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“Oh, I suppose your existence is public now. I’d hoped to wait until you were a little older and stronger.”
Wistala sat in front of Stog and waited.
There were seven riders, two riding close to the edge of the road on either side, and the rest in back in a bunch that expanded and contracted as the horses trotted close to each other and then veered away.
The riding party spotted Stog, and the five in back formed into a line, blocking the road.
“Rah-ho,” Rainfall said quietly to himself. “The thane himself rides. This should be an interesting interview.”>“Sir?” Wistala asked, lowering and raising her head.
“There are airing windows up under the overhang of the roof on the side walls of this building. Climb up and see if you can get through one, and open the door.”
Wistala didn’t like leaving Rainfall perched on Stog at the big doorway; it seemed the whole town was laid out to look at the stairs leading up to the Hypatian Hall. She couldn’t imagine what danger to expect, surrounded by paved streets and rain-collectors in the quiet of the night, but she didn’t like it.
The columns were fluted, which served her claws admirably, and alternating grips between sii and saa, she gained the roof despite the slick mist-wet. The roof tiles were long and thicker than her sii, chevron-shapes interlocking as they descended from the peak, and spotted with generations’ worth of bird droppings.
She lowered her head to look under the cornice at the side of the building and saw the gaps Rainfall had mentioned. They were recessed so that it would be hard to see them, let alone shoot arrows or other projectiles into them from the street. Wooden shutters filled the intermittent gaps.
Gripping the roof with one saa and her tail, she managed to poke one open. It gave way on a horizontal pivot-point with a loud—to her—squeak. Flattening herself, she crept in under the shutter.
An entrance gallery yawned below her. She looked down on a row of frozen head tops—larger-than-life busts were on display on the inner side of the walls, and there was little to see beneath but a few benches. The back two-thirds of the building was blocked off by a wide staircase leading up to a semicircular forum, with banners on display above wooden doors.
Wistala heard voices from a smaller half-door set beneath the great stairs.
She lowered her tail and managed to test one of the busts below. It seemed solid enough. She jumped down to it and perched for a moment atop the great man’s head—he had a heavy brow and a nose of a size to equal the fame he must have gained in life to be so immortalized—and from there leaped down to the floor.
The floor was smooth but a little dirty, and had a series of strange divots and channels carved into its surface, not deep at all and useful only in collecting dirt, as far as she could tell. But the object of this exploration was the door.
Or door within a door, rather. There was a smaller portal set in the mighty wooden doors, barred by simple iron bolts set into tubes. She drew back the bolt on the smaller door and opened it.
“Daughter, you are a wonder,” Rainfall said in his elf-tongue.
Wistala took pleasure in hearing the familiar, but wondered if she could ever call Rainfall father—even in elf-tongue.
“I do not think you can ride Stog within unless I open the larger doors,” Wistala said.
“I’ll have to ask you to bear me inside.” He slid off Stog, using a leather strap to lower himself by the hands in the manner of a laborer she’d once seen come down from Jessup’s roof by taking a rope hand-under-hand. Then he switched to his rough beast tongue: “Stog, this shall only take a moment. Don’t befoul the steps, please.”
Once he was seated upon her and holding on to her fringe, she took him through the door.
“Take me to the ingress under the stairs—that’s the attendant-judge’s office.”
Wistala bore him into the hall.
“Locks on a Hypatian hall door. Where are late-riding couriers supposed to shelter, or impoverished travelers? And what’s this . . . the design on the floor’s been taken up!” Rainfall said as they passed the channels in the floor. “Where had the poor gold gone, I wonder . . . gilding the cornices at Galahall, no doubt.”
Flickering light and voices came from beneath the stairs.
Rainfall sighed. “This hall has become a tomb to old ideals. In my grandfather’s time, at this hour there were travelers sleeping beneath the gaze of Iceandler, or Torus the Elder, the smell of pine knots burning in the braziers. I suppose the only crowds nowadays come on Taxing Day.”
Wistala saw at the base of the ingress another door, half wood and half bars, with a sort of cut-off table in the middle and a space just big enough for a man to put his fist through above the table. On the other side, Wistala caught a glimpse of shelving, divided and subdivided into cubbyholes filled with tied scrolls.
Voices and moving shadows came from the other side of the door.
“Careful with that light, there. You’ll burn my ear off. Oh, now I can’t see anything,” Sobyor’s voice echoed out into the hall.
“Take me to the grate,” Rainfall said.
Wistala went down the eight steps to the area before the barred door. Some old, dirty quill-feathers lay on the floor.
