by To call our next destination a Royal Bedchamber would be to grossly understate the impact of the place.
It wasn’t fit for a king so much as a… well, a god. In size alone, it staggered me. Okay, Torvaston was a troll, and they aren’t short, but even so: how much space does one person need? We emerged in a chamber the approximate size of a football field (yes, I exaggerate, but not by much). Dominating the centre of that space was a bed large enough to sleep about thirty human-sized people. Its four posts were trees, crystalline and sparkling but clearly tree-shaped, and apparently alive. Canopies of cobwebby gauze hung about it, and its pillows and blankets had the kind of plushness a Ves could cheerfully sink into forever.
I’ve never seen an article of furniture so clearly scream magick!
The rest of the décor was of a piece with it. Lamps of contorted crystal hung from the ceiling and erupted from the walls, glowing under their own power; carpets covered the hardwood floor, their patterns and colours shifting as I looked at them; cabinets held artefacts safely behind glass, though every time I glanced their way I beheld a different array of objects.
Etc. If this was the lifestyle of a king in a magick-soaked enclave, I could definitely see its upside.
Luan walked through that room as though he walked in the presence of a god. His soft-footed, wide-eyed, reverential behaviour unnerved me. Did he think Torvaston was going to show up?
Was Torvaston going to show up?
‘You look petrified,’ Jay said, glancing at me.
I composed my features. ‘It’s the word “god” that did it,’ I said.
‘And?’
‘Any sane person is terrified of gods.’
‘Does that include the giddy kind you keep referring to?’
‘A degree of healthy irreverence is good for a person,’ I retorted.
Jay made no answer, save for his by-now-familiar eyebrow quirk that said whatever you say, Ves.
I shut my mouth.
Jay was right about the bedchamber more nearly resembling a museum. Like the rest of the tower (or as much as we had seen of it), it was meticulously well-kept, without a speck of dust or dirt anywhere. Considering these rooms had been sealed for centuries, however, that fact registered as highly unusual. Moreover, it had the air of a museum about it, of a place not merely dusted and swept but preserved. As though the effects of time had been, if not outright stopped, then at least slowed down.
Strong magicks indeed.
I wondered again why Torvaston had closed off this room, while apparently going to some trouble to preserve it. For whom? The chances that anyone would manage to follow his obscure trail of clues and oblique references and stray magickal bits-and-bobs were vanishingly small, which was why hundreds of years had passed before anyone had done so.
And I still felt like we were here more by some kind of fluke than by our own efforts.
Or by Milady’s possible flickers of clairvoyance. After all, it was she who had manoeuvred things so that we could keep our mischievous nose-for-gold Pup. It was Pup who had retrieved the scroll-case from Farringale, and brought it to me. It was Milady again who had brought in the Baron, and through him we had forged links with the Court at Mandridore — who had sent us out here. With Alban in pursuit, bearing just the things we needed to get into this room.
I shied away from concluding that anything like fate had brought us here; that would be absurd. But a somewhat manipulated run of “luck” certainly had. So then, why?
‘What’s in here that’s important?’ I said to Jay. Luan was on the other side of the room, still in a state of reverence. I half expected him to fall to his knees before an enormous, bejewelled chair that strongly resembled a throne. He’d probably die before he so much as considered sitting on it.
I, however, strongly wanted to plant my derriere on those sumptuous green velvet cushions.
I turned my face away from it, lest the temptation should overcome me.
‘Important?’ Jay said, frowning. ‘All of it, surely.’
‘As far as intriguing uses of magick go, and evidence of a delightful excess: yes. But I mean, what’s important to us in here.’
‘You mean, what would Milady want us to shamelessly make off with?’
‘No!’ I gasped, appalled. ‘What would Milady want us to… heroically liberate in the name of magick.’
‘My mistake.’
‘Hint: It’s unlikely to be anything with material value.’
‘So not the gigantic pile of magickal silver lying in a storeroom a ways nearby.’
‘Is it really gigantic?’
‘Relatively speaking. It’s enough to make a few lyres and snuff boxes, anyway.’
‘None of it looks like it might be a conveniently flat-packed magickal regulator, I suppose?’
‘Because they absolutely had IKEA for uniquely powerful artefacts in the seventeen hundreds.’
‘You never know.’
He grinned. ‘Yes, I do. And no, it doesn’t.’
‘Curse it.’
He looked around at Torvaston’s glamorous bedchamber, and shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Ves. Everything in here is dripping in gold. It could be anything or nothing.’
Most likely nothing, I thought, though my eye lingered on those cabinets. The curiously changeable nature of the contents intrigued me a little. What better way to protect objects of unusual value, than to make it impossible to identify what each object was?
Then again, it could also be an elaborate feint. If I were prone to thieving artefacts of great power — just for instance — the so-obviously magickal nature of all those carefully stored articles would attract me greatly. I’d be inclined to empty those cabinets forthwith, and might miss something more subtle.
Like… like a secret door, for example. Secret, but not because it was hidden. More because it was so subtle. Blandly mundane in the midst of such splendour, and half-hidden behind a cabinet to boot.
‘Did you go through that door?’ I asked Jay, pointing.
‘What door— oh.’ He blinked in its general direction. ‘I didn’t notice it before.’
‘Because you looked right past it, or conceivably because it wasn’t there before?’
