There were only two pieces of furniture that seemed likely to hide anything. One was a desk littered with papers and a number of drawers; it had a chair pulled up next to it. The other was a tall cabinet of some sort with a shelf in front; it reminded Serenity of a liquor cabinet more than anything else.

Other than that, there were four chairs and an end table that didn’t have any drawers. The chair next to the end table was cushioned and clearly set up to recline while the other three chairs were simple and functional. Serenity started with the papers scattered on the end table; they seemed the most likely to be current and therefore hopefully relevant.

The first useful thing Serenity found was a slightly damaged sheet of paper; it had clearly been folded up and used as a scratchpad. Serenity didn’t think notes like “brawling - Kartip - 20 eagles - paid” actually had much to do with the situation on Asihanya. The original text, however, clearly did even if it was written obscurely.

Serenity didn’t think that anyone would be fooled into thinking it was actually about a new entertainment that was anything but shady; there were simply too many flags. Knowing what it actually meant, however, required more knowledge than was in the note. That was probably exactly the point; it wasn’t proof of anything without a lot more information.

It might also slip by spells that were searching for important keywords; Serenity wasn’t sure if the Empire used that method of monitoring the mail, but he’d heard some places did. Well, he’d heard of it as Vengeance; it hadn’t come up since he went back in time, and as long as he stayed well away from the larger nations it would probably stay that way.

The “entertainment venue” had to be what they were searching for. That meant it was probably a place; the mention of predating a war and possibly the Empire made it even more likely that Serenity was correct and the place they were looking for was the Broken Mirror below the Grand Library.

It was enough to set them to searching through everything in the room. The rest of the papers on the end table seemed to be reports on what the flyers had seen over the past few months; they were interesting but didn’t tell Serenity where any other attackers might be or even if there were other affiliated attackers; they didn’t go back far enough to show if this group was the same as the one that attacked Raz’s hometown, Stallet Center.

Some of the papers had clearly been there for a while; they were stained with something sticky and it didn’t seem to have happened all at once. Serenity wished he could just ignore those, but the oldest ones might be exactly what he was looking for. They wouldn’t say where his opponents were now, but they might tell him if he had any or not.

Serenity was a bit over halfway through the papers on the end table when Raz started swearing. Serenity recognized the language, but it wasn’t one he was fluent in. He could still tell that Raz was swearing, however; there was no other reason to use the words for that many parts of the body, especially not when combined with some of the other words Raz used. “Raz? What did you find?”

It took a couple of minutes for Raz to wind down. Serenity was impressed; he’d had no idea that Raz had such a vocabulary. When Raz repeated the same insult three times in a row, Serenity tried again. “Raz? It sounds like you found something important?”

This time, Serenity’s question caught Raz’s attention. He lowered his head; Serenity thought he’d have blushed if draykin could blush. He also seemed to be shaking a little; Serenity suspected it was rage rather than fear. His voice was tight and angry. “I found a letter taunting the Viper. It … it says that they got the first victory in the competition and describes the attack on my home and the investigation of Aki’s old dungeon. My clan’s death was a competition to them!”

Serenity nodded sympathetically. He had some idea what Raz was going through. Realistically, Serenity thought Raz was reacting to it better than Vengeance had. Not that that was hard.

He really ought to try to find - no. He wasn’t the right person. Serenity decided he’d check with Rissa about the possibility of finding Raz someone to talk to about it; he was pretty sure that the draykin’s reactions were well within the normal human range, so someone who knew what they were doing might actually be able to help him. Serenity didn’t know how to find someone, but Rissa might.

“We have to kill them!” Raz continued. “They’re gloating like my Clan’s death won them points in a stupid game!”

It probably had, but Serenity wasn’t going to mention that. “Did it say where they’re based?”

Raz frowned and looked down. “An existing secure compound. I’m not sure where it means, but it says they killed everyone until the rest ran. I bet we can find out if we go to Stallet. If there’s enough left of the market, I know people there.”

Serenity nodded. “Let’s see if we can find anything else. If there are two groups, I bet there are more. Also, I really want to know what they’re after.” It wasn’t like he could just leave them alone; if he did, he’d just be inviting another group to come investigate the Great Library. The fact that he didn’t understand their plans didn’t mean that they didn’t have some way to accomplish their goals. In fact, it probably meant that they knew something he didn’t.

They kept digging through the room. Blaze ended up with Raz at the desk while Zanzital started pulling everything out of what turned out to actually be a giant liquor cabinet. There was quite a bit of alcohol in it, but Zanzital set it to the side; it clearly wasn’t what he was looking for.

