“Yes, they would have done that. But you’re still employed. Who’s the commissioner, then?”
He leaned close and dropped his voice. “No one. None dared show interest in the post. I’m still secretary, but to Commissioner Nobody. I’m not sorry for that. I can stay down here and do what I can. They just brought this lot from Kerotea. All rubbish save the horse and this box.” Sitting on the workbench was a cube-shaped case of cracked and peeling leather, bound in corroded brass. “I’m working to get the hinge pins out so as to get it open, careful as Master Ka—the commissioner—taught me.”
Heaving a great breath, Racine climbed to his feet, straightened his back, and gave me a gracious hand up off the floor. Though no longer rattled, he was not yet easy. He opened his mouth to begin several times, and then blurted out quite suddenly, “I never thought to see you again, my lady.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. I never thought to be here again.” The unexpected encounter with Karon’s old assistant made me hope the fanciful story I had concocted to get me into the vaults might be unnecessary. Racine clearly wanted to talk. I let him.
As he offered me his stool that was the only seating in the tiny room, he drew up his brow. “I’ve often thought— wished—I could go back and change some things.”
“Who among us has not?” I perched awkwardly on the tall stool.
“I should have spoken.” He paused, his eyes unfocused as if he were looking inside himself, before reaching out to meet my gaze. “No one but you spoke for him. I should have done. All Reagor’s prattling, those stupid, impossible lies about flying boxes and living mummies, and no one said anything to dispute him. But I was afraid.”
“For good reason. It would have made no difference, Racine. You would have died for it.”
“But it wasn’t right. At first”—he averted his eyes, his color deepening again—“I was glad he was found out, afraid that because I’d been close, he’d done something to me… and I hated him for that. I hated him for deceiving me and making me so afraid. But at the trial, I listened to what you said, and it made such plain sense. And I saw what they’d done to him, and I thought how he was a good man, just and fair, and teaching me, trusting me. I couldn’t believe the wicked things they said about him. I thought someone should speak up, but I couldn’t. All these years and I still haven’t got my nerve up even to say his name here in the dark, where there’s no one to hear it.”
“Thank you for telling me, Racine. You mustn’t feel guilty. The Holy Twins themselves could have spoken for him, and nothing would have been any different. But you’ve just made life very much easier for me!”
Racine screwed his features into such a morosely puzzled knot that I almost laughed. “I had another purpose for my visit. Regarding the collection. And I was afraid I’d find no one here that I knew. Or that if there was someone I knew, they’d spit on me and chase me away.”
Racine put on his most businesslike face and bowed to me. “It has been quite a long time since I’ve had a request that was not in the vein of ‘remove this useless refuse from my sight,” or “don’t you have anything of real value?” It would be a pleasure to assist you, madam. And I give you my most solemn word not to spit.“ He waved his hand to encompass his cramped domain. ”What is your pleasure? A review of all we have left? Not much. An examination of your most efficient cataloging directories? Out of date, but still useful. Perhaps an extensive tour of our workrooms that extend from this wall here all the way to that one right there, a whole two paces longer than my armspan?“
“I wanted to find something. Something we catalogued that I would give a great deal to see. If I could get into the southwest vault…”
Racine’s smile wilted, and my spirits with it. “The southwest vault? Would it were another. We had to abandon the southwest vault, as it was wanted for something else. I moved as much of the contents as I could, but they didn’t give me much time. A good deal of it was burned. What was it you were looking for?”
“A leather trunk. Very old. It was in one corner, buried under a pile of rolled carpets.”
He tapped his long fingers on his cheek. “I don’t know. It doesn’t sound familiar. You say it was catalogued? I’ve tried to mark all those things that came from the southwest vault with their new location.”
“It had a number, but it would not have appeared on your list.”
“Well, then, we must have a look. Most of the things I salvaged went into the northwest vault.” Racine rummaged among the rubble on his table until he found a large ring of keys and a tired brown leather ledger. He took his lamp from its bracket on the wall and escorted me into the passageway, locking the door carefully behind him. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Would it suit you better if we were to be discreet about our journeying, my lady?”
“As a matter of fact, though everything I told you about my status is true, I would prefer that my visit be unnoticed. I promise you—”
He raised one hand. “No promises are necessary. This way.”
He led me down the sloping passage into the labyrinth of tunnels. A quarter of an hour’s brisk walking brought us to an iron gate, soon opened by one of Racine’s keys. Faint rustling and murmuring floated from the yawning mouths of the side passages. I swallowed hard and kept my eyes on Racine’s back. The lamp wasn’t nearly bright enough. The path angled upward toward another gate and through a wooden door.
To stand in the midst of the jumbled vault was like going backward in time, yet a single glimpse told me how depleted the collection was. The paintings, stacked so carefully, were of poor quality, the statuary mostly broken. A primitive idol in the shape of a raven-headed man looked blindly on the rest, the jewels pried from its eye sockets, its splendid belt, collar, and staff pockmarked by gouges and gaps where silver inlay and even the tiniest chips of gems had been removed. Racine led me to the corner where he had stored those artifacts rescued from the southwest vault, and we rooted through stack after stack of boxes and crates. I couldn’t think what I would do if the trunk wasn’t here. After two futile hours, I concluded I might have to make those plans.
Racine ran his finger down the pages of his ledger. “I just don’t know. If it wasn’t in the original list… Where else could I have put it? You said it was under rolls of carpets.” He thumbed through the wrinkled pages, slowly and deliberately, squinting at the crabbed writing that filled each one until I thought I might have to grab the book from him or scream. But then he tapped his finger on one page, and said, “One more possibility. I had them put a number of carpets in that niche behind the last row of pillars. It’s a little drier there than most of the vault. If your trunk isn’t there, then it must have been destroyed.”
I held my breath as he hung the lamp on a bracket in the niche beyond the pillars. On a raised floor a stack of carpets rose higher than my head. I took one side and Racine took the other, and we pulled one after another off the stack. No irregularity in the stack indicated the presence of anything so awkward as a trunk. Foolish to expect that workmen would have installed it here in the same way as they had found it. But when we had were almost to the bottom of the pile, Racine gave a shout. “Ouch! Serpents’ feet! Excuse me… what—? My lady, please come.”“
I clambered over the mountain of carpets to the other side. Racine sat on a dusty roll of wool, nursing a great bleeding gouge in his leg. “Look back there,” he said, pointing into the dark corner of the niche. “I backed into something when we were shifting that last one out of the way.”
I held the lamp high, and there in the corner, as if patiently awaiting my attention, was the trunk. “That’s it!” Avoiding the sharp metal edge that had attracted Racine’s notice so dramatically, I pulled the trunk from the corner. Holding my breath, I unlatched the hasp, opened the lid, and reached down into the dusty contents until I felt the smooth edge of the rosewood box. I looked up at Racine, my face hot with excitement.