Lorelei finished her work in records and met Creed, Nanda, and Vashtok for a meal at The Road to Beltayne. She was a bit of a lightweight and almost always limited herself to one glass of wine, but she had three glasses of red and a sweet barrel-aged port over the course of their leisurely dinner. Why not indulge herself for once? All she had to look forward to was binding more bloody books.
After Nanda and Vashtok said their farewells, she found herself strolling with Creed around Old Town to walk off some of the liquor. Creed hummed “The Ballad of Hoarfrost Cliff” about a trapped battalion’s glorious victory against barbarian raiders. Much to his amusement, Lorelei joined him at the chorus. Normally Lorelei would have sung softly if at all, but she sang full-throated and swept her arms back and forth theatrically. She closed the song on a particularly long note. Creed clapped and fell into a rare belly laugh.
They were on their way to the library to see Kellen and the mysterious bronze chalice when the clock tower bells began ringing discordantly. Lorelei paused, trying to work out whether it was the right time for the bells to ring, when they clanked oddly again.
She and Creed quickened their pace. When they reached the plaza, Lorelei stopped and stared up at library’s third floor windows. “Faedryn’s teeth.”
An orange glow flickered through the glass. Black smoke poured from an open window at the corner of the building. “Faedryn’s bloody teeth,” she said again. A fire in the library could burn half of Old Town.
Creed made for the entrance. “I’ll make sure everyone’s out.”
“I’ll call the brigade,” Lorelei said.
Then a masked, hooded figure burst from the clock tower and sprinted across the quadrata. Moments later, a man with a pronounced limp and hunched back whom Lorelei immediately recognized as the Hissing Man raced after him.
The Hissing Man spun metal balls on a rope over his head and flung them at the other man. The weights caught around the fellow’s ankles, and he went down hard on the stones with a whoof. The Hissing Man jumped on him, wrestled him onto his back, and choked him.
“Release him!” Creed shouted. “Lay on the ground, hands behind your head! Now!”
The Hissing Man looked up. Then he sprinted down an alley of the plaza. The other man ran toward the clock tower.
“Stop!” Lorelei shouted.
Neither man did, but it left Lorelei and Creed with a dilemma. The library was on fire. They needed to get the fire brigade. Plus, Kellen and Ezraela might still be inside.
Shouting arose from the street behind them, and the fire bell rang from the square beyond.
Creed drew his rapier and pointed to the library. “Check on Kellen and Ezraela. I’m going after the Hissing Man.”
Lorelei nodded.
“Use the main doors,” Creed said. “No confrontations, understand? You’re in no state to fight.” He turned and pounded toward the alley the Hissing Man had taken.
Lorelei headed through the library’s main entrance and up the stairs. The smoke was thick by the time she reached the top floor.
“Kellen? Ezraela?”
No answer, just the crackling of fire. She saw flames burning up the aisles of books in the room adjacent to Kellen’s research room. She entered Kellen’s room, but found it empty. Other than a cloth-lined case on his desk, everything looked much the same as the last time she was there.
She left Kellen’s office and was about to enter the adjacent room where most of the fire was when she heard a resounding boom overhead. It had to be the roof since she was already on the top floor. Then she heard some scraping like scree skittering down a rocky slope. Out the window, fragments of the library’s slate roof rained down, and a viridian dragon dropped into view with a rider on its back.
Even a bit woozy, the dragon looked eerily similar to Blythe’s viridian. Was the rider Blythe? No, she decided. The rider’s physique was too masculine.
Powerless to stop his escape, she took a deep breath and rushed toward the main room. “Kellen? Ezraela?”
Nothing. She headed into the smoke and started coughing. “Kellen!” she hacked. The flames flickered dully ahead; the room was like an oven.
“Lorelei?” Kellen shouted weakly. He staggered from the smoke. His tunic was charred. His arm was burned and blistered. His hair and scalp as well. Then he doubled over, clutched his stomach with his good hand. His tunic and leggings were stained with blood.
Lorelei ran to him, slipped his burned arm over her shoulders, and guided him toward the clock tower. Her eyes stung and watered. She could hardly breathe. Kellen staggered and she stopped and righted him. “C’mon!”
