I did know it was on this same level. I had not gone downstairs or up. And it was in an area apparently undisturbed since Smoke's own last visit. The dust and cobwebs were heavy and untouched.
It did not take me long to reach desert territory. It was almost as though the deep interior of the Palace became a vast and dusty maze, needing no spells of confusion to protect it.
I found the dead man only minutes after leaving Smoke. I smelled him first, of course, and heard the flies. That told me what would be coming up before I saw anything. Only the who was a mystery until the Strangler appeared at the limit of my lamplight. He had fled here to die of his wounds, trapped by darkness and confusing spells.
I shuddered. That touched my deepest fears, the wellspring of my nightmares, my crushing dread of tight, dark places underground.
I wondered if his fickle goddess had taken delight in his unhappy end.
I moved around the corpse carefully, averting my eyes and pinching my nose. In death he continued to serve Kina's corruption avatar.
Soon afterward I discovered evidence that at least one more Strangler had become entangled in the confusion of the Palace. I nearly stepped in it, being alerted only when my approach startled the attendant flies.
I paused. "Uh-oh." That looked fairly fresh. Maybe there was still a madman in here willing to dance for his goddess.
I started moving much slower and more carefully, one hand at my throat. I started imagining noises. All the ghost stories I ever heard came back to haunt me. Each few steps I paused, turned around completely, searching for the gleam of eyes betrayed by my lamp. Why did I decide to do this alone?
I began to see signs of recent traffic. I knelt, discovered what appeared to be my own previous footprints in the dust. Someone had been through since, armed with a battery of candles.
Drops of wax had fallen into the disturbed dust. And somebody had been through after that, possibly crawling, perhaps even eating what wax drops he could find.
I listened to the silence. This deep within the Palace even vermin were scarce. They could only eat each other.
Still cautious, I followed the trails of those who had come after me. My heart thumped like it was about to explode.
I started sneezing. And once I did the sneezes just kept coming. I could hold off for half a minute sometimes, but that only made the next sneeze worse.
Then I started hearing all sorts of sounds. And could not still myself long enough to reassure me that I was imagining these noises, too, or to get a fix on their source if they were genuine. Maybe it would be better to do this some other time. Then the broken door loomed out of the darkness. I stopped and studied it. I had a notion it was hanging a little differently. Disturbances in the dust suggested that someone had visited since I had done so myself.
Cautiously, touching nothing, I rounded the door, stepped into the room. "Shit!"
It had been torn apart. Few of the books, bound or scroll, remained on their shelves or in their cubbies. The undisturbed items, where I could decipher titles, were prosaic inventories or tax records or irregular city histories of little interest. I wondered why Smoke would bother with those. Maybe just to hide the good stuff? Maybe because he was fire marshall as well as court wizard?
Whatever, the good stuff was gone. And by that I mean not only any long missing volumes of the Annals that might have been lying around but also a number of what I had suspected to be magical texts when last I looked in.
"Damn it! Damn it!" I wanted to throw things, to break things, to bounce rocks off villains' heads, Even before I found the single fallen feather I had a good idea of what had happened.
I collected that feather.
On the way back I definitely heard sounds that did not spring from my imagination. I did not bother to investigate. The man tried to follow my light but could not keep up.
94
Croaker looked up, puzzled, when I laid the white feather in front of him and said, "The books are gone. And there are Deceivers lost in there. At least one dead one and one still alive."
"Gone?" He plucked the feather off the document he was studying.
"Somebody took them."
His distress was apparent only because his hand began to shake. "How?"
"They just walked in off the street and carried them away." I did not for a moment consider the possibility that someone inside the Palace had visited Smoke's books.
He said nothing for a while. "What perfect timing." Another silence. "What's this feather?"
"Maybe a message. Maybe just a lost feather. I found one like it when I discovered that the Widowmaker armor had disappeared from hiding in Dejagore."
"A white feather?"
"From an albino crow." I ran through my catalog of encounters, real and possibly imagined.
His hand shook again. "You never actually met her. But you recognized her? She was here the night the Deceivers struck? And you never said anything?"
"I forgot that. That was the worst night of my life, Captain. That night has twisted everything else around me... "
He gestured for silence. He thought. I stared. He was nothing like the Croaker who had been Company physician and Annalist when I joined up. After a while, he muttered, "That must be it."
"What?"
"The voice you encountered whenever you were pulled back to Dejagore. Think. Was it inconsistent?"
"I don't think I understand."
"Did it seem like it might be different people talking all the time?"
Now I got it. "I don't think so. It did seem to have different attitudes and styles sometimes."
"The bitch. The sneaking bitch. Always playing another game. I won't swear this for sure, Murgen, but I think the root mystery behind you tumbling all over time must have been Soulcatcher playing."
Not a wholly original theory to me. Soulcatcher rated high on my own suspects list. Motive was my big stumbling block. I could not figure a "why Murgen?" for anybody, Soulcatcher included.
"Where is she now?" Croaker asked.
"I don't have the foggiest."
"Can you find out?"
"Smoke balks every time I try to head her way."
Croaker considered that. "Try again."
"You're the boss."
"As long as it suits everybody's convenience. You sure your in-laws won't go home?"
"They're going wherever I go."
"Tell them we'll be on the road before the end of the week."
"I look forward to that like a case of the piles." I took my white feather and stomped off for a session with the fire marshall.
96
To track Goblin I went back to the last time I saw the runt myself, then followed him forward in time. Soon after having helped me out of one of my plunges into yesterday Goblin walked out of his quarters carrying one modest bag, hiked to the waterfront, boarded a barge manned by trustworthy Taglians who had become professional soldiers, and drifted down the river. Right now—approximately today—he was in the heart of the delta, transferring the barge's cargo, himself and most of the Taglians, to a deep-sea vessel wearing flags and pennons entirely unknown to me. Off on the sodden shore flocks of Nyueng Bao children and a handful of lazy adults watched as though this business of outsiders was the greatest entertainment they had encountered in years. Despite my familiarity with the tribe they all looked inscrutably alien in their native context, more so than they had in Dejagore where we all had been out of place.