Steelhands - Jaida Jones [185]
The largest door was at the end of the hall, crisscrossed with broad strips of steel and fitted with a knob in the center. There was a keyhole beneath it, and Balfour set to work once more, examining the size and shape of the hole in the door, then comparing it against the keys on the three separate rings.
I bent down to help him with them, this kind of detail being something I was drawn to instinctively. Keys were filthy instruments of disease, and I’d spent a great deal of time cleaning them for my father, and Laure’s father, and the town’s banker—whether they asked me to or not. Rather quickly—for me, at least—I turned up a silver key with the appropriate foot and what seemed like the correct number of wards shaped into it to bypass the lock.
“Try this,” I said, handing it over so that Balfour—our key man—might do the honors.
He took it, looking mildly baffled, the metal making a dull sound against his metal fingers beneath the fabric of his gloves and a slight magnetic pull causing the other keys in the rings to be drawn toward his palm. Then he set the key into the lock. I held my breath as he turned it, and sighed with relief when the tumblers shifted, the lock falling open with a click.
“Thank you,” Balfour said, straightening up and returning the key rings to his pocket.
“We’re sure this one’s not a velikaia?” Ghislain asked, peering at me skeptically.
“You would be the first to know,” I assured him, quite cheekily for me, but I was privately rather elated with my small success—no doubt the only assistance I would be able to offer for the rest of the night.
The door swung open with a gentle creak, and the six of us stepped inside. Next to me, Laure gasped, and Balfour stopped dead, as though he’d been transformed into his statue—or at least a smaller version of it.
It appeared to me that we had stumbled upon some kind of enormous workroom. Set throughout the room were long, rectangular tables made of stone and framed in wood. They were surrounded by tall stools, likely for whatever workers frequented this factory to sit upon. Against the far wall was the largest assortment of tools I’d ever seen in one place. The sight would’ve made a man like my father very happy—he imagined himself to be a talented tinkerer—but I couldn’t even begin to name half of them. I recognized dozens of pairs of pliers in a variety of sizes, as well as a hammer for sheeting metal and some kind of hacksaw. One of the tables had a dreadful mess on it, large silver and gold machine cogs littered across its surface and a long twisting pipe that looked as though it’d been bent nearly in two.
“This … This is the kind of stuff that Germaine woman had in her spare room,” Laure said, sounding weak. Slowly, she lowered her hands from her mouth, looking as though she expected the woman in question to leap from the shadows and drag her off to her offices. As if a simple physician was all we had to worry about now. “I knew I was getting a bad feeling from her, I just never …”
“I’ve been here,” Balfour said, whiter even than Raphael now, which was a feat in and of itself. “I thought it looked familiar before, but I was so distracted—I must’ve come in a different way, but this room … I’ve been in this room before. It’s where Margrave Germaine worked on my hands. Somehow, I’d thought it was part of the palace. But they must have moved me.”
Unaffected by our companions’ commentary, Luvander strode over to the table with the pieces lying on it, picking up one of the cogs and tracing his fingers thoughtfully over its sharp edges.
“Hard to tell what’s what in all this,” he said quietly. “I feel as though I’ve walked in on Yesfir naked.”
“It’s more than just material for my hands,” Balfour admitted.
“Unless the Margrave planned on making you a very large pair,” Luvander agreed. “With wings.”
He held up a finely hammered