Pacina Fioranati leads to Lucrèce Langlois, Lucrèce Langlois leads to Chiquart Boisselot, Chiquart Boisselot leads to Regina Azaïs, and traversing this chain takes less out of them—fewer trades, fewer promises, fewer flirtations—than it might have a month ago. Some mix of pity-tinged urgency, now that Corypheus is flexing his muscles in Minrathous and Kirkwall (among other places) is littered with rubble, and congenital frankness leads Azaïs to need no persuasion at all, in fact, to tell them that she passed a book that may be the one they're searching for to Col Thiers, only a month ago.
The upside is that Thiers lives in the city. One downside is that he's dead and the contents of his terrace house are locked down pending a vicious game of tug-o-war between his heirs.
This is only so much of a downside. Bastien is Bastien, and Thiers' cook isn't hard to find or hard to charm into giving them a way in.
A second downside is that Thiers, in his twilight years, had become something of a hoarder, and all three stories plus the attic of his narrow house are brimming with books, papers, letters, and junk stacked on every available surface, never mind what the library must look like when they find it.
"Shit," Bastien says—mildly and pleasantly, more in a tone like wow than oh no, barely like it's swearing at all—as he takes stock of the first room they encounter, lit only by the small flame from his firestarting runestone shaded by a cupped hand. This is a street that the city guard patrols and a house they know to be empty. Light visible from the windows will only bring trouble.
"Shit," Octavius echoes with an expression of wide-eyed, burgeoning delight threatening to put a completely inappropriate smile on his face. He manages to rein it in, but in his defence, he hasn't seen editions of some of these texts outside the libraries of the Minrathous and Vyrantium Circles, and the last time he was able to set foot in either of those places was at least seven years ago. "What an impressive collection..!"
What little light Bastien's flame provides isn't nearly enough to illuminate more than a handful of dusty spines at a time, and the reading glasses Octavius fetches out of his pocket to peer through only provide a bit more help. He squints at each spine, lips forming the names of titles and authors as he traces his fingers across them, seeming to rule most of them out at a glance if the subtle shake of his head is anything to go by. "No," he not-quite-whispers, "all of this would be useful supplementary reading, but a first edition Caecilius on Razikale wouldn't be left sitting out like this next to," he picks up a book at random, and snorts. "A revised tenth edition of Theophrastus's dialectics." He exhales a sigh that sounds suspiciously like, 'Theophrastus, I mean, really.' like, who even takes Theophrastus seriously anymore, right?
"Right," Bastien says, without skepticism. An agreeable right. He's not sure any of these books deserve to have been left out this way—a symptom, perhaps, of receiving his very first book when he was twelve years old, sleeping with it on his person to make sure no one used it for kindling, and going into full-blown mourning when one of his younger siblings left grubby fingerprints on the pages.
But for the same reasons, Octavius is the expert, more or less.
To assist with the less, he adds, "If he ever had anyone over," which does seem like an if, with the state of the place, "it could not have been anywhere someone would have seen it."
The cook was his sole help at the time of his death, and she couldn't read.
"We also have to entertain the possibility that his heirs or his solicitor have been through and removed or destroyed anything they considered bad for the family name."
Octavius hums his wordless quasi-agreement with a mild frown and a shrug, peering at the rest of the titles with the thinly restrained interest of a chronic academic. "It's possible," he hedges, "but they would need to know what they were looking for first, and there's just so much here."
He almost sounds mournful as he says it, certain that much of this material is going to be consigned to a pyre rather than make its way into the hands of dedicated curators. What a waste. (Except for Theophrastus's dialectics, evidently.) Dragging his eyes away from the shelves and back to Bastien, he nods back to the corridor and suggests, "He may have had the book rebound to conceal its provenance. Let's check the library?"
"You check," Bastien says, looking about the sitting room insofar as the dim flicker of light above his runestone allows.
