Chapter 20: The Snake in the Garden, Part 3

Xigbar hated to admit it, but Arthur actually had a decent plan. As the sun set on the city, they disguised themselves as groundskeepers bringing in sacks of fresh topsoil for the gardens. The guards at the servant's gates of the keep were urks, and though the brutes were dangerous in a fight and unshakably loyal to their masters, they weren't particularly bright. Once they were through, they got out of sight, tore open the sacks of soil to dig out their weapons and equipment, and got to work.

The keep had originally been constructed as an actual fortification for Digax's army, but it had long since been converted into the private mansion of his Chosen in Lochmire. What had once been open ground that gave defenders clear shots at any who breached the outer walls was now an elaborately decorated courtyard, with paved stone paths snaking through a forest of flowers, fountains, statues, and hedges.

They holed up inside a groundskeeper's shed, waiting out the last rays of sunshine. As darkness took over the night sky, and the evening fog rolled in, they advanced to the next stage of the plan.

An inner gate separated the grounds from the keep itself. But the servant's houses were all outside of the inner gate, and far less secure than the keep itself. Arthur used a slingshot to take out the gas lamps most likely to get them caught, and then they moved in under the cover of greater darkness, easily skirting the confused few who'd come out to see what the noise was. 

Xigbar would have preferred not to make any noise, but he wasn't in charge, and even he wasn't about to berate Arthur in the middle of a job and risk getting caught.

Things nearly fell apart when they broke into their first servant's house and were spotted by the two butlers living inside, who hadn't been asleep as their darkened windows had suggested. 

Xigbar reacted the fastest, diving forward and getting his arms around one of the butlers’ throats before he could shout. The man choked and spasmed in Xigbar's grip, which only constricted harder.

Arthur was right on his heels, tackling the other man before he could scramble out of bed. The first thing Arthur did was get a pillow over the man's face to muffle his shouts, and in a few seconds had his man pinned.

"Shh, shh, shh," Xigbar whispered. The man's struggling was growing weaker by the second, even as he veins on his forehead bulged. "That's it. Only dreams. Annnd . . . goodnight."

With one last gurgle, the man stopped struggling, and went limp. Xigbar held on a few more seconds, just to be sure he wasn't faking, and then finally relaxed. Quick as he could, he used a pillowcase from the bed as a gag, and used some of their rope to get the man tied up. Still on the bed, Arthur was going through similar motions with his target.

Xigbar was half surprised Arthur didn't kill his, but he wasn't complaining. If Arthur had learned restraint, that was one less thing to worry about tonight.

For their troubles, they got a pair of outfits that would look more at home in the keep than their groundskeeper disguises, and a set of keys to get them inside.

Despite the hour, the keep was far from silent. Servants were still cooking, cleaning, and delivering food to the various sitting rooms that were still in use by guests. Other staff dutifully scribbled away at their paperwork in scattered offices. And, everywhere, urks patrolled the halls.

The six foot tall soldiers all wore identical sets of black and red armor, helmets concealing the upper portions of their face but leaving their jaws, and the tusks protruding from them, on full display, along with their sizable biceps. They paid Xigbar and Arthur no mind, but that was only going to last as long as they were in parts of the keep where servants would be expected, and that wasn't where their ultimate goal lay.

There was artwork and cultural artifacts on display all over the halls—oil paint renditions of dragons in flight, weapons and armor from distant lands, a marble bust of the Chosen himself—but none of that was the real prize. Thanks to a bit of advance work by the Lochmire sect, they already knew the Chosen kept his most prized possessions in the east wing of the keep.

As they reached the doors to the east wing, Arthur stood watch while Xigbar got to work. Before even touching the door, his eyes swept over it, from the top of the frame to the floorboards. When he didn't spot anything, he reached into his pocket, fishing out a small bag of fine red dust.

"What are you doing?" Arthur hissed. "Get it open!"

"I'm being thorough," Xigbar said, not taking his eyes off the door. 

