Of Truth and Beasts

She sank on the bed’s edge, feeling stretched thin on all sides, and snarled her fingers into Shade’s scruff. Shade shoved her head against Wynn’s neck, but soft fur and a warm, wet tongue weren’t comfort enough as Wynn glanced at the door.

Where was Chane?

Upon rising at dusk, Chane dressed quickly, pausing briefly at the mirror over the short dresser. He tried to smooth his raggedly cropped, red-brown hair. Several objects, the results of his nightly errands, rested upon the dresser. As of yet, he had not told Wynn about these extra acquisitions.

The sword that Ore-Locks had brought him now had a plain leather sheath. A fresh cloak of deep green wool, with a full hood, was folded atop the dresser’s end. Upon it lay a matching scarf, a pair of new, fitted leather gloves, and two small leather triangles with attached lacing for their final purpose.

He still had two more items to attain, and tonight, he was already late in seeking one.

Rushing through the small study and into the outer passage, Chane locked the door to his guest quarters and hurried to the end stairs. When he reached the building’s ground level, he did not head for the courtyard. Instead, he ducked into one ground-floor chamber laden with workbenches, books, and glass contraptions and other tools. Rounding to the back, he headed down another flight of stairs.

Emerging in the building’s first level of underchambers, he stepped into a narrow stone corridor lit by two sage-crafted cold lamps set in wall-mounted metal vessels. Alchemically mixed fluids provided mild heat to keep them lit. By their steady light, he counted three wide iron doors on both sides of the passage. These were the lower laboratories of the guild.

In two previous visits over eight nights, he had never seen what lay behind any but one. He had tried opening others to peek in and satisfy his curiosity. Not one budged, though there were no locks or bars on their outsides. He headed for the last on the right, but tonight it was shut tight, like the others.

Chane let out a sigh, an old habit left over from living days. He knocked, listening for an answer, but none came. He tried the heavy iron handle, anyway, expecting the door would not open. To his surprise, it slipped inward as he twisted the handle. He hesitated and glanced along the other heavy doors.

This was wrong. Still, perhaps she was within and had not heard him. He pushed the door wide.

“Géorn-metade,” he called in Numanese.

No one answered his formal greeting.

A short, three-step access hallway emptied into the left side of a small back chamber. He had come here twice before, just past dusk, both times in haste before going to Wynn’s room. He never told her where he had been.

Chane entered, quietly closing the door. All he could see from the hallway were shelves pegged in the chamber’s left wall. They were filled with books, bound sheaves, and some slender, upright cylinders of wood, brass, and unglazed ceramic. As he stepped out of the passage, the room filled his view.

Stout, narrow tables and squat casements were stuffed with more texts, as well as odd little contraptions of metal, crystal and glass, and wood and leather. A rickety old armchair of tattered blue fabric barely fit into the back right corner beyond the orderly mess upon the age-darkened desk of many little drawers. Atop the desk’s corner sat the dimming cold lamp, brighter than he had first thought.

Someone had been here recently to rub its crystal to brilliance.

Chane scanned stacks of parchment and three bowls of powdered substances. An array of brass articulated arms anchored to the desk’s other corner each held framed magnifying lenses. They were mounted so that one or more could be twisted into or out of alignment with the others.

Chane stood in the private study of Frideswida Hawes, premin of the Order of Metaology. And he was tempted to dig through everything in sight.

He understood a little of thaumaturgy, the physical ideology of magic, as opposed to the spiritual perspective of his own conjury. Still, something here might shed a spark of light on his own research. He leaned over the desk, touching nothing as he examined the stacks of parchment and paper. Most appeared mundane, concerning daily guild operations and Hawes’s own order. Considering the top one’s immature topic, one stack seemed to be papers written by initiates.

Chane returned to the left wall’s pegged shelves.

Spines and labels on texts and containers were all marked in the Begaine syllabary. Even after nights of stumbling through Wynn’s journals, he still struggled to understand the sages’ mutable writing system. He reached for a ceramic cylinder with a wooden cap to verify that it was a scroll case.

“So ... disrespect is not your only flaw.”

Chane spun at the voice behind him and came face-to-face with a mature, slight woman in a midnight blue robe.

“Do we now add thievery to the list?” she asked.