Revolution (Chronicles of Charanthe #2)

by Rachel Cotterill

  *

  There was no question that this was the place the plans described, but they’d all expected to find something more impressive at the end of the trail. Something more in keeping with their established traditions and accumulated wealth. For all that the Empire had been funding the Association over the past three generations, they knew that they’d had no shortage of money in earlier days. This cottage, squished between its neighbours, didn’t look like a secret headquarters to be proud of.

  “It’s a bit small,” Mack said. “Are you sure this is it?”

  Eleanor pushed the door open and peered into what looked for all the world like a small cottage. It wasn’t even uninhabited. The furniture was well worn and the plates had scraps of last night’s dinner. And as if any more proof were needed, the last embers of a fire glowed in the grate.

  “I thought I was sure,” she said. “But someone lives here.”

  “Keep going,” Sebastien said, stepping past her. “It must be a marker along the way – there must be something here that’ll point us in the right direction for the real headquarters.”

  “Wait,” Mack said, pulling them both back outside. “We’d better check there’s no-one home before we go hunting around their house, don’t you think?”

  “There’s no-one here,” Eleanor said. “If there was anyone at home, they would’ve come by now to see what the noise was.”

  They fanned out into the cramped living space and began examining chairs and walls and curtains, looking for any kind of clue. But everything was merely domestic. A small kitchen area, a low sofa, an old trunk that was doubling as a table by the fire. Eleanor lifted plates, cups and trinkets from the top of the trunk and opened it hopefully, but it contained only a couple of dead spiders.

  Mack climbed the ladder into the attic bedroom, but stuck his head down a moment later to report that there, too, was apparently nothing beyond homely furnishings and bric-a-brac.

  Sebastien rolled back the hearth rug and checked the flagstone floor for any stones that might be loose or marked. When nothing made itself apparent he sank back into the sofa to think, while Eleanor left the house by the back door to look around the yard.

  They reconvened a short while later, feeling somewhat dispirited. The directions had seemed clear enough, but this was just somebody’s house.

  “Do you think we’re too late?” Eleanor asked. “Do you think it used to be here, but now...?”

  “They were smarter than that,” Sebastien said. “We’d be disappointed if they’d left something obvious to a cursory search like this. There’s something we’re missing.”

  Eleanor paced the room, studying the furniture and fittings for a second time, wondering what hidden meaning they could possibly read into these nicknacks. It was hardly the Code Tower.

  “Let me have another look at the map,” Eleanor said, holding her hand out until Sebastien passed it across. If the map had brought them to the wrong place, maybe they’d misread the map. She laid it on the table and followed the outline of streets with her fingertip until...

  “I’ve got it!”

  “What?”

  Sebastien and Mack both stared at the page again, but they still saw a pattern of Almont streets.

  “It’s not really a map of the city,” she said, smiling at the cleverness of whoever had designed it.

  “But it’s obviously–” Mack started to protest, but stopped himself.

  “Everything has to be deniable,” Eleanor said. “Nothing is as it appears.”

 

  “Even after all the safeguards they built around the vault?” Sebastien asked.

  “It’s like you said: they were smarter than we’re giving them credit for. If we can’t follow our own predecessors’ trail, that’s our failure. Think of it like the tests we had to pass to get into the academy.”

  “So what do you think it is?”

  “Look where they’ve stopped the edges of the streets.” She traced the ragged line again as she spoke. “Doesn’t that shape remind you of anything?”

  “It’s... it’s the coast of the mainland.”

  “Exactly. And if that’s a map of the coast, and we need to find the region enclosed by this house, then at a rough guess we’re looking for an island about five miles out.”

  Mack and Sebastien exchanged stunned glances but she knew she was right, and she was sure they saw it too.