“Oh good,” Serena said, eying the doors, “I was going to stay here anyway.”
Shrugging at the quip, Eva glanced around the group. From the ill-looking Sister Abbey and Arachne hanging off of her back, Serena prodding at Arachne’s limbs, to the professors–one of whom looked far more confident than the other–no one objected.
“Let’s do this,” Eva said as she pulled open the door.
The heavy stone slabs making up the doors slammed into the walls with a resounding thunder. Parts of them chipped and fell away while cracks formed in the brick walls.
Eva kept very still as she watched for any sign that the doors would fall off. It was a good thing that no one had been standing near the walls. They would have been crushed.
She might have used just a little too much force. In her defense, they were stone slabs; she figured that they would need a little force to get moving. Clearly, something had been done to them.
Ignoring the snort of a giggle from Serena, Eva pulled out her map. “It’s not far.”
Inside was a much shorter hallway containing three far more mundane doors. From Nel’s brief description from scrying inside, she knew that they were essentially storage rooms. Shelves full of dangerous objects or equipment that the rank and file weren’t supposed to handle. The idol-like devices that the Elysium Order used were in the third room.
And in there should be the obelisk.
Eva took a single step forward, only to be bathed in blinding white light.
The walls, the floor, the ceiling, it all turned white. For a moment, she thought that she was being teleported by Wayne or Zoe. The cold chill settling in didn’t help dissuade her thoughts.
The doors still standing before her were her first clue that she was not being teleported. As was the fact that, while chilly, the cold was more like a winter’s day than the debilitating freeze of their teleport.
“You’re not undead?” Sister Abbey said, genuine surprise in her voice.
“Oh? You knew this would happen? Thought you’d lead us–”
“I didn’t know!” She jumped in place as Arachne’s legs pressed inwards. Her voice raised pitch a few notches as she spoke with haste. “It is a common trap used to immobilize undead. I didn’t know that it would be here.”
“An alarm too, I’d bet,” Wayne said as he brushed past the two. He reached the correct door only to find it locked. Rather than pull out his toolkit, he opened his tome.
One page burst into flames. The flames went out and nothing but ash remained. It dusted off into the air, dispersing and disappearing as it went.
Just as the page burst into flames, the wooden door was quick to follow suit.
He stepped over the threshold before the flames had even died down.
Eva charged in after him. Arachne could handle the augur on her own.
“Back left shelf?” he asked.
“That’s what Nel said,” rushing to the place herself.
There were so many things in the room. It was hard not to stop and stare. Most were in the form of stone or wood sculptures. Some, more organic.
One that Eva did stop to look at–for only a second–was a beating heart inside a glass case suspended by four silver prongs. An eyeball dangled off the bottom. Probably the same kind as the nuns’ implanted eyes. Despite its obvious beating, Eva couldn’t see the thing itself through her sense of blood.
That didn’t stop the eye from glowing bright white as she watched.
Eva jumped back and ran to the shelf that Wayne had stopped in front of.
“We should hurry,” she said. “I don’t like this place.”
“No arguments.”
He closed his hand around an arm-sized replica of the Washington Monument. This version was covered in all kinds of markings and scribbles. The top was not a square pyramid. Rather, it had a cone with engravings on it. The first engraving had a circle. That circle was repeated just to either side, except with a sliver taken off. The pattern went around, waxing and waning until it returned to the circle at the front.
Just as Nel had described it.
He hefted it up a few inches before setting it right back down. “Heavy,” he grunted.
“Zoe can levitate it, right?”
Frowning, he tucked his tome under his arm and tried again with two hands. “Maybe,” he said, holding it in the air for a few seconds before setting it down. “Won’t be easy.”
Rather than try again, Wayne pulled up his tome. He tapped the obelisk on the front.
There was a clipped rush of cold air. Nothing else changed save for Wayne’s frown deepening further. Whatever he had intended to do had failed.
“Between is warded off here,” he grumbled to himself. “It wasn’t on the main floor…”
Again, he tapped the obelisk. Aside from another burst of cold air, nothing happened.
Eva shook her head. They didn’t have time for this. If Wayne could lift it with two hands, surely she could as well. As long as she lifted with her legs and not her back, it probably wouldn’t be all that difficult.
Putting one hand around the base and the other halfway up, Eva hefted it up.
Heavy was an accurate word. Wayne had chosen well. However, it didn’t feel quite as heavy as carrying Irene’s limp body around after their little hot springs incident. She would be useless in combat, but she had plans to help with that. With the blood in her backpack already attuned to her dagger, she would be able to control it without much physical effort.
Taking a few steps away from the shelf, Eva found the load much easier to carry as she readjusted her center of balance. It left her leaning back, but… I can do this.
“Got it?”
“I do. Let’s go.” Before she moved more than two steps, Eva paused and took another look around the room. A golden necklace with an hourglass set in the middle particularly caught her eye. “Not going to take anything else?”
“I’d rather not give them more reason to hunt us down,” he said as he moved back through the room. He didn’t so much as glance at the objects on the shelves. “This obelisk is damning enough on its own.”
“Fair point,” Eva mumbled before following after him.
Sister Abbey stood at the room’s threshold, just behind the pile of ashes that once was a door. Her mouth was agape as she looked into the room.
“Lot of good your ‘door unlocker’ was, Spe–E.”
“She unlocked one door,” Eva said as she hefted the obelisk, shifting its position ever so slightly. “That was useful.”
“Could have done it myself. You’d have done better to let S knock on the door and give you a few seconds to escape.”
“Maybe if she did that sooner. As it was, had to act quickly. I didn’t want our dear augur friend to notice me while I was unprepared.”
“Too much talk. Not enough running.”
Eva just frowned as Wayne ran into the white room. “You started it,” she mumbled to herself.
With a nod of her head to Arachne and Sister Abbey, she walked back into the icy cold room, carrying the obelisk all the way.
They got through the pure white room just in time to see a lightning bolt travel down the hall from Zoe’s dagger.
“Company,” she said through grit teeth as blindingly white lightning crackled down the hall.
Chapter 029
Zoe dove to the side, ducking into the white room while narrowly avoiding the returned lightning from the stairwell.
While her own lightning might not have been the most powerful thing she could have thrown, she had serious misgivings about killing people who were just doing their jobs. Especially when she was the one breaking and entering with the intent to steal priceless artifacts.
The Elysium Order was under no such hesitations. White lightning that only narrowly missed colliding with Zoe hit the ground a short distance behind her.