“There has to be a weak spot somewhere, though,” I said.
“There is,” Yollah said. “There’s a secret escape tunnel, built to evacuate the place in a hurry and get all the most valuable treasures out, in the event of the city being taken by an enemy or something. It comes out into the sewers below the city, which also lead to some sort of enormous, ancient structure beneath Luminescent Spires…”
“The Blood Pyramid, trust me, I know all about it. Tell me more about this secret tunnel.”
“The thing about it is,” Yollah continued, “the door can only be opened from inside the vaults. And before you even think of trying to smash it in with brute force, it’s a few feet of solid steel and stone. Even if you did conjure up a strong enough explosion to blow the door in, the force of that would certainly collapse the whole tunnel and bury us all alive.”
“Can you get inside to let us in through the secret door?” I asked. “Would any of your old guard buddies let you in?”
He smiled grimly and shook his head. “After I did the deed, they quickly figured out who I really was. The vault guards have a price on my head now.”
The task was looking quite insurmountable, but then an idea popped into my head.
“What if I could get someone inside; a really small someone, with whom I could communicate the whole time? Could you work with me and direct them to the secret escape tunnel so they could open the door for us?”
“You mean like a child?” Yollah asked. “Even the smallest children couldn’t slip through the bars and crawl through the necessary tight spaces to do that, I’m afraid.”
I grinned. “Far smaller than any child, brother. Give me a few minutes and I’ll show you.”
I closed my eyes and accessed the many intense black threads of ethereal power that linked me to each of my undead minions. I was seeking out one minion in particular, and I quickly located him and snapped my fingers, summoning him to me.
A few minutes later, the undead rat I’d earlier used to scope out the guards at the gates of Luminescent Spires came scampering into the assassin’s den. He had managed to cross a large part of the city in a small amount of time due to navigating the sewers. He sat up on his haunches in front of the bemused assassins, his beady little undead eyes glowing an unearthly hue of yellowish green.
“This is the little someone I was thinking of,” I said to Yollah. “I can see through his eyes, smell through his nose, sense through his senses, no matter where he is, as if they were my own. I can control every single one of his muscles as if they were part of my own body.”
“You could sell him to the Thieves’ Guild for a very handsome sum!” Yollah remarked, squatting down to get a closer look at my undead rat. “Such a humble little thing, yet capable of so very much! Yes, yes, he will be perfect! All he’ll need to do is get down to the lower levels, without some guard stomping on him or a cat grabbing him, and he’ll be able to open up the secret escape door for us from the inside.”
“A rat opening a door?” Yumo-Rezu asked. “That seems unlikely.”
Friya nodded. “I doubt even Vance could control a rat’s hands to manipulate a door in such a way.”
“It will work,” Yollah said. “The door is opened by means of a simple wall switch.”
“Good, that’ll be easy enough for the little guy,” I said.
“By the way, there’s one more thing,” Yollah said, “and I don’t know if it has anything to do with your quest against the Blood God, but my intuition tells me that it does. I discovered that there’s an extremely high-profile prisoner kept in a secret cell beneath the Lower Vaults. Only Elandriel and his most senior oblates have access to this prisoner, and only they know who he is. I did my best to find out his identity, but this secret has as tight a lid on it as any I’ve ever come across. Most people, even the most senior treasurers of the vaults and the captains of the elite guard, don’t even know this prisoner exists, let alone who he is. He may have some role to play in this story…”
“He may indeed,” I said, intrigued.
Who could this secret prisoner possibly be? Just the thought of it got my sixth sense tingling, and I knew right away that whoever it was, he had something to do with this whole tangled mess of lies, deception, power, and bloodlust.
“If there’s time, you should investigate this mysterious prisoner, Vance,” Friya said. “My instincts tell me that he is of some importance to your quest.”
“Yes, I feel this way too,” I said. “I’ll check him out after we’ve got our hands on the Dragon Heart and the Lord of Light’s Tear. All right, I hope everyone is ready. It’s time to break into the most secure vaults in all of Prand.”
Before leaving the safe house, I enchanted the weapons of Rhuz and the other assassins with the power of Death. Their blades and tools glowed briefly before turning into a shade so dark that they seemed to swallow the light. The assassins seemed suitably impressed with my powers, but I didn’t have time
