“I quite agree, captain,” Leen said, awarding him the mild smile appropriate for the situation. “You are a man of taste and discretion.”
He returned a modest bow. “That is my job, my lady.”
And just what was a job, these days? She herself had been spending less and less of her work day performing the standard functions of an Archivist, trading her time instead for intrigues and exhumations. Yet there was still no obvious alternative to continuing along that path; people were depending on her, not least of all the unfortunate Tarfon, who had been left, to all evidence, sealed up in a tunnel with no active exit and no easy route back, and without a light to boot. Ignoring her responsibilities had every promise of merely making things worse. Sooner or later the Scapula would be back, or Max, or if not them than surely someone else.
But was this all she could do in the meantime? Get dressed for a ball?
She could scarcely escape by climbing from her fourth-floor balcony. There was the carp pool below to cushion a drop, but the captain would certainly station an observer in the gardens. A chorus of aggrieved shrieking from within the apartment suggested she could disguise herself as Florence, her maid, but when Florence emerged a moment later under guard and relieved of her hairpin, that option dropped resoundingly from the list. If she had been thinking ahead instead of with a mind clouded by eager thoughts of Max, she could have commanded the oracle to reveal any secret entrances or exits in the vicinity of the apartment. Well, when the time came perhaps she would be able to think of something.
The captain ushered her into her own suite, expressing regret at the advisability of retaining Florence outside under care until she had recovered from her bout of antisociability. Leen was more than willing to have the captain assume the burden. She had inherited Florence from her sister, likely both as a spy on her personal life and a goad to make that life more interesting to Susannah; Susannah was not given to practical jokes or she would have suspected that as well. In any case, Florence in the best of times had an excitable temperament. At the moment - well, let the captain deal with it.
The captain’s men had searched her rooms earnestly but without, remarkably enough, leaving anything obviously broken or dramatically out of place. She was all the more surprised, then, having locked the front door behind her and wandered into the bedroom to check her wardrobe for the correct formal state-wear, to discover that the room was not, in fact, unoccupied. “The window,” explained Zalzyn Shaa, seated comfortably at the foot of the bed, “preceded by the roof, preceded by an attempt at a more straightforward entry from the hall. The hall, however, was invested by your friends.”
“I didn’t notice you,” Leen said, somewhat dazed. “I saw Colonel Houda’s widow peeping around her doorframe but that was all.”
“Yes, well. Some,” said Shaa incredulously, as though amazed at the very idea, “have called me surreptitious.”
“But wait a minute - weren’t there guards outside in the garden too? Didn’t they see you climbing in the window?”
“Of course there were guards,” Shaa said, “it’s scarcely worth doing if there aren’t guards.” Leen didn’t know him well enough to be certain when he was being sarcastic, but then she had gathered it was safe to assume he was being sarcastic all the time. “But no,” he went on. “They didn’t see me. Or shall we say I would seriously doubt it. Might I suggest your formal livery as a Nerve?”
“What? Oh, right. It is a Knitting, isn’t it.”
“Just so.” Shaa popped from the bed with a spry bounce and ambled toward the door. “Perhaps I’ll wait in the sitting room while you attend to your infrastructure.”
“Thank you,” said Leen. “Thank you very much.”
“No problem at all,” he called, now firmly out of sight in the other room. “Did you build these?”
“What, the stuff on the étagère?” Leen yelled back, trying to decide if she had time for a shower; trying to decide if there was any chance of avoiding it. She clenched her teeth and edged in front of the mirror - a shower, definitely, without question. Fortunately the palace apartments were quite well appointed in matters of plumbing and other luxury services, and the central water pressure was generally more than adequate. “Uh, yes. Actually, yes and no. The originals came from the Archives, books of course. You can see they’re paper? I had them copied - I wouldn’t cut up the old ones, of course.”
“Of course. These began as flat sheets of paper with schematic diagrams of assembly?”
“Diagrams, yes, but it was as much just a matter of fitting the symbols together. An idle diversion, I’m sure, cutting out paper sculptures.”
“There’s no need to apologize for yourself to me of all people,” Shaa said, balancing the level of his voice between that necessary to pierce the patter of the shower at the low end and that loud enough to alert the guards outside. “I’ve spent far too much of my life in exactly that position to require it of others. What a marvelous structure this one is, this tower.” He stepped back and contemplated the assemblage formally, as though it were an exhibit in a gallery. “The open lattice-work sides, the curves on these four stouter legs merging into such a graceful upward thrust. And judging from the scale of the windows on this observation level, it would have been easily, oh, almost two hundred person-heights tall. Imagine that. One might as well be stepping backward through time and standing shoulder to shoulder with the ancients, although obviously this was some special monument even for them or such a model would never have been commissioned. And next to it on the shelf, this ship. Observe how low it sits to the waterline, the smooth and cunningly sealed deck, this narrow dorsal fin.”
“I agree,” Leen gurgled. “It appears to be some species of submersible.”
“Remarkable. I would keep this collection from Maximillian, however. At least until you’ve made your mind up about him.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“He’d fall in love with you over these alone. Of course,” Shaa added thoughtfully, “he might try to walk off with them too, but then that’s always the risk you run with Max. So did you make an attempt to rescue him, or is that escort outside the door just a new affectation?”
“Yes, I tried. He was gone.” The explanation behind that remarkable fact carried her past the finale of her admittedly abbreviated shower and through a round of vigorous toweling to boot. “Do you think he escaped?” she concluded.
“With Max that is always a possibility,” Shaa mused. “I am inclined to think he did have some active role in not being there; the effigy on the bed of restraint in his stead does suggest his personal touch.”
“But if he didn’t escape on his own, as I think you seem to be implying, and you didn’t help him, then who did?”
“The most cost-effective way to get that answer is to wait until he shows up, and ask him. I suppose you could have had that oracle machine of yours tell you where he went, but you never made it back there, did you, and when you set out in the first place it was because it had told you he was in the cell. Not that I think it was lying, or trying to get you in trouble, mind you; not necessarily. But you do have to watch your step around these old machines. Look at the fate of the unfortunate Tarfon. Have you given any thought to extracting her before she starves?”