Chapter Two Hundred and Ninety-Nine - My Bunny Sense Is Tingling

Tracking down the strange musician wasn’t as easy as I expected it to be. It wasn’t like we were outside where he might have left footprints on the ground or anything. This was a nicely appointed building, and while there might have been a scuff or two on the carpet that would give someone with a tracking skill enough to go on, I wasn’t that person.

“Dang,” I said.

“He can’t have gone too far,” Awen said. She looked up and down the corridor.

It seemed unlikely that he’d backtrack, so I ruled that out. It wasn’t impossible, but it was less likely, I thought. That left... every other direction, which was a lot of directions.

He could have gone into the main hall, but that would mean bumping into politicians and diplomats and important people. That felt unlikely; he would stick out like a sore thumb. So, that left the back rooms behind the stage, and maybe the basement.

The stage was a more obvious choice. If the maybe-mysterious musician was just an ordinary-unmysterious musician, then it made sense that he’d head for the stage where all the other musicians were currently playing for the crowd. maybe he was part of another act?

“Come on,” I said. “We’ll look backstage and then if he’s not there, we can start looking elsewhere.”

Awen nodded as she stepped up next to me, skirts swirling around in a pretty way. “Broccoli?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you sure that the person you saw was weird? It could just be someone that works here,” she said.

I considered it. “You might be right,” I said. “You’re probably right, even.”

“Then why are we chasing after them?”

“Because... I don’t know,” I said. “I know I saw them before. It’s like a word on the tip of my tongue, but a person’s face instead. Uh, not a face on the tip of my tongue, that’d be weird.”

Awen giggled. “Let’s not start licking people, please. I think the sylph think we’re strange enough without us doing anything like that.”

I nodded. “I promise I won’t lick anyone.”

“Good,” Awen said. “Now, where did you see them last?”

“Uh, I don’t know. I think that’s part of not remembering.”

“Was it in Goldenalden?” Awen asked.

I frowned. “No, I don’t think so. Before that, maybe?”

“We didn’t see that many sylph before arriving in Sylphfree. You did head out at that one town, uh, the one near the coast.”

“Granite Springs. Yeah, maybe I saw him there?” That didn’t sound quite right. It was really starting to bother me. How could I forget a potential friend I’d met? It was just wrong. I had to set aside my mental search for a moment as Awen and I arrived behind the stage. There was an open doorway, the other side of which wasn’t nearly as well decorated, and the corridor there had racks and heaps of ropes and the sorts of things I guess were normal to find behind a stage.

If I was Rainnewt and I was up to no good, where would I go?

I didn’t know that it was Rainnewt, of course. I only suspected it, a lot. So much that my tail felt twitchier than usual.

There were also two guards at the doors, both of them looking mighty serious. “Hello ma’am, can we assist you?”

“Yes!” I said. “In two ways. First, did you see a musician come pass here? A sylph, about this tall.” I brought my hand to around the sylph’s height. “Dark hair. Like brownish-black. I guess about your age? Um, was wearing the same uniform as the people in the orchestra.”

“Are they a friend of yours?” the guard asked. “Did they accost you?”

“Huh? They might be a friend? They didn't accost me or anything and I'm not sure I've ever seen them before,” I said. “But I’m looking for them now.”

The guards glanced at each other. “Why?”

“Well, he was a bit suspicious, maybe. Did you see him?”

“We didn’t see anyone of the sort, no,” the guard said. “The orchestra all came in from the back.”

“Alright, thanks,” I said. “Uh, my other thing! I was wondering if you could get someone for me? Either Princess Caprica or Amaryllis Albatross. She’s a harpy. You can’t miss her.”

“Ma’am,” the guard said, “the summit speech is about to begin, perhaps you should return to your seats?”

I pouted, but Awen’s hand on my shoulder reminded me that I was maybe being a little bit weird about this. “Fine. Thank you,” I said before turning around.

“It’s okay,” Awen said. “You did what you could?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “At least we learned one thing, he didn’t come over here.”

“Which is a bit weird,” Awen said. “He had a big case with him, right? I think it would be hard to forget someone like that, maybe.”

“It would be extra weird if he returned to the main hall,” I said. I paused as we arrived in front of one set of doors. The plain doorway that Caprica had said led into the basement.

Awen glanced at it. “You don’t think...”

“Maybe,” I said.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to go down there,” Awen hesitated.

“Just a peek. It’s probably locked anyway.” I reached over and tugged on the door. It opened, the hinge a bit rough, but it was definitely not locked.

The room beyond was dark, only lit by the cracked open doorway and little else. There was a staircase, made of wooden planks and lined on all sides by rough-hewn stone walls, as if the entire passage was melted through the rock of the mountain.

“I guess he might have gone down there,” Awen said.

“I guess,” I said.

“Should we go back? Maybe tell the guards?”

“I kind of want to go exploring down there,” I said. It looked creepy and dark and fun.

Awen sighed. “I knew you’d say that. Let me tie my skirts up a little, I don’t want to trip down the stairs.”

“Oh, you could stay up here,” I said. “Watch Amaryllis’ bit to make sure it all goes well.”