At the stairwell, they got a breath of blessedly fresh air. Knowing the air would feed the fire, Lorelei slammed the door shut. Then she led Kellen down the stairs to the ground level service door. He collapsed just outside of it. Lorelei knelt beside him, took a kerchief from her belt pouch and pressed it to his bleeding gut.
“Kellen, wake up!” A crowd had gathered on the far side of the plaza, and she shouted to them, “Get a nun! He’s been stabbed!”
A young man and woman sprinted away and returned in less than a minute with a portly nun in a gray robe and a white wimple, who was likely already headed to the library. The nun put her thick leather bag on the ground and knelt beside Kellen. “Tell me what happened.”
Lorelei didn’t know what happened, but she told the nun where she’d found Kellen as the old woman set to work.
Time passed quickly after that. Kellen’s wound was treated and he was taken away on a horse-drawn wagon to the abbey. Creed returned with a nasty gash to his forehead, but without the Hissing Man. He and Lorelei worked with the fire brigade to control the blaze. Somewhere along the way, Nanda and Vashtok showed up and joined them. What turned the tide was a pair of white-robed shepherds, who used the power of aura to help stifle the blaze. Eventually, the fire was brought under control.
By then, it was the middle of the night. Lorelei wanted to go to the House of the Holy Meadow, where Kellen had been taken, but she couldn’t. She needed to check Kellen’s office first. “Is it safe to enter?” she asked the fire master.
The fire master, a matter-of-fact man with a jet black beard, stared at the owl badge on her swallowtail coat, then Creed’s. “It’s safe enough. Just be careful on the top floor.”
Lorelei borrowed a bullseye lantern from the fire brigade and entered the library. Creed wetted a fresh bandage and cleaned some of the crusted blood from his forehead, then joined her. They headed up the main stairwell, now scattered with debris, to the third floor. The main room, adjacent to Kellen’s research room, was a scattering of rubble, burned books, and charred shelves. The roof looked like the blackened ribcage of a tomb drake.
Near a doorway with hinges but no door to speak of lay a blackened corpse.
“Ezraela?” Creed asked.
“Must be.”
The broken remnants of a shattered lamp were scattered next her.
Lorelei headed to Kellen’s research room. The framework around the doorway was splintered. The notes and string and cork board was just a black stain on the wall. Piles of ash lay on his charred desk. A box-shaped hunk of char sat on the floor in front of the desk.
She motioned to it. “I reckon that was what the chalice was stored in.”
Creed touched one corner of it with the toe of his boot, and it crumbled. “So where’s the chalice?”
Lorelei took a deep breath and let her vision go distant and unfocused. In her mind’s eye, she saw the Hissing Man’s victim rise and run toward the clock tower. “The one with the mask took it,” she said.
Creed’s gaze seemed to wander the burned shelf behind her. “You sure?”
Lorelei nodded. “When he ran into the clock tower, he had a cloth sack hanging from his belt. There was something heavy in it.”
“Any idea who he was?”
“No, but he was clearly there for the chalice. Maybe the Hissing Man wanted it, too, and that’s why they were fighting.”
Creed’s frown deepened the lines over his blood-stained brow. “This reeks, Lorelei.”
Lorelei agreed, but before she could say so, the crunch of approaching footsteps came from the hallway. Praefectus Damika appeared in the doorway. She took off her hat, raked a few strands of her dark, kinky hair into place. “I heard about Kellen. How is he?”
“Stable, last I heard,” Lorelei said. “A nun took him to the House of the Holy Meadow, just across the Wend.”
“I’ll pay him a visit him when I can.” Damika glanced back the way she’d come. “The fire master tells me the body is likely the archivist, Ezraela.”
“Probably, yes.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. Did you know her well?”
Lorelei shook her head. “I’ve seen her around the library, spoken to her a few times, but that’s as far as it went.”
Damika nodded. “I hope you’ll forgive my abruptness, but as you can imagine, questions are being asked. I need to know if any of this has to do with the Red Knives and the situation in Glaeyand.”
Lorelei’s cock up in the Holt was the last thing she wanted to think about. “It’s possible,” she admitted. “The Hissing Man was here, as was another man, possibly a Knife. But we weren’t involved, if that’s what you think. We were heading to talk to Kellen about a chalice he’d told us about. Then we saw the library burning.”
Damika turned to Creed, and he nodded.
“The chalice,” Damika said, “Kellen mentioned it’s related to the case you were working on with him?”
