by S. R. Witt
How lucky was that?
I poked my head out the window after the rope and gave a low whistle, then another, followed by two more in quick succession.
After a wait that had me convinced Bastion had gotten tired of waiting on me and logged out, my brother came hustling across the road. His armor jingled and jangled like sleigh bells as he jogged. I’d have to teach him to be a little stealthy if we were going to keep doing this.
“Tied off?” He stage whispered up to me.
“Nah, this is all part of my devious plan to trick you into falling to your death. Fear my unexpected, yet inevitable, betrayal.”
“You’re such an asshole.” He grumbled.
I wrapped my end of the rope around my waist and held onto it with both hands. I leaned out the window and said, “Just climb, ya big baby.”
Bastion weighed a damned ton. As soon as his feet came off the ground, I skidded six inches across the floor. Bracing my boots against the wall helped, but my back ached from the strain of supporting his weight while he climbed. Bullets of sweat poured down my spine by the time Bastion appeared in the hole in the wall.
He grabbed the windowsill and let go of the rope. “Little help?”
I dropped the rope, grabbed his weapon harness with both hands, and threw my weight back.
Overbalanced, Bastion fell through the window and into the attic.
Right on top of me.
It was like having an antique car dropped on my chest. His breastplate smashed my lungs flat, and the hilts of the weapons in his harness dug into my abdomen and legs. I slapped his back and gasped, “Get. Off.”
Bastion pushed himself off me, smashing me even flatter in the process. Before I could catch my breath, Bastion grabbed me by the front of my armor and hoisted me onto my feet. “Not much meat on your bones, bro. You should hit the gym.”
“Maybe you should lose a few pounds. You’re as big as a house.”
He flexed and opened his mouth for another round of insults, but I held a finger to my lips to indicate we should probably shut the hell up before we attracted the wrong kind of attention.
For once, Bastion nodded and kept his mouth shut.
I picked our path across the attic carefully, testing every step to make sure the floorboards were sturdy and wouldn’t squeak too much under Bastion’s weight. It was a slow, tedious process, but it got us to the attic’s door without raising a ruckus or one of us falling through a rotten spot.
The attic’s door was set into the floor. There was no latch on our side, because why would there be? The people inside the house were the ones who needed to be able to lock or unlock the attic door, not the raccoons who found their way in during the winter.
I crossed my fingers and pushed on the door. It didn’t move. “Locked.”
Bastion brushed me away from the door with the back of one huge hand.
“Quiet—” I started, but my warning was too late.
Bastion’s armored boot slammed down on the attic door on the side opposite the hinges.
Wood splintered, and metal squealed. The door gave way with an unholy racket, swinging down into the house on its hinges, and slamming into the wall with enough force to rattle the whole manor.
“I thought I asked you to be quiet?”
My brother shrugged. “You couldn’t open the door. So I did.”
“And told the whole neighborhood we were breaking in!”
Bastion pointed toward the opening. “We headed down or what?”
“Try not to knock the whole building down on top of us.” I snapped and dropped through the open trapdoor without a sound.
The interior of the house smelled of dry rot and dust. The walls were thick and the windows sealed against the elements. The old man had been rich enough to afford glass instead of just shutters, and without fresh air moving through it, the whole house was as still as a mausoleum.
Bastion dropped out of the ceiling with all the stealth and subtlety of a overturned china cabinet.
“Next time,” I whispered, “toss down a bag of broken glass before you jump. It’ll be quieter.”
Bastion threw a joking punch at my shoulder that landed with enough force to knock me into the hallway’s far wall. “You’re just jealous because I’m so massive.”
“You are so right. My secret shame is that I can move around without sounding like a reject from the tin man auditions. Try and keep it down while we check this place out.”
“Don’t be so paranoid,” Bastion whispered. “There’s no one here, and no one outside can hear us. The walls are too thick.”
He was probably right, but I couldn’t shake the feeling there was something off. I held a finger to my lips to silence him and listened intently for the sounds of approaching guards. Nothing.
“Let’s start digging around. I’ll take the north end, you go south. We’ll meet back in the middle.” I pointed in the direction I wanted Bastion to go because he’s never been great with directions. If he can see it, he’ll fight it, but otherwise, Bastion needs someone to keep him aimed where he needs to march.
Maybe that was why he was so hip on becoming a paladin. Once he signed up as one of the church’s shining knights, there’d always be someone telling him what he needed to do to be the kind of hero he’d always imagined himself to be.
Or maybe he just liked their fancy armor.
We parted ways, and I headed toward my end of the house. I tried to calculate how long it would take us to search the whole place, and realized this wasn’t going to be a quick in-and-out job.
Wenderly’s mansion wasn’t just the biggest house in Frosthold, it was the largest by several orders of magnitude. I hoped it wouldn’t take us much more than a couple of hours, but I had a sneaking suspicion it was going to be a long night.
There were six rooms on my end of the hall, and judging by how big the place was on the outside, that was less than a quarter of the rooms on this floor. That didn’t take into account the two floors below us or any basement the place might have.
