After squirming through the fence, they were off. The city of Suld never truly slept, but the night streets were not nearly as crowded as they were during the day, and that allowed Keritanima to lead them unerringly towards the Hammer Cathedral. She had memorized a map of the city streets, and it allowed her to guide them on empty streets and through dark alleys, staying out of sight from anyone who may want to watch or follow.
They stopped to wait for a trio of drunken Wikuni to stagger down the street, hiding in the shadows of an alley. The lamps on poles that illuminated the street kept them back a bit in the alley, out of the direct light, and the rough voices of the sailors echoed on the walls lining the street. From behind the wall, faint sounds of giggling could be heard.
"Someone's having a good time," Keritanima whispered in a chuckle.
"Let's hope they stay focused on what they're doing," Tarrin whispered back. "There's a window right over us."
"Well, I guess that'll depend on him," the Wikuni said with a wink.
"You never had to fight off Jesmind," Tarrin replied absently.
"I certainly am glad of that," Keritanima said with a grin.
Tarrin gave her a look, then snorted.
"They are gone," Allia whispered from behind. "Let us move."
The Hammer Cathedral was surrounded by a large iron fence, much in the same way as the grounds of the Tower were. But this fence only came up to Tarrin's waist, a decorative boundary, and its simple gatehouse and gate, which were more normal sized, were neither ornate nor functional. Tarrin didn't understand why full sized gates were placed on a fence an eldery woman could climb over. They went over that fence directly across from the servant's entrance, but had to hide behind a row of small trees while armed men wearing the livery of the church marched by. The huge sculpture of the Scales of Justice were visible to his night-sighted eyes not far away, and he took a moment to be impressed by them. The pans hung from chains as thick as his leg, and the stand from which they were suspended towered of the large hammer-shaped building which rested beside it. Each pan had to be twenty spans across, and they hung perfectly level with each other. It was said that a single raindrop could make the scales dip to a side, so perfectly balanced they were, but they never did. His father had told him the legend of the scales, that only living things placed upon them made them move. They were used to try criminals against the church, where the power of Karas pronounced judgement on the accused by placing them in the scales. If the accused was guilty, the scale dipped. If he was innocent, the scale rose.
And now they were about to commit a crime against the church. Tarrin mused on that as they darted across the gravelled pathways of the grounds around the cathedral, reaching the small door used by servants and acolytes when performing their daily chores. That door was locked from the inside, but Keritanima knelt by the door and reached into the leather bracers on her arms, and withdrew narrow steel prods. Lockpicks.
It only took her a brief moment to give the lock, set directly into the door, a few expert nudges and pokes, and then she turned the lock. The door creaked open slightly, and she gave her friends the slightest of smiles before they slipped inside.
The interior was much different than the grim stone people saw outside. Banners hung at regular intervals along the walls, both symbols of Karas and tapestries, breaking up the dark monotony of the gray stone. Karas was a god of justice and law, but Karas didn't feel that the pursuit of law and justice had to be sober and taciturn things. The interior of the cathedral, even the servants' passages, were well lit and decorated, seeking to raise the spirits of all who tread the shaped, polished slate stones beneath their feet. There was a long red rug that ran along the center of the passage, starting just in front of a straw mat set by the door so that entrants could clean their shoes, and then trailing off towards the juncture between the three wings of the building.
According to Keritanima's plans, Tarrin remembered that the two flanges of the building were used as storerooms, quarters for the inhabitants, and places of spirtual enlightenment and entertainment. In other words, it was just like the barracks, or the Initiate's Quarters. Behind the doors lining the walls were storerooms, quarters, chambers of peace for prayer, and places where they taught the tenets of their faith. The main section of the cathedral, which formed the handle of the hammer, was the nave and main cathedral area where the services for the public were conducted. Because they were in the residential areas of the building, that meant they ran a better risk of being discovered. But they didn't have far to go.
