"Stop that."
Stop what, this?
"Yes. I don't like it."
I could feel how uncomfortable it was making him, so I didn't continue, although I couldn't help but ask why. "All right. But why does me doing that bother you so much?"
He glowered some more at me, and ignored my question. "Why are you trying to find the statue here? I told you it was stolen. Why aren't you using your powers to locate it?"
"I'm looking here first because you don't know for a fact that it was stolen."
"It has to have been stolen. I know every inch of this castle, and there are no monkey statues anywhere."
"It could be hidden," I pointed out, admiring for a moment the gloss on his shoes. "Until we rule out absolutely that it's not here somewhere, it doesn't make sense to search elsewhere."
"Doubtful."
I sighed, closed my eyes, and crossed my arms over my chest. "Shoo."
"What?" Disbelief was rife in his voice.
"Shoo. Go away. Leave me alone so I can work."
"You're shooing me from my own library?"
"Yes." I uncrossed my arms to make shooing motions, peeking at him through barely opened eyes. He looked outraged at the thought of me telling him what to do. "If you're not going to be quiet and let me concentrate, you have to leave."
He drew himself up, not that he wasn't impressive enough before. Now he positively loomed over me. "I will not be shooed from my own room."
"Fine, then. Just give me a little quiet so I can focus and do the mental thing."
The leather couch sighed softly as he sat a few feet away from me. "I thought you said you could only do the astral projection when you were aroused?"
"I can. But this isn't astral projection - I'm just opening myself up to the castle and touching its awareness. My mind will send out little tendrils to wander around, but my consciousness will remain here."
"Mind tendrils? That sounds stranger than anything I've ever heard of, even sexually driven astral projection."
I laughed and opened my eyes long enough to grin at him. "Yes, it is a bit weird, huh? But it works."
The only sound in the room for the next few minutes was of the central heating kicking in and blowing warm air through a grate on the floor near me. I let myself relax, pushed down my brain's desire to think about Paen, and slowly allowed the essentia of the castle to sink into my body.
Every building has an essentia. It's the essence of existence, similar to the souls of living beings, a collection of emotions and thoughts that have been imbued upon its structure and pulled from the surrounding environment. Most dwellings' essentias consist of a mixture of happiness, contentment, and sorrow, as collected over the years from the people who've lived in them. I've only once encountered a place that had a bad essentia, but most places, like this castle, were an assortment of emotions, most good, a few bad, but nothing unexpected.
"This castle has been at peace for the last five hundred years," I told Paen without opening my eyes. "But before that, it had a violent history. Many people were killed here, some justly, others without reason."
I heard him shift on the couch. "My great-grandmother's family fought long and hard to retain the castle. It was under siege many times."
"You resemble the man who built the castle," I said, catching a flash of him in the castle's consciousness. "He loved this land dearly. He died defending it, and was happy to do so."
Just what I need - a house whisperer.
I laughed. "I can't help it if houses talk to me."
"Stop reading my mind!"
"I'm not reading it. You're talking into mine."
"I am not," Paen said crossly. "I've told you I can't do that with strangers. You're poking into my mind, and I want it to stop."