The Wens' lower levels had contained the books Princess Soliel now believed had caused the miasma. Rat was interested to see what the Yangs contained.
Maybe more of those books?
Or a sampling of the artifacts missing from the Vaults.
Noble families guarded their treasures with a zealousness that put dragons to shame.
And they were much more underhanded and vicious about increasing their collections.
Most of the noble family manors in the Camelia were designed the same, given the restrictions the estate faced with the rocky cliff sides it was built on. They could only dig down so far, and they could only spread so much. Most of the buildings in the estate went up instead of sprawling out like the estates in the capital, and the easiest place to secure valuables was the few floors that they did manage to dig into the earth.
The Yangs had gone a step beyond what Yuze and Kai Low had reported seeing in the Wen's. Every door was triple locked with guards. It had never taken Rat so long to make it down three flights of stairs before.
"We'll lock the door behind you," the senior guard said. His partner was nodding off in the corner. "Knock twice if there's an emergency. Knock three times if you need help. Knock four times if all is good. Otherwise, this door doesn't open again until your shift is over and you're replacements are here."
Rat nodded, committing every word to memory.
The senior guard unlocked each of the three locks with different keys and pulled the heavy door open. Another guard was waiting on the other side, and he stopped to introduce himself to Rat before escaping for his break.
Rat stepped into the lowest hall of the Yang Manor and turned back to watch them close the door behind him. He stayed long enough to hear the locks click back into place and then rapped his knuckles against the door four times.
He didn't step away until he'd gotten four in response.
The lowest level of the Yang Manor had forgone the decoration and comfort of the other levels. The floor was cold, hard stone, and Rat could make out piles of dirt in the cracks and corners. There were torches set evenly along the walls. One of the responsibilities of the guards was to ensure they stayed lit at all times.
Rat walked the entire floor once, counting his steps to measure its size and layout, before he even considered opening any of the doors. He was startled to realize it was an entire hallway wider than the upper floors he'd seen earlier in the day.
He went back and did it again just to be sure and got the same number.
Had the Yangs added it after the upper floors had been built? They'd inherited the manor when they first arrived at the Camelia, and while it was still one of the oldest in the estate, it was also in the center of the wealthiest residential neighborhood.
The amount of effort that they'd put into adding an entire hallway after the main building and the others around it had already been completed would have been dwarfed by the effort required to keep it secret.
It must have taken a few decades at least.
And legally, they should have reported it to Lord Ye, because there was always a chance that digging underneath the buildings in the estate could destabilize everything that had already been built.
Something told Rat they definitely hadn't reported their addition.
He double checked the clock, a carefully measured candle with nails installed for each hour of burning. It had three hours left before it needed to be replaced, and Rat had two hours before the previous guard would return to give him a break.
He decided to start with the new hallway and counted six doors along what would have been the wall away from the older hallways and one at the dead end.
Why hadn't they connected it to the older hallway?
Rat went to that door first.
It was locked, and they hadn't given him any keys when they'd sent him down here. He made a mental note to find out if guards were given keys for any of the other floors or if it was just this one.
There wasn't enough light to see into the locking mechanism, but he pulled out his lock picks anyway. Maybe he could feel his way through.
It was an expensive lock; the pieces were so small and well-made that he could barely feel the catches. He had to close his eyes and tune everything out, which left him dangerously vulnerable if anyone decided to try to put a knife in his back.
It took a dozen tries before he managed to figure out all the catches, and then another half dozen before he managed to get them all at once. It was the most work he'd had to put in on a lock in years, and the realization that all the locks in the Yang Manor might be the same brought his mood down significantly.
He paused for a moment and considered whether it was all worth the trouble. Leadership changed; that was a natural part of life. The fact that the Ye bloodline had been in power for so long was already strange, practically unheard of in Sorrow. Though there were a few bloodlines in Song and Snow that stretched back even farther, but they were the exception even there.
Ah, but he did like Lord Rong, and it wasn't like Lord Ye was a bad leader. There were certainly worse out there.
There was worse in the Camelia, and Rat definitely didn't want any of them taking over.
He didn't know if Lady Yang would be good or bad, but generally, someone who went to these kinds of lengths to take power wasn't that good with it.
The mechanism separated with a soft click, and Rat forced away all those pointless thoughts. He tried not to waste time thinking about things he didn't have the power or the work ethic to change.
~ tbc