Kyon laughs below me. He comes to stand next to the tree pillar on the opposite side. “You figured out my puzzle,” he says. He puts his hand on the pillar, and another glass platform raises him up to me. “Now what?” His eyebrow arches in question. I glance across the open airspace to the gallery railing across the room.
I have no idea what will happen if I move forward off the glass step, but I know that something will, because Kyon is watching me with an air of expectation. I take a deep breath, hold it, and take a step forward toward the railing. My foot connects solidly with another glass step in the shape of a clear river stone.
“Did you know it was there? Or were you just being brave?” Kyon asks.
“I was being hopeful.”
From below, it must look as if we’re walking on air as we cross the room to the gallery railing, which turns out to be merely a hologram. The gallery is real enough, though, and I’m grateful for the solid stone beneath my feet. “Do you want to see more?” Kyon asks me.
“I want to see everything,” I reply. I do. I want to know him so that I have a better chance of surviving him. I will put up no fight yet. I have to bide my time. I need him. If I’m to be free of the Brotherhood, he’s my best chance. He has as much to gain by their demise as I do. I’m just afraid that he’ll see through the cracks in my heart. I have more weaknesses than I’d like to admit.
“Fulton,” Kyon calls to his mentor on the ground. “Where have you put our guests?”
“They’re in Beauty—garden level.”
“Beauty?” I ask.
Kyon escorts me from the gallery to a long hallway that is entirely glass on one side. Sunlight falls on us and warms me. This hallway overlooks a flower garden outside. Butterflies flitter around it in droves, feasting on lush buds. “I’ve named all the towers in the house.”
“What was the one I just left called?”
“Kingdom,” he replies.
“And this one?” I ask when we reach the end of the corridor. We enter through a magnificent archway into another tower.
“This part of the house is called Foundation.”
We enter at the gallery level. It looks a lot like a study. The walls of the gallery are lined with books and artifacts. Iron helmets adorned with wings as well as wicked-looking swords are on display behind glass. As I gaze over the wrought-iron railing, I find below us is another round room. The floors are stone with inlaid Nordic knot symbols. Beautiful tapestry carpets with rune symbols of green and gold cover large areas of the floor. Four sets of stairs descend to the lower level from four areas of the gallery. Spiral staircases wind upward to more levels in Foundation. The rows and rows of books and artifacts go all the way up to the pointed peak at least fifteen stories above us.
I leave Kyon’s side and explore the room. Taking the stairs down, I see a study of a kind and a space that Kyon must use to tinker around with things. The first table I happen upon is covered with parts—cogs and washers and metal pieces. The inner workings of some machine is laid out in a definite pattern, as if he took a clock apart and laid it out in a road map in order to be able to put it back together. Another long table with bottles and vials and burners is laid out in the most particular way, as if an experiment had been started and abandoned, but then preserved so that he could pick it up again. I don’t touch anything, treating it with the kind of respect it deserves.
“This is your study?” I ask.
“Yes. I spend much of my time here.”
Only one portrait is in this room: an oil rendering of a very beautiful, petite woman. She looks like a Norse goddess. Her cerulean eyes sparkle with a secret truth that she ponders while she stares back at me. Her face is the graceful, flawless, feminine form of Kyon’s. She has to be a close relation.
“Is she why you’re bad?” I ask as Kyon joins me to gaze at the lovely woman frozen in repose.
“She’s my mother. Her name was Farling.”
“She was a priestess?”
“She was. She was also your mother’s best friend. They used to say their names