Jay thought. ‘I honestly don’t know.’
‘I vote we investigate.’
‘Seconded.’
But as we ventured towards the door, it melted away.
There and then gone.
Jay took this in stride, which said a lot about his experiences with the Society since he’d joined us. Disappearing doors? All in a day’s work. He went up to the wall where the door had been, and felt around with his hands. ‘It’s really gone,’ he reported.
‘Right.’ I did a three hundred and sixty degree turn, scanning the room.
And spotted the slithery thing skulking behind an elegant console table, not far from the throne. Chair. Whatever. ‘There!’ I said, and ran for it.
This time, I almost made it before it began to fade. ‘No, you don’t,’ I said, and made a grab for the heavy silver (or Silver?) doorknob.
My fingers closed around it, and I yelped. It was cold, like ice fresh from the freezer. It hurt to touch it, but I grimly hung on, and threw my full body weight behind my efforts to haul it open.
Without much effect. A five-foot-barely-anything Ves doesn’t weigh all that much, I guess. The door fought me, inexorably squeezing itself closed. ‘Ow,’ I yelled, the doorknob burning my hands in that weird way that only ice can do.
Jay’s hands closed around mine, and suddenly the door’s trajectory was reversed. Inch by inch, we prised it open until Jay could get a foot in between it and the doorjamb.
There was no stopping him after that. He dragged the reluctant door open by sheer brute force, face thunderous, and finished the process off by way of a couple of rather savage kicks. ‘You can let go,’ he said, and dragged my hands away from the doorknob.
I relinquished it gratefully. Jay, standing squarely in the way of the door, wouldn’t let me go in until he’d turned my hands palm-up and checked them over.
‘Hurts?’ he asked.
I twitched my fingers. ‘Ow,’ I confirmed.
He glanced again at the door, and the thunderous look returned. Was he angry with it for burning my hands? ‘I’ve nothing to say in defence of the door’s conduct,’ I offered. ‘But in fairness, it was me who grabbed the handle like an idiot.’
Jay released me. ‘Whatever’s out here better be worth it.’
At first glance, it didn’t look like it. Stepping from Torvaston’s spectacular bedchamber into his hidden rooms was like going from a palace into a monastery. We beheld a simple scholar’s cell, white-walled, with an unpolished oaken floor and a single desk — the high-backed kind, once commonly used in cloister libraries.
I hastened eagerly towards that desk, my injury forgotten.
But only disappointment awaited me there. The desk was bare. No ancient quill-pen did I see, lying where Torvaston (presumably) had left it before he died. No stone inkwell sat waiting, filled with peculiarly fresh ink.
No books, scrolls or diaries lay open and inviting, filled with ancient secrets for Val to pore over.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, searching in vain for signs of something interesting in that room. ‘Why was this place hidden and protected, if there’s nothing here?’
‘Well.’ Jay paced back and forth, his dark eyes scanning every inch of the walls and floor. ‘If the room itself was hidden and protected, does it not stand to reason that its contents might be as well?’
Hmm.
I devoted myself to a close scrutiny of the desk. I patted it all over with my hands, searching for signs of a hidden drawer. I knocked upon its panels, hoping for hollow sounds suggestive of a secret compartment.
Nothing.
‘What is it that you are doing?’ came Earl Evemer’s voice all of a sudden, and he sounded every inch an aristocrat. Grave, pompous, disapproving.
‘Looking for something significant,’ I answered, without stopping what I was doing. Having got this far, we weren’t stopping just because Luan wanted to treat Torvaston’s personal effects as religious relics.
‘Be careful,’ he snapped, as I knocked a little too hard on the heavy oak wood and made it rattle a bit.
‘I could set fire to this thing and it would be virtually untouched,’ I said, with faint annoyance. ‘They’re built to withstand the apocalypse, and this one no doubt has heavy magickal wards as well.’
Luan began to look like a harassed parent with two exhaustingly wayward offspring. ‘I begin to think—’ he said, but whatever he had begun to think was destined to remain forever unknown, for Jay’s cry of triumph interrupted him.
I looked up. Jay stood face-to-face with a plain, white-washed expanse of wall. He had his fingers in something. As I watched, he peeled back a section of the wall like it was wallpaper.
Which it wasn’t. I felt a surge of magick from his corner of the room; he was stripping away glamours like they were pasted on with glue.
I made a mental note to ask him how he’d done that, later.
Behind the glamoured wall, another door lay concealed, but this one was tiny — about two feet square, and positioned about seven feet off the floor.
Over Jay’s head, and well over mine.
‘I need a box to stand on, or something,’ said Jay, breathless with excitement, because above his head the door — crystalline and sparkling with magick — was slowly opening.
‘Allow me,’ said Luan severely. Before either of us could interfere, he reached up with ease and extracted the contents of the glamoured space in the wall.
My librarian’s heart beat quick, for it was a scroll, and a good one, too. Wide and fat, it contained a great deal of rolled-up parchment. It practically glowed with promise, but that might just have been my fevered imagination.
I stopped breathing as Luan slowly, carefully unrolled it.
‘These are plans,’ he said, in the hushed voice of awe.
‘Tell me they’re for the Heart,’ I blurted.
He didn’t so much as glance at me, his gaze glued to the parchment. ‘I… I believe that is exactly what they are.’
