AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Later that night, after she’d closed up the shop and climbed the rickety stairs to her cozy apartment above it, Hali pulled the paper out once more and set it on her writing desk. She’d been turning it over and over in her hands all evening, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was important. A puzzle, just waiting to be solved.
She’d already figured out that the symbols weren’t random; they repeated too frequently for that. And the more she looked at them, the more she was sure they were just a simple substitution cipher, like the ones she and her uncle used to play with when she was a child.
She scribbled the symbols out on a fresh piece of paper, and set about trying different letters in place of them. After a few false starts, a pattern started to emerge. The second symbol looked an awful lot like the letter “U”, and the third one could be an “S” or a “C”. The more she stared at the first symbol, the more convinced she became that it was a “D”, with the diagonal line just a little too short to be an “O”. DUCKS? DOCKS? Neither seemed terribly illuminating.
D_U . . .
DS?
D_CK?
Hali wrinkled her nose. She really hoped it wasn’t “DICKS”. Not that she had any idea what the message might be about, but she was fairly certain that was not the answer.
She scrutinized the symbols until they seemed to blur and dance before her eyes. Were her guesses at the substitutions wrong, then? Or maybe it was a different kind of code, one that she wasn’t familiar with.
She was just about to give up and make herself a cup of camomile tea when she heard it: a soft thump from somewhere below. Hali froze, her heart leaping into her throat. The Folio & Fancy was on a quiet side street, and this late at night, most of the other shops would have closed up. The noise could just be something shifting or falling over in the stacks, she told herself. It had been a while since she’d straightened up down there.
But the more she listened, the more certain she became that it was the unmistakable sound of the front door’s latch being jiggled.
She snatched up the paper and the coded message, and stuffed them into the pocket of her dressing gown as she crept out into the hallway. The floorboards groaned under her weight, giving her no chance of making it to the back staircase unheard. She’d need to confront the intruder head on.
She slunk down the side staircase that led to the main floor of the shop, keeping to the shadows. The front door was just at the other end of the room, and she could make out a dim shape in the darkness on the other side of the frosted glass.
With a sudden rush of movement, she lunged for the door and yanked it open.
“Who’s there?”
There was a startled yelp, and a figure in a tattered cloak went running off into the night.
“Damn it!”
Hali made it as far as the end of the block, but the street lamps were sparse in this quarter near the wooded University, and they had quickly vanished into the shadows. She hugged her arms around her dressing gown and hurried back to the bookstore, the night air suddenly much too vast and lonely, sharp with a danger she hadn’t known she faced. She’d managed to secure the door, but the lock had been mangled, and she didn’t relish the idea of leaving it unguarded while she went upstairs, or to fetch the city guard, in case the figure came back. Which meant keeping vigil overnight until Sooty came in, and she could entrust him to watch the shop while she made her report to the guards.
Mind racing, she trudged back into the shop and lit an oil lamp. She was too rattled to think about changing out of her nightclothes, or going back upstairs at all, and the thin cotton clung to her skin as she paced back and forth. She needed to do something, anything, to take her mind off of what had just happened. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t stop thinking about the coded message, and the figure in the tattered cloak.
Who were they, and what had they been looking for?
The more she turned the question over in her mind, the more determined she became to find an answer. She was tired of being afraid, of tiptoeing around the shop at night, of jumping at every little noise. She needed to know the truth, whatever it might be.
Even if it meant putting herself in danger.
Chapter
Four
Osric Emberhearth had just begun to relax as he approached the Folio & Fancy with a tray of pastries and coffees for Hali and her assistant, Sooty, whom he’d noticed had a tendency to consume a volume of coffee greater than his entire gnomish body seemed capable of holding. The morning sun was shining, the streets of Luminara already bustling with shoppers, and the savory aroma of the pastries promised a rare treat of a morning. But as he drew closer, he noticed Hali engaged in a heated argument with a city guard officer, and his shoulders tensed reflexively.
“I’m telling you, someone tried to break in,” Hali was saying, her voice tight with exasperation. “The lock was damaged, and the wards triggered, but thankfully they didn’t get inside.”
The guard officer, a young human woman with a no-nonsense expression, raised one eyebrow. “And you’re sure it wasn’t just a malfunction with the lock? You know these old buildings can be finicky.”
“The locks are enchanted,” Hali said. “I highly doubt it was a malfunction. Also, the cloaked figure I chased for several city blocks would indicate the lock didn’t just malfunction on its own. Now, are you going to investigate, or should I just assume you’re all in the pockets of the Crimson Ledger or whatever two-bit goons are running the city these days?”
The guard officer let out an exasperated sigh and tucked her notepad back into her belt. “Look, Ms. Brightminer, I understand you’re upset. But we don’t have the resources to investigate every little thing that goes bump in the night. If you notice anything else out of the ordinary, then you can report it at the guard post again.” She scribbled something on the back of a card and held it out to Hali. “But please try not to come running to us with every shadow that moves, all right?”
Hali’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. I just thought you should know.” She turned away, then paused, her brow furrowing. “Wait a minute. I said the wards were triggered. Does that happen a lot? Wards going off in shops and whatnot?”
The guard officer’s stony expression softened, and she shifted from one foot to the other. “Not usually, no. Most of the shops around here don’t bother with that kind of thing. But the wardstones are old, and they can be a bit touchy sometimes. More trouble than they’re worth, if you ask me.”
