to be silent this time and feeling lucky that he had not waked this man, and then he went on to a large stairway.
Bedchambers began on the third floor in olden times. Would it be the same now? He went all the way up. It was certainly likely.
When he reached the end of the corridor on the third floor, he turned down another small hall and spied light beneath a door, and decided upon that as his beginning.
Without knocking, he turned the knob and let himself into a small but elegant bedroom. The sole occupant was a woman with gray hair, who looked up from her desk with obvious but fearless amazement.
This was just what he had hoped for. He approached the desk.
There was a book open there under her left hand, and with her right she’d been underlining words in it.
It was Boethius. De topicis differentiis. And she had underlined the sentence, “Syllogism is discourse in which, when certain things have been laid down and agreed to, something other than the things agreed to must result by means of the things agreed to.”
He laughed. “Excuse me,” he said to the woman.
She was looking up at him, and had not moved at all since he entered.
“It’s true but it’s funny, isn’t it? I had forgotten.”
“Who are you?” she asked.
The gravel in her voice, the age of it perhaps, startled him. Her gray hair was heavy and worn in an old-fashioned bun on the back of her head rather than the sexless bob of the present fashion.
“I’m being rude, I know,” he said. “I always know when I’m being rude, and I beg your pardon.”
“Who are you?” she asked again in almost precisely the same tone of voice as before, except that she put a space after each word for emphasis.
“What am I?” he asked. “That’s the more important question. Do you know what I am?”
“No,” she said. “Should I?”
“I don’t know. Look at my hands. See how long and thin they are.”
“Delicate,” she said in the same gravelly voice, her eyes moving only very quickly to his hands and then back to his face. “Why have you come in here?”
“My methods are those of a child,” he said. “That is my only way of operating.”
“So?”
“Did you know that Aaron Lightner was dead?”
She held his gaze for a moment and then slipped back in her chair, her right hand releasing the green marker. She looked away. It was a dreadful revelation to her.
“Who told you?” she asked. “Does everyone know?”
“Apparently not,” he said.
“I knew he wouldn’t come back,” she said. She pursed her mouth so that the heavy lines above her lips were very defined and dark for a moment. “Why have you come here to tell me this?”
“To see what you would say. To know whether or not you had a hand in killing him.”
“What?”
“You heard what I said, did you not?”
“Killing him?” She rose slowly from her chair and gave him a cruel look, especially now that she realized how very tall he was. She looked to the door—indeed, she seemed about ready to move towards it—but he lifted his hand, gently, asking for her patience.
She weighed this gesture.
“You’re saying Aaron was killed by someone?” she asked. Her brows grew heavy and wrinkled over the silver frames of her glasses.
“Yes. Killed. Deliberately run over by a car. Dead.”
The woman closed her eyes this time, as if, unable to leave, she would allow herself to feel this appropriately. She looked straight ahead, dully, with no thought of him standing there, apparently, and then she looked up.
“The Mayfair witches!” she said in a harsh, deep whisper. “God, why did he go there?”
“I don’t think it was the witches who did it,” he said.
“Then who?”
“Someone from here, from the Order.”
“You don’t mean what you’re saying! You don’t know what you’re saying. No one of us would do such a thing.”
“Indeed I do know what I’m saying,” he said. “Yuri, the gypsy, said it was one of you, and Yuri wouldn’t lie in such a matter. Yuri tells no lies as far as I can tell, none whatsoever.”
“Yuri. You’ve seen Yuri. You know where he is?”
“Don’t you?”
“No. One night he left, that’s all anyone knows. Where is he?”
“He is safe, though only by accident. The same villains who killed Aaron have tried to kill him. They had to.”
“Why?”
“You’re innocent of all this?” He was satisfied.
“Yes! Wait, where are you going?”
“Out, to find the killers. Show me the way to the Superior General. I