At that moment, two guards turned a corner in the distance, and came along the passage. They saw Tantaerra and The Masked listening at the open door, shouted, and snatched out their weapons.
The Masked strode through the doorway into the audience chamber as if it were his own. Tantaerra hastened to follow.
Lord Krzonstal Telcanor gaped at them, then smiled in triumph and told his advisor, "Behold! The two investigators from the General Lords I persuaded to undertake a certain mission for the glory of Braganza!"
"I do recall, Lord. Yet I look upon them now, and see no Fearsome Gauntlet."
Telcanor winced, then glared at Tantaerra and her partner. "Well? Did you recover it?"
Tantaerra glared back. "We have not. Yet."
"Yet you dare to return? You're traitors! You must have been merely posing as investigators reporting to the General Lords. Guards, kill them!"
"No, Lord!" Tartesper snapped. "These two alive protect your neck! These two dead will be dismissed as mere fabrication on your part! They must be taken to the Bailiff for questioning!"
The guards hesitated, swords half-out, and looked to their master.
Who sighed and said reluctantly, "Tartesper, you are right. As always." He waved his guards back.
Whereupon the advisor confronted Tantaerra and The Masked. "The time has come," he told them coldly, "for you to tell us who you truly are."
"Lord Investigators, reporting directly to the General Lords," Armistrade said boldly.
Tartesper shook his head, his disbelief clear, then asked quietly, "Tell me: what sleeps beneath the white tomb?"
"The greatest secret in Canorate," The Masked told him promptly.
The advisor lifted an eyebrow.
"What gate does the black key unlock?"
"The gate to Molthune's heart."
"Who was the seventh?"
Tarram's answer came a shade more slowly this time. "The Red Dragon."
Tartesper sneered at him. "A clever thief may buy or overhear one pass-phrase, or even two, but I've not found one yet cleverer than me."
He looked at Lord Telcanor. "They're no 'Lord Investigators.'"
Then he turned to the Telcanor bodyguards, and ordered, "Disarm and arrest them."
"I'd not try that, if I were you," The Masked warned, backing toward the east wall and drawing a dagger. Tantaerra moved with him, wishing she still had two hands so she could have two daggers right now.
Unimpressed, the guards drew swords and advanced.
"Keep back," The Masked warned them calmly.
One sneered, and none of them paused in their menacing advance.
Tantaerra saw her partner's mask flash; he'd called on the gauntlet. A moment later, with a sound like parchment tearing, only as loud as thunder, a rift opened across the floor of the audience chamber.
And swiftly widened, amid rumblings that grew louder and louder.
Some lamps below exploded like shattered stars as ceilings fell and walls crumpled. Several floors beneath the audience chamber were collapsing into a chasm.
Three of the bodyguards fell into the gulf with startled shouts, tumbling down through torn timbers, falling wall stones, and plaster dust. The others scrambled back from the edge of the rift.
"My home!" Lord Telcanor howled, his goblet falling forgotten from his hand to bounce on the floor, ringing like a bell-until it fell into the rift, and was lost in the widening destruction below. He swelled up in fury and pointed across the gulf at Tantaerra and her partner as if his fingers could stab them across half a room. "Arrest them!" he bellowed, "and break their arms and legs! They don't need to be able to run and fight to answer the Bailiff of Braganza!"
The Masked's mask flashed again.
One wall of the audience chamber tore open from top to bottom, leaving the room open to the night. As Lord Telcanor gaped in disbelief, a cool breeze wafted in.
Through the gap, another wing of the mansion could be seen across a courtyard, soaring and grand in the light of its many lanterns.
"It would be unwise to continue to demand such things, Lord Telcanor," The Masked told their shaken host, and pointed at that grand wing of Telcanor House.
It promptly groaned, shed a few roof slates, then slowly, but with a quickening, growing thunder, leaned forward and collapsed before their eyes, a huge swath of its front wall falling into the courtyard.
Leaving five floors of rooms torn open to the air-and Lord Telcanor aghast and in tears.
"We can kill everyone, and destroy Braganza, if we must," Tantaerra informed the Telcanors on the far side of the wide chasm that now stretched from one end of the audience chamber to the other. "Don't force us to do so."
She shot a look at her partner, lifted her hand to shield her face, and behind it hissed, "How did you do all this?"
"Badly built, this place," he muttered back. "Make the right pillar vanish, and all the rest follows."
The advisor hurled a spell at them, shouting, "Abadar demands your destruction!"
Purple flames roared out of nothingness to sear Tantaerra and her partner-but vanished right in front of their noses, leaving them standing unscathed.
"Abadar does nothing of the sort," The Masked retorted. "Just as you're no priest, of Abadar or anyone else!"
He lifted his hand, and the Fearsome Gauntlet rose into view, up through the chasm.
The advisor swiftly snapped out another magic.
Tarram Armistrade smiled. The mask pulsed, the gauntlet drank the advisor's spell-and went dark. It shuddered in midair, and with an audible groan cracked from one end to the other.
As its fragments started to fall, Tantaerra shot a look at her partner. He stared back at her, aghast.
They fled for the back passage door together.
The advisor hurled another spell after them, but succeeded only in blasting down the door and the wall that framed it. The flying fragments of that blast crushed the foremost bodyguards, who'd taken another door out into the passage to get around the rift and reach The Masked and Tantaerra, spattering the passage walls with gore.
"After them!" Lord Telcanor bellowed, his voice terrible with wrath. "Kill them!"
His surviving bodyguards hesitated for a moment, but he ran out into the passage after them, his eyes ablaze with fury.
Not waiting for him to catch up, they resumed the chase.
Too enraged to fear for his own safety, their master followed. They pounded past the smeared bodies of the fallen guards and along the passage, where Lord Telcanor flung open the door of his treasury and roared at the duty guards inside to join him, so loudly that they flinched back.
They rushed out into the passage, and their master led them, following Tantaerra and The Masked, pelting down the back stair, where-
Lord Krzonstal Telcanor came to an abrupt halt, to gawk at carnage.
The staircase below him was choked with the broken bodies of his guards. Just in time, he saw their doom and his peril-as long, wormlike arms reached down from the sloping underside of the stair, seeking to rend.
A tentacled monster was clinging to the ceiling above him, reaching for them.
Telcanor and his guards stumbled hastily back up a few steps, out of reach, as the tentacled monster clinging to the ceiling grabbed at them.
Below them on a landing, Tantaerra and Tarram put their backs to the wall.
"It's Voyvik!" Tantaerra shouted unnecessarily. "Use the mask, or something!"
Next to her, The Masked spread his hands helplessly.
Then a door on another landing opened, and blue bolts of magic streaked out, missiles that swept up and unerringly into the monster.
The terrified Lord Telcanor sobbed and clawed his way back a few steps higher.
The tentacled monster convulsed, writhing in pain. Another volley of magical missiles raced from behind the door to smite it, and it shuddered and shrank back-but when the blue radiance faded, the weakened, maddened creature reached out again angrily.