The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,211

selfish. And probably not satisfying. Right? “Go ahead,” she said.

She’d asked to hear about his project first; it gave her time to gather her wits.

“Easy one first,” he said. “Zelorn is indeed a wine merchant. Very successful one, too. Well-known among the nobility. Karris didn’t have her people dig too deeply, though, lest it alarm anyone.” He described where to find Zelorn’s house, and his profile: physical description, style of clothing, three kids, six slaves, various servants between home and business, two long-term mistresses, and a pretty young wife who spent a lot of time crying about his many affairs, the pursuit of which seemed to be his main pastime.

Other than being a pagan priest, Teia thought.

“That was the shallow digging?” Teia asked.

“That’s exactly how I reacted,” Quentin said. “High Lady Guile said, ‘Of course. Anyone in the upper nobility would dig that much into anyone they were considering doing even casual business with.’ ”

“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,”