His every sense alert, Tarrin scanned the torchlit passage with his eyes, sifted through the air with his sensitive nose, listened for even the tiniest sound, seeking to learn of the approach of a resident or guard well before they saw his group. But they encountered nothing as Keritanima led them twenty paces up the wall and then pointed quickly to a large, nondescript section of stone wall. That was the location of the door to the secret passage. Their main task now was to find how it was opened before someone wandered along the passageway and discovered them.
Allia pointed along the door's very faint outline, for it was built so well that only Allia's sharp eyesight could make out its borders. That gave Tarrin and Keritanima a place to look. Tarrin and Keritanima leaned in near the wall and sampled its scent with their noses, sorting through the smell of stone and cloth, the lingering traces of man-smell that permeated the passage, until Tarrin found an area of the wall that had human smell on it. He reared back and looked, and saw the slightest impression of some kind of round button or mechanical device in the narrow crack between two shaped building stones. Reaching between the seams of a stone with the tip of a claw, he pressed that little button.
The secret door opened inward with utter silence, swinging on oiled steel rods that pierced it from the top and the bottom. Keritanima nodded to him with a wink, and they quickly slipped into the dark passageway as the door began to close on its own.
Tarrin felt Keritanima touch the Weave, and a very faint ball of white light appeared over a single finger. "Alright, that was the hard part," she whispered to them. "The first of the rooms we're going to check out is at the end of this passage."
"Lead on, sister," Allia said calmly.
The passage was narrow, cramped, and its stone walls and floor were not as smooth and attractive as the passages outside. Built within the wall, it often cramped down or expanded to follow the contours of rooms that were on the other sides of the walls. There was a smell of mildew and stagnation in the passage, but there was enough man-smell to tell Tarrin that it was travelled with regularity. The stones beneath his pads were slick and clammy, and they were cold enough for him to feel it through the thick pads that protected his feet. There were no cobwebs to be seen, and Tarrin could make out soot stains on the arched ceiling of the passage. No doubt the torch fires burned any cobwebs away.
The passage joined with another that ran off to their right, and it led to a series of stone doors on either side of the widened passage. From that side, it was impossible to tell if the doors were secret on the far side, but Keritanima ignored all of them as she led them along the hallway. She shooed a rat out from underfoot, the animal having no fear of the non-human smells of the invaders. She led them around a corner, and into a hallway that ended in a bronze-gilded door of stone. It had a huge lock on it, running through a pair of eyes that held a thick bronze bolt in place to keep the door from opening, and the door's tarnished appearance hinted that it was not often used.
"This is it," she said, drawing out her lockpicks. She set the little ball of light in midair just over her shoulder and went to work on the lock. It succumbed to her superior skill quickly, and she set it carefully on the floor. Tarrin and Allia turned that bolt eye so it could be drawn, and it made a high-pitched screeching sound as metal grated on stone. Tarrin winced, and Keritanima's ears laid back slightly, then she gave them a glaring look and nodded. Slowly, Tarrin pulled the bolt from its socket in the stone, trying to min
imize the squealing and squeaking of the bronze as it ground over stone. But it came loose of the hole in the wall, and he pulled on that bolt like a handle, pulling the door open.
It creaked on unused hinges, and slowly opened into a large room that was kept in utter blackness. Keritanima pointed, and her little ball of light ghosted into the chamber to illuminate it before they entered.
It was a treasure vault. Rows of chests lined the floor, and a shelf on the far side of the room held several large gems and works of art. One of those chests was open, showing a large number of gold and silver coins.
"Well," Keritanima said in a light voice. "Too bad I'm not here for money."
"Why would a church have such wealth?" Allia asked curiously. "Is not their duty to help the poor?"
"Churches are money-making institutions, sister," Keritanima snorted. "Most churches spend as little as possible on things they're supposed to do. Behind their words of god and piety, they're just as greedy as everyone else."
"It is sad," she said.
"That's why I don't follow any god," Keritanima said bluntly. "Their priests are even worse than the nobles, and their gods won't do anything to stop them."
