How, you might wonder, could I so blithely sell out my friends? My simple answer is that I didn’t think of Lewibindi Jaestis as a friend. It is true that he had been acting very friendly towards me in recent days. But we had no old intimacy. He might be nice to me, but he was nice to everyone. Because he wanted things from them. Present things and future things. Niceness was his weapon. Still, I realize now that my betrayal of him did bother my conscience, as I immediately embarked on a tremendous bender.

  The spy master drank up his whiskey and hurried away and I settled down for a nice nap in the snug. When I awoke I ordered a good yeasty ale, in honor of the Prince of Churl’s home. The next few days are a bit of a blur. I was naked at least once. I danced quite a lot. Someone bit me on my shoulder at one point. I learned a new song, a haunting melody with words that I couldn’t quite remember. It teased at my mind like a bit of food caught between a rear molar.

  My binge took in the whole city. I was in the Dust and Pen for awhile, and then in Dirty Drake’s, where I apparently interrupted a poetry reading. I have a memory of standing on the wall of the library complex. I have another memory of squatting beside the mayoral mansion and relieving my bowels. At some point a kindly woman with heavy arms and an insistent attitude gave me a bath, as evidenced by a vaporous memory of someone yielding a sponge with great force and efficiency, and by the fact that I didn’t stink when I finally came to. Faces swam before me. My friends the songsters. The apple-cheeked matron who worked for Bhaetamistri. Malreesi Muelant. Lianahndra, appraising me with disappointed eyes. I didn’t know which I had really encountered and which were simply present in my inebriated brain.

  I awoke in the Bird and Baby. I was lying on a bench in a corner, and the boy Oulute was wiping my face with a cold cloth. I had a rancid, acidic taste in my mouth. “I vomited,” I asserted, and Oulute laughed.

  “You puked your guts out,” he told me.

  “Well, they seem to still be in place. Although I’m not sure that they want to be.”

  “Have some water.”

  “Water is kind.”

  I drank. It was soothing and cool. My mouth was still rancid. “Do you have anything to eat?” I asked.

  “Sraymalik says that you’re not to eat here. Come on, get up. I’m supposed to take you home.”

  “Home? Now that is a concept that still resides in the realm of theory. I have a place where I usually sleep. I have no home.”

  “You have Haunts and Scribbles,” he said, nudging me upwards.

  “I knew a little girl once,” I said, “in Doefrit’s Bend. Whenever she was surprised or injured she would say ‘I want to go home.’ Even when she was in her own house. It annoyed her father, but I knew what she meant. Really, Oulute, I must do something about this taste in my mouth.”

  “We can get you some steamed buns,” he allowed. He really was quite a nice boy.

  The buns were very tasty. Pork in a plum sauce. Not too spicy. My stomach took some time to consider them, and then decided to let them stay. I had a terrible headache. The air was still cold, the ground still icy, the banks of snow were yellow and brown with waste. Libreigia is truly hateful in winter.

  Oulute deposited me in the atrium and I had to undergo the fearful administrations of Whinagher before I was allowed to crawl up the stairs to my chambers. There I slept for several days. Or at least one day. When I awoke I found that no one had bothered to look in on me, and that I had no water. I picked up my rather dirty pitcher and made my way down the spiral stairs, going past the library and descending to the kitchens. The cook has a hangover cure, as all cooks must, and they gave it to me with a few snipes and jeers. A cook boy was directed to take me outside and along the freezing path to the bath house. There I sat for an indeterminate time, immersed in one of the blessed pools, feeling the effects of my binge float away on the water. Libreigia is built over a series of natural hot springs, and almost all of the towers have a bath. It is one of the few recompenses for having to live a scholarly life.

  It was when I was dressing again that I found the note tucked into my sleeve pocket. It was written in a very fine hand, and I had to take it out into the garden to read it. *Jaestis has retrieved the elephant and returned with it to Haunts and Scribbles. Please take it from him and bring it to the Dust and Pen.* I goggled at these words. I was shivering, and I could feel icicles forming in my wet hair. Someone had slipped this note into my pocket during my binge. But who? And when?

  It was clear that it came from the spy master, but I doubted that he had delivered it himself. Perhaps I really had seen the apple-cheeked matron. Perhaps the woman who bathed me had an ulterior motive when she took up the chore of scrubbing at my stinking skin. Perhaps Oulute was in Bhaetamistri’s pay. As I stood in the garden, shivering and clutching the note, I resolved that I would never get that drunk again.

  Now that I had been given a mission I found that I had to hang about Haunts and Scribbles, nursing my hangover and hoping to avoid any long conversations with the other scholars. I checked to see if Lewibindi was in his rooms. He wasn’t. I went down to Lianahndra’s chambers and asked if she had seen him. She told me that I disgusted her and threw me out. After making sure that he wasn’t anywhere else in the tower, I went down to the atrium.

  It was midafternoon. Whinagher was sitting at his desk, poised above the reading tables and facing the door. A line of children slouched on the bench beside him. A couple of them were occupying themselves with a game of dice. A scholar from one of the other towers came into the atrium and demanded access to an ancient text. One of the children was sent to fetch it. The scholar took it and settled at a table to read and take notes, watched carefully by Whinagher lest he slip the treatise into his robes and disappear into the city.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Whinagher was also watching me, and after awhile he summoned me over. “Is there something you need, Bends?” he asked in his usual condescending way.

  “I am trying to preserve my better nature,” I said haughtily.

  “By skulking about the atrium?”

  “I am struggling with a temptation. I want to go out and see my friends in the wineshops. But my gut and my head and, in fact, my whole body, seem disinclined to follow the dictates of my will. They demand that I subject myself to a quiet evening at home. Only there is nothing to do while one is at home.”

