Adamat showed his papers at a temporary guardhouse a few hundred yards from the manor and was waved on. At the front door, he remembered his second visit to the manor: during the battle in which Tamas fought and captured Charlemund. The burned-out remnants of a carriage still lay beside the gravel drive, and there were still muddy furrows where Privileged sorcery had dug up the ground.
At the front door another pair of watchmen lounged on the stoop, a game of dice between them. They stood as Adamat left his carriage and approached, with SouSmith behind him.
“They said that you would have a key,” Adamat said.
“Right. We do,” one of the watchmen said. She was a young woman, no more than twenty-five, and she held a musket and wore the light blues of the city police. “Papers?”
Adamat presented his papers once more. “Did I see smoke coming from one of the chimneys?”
“Probably,” the second watchman said, rubbing a thumb under the rim of his hat. He was an older fellow with gray in his mustache.
“I didn’t know the manor was occupied.”
“The state employs a few of the former staff in order to keep the building tidy until they can get around to selling it,” the first watchman replied, handing Adamat back his papers. “Don’t worry about them, they stay out of sight. The library is in the south wing, all the way at the end. Head inside, past the first staircase, and take a left. That hall dead-ends in the library.”
“Thank you very much,” Adamat said. He waited for them to unlock the door and then slipped inside, followed by SouSmith.
The foyer still held evidence of the fight that had taken place there many months previous. Someone had tidied up the mess Adamat remembered, but there was no hiding the chips in the marble from bullets, nor the empty pillar where a bust of Charlemund had once stood.
SouSmith paused and gave a low whistle. “One man lived here?”
Adamat had forgotten that SouSmith had never been allowed inside on their previous visit together. “Kind of off-putting, isn’t it?”
SouSmith ran his thick thumb over a chip in the marble banister. “Nah. Should have gone into the clergy.”
They left the foyer and followed the watchman’s directions toward the library.
“You said Charlemund escaped,” SouSmith asked.
“That’s what Ricard told me.”
“Think he could be here?”
“What? In hiding?”
“Yeah.”
“They’ve got watchmen and servants. He couldn’t go unnoticed.”
SouSmith stopped suddenly and looked up and down the hallway. It was over two hundred yards long, the ceilings twenty feet high, and had no less than thirty doors. He cocked an eyebrow at Adamat.
“Okay, it’s big,” Adamat conceded. “But Charlemund is… well… you’ve met him. He’s used to command. To luxury. I don’t think he could ‘hide’ anywhere if his life depended on it. My best guess is he’s already fled to Kez or Novi or someplace farther. We’ll hear about him sooner rather than later.”
Their voices carried as they spoke, giving the place a strange echo and sending a chill up Adamat’s spine, which he attributed to the autumn cold.
The hallway ended in a pair of closed double doors. Adamat jiggled one handle, finding it unlocked, and pulled. The room inside took his breath away.
Charlemund’s library was a rectangular room several times larger than Adamat’s house. Books lined every wall, sorted neatly on cherry bookshelves. There were wooden ladders on runners to reach the high shelves, and each corner had an iron spiral staircase to reach the second floor. There was a grand, marble-trimmed fireplace at either end of the room.
There weren’t as many books here as there were in the Public Archives or the university library, but this collection was nearly as big as, if not bigger than, the late king’s library. It baffled Adamat how one man could have acquired so many books. Charlemund had been far from a “man of learning.”
“I don’t have any bloody idea where to start.”
SouSmith grunted and threw himself down into one of the leather wingback chairs by the cold fireplace closest to the door. “Wake me when you’re done,” he said.
“You’re no help at all.”
By the time Adamat had a grasp of Charlemund’s indexing methods, SouSmith was already snoring loudly.
Uskan had sent him a list of a dozen books that might be of some interest. Adamat started with those, finding them and pulling them down, stacking them on a table in the middle of the library. When he had collected them all, he began to skim each book quickly, casting each page to memory in order to examine it more closely later, all while looking for words like “shadow” and “shade.”
He finished with the first dozen books by one o’clock and returned, somewhat on edge, to the rest of the library.
Adamat’s Knack allowed him to move through the library at what most would find a startling speed. To him, it was frustratingly slow. The library was sorted according to the name of the author, which was very little help. He was forced to look for titles that stood out as religious books, or for authors he recognized as scholars. He took down another stack of a dozen books and began to run through those.
He was on his third stack of books by four o’clock. SouSmith had awoken and fallen asleep again, and the lengthening shadows told Adamat he wouldn’t have much more time to read by daylight.
“SouSmith,” he said, shaking the boxer’s shoulder.
SouSmith opened one eye. “Eh?”
“Do you have a match? I need to light the lanterns. Or a fire, or something.”
“Nope.” His eye closed.
Adamat sighed. SouSmith wasn’t going to be a lot of help here. Adamat still had him working as a bodyguard for another week, but the real danger had passed, and SouSmith knew it. He also knew that Ricard was footing the bill. Adamat couldn’t bring himself to blame SouSmith for slacking off.
“I’m going to find one of the servants,” he announced.
SouSmith grunted.
Adamat remembered that the smoke had been coming from a chimney in the north wing. He envisioned the house in his mind’s eye, remembering his brief inspection after the battle with Charlemund. The north wing had a ballroom, an observatory, the dining room, the kitchens, and the servants’ quarters.
That was his best chance for a match. Maybe they’d even light the library fireplace for him.
He gathered his hat and cane and headed down the main hallway. He climbed the foyer stairs and continued down the main hall on the second floor, where he came to the servants’ quarters. This part of the house was warmer, and he found himself looking forward to the heat of a fireplace. The autumn chill was more pronounced in this place than he’d expected.
He knocked on several of the servants’ doors, but received no answer. Three of the doors were unlocked, and inside he found evidence of habitation, but there were no servants present.
Frustrated, he took the servants’ stairs down toward the kitchens. Back on the first floor, he could hear the sound of voices. Finally!
He entered the kitchen from the back. It was an immense room, some thirty paces across, and he was startled to find it rather well stocked, despite the skeleton crew of servants. Herbs hung from the ceiling, there was canned meat on the shelves – dusted, no less – and sacks of grain unmolested by rodents. A figure at the opposite end of the room, wearing a white apron and a tall white hat, was singing to himself in front of the only lit oven.
“Excuse me,” Adamat called.
The figure turned, giving Adamat a good look at his profile, and Adamat’s feet suddenly felt like lead. He grabbed his cane in both hands and twisted it to draw his sword. His mouth was dry, and he pointed the tip of his sword at the fugitive Arch-Diocel, Charlemund.
“You,” Adamat hissed.
Charlemund’s eyebrows rose. His apron was covered in flour, and his hands full of bread dough. “Uh, yes?”
Adamat’s mouth moved, but he wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to say. The Arch-Diocel was a national traitor and a villain, and he had wounded Adamat twice in their last encounter. But he didn’t appear to be armed. If anything, he was more surprised to find Adamat here than Adamat was to find him.