Tarrin wondered what Karas would think of all this. Tarrin wondered if he even knew.
After closing and locking the door back, Keritnaima led them along a series of dark, empty passages towards the middle of the building, approaching the nave and gallery that marked the main cathedral chamber. She led them to a nondescript door of molded wood, protected only by a rusted out lock that disintigrated when Keritnaima put a lockpick in it. Shrugging, the fox Wikuni dropped the remains and opened the door, then sent her little ball of light in to illuminate it.
It was a crypt of some kind. A sarcophagus rested in the middle of the dark, bare chamber, plain stone with no markings, resting on a simple stone slab. That struck Tarrin as odd. According to Eron, the church had a catacomb complex under the cathedral, where their priests and the faithful were often buried in crypts. Why have a single crypt here, in the dank secret tunnels of the cathedral? And why put a lock on the door?
"I wondered where this was," Keritanima whispered.
"What is it?" Tarrin asked.
"That's the tomb of Arbok," she replied. "Arbok was a priest of an evil god that vanished long ago. The priests of Karas executed him for crimes against Karas, then buried him on ground sacred to Karas, so that Arbok's spirit could never have peace. That was their pronouncement of justice on him."
"It is wrong to punish one beyond death," Allia said shortly. "Death is the ultimate punishment."
"Tell that to the priests," Keritanima said. "The priests of Karas have a nasty reputation. They're almost as bad as the priests of Pygas the Avenger when it comes to revenge. But they call it justice," she shrugged. "This means the big room on the other end of the cathedral is probably what we're looking for." She threw her tied hair back over her shoulder, then slashed her tail in the air a few times behind her. "Now comes the hard part."
"What?"
"Crossing the Nave without being seen," she said with an eager grin.
"Miranda was right. You do enjoy this," Tarrin grunted.
She only gave him a wicked smile, then licked him on the cheek as she turned away from the doorway.
Getting across the Nave wasn't as hard as Tarrin thought it would be. The huge chamber, filled with stained glass windows and a huge mosaic on the floor of Karas' symbol, rows and rows of pews separated from the dais and altat by an ornate polished wooden rail, was populated by some ten young men. They were all very young, looking to be acolytes, and they were attended by a single portly man with small round scars pocking his face. The man was short and had greasy hair, and he was dozing in a chair not far from the dais as the young men scrubbed at the floor and pews with soapy water and brushes. All of them were wearing a simple black robe tied with a white belt. The door though which the three non-humans looked was in the far back corner of the massive worship chamber, behind the dais and the altar. The back wall of the Nave was lined with four ornate, gold-inlaid doors. Those were probably doors to private chambers of very high ranking churchmen. Fortunately for them, all the young men and their overseer were on the far side of the huge room.
"One at a time," Keritanima said in a whisper. "Tarrin, you first. That's where we want to go," she told him, pointing to a door on the far wall.
Tarrin nodded, hunkering down, and then shifting into his cat form. He crept out into the huge chamber, noticing the ornate paintings on the ceiling, and he wondered idly how they got the painter up there.
A bell suddenly tolled somewhere over his head, and it scared Tarrin half out of his wits. He fought the wild urge to scramble up and under something, to seek cover, but he realized that nobody could see him. He was behind the dais, and he was so small that he was out of the sight of the men on the other side of it. The bell tolled six more times, and then it fell silent, but Tarrin stayed frozen until he was sure that the loud noise had indeed come to an end.
Staying near the wall, he slunk across the large chamber, quickly and quietly reaching his goal. He shifted back and opened the door, then stepped through it before anyone noticed.
The passage beyond was a mirror of the one into which the secret passage had emptied. It was just like the passage they'd found when getting into the cathedral, wide and well lit, with a carpet running along the center and the walls decorated with many paintings, banners, buntings, and tapestries. He kept an eye on that empty passageway as Keritanima and Allia slipped across the Nave unseen.
"There are no guards," Tarrin noted to Keritanima as they waited for Allia.
"There never are," she whispered back. "The priests are trained to fight. They serve as their own guards."