Serenity found some more notes as he dug through the pile; by the time he finished, he was fairly confident that there were at least four other groups still attacking Asihanya. Of the original groups, one had already been defeated; Blaze located a message calling for help and then another where a competing group investigated the site several days later.

Two had pulled out when they didn’t find anything after a few months, abandoning the expedition as worthless. One of their messages contained the best description of what they were looking for that was in any of the paperwork: they were looking for an old site located at a ley line nexus that couldn’t even be seen without the key, but that should be easy to find as long as you had the key. That was what actually made those two groups leave; they’d checked all the nexuses they could and none responded to the key.

That set off another round of searching through the paperwork. Raz located a scrap of paper they’d ignored before that had a list of locations, each of which was scratched off. Most were map coordinates, but some also had what was at that location written next to the coordinates. One of them was “Takinat, Great Library”. Like all of the others, it was crossed out. Unlike the others, it was crossed out three times, then scribbled over, while the others just had a line through them. Serenity wasn’t sure if that meant the Viper had checked it out repeatedly or if he was just annoyed at it.

The location of the base was also on the list. In a lot of ways, that made sense; it explained how people from another planet found the cave system in the first place: they were there for another reason.

As far as they could tell, only seven other groups had ever been in contact with the Viper. Serenity hoped that was all there were; he didn’t even want to clean out that many. This one plus Stallet would get the two areas his people cared about taken care of; as long as he could ensure the invaders wouldn’t return, that was enough. Unfortunately, if they were actually after the Broken Mirror, he couldn’t manage that on his own.

What he really needed to do was get the people of Asihanya to step up and defend their own planet. Takinat could probably have handled this without him, though the logistics and coordination would have been far more difficult without Ita, Legion, and Kerr.

“Any luck on finding a key?” Serenity wasn’t certain what it would look like. Keys could take on a wide variety of forms; there were even some kinds that were more like authorizations that the Voice would track for you.

“I think so.” Zanzital’s words were soft, but there was something to them that made the hair on the back of Serenity’s head rise. “This was hidden in a secret compartment behind some of the alcohol.”

Zanzital set an octagonal coin on the desk where everyone could see it. The face that showed held a somewhat familiar symbol. While the ring hovering above the knife and hand was new, Serenity immediately recognized the rest as the symbol of Order’s Guild.

Serenity shook his head. “That’s the key? I hoped I was wrong.”

Zanzital shook his head. “It’s worse than that.” He flipped the coin over to reveal a symbol that looked like a trio of curved slash marks. It didn’t mean anything to him or Blaze, but Raz jumped. “That’s right,” Zanzital stated as he stared at the coin. “The symbol of Order’s Guild backed by the symbol of the Destroyer. I don’t know what’s going on here, but whatever it opens is something that needs to stay closed.”

Serenity could think of several people known as the Destroyer; for that matter, the Final Reaper was called that by some people. He didn’t know of any that used that symbol. “The Destroyer?”

“That’s not what we called it,” Raz interjected. “We called it the Claws of Doom. There are things marked with that scattered across many ruins on Asihanya. You don’t touch the symbol, you don’t enter the ruins, and you definitely don’t take anything out. Every time someone does, it brings disaster. Maybe not to them but to everyone around them. It’s a trap, but not just for the people who are there. A trap of greed.”

Zanzital nodded. “That’s what we say about the Destroyer. This key is a trap. I don’t know how, but it is. It could be as little as a trick to fool us into distrusting Order’s Guild or it could be something far worse.”

Knowledge could be dangerous; if this was a key that would let people into the Broken Mirror to plunder its secrets, that could be bad enough. It would be worse if it were something like a virus that could take control of the Broken Mirror; Serenity didn’t know what its capabilities were, but it was entirely possible that it was able to destroy itself if nothing else. That could be devastating for Takinat. However much he wanted to ask the Broken Mirror what the coin really was and what it meant, he couldn’t take the original to it without more information.

He could, on the other hand, take a drawing of the coin. That should be enough to let the Mirror tell him what it knew; perhaps it would know why the coin was supposed to let people in. It might even know why the symbol of Order’s Guild wasn’t quite the same as the one he knew; was it just the passage of time or was there more to it?

Come to think of it, Zanzital might know that part. “The symbol on the other side isn’t quite the same as the one I’m familiar with, there’s a circle at the top, over the hand. Do you know why?”

Zanzital flipped it back over and looked at it. “I didn’t notice. Why would it be different?”

Lillene

Claws of Doom would make a great book title.