The Sea Peoples(44)
The American continued to the English armorer: “Did you continue the search so persistently without any certainty of the greave being still in existence?”
“Of course,” the posh Englishman replied coolly.
“It was worth something to you.”
“No,” the older man with the English accent replied, laughing. “My pleasure in finding it was my reward.”
“Have you no ambition to be rich?” the American asked, with a sly smile in his voice.
The tone put Pip slightly on edge, as if it were a cat toying with something small and helpless.
“My one ambition is to be the best armorer in the world,” the Englishman answered gravely.
The conversation ended and Deor hissed: “In here! He mustn’t see us!”
They opened the door on the opposite side and entered. Pip gave a brilliant smile at the proprietor, sitting at a desk piled high with the musty-smelling books that crowded the shelves all about. They were ancient-looking for the most part, the leather of their binding wrought in ridges or tooled, often cracked and dried with age. They were the sort of thing the Bunyip aristocracy of Station-Holders in Townsville would have paid through the nose for if some salvager could get them out of the dead cities.
He peered at her over reading glasses with narrow lenses and cackled. “Not often we see a young miss like you in here! What might I help you with?”
Behind them the door to the armorer’s shop clinked open and shut. Footsteps went down the hall to the stairwell, and then up it with a tap of shoe-leather on boards and a creak.
“What’s that you have there?” Deor asked, nodding his head at the slim volume the old man was reading.
“Oh, just something French,” the man said, smoothly sliding another book across it.
From the brief glance at the page it was a printed play with stage directions and dialogue.
And with naughty pictures, probably, Pip thought; though what she’d seen had been only a chastely-robed woman gesturing wildly. Now what?
“Follow,” Deor said.
They filed out with the merchant staring after them in bewilderment—Toa reluctantly putting down a book on Gothic cathedrals, a style for which he had a passion, which had also astonished the proprietor—and went to the stairs. Pip put her hand into the bag over her shoulder, reaching for her slingshot. Somewhat to her surprise, it was still there rather than being transmuted to some fascinatingly archaic firearm of the ancient world.
Deor put a hand out as they filed up the stairwell, Toa walking crabwise next to the wall so the steps would creak less. Pip paced up quickly on quiet cat-feet, the slingshot clamped in her hand. The building was strange, obviously old and run-down, but equally obviously built in the modern fashion for natural ventilation and lighting from windows, lanterns and candles, though electric lights had been added later in a slapdash fashion.
Deor stopped at the top of the stairs. Thora followed him, hand on the gun in her handbag as it would have been on the hilt of her sword, and pointed to a door. Deor nodded, then made a sign towards the next one down the corridor; it had a disused air, and he listened at it and then nodded again.
“John,” he said very quietly.
Thora tested the knob, then began to lean against it, her leanly muscular arm tensing. Pip stepped forward:
“Let’s be subtle, shall we, eh?” she said.
Thora stepped aside, frowning faintly. Pip felt slightly abashed for a moment at the implied professionalism.
Tsk, tsk, girl. Mind on the prize, what?
She pulled her lockpicks out of the bag—they were there, and in the same chamois-leather wrap she usually kept them in, an identical replacement for her mother’s.
Perhaps it’s better that I’m not Supreme Goddess after all, she thought mordantly as she unlimbered two of them; the lock was a straight French, the antique straight-through type with two studs on the end of the key and much easier to jigger than a Yale style. I seem to be rather unimaginative even when I’m in a sodding spirit realm and can make things by thinking about it!
Her fingers moved carefully, slow steady pressures and then . . .
Click.
Picking locks is not for the nervous, as Mummy always said, she thought, rocking back on her heels as Thora went through with a nod and her hidden hand undoubtedly still clenched on the gun-butt.
They all followed, Toa last and closing the door delicately, with a hand that made the chipped glass knob look like a bead. Then he braced the door with his long-handled shovel, digging the point into the battered, splintered boards of the floor.
The others fanned out to search the suite of rooms. Most of whatever furniture it had had was gone, or draped in dingy sheets. There were four rooms, and one included a toilet and tub. The water wasn’t connected, and the tub was coated with a thin film of what Pip thought was actual marble. Thora exclaimed from another room, and she went into it. The Bearkiller woman was looking at a flower in a vase. . . .
Except that it wasn’t a rose, as she first thought. It was a carving, done in marble too, a creamy white color. The work was exquisitely detailed, and she wouldn’t have thought it was possible to catch the fleshy delicacy no matter how skillful you were. She looked at it in fascination and reached a finger out towards it.
“No!” Deor said sharply, his eyes fixed on the rose.
“It’s a dangerous carving of a rose?” Pip asked in exasperation.