099 – Within The Queen's Chambers

  Karen had to prowl the palace wings and corridors a bit and pace the patrolling guards, before finally arriving on the second level of the residence wing, and the chambers set aside specifically for The Queen. These were directly adjacent to The Kings chambers. At first, Karen was surprised that there were no guards standing outside the doors to either chambers. She put that aside and set to work. Here Karen had to break in. She focused her talents and senses and felt the mechanism, then focused on the tumbler that the key would engage, aligning its lock pins, turning the tumbler, and causing the mechanism to open. She took the door handle, and carefully opened the door enough to slip through, and closed and then relocked the door.

  These were not the rooms Karen had officially visited earlier; those were in another wing. These were the unused Queen's Bed and Dressing Chambers. These had been unused since she took up residence in the Arbor. Karen recognized these chambers from the guard's dream.

  This first chamber was a wide, narrow sitting room; the inner wall behind Karen and two at either end of the chamber rose two floors worth to the ceiling. The opposite facing wall of this part of the room only went up one level and traversed the room the long way; the side facing this part appeared to be lined with shelves, contained a fire place for either end of the room and had arched double doors in the middle. The overall chamber was spatially subdivided into rooms.

  This chamber was open for its width, with two sitting rooms to either end clustered around the fireplaces and shelves that lined all the walls. In between was a greeting foyer. Almost half of the furniture had been removed over the years, the rest was covered by loose fitted dust covers. All the hangings and painting that would have hung on the walls had been removed.

  Her senses identified the outer two thirds of the overall chamber on this main level was divided into three approximately equal rooms.

  Karen went through large double doors between the shelves and into the center room, it being a changing and dressing room. These three rooms were only one story tall. The dressing room opened through arches into the other rooms on either side, on the left was a bathing room, on the right the bed chamber. All three of these rooms had large windows looking out into the gardens below. The window curtains had all been removed. Moonlight came through the partial overcast of clouds lighting the chamber dimly.

  Karen moved deeper into the dressing chamber, looking in the chests and wardrobes. Everything in the room was covered in dust. Some periphery memories from the guard said The Queen rarely wore any fabric now, so what little was here was too old to be of use to Karen’s investigation. Karen dug through what she could find, but the majority of the psychometric information was of the attendants who had last handled the cloth.

  Moving on from here, Karen looked over the bath chamber, but it was clean, though covered in a layer of dust. A medium sized fire place mirrored the one on the other side of the wall. The larger pieces of furniture, chairs, tables, and such, were covered in dust clothes.

  In the bed chamber, the large four post bed was bare. The mattress had been removed, and the canopy taken down. From the memory of the guard, there were several pieces of furniture absent, probably moved elsewhere, or possibly destroyed. As in the bath chamber, there was a fire place that mirrored the sitting room side.

  Karen went back to the sitting rooms. The two conversation areas were defined by groups of couches and chairs around tea tables, each facing one of the fire places. Now there was enough in the room to make one complete setting, and a little more, but all spread out. From either side of the double doors into the dressing chamber, behind the bookshelves, a pair of stair cases ascended up to the floor above, over the outer rooms. There were support pillars that echoed the arches between the rooms that rose from the wall, demarcating the space above in thirds. Karen figured the fire place chimneys must be diverted to go up those.

  Karen climbed up the stairs over the bed chamber and found an open area across the whole, like the sitting room below, though with pillars and arches demarcating three areas two stories high. The inner wall extended high enough to have a comfortable bench along its whole length. The fireplaces up here echoed the location and size of the fireplaces in the bathroom and bedroom below. The windows on this level were taller than the ones in the three rooms below. Also two sets of doors led out onto the battlements of the fortress.

  As Karen looked over the furniture and arrangement, and compared the memories of the guard, this was The Queen’s primary study and sitting room, and private eating and entertaining area. Again some of the furniture had been removed. But some work tables and book shelves were arranged into an office or study and library over the bed chamber.

  Karen moved into the study and found that while most of the furniture had dust clothes, about half of the shelves here were still occupied with things; like below most of the shelves had been cleared of books and decorations. It looked to Karen that this part of the room was still used occasionally, as one book shelf did not have any dust on it.

