‘Almost there …’ Reichis said, carefully rotating the lock’s small wheels.
‘You said that already. Six times.’
He glanced over at me from where he stood on his hind legs so he could reach the lock that held the back entrance to Dexan’s lair. ‘You really want to do this again?’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
Reichis resumed his work. I’d laid a circle of copper wire on the ground around us to counteract any warning charms that might have been inscribed onto the lock. I figured as long as we kept it in the circle, the spell shouldn’t be able to reach Dexan.
Eventually Reichis got the lock open, and we left it within the wire.
With the door open, I was about to go in when I felt Reichis tug on my trouser leg. ‘What?’ I asked.
He pointed with one paw near the floor just inside the entrance. At first I couldn’t see anything, but when I knelt down to squirrel-cat height I could just barely make out the thin wire running from one side of the doorway to the other. ‘Tripwire,’ Reichis explained, and hopped over it into the dark space beyond. After a few seconds he called out, ‘Hey, Kellen, you should see this. Kind of a clever trap. There are actually six different wires running across the floor, and if you trigger any one of them, a small lever turns a pulley connected to a large—’
‘Can you disable it?’
A pause. ‘Well, sure, but don’t you want to hear how it works? I mean, it’s pretty cool the way the blade will just take your head off and all.’
‘Maybe next time,’ I said.
‘Your loss.’
A few minutes later I heard a crashing sound that nearly gave me a heart attack. ‘Reichis?’
‘What?’ he asked, poking his head out the door.
‘What was that?’
‘A big mother of an eight-foot-long steel blade crashing to the floor. What did you think it was?’
I followed him inside, fumbling around until I found a glow-glass ball suspended near one of the walls. I set my will on it, and after a second or two managed to get a somewhat pathetic but still helpful amount of light.
‘Nice place,’ Reichis said.
He wasn’t kidding. What should have been a dank cave turned out to be an extremely large and elegant open room with polished marble floors and walls reminiscent of a Jan’Tep sanctum. Large display cases stood in various spots around the space, filled with books and charms and any number of interesting artefacts. A door in one wall led to a bathroom. Reichis, of course, was immediately entranced by the tub. ‘Will you look at this thing? It’s huge.’ He started fiddling with a tap on one side. ‘Running water too.’ He hopped back off the edge of the bath and followed the copper pipe to a small wood stove. ‘Hey, fire this up for me, would you, Kellen?’
‘Are you serious? We’re on a heist here, Reichis, and you want to take a bath?’
The squirrel cat started sniffing around the room. ‘Not unless I can find some butter biscuits, I don’t.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s find the onyx bracelets he uses to control the worms. After that I promise I’ll buy you all the butter biscuits you can eat.’
‘Deal,’ Reichis said, then added more quietly, ‘sucker.’
As we began searching the vast room with all its curios and furnishings, I became confounded by the fact that Dexan – someone I would have expected to be constantly on the move – had created something so … permanent for himself.
‘Any luck?’ I asked Reichis.
He glanced back at me from where he was hanging off the top of one of the glass cases. ‘There’s kind of a lot of ground to cover here, Kellen. What about asking that thing in your eye?’
I shook my head. I’d tried several times since we got here but the sasutzei wasn’t responding. Maybe some of Dexan’s own wards interfered with it somehow. I rubbed at my right eye and felt nothing there. I’d probably asked it for help so many times on the way here that the spirit had got bored and abandoned me entirely.
‘What about one of those Jan’Tep magical whammy things?’ Reichis asked.
I almost laughed. ‘When have you ever seen me successfully cast a seeking spell?’
Reichis went back to rifling through the shelves and grumbled, ‘I can dream, can’t I?’
We kept searching for an hour, making rather a mess of Dexan’s palatial home, when all of a sudden the glow-glass ball I was carrying to illuminate the room flickered out.
‘Hey, a little light here?’ Reichis said.
Unfortunately I couldn’t make the glow-glass ignite again. Worse, I was pretty sure I knew why. I looked down at the red mark on my palm and felt the sting of Dexan using it to block my magic.
‘I told you the charm would go away by itself in a couple of days,’ Dexan himself said, stepping into the room. ‘If you’d just waited until then, you might have had a chance.’
I started to reach for powder from the pouches at my belt, but stopped myself when the burning in my palm increased.
‘Oh, you’re not going to start with that again, are you?’ Dexan asked. He sighed theatrically. ‘You know, it’s hard to believe, but even after all the nonsense you’ve put me through, I still can’t quite get myself to hate you, Kellen.’
‘That’s nice,’ Reichis chittered, climbing up another of the cases to gain the height he’d need to glide down and attack. ‘Tell him the feeling ain’t mutual.’
‘Unfortunately,’ Dexan went on, ‘I really can’t allow you to keep breaking the first rule though.’
I reached into my pockets and took out some of Ferius’s steel playing cards. At least those Dexan couldn’t interfere with.
‘Should’ve become my apprentice when you had the chance, Kellen,’ Dexan said. He made a simple somatic shape with his right hand, and this time I could see the slight shimmer of the onyx bracelet around his wrist. The sounds of thick claws at the end of four short legs clacked against the marble floor, along with the rustling of a heavy tail being dragged behind.
‘Great,’ Reichis said. ‘He brought the damned crocodile.’