Octavius may very well be right, though it would be odd for this careless hoarder to be the first to think of changing the cover, and odd (or obstructionist) for Azaïs not to have tipped them off if it had been rebound before him. But about the library, at least, the odds seem good. Hiding it amongst the other books would make as much sense as anything.
But while Octavius' skills may be best applied to a library, Bastien's are best applied to loose floorboards and disguised safes and statues that need to be turned just so to reveal a hidden chamber. And if they're going to be opening every book to see if the contents match the packaging—
"I'll come help you after I've had a look around the other rooms."
Someone is going to be opening every book to see if the contents match the packaging, at any rate. "All right," Octavius says, "I'll just--" and he makes a more or less universally awkward 'I'll just, you know, go do that' head-nod-and-handwave gesture while trying to slip past Bastien and into the hallway.
Getting to the library involves scaling a flight of stairs and then tugging an additional hidden staircase down via a cord to ascend to the attic, but once he's up there and has conjured a little orb of light into one hand to illuminate his immediate surroundings, Octavius is momentarily transfixed by all of the books on display--even if the displays in question are towering stacks of books that could come tumbling down on top of him if he isn't careful. Perhaps it will be in everyone's best interest if he starts with what he can see on the shelves.
Having squeezed himself between two towering pillars of books, he heads over to the shelves and begins the tedious process of trying to find the needle in this literary haystack.
Elsewhere, Bastien's search is not exactly fruitless.
There's a trick floorboard disguised by a carpet and a nightstand, with contents so old and grimy that they were likely left behind by whoever lived here before Thiers: a hand-carved wood and ivory tobacco pipe, a gold locket in Blessed Age style with an ancient curl of hair inside, a slab of bricky clay with the impressions of two tiny feet. Someone's treasure. Bastien pockets the pipe and locket and moves the footprints to a drawer in the nightstand, where Thiers' heirs might be more likely to find and wonder about them.
Behind a painting is a vault, easy enough to crack, containing provisions for a man either paranoid or only very well-prepared in a relatable way. A change of clothes without any signs of wear, in case a man needed to disappear and didn't want anyone to be able to describe what hat and jacket he took with him, with coins and a few jewels sewn into the hems. Traveling gear and a sack of money. Bastien spends a few minutes snipping the valuables out of the jacket and sewing the hem back up, but he leaves the sack alone.
Elsewhere, less carefully hidden, are coins dropped into drawers as if tossed there in the process of trying to clean, bundled correspondence with other academics and friends, and—in the back corner of an armoire—a shimmery black silk scarf.
All decent fruit, all unlikely to be marked as missing in the neglected mess of the houe. But the fruit—the book—is not anywhere he looks, so eventually he wanders back to the library, peeking through the windows on the staircase as he goes to ensure the guardsmen are still unworried and half-asleep at their posts. His bag and pockets don't jangle when he enters; he's better at this than that.
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no subject
The upside is that Thiers lives in the city. One downside is that he's dead and the contents of his terrace house are locked down pending a vicious game of tug-o-war between his heirs.
This is only so much of a downside. Bastien is Bastien, and Thiers' cook isn't hard to find or hard to charm into giving them a way in.
A second downside is that Thiers, in his twilight years, had become something of a hoarder, and all three stories plus the attic of his narrow house are brimming with books, papers, letters, and junk stacked on every available surface, never mind what the library must look like when they find it.
