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They’d murdered Mom, and theywouldpay.
I carefully made my way through the mess to the other side of the desk. All the drawers had been opened—or forced open, in the case of one—and the contents tipped out over the floor.
“Wonder what they were looking for?” I bent and carefully sifted through the junk. “Gratham is a service broker and isn’t likely to be holding anything of value in a place that’s in essence unsecured.”
“You’re forgetting that iron-barred room.”
“I wouldn’t have thought Gratham would be dealing with anything actually requiring that sort of security. Not in an out of the way place like this.”
“Maybe he was a black market collector of valuables on the side.”
I snorted. “In a small town like this, where everyone knows everyone else’s business? Unlikely.”
“Maybe he was a legit collector. There are plenty around, you know.”
“I guess so.” I wrinkled my nose. “Do you think they were looking for the keys to the grated door?”
“Possibly.” Lugh shrugged. “It’s also possible whoever hired him to attack us thought Gratham was holding onto the sword. We were supposed to go up two days ago, remember.”
“Yes, but we weren’t exactly hiding out in the hotel. If we were being watched, they’d have known we didn’t head up there until this morning.”
He carefully opened the top drawer of a filing cabinet whose contents lay strewn around his feet, then felt inside with a gloved finger. I wondered what he was searching for, then remembered the cabinets in Nialle’s basement had had a wireless switch hidden in the back of them that opened a secret room.
Out in the hall, something heavy scraped across the floor.
“And I think that might be our door. Follow me, sister dearest.”
I carefully picked my way back through the rubbish to the hall, and once again energy flickered down the knife blade. I paused, looking up, wondering if whatever it sensed lay upstairs. The response wasn’t particularly strong, which suggested the evil or spell it was picking up was either days old or simply fading.
“Ha, right first time,” Lugh said, snagging my attention again.
I hurried over. Both the barred door and the wooden one behind it were now open, revealing another storeroom. Rather than the open shelving the other storerooms had, this one was filled with sturdy-looking two-door security cabinets with mesh fronts. Inside the closet were a number of silver plates and gold statuettes, though from where I was standing, I couldn’t see if they were antiquities or modern.
“I’m not seeing anything in the way of protection spells, which is odd,” I said. “He’s a services broker—he’d have to be aware that a dark elf or even a really good human thief could get in here easily enough.”
Lugh shrugged. “Spells can be disarmed if you have the knowledge. Besides, he’s got cameras and a point-to-point beam system installed. That makes things a whole lot tougher.”
I’d seen the cameras but not the point-to-points, and they were so small it took a good bit of squinting at the skirting boards to see them. There were enough of them to suggest the floor was heavily crisscrossed.
“Do you think this is the reason why the power is off?”
“Possibly, but most of these systems have a battery backup. Unless you can deactivate that before you take the power out, you’ve little chance of getting in without being caught.”
I raised an eyebrow. “And you know this how?”
He grinned. “Not all the antiquities I acquire for the museum are found in out-of-the-way, dangerously remote locations. Some of them are found in the very plush, supposedly ultra-secure safe rooms of black-market collectors.”
As the sound of approaching sirens began to bite the air, I snorted and stepped back. “I suggest we check upstairs before the coppers get here. The knife is intermittently reacting to something up there.”
Lugh glanced at the currently inert knife, then nodded and motioned me to lead again. The steps creaked as we made up way up, and the banister was silent. Not because of the multiple layers of stain, but because it had been made of recycled materials whose voice was lost long ago.
I reached the landing and stopped. Three doors lay before us—one to the left, one to the right, and one in the middle. All were closed, giving absolutely no indication of what might lay behind them. There was no sound other than the approaching sirens, and no odd smells—though I wasn’t entirely sure why I’d been half expecting the latter.
The knife was reacting to the middle, but its response remained faint. I hoped that was a good thing, though I suspected the opposite might be true.
My pessimistic nature coming to the fore again.
I glanced at Lugh. “I don’t suppose you want to go first?”
