Free Seven Dreams by Charlotte E. English

treasures, I daresay I should lose them all. The very
best and rarest are safely tucked away, and so I have no
apprehensions.’ His chest swelled with satisfaction as he made
these fine pronouncements, and he nodded his own approval to
himself. ‘I daresay your lord and ladyship would like to see them?’
he added.
    Finally. Serena,
relieved that she would not have to coquette her way into these
“secret” rooms, smiled her perfect approbation of this plan. ‘What
a great treat!’ she declared. ‘How I long to see these rarest of
treasures.’
    ‘ Are
they so very fine?’ said Lord Bastavere, with a harsh laugh. ‘They
cannot rival the collections of, say, the Iving Gallery, or the
Irbel National Museum?’
    The Baron,
bridling, returned that it most certainly could, and Serena
blessed her brother in her heart. Nothing would now stop the Baron
from showing them every part of his vaunted collections, and though
the prospect was a stultifying one, she felt some hope that they
would be able to locate the key before Halavere showed
up.
    The problem of
Jisp — or Teyo — had slipped her mind in the midst of these
manoeuvrings, but before they had reached the door she was
horrified to observe a tiny, lithe form scurrying beneath her
skirt. Moments later she felt the dubious and unsettling sensation
of many sticky toes and a scaled little body worming its way up her
ankle. The creature clung to her leg and remained there as she
walked with the Baron and Fabian through the wide hallways of the
house. She hoped it was Jisp under there.
    Blessing the
lucky chance which had led her to don particularly voluminous
drawers that morning, Serena tried to ignore the clinging pressure
about her lower leg and chattered in the liveliest fashion all the
way through the house to the centre, near the main staircase. Here
they paused, and the Baron, with an expression of enormous pride,
activated some mechanism that lay concealed behind a revolting
painting of pink-faced infants that adorned a secluded corner of
the hallway. A previously hidden door swung smoothly open. Behind
it, Serena observed a staircase leading down into the depths
beneath the house.
    The Baron
advanced to the top of the stairs and clapped his hands loudly
three times. Lights instantly began to flicker to life below,
revealing the considerable extent of the stairs. Serena was
impressed in spite of herself. The Baron certainly spared no
expense, either in hiding his treasures or in impressing his
guests. That light set-up alone must have cost a fortune. She
allowed herself to be conducted down the stairs on her host’s arm,
leaving Lord Bastavere to wander along behind.
    At the bottom, a
long corridor stretched away with several doors set into it. Serena
stared at them in some dismay. Surely they did not all lead
to galleries full of antiques? Her comfortable notion that they
might secure the key before Halavere even arrived began to fade,
and doubts returned.
    The Baron was
already opening the first door, and she was soon called to precede
him inside. She noticed, with further astonishment, that he did not
use a key to access this room. The locking mechanism was altogether
different, and involved the pressing of a series of buttons in some
kind of sequence. It was not at all reminiscent of anything she had
seen before, which raised interesting, and not wholly encouraging,
possibilities. Exchanging a brief glance with her brother as she
went inside, she concluded that he was as mystified by it as she.
She made a mental note to pursue this subject later, for before her
stretched a vast hallway well-lit by hundreds of floating
light-globes. The walls were lined with cabinet after cabinet, and
long glass-topped display cases occupied the centre of the room. A
swift glance revealed all manner of curiosities stashed behind
those glass panes, from statuettes and books to hair ornaments, tea
cups and jewellery.
    There must be
many hundreds of objects down here, she realised