Taking a pinch of dust from the bag, Xigbar flicked it into the air near the door handle, and the base of the door, and waited. Ground down from the jewel of a ruined artifact and alchemically treated, the dust would shimmer in the presence of active spellcraft, but was insubstantial enough to avoid actually setting any hidden spells off.

That was the theory anyway. Xigbar had bought it from a Paver quartermaster who insisted he used it on all his jobs, but Xigbar had been in his first month with the guild at the time. He wouldn't put it past the bastard to sell faulty equipment to the new guy.

The dust remained dormant. Either it worked, and he was safe, or he'd been ripped off, and was about to pay for it. And there was only one way to find out.

His lockpicks slipped into his hands with a flick of his wrist. It took him a minute, but eventually, he was rewarded with a click.

Even then, he didn't open the door—not fully. Instead he pushed it open as slowly as he could, until there was just enough of a gap for him to slip the blade of his long knife in. He swept through the gap with the blade, catching on something near the top. A peek inside spotted a thin cord tethering the door to a mechanism he couldn't see.

Gently as he could, he pushed his blade against the tether, until he felt it go taut. There was a light clink of metal on metal, then a tiny snip, and something fell to the floor. Xigbar tensed, waiting for something to come crashing down on top of them.

Nothing did.

Xigbar opened the door to find a bell that would have chimed with the opening if he hadn't cut the cord, and nodded, satisfied with himself, and the two of them slipped further in.

"Took your sweet time," Arthur muttered.

"You want to do this right, or do you want to do it fast?"

"Shouldn't take you that long to do it right!"

"Like you could do better."

Arthur glowered, but tellingly didn't dispute Xigbar on that last point.

Now that they were in the east wing, things were quiet. There were no guests in this part of the keep, or any servants dressed like them. There weren't even any urks, which they briefly considered a blessing, until the first time they ran into an elite.

Unlike the urks, who wore black armor with red accents and decoration, the armor sported by the elites was all black. A blood red glow emanated from the seams in the armor, turning them into crimson beacons in the dim halls. While the armor of urks left the upper arms and lower jaws exposed, elites were completely encased.

When they caught sight of the red glow coming from around the corner, the both of them immediately ducked for places to hide, with Xigbar cramming himself behind a vase's pedestal, and Arthur disappearing behind the curtains. Neither of them so much as breathed until the elite's footsteps faded completely from earshot, and even then, Xigbar's heart didn't stop pounding.

By all accounts, elites weren't actually all that physically stronger than urks. But they were a lot smarter, and their armor packed magic behind its plates. Xigbar had heard stories from people who claimed to have fought one and walked away, or even won, but none of those were from people he actually trusted, and he wasn't about to try his own luck.

Mercifully, neither did Arthur, and the two of them adopted a policy of stealth and evasion as they made their way to their objective. They hid around corners, in alcoves, behind the keep's decor, and on one occasion, in the rafters, without once being spotted. Only once did things get close, and when that happened, Xigbar transformed his jade armband into its snake form, and used it to distract the elites that came dangerously close to discovering their position.

That was going to raise questions—the snake his armband turned into wasn't native to this continent—but hopefully, they'd be gone before that became a problem.

There were a few more traps to keep an eye out for, most of them keyed to physical or magical alarms. It usually feel to Xigbar to actually spot and disarm them, and yet Arthur never seemed to get any more cautious about their presence. In the penultimate room before the vault—a spacious, indoor garden with a large skylight—Xigbar had to forcibly tackle Arthur back to stop him from breaking a tripwire that would have brought a solid iron portcullis crashing down over the exit.

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Arthur almost yelled at him for that one, but cooled off when Xigbar pointed out the tripwire and the mechanism it was tied to.

Close calls aside, everything had been going basically okay. So Xigbar should have expected it when they finally reached the doors that barred the way to the Chosen's personal treasure trove, and they hit a snag.

"Shit."

"What now?" Arthur asked.

"It's sealed," Xigbar reported. "The doors are reinforced with magic, and they're not opening without the passkey."

"So who would have the key?"

"Depends on what it is," Xigbar said. "It could just be a password you say out loud. It could be some kind of token. It could be it takes the blood of a virgin. These things are finicky."

