A wet apparition?
Who had run by her? Why hadn’t they acknowledged her?
Then, even as she gazed at the footprints, dust filled them in, erasing their existence. The drops of water evaporated. All this though nothing shifted or swirled, her own footsteps remaining unchanged and clear.
Heart pounding, she grabbed the lamp and exited the corridor, the dark rolling in behind her retreating lamplight.
Imagination. I imagined it all.
But a prickle of premonition on the back of her neck warred with that simple explanation.
The records room was a vaulted chamber of tables and shelves overflowing with books and scrolls and crates of paper. Lamps had trouble illuminating the vast space and shone like small, insignificant orbs. With no windows but arrow slits along one wall, it might as well have been night. A decorative frieze was lost to the shadows, and the torsos of carved figures soaring toward the ceiling were severed in half by light and dark.
A clerk sat at a writing desk. He was so absorbed in his penmanship he hadn’t heard Karigan enter.
“Excuse me,” she said.
The clerk squawked and bounced up from his stool, knocking it over, which in turn pushed over a pile of books on the table behind him. The cascading books toppled a barrel of rolled maps. He squawked again when he saw that the ink of his pen had splattered across his papers. Hastily he grabbed a container of sand to sprinkle on the wet blotches, but the container’s lid fell off, and the entire contents of the container poured out into a little mound on his papers.
The clerk could only stare at the mess.
He was so expressively mortified that Karigan nearly laughed, but knowing it wouldn’t be appreciated, she swallowed it back. She stepped forward and the little man jumped again, eyes wide through his thick specs, and his hand over his heart.
“I’m sorry,” Karigan said, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“I thought you were a . . .” But he just trailed off, shaking his head and muttering.
Feeling somewhat responsible for the mess, Karigan set aside Captain Mapstone’s papers on a nearby table and said, “Let me help you.” She set to work righting the map barrel, and re-stacking the books.
The clerk watched her for a moment, then shook himself and tended to his sand-covered papers.
“You don’t get many visitors here, do you?” Karigan said.
“Very few.”
She wasn’t surprised she had startled him, if he wasn’t accustomed to people walking in very often. He’d also been concentrating on his work and was probably unaware of his surroundings. Still, it didn’t account for the way he now darted his gaze about, as though he expected someone to leap out of the shadows at any moment.
Considering the dark ambiance of the place, and what appeared to be a solitary job, it would be easy for one’s imagination to run wild. The ancient surroundings, the life a building could take on of its own—the moans of the structure, its wheezings and exhalations as air currents shifted, the flickering shadows . . .
Yes, all fodder for the imagination.
Had her own imagination been similarly triggered when she stood in the abandoned corridor?
When she placed the last book atop the pile—a dusty volume containing a ten-year-old inventory of castle livestock—she turned to the clerk. He seemed to have the sand situation in hand, but he’d have to copy over the memorandum he’d been writing. The splotches of ink rendered it illegible.
Hoping she wouldn’t spook him again, she said, “I’m sorry you’ll have to start over.”
The clerk sighed and fiddled nervously with his black sleeve guards. “It wouldn’t be the first time.” He then gazed nearsightedly at her. “You’re not Mara.”
“No, I’m Karigan, and I’m helping out Mara and Captain Mapstone. I brought over some documents. And you are?”
“Dakrias Brown, recordskeeper.”
“Tell me, Dakrias, did anyone else come by here shortly before I arrived?”
“No. No one has been here all day, except the chief administrator, and that was hours ago.” He glanced anxiously about. “Why do you ask?”
“I thought I saw someone near here just a few moments ago.”
Dakrias’ gaze turned penetrating. “It happens sometimes.”
“What? You said very few come here and—”
“Yes, I did. I did, indeed. Very few people.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I am often here alone,” Dakrias said, “filing records, copying correspondence, that sort of thing. The other clerks call this place the crypt.” He frowned with distaste. “They are all on an upper level, in a more active section of the castle. They have windows. They just don’t understand what it’s like down here for me.”
“Why are you down here away from the rest of administration?”
Dakrias shrugged. “Too much effort to move hundreds of years of census records, and all the birth, marriage, and death registers . . . No one wants to deal with moving it—no one. It’s just easier to leave it be, because they know Dakrias Brown will take care of it, and they just forget about me. Hmph. They don’t have to be stuck down here.”
His eyes roved about the chamber. “This was once the library, before the castle expanded prior to the Clan Wars.”
A library . . . A dark and gloomy one at that.
As if picking up on her thoughts, Dakrias jabbed his finger toward the ceiling shrouded in shadow. “Used to be domed with glass, but they built right over the top of it.”