He clung with his hands, and slowly lowered his legs until he was hanging from the limb; then let go, flexing his knees for the fall.
He landed on turned earth; a tumble of frozen clods that made footing uncertain and gave him a bad moment as his ankle started to twist. But he managed to save himself by flailing his arms for balance, and a moment later Gwyna landed beside him.
He tapped her on the shoulder; she followed him to the building, where they crouched in shadow for a moment, listening intently.
Nothing. All was silent.
There were some advantages, he reflected, to trying to break into a building in a place where there were treekies at night. No such place would ever have guard dogs or sentinel geese; the treekies would happily make a meal of them.
This was probably the kitchen garden; the rear door into the kitchen itself would be to his right. But he didn't want that door_for as he had told Gwyna, the kitchen might well have a guard on it. He wanted a side door, preferably one that led into a meditation garden.
He went to the left, with Robin following. He left one hand on the wall to guide him and tried to feel how the ground changed under his feet. Here in the kitchen-garden, it would be gravel between the plots and the building; once he reached the meditation gardens, the gravel should give way to grassy lawn.
From time to time his hand encountered the frame of a window; when that happened, he warned Robin, and crouched down below the level of the sill, crawling on hands and knees to get past it. All it would take would be one sleepless Brother staring out at the stars, and seeing a man-shaped shadow pass between him and them, and it would all be over.
Finally, his foot encountered grass; thick, well-tended grass, by the feel of it. In the summer it must be like a plush carpet. Very difficult to achieve and maintain that effect; now he knew what the poor novices here spent their disciplinary time doing.
Praying and weeding; praying the weeds don't come back. He smiled a little, but it was a smile without humor. What need had an Abbey for a lawn like that? He wondered if the surly Brother Pierce was permitted to walk in this garden; such a lawn would make a barefoot "penance" into a sensual pleasure.
Two more windows_then his hand encountered a frame that did not mark a window, but a doorway. Exactly the place he wanted!
The door was unlocked, and swung open at a touch, without the creaking that the kitchen door would likely have emitted. A tiny vigil-lamp burned beside it on the inside wall. He slipped inside, Robin followed, and they closed the door lest a draft give them away.
This doorway gave out on a short hall; they followed it to the end, where it intersected with a much larger hall. He thought for a moment, trying out the pattern of most Abbeys in his mind.
The Library was always next to the Scriptorium, where the manuscripts and books were copied. The Scriptorium needed very good light, which generally meant a southern exposure; the Library demanded much less, lest the manuscripts fade. He thought that the wall they had come in on faced south_
There were two doors to the left; none to the right. He went left, and opened the one to the room that had an outside wall.
The smell told him it was the Scriptorium; wet ink and paint drying.
So the room across the hallway should be the Library.
He tried the door; it was locked. He smiled to himself in great satisfaction. He knew from all his other clandestine forays that if the Library was locked, it would definitely not be not guarded or watched. Locked, because every Library had some "forbidden" work in it that the novices spent their entire novitiate trying to get at to read. But it would not be guarded, because, of course, novices would not dare to remove the treasured tome, lest they be caught with it in their possession.
But the locks of Libraries, as he had reason to know, were built to impress, not for efficiency.
Gwyna might be skilled at picking pockets, but he was a Master of Library Locks.
It was a matter of heartbeats with the help of a long, slender wire and a bit of wood. The lock fell open, and the door swung inward.
To his relief, there were more of those tiny vigil-lamps burning here; they would not have to work blind. As Gwyna closed the door behind him, softly, he studied the bookshelves, and suddenly realized with dismay that he had no idea where in all of this to start!
There were hundreds of books in here, not the mere two or three dozen he had expected! Bookshelves filled the room, reaching from floor to ceiling, and all of the shelves were full. If they were cataloged in any way, he didn't know what it was. The key to all this probably resided in the Librarian's head_
As he gazed at the wealth of books in an agony of despair, he shoved his hands down into the pockets of his breeches_and encountered a small, hard lump wrapped in silk.
The pendant!
In a heartbeat, Talaysen's lessons on the laws of magic flashed into his mind. What once was one is always connected. Things that are related are connected. Things that are similar are connected_
It was the second law that he needed to use now. Things that were related were connected, and under the proper circumstances, they would attract or resonate with each other. Since the pendant had something to do with the Ghost, it followed that the pendant could lead him to something else that related to the Ghost.
He hoped.
As Gwyna watched him curiously, he took the pendant out of its silk wrapping, wincing a little at the discordant "music," and held it in his hands, tuning his mind to find more of the same "music."
There was music of various sorts all around him; many, many of these volumes had something to do with magic. Some of it was pleasant; some absolutely entrancing, the kind he could get lost inside for hours.
But he didn't have hours, and he wasn't looking for anything pleasant.
Then he heard it; a thin, evil trickle that could not by any stretch of the imagination be called a melody. A discordance of which the pendant was only a small part.
He turned and followed it; it led him to a panel on the back wall, to one side of one of the enormous bookcases. It was a panel like many others in the room, but when he tapped it slightly, he thought it sounded hollow.
The only trouble was, he couldn't open it.
He tried everything he could think of; pressed anything that looked like it might be a release, and all to no avail. Gwyna took her turn at it, but her skill was not in this, and she was no more successful than he was.
He was about to make another attempt, this time at forcing the panel open, when he felt a presence behind him.
He turned; Gwyna whirled at the same instant.
Brother Reymond stared at them in dumb shock, his mouth agape with surprise.
Robin didn't wait to see what he'd do; she muffled his mouth with both hands, as Kestrel grabbed his arms. Together they wrestled him around and stuffed him in a corner.
He looked at her; she looked back at him. "Now what?" she mouthed at him.
He shrugged. "We t-try to convince him," he whispered back, then looked into the frightened eyes of the Brother.