"Can you get through it or not?"

"If I had all night? Sure. But someone's going to come through here sooner or later, and I'm betting on sooner," Xigbar said.

Xigbar expected Arthur to get frustrated, maybe start yelling at him. Instead, a dark smirk crept across his face. An alarm bell began to ring in the back of Xigbar's head. Nothing good was going to come out of that smile, he knew it. And a moment later, he was proven right.

"Then I guess we go loud," Arthur said as he dug into the bottomless bag tied to his hip.

He withdrew a perfectly square slab of granite the size of his hand, which glowed fiery orange from a rune carved into one side and all along cracks on its surface.

"What is that?" Xigbar asked.

Arthur slapped the device against the sealed doors, where it remained even after he withdrew his hands. He tapped the rune on the face, and it began to pulse. He met Xigbar's eyes, and his smirk grew into a smile.

"Lockpick," he explained.

Xigbar dove behind the pedestal of a marble statue, realizing what Arthur had done. Arthur joined him a moment later, and the two of them hunkered down as the dwarven demolisher exploded in a fall of fire and force that sent stone and wood shrapnel flying.

A low whistle began to echo through the halls. An alarm.

"What the hells was that?!" Xigbar demanded.

"You said we didn't have time! So I made some," Arthur said.

"And let ever urk and elite in this place know we're here?!"

"Quit you're whining! Sooner we get what we came for, the sooner we can get out of here!"

Xigbar let out several choice insults in Iandran, none of which Arthur understood, and the two of them dashed inside. Waiting for them was a room arranged with rows of pedestals, each displaying a piece of jewelry or other artifact, while the walls were lined with strongboxes. 

Arthur drew his cudgel with one hand, held his bottomless bag in the other, and started smashing the cases on the pedestals. Xigbar drew his lockpicks and got to work on the boxes, which were all mounted to walls. He got one, then two, then three unlocked, leaving them pulled out from the wall and open for Arthur to empty out behind him. He didn't think he'd crack a fourth before security collapsed on them, so instead he helped shovel the boxes' contents into Arthur's bottomless bag.

They actually got quite the haul—a necklace of grape-sized emeralds, an Old World longsword the shined bright blue along the edge, an obsidian crown that hovered in the air on its own, an arrow that glowed pure white, half a dozen sealed scroll canisters, and what was referred to in academic circles as a shitload of scales.

"You see anything else?" Arthur asked.

Running on adrenaline, half his mental attention on calculating the worth of everything they'd snagged, Xigbar didn't really think when he heard Arthur. Instead, he just took one last sweep of the room to see if there was anything else that fit their criteria of obviously valuable, and easy to stuff in the bottomless bag.

And that was when Arthur clubbed him in the back of the head.

For what he lacked in finesse, Arthur made up for in raw strength. When his cudgel made contact, Xigbar's vision completely failed him for a second, and when it came back, everything seemed out of focus and sideways. It took him several seconds to realize that second part was because he was lying on the floor.

By the time he pushed himself to his feet, an iron portcullis was slamming down over the exit. Arthur stood on the other side of it, a massive shit eating grin spread on his face and growing by the second.

"What the hells, Arty?" Xigbar spat, head still spinning.

Arthur chuckled, shaking his head. "You've got some real balls, Snake. I'll give you that. Ratting us out to the Chosen to sabotage the job? That's dirty, even for you. How many scales did they pay you to stab us in the back, huh?"

The battered cogs in Xigbar's head took an extra second to process what Arthur was saying, but once they did, he was furious. "Seriously? Do you actually think anyone's going to believe that bullshit?"

"I not might have a lot of friends in the guild, but I've got more than you," Arthur said. "Plenty of people who'll back me up when I tell Larian you always put the cash over the guild. And besides—"

He glanced behind him, where they could both hear armored footsteps coming. "—it's not like you're going to be around to say any different."

"You son of a bitch," Xigbar said. "When I get out of this—"

But Arthur was already walking away, leaving Xigbar alone, trapped, with all of the keeps security closing in around him.

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