“Sometimes I think the nobles are just like the rest of us, and then other times . . .” Teia said.
“Also exactly my reaction,” Quentin said.
“But that was the good news, though, wasn’t it?” Teia asked. Though that was all helpful, she could’ve learned it herself—though any time she went out in public was a time she was risking Sharp finding her.
“Afraid so. Now, about the other project,” he said. He opened a folio on his desk. “These are copies of all the final plans for each of the Chromeria’s seven towers. Builders’ notes, allotments of slaves, materials requests, stockpiles, and overages. Everything I could find. No budgets, irritatingly, which is what keyed me in—but I’m getting ahead of myself. If there’s a hidden room in the Chromeria anywhere, it should show up here.”
One of the jobs Teia had given Quentin was to search the Chromeria for the Old Man of the Desert’s secret room. She knew he had one, if not more. She herself had lost caches of clothing and money and weapons simply to servants or strangers stumbling across them; there was no way the Old Man was going to risk the same happening to his code books; there was no way he’d risk someone interrupting him as he penned or decoded his secret messages. Secrecy required privacy, and the bigger the secret the more privacy required.
“That sounds pretty good . . . can you not read them? Are they in code or something?” Teia asked.
“No, I can read them. Now. I had to study up on construction techniques and terminology. Took me a while,” the slender young man said.
“So . . . the bad news is . . . ?”
“The plans show no space for any hidden rooms at all,” Quentin said. “Everything is clear and public.”
“Okay . . .”
“But I found an exterminator’s report of a rat’s nest . . . right here under the young discipuli’s barracks.”
Teia looked at the plans, but for her they might as well have been written in Old Tyrean. “Explain?”
“See, in the diagram here, there’s no space at all. This is supposed to be hardwood planking directly over stone. But the rat catcher’s report mentions finding a rat king . . . Do you know what that is?” He looked ill just speaking about it.
“No.”
“You don’t want to. Regardless, he said the rat king was two paces high. According to the plans, that’s impossible. There’s no space for it. So the plans are wrong. So I went outside, and using some trigonometry and an astrolabe, I was able to calculate the heights of the towers.”
“And the Prism’s Tower was taller than these plans say,” Teia guessed.
“No. All of the towers are taller than these plans say. Four paces taller! And these are the most recent plans. So that means there isn’t just one secret room, there’s the equivalent of one secret floor. In every tower.”
“How do you hide an entire secret floor?”
“Cleverly, I guess. Maybe not all in one place? People look at the towers from the outside all the time, and point out their rooms and the rooms of their friends. I don’t even know how you do it, honestly. I’m no master builder, but whoever did this certainly was. Of course, I am pretty sure that they must have the true plans somewhere. For the inevitable repairs, or to keep later workmen and servants away from them, if nothing else. So I’d guess the Black would have those, or the promachos.”
“My money’s on Andross Guile. The man’s a maelstrom of secrets.”
“I concur,” Quentin said.
“Quen,” Teia said. “No one says, ‘I concur.’ ”
“I know, but it bothers you,” he said with a quick grin.
She forced a smile, but then returned to the task. “It’s not like we can ask Carver Black,” she said. She sighed. Should she break into his rooms? His office? How long would it take her to find a book he’d hidden? Could she spare the time from hunting the Order itself to surveil him? What reason would Carver Black have to check the old tower plans? He might have those documents, not ever check them.
And who was to say Carver Black even knew? Would the Old Man of the Desert hide in a place Carver Black knew? Was Carver Black himself in the Order?
She sighed. It all made her head hurt. She would need years to untangle all this fully. And it wasn’t like she could kill Carver Black without anyone noticing. No, her best bet wasn’t to go after individuals to find if they were in the Order; it was to let the Order come to her. She rubbed her jaw gingerly.
She had to figure out some way to mark every person who attended their Feast of the Dying Light, the night before Sun Day. Maybe in the changing room? Could she mark their clothing?
Then Karris’s soldiers could sweep down on the traitors on Sun Day morning and wipe them out in one fell swoop.
They could celebrate Sun Day by putting the Old Man of the Desert up on Orholam’s Glare.
There was one man Teia would happily watch cook, screaming in agony as he died.
If she could survive so long. She rubbed her jaw again.
“Tooth still hurting?” Quentin asked. “I thought you were going to go see the White’s barber about that before all this even started.”
“I did. Not that I can tell, but he said it’s better now than it would have been if I hadn’t come to see him.”
“A nonfalsifiable statement. Clever.”
“I’m supposed to chew some herbs to help, but I always forget,” she said. “I don’t know what irritates me more: that he may be a charlatan or that this may be my fault because I don’t follow instructions.” She heard the whinging in her voice, and shut up.
Quentin looked at her, and didn’t fill the sudden silence.
“It’s killing me,” she said.
“Your tooth? Not your tooth.”
She sat on Quentin’s bed. “Quentin, you’re on a first-name basis with the guy: how can Orholam allow this?”
“This?” Quentin asked uncertainly.
“I’m a butcher, Quen. I’ve taken to scoring a notch on my knife for each kill.”
He said nothing, but he wasn’t fast enough to hide the brief flash of distaste on his lips.
“Not to brag about the number. To remind myself. Because I was forgetting. They all run together until I dream: Oh, the way that one slave gurgled on his blood because he bit his tongue so hard in his fear of me before I even touched him. How that other girl wept from the moment the door opened and never even got a word out because she was crying so hard. I remember how I despised her, how I wished she would die as bravely as some of the others had. Do you know, they gave me a break? The Order. Said that too many slaves had disappeared, and they needed to hold off until some more refugees came to the island so no one would get suspicious—and I felt disappointed because it would interrupt my studies. Disappointed. For only a moment, yes. But what the hell is that? I don’t want to be this person I’m becoming, Quentin. Why would Orholam allow this?”
“ ‘If Orholam can do something, and if He cares about us, why doesn’t He?’ ”
She nodded. “So what’s the answer?”
“The answer’s simple for the mind, but impossible for the heart. And the question, honestly asked, always comes from a wound.” He said no more.