  “You could do some scholarship.”

  “It is true that the world is waiting for my treatise on the People of Skies and Visions,” I allowed. “I delay in the hopes of building their anticipation to a fever pitch.”

  Whinagher snapped his fingers and a boy scuttled forward. “Go and find something for Bends to read,” he said.

  The boy gaped at him. “What sort of thing?”

  Whinagher appraised me. “Something light and stupid. How about Vahressa Toehbit’s ghost stories?”

  The boy scuttled off. I made a face at Whinagher. “I am uninterested in ghost stories.”

  “Then you belong to the wrong tower.”

  “What is so objectionable about this book that you’ve chosen for me?”

  “It’s a book for children.”

  Dismissed in this way, I took the book, when it was brought, to a table by the door. I found it very charming. I was deep into the tale of a girl who saw a ghost in an umbrella, and beginning to feel hungry, when Lewibindi Jaestis came hurrying through the atrium. He was moving too quickly for me to catch him. I hurried after him, tucking the Toehbit book into my sleeve for further reading. His footsteps echoed loudly up the spiral stairs. I was in no shape to chase him, yet chase him I did. His footsteps stopped at Lianahndra’s door. I heard him throw it open and say, “I was followed.”

  The sound of a chair scraping against the floor as it was pushed back from her desk. A note of alarm in her voice. “But you got it? Did they see you come and go from the Countess’s house?”

  The door closed. I crept up to it. I could hear their muffled voices in the room beyond. I could only make out a handful of words. Something about a tile, and messages, and waiting until nightfall. Then Lew’s footsteps were coming back towards the door. I gathered my robes about my ankles and ran lightly up the stairs.

  I sat beside Lew and Lian at dinner, and did my best to be amusing. Lew smiled at my japes, but there was worry in his eyes. Lianahndra contrived to ignore me. After dinner I asked if they might like to have a drink in my chambers, but they declined. Lew went out into the city again. Lian returned to her studies. I crept up the spiral stairs and set to searching Lewibindi’s chambers.

  You can learn a lot about a person from their chambers. Lewibindi’s were very neat and tidy. There were three styluses arranged on his desk, and their nibs were very clean. The inkwell was made of clay and decorated with a pleasing zigzag pattern. It was free of the usual smudges of dried ink, as if he wiped it after every use. His desk was innocent of any books or scrolls, although there was a single sheet of paper laid out on it. This paper bore nothing but the alphabet, each letter written distinctly and spaced apart from its fellows. There was a triangular piece of tile on the paper. It’s tip was pointing at the letter T.

  His bed had a curtain about it. The sheets were tucked and the pillows fluffed. He had a wardrobe with a fine carved filagree upon the doors. It had been polished so much that it gleamed even in the meager light from the windows. It was full of shadowy robes and smelled of cedar chips. I did not light a lamp to search. I relied on moonlight and the city’s glow.

  The little elephant was not in residence. I stood back after my labors and surveyed the room, looking for nooks and crannies, secret panels and other such hiding places. Lewibindi’s chambers were as clean and neat and pleasing as his outward appearance. But since I now knew that there were strange secrets hiding behind his handsome facade, I was sure that the room must also be obscuring something. I looked at the bed curtain. It draped down from a stout oaken frame. I went to it and ran my fingers around the frame. Sure enough, there was a little alcove, carved out of the wood at the head of the bed. It was empty at present, but I was certain that it was big enough to hide the elephant.

  I was just about to leave in triumph when I noticed that one of the pens on the desk was slightly out of line. Had I jostled it? I went to straighten it and inadvertently knocked the inkwell to the floor. I imagined a huge and disastrous splashing of ink across the tiles. For a moment I was relieved that the inkwell only spilled a small trickle. Then I was suspicious. I picked it up and turned it over and found that it had a little sliding door on its bottom. I opened it, and there was the elephant, snug within.

  It was a moment’s work to sop up the ink, aided by the fact that Lewibindi had a full jug of water beside his wash basin. The elephant was safely in my sleeve pocket. The inkwell was carefully returned to its place on the desk. I tread lightly from the room.

  I intended to go immediately to the Dust and Pen, but I was halfway through the atrium when it occurred to me that Lew would notice the water gone from the jug. I snuck back up the spiral stairs, took the jug, refilled it with water from my own room, and replaced it. Back down, intending to flit away into the night. I was at the atrium door when I started worrying about the inkwell. Back up the stairs to snatch the inkwell, take it to my chambers, and refresh it with my own poor stock of ink. Back down, the night beckoning. I was nearly out the door when I worried that I had disturbed the pillows on his bed. Back up the stairs to stand in the doorway of his chambers, peering into the gloom and trying to ascertain whether it was possible to notice incremental pillow shiftings.

  It was now fully night, and the children were negligent and hadn’t lit the stairway lamps. Lewibindi’s room was very dark, as clouds had filled the sky and muted the light from the windows. A strange sensation crept over me as I stood there. The tower seemed very silent. I waited for a scholar to sneeze on the floors below. No sneeze came. Was I alone? Had they all gone off to some banquet that I wasn’t invited to? The song that had been haunting me came back into my head, as if it had been waiting to ambush me on the darkened stairs. I stood for a moment, and then shook myself. I wanted light and good cheer and a drink. I turned, intending to finally go to the Dust and Pen, and something moved in the corner of my eye.

  I turned back. There was a man standing right behind me. So close that I should have felt his breath. He was shorter than me, and his head was tilted up to my face, as if he wanted to scrutinize me. He had large, round eyes and bushy eyebrows. And he had a hairlip.