The kitchen was located in a rear corner of the building; the adjoining walls featured a small ventilation window. Max hoisted himself atop an upturned washtub and looked out. In the dim light outside he made out a modest field, with perhaps a hint of the city wall at its back. Directly outside the window was a skeletal tree. He closed his eyes and felt quickly around. The window didn’t seem trapped, but Max didn’t like the feel of the tree, or of the grounds, for that matter. The window was constructed around wooden crosspieces set in an elliptical frame and hinged to swing outward: when Max tentatively tried to ease it open, though, the window stuck. A convenient canister of kitchen grease later, it moved silently open, the barest start of a shriek yielding to another globbet on the hinge.
Max stuck his head out through the open frame. Another roundish window on the second story was a few feet to one side. By standing on the sill he could almost reach its frame. He crouched, then sprang, grabbed the lower jamb of the second-story window, and chinned himself on it. Inside the window was a bedroom, dark and quiet. The window opened at his touch. He lowered himself silently to the floor.
Max tiptoed toward the door. Behind a screen concealed from the window was a bed, containing a sleeping girl apparently covered only by a small rug and a flimsy burnoose. He paused and raised an eyebrow, wondering briefly at the tastes of gods. There were certain things in the story of Oskin Yahlei, the mobile castle and its kidnapped occupant, Karlini and Roosing Oolvaya that made less than total sense when accepted at face value. Max was especially suspicious about the role of Oskin Yahlei. Hopefully, though, Max thought, moving to the door, the moment of resolution is approaching. The corridor beyond the door was bare.
The corridor ran directly over the back hall Max had scouted downstairs, and in the same direction. Where the cross-corridor on the first floor had led to the front of the house, though, there was nothing here on the second floor but a blank wall. On the other side of the blank wall, Max assumed, was the second-story extension of the large open room off the front hallway on the ground level. The architecture was unusual for a house. Max had already taken into account the cemetery on the lot to conclude that the place was probably a converted temple, with the big room on the first story being the worship space proper. One thing he was still wondering about was what god the temple had originally been dedicated to.
Across the hall from the bedroom he saw another door standing ajar. The room behind it was empty. Max crossed and entered. On the wall to the left of the door were three large open windows overlooking the expanse of the sanctuary. A tightly wound circular staircase in the back left corner led down to the ground floor, probably to the room that had been on the other side of the double doors flanked by guards. Empty bookcases lined the remaining walls. A blackboard on a tripod stand, recently erased, leaned against the bookcase behind the stairs. A large desk with a matching armchair and the carved lectern next to it dominated the center of the room. The desk bore a stack of cryptic papers, a scattering of glassware, candles, and chalk, and a set of unlabelled canisters with tightly sealed lids. This was apparently Oskin Yahlei’s workroom; he would have to show up here sooner or later.
Why a god needed a workroom was another question that was fueling Max’s pet suspicion. He crept to the top of the circular staircase and paused. Voices were audible from the room below, but their meaning was lost. Rising, Max crossed to the nearest window for the view of the temple interior. Scattered candles and a few torches smoldered below. Whatever altars, tapestries, fonts, or other furnishings had originally filled the chamber were long gone, leaving only bare walls and long trails of soot. In the typically dim light, Max could make out a half-dozen of the men with the purple badges, and another group of perhaps eight or ten clustered to themselves near one wall - regular Guard troops, most likely. The Guard soldiers were watching a small number of prisoners; the lighting made it difficult to tell exactly what was going on. No one was being given the level of attention and respect that Oskin Yahlei would command, so if he was in the building he was probably in the room just below. Max stepped back from the window and eyed the workroom. The only hiding place that would be concealed from both the door and the staircase was behind the desk, so Max moved around the desk and lowered himself to the floor.
The voices downstairs were still engaged in conversation. Max rummaged inside his backpack, pulled out a flat rectangular case, and snapped it open. Inside was a blowgun and several darts with finned ends. Their needle points glistened with a sticky dark brown substance; a scratch would cause immediate stupor lasting hours in most any living thing smaller than Haddo’s buzzard. A larger dose - two darts’-worth, say - would not only turn down the conscious mind but the vegetative as well, thereby arresting the victim’s breathing. Fitting the tubular halves of the blowgun together, Max slid a dart inside and placed the weapon next to him on the floor. For good measure, Max also loosened the stiletto in its leather sheath strapped to the outside of his boot, and then set to work with his other preparations.
Max didn’t know exactly what he was going to need to do. That is, he knew what he had to do - deal with the ring, the ring that was holding the owner of Karlini’s castle a prisoner, the ring that Oskin Yahlei no doubt was wearing - he just didn’t know exactly what he’d have to go through to accomplish that. To deal with the ring he’d presumably have to deal first with Oskin Yahlei. He wasn’t sure how much dealing-with Oskin Yahlei would take, but Max figured he’d better be prepared. From all accounts, the ring had been designed to trap and encapsulate the owner of the castle, allowing the ring’s wearer to utilize the power of the being penned up in it. It was this occupant that Max would have to release. Any magician in his right mind would only take on a task like that when the conditions would allow patience and fine control; there were a lot of nasty things that could go wrong. For one thing, recorporating a disembodied entity was a major job usually done in several stages. When the entity was presumed to be a Death, and when one could reliably assume he would emerge in a state of no little annoyance, that only made things worse.
Max didn’t have the luxury of choosing his time and place, but he’d prepared as well as he could. He and Karlini had designed a set of nested confinement spells that Max had brought with him. The plan was to incapacitate Oskin Yahlei, by sneak attack or subterfuge if possible, then encase him in the big confinement field with the ring still on his finger. The ring itself would be wrapped in the other restriction spells within the larger cage matrix. Max was hoping that would give him enough protection to probe the nature of the ring’s defenses while containing anything that started to leak out; the probes that would enable this were ready, too. The whole sequence was linked and programmed, in fact - the confinement layers would crystallize simultaneously in a self-supporting array, automatically activating the probes in quick graduated sequence. A battery of quiescence/somnolence thrall-routines firing with the probes would hopefully calm the ring’s occupant to a decent level of sedation. If he had to, Max would try to release the ring’s prisoner at that point, when the results of the probes were in, but he was hoping that wouldn’t be necessary. With a little luck he’d have stabilized the ring enough to get it off Oskin Yahlei and take it away with him without setting things loose.