Chef wasn’t in the kitchens. Workers were still running around in the commotion. It would be a little while before anyone was looking for me. Before I could talk myself out of it, I slipped away.
Not ten minutes later, I pushed into the small map room Béatrice had led me to all those weeks ago. Luckily it was empty. Like before, the atlas lay open on the table.
I flipped past a few pages and stopped at the map I’d seen the first time I’d been in this room with Bel—a city in the shape of a star.
Slowly, I brought a hand to the page and recoiled. It was slathered with dozens of magical signatures. Tiny handwriting ran across the top.
Alpenheim.
The capital of Skaadi, and according to this map, a city brimming with undiscovered artéfacts.
Alastair was furious we weren’t heading there soon. He already had a whole curio of artéfacts in his office—more than enough for every suminaire he took on. It shouldn’t matter if we visited Alpenheim tomorrow or a year from now, but for some reason it did.
Beside the atlas were more scraps of paper. I lifted a scribbled drawing of a signet ring, just like the last time I was here.
Bel had said Alastair kept a record of known artéfacts, that he was searching for a few. Alastair could be looking for the signet ring, I supposed. It could be a reason why he’d seemed so desperate to visit Alpenheim.
Whatever the case, it wouldn’t help me get to Zosa.
I slammed the atlas shut and paced. The woman in the portrait above the hearth seemed to watch me.
“Why does Alastair go through such lengths to trap everyone? Surely it’s not just to keep magic safe,” I said, half expecting her to answer me. “I bet you think it’s hilarious when workers attempt to speak with paintings.”
Rubbing my temples, I leaned against the shelf beside the fireplace. An old candlestick tumbled to the ground. I put it back and my eyes snagged on a small, dusty book jammed between the shelf and the wall.
The book was ancient, its spine embossed with Société des Suminaires, the same words printed on Alastair’s infinite ledger.
I pulled the book out and flipped it open. It was written in Verdanniere. I ran my fingers over a bold, curving script on the inside page that read May your artéfact guide you toward your soul’s desire.
Artéfact guide you were the same words from that lobby plaque. I remembered that plaque perfectly—the rubbed-off words. It could have easily once said the same thing as this book.
The rest of the page was a table of contents with sections labeled Building Map, Code of Conduct, General Regulations, Artéfact Regulations, Policy on Secrecy, Directory of Staff, and Information for Boarders.
It read like a handbook. The embossed printing date on the bottom was over a century ago, during Renaissance de l’Acier, the Steel Renaissance, a period when all the great northern Verdanniere cities ballooned to their current size.
Back then the world was a cruel place for suminaires. If this society had let them stay on as boarders and kept them a secret, it would have meant the difference between life and death.
I flipped to the building map. The floors were made of rooms you’d expect to see in a society headquarters: various common rooms, two smaller kitchens, a series of offices. The top three floors were labeled Boarding and consisted of smaller rooms interspersed with lavatories, and rooms designated for artéfact practice.
The entryway on the first floor wasn’t grand by any means—tiny compared to the other rooms—and labeled Lobby. I didn’t think much of it until I noticed a landing on the sixth floor labeled Moon Window.
My lips parted. There was no mention of the hotel anywhere, but it had to be this same building. It was too coincidental. That meant this building used to house a society of suminaires—a secret society that no one outside the hotel knew existed.
There never seemed to be an end to the secrets in this hotel, no matter how much I learned. I knew every cranny of Bézier Residence. I’d walked nearly every street in Durc. That knowledge kept me grounded, whereas here I had the impression I was standing inside a shifting labyrinth; there were whole swaths of this building I hadn’t explored, new halls and rooms popping up without notice and vanishing just as quickly. A mystery within a mystery.
I imagined that if I peeled back the floral wallpaper, I might uncover locked doors leading to secret drawing rooms and dimly lit libraries filled with tomes on magic. Members of this society once walked these halls—lived in these very rooms—practicing the very thing that would have gotten them killed. But the society wasn’t here anymore.