“Of course!” the old man said with a laugh. “Anything placed in these cabinets will last indefinitely, refreshed as the day it was put in with each new rise of the sun. I’m glad these flavors will be enjoyed by someone instead of sitting here trapped in an endless cycle getting a day stale and reverting again. Had I thought more about it at the time I was preparing to go through my experiment, I might not have bothered with the preservative spells for food, but…” He waved the thought away and pointed to Rattle. “I know Rattle’s glad to have some more cooking to do. The pots had been unused for years.”
Rattle fluttered its bat wings to show approval before turning its attention back to the tasks at hand. Most of its legs were now being used to steady the heavy pot as it continued stirring. The smell coming from within was delicious; Skate thought she detected the aroma of meat, either beef or pork. “It is good at it,” she said, more to herself than to her host. “I had a question,” she added as she moved to the kitchen door, the heat from the stove becoming too much to bear. “You’ve got a lot of money, right?”
Belamy looked taken aback by her forwardness. He stuttered a few times, and finally managed to say, “Well, I, ah, don’t know about ‘a lot,’ but I have enough to live quite comfortably.” He looked around the room as he spoke, a shine coming to his watery eyes as he looked on his books, his fine desk, and his comfortable chair. “Yes, quite comfortably. Why?” He arched a feathery white eyebrow as he tried to size up his guest.
“I was just wondering where you got it from,” she answered easily, another lie prepared well before she’d broached the subject. “Did you inherit it or win it or work for it or what?” The thin draft poking through a closed window gave her some relief from the boiling cauldron that was Rattle’s kitchen.
“A combination of working and winning, I should say,” the old man said, clasping his hands behind his back. “In my younger days, I was something of a treasure hunter. As I grew older, I had acquired enough wealth from those travels to ‘retire’ from such a life and begin selling my services as sage and wizard to the local population. Of course, only the nobles of the city and the wealthy merchants who had begun to rise in stature could afford the cost of magic, so these were my clientele. They could afford much, so that’s what I charged them. I still do occasional alchemy work or spellcasting, but more as favors to old friends and clients than any real need for the work or the money.”
Alchemy? Skate thought but did not ask; instead, she said, “Old friends? You can’t have too many friends as old as you. No offense.”
“None taken.” He smiled as if to reassure her. “You’re right, of course. The friends of my youth are long gone, though I have made many enduring connections in my older years with those of the younger generations. Some of them pay visits every so often; the trio you evaded two days ago are among them. Wise and capable, and magic users in their own right, they have much to offer even a well-read old coot like me.” He smiled contentedly, a vision of pride and gratefulness. “I’ve known them for years,” he added, moving back toward his customary seat at his desk.
“What’s alchemy? Is it magic, too?” This was what she was more interested in, since she had no idea what the practice would even look like. Magic she understood at a rudimentary level: wiggle your hands and say some words, and stuff happens. This new thing was unknown in even that limited sort of way.
“Not exactly, no.” Belamy seemed to consider something, and then rose again from his seat. “Here, follow me again.” He moved toward one of his bookcases along the wall beneath the stairs and pulled a book off the shelf—except that as soon as the book leaned forward from the rest, the bookcase swung forward on unseen hinges.
A bark of surprised laughter escaped Skate’s lips. At Belamy’s curious expression, she felt the need to explain herself. “It’s just…I’ve never seen a hidden stairway behind a bookcase before. It’s clever.” Belamy smiled back, satisfied with the explanation, and began his descent into the dark spiral descending stair. Skate felt fine about the lie, because the truth of her mirth would have revealed her association with other thieves, which would needlessly complicate her job.
The real reason she had laughed was because this kind of misdirection was well-known among burglars, and its reputation brought nothing but ridicule. “A good thief,” Haman had once told her when the topic had come up in a common area of one of the hideouts, “knows exactly how to find such ‘hidden spots.’ They’re pitifully simple to find; just look for a place where there should be space but isn’t.” The nearby table that had been discussing the concept laughed uproariously as the mocking conversation continued. Skate had only been paying attention to Haman at the time, and did not notice the rest of their words.
“You probably won’t ever see one,” Haman had said, resettling his spectacles and reviewing the page in front of him, “since they fell out of style ages ago; people in this city learned fairly quickly what poor protections they were.”
Belamy had never gotten the notice, it seemed—unlike in Ossertine’s home, where the space had been a product of magic, a passage that should have led into the neighboring house but had not—this entrance was entirely mundane.
Another giggle threatened to burst out, but Skate was ready for it this time and suppressed it.
Belamy brought a magical ball of light out from somewhere down below and called up to her. She responded and began her descent. The stair was narrow, and the white light from below cast a grayish hue on the cut stones of the wall. The ghostly color made Skate pause. The thought that had been floating in the back of her head surged forward again. He’s probably a monster. I’m going underground with someone pretending to be alive.
She stood on the top step. If the bookcase swung shut, she might be trapped.
She took a deep breath. If he wanted to hurt me, he could have fifty different times.
Skate knew her reasoning was solid, but her sense of dread grew as she took the next step. The Boss wants a big score. That did little to ease the deepening pit in her stomach as she placed a steadying hand on the inner wall of the spiraling stairs, though it shifted the target of that ill ease toward Boss Marshall.
She came to the end of the steps.
In front of her was Belamy, a ball of light floating over his open hand. He was fidgeting with a latch on a lantern in one wall. He turned toward Skate and jerked his head behind him. “Open that one, will you?”
Skate saw in the other wall a lantern identical to the one Belamy was trying to open. She moved toward it, keeping a wary eye on the old man’s silhouette as he struggled with the latch. She got to hers and immediately saw the problem: the metal had started to rust. She took one of the thin pins from her hair and tried scraping the corroded metal away. It came off surprisingly easily, and within a minute, she had flipped the latch open and drawn the metal shade upward.
Skate squinted, eyes watering, as more white light streamed into the room.
The squeak of metal behind her made the light grow stronger still. She turned around to see Belamy smiling at the lantern he had bested, wiping his hands together to shake the red rust off. It fell in clouds until it dispersed from vision entirely. He shook his light-bearing hand, and the ball of light disappeared; the magical lanterns provided more than enough for comfort’s sake.