The Cedartree Museum occupies a converted warehouse on Chuza’s affluent northern side – a public gallery on the ground floor, a private collection up on the mezzanine, and Dr Asquith Cedartree the 2nd himself rarely far from either. A chronic, cursed cough – a souvenir, he says, from his own adventuring days – keeps him from leaving the building at all; his cane and milky blind eye do the rest of the talking about how long ago that career actually ended.
Every exhibit case in the private collection carries its own fire-trap ward, and Asquith has spent years telling anyone who’ll listen that his magic, not his two guards, is the real reason the museum has never lost a piece. He wasn’t entirely wrong. He also wasn’t quite right.
FILE NOTES
The break-in that finally proved him wrong was patient rather than clever – weeks of preparation, by the look of it. A street urchin, guided through the sewers by glow-in-the-dark dye marking the route for torchlight alone, hauled a dancer’s ladder up from the neighbouring rooftop, hooked it onto the museum’s own anti-climb spikes, and let the rest of the gang in through a top-floor window rigged from the inside. The prize was a single book: Enciervanal Doamni Soar, a rare and incomplete treatise on summoning demons, translated from an original whose author died, mysteriously, a year and a day after finishing it.
The fire-trap did exactly what Asquith built it to do. The urchin who reached into the case for the book never made it back out – the guards found him burned to a crisp on the gallery floor, the case open beside him. What they also found was Valka, already known to Section 18 by then, gagged and tied to a chair – his own gang having apparently turned on him mid-robbery and left him behind for the Agents to collect. His signature tooth extractor, the same tool he still carries, was never actually for opening locks, whatever he claimed at the time.
“Hmm, that is not… sssignificant to the sssituation, yesss.”
Valka, declining to explain how he got in
STATUS: Filed under Locations. The book was recovered and now sits in Section 18’s own evidence hold rather than back on Asquith’s shelf – a compromise he accepted with rather less grace than he accepted the credit for catching the thieves.