He peeked around the corner and was surprised to discover that the quality of the masonry abruptly stopped ten feet or so away. Beyond that point, the walls of the tunnel looked as if they had been hammered repeatedly with sledges—or perhaps, he thought wryly, been blasted with haphazard use of TNT. Twenty feet farther, a small chamber had been roughly excavated, with an ironbound door set in the far wall. Judging from the chunks of rubble littering the floor, Chuck figured the work had been done recently. The monsters that had abducted his friends must have found the beginnings of a back door to an underground fortress and forced their way in. Not particularly elegant, but effective.
Chuck slipped around the corner and edged down the tunnel and into the room, looking for possible foes or peepholes through which a sentry could be looking. He discovered none, which didn’t really surprise him. The three outside the tunnel would theoretically provide ample warning, and any other guards outside that door would merely get butchered if enemies came down the tunnel. Approaching the door, he first put his ear against the keyhole on the off chance he could hear any noises on the other side. The thudding of his heart was the only sound he heard, and he forced himself to take several deep breaths to calm his nerves. Confident that he wasn’t going to be surprised by someone opening the door, he examined it closely.
The wood was oak, and the size of the bindings and the rivets within them indicated that the door was thick—at least half a foot, perhaps more. He had no expectation of being able to break it down, but it was one more piece of information he could use. They keyhole itself was large, suggesting a heavy internal bolting mechanism. He nodded at that. Larger bolts required larger keys, but that also provided more wiggle room for lockpicking. Tentatively, he slid a narrow tool down the crack between the door and the frame. It met resistance exactly where the bolt should be, signifying it was indeed locked. If they had turned the bolt, the door was almost certainly barred from the other side, so even if he managed to pick the lock, he still wouldn’t be able to get through. Stonemasons the kobolds were not, but they installed solid doors. This was literally a dead end.
“OK, think,” he murmured to himself, knowing that the sound wouldn’t pass through six-plus inches of wood. He didn’t have a tool long and sturdy enough to raise a bar on the other side of the door. So that seemed like a bust. He looked around, but the chamber was otherwise empty, and the ceiling was not especially high. He couldn’t just hide behind something and wait to slip in the next time the door opened up. There wasn’t a lot to work with.
He turned his attention to the smoother walls of the passage, hoping to find the telltale crack that indicated a hidden door. It was clear that the kobolds had found a dead end at the point in the tunnel where the walls transitioned from smooth to rough, then hammered away, extending the tunnel, until they busted through into the main chamber. They slapped on a door, and voilà!—instant entryway.
But it didn’t make sense that there would be a finely crafted passage in the hill that led only to a dead end in the first place. All the recent digging meant that the bad guys hadn’t found a secret door, and after ten minutes of searching, Chuck finally concluded he wasn’t going to either.
He leaned against the wall and slid down to a sitting position. “Now what am I gonna do?”
He didn’t relish the thought of sneaking back past those sentries. He could poison one but was no match for a toe-to-toe fight against the other. His only option was to go forward. The trick was finding a way to do so before someone decided to walk down the passageway.
He stared at the opposite wall for a time, letting his mind wander. Dots began to appear in his field of vision, so he closed his eyes and shook his head to clear them. When he opened them again, he discovered that the dots were still there. Faint, but definitely there. Scrambling up, he fixed his eye on one of the dots and stepped over to it, putting his finger right where he had seen it. Up close, it didn’t seem to still be there, but he knew better than to ignore it. He pulled his dagger back out and poked with it. A little mortar chipped off, which surprised him. His blade shouldn’t have been strong enough to cut rock by a long shot. He cut at it some more, and soon a perfectly round hole the size of a quarter was revealed. Thinking that it must be hiding a trigger for a secret door, he began exploring it with his finger. A niggling voice in the back of his head said it could be a trap, but he dismissed it. He was plum out of choices at this point.
With a little more prodding, his finger pushed through and into an open space. He cleaned out the hole as best he could, first with his finger and then by blowing lightly into it. No matter how much he played with the inside of the hole, he was unable to discover any hidden triggers or catches. He stepped down the hallway a bit to give himself some perspective and tried to identify where the other dots might have been. Now that he knew more or less what to look for, the others became clear. They were regularly spaced and in a perfect vertical line from a foot off the floor up to a foot short of the ceiling. Marking the next higher one with his eye, he returned and carved out the next hole, finding it to be exactly like the first. There were a couple inches of mortar, then emptiness behind it.
“Very interesting,” he said to himself, and stepped back again to survey the situation. A series of equally spaced holes bored into a wall in a straight line from floor to ceiling. He grinned. “Oh, no they didn’t.” He approached the holes again and looked straight up at the ceiling. “Oh, yes they did!” He stopped short and looked around, worried that in his enthusiasm he might have given himself away. While having guards come charging out the door would take care of the locked-door problem, it would create new problems that would be significantly worse.
Taking out Jimmy’s dagger-sword, he jammed it into the higher of the two holes, all the way to the hilt. He hadn’t expected it would go all the way in, but the magic must have adapted to fit it the same way it had when he first picked it up and it became a dagger. The hole into which he had shoved the blade was about chest height.
He nodded. “Yeah, that’ll do.” He squatted for a moment and then leapt straight up, landing on the hilt and balancing easily on one foot. TJ may have gained some knowledge, and Jimmy some strength, but Chuck had the agility of a cat. Or at least a cat burglar.
It took only a few seconds of poking at the ceiling to find where the trapdoor was concealed directly above his head. A little scraping revealed a keyhole, and within seconds he had the lock picked and the trapdoor pushed up and open. There was darkness behind the hole, so Chuck dropped back down to the ground to fetch a torch from one of the sconces, then tossed it up and into the opening. He hoped that what he had found was an escape route and not a sally port, from which to pour boiling oil on invaders—or he might find something horribly flammable up there. Glancing around, he discovered that he’d created quite a mess on the floor with all the scraping he had done on the ceiling. He stepped over to where the mortar chips lay and kicked them into the recently excavated portion of the corridor. With all the rubble already on the floor, the chips would be invisible even to someone looking for them. There was nothing to be done about the holes he had dug in the wall, so he just hoped no one would notice.