There was no use crying about the job, so I walked to the farthest end of the hall and tried the last room on the left. The door wasn’t locked, and why would it be? These were bedrooms, not bank vaults, and anyone who might use them had died decades past.
The bedroom was empty. Not a stick of furniture remained in the place. The walls were naked, save for curling strips of old paint. If every room was like this, searching the mansion wouldn’t take nearly as long as I feared. It also wouldn’t net us any sweet loot. I wasn’t sure what to hope for.
I left the door open and headed to the next bedroom. This one faced the rear of the house, and the shutters over its two windows were cracked and broken. The glass was still intact, and I saw over Frosthold’s wall to the snowy forest and hills beyond it.
There was furniture in this room, but it was ruined.
Not from the ravages of time, but from brute force. The four-poster bed was torn to pieces. Its frame was wrenched apart, and the legs and posts had been tossed into the corner. The mattress was shredded and its stuffing scattered around the floor.
A dresser was tipped over onto the floor. Its drawers had been flung against the wall so hard they’d broken apart and left deep dents in the plaster. The clothes it had once contained were shredded to rags and discarded in front of the ruined furniture.
The next four rooms on my end of the hall were in the same condition. The amount of furniture left in each differed, but the condition did not. Someone had gone to great pains to completely destroy everything in those bedrooms. They’d splintered furniture into kindling. The clothes and bedding were reduced to tatters of filthy cloth.
Whoever had done this was thorough and strong as hell. The whole place looked like someone had gone through it with a wrecking ball and an industrial paper shredder.
Bastion was waiting for me in the hall when I finished my assessment of the last room on my end. “Anything?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. So
meone tossed the place. I hope they didn’t beat us to the punch.”
Bastion tucked his thumbs into his belt and raised an eyebrow. “Why would the game give you a quest you couldn’t complete?”
It was a good question, but recent experience told me this game was not playing fair. “Why did I get a quest that was interrupted by an invasion of goblins? And why did someone give a quest to that wizard to protect the same merchant I’d been sent to terrorize?”
That earned me a frown from my big brother. “You’ve got a point there. Maybe that’s why my bribe to the captain of the guard didn’t work out.”
Until that moment, I’d completely forgotten about Bastion squandering our goblin-killing money. Irritated, I poked him in the chest with the point of my index finger. “I told you that was a waste of money.”
He raised his hands in surrender. “You’re right, you’re right. If you still need money to pay off your thugs, you get first cut from whatever we get out of this place.”
My brother’s magnanimous gesture felt more than a little hollow to me. We’d just searched a third of the building and hadn’t found so much as a stray copper piece. “You’re right. But I also get first cut of anything else we ever find. You’re terrible with money, and we need to get smarter about this business.”
And it was a business. Dragon Web Online was exciting and could be a lot of fun, but we were here to earn money. And that meant not blowing every coin we stumbled across on half-assed schemes.
“We can fight about this when we get home.” Bastion hiked a thumb over his left shoulder in the direction he’d been searching. “But I want you to look at something.”
He led me down the hall and gestured toward the open doors. “Notice anything odd?”
I peered through the first door on my right. It was just as wrecked as the ones I’d searched. Maybe even worse. There were deep dents in the wall, and the plaster ceiling was cracked. Even the cobwebs had been shredded, leaving behind just a few wisps in the room’s corners.
Then I saw it.
The end of the hall I’d searched had eight doors. There were four on the left side of the corridor and four on the right. But Bastion’s end of the hall only had seven doors. There was a noticeable gap between the second and third doors on the hall’s west side. “Where’s the other door?”
Bastion walked to the blank section of wall where the door should’ve been and banged his mailed fist against the wall. “That’s an excellent question. There should be a room right here.”
I joined him in front of the blank wall and drew my handy dandy crowbar from my cloak’s pocket. With a little pressure, its toothed end dug into the plaster. I leaned against the crowbar, and it went in two inches before it met immovable resistance. “There’s something back there. Let me take a closer look.”
My Thief’s Eyes revealed a golden outline the size of a narrow doorway. “There’s a door behind the plaster. But I don’t see any way to open it.”
My brother brushed me back and took the crowbar from me. He pushed it into the wall until it would move no farther.
Bastion threw his weight against it. There was a dull metallic clink, but the tool didn’t budge.
He raised an eyebrow at me. “Hear that?”
Knowing there was a metal door didn’t help us get through it. I took my crowbar back from Bastion before he could break it, and tucked the tool back into my cloak. “Let’s search the rest of the place. Maybe there’s a hidden lever or something that’ll open this up.”
“Or I could just hack my way through the wall,” Bastion said and lifted a heavy hatchet from his belt.
My brother had as many weapons as I did thieves’ tools. He was a walking arsenal.
I shook my head at him. “Let’s not start demolishing the place. If we don’t find anything, we’ll come back, and you can knock yourself out.
