Pathfinder Tales: Lord of Runes by Dave Gross Page B

the floor?” I said.
    The boss twisted his diamond ring and shined the magic light on the floor. Illyria followed his lead. Footprints stood out in the dust and mold. They were small prints—not slip small, but lady little. Someone had squeezed through one of the little windows, walked along the shelves, and gone back the same way. It was harder to tell since we’d come in, but it didn’t look like anybody had come through the secret door in a long time.
    “What do you make of this laboratory, Lady Illyria?” said the boss.
    “He was building a golem.”
    “I concur,” said the boss. Still, he looked surprised that she’d said it. He let out a sorrowful sigh. “That may explain the missing ‘hard men,’ if not those whose bodies were left in the streets.”
    “What are you talking about?” said Illyria.
    “The more urgent question is, ‘Where is the creature now?’”
    Illyria did a double-take on the boss. She didn’t miss the fact that he hadn’t answered her question. “Perhaps he never completed it.”
    “Or perhaps he did, and the monster murdered him.”
    Illyria looked surprised. “But they say he died in his sleep. Surely there would have been signs of violence.”
    “Did you know of Ygresta’s efforts to construct a golem?”
    “No,” said Illyria. She matched his stare. “I didn’t . I certainly can’t imagine him killing people for material. I do know he was always looking for ways to impress the masters, especially Uncle Toff. A successful animation on this scale might have done that.”
    “Touch nothing. Let us see what we can learn from the remaining materials.”
    While they poked through the lab equipment, avoiding each other’s eyes, I made a circuit of the room. Arni followed, whining now and then when he found a new smell. We found a stink of acid and some gray gunk in the frog vat. Somebody had sketched charcoal runes in one corner. Nearby stood a stool with a half-melted red candle dribbling over its seat.
    I followed the boss as he inspected the shelves. He turned to me and said, “What do you see?”
    “There’s stuff missing.”
    He nodded. It’d been a while since he quizzed me on that sort of thing, but he liked hearing that someone else noticed what he did. Or maybe he was just theatrical. Sometimes I think he wished he could have been an actor but couldn’t on account of “count.”
    Illyria went right away to the empty spots we’d noticed. The boss raised a hand like he was going to stop her. When he saw that she wasn’t touching anything, he stopped himself.
    Illyria turned her light on each of the spots: a circle here, a rectangle there, a set of three spots where there’d been a tripod, and things like that.
    “Do you recognize any of the missing items?” said the boss.
    Illyria took a long look at the empty spaces. “Here there were books, obviously. I can’t tell you what the other things were. Until today, I didn’t even know Professor Ygresta had his own laboratory.”
    The boss knelt to inspect another of the empty places. He turned his face away from Illyria, but I could see in his eyes that he was deciding whether he could believe her. From what little I’d seen, I couldn’t decide either.
    I knelt beside him and touched one of the spots where something had been taken. While the rest of the place was covered in a carpet of dust, there was a lot less where the missing stuff had been.
    “What do you think, boss?” I whispered, even though Illyria was all the way across the room. She was looking at the shelves through a round lens attached to a black ribbon. “Three, four days?”
    He pulled a hankie from his sleeve and wiped a blank spot. Peering at the dust that came off, he nodded.
    “So it’s not like she stole anything while you were here yesterday, or after you left.”
    “No, but she is the one who gave me the key.”
    “Look here.” Illyria waved us over. “Everything that is missing was magical.”
    The boss shook his head as