148 – Hidden Vault
Makhus furrowed his brow and nodded. Slowly, exaggeratedly.
“I get it,” he said. “However, you must be aware of the fact that I do not have the supplies to produce more complex restoratives and performance enhancers? We’ve scarcely even re-opened the store.”
The governor grinned, “I have already sourced everything necessary to produce ten times as much as I need. Deliver at all, your payment will be three-hundred and twenty gelt per dose. Keep delivering, and I will arrange for a direct supply contact from Kargaria’s Bluesky Alchemist’s Guild. No border holdups, no trigger-happy Inquisitors, I’ll even give you a tax exemption on whatever you get imported.”
He didn’t even know what it was that he would be making, and already Makhus had decided to accept. The offer would’ve been too good to be true under different circumstances, but considering the governor’s current state, plus his political position and the politicking that likely went on in the background… He was more than willing to believe that a stately sum and a couple favors in Kargaria were an acceptable price to pay for the politician in exchange for his own health and wellbeing. After all, Crovacus Estoras had a reputation for frankly unreasonable perseverance in business and politics alike, so much so that even a nobody like Makhus had heard of him before everything went to shit.
“Oho?” Makhus mused. “What is it that you would have me brew, then?”
For a few seconds, a few eternal, agonizing seconds, the two men stared each other down. There was no animosity between them, yet they still felt a mutual tension in the knowledge that, had their circumstances been even slightly different, they would be trying to kill one another.
“Fivefold Philter,” the governor croaked. “I need you to make me approximately a week’s worth of Fivefold Philter, that is to say three doses. You get paid half before and half after. After that, we can speak further on the nature of further agreements..”
Makhus couldn’t help raising an eyebrow, “...I apologize for my skepticism, but I’ll need to see these supplies of yours to believe that you have enough to make even those three doses, let alone thirty.”
“Why don’t you see for yourself?” the governor said with a smile, slowly rising from his seat. He walked over to one of the many shelves of his office, this one in particular decorated with a great many exotic, if mundane, artifacts. Oil lamps, puzzle boxes, sculptures, and so on. Makhus followed suit.
The governor’s substantial frame obscured what he was doing, but soon there was a quiet click and a section of the wall swung inward to the sound of escaping gas. Makhus let out an inadvertent chuckle at this, thinking, “Of course he had a hidden chamber built-in.”
As quickly as the hidden door opened, Crovacus slipped on through with Makhus following closely behind, at which point the governor pulled an entirely unconcealed lever on the wall that made the door swing shut and seal itself to the sound of a click-clacking mechanism. The alchemist was impressed, remarking as he followed in the governor’s stead, “Seals to prevent a draft, and opens inward to not leave any marks on the floor. Does the door somehow fake the sound of a solid wall when you knock on it too?”
“Nice guess, it does,” Estoras chuckled before he turned and walked down the hidden passage. It was too short to be called a corridor, little more than an intermediary room with another door at the other end. This one was effectively just a downsized vault door, likely there to stonewall any unwelcome entrants. It had four separate dials and two bizarre keyholes with multiple right-angle turns and zigzags each, obviously designed specifically to stump lockpickers.
Crovacus reached into the pocket of his suit pants and pulled out an elaborate, frankly ridiculous-looking key with a head consisting of multiple moving pieces, rotating several into position and sliding others all the way back so they wouldn’t enter the keyway. It didn’t even look like it would fit until he pushed it against the keyhole, only for some of the parts to fold under the pressure as the key clicked into the mechanism. With his left hand he reached for the first dial, turning it back and forth with practiced speed and precision as he slowly turned the key clockwise by small increments.
He had turned the key a quarter of the way by the time he stopped fiddling with the first dial, moving onto the second and continuing the process that now became clear to Makhus. Each correctly input number in the sequence allowed the key to turn a little further, and it would take all four dials in the correct order to open the door. Both that door and the room it was attached to had better be nigh indestructible with such a complex locking mechanism, seeing as it would be rendered useless by a simple hole in the wall.
It was at least another minute before the key had turned all the way around and the loud clack of the door opening resounded, swinging noiselessly inward on its hinges. Following the governor through to the other side, the alchemist saw that the hidden room truly was a reinforced vault, whose solid metal walls were etched with distinctly Grekurian-style glyphs.From kinetic dispersion and structural reinforcement, to glyphs that almost exactly matched those used on essentia-stabilization seals. A third of the room was stacked floor to roof with boxes, whilst another third had boxes of varying sizes and designs, from simple crates to elaborate puzzleboxes. There was a bulky, metal table off to the right, many smaller boxes stacked underneath it. Crovacus walked between a few crates, vanishing from sight for a moment before he re-emerged with a utilitarian-looking grey lockbox with two dials and a different, but still ridiculously malicious keyhole.
Setting it down on the table, the governor rearranged his key, slid it into the slot, and started turning dials again. Back and forth, back and forth, turning the key all along. Half a revolution for one dial, half for the other, and the box came open with a click and the hiss of escaping gas.