Chapter 16 #3
I wandered in that direction, and saw that Tauri and the Orbiis were hard at work—though what they were doing was difficult to decipher.
They appeared to be anchoring thick, tarred rope to several segments of the Burav mansion’s northeast corner, and were using a medley of reagents and steel implements—screws, levers, wrenches, and the like—to secure the ropes to the wall.
What made this or that bit of the wall more appropriate for a rope was beyond me, but it was clear that the work had been carefully done.
Tauri saw me approaching and gave me a grin and a lazy wave. “We make good progress here! I honestly think my chaps are having a cheerful time of it. Many were Engineers once, as I said. Probably a good bit of fun to trot out the winches and levels once more.”
“What are they doing, sir?”
“Ah. Well—they intend to rip down the wall, and cause most of this bit of the mansion to collapse.”
“Ahh—pardon?”
An indolent flick of his golden hair, which still shone despite the generous streaks of ash.
“Oh, I can hear your thinking, chap. Our primary strategy is not always to stick cords in things and rip them apart, as we did to that poor girl’s skull, and shall now do to her home!
Rather, we were surveying the mansion to check its stability to ensure it was safe to enter when we noticed something very strange about its shapings.
Many of the walls remain standing. As do a good bit of the stairways, thanks to their covoli-vine threading.
Yet we noticed…well, there are chambers on the first floor that have no egress to any hallway that we could identify! ”
I watched as one Orbiis signum screwed in yet another eyed bolt into a stretch of covoli and carefully knotted rope through it. “And…what does that mean, sir?”
“It means a hidden portion of the house that seemingly has no door,” he said gently. “A set of rooms that fire could not touch—nor could any person enter.”
“A secret room?”
“You’re getting closer. We did some cursory examinations.
Pulled away a stretch of woven vine that was deemed safe.
We found a steel wall behind it—and not just any steel.
It is janarti steel, the same grade they use to produce the bombards of the sea walls.
From our testings of its surface, it’s about three span thick.
An enormous thing, really.” Another lazy smile, as if we were punting a boat across a river together on a carefree day.
“Not a secret room. A vault. And one that assuredly survived the fire!”
I stared at the crumbling mansion, thunderstruck. “Burilis Burav…had a secret vault built into the foundations of his house?”
“Yes, that’s what we think. Haven’t found the door yet. Much of the surrounding structure won’t last a week, so. Can’t really do any snooping in there. Best to pull it down—and then, with luck, we see what’s inside.”
I glanced at him again, and saw that his face was filled with delight, like a child at play with his favorite toys. “You were an Engineer, too—weren’t you, sir?”
“So I was. You can see why I was a little reluctant to perform an autopsy, I expect. I have cursory training in the biologic arts, but…it’s not my strongest virtue.”
“Were you at the sea walls, sir?”
His look of delight vanished. “What?”
“At the sea walls, in Talagray. Spatiasts are often placed among the bombard crews. They have skill with artilleries that are beyond most normal folk. So I simply thought…”
He gave me a piercing look. Then came a smile, and he laughed, as if trying to forget the whole thing. He walked away without another word.
—
It seemed to take no time at all for the Orbiis officers to finish their project.
Soon the many tar ropes were braided together or affixed with clamps.
These braids and knots were then tied to padded horse collars, which they hung about the necks of three of the most terrifying destriers I had ever seen.
The beasts were unused to plow-horse work, and champed and whickered in complaint, but their handlers quickly soothed them.
Commander Tauri’s estimation of the house’s structural integrity was accurate: it took but ten seconds of the destriers’ hauling to make it all come crumbling down.
Once more, the air was filled with ash and smoke—but he and his Orbiis had arranged it so that the walls fell in such a specific way as to reveal what lay behind them.
We waited, eyes narrowed against the soot, cloth pressed to our noses and mouths. Slowly the air cleared, and we looked.
It was a vast thing, some forty span long and twenty span wide, and where it was not charred and dark it shone like silver in the midmorning light.
The Orbiis officers converged on it like ants upon a sparrow’s carcass and began stripping it, pulling away the smaller bits of blackened wood, or using the ropes and the destriers again to remove the larger segments. Then it was fully revealed.
It was most definitely a vault, much like what one might find in an Imperial Treasury. And there, at one end, was its door.