  Karen opened the dust free books and found a journal of several volumes. She paged through it looking for the entries about the transformation. The text was almost impossible to read in the dim light, but Karen’s psionic senses helped; she could read the ink on the page, as easily as see the dark on the light. She also took psychometric impressions with her other senses as she went. The early ones were of the same black-haired woman from a teen up to her mid 40’s. It was in a slightly stilted script. Not the flowing script of a trained scribe. This was The Queens own handwriting. The Queen was a complex, though straight forward personality. She wanted much, and moved methodically to get it. Then in the middle of the last volume she found the transformation notes and some of the setup.

  Paging slowly through it Karen found a detailed record of The Queen’s preparations and of what she expected would happen. The last entry was from the morning that she performed the ceremony. This entry posed the one note of fear in the whole sordid array. Fear that the daemon would not do as she desired. There were no further entries past that point. Karen put that volume back and pulled out the next one.

  The first entry was the day after she first emerged. It was a joyfully incoherent rhapsody to the daemon. Evidently The Queen had an initial hard time filtering between her own thoughts, and the daemon. The subsequent volumes were of the transformed Queen. They radiated a guiding of malevolence to all else within them. This confirmed to Karen what the viceroy had said. The two were bound; killing The Queen would first require banishing the daemon. There were ways to do that.

  Karen’s senses suddenly alerted. She sensed a strong presence scanning in her direction. Karen first jumped to the ceiling above her, concentrating on inverting her personal gravity. She turned to face the presence, while instinctively moving to a darker area among the stone rafters, and psionically shielding herself further. The two moons casting light into the room showed nothing in the room with her, short of some kind of invisibility. But magic or more so minds were still detectable, at least in presence, to a psionic talent. And she sensed none in here with her. She found herself looking out the windows and at the tree.

  There was a bastion wall between here and the arbor. The tree stood nearly as tall as the tallest tower on the fortress around it. Its branches did not spread far from the trunk. Only about three lengths of a person, splitting several times along the length. And they were spaced evenly around the whole of the central trunk.

  A sense of some kind of general scan seemed to come from it. But on a magic level that Karen had never experienced before. She had directly experienced a kind of magic similar, once, recently. That was not a pleasant memory.

  Karen moved to the darkest area of the room, and dropped two stories back to the floor. She then concentrated on the journal, memorizing the last entries, about The Queen’s transformation and the bond to the daemon. That done, she moved back to the study area and put the journal back on its shelf.

  Karen then scanned the room, to be sure she was not leaving any residue of her own. Beyond in the hall, two guards were approaching, on patrol. And yet the tingle of mortal danger lingered. She dismissed going through the fire place, and chimney. Those were barred against such, and finding the hidden bolt hole would take too long.

  Karen blocked the brooding malevolence and focused on the hall outside. The guards had passed, the next set was not yet to the corner. Karen worked the lock, eased the door open, tripped the lock, and slipped back out of the room. She psionically held the door latch to keep it quiet, then slunk down the hall pacing the patrolling guards, shrouding herself as she went.

  Karen made her way into the garrison of The King’s Guard. This was in a different wing from the Queen's personal guard. She put aside what she had learned about the Queen to focus on what she could learn about the Kind and his potential weaknesses.

  After surveying the garrison's barracks, she selected a member of The King’s Guard, and dove into his dream as she did the member of The Queen’s Guard. This was a simpler probe.

  This one had not been in attendance at The Queen’s doings, he was too young. However she did learn from him that The King had long since given up any hope of a relationship with The Queen, beyond a formal one. Even before she transformed she had left his bed. He had expressed regular hope to grow old with her. Now he quietly hoped to outlive her, that someone might figure out how to kill her, and banish the abomination from his castle.

  Also the King treated his guardsmen like fellows, honored them, and was loyal to them. As such they were professionally loyal to him. The King seamed to long for the battlefield, and still wore armor regularly. He tried to dress as the guard did, but accepted that his station required fancier dress. He practiced on the same pitches and fields as the guard.

  She also found that the King kept a regular concubine.

  Karen knew as well as anyone in Krogg that the armed services were co-ed, and mostly segregated by sex. She was mildly surprised to learn the open secret among the guards that the King's concubine was an officer on his Personal Guard. She passed by this information as it did not appear to have any current bearing.

  Deciding that there was nothing to learn here, Karen extracted herself from the man's dreams.