To help in his attempt to clean up and fix bits of the property, Dev continued to collect potentially useful items whenever he ran across them, whether in the village or around the palace. He had quite an assortment of long, flat boards, as well as two buckets and two ropes. He’d even found some sheets of chain-mail mesh in a small building at the back of the palace that he called the foundry. Dev used the chain mail to make a fishing net, which would be easier than the hook-and-line method. And with the leftovers, he fashioned a chain-mail shirt to go under his regular cloth shirt, which would protect him from being stabbed by a sword or knife in case intruders ever came. One couldn’t be too careful when one was all alone. Besides, wearing it made him feel stronger.

This particular day began with a startlingly bright sunrise that streamed in through the newly cleaned east window onto his face, waking Dev up. He went to the window to watch it rise, bumping his nose against the glass and leaving a smudge.

“Oh, glorious sun,” he said in praise. He loved how it lit up and made colors with the clouds in the sky. After breakfast he tinkered around the palace, then decided this would be the day to try to reach a little alcove that he’d seen from one of the turret staircases but couldn’t access because of the rotting floors. He went to the foundry and gathered up two long boards and a rope. Then he ventured out across the courtyard to one of the small corner towers, whose staircase hadn’t been mysteriously melted, and climbed up and around the debris to the fifth floor.

He looked around for something solid and sturdy to anchor himself to. He was suspicious of the leaky ceiling, so he tied one end of the rope around the bannister at the top of the stairs. The other end he secured around his chest as a safety measure. Then he surveyed the great room that stretched out before him. There was nothing in it. In some places the floor had caved in from rain and rot. There was a gaping hole directly in the center of the room, below the point of the onion spire, where leaks had been causing deterioration for years. The floor joists showed through in places, but at the edges of the room they looked relatively solid.

The prize Dev was after was a small alcove on the opposite side of the great room, which had some interesting things in it. With the rope around him, he wouldn’t fall far if those joists were rotten too and gave way under his weight.

He placed the first board on top of the exposed floor joists and tested it gingerly. It held him. He walked across, laid the second board down and stood on it, picked up the first board, and repeated the process, all the way around the edge of the great room to the alcove. As Dev drew closer to it, he could see more clearly what was in it: a small writing desk like the one in his mind image of the gray man. Next to it was a large metal box.