“Amaryllis will be fine,” Awen said. “But you’re likely to get into a heap of trouble. Someone needs to be there to save you from it.”

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“I don’t get into that much trouble,” I said.

She gave me a look.

“No, really. I get into a little bit of trouble here and there, but so far we’ve always gotten out of it just fine.”

“That’s nice,” Awen said. “I’m still coming with you, unless you really don’t want me to come?”

I crossed my arms. “Don’t be silly, Awen, you’re one of my best friends, of course I want you to get into trouble with me... a little bit of trouble. Probably less than an inconvenience, really.”

“Sure,” Awen said. It didn’t sound all that sincere, but she did step up ahead of me, one hand rising a moment before it started to glow faintly as a ball of light appeared.

I slipped in next to her, my own hand rising while I tried to copy the same spell. I was a bit out of practice with that one, but it was a simple enough spell that I got it before I was more than a couple of steps down.

“Someone’s been here recently,” I said.

“The dust on the steps,” Awen said.

I nodded, then realized she couldn’t see it. “Yeah, you’re right,” I muttered, almost in a whisper. There were footsteps imprinted onto the steps, leather soles marking a path down and down.

The steps went down much lower than just one floor, and by the time we were at the bottom the door we’d entered from was barely visible.

The stairs bottomed out in a large room. It was almost a cavern, with sleek stone floors and distant walls. Pillars stood out at even intervals, turning the shadows we cast into choppy lines across the near-emptiness.

The basement wasn’t empty-empty, just near-empty. Crates lined the sides, some in big piles, others stacked up in neat rows closer to the centre of the room. There were no signs of our strange musician except for a few faint marks on the dusty ground and maybe a few broken spiderwebs.

“He went this way,” Awen said. She knelt next to some of the tracks, then looked up in the direction they flowed in. “This really is getting suspicious,” she whispered.

The ceiling was low enough that the little floof hairs on the tips of my ears brushed against it. It made me want to hunch down subconsciously. “Why is the basement here so big?” I whispered.

“I think they might have used it as a shelter or something,” Awen whispered back.

We started to follow the path our mysterious friend left in the dust. It led around some boxes that looked like they were filled with big cloth banners. I heard a faint ticking sound. It wasn’t just one, there were a few that were echoing across the room, but I figured it was just water dropping, or maybe some old abandoned clock ticking away.

I really hoped it was someone collection of antique clocks.

As we came around the boxes, the sound grew much louder.

“Oh no,” Awen said.

A case was left on the ground, the same case that our musician friend had been carrying earlier. It was pressed up against one of the pillars. The case was open, revealing an intricate little machine made of brass and steel. It was like a clock, but next to it was a big barrel that filled most of the case.

“I’ve played a lot of musical instruments,” Awen said. “And I’ve seen more. But that’s a new one.”

“That looks a bit like a bomb,” I said.

“It does look like that, yeah,” Awen said.

We both glanced around, but there were no signs of the musician, just a few tracks leading off deeper into the darkness.

Awen’s light dimmed. “We might want to be a little less obvious,” she whispered as she moved over to the probably-a-bomb. She knelt next to it, then carefully leaned over the clock-like device on the side.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A timer. See, there’s a mainspring there, and those gears are turning with its push... and look at that part there, and there. They look like primer rods. See, they’re under tension, and I bet those little plates there are strikers.”

“So, definitely a bomb,” I said.

“Probably,” Awen said. “It’s pretty complicated, but it looks like it’s set up to be a big timer that goes off at a specific time.”

“Do you know when?” I asked.

She looked at the mechanism again. “Maybe two hours? It doesn’t exactly have a clockface, so I’m guessing.”

“Huh... well, I think we should probably tell the guards,” I said.

“That sounds reasonable,” Awen said. “I can disarm this too. It’s got two anti-tampering things, but that’s all I see.”

“There could be more.”

“I can be careful,” Awen said. “Even if we get the guards, and they believe us, it might take a while to disarm this.”

I licked my lips while looking around some more. “Awen, what are the chances that this is the only one?”

Awen glanced up at me, then stared at the other pillars. “Low. Just one of these pillars breaking might shake the building up a bit, but I don’t think it’ll bring the whole palace down.”

“So you’d need more than one?” I asked.

She scanned the area. “If it were me, I’d blow up as many of these pillars as I could. All at the same time. I’m not sure what’s in that box, but it might not be enough to destroy the pillar, so you’d want enough of them going off at once to make sure you took out at least a few of them. Plus the explosion might be contained in the room. It looks pretty solid in here.”

“Right,” I said. I didn’t quite know enough about explosions to follow, but I was clever enough to remember that more bombs made for more boom. “Oh.”

“What?” Awen asked.

I shivered. “I remember where I saw him before,” I said. “In Fort Sylphrot. The ball. The explosion there. We saw a harpy running away, then he transformed into a sylph.” I spun as I heard a scuff, a shoe scraping on stone. “It’s Rainnewt.”

Rainnewt clapped slowly, the sound echoing out into the empty space. His face was set in a sardonic grin. “You are one persistent bun, you know that?”

***