Gold? I’ll be grateful just to get out of all this alive, Tinwright thought, but of course he didn’t say it—he could certainly find use for a few coins of any metal. He did his best to tell Brone everything that had happened, starting with the strange scene in the cemetery and Okros’ corpse in the Eddon family crypt, continuing through everything he could remember of his days of personal service to Hendon Tolly. He was only halfway through, and had just finished telling Brone in a slightly stumbling fashion about the lord protector’s meeting with the autarch, when the older man did something that astonished him. Brone lifted his hand to silence Tinwright in mid-sentence, then shouted for a page.
“Oyler, bring some food for Master Tinwright,” he told the dirty-faced boy when he came in. “And nothing cold and nasty, you little devil. Make sure you take something that’s been on the fire.”
The boy scuttled out. Then, as Tinwright was already wondering if he’d fallen asleep and was dreaming, Brone lifted a jug of wine out from behind his chair—not without a great deal of grunting and cursing—and poured a cup for himself and also one for Tinwright. Unprecedented!
“When you’ve had something to eat—you look terrible, lad, by the by—you’ll tell me all that autarch bit again, and slowly, so I can write it down. Go on, drink up.” Brone frowned at Tinwright for a moment, as if it was the poet who was playing out of character instead of Brone himself. “In the meantime, while you’re eating, tell me everything else that’s happened since then.” He shook his head. “So that was what truly happened to Okros, was it? His wound never looked much like he had been caught under a wall—the Three alone know how many walls we’ve seen knocked down since those cannons started booming, and how many dead and dying we’ve pulled out from under the stones. Not to mention that there was no arm to be found. No, I couldn’t make sense of it, myself—murder, certainly, but taking an arm off like that, neat as a butcher… ?”
Tinwright stayed with Brone for what must have been at least another hour and was likely more. Brone kept asking him questions, which sometimes made him change what he had said before, which Brone would then cross out from the parchment with a great many sulfurous curses before laboriously writing down the new version.
When the questioning was over, Lord Brone told Tinwright some ways he could get a letter to him in sudden need. Then, to make the topsy-turvy evening complete, he offered Tinwright a handclasp of farewell. “You’ve done well,” the large man said. “This is much and much to think about. Try to stay alive. It would mean a loss of useful information if Tolly put a knife in your throat.”
This last was much more like the Brone he knew, and in a way it made everything that had come before seem even more impressive. The man hadn’t gone mad: Tinwright must have actually pleased him.
After leaving Brone, he had an overwhelming urge to go and see Elan, but if Hendon knew about his sister’s house as he had claimed, then the worst thing Tinwright could do would be to draw further attention by actually going there. Since for once he wasn’t hungry, he decided to take advantage of this unusual feeling of well being and have a start at the work he was supposed to be doing.
Okros’ rooms were also in the residence, only a few corridors away from the old royal chambers that Hendon Tolly had commandeered for his own. The sour-faced guard waiting in front of Okros’ doorway wore the key on a chain around his neck, but when he saw the message bearing Hendon Tolly’s seal, he sprang to attention. After unlocking the door, he clearly intended to follow Matt Tinwright inside, but the poet told him, “I need to be on my own here. ‘It is not enough to see with the eyes of my body,’ ” he added, quoting from the Kracian bard Tyron. “ ‘I must see with my soul as well, or I am no better than blind.’ ”
The guard gave him a look that suggested speaking Kracian poetry was a suspicious thing to do even at the best of times, but reluctantly agreed to remain outside.
Tolly had told him that Dioketian Okros’ rooms had been left more or less as they had been when he died. If so, Tinwright decided, the physician must have been something less than tidy. The place was in chaos, books and papers piled on every surface, as well as what looked like entire baskets of documents dumped out and scattered across the floor. Tinwright suspected however that some of the havoc had been caused since the scholar’s death and that more than a few people had likely rummaged through this chamber in search of any secrets or wealth Okros might have harbored, perhaps even the guard standing outside this moment. Tinwright knew that Hendon Tolly had taken many of the physician’s books and artifacts himself on the night Okros died; he would not be able to examine those without Tolly watching over him. This was his one chance to see if Okros had left anything else.
What remained seemed to be divided between the most ordinary and the most esoteric sorts of texts, mostly to do with history and the divinatory arts. The only thing that caught his attention was a volume entitled The Agony of Truth Forsworn, which he had never seen nor heard of, but whose author, Rhantys of Kalebria, he seemed to remember having once heard something strange about. Tinwright pulled it from the shelf and then began to look in less obvious places, testing the dead scholar’s furniture for secret drawers, even examining the backs of all the cabinets for hidden compartments, but with no luck. While Tinwright was pushing the last of them back against the wall, he did notice something quite extraordinary. On the corner of the top of the cabinet, on a surface otherwise covered in a thick fall of dust, were several strange marks which looked almost exactly like the prints of tiny human feet.
It had to be some trick of the eye, he decided—probably they were only the marks of someone’s fingers who had, like Tinwright, been moving the cabinet. Still, it was impossible to look at the half dozen small marks, obscured though they were by subsequent larger and less specific marks, and not imagine a human the size of a clothes peg leaving them behind in the dust like tracks in the snow.
To his great irritation, Tinwright then had to spend long moments quibbling with the guard as to whether he was permitted to remove something from the room, but he relied on his temporary power as Lord Protector Hendon Tolly’s envoy and the guard, grumbling, finally gave up.
While he had this unwonted freedom, Matt Tinwright had no desire at all to go anywhere near Hendon Tolly himself, so instead he made his way back across the residence and out to the servants’ dormitory near the kitchens where he and Puzzle had for so long shared sleeping quarters.
The jester was half asleep on the cot, a little the worse for drink, but began to move over to make room for Tinwright.
“No, I’ll sit up,” he told the old man. “I have reading to do.”
“I haven’t seen you lately,” Puzzle said. “I worried about you.”
“I’ve been waiting on the lord protector.”
Puzzle sat up now, his eyes wide. “Truly? What good luck!”
Tinwright rolled his eyes, but it was foolish to expect the old man to understand the truth. “I suppose. I do not mean to disturb you, though. I just needed a place to read in quiet.”
The jester would not take the hint. “Did you know that Lady M’Ardall asked me to come to their house in Helmingsea and entertain her friends and family? As soon as the siege has ended, they will take me in their coach and all!”
“That’s wonderful.” Tinwright opened Rhantys’ book, trying to ignore the jester, who had apparently decided against sleeping and had begun to rattle off all the interesting things that had happened to him of late—interesting to Puzzle, in any case.