The Book of Athyra (48 page)

“Only because I’ve been stung. Let’s hear what you have in mind.”

I gave him the general outline, omitting details he didn’t need and wouldn’t have been happy knowing. He listened very intently, then he said, “Yes, indeed. And we don’t even have gloves, much less whatever you’re supposed to use to protect your face. The question is, how big is the swarm, and how nasty do they get when they’re roused?”

“Yeah, that’s the question. And can you think of a better way to find out?”

He sighed and shook his head. “Unfortunately, Kiera, I can’t.”

“So I should go ahead?”

He nodded briefly, like he didn’t enjoy the prospect. Well, neither did I, come to that. I said, “What are you going to do while I’m off gathering sweets?”

A peculiar sort of smile came to his lips. “I’ll think of something,” he said.

*  *  *

A
LL WE HAD TO DO
was keep our heads down and keep learning things, and eventually, maybe, we’d start to get an idea about what was going on; then, just maybe, we’d be able to figure out what to do about it. That, at least, was what I was thinking as I stepped out of the little cottage and repaired home to make myself annoying in a couple of different ways to several different people.

The next two days were no more fun than I’d thought they would be—most of those I spoke to I didn’t like, and they didn’t like me, and they couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me anything useful, anyway—but in the end I came up with some hard information. I noted it down carefully, and, psychic communication being impossible while Vlad wore the Phoenix Stones, I had to hold on to what I’d learned until I would see him next: tomorrow or the day after, depending on how things went tonight. When
I was done asking irritating questions of irritating people, which was in the afternoon of the second day, I picked up the tools I was going to need and prepared to do what I was good at.

Vlad and I, back in the old days, used to compare our respective crafts, and one of the things common to both was the need for preparation, and, in conjunction, how dangerous it was to try to do anything in a hurry. The trouble was, things were happening too fast, and I had the feeling they were going to happen even faster.

Well, I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. After getting what I needed from home, I spent the rest of the afternoon going from place to place in Adrilankha, trying to get the information I needed to have a chance to pull this off.

I wished I had a familiar to grumble at while I did so. Vlad’s told me about several times Loiosh has saved his life, or suggested the solution to a problem, or provided the necessary help to complete a witchcraft spell, but I have the feeling that the most important thing Loiosh does for Vlad is give him someone to grumble at. You feel stupid grumbling to yourself, so I didn’t.

The day was waning when I had finally acquired everything I needed. I took about four hours to study the situation, curse about everything I didn’t know, and come up with a tentative way in, a provisional agenda, and a possible way out, with maybe a couple of alternatives for the last, all of which I knew would likely be rendered useless if something went wrong. For the first time in more years than I could remember I actually thought about how humiliating it would be to get caught, because for the first time in more years than I could remember it seemed like a real possibility.

I cursed yet again and made my way to the Imperial Palace, Orca Wing.

The phrase “breaking into the Imperial Palace” has been used among people I know for a long time as an expression of the unthinkable: “Argue philosophy with an Athyra? Might as well break into the Imperial Palace,” or, “Bet the round stones? Sure. And then we’ll break into the Imperial Palace.” That sort of thing. It’s a fascinating little phrase, because it only makes sense if it goes back to the early days of the Empire, when all that existed was the old nucleus that became the Imperial Wing; breaking into the Imperial Palace is as easy in the execution as it is meaningless as a concept: most of the doors you can just walk into;
where
in the Imperial Palace do you want to break into?

And, of course, to do what?

In any case, I “broke into the Imperial Palace” by walking into the
Orca Wing. I wore a nice, full coat of Jhereg grey with natty black fringe, a hood in case it got cold, and one that was sufficiently voluminous to hide my tools. I nodded to the tired-looking Orca watchman as I went by.