"But they should have men stationed in the halls," he told her.
"You can tell them if you want," she said with a wink. "I'm rather glad that they don't. If they did, this would be alot harder."
It very nearly ended a moment later. Just as Allia rejoined them, one of the doors in the passageway creaked open. Keritanima had just started down the passageway, and she quickly opened the closest door to her and ducked inside, which had been the very first door leading from the Nave. Tarrin and Allia fled inside with her, and they found themselves in a small room filled with long racks holding black robes similar to what the young men and overseer in the Nave had been wearing.
"Idea," Keritanima said, looking at them.
"Bad idea," Tarrin said as his ears picked up footsteps stopping just in front of the door Allia had just closed. His heart jumped a bit in his chest when he realized that the man was about to open the door!
– Hide!- Keritanima signed quickly, and they scattered. Tarrin had the easiest of it, for he simply changed form and got behind the door as it opened. He didn't see where Keritanima and Allia went, but when the light flooded in from the hallway, blocked by the shadow of a man, there was no sign of them. The man, a middle aged man of tall stature and a balding ring of gray hair on his head, stepped in wearing a simple black robe of a rougher weave than the ones hanging in the room. Tarrin hid in the shadows at the corner of the room, his black fur melding with the darkness, ready to shift back and attack the man, should he catch sight of his hidden sisters. But that proved to be unnecessary. He removed his robe calmly and pulled one of the others off the wall, showing no sign that he had seen any activity in the room. Hanging his robe in its place, he then tied the new robe around his waist and filed out as calmly as he had come in.
"That was nervous," Keritanima whispered as she came out from behind a robe rack.
"That was too close," Allia agreed with an explosive sigh, coming out from behind another.
Tarrin shifted back and looked at his sisters. "How far do we have to go, Kerri?" he asked in a hushed voice.
"About fifty paces, then we turn into a side passage," she replied. "I think we could make it, wearing these robes."
"We may as well," Tarrin shru
gged.
They stepped out wearing the robes. Tarrin and Keritanima looked a little strange, for their tails did create a bit of a bump in the seat of the robes, and Tarrin almost stepped on his twice as it tried to find a place to hang without being scrunched up against something. Keritanima's lushly furred, luxuriantly bushy tail was causing her even more problems. Tarrin finally wound his tail around his waist to get it out of the way.
It was a very nervous fifty paces. That side of the cathedral was alot busier than the other side had been, and the trio had passed by no more than three groggy, sleepy priests as the men moved towards the Nave. Luckily for them, the three men had not given them a very close look. They heard more activity behind them, and Tarrin dared to look back. Men were coming out of the doors they were passing, priests being called to the Nave by that bell that had nearly scared his tail off. They didn't look at the three of them that closely, but more than one gave them a second glance. Maybe because they were going the wrong way.
They reached a four way intersection in the passageway, and the three of them turned up into one that no men were coming out of. Keritanima was staring at the wall, counting her steps under her breath, and Tarrin and Allia were just following her blindly. She stopped, looked towards the men filing past the intersection, then motioned at the wall beside her with a gloved hand.
It took them only a moment to find the button that opened the secret door, but this one had no man-smell to make it obvious. It was Allia's keen eyes that spotted it, a very dust-choked little spot on the wall between two stones that held the button that opened the door. And unlike the first one, this door squeaked loudly in protest as it opened. The noise made the hair on Tarrin's tail frizz, and he desperately looked back towards the intersection to see if anyone else had heard it. Keritanima dove in almost as soon as it began to open, and Tarrin and Allia piled in after her.
As the door squealed closed, Tarrin looked down the dank passage. It was pitch black, and unlike the first one, this one was filled with cobwebs and smelled heavily of mold and stagnation. Keritanima touched the Weave and created her little ball of light again, and it illuminated a rubble-strewn passage with an uneven floor, the skeletal remains of rats and other creatures, and thickly covered in cobwebs.
The Tower of Sorcery f-1 Page 83