything back properly. Anyway, did we ever actually try to open the chests or did we just sense the locking spell and pick the locks?”

  Sienna thought about it, her brow creasing as she recalled the exact order of events. “We sensed the locking spell, and Calessa tried to open one, and then picked the lock. I didn’t touch any of them until they were open, and neither did you.”

  “Try to open one now,” Tallis suggested.

  The frown deepened, but Sienna did as he said, reaching for the nearest one and trying to pull the lid up. It didn’t budge. She looked back at Tallis as if to say, ‘well?’ Wordlessly, he reached over and flipped the chest open. Her eyes widened. “Ah – but – what?”

  “I don’t know why they’ll open for me. But they all do.” Tallis demonstrated, moving around the room. “They’ll open for Brannon too.”

  “He doesn’t use any sort of magic on them either?” Sienna asked, and Tallis nodded, gazing down at the origami dragon. “Well. Another piece to add to the mystery. It’s possible that your magic is just stronger than the priests who did these spells, so you thwart them subconsciously. I assume that Brannon has magic?”

  “He does,” Tallis said with a nod. “I can feel it, but he doesn’t know he has it. I don’t even think he used it last night. He hasn’t had any training, or been tested. They’re going to a lot of trouble to protect him. From what, I don’t know.”

  “Where in this maze does he stay?”

  “I think he stays in their temple,” Tallis said, and Sienna’s brow furrowed slightly. “I know, I know. He says there’s a temple here. And he means the real thing. One of the old ones, not the dinky little shrine on the second floor. He said he might show it to me tonight. He also knows where this chest is,” Tallis continued, tapping the empty spot. He had already thought about this a great deal, mentally cataloguing his conversation with Brannon a dozen times so he would remember what to tell Sienna in the morning. “He says there’s a ring in it, not that it really matters. And that a man took the one that is actually missing.”

  “How in the blazes does he know that?” Sienna asked.

  “I’m pretty sure he saw the man take it.”

  Sienna let out a low whistle. “Maybe that’s why the Elder has been guarding him so closely. If anyone knew he saw it happen . . .”

  Tallis shook his head. “No, that’s not it. I don’t think the Elder knows he saw anything. They’re keeping him hidden for a different reason. He’s special.”

  There was a pause. “Special?”

  “Yes,” Tallis said firmly. “Special.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  Tallis shrugged. “He’s just special.”

  Sienna sighed. “Is there anything else you wanted to show me here?”

  “No.” Tallis closed the chest, saving the origami dragon for last and giving it a slow, wistful look.

  * * *

  After breakfast, Tallis began the daunting task of questioning the monks. There were fewer than thirty at the monastery, but while none of them took very long, it added up to a great deal of time sitting in a hard wooden chair receiving the same answers over and over again. Elder Edrich seemed to view this as a waste of time, but he didn’t question their methods.

  While Tallis questioned the monks, Sienna explored the grounds, with a few of the monks as her guides. She had already done a thorough and covert exploration of the tunnels, though they both suspected there were some she hadn’t found. She had most of them mapped out, but both she and Tallis had no idea why there was such an extensive network of them.

  After the first hour of questioning, Tallis’ eyes began to glaze over. The monks all agreed. No, they didn’t know anything about the theft of the chest. No, none of them had felt anything strange. They admitted that the chest contained a holy relic, but none of them seemed willing to admit that they knew what it was. Elder Edrich knew, he was told time and time again.

  The monk that had ‘discovered’ the theft was an older man named Nazaire. Tallis suspected that Elder Edrich had picked him because he was a relatively decent liar. He told a tearful tale of going to clean the room in the morning and finding the cracked window and the chest missing. Of course, he had immediately reported it to the Elder.

  Tallis tried to poke some holes in the story, but it held up underneath the questioning. It had clearly been carefully thought out.

  There had been no witnesses to the theft, and no one had noticed anything out of the ordinary.

  The priests that had put the spells on the chest were not in residence, and the warding locks on the room were standard and could have done by anybody.

  All of which added up to a frustrating morning.

  Tallis met with Sienna after lunch. “Any luck?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve been over these thrice-damned grounds more times than I can count. There’s no magical trace anywhere that isn’t one of the monks or the Elder himself. I’ve looked over that room a dozen times and haven’t noticed a damn thing – not that I would, since it’s not where the chest was stolen anyway.”

  “Anything outside?” Tallis asked her.

  “Some faint traces,” she said. “Nothing specific that caught my interest.”

  Tallis thought it over. “What was their explanation for all the tunnels?”

  “They had plenty,” Sienna said. “Storage, for one. Quicker passage around the building, for another. Nothing that really made sense. A few tunnels, yes, but not the maze underneath this place.”

  “Better and better,” Tallis said.

  “Oh,” Sienna said suddenly, “while I was outside, we got a message from Calessa. It was fairly entertaining, really.” Without taking any paper out, she repeated the message back to him verbatim. “I destroyed it, of course,” she added.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “She seems like she’s having a grand time,” Sienna added.

  “Like she could be having any worse of a time than we are?” Tallis grumbled. “You didn’t have to sit in one of those chairs all morning. Gods, I’m stiff.”

  She prodded him in the side. “Don’t be a baby.”

  “Fine, you sit in one of those chairs tomorrow.”

  “By this time tomorrow, I expect to be ‘gone’, remember?”

  “Oh, yes. Would you care to seek out the Elder? We could have another religious argument.”

  “That would be lovely. Perhaps we can tell him that we’re tired of being lied to?”

  “You can tell him that,” Tallis said. “I’ll try to be a peacemaker. After all, an Elder of the old religion wouldn’t lie to us.”

  “You called
him a liar just as often as I did when we first got here,” Sienna remarked.

  “I was hasty in my judgment.”

  The Elder was in his chambers, and they were admitted immediately. Sienna was curt and went straight to the point. “Elder Edrich,” she said sharply, “we are making no progress. We cannot reasonably be expected to make progress until we are given all the facts involved in the case. You are withholding information and we would be well within our rights to leave, as we have other business we could be attending to.”

  Elder Edrich sputtered for a moment, then took a deep breath and gestured for them to take a seat. Sienna did so, rather primly, and Tallis followed suit. “You are Warders, are you not?” the Elder rumbled. “This is a magical artifact. There were spells placed on the chest. Why can you not track them?”

  Tallis tried to intervene. “It’s not quite as simple as that,” he said. “We’ve never seen the chest, and we can’t track spells that we have no familiarity with.”

  “Nothing else has been stolen from here,” Edrich retorted. “There should be a trail of some sort. You should be able to find it!”

  “Maybe if we were shown the actual beginning of that trail, we would be able to,” Sienna said.

  The Elder’s expression tightened. “What are you accusing me of, young lady?”

  “She’s not accusing you of anything, Elder,” Tallis intervened quickly. “She’s just frustrated. We all are.”

  Edrich glared, but subsided. Sienna stubbornly persisted. “Tallis, you know damn well that the chest he’s looking for wasn’t stolen from where he says it was. That window probably got cracked when some half-brained monk hit it with a broom while dusting the ceiling.”

  “Why would the Elder not show us the beginning of the trail?” Tallis asked in a reasonable tone. “He wants the chest back.” He shot a look at the Elder. “You do want the chest back, correct?”

  “Of course I do,” Edrich growled. “That’s why you’re here. The thief must have left some magical trail. Even if you can’t see the exact place where that trail begins, you should be able to pick it up somewhere!”