Chapter 78 – The Room of Secrets

The next cycle, when the Torrviol guard went to raid the spy’s headquarters, Mirian and Jei accompanied them. By now, Mirian knew far too many details about the guards for them to be able to dismiss her, and like with Luspire, she’d had practice navigating the conversations with them. She did the verbal equivalent of strong-arming them into accepting her presence, then helped carefully direct the raid.

“There,” she said after they were past the first trapdoor and the second glyph-trap. She pointed at the nondescript spot on a rug, beneath which was the paving stone with the runes. “Avoid that spot at all costs as we get into the room. There’s a special trap there, completely undetectable by standard divination, and I don’t know how to disable it.” No need to tell them about the runes or the possible necromancy connection. And no way was Mirian duplicating an unknown rune and imprinting it on their souls, even if she had the faintest idea how to do that. Mirian had already checked the souls of these guards for that telltale rune last cycle, so she knew they weren’t spies themselves.

“Then how do we get in?” Roland asked. “Is there another secret door?”

Mirian jerked her head at Jei. “Through this wall,” she said.

Jei looked at Mirian, raised an eyebrow, then shrugged and brought out her orb. She started transforming the bricks in the wall, then telekinetically peeled the section away. Several shelves full of paper came with it, splashing across the floor, but the room lay open.

Her heart raced. No fire. Had they done it?

She’d never been inside the room before. It was disappointingly typical; it looked just like a small office, complete with organized filing systems.

“We need to get as many papers as we can to Magistrate Ada’s office. Which is hopefully all of them. This building is still rigged to burn.”

Mirian tried the drawers in the large wooden desk and found them locked. She didn’t bother picking them; it would take too much time. Instead, she used force spells to crack open the drawers, tearing apart the wood. Bottles of magical ink and scribing tools clattered onto the floor. She rooted through the rest of it, finding more arcane materials, but not what she was looking for. Mirian had scribed several divination spells already, and deployed those now; a refined version of the detect passages spell she’d started using so long ago.

A faint glow settled in on the back of the desk. There seemed no way to access it. Likely, there was some secret switch or sliding compartment. Mirian didn’t bother looking for it. She tore the entire top of the desk off.

Jei said, “Good channeling efficiency and precise force application. You have been practicing.”

Mirian smiled. “I’ve had a good teacher.” Inside the desk, she could now see the small mechanism that protected the hidden compartment. Inside that compartment was a small, ornate chest, about two handspans wide, and half as long. The chest was wooden, with silver bands wrapped around it. The dark wood was carved with swirls and whorls reminiscent of the statues in the Luminate Temple. When she attempted to rip it open with magic, the spell’s energy dissipated like it had just hit an especially strong aura. Interesting, she thought.

“Try to open it,” she told Jei.

Jei’s spell also fizzled. She tried again, pouring enough power into the spell that Mirian felt the flow of mana through the air near her. Again, the same result. “That must be studied,” she said.

Mirian didn’t need any convincing. The guards had called a wagon to transport all the papers to the magistrate. She tucked the chest under her arm, and followed the guards as they headed to Ada’s office.

***

It didn’t take long for them for their bounty of papers to yield results. Most of the documents didn’t even need Jei’s algorithm to be deciphered, just a simple translation.

“Gods above,” Magistrate Ada breathed as she started sorting through them. “This is everything. This is… everyone. I’ve never seen such a well documented scheme.”

Ada’s self-control was usually unflappable, but as they continued going through names and documents, Mirian watched her fingers start to shake. She could see why. Mayor Wolden wasn’t the only official implicated. Several professors and city councilors, a dozen well-regarded merchants, and half the Torrviol guard were implicated. All of them had either been blackmailed, intimidated, or bribed. The spiderweb had wrapped around the entire economic and political power apparatus of Torrviol. Mirian even recognized a Bainrose librarian’s name on a list of bribed officials. There was also an ominous note, unsigned, that read ‘I’ll take care of the Archmage.’

Mirian hardly had to manipulate Ada; with so many people implicated, she needed someone who she could trust, and Mirian was the obvious choice. Mirian recruited her Eskanar language tutor extra to come help decode the documents, which Ada paid the woman for. The tutor had no soul-mark, and didn’t seem to be one of the targets.

While Ada’s office worked on the translation and documentation, Mirian worked on studying the strange chest they’d found. They kept it in the Magistrate’s Building, with guards on the lookout for anyone that might come to try and retrieve it. It was clear to her the box was using some form of soul-magic, and while she helped ward the room with arcane glyphs, she knew those glyphs might very well be useless at stopping celestial divination magic—if such a thing existed.

Her attempt to use Xipuatl’s Elder reliquary failed utterly. The runes he had taught her were insufficient for affecting the chest in any way, though it was interesting to try to analyze it. As far as she could tell, there was mana inside the material of the chest, somehow, not in a flow-state.

“Another thing that contradicts the standard theories,” Xipuatl noted. “I wonder how many people know how to do something like… this.”

Mirian contemplated the chest. The silver bands were not actually made of silver, but some other metal she couldn’t identify. “It doesn’t look ancient. But maybe it came out of the Labyrinth?”

“Either way, it should have been a discovery presented to the wizards of Baracuel, not hidden away for whatever nefarious purpose.”

With magic unable to open it, Mirian brought the chest down to the crafting center, where Ingrid could help her use more mundane ways to crack it open. She made sure to have an escort while moving the chest around; she still didn’t have any idea what the Impostor did during the cycle. So far, nothing she’d done had brought her out of the shadows, but Mirian suspected that if successfully cracking open the spy’s headquarters didn’t lure her out, nothing would.

First, they tried chiseling open the gap between the lid and the body of the chest so they could fit a bar in and lever it open. However, the chisel only sparked and blunted as they hammered it in, and it would neither fit in the gap nor damage the wood enough to make one.

The band saw broke trying to cut the chest open, sending out a shard of metal that nearly hit Ingrid. With the drill press, Jei and Mirian maintained force shields around the device while Ingrid lowered the machine down. The drill scuffed the hells out of it, but it also made a horrible screeching noise and started melting the drill bit, so they stopped.

Ingrid, now more determined than ever to get it open, next suggested they make the chest cold. Since they couldn’t use magic on the chest directly, Jei and Mirian worked together to use heat displacement spells to get a bath of water below freezing, with a special mixture of salts keeping the water from actually turning solid. Then dunked the chest in there, let the metal turn brittle, then set it on the anvil press.

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The anvil press did the trick.

As the pressure increased, the silver bands groaned, then cracked apart. Mirian jumped back as cobalt flames engulfed the chest.

“What is it?” Jei asked.

It took Mirian a moment to realize no one else could see the flames. She still had Xipuatl’s Elder reliquary with her. “The soul-magic is doing something,” she whispered to her. Gingerly, she put her hand towards those flames, then snatched it back when she felt the burn. Not on her flesh; she’d glimpsed the flames searing the weave of her soul, and felt a sensation like no other. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. “Stay back from it. Some sort of spell. It looks like an enchantment undergoing rapid exomagical decay, though.”