"Shit," Bastien says—mildly and pleasantly, more in a tone like wow than oh no, barely like it's swearing at all—as he takes stock of the first room they encounter, lit only by the small flame from his firestarting runestone shaded by a cupped hand. This is a street that the city guard patrols and a house they know to be empty. Light visible from the windows will only bring trouble.
no subject
What little light Bastien's flame provides isn't nearly enough to illuminate more than a handful of dusty spines at a time, and the reading glasses Octavius fetches out of his pocket to peer through only provide a bit more help. He squints at each spine, lips forming the names of titles and authors as he traces his fingers across them, seeming to rule most of them out at a glance if the subtle shake of his head is anything to go by. "No," he not-quite-whispers, "all of this would be useful supplementary reading, but a first edition Caecilius on Razikale wouldn't be left sitting out like this next to," he picks up a book at random, and snorts. "A revised tenth edition of Theophrastus's dialectics." He exhales a sigh that sounds suspiciously like, 'Theophrastus, I mean, really.' like, who even takes Theophrastus seriously anymore, right?
no subject
But for the same reasons, Octavius is the expert, more or less.
To assist with the less, he adds, "If he ever had anyone over," which does seem like an if, with the state of the place, "it could not have been anywhere someone would have seen it."
The cook was his sole help at the time of his death, and she couldn't read.
"We also have to entertain the possibility that his heirs or his solicitor have been through and removed or destroyed anything they considered bad for the family name."
no subject
He almost sounds mournful as he says it, certain that much of this material is going to be consigned to a pyre rather than make its way into the hands of dedicated curators. What a waste. (Except for Theophrastus's dialectics, evidently.) Dragging his eyes away from the shelves and back to Bastien, he nods back to the corridor and suggests, "He may have had the book rebound to conceal its provenance. Let's check the library?"
no subject
Octavius may very well be right, though it would be odd for this careless hoarder to be the first to think of changing the cover, and odd (or obstructionist) for Azaïs not to have tipped them off if it had been rebound before him. But about the library, at least, the odds seem good. Hiding it amongst the other books would make as much sense as anything.
But while Octavius' skills may be best applied to a library, Bastien's are best applied to loose floorboards and disguised safes and statues that need to be turned just so to reveal a hidden chamber. And if they're going to be opening every book to see if the contents match the packaging—
"I'll come help you after I've had a look around the other rooms."
no subject
Getting to the library involves scaling a flight of stairs and then tugging an additional hidden staircase down via a cord to ascend to the attic, but once he's up there and has conjured a little orb of light into one hand to illuminate his immediate surroundings, Octavius is momentarily transfixed by all of the books on display--even if the displays in question are towering stacks of books that could come tumbling down on top of him if he isn't careful. Perhaps it will be in everyone's best interest if he starts with what he can see on the shelves.
Having squeezed himself between two towering pillars of books, he heads over to the shelves and begins the tedious process of trying to find the needle in this literary haystack.
no subject
There's a trick floorboard disguised by a carpet and a nightstand, with contents so old and grimy that they were likely left behind by whoever lived here before Thiers: a hand-carved wood and ivory tobacco pipe, a gold locket in Blessed Age style with an ancient curl of hair inside, a slab of bricky clay with the impressions of two tiny feet. Someone's treasure. Bastien pockets the pipe and locket and moves the footprints to a drawer in the nightstand, where Thiers' heirs might be more likely to find and wonder about them.
Behind a painting is a vault, easy enough to crack, containing provisions for a man either paranoid or only very well-prepared in a relatable way. A change of clothes without any signs of wear, in case a man needed to disappear and didn't want anyone to be able to describe what hat and jacket he took with him, with coins and a few jewels sewn into the hems. Traveling gear and a sack of money. Bastien spends a few minutes snipping the valuables out of the jacket and sewing the hem back up, but he leaves the sack alone.
Elsewhere, less carefully hidden, are coins dropped into drawers as if tossed there in the process of trying to clean, bundled correspondence with other academics and friends, and—in the back corner of an armoire—a shimmery black silk scarf.
All decent fruit, all unlikely to be marked as missing in the neglected mess of the houe. But the fruit—the book—is not anywhere he looks, so eventually he wanders back to the library, peeking through the windows on the staircase as he goes to ensure the guardsmen are still unworried and half-asleep at their posts. His bag and pockets don't jangle when he enters; he's better at this than that.
"No luck," he whispers. "You?"