“It’s a nightmare up here.”
I expect the guards to come charging in to see if we’re alright, but they must be accustomed to a lot of banging and crashing in this room because they leave us alone.
“Anything?” I call after I don’t hear him moving for a while.
“It’s pointed over towards Dalven. Near Adria’s camp. But the palace would be clearly visible from here as well.”
“I don’t like that.”
“Me neither. But it must weigh five hundred pounds. I’ll have to send someone else to come and get it.”
“An earth-born, maybe.” That’s probably how they got it up there in the first place.
“Do you have anything?” Taran says as he starts climbing down.
“Not really.” None of the papers I’m looking at seem to contain any damning information about the Guild’s activities, but I didn’t really expect them to. Why would the acting Guild Mistress or the former Guild Mistress keep anything that would get them in trouble here when they could just slip it into any of the thousands of books in the room?
But then something occurs to me: people are lazy. I open the drawers of the desk. More papers, ink, quills, letter openers. I feel around for hidden compartments like on my brother’s desk, but I feel no give, no slot to slip a finger in to reveal a false bottom.
I stand back and look at the desk. It’s made of a nice Nithyrian wood, quite similar to the reddish kind of cedar Ronan prefers, only the lacquer is a bit darker. And it’s thick. The top of the desk is much thicker than is typical. It must have cost a small fortune, although judging by the amount of priceless items in the room, the Guild has been spending its fortune indiscriminately.
The top istoothick, I realize. I knock on the wood, and the sound is hollow. Either the carpenter was having a weird day, or there’s a secret compartment somewhere in the top.
I feel around under the desk until my fingers catch on a keyhole. “Found something.” I reach into my pocket and remove my wrench and rake, picking the lock as Taran approaches.
“Anything in these papers?”
“No idea. Take a look.”
The lock is trickier than ordinary. One of the pins truly does not want to stay in place, but after several failed attempts, I finally manage it.
I pull down, and a stack of papers falls out onto my head. “Here we go.” I pass half of the stack up to Taran to read. “Bolts of silk? Linen thread? This looks like it’s just a tailor’s receipt.”
“These are strange as well. Pigments for painting, I think. It could be coded.”
“Better take it all.”
We’ve been gone a long time now, but I hate to leave this room without giving it a more thorough search. By the time we return here, anything they don’t want us to see may have been moved, if it wasn’t moved already. “There’s one more desk like this I want to check.” It looks similar enough that it probably has the same compartment.
Taran follows me over to the other desk. It’s over to the far side of the room, and it takes us quite a bit of time to navigate the maze of the floor, but we do finally reach it. I’m grasping underneath it when I feel something familiar.
“Ronan,” I say. I meet Taran’s blue eyes, his expression troubled.
“Nearby?”
I shake my head. “Not in the tower yet. He’s in the main building below.” He feels like he’s still a good distance away from us, but I usually can’t feel him from this far. Maybe something is affecting my magic. “We need to go.”
“What’s he feeling?”
“Annoyed. Worried. Pretty much what you’d expect.”
I feel under the desk quickly but don’t immediately find a matching keyhole, so I abandon the search. I follow Taran out into the tower’s stairway, thanking the guards, and then I take the lead once we’re back in the main building.
“This way,” I say, leading us through an archway into a narrow corridor. It isn’t the way we came before with the apprentice, but I’m hopeful that they’ve just continued the tour without us and aren’t searching the entire Guild for us yet.
The narrow hallway opens into a much larger corridor, this one filled with alchemists coming and going in their brownrobes. The air smells of honey and cinnamon—the dining hall serving breakfast must be nearby.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” asks Taran.
