At the end of this second hallway, approximately beneath where the royal chamber was, he came to a wall with a stone door. A sturdy oak bar lay across it, preventing entry from the other side. Chuck examined the area directly surrounding the door and discovered a peephole off to one side. Through the hole he could see an enormous gallery with dozens of pillars; the room was illuminated by hundreds of torches. It appeared he had found the bad guys. The kobolds moved back and forth through the chamber. Twice one of them walked right in front of his peephole without giving the door a single glance. Chuck deduced that either they had tried to break down the door and failed or didn’t even know it existed.
He went back to look at the door, particularly where its hinges were attached and where the bindings for the oaken bar were bolted to the wall. They were completely flush and showed no sign of wear or buckling, which meant that the kobolds hadn’t even bothered trying to knock it in. With the numbers that he had seen through the peephole and at the attack, he found it hard to believe that they couldn’t have bashed it in if they’d put their mind to it. It must be hidden by something.
There was no way he was going to try to open the door while the beasts were walking around just outside, so he would have to wait until the activity decreased. Kobolds were nocturnal creatures, so he must have gotten here right around lunch-time. He figured it would be a good eight hours before things would settle down enough for him to explore. It was fortuitous that he and his friends would be the most alert when their foes were the most tired. They would have the upper hand if it came to a fight.
To pass the time, he began rummaging around the adjacent chambers in the hope of finding something interesting. The people who lived back here seemed to have left in something of a hurry. All of the living chambers still had clothes in them, just as with the royal bedroom upstairs. The barracks was empty, but that made sense because the soldiers likely had living chambers in other parts of the complex and only brought their required kit when on assignment protecting the royals. That didn’t explain why the trapdoor in the escape hatch was also barred from the inside, but he put it aside as something to pursue if he managed to survive the rescue attempt.
He retraced his steps upstairs and began a more thorough search of the royal bedchamber. There were candles placed strategically around the room, and he lit them to keep from having to hold the torch while he searched. In moments, the entire room was awash in a warm glow. The clothes were short and the boots were long, another sign that the former occupants were dwarves. Much of the clothing had been eaten through by bugs, leaving it worthless. There were several more sets of clothing that exhibited golden buttons, but after he found the bag of gems, the buttons just seemed like overkill. A small bookshelf in the corner boasted an assortment of heavy bound books with titles in several languages. He ran his finger along their spines, but none of them seemed particularly interesting. The history of so-and-so. A book on astronomy. A book of genealogies. Perhaps they were valuable to a bookseller, but they were too bulky and were just as likely to be worthless, so he left them where they lay. He had hoped that he’d find something that TJ would deem worthwhile, but unfortunately, none of the books were titled Really Cool Magic Spells Your Friend Doesn’t Already Know, so he was out of luck.
A large tapestry displaying a dragon breathing fire from the top of a mountain hung on the wall opposite the bookshelf. A sly smile crept over Chuck’s face. He padded over to it and gingerly lifted it away from the wall. He shook his head in disbelief at just how stereotypical it was to place a hidden vault behind a tapestry in the king’s room. It was one of those things that people laughed about when he was training: Don’t forget to look behind the tapestry! He was about to pull the fabric aside when a gut feeling stopped him. He slowly released his hold on the cloth and turned back toward the bookcase. Crouching, he walked around the bed and over to the space directly opposite the vault door.
There, just above the bookcase (which would be about chest high for a dwarf), was a series of small holes running horizontally along the wall. He removed a long, skinny tool from his satchel and carefully slid it into one of the holes. About three inches in, it met resistance for a moment and then slid slightly to the side before going in another couple inches and then stopping: darts. Chuck nodded and withdrew the tool. Giving it a slight sniff, he recoiled at the sensation of fire shooting up his nostrils and fell back on his haunches. He shook his head, recognizing that smell. It appeared that the king wanted his robbers to die slowly, in pain. Not a professional’s poison.
He pulled the books off a shelf and stacked them on top of the bookcase so that they covered the holes and then nodded at his handiwork. The discovery of the darts meant that the entire area warranted a much more thorough search before trying to open the vault. They may not have stopped at a single trap, and the next one could kill him just as dead. A search for more holes yielded nothing, so he proceeded to check the ceiling directly above the tapestry. His search of the ceiling was just to be safe; after the poison-dart trap, it was unlikely the ceiling would also be rigged, since replacing ceiling stones was a lot harder than rearming a spring trigger. But he searched it anyway. One thing he’d learned about royals over his long career was that when it was someone else’s job to do something—like resetting a ceiling stone—the difficulty of the effort wasn’t a consideration.
As expected, that search yielded nothing. He decided it was time to approach the vault. He grasped the tapestry firmly by a bottom corner and, standing to the side, yanked it as hard as he could. The fabric popped out of its bindings in the wall, and a burst of flame shot out from the wall behind it, straight at the spot where someone would’ve been standing had they pulled down the tapestry from the middle. He nodded and went to smother a small fire that had broken out on a rug. When the black streaks in his vision caused by the flare had disappeared, he slowly examined the vault door. There were three keyholes visible, and a small depression that acted as a door handle. Again Chuck put his nose to the test, and after smelling the door, it gave him the all clear. He then fetched a candelabra to give himself more light and discovered slight discoloration in the area of the handle. He held his breath and placed a candle flame directly on the indentation. A black smoke curled up, and he immediately threw his other arm over his nose and mouth and backed away. The smoke curled upward and was whisked away by some invisible ventilation system. He liberated the pillowcase from one of the pillows on the bed and set it aside to wrap his hand in later when he was ready to open the door.
Having decided all the traps had been dealt with, he approached the locks. It was possible that all three locks were legit, but it seemed more likely to him that at least one was a decoy, and if someone tried to open the wrong one, either another trap would spring or some other fail-safe device that made the vault impossible to open would trigger. His first inclination was to use the trick he had before, where he slid something in the crack to find the lock. But the seam between the door and the wall was too tight. The next thing he tried was blowing softly into each of the three locks and listening to the sound it made. Different tumblers whistled different ways when you blew through them, and that made it easier to select the correct tool for the job. Unfortunately, there was nothing that suggested one lock was real and the others weren’t. Chuck took out one of his tools reluctantly and gently probed the upper lock. He hoped he would be able to tell the real lock from the fake without triggering whatever unpleasantness was in store for would-be thieves. Frowning, he moved to the second lock, and then to the third. All three felt identical.