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[size=150]Chapter 35: As Silent As A Breeze[/size]
___Time passed, slowly. But it passed.
___I saw Seifas wake. Dagon reacquired his normal nonchalance; although I now could see the signs beneath.
___Dagon chose a room, and closed its door, leaving Seifas to keep his watch alone.
___Seifas stretched, near the firepit, on the floor, having pulled out a tiny vial from a belt-pouch. Opening his ‘pillow’…Ah! An answer to a mystery!—a leather-covered book! He must have kept it in a trouser pocket. From within the book he picked a writing bone, dipping it into the vial.
___Seifas kept a journal.
___He lay on his stomach, leaving the healing scars upon his back to open air, his nose almost on the page, his hand precise and quick despite dim light—too dim for any normal man to read and write, but not for juacuaran eyes.
___Why so dim, I wondered…? Because, only one torch remained alight; and as I watched, it also sputtered and then extinguished. Older torches needed some attendance—but Dagon had been too intent on his hateful thoughts; and now the great and cautious juacuar was too intent on writing his book!
___Still, a meager firepit glow would be enough to show me, if I walked onto the landing.
___Seifas quickly settled into a habit: write one page, look around, and then begin another.
___Plenty of time.
___Gemalfan, in his disciplex, had written of an incidental property of Silveraire—one that now would serve me well.
___I waited, until Seifas gave the area a piercing gaze.
___Then I quickly jotted a plane of Silveraire, halfway down the hall, toward the firepit, filling it in from floor to ceiling and wide from wall to wall. With my smaller mirror still in place, I now could see the dim reflection of my section of the hall. I specially bound the jotting, securing the image of my hallway half, and then revolved my plate around its axis, like a cattle gate.
___When Seifas next looked up, he still would see my hallway section—just as he had seen it before!
___True, he would be seeing it reversed, as with a normal mirror; but in a symmetric hallway such a difference wouldn’t be instantly notable. A close inspection might have shown the stairways leading up and down had now reversed positions; but in chancy light this seemed unlikely. Besides, it only had to last for half a minute.
___I walked around the corner, to Jian’s door.
___What did I feel?
___Too many things.
___I placed my left hand near the handle of his door, and bound on it another, larger Airebelle—for of course my current sphere was pooling on its surface, not surrounding it. With my other hand I pushed the latch, opening the door within its silent belle.
___Dark inside—too dark for me to see. Now I had to take a risk. I whistled up a wisp, but fashioned it in the new alteration I had discovered that evening.
___It burst into its existence, but not brightly; glowing as faint as starlit mist instead.
___Showing Jian asleep upon the quitch.
___No furniture to speak of; only wooden framing in the far left corner, holding the grass and patch of dirt upon which Jian was sleeping. The frame was long, but wasn’t wide enough for two.
___Not under normal circumstances, anyway.
___I stepped with care into the room, then shut the door; and as it neared my unmoved wrist, I dropped its belle and yanked my hand inside, gambling that the small remaining “snick” would not be heard by Seifas—nor by Jian.
___Now that I was in, I dropped the Silveraire plate outside: at worst the juacuar would only see the firelight stretch a little further down the hall.
___I was in. I deeply breathed.
___My conscience twinged; I tromped it underfoot.
___I had come too far, I told myself.
___I owed this to myself, I told myself.
___Jian owed this to me, I told myself.
___Then why not let him choose to give it?
___Because I want it now, I told myself.
___I am so ashamed, for what I did that night.
