Storm Breaking

'Well, there is something here, all right,' Master Levy replied in an absent tone. 'This is a movable stone, and I would guess that it drops down and fits into a slot carved into the rock. It may take me a while to figure out the release, though. Tell me something, do you have any idea if this mage thought in patterns, in numbers of things? As in—oh, the Karsites think in terms of one, seven, or eight—if they build a device with a catch, it will either have a single trigger-point or seven. That's because they have a single God, but in the usual representations of Vkandis as the sun rising, there are seven rays coming from it and in the ones of the sun-in-glory there are eight rays. The Rethwellans almost always use three, for the three faces of their Goddess. Most Valdemarans use three or two, three for the same reason as the Rethwellans, or two for the God and Goddess. It's not a conscious thing, it's just the kind of patterns that people establish as very small children.'

'You might try four,' An'desha said, after a moment of thought. 'Urtho shared the Kaled'a'in faith, if he shared anything religious with anyone, and that's the same as the Shin'a'in. Except where it's free-flowing and curvy, there's a great deal of square and diamond symmetry in the decorations around here.'

Master Levy grunted what sounded like thanks, and seemed to widen his scope of examination a bit.

Finally he sat back on his haunches, stretched all his fingers and shook his head. 'Shall we see if we're supremely lucky and we're not dealing with a random placing?' he asked An'desha, his saturnine face showing rather more humor than An'desha was used to seeing from him. 'If your guess is right, I think I've found all four trigger points; if mine is right, this far inside his Tower Urtho would not have bothered to be terribly clever about hiding his additional workrooms and the catches won't be difficult. I don't suppose you've got a clue about an order in which to push four trigger-points, do you?'

'If you're not supposed to push all of them at once, you mean?' An'desha thought again. 'East, South, West, and North. That's the order in rituals, with the Maiden being in the East and the Crone in the North.'

'That sounds as good a guess as any. Let's see what happens.'

Master Levy reached out with one of his tools, but An'desha shot out a hand to stop him. 'Wait a minute!' he stammered. 'If you do this wrong, is anything likely to—well—go wrong? Will the ceiling fall in and crush us, or poison gas start seeping in here, or something?'

Master Levy paused. 'There is that possibility,' he began, and laughed at An'desha's expression. 'Oh, for Haven's sake, it's not very likely he'd put something like that in the floor now, is it? Where it might be triggered by accident just by people standing on it?'

An'desha flushed, embarrassed. 'I suppose not,' he replied, letting go of Master Levy's hand.

The Master Artificer continued his interrupted task, depressing a small spot in the stone of the floor. An'desha noted with fascination that it remained depressed so that if one had placed a coin on the spot, it would be flush with the rest of the floor. Master Levy then touched a second, and a third, both of which also remained depressed after he touched them, and although An'desha had not been able to spot the second place, once he had the distance between the first and second, he was able to deduce the locations of the third and fourth spot before Master Levy touched them. An'desha held his breath in anticipation when the Master Artificer pushed on that last place.

Nothing happened for a long moment, and An'desha sighed with disappointment. Master Levy however, had his head cocked to one side, and as An'desha sighed, he stood up, looked fixedly at a place in the pattern of the floor shaped like an octagon, then stamped sharply down on one corner of it with his boot heel.

With a reluctant, grating sound, the stone moved a trifle, dropping down by about the width of a thumb.

Master Levy stamped downward again, and the stone moved a bit more. 'It's stuck. Old, you know,' he quipped. He continued urging it with carefully-placed blows of his heel as it dropped down about the distance of a man's hand measured from the end of the middle finger to the wrist, then began to slide sideways. Once there was a sliver of a gap between the octagonal stone and the rest of the floor, he got down on hands and knees again, and peered at it.

By now, thanks to the sounds of stamping and the grating of stone-on-stone, he had attracted the attention of everyone in the Tower who was not asleep. 'Will you look at that!' Silverfox exclaimed, as the curious gathered around. 'We never guessed that was there!'

'I am looking at it. I think I'm going to need something to pry with,' Master Levy replied. 'The mechanisms are rather stuck, which shouldn't be too surprising considering their age. I'm afraid once I get this open, it's not going to shut again.'

'I don't see a problem with that,' Firesong said, dropping down on his heels to peer at the stone himself, beside Master Levy, while Silverfox went off to get a pry bar from a Plainsman. 'If there's anything down there worth bothering with, we wouldn't want to close it, and if there isn't, we'll clean out the trash and use it for sleeping quarters or something.'

Master Levy grunted and nodded his head as he felt along the crack with great care, then put his nose to the crack to sniff at it gingerly. 'I don't smell anything that shouldn't be down there,' he said after a long moment while he concentrated on the scent with his eyes closed. 'And I always did have the best nose in my year-group. When the students were experimenting, my Alchemy Master always used to count on me to know when to evacuate the workroom if something went wrong.'

'Comforting, considering there might be a mechanism to release poisons into the room below, if not this one,' said Sejanes, coming up to the rest with his hair all rumpled from sleeping. Silverfox arrived at that moment with