The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 14.3

For a period of weeks following his wife's untimely death, Valkin Helg took to his bedchamber and did not emerge. Key was not allowed inside, which he discovered the one time he tried to enter.

Once a day a foreman from one of his factories would arrive, and be admitted for a few minutes, but other than that he took no visitors. The servants left covered plates for him in the hall that were occasionally eaten.

For his part, Key spent almost no time worrying about his father's decisions. He took advantage of them. His tutors stopped appearing regularly, probably because his father had stopped paying them, and without those stiff-necked old academics to keep his learning focused on business matters, Key was able, for the first time, to determine his own course of studies.

He had begun going to his lab directly from school in the afternoon, giving him several more hours of time spent dabbling in the old cistern.

It was almost a week before it occurred to him that he hadn't told Seffa what had happened. She had kept on arriving at her normal time, and had no doubt presumed that he had simply arrived slightly before her for the past several days.

But on Fourthday after his mother's funeral, she came early herself. Key couldn't tell whether she was surprised to find him there or not. Had she come just to discover if he had changed his schedule? Or was she there for some reason of her own?

"How long have been here?" she asked, guilelessly.

"Two hours," said Key. He'd spent the first hour after class in one of his academy's student laboratories, a trove of instrumentation and supplies that Key could only dream of owning himself. Perhaps if Valkin continued his seclusion, he might look into changing his concentration. Until then, he was limited to taking advantage of his expanded freedom to explore parts of the school previously off limits to him.

"Have you been coming this early all week?" she asked. Key nodded. "But what about your tutors?"

"Father hasn't been paying them," he explained, digging a few things out of a canvas bag he'd appropriated from one mansion Helg's storage rooms. There were insulated cables, a set of alligator clips...but Seffa was still talking. He looked up.

"Why not, I said?"

"Because of mother," said Key.

"What about her?"

"She died."

Seffa's gasp took him by surprise. Clapping a hand to her mouth, her eyes took on a rather haunted cast, and then her arms were around him, squeezing him uncomfortably tight.

"Oh Key," she whispered into his neck. "I'm so sorry."

Such was their relationship, and her knowledge of him by that point, that she did not question that he hadn't told her. Indeed, she seemed to take it rather in stride, in spite of the fact that any other close friend would have conflicted feelings indeed about the fact that their bosom companion had kept the death of a parent from them for nigh on a week.

"Yes," said Key. "She was..." He found suddenly that he couldn't finish.

"Your mother," said Seffa.

After a long moment breathing in the honeyflower scent of her hair, Key pulled away and scrubbed at his eyes.

"I've found something," he said, turning back to the canvas bag. "I took it from the laboratory at school." And from the bottom of the sack he produced his prize: a wooden box, packed tight with glass cylinders plugged with copper tops, all wired together. It was a student battery, one of the basic ones they used to teach about electrostatics.

"That's nice," said Seffa quietly, standing beside him and putting her hand on his. "But Key-"

"I only hope its capacity is large enough," he said, uncoiling the cables and preparing to hook them up to the battery's terminals. "It's the elekstone, you see. I didn't have what I needed to proper research before, but now-that is, of course, if you'll lend me the pendant again, I can-"

"Key."

"What?" he asked. What had they been talking about again?

"Your mother is dead," said Seffa.

Key looked at her eyes, saw the line between them, the look of concern that he'd seen for the first and only time in her eyes.

"Yes," he said, after a long moment. Even as he brought his mind back to the present, he realized how desperately he'd wanted to throw himself into his experiments. Looking at Seffa brought out uncomfortable feelings, feelings that ached and haunted him. Feelings he'd rather disown entirely.

Seffa seemed to be waiting for something.

"I can't," he said, willing her to understand him.

"Why can't you?" she asked.

Key couldn't answer. He saw something else in her face, then: whether it was deeper concern or some nebulous disappointment that he couldn't begin to understand, he didn't know. He patted at her gently, and managed a weak smile.

He turned back to his battery, and when he looked up again, she was gone.

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