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.It was a fairly small room, but full to overflowingwith cabinets, maybe forty-five or fifty of them, all of which were, no doubt, full tooverflowing with the recent financial records of the Empire whatever I waslooking for was probably in there.I checked the room over carefully, fixed it in mymind, prepared to teleport, and stopped cold.Something wasn t right.I put the tube back against the wall, held it tight, relaxed, and looked again.Theroom was entirely dark, and I hadn t wanted to risk light until I could be sure theyhad nothing to detect it, so I d used a spell that affected my sight rather than theroom; this is tricky because it is very easy to miss things that are near other thingsobjects tend to blur and merge in the magical vision but it seemed that there wassomething odd next to one of the cabinets against the wall.I checked again, and there was no trace of sorcery except for those spells I hadalready found and circumvented, which meant, if this was an alarm, it wasn t amagical one.Of course, there was no reason to believe it was an alarm it was justsomething that wasn t a filing cabinet or a pen, or an inkwell, or anything else Icould readily identify.I almost talked myself into going in, but you don t get to bemy age without developing some instincts and learning to trust them, so I put a littlemore effort into seeing it.If the ceiling was as high as the ceiling of this room, then the filing cabinets wereabout eight meters tall, in which case the object sitting on the floor was about twometers tall (scale can be a problem when seeing this way try it yourself) andresembled, more than anything else, a small gong, with some sort of round plateattached to a thin frame by a pair of wires, and even what might be a diminutivebeater positioned in front of it, attached to the frame.I couldn t see how thick any ofit was for sure, which didn t help any.I doubted it was actually a gong but Icouldn t figure out what it was, or what it was doing there.If it was magical, I d lost all of my skills, and if it wasn t magical, what was it?Could one use witchcraft to create an alarm? My guess was no, but I couldn t reachVlad to ask him, and I didn t want to ask Cawti because she d ask questions.No, Ididn t think witchcraft could do something like that.And I really doubted thatShortisle would think to hire a witch, anyway.aaTTnnssFFffooDDrrPPmmYYeeYYrrBB22.BBAAClick here to buyClick here to buywwmmwwoowwcc.AAYYBBYYBBr rIt was probably something completely harmless that had nothing to do withanything, and when I looked at it I d laugh.Except that I still had this feeling.Well, if it was an alarm, it had to be connected to a device to notify someone, or adevice to trigger a trap, or a device to make a noise, or something.And if theconnection wasn t magical, it had to be physical.Well, was there a string or a wirerunning from it to somewhere else?I looked, and focused, and.Yes, there was.A wire or a string ran from it up to the ceiling and disappeared above the room.Maybe it was an alarm.If so, how did it work? What was it supposed to detect, and how would it respond?How could it send a magical impulse through the string if there was no magicaround the device? And if it wasn t supposed to send a magical impulse, what couldit send? I had the sudden image of someone creating an artifact that did nothing atall, but knowing that if there was a strange device in the room, no competent thiefwould break in before figuring out what it did.An effective deterrent to be sure, butI suspected there was more to this object than that.Well, what would have happened if I d teleported into the room? Nothing.I d havebeen there, maybe right by the device, maybe not, but it couldn t sense me, anyway,so.Slow down, Kiera.What happens when someone teleports into a room?The same thing, more or less, that happens when someone opens a door and walksinto the room: air gets pushed around just a little when the door is opened, morewhen you materialize from a teleport [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]