His face fell. “Oh well, I was just curious if things were different in Armer, lass. Never mind.” He paused. “Oh, just tell her Patzer. All right then.”
Gods help me.
“I’ve got my own problems with Royalty. They’ve access to technology even you Seekers don’t, and hoard those secrets from the rest of us. They keep their golem from us and game the currency systems and energies for their own benefit. Imagine being able to live three hundred years!”
Terese shrugged diplomatically. “They say we can’t use their tech because we’re unable,” she said. “I don’t think about them much, I just hunt chaos and cadvers. One of the Seeker oaths is to obey the Royals, so I can’t complain much. But they give us a lot of materials and funding. Our jobs would be harder, if not for them.”
“Bloody Royals,” Patzer huffed, then stopped in his tracks without warning and pointed. He waved his arms at a shaky, mostly decimated building. “See that ruined temple? That’s where we’re headed.”
“That’s the safest place out here?”
A light bloomed around the outline of a door, framing a man’s silhouette. As they came closer, she saw the man had a long face and graying hair. He was of an age with Patzer.
“Head Saarg of Armer Stone, meet Drool.”
Well, it was a better name than ‘Slobber’. She extended her hand politely. The man ignored the hand, just nodded and showed them into the temple. The sole evidence of habitation was the thick-wicked candle on the floor.
Patzer shut the door and nodded to Drool. Was this the moment Patzer would hit her with his wooden club or slash her with his long knife?
He faced her.
“Years ago, I paid dearly for this place. I like to come here not because it’s mine, but because I earned it.” With that, Drool pulled on a camouflaged handle on the ground she hadn’t noticed before. A trapdoor opened.
She looked up in surprise. “Really?”
Patzer gazed through the entrance. “If you never spoke of this place in any way, Head, it would make my sleep deeper. Children ask promises, for children believe the world is simple, like them. I ask no promises.”
“Patzer,” she said, “there’s no advantage in telling of this hideaway.”
He nodded and laughed. His moods changed too quickly. His head was either filled with strange chemicals or he didn’t understand how people worked. She preferred Lijjen’s predictability, caustic as it was.
“I’ll show you!” he said, and, grinning, he took the candle down the ladder into the hideaway. Moments later a beam of light – much more than a candle’s worth – burst from the ground. She and Drool descended, shutting the hatch after them. She walked through a short corridor into the central chamber.
“How did you find one in working order?” she said, not keeping the envy from her voice.
In an oval room, with blue light emanating from its walls, ornate and shell-like mosaics glowed bright as day, with moving designs mimicking waves or air currents. There were no decorations suggesting who the designers or first tenants had been, but there was little reason to doubt they’d been royalty. Patzer had placed his candle in a small, shimmering nook at the far end of the room. The flame’s interaction with its nook somehow replenished the room’s air and light.
Terese stood within a massive, functional artifact. She had never seen a hideaway in working condition except in plays or children’s storybooks. She’d been in a few old, broken ones though, for cadvers had a nose for hidden places.
“It’s come in handy, Head, I admit.”
She didn’t even mind the cocky swagger in his voice. “It doesn’t have any… other entrances, does it? It’s not part of a network, like they say?”
He shook his head sadly. “This one is isolated. Drool and I checked, didn’t we Drool?”
Drool said nothing. A man of few words.
“I’ve set traps here on occasion, hoping the one whom I purchased this place from might return. But no. In all these years no one’s visited here after… I bought it.” His face fell. “But it’s mine now, and I’ll fight any Royal for it,” he added, satisfied.
“Our Royals don’t care what we do with our hideaways,” she said, touching the chamber’s side and shifting the tiles in a gentle wave. Where she pushed, blue and green swirls expanded and thinned, adding their own flow to the perpetual motion of the hideaway’s inner core. “Maybe they have their own ones.”
If the Royals knew what the hideaways were, they hadn’t passed on the knowledge.
They were a common topic of fascination. Children’s stories were filled with possible things that the hideaways could have been. Every hideaway she’d ever been in had been a broken, dank and depressing affair. But this one was the way the stories said the hideaways should be. Full of unspoken potential.
She lowered herself onto a section of the ancient wooden bench that ran the main room’s circumference, and through the smaller attached spaces that may have once been bedrooms.
Dinner was a picnic on the floor: Dried meat, fruit and nuts supplemented by honeyed rice supplied by Drool. The hideaway’s temperature tended toward a middling warmth, somehow maintained by technology she could only wonder at. She soaked in every detail. One day, hopefully soon, she’d tell Pella she’d slept in a working hideaway with designs, lights, and polished, age-darkened wood. A few weeks before she’d left Armer, she and Pella had used cushions to make a hideaway all their own, cutting out paper suns and stars and sticking them to the pillows, playing pretend.
She made polite conversation with Patzer. Drool listened, never contributing. In fact,
