The Emperor's Edge

The Emperor's Edge Ch. 11 Pt. 2

The Imperial Real Estate Library was located in a bland concrete building. Above the double doors, an engraved timeline marked the significant dates in the seven hundred years of imperial expansion. What more could one need in the way of adornment?

“Are you sure you don’t want to go back and send Books out here?” Amaranthe asked at the base of the stairs. “The next step is to find out where this Larocka Myll lives. This will involve long, tedious research.” As soon as she said it, she winced. That sounded condescending. As if she didn’t think he was capable of doing it. “I’m sure you’d have no problem with it, but I don’t want to bore you.” Was that any better? Maybe she ought to just stop talking.

“You’d rather bore Books?” Sicarius asked.

“He used to grade papers for a living. He’s probably used to it.”

“I can do tedious research. Let’s go.”

He must want Larocka’s address badly. Maybe he thought he could get it by this evening and stick a dagger in her back that night.

“As you wish,” Amaranthe said.

She led Sicarius past a young desk clerk who did not look up from his book when they passed. The cavernous interior had one main floor, surrounded by four tiers of balconies. Tall rolling ladders allowed access to the wall-to-wall shelves, which rose from floor to eighty-foot ceiling. They were crammed with books on property taxes, real estate law, underwriting, and other scintillating topics. Tall windows let in light, and gas lamps shed bubbles of illumination, but even in the afternoon it felt like twilight inside the building.

“The residential plat maps are in the back.” Amaranthe weaved through a maze of standing bookcases, filing cabinets, and dusty tables. They only passed one other person, who was on the way out. “Industrial and business are in the basement.” She pointed to a couple places where narrow stairs led down.

“With Larocka’s name, we can look up where she lives?” Sicarius asked.

His eyes probed the shadows, out of habit, she supposed. Somehow she doubted many bounty hunters lurked at the Real Estate Library.

“Unfortunately, it’s not that easy,” she said. “If you know an address, or lot number, it’s a simple matter to find out who owns the property, what they paid for it and when, who owned it before, and all sorts of semi-interesting stuff. But, you can’t just look up names and find people’s addresses.”

“We have to look at maps of all the houses in the city and hope to find her name? Lokdon, there are a million people in Stumps.”

 “Regretting your quickness to volunteer for this?” She slid him a smile over her shoulder. “Don’t worry. First off, only about ten percent of the people in the city own property. Second, the new rich gravitate toward the Ridge, where the houses—and the parcels—are big, so it’ll be easy to skim through the names on the plat map. I’d bet two weeks of pay she lives up there. Well, I would if anyone was paying me anymore.”

They spent the afternoon hunkered over maps in the back corner of the building. The daylight filtering through the windows waned, and the property lines grew squiggly before Amaranthe’s eyes. It was a good thing Sicarius had not taken her up on that bet.

“That’s it. We’ve looked at every house on the Ridge.” Yawning, she leaned back, tipping the front two legs of her chair off the ground. Maps scattered the table with books keeping the edges from rolling up. “I was sure she’d live there. It’s a status symbol. Every business man or woman who makes it buys a house up there.”

“She could be married with the house in her husband’s name,” Sicarius said.

“Not unless she bought it more than twenty years ago. Today’s law says both names go on the property. I suppose she could be that old, but...”