Pins, the delicate components of the lock, fell into Dellen’s palm, and a moment later, the lock’s bolt turned. A grin split his lips, and he winked at Gilgamesh. The door pushed open beneath his hands, revealing the dark laundry.
There were not even dim sconces in the walls, and the windows provided little in the way of light. Once Gilgamesh had flown in, Dellen pushed the door closed behind them and lit a few sparks on the tips of the fingers on his left hand, like a torch.
“Handy trick,” Gilgamesh said.
The room lit up, revealing an ironically dirtier feeling space. The laundry felt tired, the floor looked more worn from plodding feet than the corridor outside, the wooden tables bore water stains, and there were piles of clothes, and sheets everywhere, as well as garments hanging to dry.
“How much time did you say you spent here?” Gilgamesh asked.
“Hours every day, after I had already spent hours practicing throwing ball lightning,” Dellen said, looking around.
“So you must know every inch of the laundry.”
“No, the order is fond of telling the initiates to do one thing and one thing only. I believe they were actively encouraging boredom. I kept cycling between a few different tasks in here, but there are a number of doors I want to open.” Dellen walked through the laundry. The first door showed him hundreds of folded red robes. He picked up a stack and looked through it, looking for the symbol that he thought indicated Third Trinity. He could feign Third Trinity, the change in steelskin between Trinities was incremental. He pulled the robe on over his head.
Two doors later he found a room of masks. They were all more or less the same. Dellen picked up a few and felt their weight, just in case there was a difference that was not immediately obvious.
The metal was cool under his fingers, but apart from that, they weighed the same amount, had similar padding underneath, and even carried the same smell. Dellen slipped a mask onto his face. It felt heavy on his face, and the metal made him feel like he had never left. His hands itched to pull it off and throw it across the room.
“I don’t like the way that makes you look.”
“I don’t like the way it makes me feel.” Dellen put up a hand, “Let’s not talk about it, let’s go down. The cells are on the deepest level, I cannot quite see Lady Katherine experimenting on them there. Maybe the level above?”
“What would she need for the experiments?”
“Two things,” Dellen said, “A place for the experiments and a place to keep the unforged, preferably far away enough from the experiments that they could not hear what was happening, but close enough that the unforged wouldn’t be seen walking, even here their appearance might be enough to make initiates curious.”
“Have you seen any workspaces?”
“Yes, Ardentus had the Electrical Aether initiates help him craft a set of gauntlets.”
“Where was the workspace where you helped make the gauntlets?”
“Ah, well, that was unusual, it was attached to our training area, but hidden. Ardentus stood on a metal circle, and I think it was connected to some sort of Aether conduit, it caused a hidden door to grind open, revealing a passageway that led to where we made the gauntlets.”
“So you’re saying that this Lady Katherine might have some sort of a hidden lab.”
Dellen frowned, “It’s possible, yes.”
“Any chance she also uses Electrical Aether?”
“No, she has an affinity for Terra Aether.”
Gilgamesh sighed, “She has an affinity for Terra Aether, and you’re wondering whether the place where she is hiding things is above ground or below ground? Did you think about this at all?”
Dellen’s cheeks coloured under his mask, “That doesn’t help us find the unforged.”
“Of course it does! This means that your Lady Katherine has them somewhere below ground. That means we don’t need to check most of this tower, and I don’t think either of us thinks that they’re being hidden in that cell block where you nearly succumbed to hypothermia.”
Dellen’s mind raced ahead as he tried to find a hole in Gilgamesh’s reasoning. “No, I suppose you’re right.”
“Where does that leave us?”
“Did you scout around at all while I was freezing in the water?”
“No, I stayed by nearby yelling your name, trying to wake you up so you wouldn’t drown in a few inches of water.”
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Dellen could not quite find it in himself to fault Gilgamesh for that. “Thank you. That means we have two levels to check first. For some reason, I don’t expect the unforged on the same floor as the dining hall where I took my meals.”
“Lead the way.”
Still trying to be quiet, Dellen closed the doors to the room of masks, and the room of robes before creeping out of the laundry and closing the door. He put his hand on the lock and instead of using a magnetic field to pull, he used it to push. A moment later there was a click telling him the door was locked again. There was a small chance that even with the pins missing, his damage could go unnoticed for quite some time, maybe even years.
Satisfied, Dellen walked toward the central stairs, and walked down another level, this time with his mask and robes of rank on. He felt confident, and no longer fought not to hunch.
“I hear noises ahead,” Gilgamesh said. Dellen paused mid-step before resuming his stride. He rounded the corner of the stairs and found a Fourth Trinity member of the Order walking up. Narrowed eyes fixed on the center of his chest before she nodded and walked by.
Dellen managed to return the nod, just, although he almost could not believe that the thumping of his heart had failed to give him away.
“Good thing you got those robes and that mask.”
