If Shortisle was engaged in anything shady—or, in fact, even if he wasn’t—he wouldn’t make it easy to get to the financial records of the Empire, so I intended to take this carefully and slowly, and make sure I’d found everything before I moved.
I studied the door, the floor, and the ceiling first, looking for anything obvious, and found nothing. Next I looked as closely as I could through and into the keyhole, but I didn’t see anything that looked like an alarm.
The next step was to feel for the presence of sorcery in the area, and, yes indeed, it was all over the place; there was nothing subtle about it. Was it double-trapped? That is, would looking at it closely set off an alarm? Well, there are the tendrils of spells that hang in the real world like abandoned cobwebs; and one knows the feel of these strands if one has ever walked through a dark and gloomy place—so, too, were these bits of amorphia all around me in that place that was dark to the outer eye, but now filled with light to the inner. I can brush past cobwebs without making them fall, but what if the web is not abandoned, after all? Then the spider will know I am there; and if there is anyone watching the spider, then I cannot brush her or her threads aside without all the world being aware of me.
Ah, little spider, you have a bite, do you? And someone watching over you? Well, let him watch, little spider, and you—find me if you can, for I know cobwebs better even than you, and I will send up my own spider that will look like you, and act like you, and gobble you up, and then sit fat and happy in your place while the watcher watches, oblivious.
I took a few minutes to catch my breath before I proceeded. One becomes exhausted when using sorcery in proportion to the intricacy of the spell, not the amount of energy used; a fact that I think Vlad still doesn’t understand since he still compares it to witchcraft—an art I’ve never begun to understand.
When I felt better, I used the same device I’d used at the bank to look into the room in preparation for teleporting. It was a fairly small room, but full to overflowing with cabinets, maybe forty-five or fifty of them, all of which were, no doubt, full to overflowing with the recent financial records of the Empire—whatever I was looking for was probably in there. I checked the room over carefully, fixed it in my mind, prepared to teleport, and stopped cold.
Something wasn’t right.
I put the tube back against the wall, held it tight, relaxed, and looked again. The room was entirely dark, and I hadn’t wanted to risk light until I could be sure they had nothing to detect it, so I’d used a spell that affected my sight rather than the room; this is tricky because it is very easy to miss things that are near other things—objects tend to blur and merge in the magical vision—but it seemed that there was something odd next to one of the cabinets against the wall.
I checked again, and there was no trace of sorcery except for those spells I had already found and circumvented, which meant, if this was an alarm, it wasn’t a magical one. Of course, there was no reason to believe it was an alarm—it was just something that wasn’t a filing cabinet or a pen, or an inkwell, or anything else I could readily identify. I almost talked myself into going in, but you don’t get to be my age without developing some instincts and learning to trust them, so I put a little more effort into seeing it.
If the ceiling was as high as the ceiling of this room, then the filing cabinets were about eight meters tall, in which case the object sitting on the floor was about two meters tall (scale can be a problem when seeing this way—try it yourself) and resembled, more than anything else, a small gong, with some sort of round plate attached to a thin frame by a pair of wires, and even what might be a diminutive beater positioned in front of it, attached to the frame. I couldn’t see how thick any of it was for sure, which didn’t help any. I doubted it was actually a gong but I couldn’t figure out what it was, or what it was doing there.
If it was magical, I’d lost all of my skills, and if it wasn’t magical, what was it? Could one use witchcraft to create an alarm? My guess was no, but I couldn’t reach Vlad to ask him, and I didn’t want to ask Cawti because she’d ask questions. No, I didn’t think witchcraft could do something like that. And I really doubted that Shortisle would think to hire a witch, anyway.
It was probably something completely harmless that had nothing to do with anything, and when I looked at it I’d laugh. Except that I still had this feeling.
Well, if it was an alarm, it had to be connected to a device to notify someone, or a device to trigger a trap, or a device to make a noise, or something. And if the connection wasn’t magical, it had to be physical. Well, was there a string or a wire running from it to somewhere else?
I looked, and focused, and ...
Yes, there was.
A wire or a string ran from it up to the ceiling and disappeared above the room.
Maybe it was an alarm.
If so, how did it work? What was it supposed to detect, and how would it respond? How could it send a magical impulse through the string if there was no magic around the device? And if it wasn’t supposed to send a magical impulse, what could it send? I had the sudden image of someone creating an artifact that did nothing at all, but knowing that if there was a strange device in the room, no competent thief would break in before figuring out what it did. An effective deterrent to be sure, but I suspected there was more to this object than that.
Well, what would have happened if I’d teleported into the room? Nothing. I’d have been there, maybe right by the device, maybe not, but it couldn’t sense me, anyway, so ...
Slow down, Kiera.
What happens when someone teleports into a room?
The same thing, more or less, that happens when someone opens a door and walks into the room: air gets pushed around—just a little when the door is opened, more when you materialize from a teleport. And if that gonglike thing is thin, then just a little air movement would be enough to make it tap against the beater, and if that was a metal wire, it could carry the sound, or the vibration, through the Palace to a place where it could be amplified, and someone, somewhere, would know that the integrity of the room had been violated.
I’d have whistled to myself if I weren’t being especially conscious of sound. It was a very clever device; just the sort of thing the Orca would come up with, and I was only surprised that no one had thought of it, or a variation on it, years and years ago: simple, elegant, and almost impossible to detect.
Almost impossible.
Thing is, I’m not just a good thief, I’m the best thief in the Empire. I reached the fingers of magic into the room and felt the thin metal plate. Careful now, Kiera. Don’t get cocky with all those thoughts about how good you are: you’re good because you’re careful, and you’re careful because you’re patient. Take it slowly, and ...
It was immobilized.
I sighed, took a breath, and teleported into the room. Nothing went off, nothing moved. I did yet another check for magic, then made a light and began looking through the Imperial financial records. These were, you understand, only the most recent and active sets: the rest were saved by some method known only to the sorcerers of the House of the Lyorn and the archivists of the House of the Orca, but it was the recent and active records I needed.
I imagine the organization of the packets in the cabinets, and, indeed, the arrangement of the cabinets, all of them marked with numbers or symbols or a combination, made sense to those who worked here, and I would even guess that somewhere was a key to the whole thing that would explain how to interpret everything else, but I had no clue how to make sense of any of it. Fortunately, I didn’t need to. I opened a packet at random, saw nothing that meant anything to me, closed it, and put it back. Then I went to another cabinet and did the same. Then another, until I had opened at least one packet in each of them, and riffled through probably two hundred collections of notes, invoices, receipts, and other accounting arcana.