I shook my head, huffing a laugh. “Maybe one of the others knows. Or maybe we’ll simply have to take them all back with us.”
Trust me. You will know.
Adalbrand smiled as he tossed the cup up and caught it again. “I don’t think that this is it.”
“Why not?”
He pointed to the body of the cup. “Because it doesn’t look like the pictures.”
He felt in a pocket and produced a piece of parchment and showed it to me. The Poisoned Saints, it would seem, were more helpful with exact instructions than the Aspect of the Rejected God had been. His parchment showed a cup with a wide base and embedded with cabochon gems. The walls of the cup were etched with something — but the sketch was unclear on the details. The cup he was holding had no gems.
“This is someone’s dirty secret,” he said grimly. “A family heirloom, perhaps? Hidden in that sphere?”
I nodded. That made sense.
“Any other secret compartments that you care to open?” I asked him, but he shook his head. I was still wary of him despite his vow. A man who took you violently by surprise once might do it again. A little teasing and friendliness might lead to a partnership eventually, but we were not there yet.
“On to the next room then, shall we?”
He kept hold of the cup even though he knew it wasn’t the right one. Interesting.
We tried three more rooms, this time with Brindle dogging our steps. Two we checked separately, the last we checked together.
Each room we searched was more elaborate than the last, decadent in a way I wouldn’t have credited to a monastery. There were none of the plain, stark outfittings of our houses of prayer. These were laden with treasures more suitable to the apartments of a king. Had I the desire, I could fill my pockets to the brim with curiosities and live a life of luxury. I would do exactly that, were I not sworn to abstain from riches.
The room I’d checked on my own had a cage in it large enough to hold the bed. I counted five avian skulls and assorted bones inside. No cup.
All these rooms seemed to have been abandoned with haste. Clothing was flung everywhere, blankets tangled, cushions disarranged. I searched systematically, looking for anything that might be the cup or a clue for finding it. I found three more books just like the first, though in different handwriting, as if four people were working toward the same goal — the same invention. I kept them with me, interested to try to see what manner of project had inspired all four of these people at once. Perhaps it was a clock like the one in the main room. Or some other wonder of art and craft.
I did not find another cup in the rooms, and by the time we went back to the halls, someone had removed all the cups from their alcoves in the wall.
Brindle kept his eye on Adalbrand, snuffling his way from room to room with doggy enthusiasm. I kept a close watch on him. I was worried that in the low light of this place, his eyes might glow their hell-and-heaven brightness and betray us. These rooms were lit with clever windows, narrow but effective, cut into the rock on one side and out to the sea, and then cut from room to room. The depth of rock and narrowness of the slivers would make spying difficult, but they let in enough light to search the rooms without lantern or torch.
It was not until the third room that we found a clue.
There was a tapestry on the wall. At the very top of the tapestry, the cup from Adalbrand’s sketch was carefully embroidered, complete with the blue cabochon gems on the walls and something that looked like eyes all around them. Beneath it was a dark building ringed with reaching branches. It was picked out in an outline beside the sea, and that wouldn’t have been enough to tip us off, but the building extended down beneath the earth to where a long staircase ended with a clock on one side and a fountain on the other, and beneath it all were gears.
“I think the cup must be here somewhere,” Adalbrand said from beside the desk. He held up a single sheet of parchment. Someone had scrawled across the bottom, but at the top was a very accurate depiction of the Cup of Tears. It looked much like Adalbrand’s sketch, but the eyes sketched around the gemstones were clearer.
He passed the parchment to me. “Can you read it?”
Beside us, Brindle yawned, apparently bored beyond belief even as the demon inside him sprang to attention.
“It says Aching Cup,” I replied after Brindle translated.
“That’s close enough to Cup of Tears. It could be that your translation is not precise. And the rest?”
These little poems are so delicious. I can almost taste the fear worming through them. Let me read it for you.
It worried me that he liked this so much.
This most holy of cups,
This most painful of drinks,
It cuts down to the quick,
It does more than one thinks.