Dellen nodded but otherwise did not acknowledge the statement, there could be more ears walking about. He suspected that the Third and Fourth Trinity members spoke with fewer prohibitions and limitations, but he still felt unease. He reached the floor below the dining hall and looked both ways. It was always grim corridors. At Lady Lockridge’s estate, stairs opened onto grand ballrooms or entrance foyers. The Order’s architecture seemed devoid of any flair for beauty. It was unrelenting stone corridors, lacking even the warmth of wood, and nondescript doors that could have been rooms for initiates, supply closets, or torture chambers.
Without opening them, there was no way to tell.
Dellen made a gesture indicating to Gilgamesh that he was going to check the first door.
“Not there. If we assume that Lady Katherine is hiding them, it seems unlikely that the entrance would be one of the first doors that anyone might see off of the main stairwell. It would make more sense for her to have access to a hidden stairwell and have it be a door near there.”
Dellen blinked at him. He had not considered a hidden stairwell. He made a gesture with his hand, indicating that Gilgamesh should continue. “The question is, how would we go about finding a hidden stairwell.”
The hidden door in Ardentus’s training room had been impossible to discern even after Dellen knew where to look for it, however, it had been utilized with Electrical Aether, meaning use of that door was specific to those with an affinity for Electrical Aether. If the order was to have built a hidden stairwell, they would, presumably, have built it with the requirement that Aetherforged of a variety of affinities would be able to make use of it. There would need to be some sort of a discreet activator, if it existed at all.
Dellen took Gilgamesh’s original point, and did not check the first room, on a whim he chose to walk left rather than right, and he made his way three doors further down the corridor before trying the first handle. It was locked. He repeated his magnetic pin-breaking trip, waiting for the sound of metal hitting metal, and tried the door again. The handle turned, and the door swung in.
“Good thing you know how to do that. I can’t imagine how we’d cover half so much ground if you couldn’t.”
The room within was dark and windowless, closing the door, Dellen conjured sparks above his left hand, to reveal floor-to-ceiling bookcases. “What is this? Why was it locked?” He wondered aloud. Taking a tome at random from the shelves he saw that it was a record of the initiates of the Order. Many of them were just recorded as dates and affinities. It seemed names were not marked down until initiates passed Second Trinity. Interesting, but unhelpful, he already knew that the Order had the unforged, what he did not know was where they were.
“Are there any other records in here?”
“I don’t know, what are you looking for?”
“Maybe there are old architectural drawings,” Gilgamesh said.
Dellen spent a split second looking at Gilgamesh before his thoughts clicked together, architectural drawings could include things like hidden chambers, especially if this record room was normally locked. He replaced the tome on the shelf and began to scan spines, looking for anything to indicate something like what they were looking for.
“Hey, careful with those sparks, you’re getting a little distracted, and between all this dust and the books, I’ll bet this room could go up like tinder.”
Dellen angled his body, keeping his left arm further away from the shelves, running his fingers up and down spines in an effort to read each and every one. “This seems like too many records, they can’t take in this many initiates.”
“They don’t, well, at least not here. This looks like records for all of the chapters of the order.”
Dellen put down his book and groaned, “In that case, this is probably a dead end, let’s check the rest of the floor.” They left the room, and checked each door that they found, some opened onto small rooms, some onto large, one room was a crypt with stone shelves filled with bones and bodies stretching so far back that Dellen had to wonder if perhaps it went to, or even past the outer wall of the Order.
“Let’s not check in here,” Gilgamesh said.
Dellen hastily closed the door and kept moving. If there was an entrance to a secret stairwell in the corridor, they missed it during their search. They continued on, moving a floor deeper into the order.
“What are you doing?” A rough male voice asked Dellen from behind.
Dellen’s head whipped up, he had been unlocking a door, pins hit his palm.
“I don’t know where he came from!” Gilgamesh said, “There was no one in the corridor, I don’t know where they came from.”
Dellen turned on his heel unhurriedly, “Who are you to ask me what I’m doing?” The stranger before him was two or three inches shorter than he was, with a thick red beard that should have clashed with his robes but did not. It strained against the boundaries created by the mask. The symbol on his chest suggested that he was of the Third Trinity.
“Who am I?” The man replied with a growl, Alben Tarfen, assistant to Lady Katherine. “You do not have the authority to open that door.”
“Is this not the door to the records room?” Dellen asked, feigning confusion, I was told to bring back records of the last three years of initiates. “Master Tiberius wants a tally of how many Electrical Aether initiates we gather, and how many manage to break through to Third Trinity and beyond.”
“Sounds like pointless busy work,” Alben looked at him, his head moving slightly forward, “And why are you looking for records after midnight?”
Dellen did his best to sound irritated, “Would you argue with Master Tiberius if he asked you to do something after midnight?”
Alben laughed, “No, but,” he paused, and his voice lowered, growing fiercer, “I don’t believe your story at all.” He lunged toward Dellen.