Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [116]
“I told him. I’m his agent, it’s my duty to keep him informed.” She sniffed. “Father could use some lessons in subtlety himself. All right. I will try those hiding places right now—if the bottle isn’t there, we’re no worse off than we were before. I will be back before nightfall and let you know of my progress.”
Or lack of it, she thought, as she left the stable. And she felt her head again. This task was turning out to bid fair to break her skull. Ow.
The view from the minstrel’s gallery above the throne room was superb. You could see everything with nothing in the way. There was only one guard on the throne room. The three captives eyed him dubiously. He was one they all recognized and he was a good enough fellow, but they probably could not get away with strolling into the throne room and rummaging around in secret hiding places.
“Should we distract him with our feminine wiles?” asked Yulya in a whisper. She didn’t look happy about the prospect, but in the past few days she had gone from timid and incapable to determined and capable of accomplishing quite a bit. That Rusalka would not have gotten the better of her a second time. She still wasn’t the equal of, say, Klava, but her attitude toward everything had improved enormously.
“I don’t think so,” Katya whispered back. “Not that you don’t have plenty of feminine wiles, Yulya, but it’s one thing to chat up one of the guards when they aren’t on duty. It’s quite another to come marching up to him when he’s on an important post and start batting your eyelashes at him.”
“You think he’d suspect something?” Yulya sounded more relieved than disappointed.
“I would, if I were him. These fellows aren’t stupid, more’s the pity.” Katya surveyed the room, looking for any more guards. Their hiding place in the minstrel’s gallery gave them a good vantage point for any purpose; the carved screen across the whole of it allowed them to see without being seen. Evidently the Katschei or his predecessor believed that minstrels should be heard and not seen. “Remember what Sergei told me. Since The Tradition doesn’t hold the Jinn here, we can’t count on him making Traditional Path mistakes, like hiring stupid guards. And he hasn’t.”
“It’s true that they do seem very smart,” Yulya said thoughtfully. “Smarter than I would have expected.”
“All right. He can’t see the throne from where he’s standing,” Katya observed. “Guiliette, it looks as if the first hiding place is yours to look into. Literally.”
The Wili nodded, and slipped into her semitransparent state. If she was moving, you would certainly see her, but if she was still, she could be mistaken for a trick of shadows. “I’ll come through the corridor wall and then freeze in place.”
The problem was this throne room was built in a kind of extension to the Castle itself, so that there were three outside walls. It had probably been planned in order to have as many windows as possible, taking advantage of natural light. However, that made getting into it a challenge. The four of them were in the minstrel’s gallery on the one inside wall, facing the rear of the room and the throne, and directly above the corridor that gave access to the room.
The throne was not only on a dais, it was inside a kind of enclosure that was twice the height of the throne itself, gilded on the inside. The effect would be to make both the throne and its occupant seem larger and more important. Katya wondered what the Katschei had looked like. Had this been his idea? Had he been a wizened little thing, or the opposite? She had the feeling he had been small and wizened, and very self-important.
There were two niches for guards behind the throne, in the two rear corners of the room. Because of the enclosure, the one guard on duty could not actually see the throne itself. But Guiliette would have to be very careful when crossing the floor between