“That’s right,” Lorelei said. “Ezraela had just come back from Erimaea, where she’d apparently hidden it away. When we got here, we saw Blythe running from the clock tower and the Hissing Man chasing her—”
“Hold on.” Damika stepped back into the hall and waved toward the main room. “Ordren! Over here!”
Ordren entered the room in that lanky, scarecrow way of his.
Damika motioned for Lorelei to continue. “Start from the beginning. Tell us all of it. And then you’re going to leave this to Ordren. Go visit Kellen if you wish, then get some sleep. You two look like a dragon chewed you up and spit you out.”
Lorelei wanted to argue, but she was in a deep enough hole already. And Damika was right about her needing sleep. She was so tired she could hardly think, and she was getting a bit of a wine hangover. She and Creed answered a few more questions from both Damika and Ordren before the Praefectus seemed satisfied.
“Good?” Damika asked Ordren.
Ordren answered with a shrug and a sneer. “For now . . .”
Damika dismissed Lorelei and Creed.
Lorelei and Creed walked down the stairs and into the quadrata. She felt defeated, but there was nothing she could do. “I’m off to see Kellen,” she said.
Creed squeezed her arm, then probed the skin around the gash to his head. “I need to go home and clean this up.”
Lorelei made her way to the House of the Holy Meadow. The same nun who’d helped Kellen led her to a starkly appointed room. Kellen lay in the room’s lone bed. His head, shoulders, and arm were bandaged. Most of his visible skin was smeared with a shiny ointment that reflected the light of the candle on the side table.
“Best you don’t stay long,” the nun said.
“Of course. Thank you, Sister.”
The nun took her lantern with her, leaving the candle on the small bedside table the only light. Kellen, perhaps roused by their voices, opened his eyes and looked around. “Ezraela?”
“I’m so sorry, Kellen.”
Kellen tried to speak, failed, then swallowed hard. “The chalice?” He asked and fell into a short coughing fit.
“The chalice was stolen,” Lorelei told him.
“By the Hissing Man . . .”
“No, by a thief, we think.”
“A thief . . .” Kellen broke his gaze. “I saw him in the aisles when the Hissing Man attacked me.”
“Did you recognize him?”
Kellen took some time to think. “He was wearing a mask, but the fire lit him up. He was Kin, and he looked familiar. Someone I met during my time in Andalingr, maybe?” He coughed several times before speaking again. “No, I can’t recall . . . Damn, if only I’d . . .”
“Don’t worry about it now. We’ll find him. We’ll find the Hissing Man as well.”
Kellen hardly seemed to hear her. He coughed and closed his eyes.
Lorelei went home took a bath to wash off the smoke. As she sat naked in the small copper tub, Kellen’s words haunted her: Someone I met during my time in Andalingr.
Her aching body begged her to slip into bed and rest, but she couldn’t. Not yet. Something Rylan had said was tickling the back of her mind. At the eyrie, he’d told the story of how he’d tended to a cranky gold vixen near Thicket and discovered a rift. He said he’d been visiting family in Thicket, and Thicket was the village below Andalingr, where Kellen had done a two-year rotation with the local constabulary.
She made her way to the Crag. It was an hour before reckoning and drizzling. When she arrived, Maudrey was already in records.
“Will wonders never cease?” the cranky old woman said. “You’re actually early.”
“I need to see Kellen’s old records.”
“Well, aren’t you the cheeky one—”
“He was caught in the fire last night at the library and burned badly. I need to see his records.”
Maudrey had been working in records for decades. She knew Kellen. They’d been friendly from what Lorelei remembered. After a pause, she nodded soberly and led Lorelei to the shelves on the far side of the room. She pointed to a set of eighteen thick, bound volumes, each lettered with his full name and a range of dates.
She pulled several from early in his career and scoured them until she found what she was looking for, the investigation of Beckett Holbrooke, a Kin woodsman suspected not only of bonding with a dragon, but passing the knowledge to others, both of which carried the death penalty. Rylan Holbrooke was his foster son and had also been apprehended. A viridian vixen had been killed during their capture.
Lorelei scanned the page and found a more detailed description of the chase into the Holt and the apprehension itself. The vixen had been cornered at her nest, which had allowed Kellen’s bronze to dispatch her with relative ease, but the nest had been home to two viridian kits, both of which had escaped.