James Galloway - The Tower of Sorcery

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 minimize 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?