The Wyvern's Spur - Kate Novak [99]
"Are you sure we aren't lost?" Olive asked.
"Oh, no," Giogi said. "After my mother died, I lived here at Redstone. There are simpler routes, but I thought, as long as we're avoiding disturbing Aunt Dorath, we may as well try avoiding disturbing Steele, too."
"Why did you move back to town?" Olive asked.
"Well, town is so much more interesting than the country. The inns and the adventurers passing through and-"
"And not needing to avoid disturbing Aunt Dorath," Cat suggested with a smile.
"Aunt Dorath isn't that bad," Giogi snapped at the mage.
Olive groaned inwardly. Loyalty to your family is fine, Giogi, my boy, she thought, but you don't want to get tetchy with our mage just before you start going through your uncle's magic.
Anxious to stem any flood of bad feeling, and remembering something Giogi had said to his burro, Birdie, about his family interfering in his life, Olive volunteered an observation of her own. "Everyone needs to make his own life for himself, though," she said aloud. "Cyrrollalee knows, I loved my mother, but she never understood why I chose music over merchandising, so I hit the road. The people who love us the most have more trouble accepting that we're different from them than strangers do."
"That's true," Giogi agreed as he opened a rusty door. Olive noticed that, despite the rust, the hinges were well oiled. A cool, dry darkness lay beyond the door.
Giogi drew the finder's stone from his boot and held it out in front of him. It illuminated a long, low tunnel. Giogi and Cat were both forced to stoop to get through, though Olive could walk upright. The tunnel ran into a round room no more than ten feet in diameter but several stories high, more like a chimney than a room. Centered in the room was a steep, tightly spiraled iron staircase rising into the blackness above.
Loviatar's Lackeys, Olive groaned inwardly. What possesses humans to construct such torture devices? "You two go on ahead. I'll catch up," she said.
"We can't leave you behind," Giogi objected. "It's too dark."
"Not for me," Olive said, massaging a calf muscle. "I can see just fine in the dark."
"You can? How extraordinary," Giogi commented. 'But are vou sure you'll be all right?"
"I'll be fine."
"Very well. It's just at the top of the stairs."
With his long legs, Giogi clambered up the stairs two at a time. His boots sounded against the steps like a gong. Cat followed, taking one step at a time, but her feet moved quickly enough to keep up with the nobleman. Her boots tapped a noise like a cobbler's hammer.
Olive waited until they were too far ahead to look back and witness the undignified methods a halfling had to resort to, to climb human stairs. With a sigh, she hiked her skirt up over her arm and began scaling the tower stairs, using both her hands and feet.
Olive climbed for a few minutes, then looked up. The light from Giogi's finder's stone had vanished. Presumably he and Cat had reached the top and turned some corner. But the stairs still reverberated under her hands with someone's tread. Olive looked down.
A lamp glowed far below her. Who could that be? Olive wondered. Her dark vision had never been as reliable as that of other halflings, so she was unable to make out any details of a face or even clothing from a distance. She could rule out Gaylyn and Julia. It was unlikely to be Aunt Dorath. It has to be a servant, Steele, or Frefford, Olive concluded, unless the Wyvernspurs keep some monstrous guardian here, too. She began climbing more quickly.
At the top of the stairs was another rusty door, which Giogi had left standing open. Olive stepped through it and into Drone's lab. She closed the door quietly behind her. There was a key in the lock, so she turned it. Whoever's down there can knock if he wants to join us, she thought.
Olive had seen the labs of more than a few powerful wizards in her travels. They all shared one thing in common: clutter of mythic proportions. Telescopes and astrolabes stood in front of every window, even though the view at every window was blocked on