So let’s see. One, two, third corridor to the left, up the stairs, down the hall to the statue. A long way. There was no bloody statue of Sealord Cren; how old was that information, anyway? Well, it had to be either this passage or this one, and . . . yes, there were the marks where the statue used to be. Good. Now another stairway, and two more turnings, and it had been quite some time since I’d seen anyone. The Orca were forced to work long, irregular hours when at sea; they made up for it ashore by working no more than they had to.

There were supposed to be a couple more watchmen to circumvent right before I reached my destination, and I became worried when I didn’t see them. But I waited in the corridor outside the doorway into the Ministry until at last I heard one walk by; the footsteps were measured and casual and went away after a while. Nine and a half minutes later I heard a different set. Eleven minutes later the first set returned. I spent another half hour there, just to make sure of the timing, then moved.

The door into the Ministry had only the most cursory lock, and the alarm was trivial. Once past it, I had to get into Shortisle’s office, and I spent most of the seven minutes I’d given myself in checking for alarms; then I retreated once more to wait for another cycle of the watch. The next time I spent only five minutes more checking for alarms, about a minute disabling them, and maybe twenty seconds opening the door, slipping through, shutting it, and locking it again. Then I put the alarms back up in case the guards checked them. I put some cloth under the door so that no one would see light peeking out, then looked around.

There was a door in his office that had a nice little sign on it reading, “Records.”

If Shortisle was engaged in anything shady—or, in fact, even if he wasn’t—he wouldn’t make it easy to get to the financial records of the Empire, so I intended to take this carefully and slowly, and make sure I’d found everything before I moved.

I studied the door, the floor, and the ceiling first, looking for anything obvious, and found nothing. Next I looked as closely as I could through and into the keyhole, but I didn’t see anything that looked like an alarm.

The next step was to feel for the presence of sorcery in the area, and, yes indeed, it was all over the place; there was nothing subtle about it. Was it double-trapped? That is, would looking at it closely set off an
alarm? Well, there are the tendrils of spells that hang in the real world like abandoned cobwebs; and one knows the feel of these strands if one has ever walked through a dark and gloomy place-so, too, were these bits of amorphia all around me in that place that was dark to the outer eye, but now filled with light to the inner. I can brush past cobwebs without making them fall, but what if the web is not abandoned, after all? Then the spider will know I am there; and if there is anyone watching the spider, then I cannot brush her or her threads aside without all the world being aware of me.

Ah, little spider, you have a bite, do you? And someone watching over you? Well, let him watch, little spider, and you—find me if you can, for I know cobwebs better even than you, and I will send up my own spider that will look like you, and act like you, and gobble you up, and then sit fat and happy in your place while the watcher watches, oblivious.

I took a few minutes to catch my breath before I proceeded. One becomes exhausted when using sorcery in proportion to the intricacy of the spell, not the amount of energy used; a fact that I think Vlad still doesn’t understand since he still compares it to witchcraft—an art I’ve never begun to understand.

When I felt better, I used the same device I’d used at the bank to look into the room in preparation for teleporting. It was a fairly small room, but full to overflowing with cabinets, maybe forty-five or fifty of them, all of which were, no doubt, full to overflowing with the recent financial records of the Empire—whatever I was looking for was probably in there. I checked the room over carefully, fixed it in my mind, prepared to teleport, and stopped cold.

Something wasn’t right.

I put the tube back against the wall, held it tight, relaxed, and looked again. The room was entirely dark, and I hadn’t wanted to risk light until I could be sure they had nothing to detect it, so I’d used a spell that affected my sight rather than the room; this is tricky because it is very easy to miss things that are near other things—objects tend to blur and merge in the magical vision—but it seemed that there was something odd next to one of the cabinets against the wall.

I checked again, and there was no trace of sorcery except for those spells I had already found and circumvented, which meant, if this was an alarm, it wasn’t a magical one. Of course, there was no reason to believe it was an alarm—it was just something that wasn’t a filing cabinet or a pen, or an inkwell, or anything else I could readily identify. I almost talked myself into going in, but you don’t get to be my age without developing
some instincts and learning to trust them, so I put a little more effort into seeing it.