It was a small thing, rising to about shoulder height on me, and a little narrower than most common doors.
It was just the right size of door, I thought, that any child who spied it would immediately find it captivating, like a hatch leading to a hidden attic.
In its center was a large handle, and above it was a curious mechanism.
It looked like four little beads arranged in the shape of a diamond, each planted there on the door’s steel face.
And there, at its top, were three engraved words—Jiltirlik arkasani qunarli.
“That is the Kurmin tongue,” I said, squinting at the characters through the soot. “Though I don’t know their meaning.”
Tauri pushed past me to examine the four little beads embedded in the door.
“These tumblers…they are very curious. They aren’t wheels or anything so simple!
They appear to have—oh, hell—more than thirty sides apiece?
” He sighed and rubbed his face in dismay, indifferent to the smears of soot.
“You’d better get your immunis, then. She likely needs to see this—and I pray she can make sense of it! ”
—
Ana stood before the door, head bowed, one skeletal hand placed against its steel surface. She listened as Tauri and I described it, as well as its discovery. Seriv lurked at the back, squinting at the door as if worried it might pop open and another inferno would come pouring out.
“We believe the door was stationed under a stairway,” said Tauri.
“If I were to guess, it was quite hidden—perhaps by a tapestry or curtain or some such. The surviving servants claim to know nothing of it at all. It is locked with a most marvelously complex little combination sequence. It does not use wheel tumblers, but rather a set of triacontahedron apparats that seem to use some manner of lodestone embedded within it.”
“Ahh—what, sir?” said Seriv.
“It means,” said Tauri, “that we are not looking at trying to hit the right combination of a sequence of four of, say, one through ten on a metal wheel. This would be one of thirty, four times over. Which is, I think, some ghastly number of potential combinations…”
“810,000, I believe,” muttered Ana.
We all stared at her.
“I said I believe,” she sniffed. “I might be off!”
“I…shall take your word on that,” said Tauri. “So. Stands to reason just flipping the little thirty-sided tumblers randomly about in their sockets isn’t going to get us there.”
“What’s actually on the damned things?” I asked.
“The tumblers appear to have the same sets of symbols, at least, which is a relief. Digits zero through ten, followed by nineteen characters of the imperial standard alphabet. As to why it doesn’t have all the characters, I’ve no idea.
It excludes some of the least common ones, though.
No z, no q—bit odd for a Kurmini fellow, these are pretty well-used in their tongue—but it also lacks the Sazi yulat and the Stravsi trinami. ”
“There’s no possible way that we could determine what the proper combination is?” I asked.
“Probably not,” said Tauri. “If Burav had left us a simple lock that needed the proper key, my people could probably pick it pretty swiftly. We spatiasts are cunning craftsmen, you see…But tumblers are much trickier.”
“Yet it looks like old Burav might have left us a clue,” said Seriv. “What’s it say at the top of the door there?”
“It’s Kurmin,” I said. “It reads—Jiltirlik arkasani qunarli. But I don’t know the translation, but we’ve many Kurmin folk about, so—”
“Brilliance is forever fecund,” said Ana. “There. I have saved you the time.”
Tauri glanced at her sidelong. “I was hoping you might have some guidance, Immunis Dolabra…”
“Guidance?” said Ana. “No.” A poisonous look stole over her. “It is a riddle. And I despise riddles.”
“You do?” I said, surprised. “I thought you would li—”
“Oh, yes, yes, just because I am a detective, people think I delight in puzzles!” she sneered.
“But a riddle is only as smart as its creator is stupid, for an idiot finds many things in this world confusing and assumes them to be clever! Riddles are always products of a mind trying to be cunning, so they can lead to all sorts of dunderheaded shit. The trick is making yourself as stupid as the creator and imagining what they might believe to be ingenious!” She glowered through her blindfold at the door as if it had personally insulted her.
“Fuck’s sakes! Is there a way to disassemble it? ”
“Certainly,” said Tauri. “If you’re willing to wait a week or two.
It is of Hymerian origin, created by spatiasts at least as cunning as my own folk.
Its intricacies are beyond the comprehension of, well, conventional minds.
They made the lock and the door very specifically to not be opened, and they did a good job of it. ”