In a little church, its roof enhanced with frescoes in the style—if not by the hand—of Michelangelo, a whiskery man lashed to a cross talked in an electoral tone in a language that Alexandra recognized as old Hebrew; occasionally he would blast out giggling. In what had once been an aviary, a room covered with broken screens and rusted confines and birdlime, a great many flesh bugs were devouring the remains of a gigantic and unidentifiable creature. In a room whose dividers and roof rose with dark silk, a chunky lady lay bare on a canopied dark bed, playing a game whose counters were small bones with luxurious silver trims; her rival was a dark, starved man close to eighteen inches tall, who sat on the edge of the bed, generally looking with dismay at the pack of little gabbing white canines that remained on their rear legs and pawed at the spread, attempting to get at him. There were, Alexandra said, many such rooms, maybe hundreds.
Beheim would have gotten a kick out of the chance to research them all, for he thought they might yield hints that would enlighten until recently uncataloged aspects of the Patriarch’s person and in this manner serve to expand his perception of the Family; in any case, time was short, and they continued past these rooms toward one wherein Alexandra accepted they would discover Mikolas de Czege, the more youthful sibling of Buka de Czege, who was the patriarch of that branch. As the Valeas and the de Czeges were fighting, she was hesitant of going up against Mikolas, not because she dreaded him—she asserted she didn’t — but since she would not like to fuel the quarrel. “Try not to allow him to snare you into outrage,” she advised him. “You’ll realize nothing that way.” Given the standing of the de Czeges, Beheim himself was none too anxious to even think about meeting Mikolas; yet whenever he had finished this assessment, he thought, the most noticeably awful would be behind him, thus he went ahead with, assuming not certainty, something of a confident temper.
One mass of the long, restricted room where they discovered Mikolas was dark, with segments of stripping backdrop hanging down and set with tall, tight windows; behind the glass of each were incredible lamps from which chutes of pasty fake daylight spilled onto the unpleasant wooden floor. Like winter light, it faced up the overall deterioration and made the space it lit appear to be emptier, more forsaken. Three youngsters, two young men and a young lady wearing clothes, all with brownish hair, lazy and pale, all roughly eleven or twelve years of age, were sitting underneath the window farthest from the entryway, gazing into no place; close to them was a single in a row upheld seat whereupon some attire and a towel was stacked. Different dividers, additionally stripping and dark, were austere, and from stakes subsequently were suspended an assortment of weapons: blades, whips, maces, lances, knives. At the focal point of the room was a dark post with two catches mounted on it that ran up into a case of white metal on the roof, and a man-sized sham of pale, intensely grained wood with a saber darted to its hand. It’s anything but a long nondescript oval, pointed at each end, something insectile about the shape, and it’s anything but a thinnish neck; its body was scarred and scratched; a red heart was painted on its chest, and wires ran from it’s anything but a perplexing plan of links and tracks that merged upon the case on the roof and allowed the faker to move about the room, even into its farthest corners. At whatever point Mikolas assaulted, the sham would repel and afterward make a broken-down looking yet powerful counterattack. In the wake of watching from the entryway for some time, considering the crate and the wires, Beheim could not determine how the system functioned. There should be, he closed, a gadget inside the metal box that deciphered Mikolas’ attacks and counter-attacks into fitting responses on the spurious’ part, yet such a gadget would needs be of inconceivable complexity, and he was unable to start to envision its basics.
Mikolas was a short, husky man, clearly in his center twenties, with metal forger’s arms and a brutish, substantial jawed face; thick stubble shadowed his cheeks. His dark hair, which was trimmed like a monk’s, was for the second covered up underneath a studded metal cap, and he wore a cushioned tunic and stockings. Each time he swung his sword, he produced a greedy snort.