faint presence of all the smaller lives inside it. Stop it, he told himself, annoyed. He refused to be sick with longing for a place he had barely spent two nights in.
Sometime later, out in the foyer, the heavy door to the stairwell opened, someone walked through, and the door was closed and locked again. Quiet footsteps moved away down the hall. That was the guard who patrolled the public rooms on this level. There had been no click of a key, so another guard in the stairwell had unlocked and locked the door for him. But Moon wasn’t planning to use the stairs.
Moon listened to the guard make several slow circuits of the level. Finally the man’s steps returned to the stairwell door, there was a quiet knock, and the door opened and closed again. Presumably the guard wouldn’t return for a while. Moon shoved off the bed and reached the door. He eased it open silently, stepped into the corridor, and pulled it shut behind him. The corridor lights had been turned down until they gave off only a dim light and a faint trace of mist. Shifting in a blur of motion, he bounded down the corridor. He kept his claws carefully sheathed so they wouldn’t click against the tile and betray him.
The first thing he did was rapidly search the rest of this level. He found two other corridors, both with closed doors. By the sound of breathing, only three rooms were occupied. He couldn’t tell which two held Negal and Orlis, but a low whispered conversation marked the one with Esom and Karsis. There were two other open sitting areas, and a larger room with a cold bathing pool, but no other doorways to the stairwell, and no windows.
He whipped back through the door into the big common room. The vapor-lights here were still bright, lighting the empty room and making him feel exposed to the entire tower. Ignoring the sensation, he went to the hearth, stepped over the rim, hooked his claws into the mortar between the sooty stones, and wriggled up into the chimney.
Climbing the dark shaft, he peered upward. His eyes adjusted quickly, but there wasn’t much to see. The chimney wasn’t straight and shunted sideways at intervals to work its way up through the tower. He passed openings for several other connected shafts, too narrow for even a slender Raksura to climb down. At least it was a sign that all the hearths in this side of the tower connected to this central shaft.
When he was high enough to be above the big meeting room, he hit a junction with another large shaft. Hah, he thought, quietly satisfied at guessing right, and climbed headfirst down it.
He reached the bottom, where it opened into the hearth near the far end of the large chamber. He hung his head down and peered cautiously out, every nerve alert.
The vapor-lights had been turned so low they were nearly out, and the place seemed even more cavernous, the statue-pillars looming life-like in the shadows. He tasted the air and caught lingering scents of perfume, stale food, and wine. Nothing moved, and it was almost unnervingly silent.
He slid out of the chimney and stepped down off the big empty hearth, lifting his spines a little to dislodge some of the soot. Ghosting across the marble floor, he bypassed the stairs to jump up to the railing of the gallery.
The hall beyond the archway was smaller than the one down on the second level of the tower, with no alcoves. Ardan’s acquisitions hung on the walls or stood on plinths. It was all artwork, wall carvings, pieces of sculpture, the gems and metal glinting faintly in the dim light. Moon walked through rapidly, reached the end, then turned back. He forced himself to move slowly, to look at each display more closely. It has to be here. It wasn’t sitting by itself on a plinth, but it might be stuck in with one of the other objects.
He stopped abruptly as the skin under his spines prickled with unease; he wasn’t alone in here anymore. He turned, slowly.
Barely ten paces away a mist hung in the air, and something formed rapidly inside it.
Moon snarled under his breath. He had forgotten Ardan’s magic. Groundling guards were probably posted in any area where the inhabitants of the tower might move around during the night. In the chambers that were supposed to be empty, the guards could be more deadly. The mottled