If the ceiling was as high as the ceiling of this room, then the filing cabinets were about eight meters tall, in which case the object sitting on the floor was about two meters tall (scale can be a problem when seeing this way—try it yourself) and resembled, more than anything else, a small gong, with some sort of round plate attached to a thin frame by a pair of wires, and even what might be a diminutive beater positioned in front of it, attached to the frame. I couldn’t see how thick any of it was for sure, which didn’t help any. I doubted it was actually a gong but I couldn’t figure out what it was, or what it was doing there.

If it was magical, I’d lost all of my skills, and if it wasn’t magical, what was it? Could one use witchcraft to create an alarm? My guess was no, but I couldn’t reach Vlad to ask him, and I didn’t want to ask Cawti because she’d ask questions. No, I didn’t think witchcraft could do something like that. And I really doubted that Shortisle would think to hire a witch, anyway.

It was probably something completely harmless that had nothing to do with anything, and when I looked at it I’d laugh. Except that I still had this feeling.

Well, if it
was
an alarm, it had to be connected to a device to notify someone, or a device to trigger a trap, or a device to make a noise, or
something.
And if the connection wasn’t magical, it had to be physical. Well, was there a string or a wire running from it to somewhere else?

I looked, and focused, and . . .

Yes, there was.

A wire or a string ran from it up to the ceiling and disappeared above the room.

Maybe it
was
an alarm.

If so, how did it work? What was it supposed to detect, and how would it respond? How could it send a magical impulse through the string if there was no magic around the device? And if it wasn’t supposed to send a magical impulse, what could it send? I had the sudden image of someone creating an artifact that did nothing at all, but knowing that if there was a strange device in the room, no competent thief would break in before figuring out what it did. An effective deterrent to be sure, but I suspected there was more to this object than that.

Well, what would have happened if I’d teleported into the room? Nothing. I’d have been there, maybe right by the device, maybe not, but it couldn’t sense me, anyway, so . . .

Slow down, Kiera.

What happens when someone teleports into a room?

The same thing, more or less, that happens when someone opens a door and
walks
into the room: air gets pushed around—just a little when the door is opened, more when you materialize from a teleport. And if that gonglike thing is thin, then just a little air movement would be enough to make it tap against the beater, and if that was a metal wire, it could carry the sound, or the vibration, through the Palace to a place where it could be amplified, and someone, somewhere, would know that the integrity of the room had been violated.

I’d have whistled to myself if I weren’t being especially conscious of sound. It was a very clever device; just the sort of thing the Orca would come up with, and I was only surprised that no one had thought of it, or a variation on it, years and years ago: simple, elegant, and almost impossible to detect.

Almost impossible.

Thing is, I’m not just a good thief, I’m the best thief in the Empire. I reached the fingers of magic into the room and felt the thin metal plate. Careful now, Kiera. Don’t get cocky with all those thoughts about how good you are: you’re good because you’re careful, and you’re careful because you’re patient. Take it slowly, and . . .

It was immobilized.

I sighed, took a breath, and teleported into the room. Nothing went off, nothing moved. I did yet another check for magic, then made a light and began looking through the Imperial financial records. These were, you understand, only the most recent and active sets: the rest were saved by some method known only to the sorcerers of the House of the Lyorn and the archivists of the House of the Orca, but it was the recent and active records I needed.

I imagine the organization of the packets in the cabinets, and, indeed, the arrangement of the cabinets, all of them marked with numbers or symbols or a combination, made sense to those who worked here, and I would even guess that somewhere was a key to the whole thing that would explain how to interpret everything else, but I had no clue how to make sense of any of it. Fortunately, I didn’t need to. I opened a packet at random, saw nothing that meant anything to me, closed it, and put it back. Then I went to another cabinet and did the same. Then another, until I had opened at least one packet in each of them, and riffled through probably two hundred collections of notes, invoices, receipts, and other accounting arcana.