“But that’ll make a hell of a lot of noise, and there’s no telling what kind of attention it’ll draw. Better if we leave it until last.”
“Fair enough. Let’s see what we can find.”
A staircase branched off from the middle of the hall and led up to the second floor. A thick runner muffled our steps as we descended and, despite its age and neglect, the staircase itself didn’t creak or break even under Bastion’s armored weight.
The second floor had a different layout than the third. The staircase ended in a short hallway running east to west with arched openings to the north and south. The upper floor must’ve held the residents’ bedrooms. This one was for offices and libraries and salons or whatever else rich fantasy nobles needed.
I led the way to the north. The hallway was narrower than the one upstairs and ended in a T-intersection. A shuttered window dominated that end of the hall. There were two doors to the west and one to the east in this hallway.
Thick iron bands reinforced the door to the east, and a massive lock held it closed. The door and lock were both scarred and dented but still held fast. Bastion leaned past me to shove on the door, but that had about as much effect as trying to move a mountain.
He shrugged. “Must be locked.”
I pointed a finger at the lock. “Ya think? Watch and learn, youngling.”
The lock was impressive looking, but it didn’t seem too complicated. Especially not for someone who spent all his free time opening locks for asshole priests.
SUCCESS! You open the lock with ease.
The lock’s mechanism popped, and the hasp swung free. I lifted it away from the latch and tucked it into my inventory. You never know when a big ol’ lock will come in handy.
A gentle shove swung the door open with a faint creak. The big door and heavy lock had saved this room from being ransacked, but it wasn’t exactly stuffed with furnishings.
It contained a small desk and two bookcases built into its walls. A quill pen and matching ink pot rested on a stained blotter gone brittle with age. And that was it.
I was halfway across the little room when something slammed above us.
Bastion grabbed me by the shoulder. “What was that?”
Icy dread settled in my guts like a ball of slush. “Sounded like the attic door.”
“No way. We’re alone in here.”
The slush in my guts hardened into a ball of ice. “I don’t think so.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I spun around and grabbed Bastion’s arm before he could draw his blazing longsword and go looking for a fight.
“Don’t move,” I whispered. “Don’t even breathe.”
VERBOSE LISTEN SKILL CHECK
Wisdom (10) + Listen Skill Ranks (1) + d100 (82) = 93
vs
Listen Difficulty = 75
Skill Check Result = 18
Degree of Success = 1
Skill Activation Time: 5 seconds
Stamina Cost: 0
SUCCESS! You hear one set of footsteps on the floor above you.
You have increased your mastery of the Listen skill. (Rank 2)
I hooked my fingers around the handles of my stilettos and pointed at the ceiling.
“Somebody up there just locked us in,” I whispered, “and we’ve already searched that floor anyway. We’re going to sneak through this floor, find the Codex, and get the fuck out of here without them finding us.”
Bastion considered my plan for a moment, then nodded. My brother was always going to be headstrong but he was starting to listen to me as my skills improved. It was nice. “I’ll be as quiet as I can.”
He stood motionless while I went through the small office. If we were careful, maybe we’d wrap this up without starting a massive fight.
Maybe.
The desk wasn’t huge, but it was solid, and each of its drawers housed a fancy lock. The thin, wide drawer below the top of the desk wasn’t locked, but it was empty.
The top two drawers on the right side were unlocked and empty, as well. But the bottom drawer on the right was locked.
Goody.
I kneeled and
retrieved the lock picks from the pouches on the back of my gloves. The slender tools nestled into the lock’s opening, and I adjusted the position of the tumblers by feel. The picks vibrated in my hands, transferring a sense of the lock’s innards to my fingers. This tumbler goes up, this one slides down, this one up.
A quick twist of my wrist levered the locking mechanism around, and the drawer opened with a faint click.
The drawer didn’t contain any shiny gems or piles of gold. A black book stuffed with vellum pages and bound in stained leather covered the drawer’s bottom.
I eased the tome out of the drawer and uncoiled the thick black cord holding it closed. The unlined pages were filled with blue lines of regimented script. I flipped to the last page with writing on it, about halfway through the book, and read Lord Wenderly’s final journal entry.
The vault is secure. At last, I can take my leave of this place without worrying those meddling fools on the Council will steal the Burning Codex and wrest control of Frosthold from me.
The plasterer I hired from Arclithin assures me his work is without peer, and I must say even I cannot find any sign of the door he’s hidden behind the false wall on the third floor.
Should anyone be so talented as to find it, the clockwork lock I procured from the traveling gnome will defeat any attempt to open the black steel door.
The magus assures me the threadbound ward he’s placed upon the door will deal with anyone resourceful enough to get past the formidable physical safeguards.
I leave on the morrow for one, final quest. Though my body aches, my spirit is willing.
I pray the gods—
Bastion shifted his weight from his left foot to his right. The armor plates on his legs clanged together, and the floorboard under his right heel creaked like a screeching cat.
Footsteps hustled across the floor above us, heading toward the stairs.