Halfway down, the stairs split in two. The red carpet continued on down the staircase to the right, while the one on the left was bare and plain.
Everyone paused to check with me.
I nodded to the red carpeted option. If our choices were treasury or dungeons, I doubted they’d put a fancy runner on the path to the dungeons.
The stairs curved as we crept down.
A light at the bottom made us slow.
Illium stepped into the hall and into their line of vision.
“Halt!” We heard the guards call immediately. “What’s the password?”
“Jade dagger,” Illium’s deep voice rung out.
A long pause.
“Come forward,” they called, less strident now.
I waited, picturing Illium calmly drawing out his powders and blowing them in the guard’s faces.
Moments later, a thud sounded, followed by another, as the guards dropped to the floor, unconscious.
Though Illium insisted the powders would only reach his intended victims, I still drew the collar of my shirt up over my mouth and nose as we stepped into the hall and passed the two armored guards sprawled helplessly on the floor, out cold.
This time, I nodded to Ryo, my escape artist. Able to get in and out of a tight squeeze, he could always see all the angles. He would stay outside and rearrange the soldiers to concoct a believable scene.
With two it could be trickier. It’d be difficult to convince someone that two guards fell asleep at the exact same time.
Since our aim here was to be invisible, Ryo had sketched a few different options. He pulled a small hammer and chisel from his toolbelt, which meant he’d gone with his favorite choice. He intended to chip away a few large bits of rubble from the ceiling and rearrange them around the guard’s heads, to make it look like a small earthquake or shift in the castle structure had caused debris to fall from the ceiling and knocked them out.
Grinning, Bosh pulled out the key to the lock that he’d swiped from Captain Tehrani in the midst of the feast upstairs.
Once the bolts clicked open, he swung it wide for us with a smirk and a bow.
Naveed led the way inside, and we followed, leaving Ryo to his work.
We’d broken into many castles before, but this treasury was definitely on the larger side. The vast room stretched what had to be almost a third of the castle above. We held our candles aloft.
King Gaspar had an enormous work table front and center, currently piled with gold bars, leading me to believe he often came down and counted. We wouldn’t touch those. Along the walls were different cases set up to display a wide assortment of jewelry and weapons, which all gleamed in the light.
Arie lit one of the main lamps before I caught her and the room burst into light.
“Stop,” I hissed before she lit another. “We leave no trace. That includes everything down to the dust on the table and the oil in the lamps.” I twisted the key to extinguish the flame in the lamp, which caused the room to fall into a deeper darkness than before, almost sinister.
“You should’ve told me,” Arie mumbled.
“This is how you learn.” I grinned and bumped her elbow to show her no harm was done. “Now spread out, touch as little as possible, and look for things that won’t be missed right away. Things we can sell fast before the king starts looking for them.” Everyone nodded and steered away from the obvious gold bars lying on the table, which were stamped with the king’s face.
I moved along the wall, studying the delicate designs on the sword in the glass case nearest me, specifically the jewels lining the hilt. Carefully opening the case, I lifted the weapon, turning it over. There were just as many jewels on the other side—but not for long.
With one of my smaller tools from my bag, I managed to dislodge the jewels along the backside with ease, dropping them into my bag, before replacing the sword on its stand inside the glass case. No one would be the wiser unless they also took the sword out, which I highly doubted would happen anytime soon.
“Here, boss,” Bosh handed me a bag full of coins. “These were in a trunk.”
Naveed stepped up behind him and gave me a string of pearls, a jeweled bracelet, and a small pin crusted with diamonds.
I dropped all the items into the bag. They clinked together in the quiet room.
