Taran hesitates, looking around the living quarters. “Alright, but let me lead.”
I nod to him and follow him up the stairs.
As expected, we pass several more guards as we climb to the tower’s higher floors, but they all recognize Taran and defer to his authority. “Remind me to bring you along the next time I need to sneak around somewhere,” I say to him. “Who needs to learn to pick locks when they just let you go anywhere you want?”
“There are places even here that I imagine I wouldn’t be allowed to go.”
“The gold-refining rooms.” Nowthatwould be a good place to hide something. Only the upper echelons of the Guild have access to those rooms at all. From what Zara told me, the process is broken up so that none other than a handful of people at the very top know the entire thing. Even many of the highest-ranking wardens only know a single step.
We’re nearly to the Guild Mistress’s chambers, but I’m wondering if we should abandon this search in favor of trying to find our way to one of the gold-refining rooms. But if we did, we’d have no way to enter them, and we’ve come this far.
“Halt. Who goes there?” comes a masculine voice from the top of the stairs.
“General Taran Orinsen and Sylvara of House Verran, on the God-King’s orders,” says Taran. His tone is bored rather than forceful, which I admit makes it sound much more authoritative. Nothing to see here. Everything is above board.
“Approach,” barks the voice. At the top of the staircase, unlike all the other landings, there’s a door carved with ornate symbols. Some resemble the carvings in the palace, while others are of a more astronomical nature. I’ve only seen their likes in one other place: the Great Library of Faros.
The pair of guards before the door bear the seal of the Royal Guard on their chainmail. These are palace guards, likely hand-selected for the job by Ronan.
“We weren’t told to expect you, General.” The other guard, a tall woman in her forties, gives us a thorough looking-over. She seems satisfied with what she finds. “Do you require admission into the Guild Mistress’s private chambers?”
“Yes,” says Taran. “And we require your discretion. No one is to know we were here.”
“Understood, sir,” says the male guard. “Proceed.”
I gawk at Taran as we enter unchallenged. “You are the perfect person for this job, do you know that? They didn’t even argue with you.”
“Technically, I’m their boss,” he says. “Although in practice, I usually let Commander Elia handle the day-to-day operations of the Royal Guards beyond the palace. My hands are full enough keeping an eye on Ronan.”
“I believe that,” I say with a smile.
That same smile fades quickly when I look around the room we’ve entered. “Oh, fucking hell.”
The chambers of the Guild Mistress are enormous. Whereas the other floors had multiple rooms, this room takes up the entire floor of the tower, and it stretches up several stories all the way to the roof. Shelves line every wall, much like the Great Library, but here they’re filled not only with books but with strange artifacts, glass containers in a variety of shapes and sizes, jars and bowls containing all sorts of strange ingredients: herbs, oddly colored fruits, and even a jar full of something suspiciously like human teeth. There are ladders and stairways thrown up seemingly at random, many of those littered with papers and scrolls, some leading to nowhere at all. My eye catches on something gleaming near a round window at the very top of the tower: a large golden spyglass.
“Do you suppose Zara watched Ronan getting dressed from up there?” I ask Taran.
He’s looking around the gigantic mess of a room in stunned silence, his hand drifting towards a vial of dark red blood. He spots the spyglass and frowns. “The palacewouldbe visible from there.”
I was just joking, but now I’m somewhat disturbed. “How Zara communicated with Cyrus, maybe.”
Taran nods. “I’m going to check it out.”
“Great, I’ll just look…” Gods, where could I possibly look? I suspect from the way things are thrown about that the guards have already thoroughly searched this room, but even if they did, would they have known what they were looking for?Idon’t even know what I’m looking for.
I do know where I’m going to hide something if I want no one to ever find it, though.
I follow a path through the debris on the floor to a desk near the center of the bottom of the room. Judging by the way the paths through the stacks of books and shelves converge, this might be the Guild Mistress’s most-used desk.
The papers on the desk are arranged far more neatly than anywhere else in the room, and there’s little dust here. I glance at a ledger on the right side: quantities of ingredients collected during the most recent harvest.
At least I’m in the right year.
I’m sorting through the papers beneath it, looking for anything with a royal seal or Cyrus’s name, when something comes crashing down from overhead.
“You alright?” says Taran. “I can’t see you.”
“I’m fine. You obliterated a jar of dried leaves.”
