Chapter 91: Uninvited Guest
Distantly, just loud enough that he could hear it over the sound of his heavy breathing, Simon heard chamber music. Or something like that, anyway. Classical music had never been his thing, but he could make out a couple different stringed instruments and realized that there had to be some kind of ceremony or event going on in this building.
Is it the cause of the fog, he wondered. If it's not, I probably need to warn them, but music in the middle of the night in a creepy old temple? It can’t be a coincidence.
Slowly, he rose to his feet and began to look around. What he really needed was a window so he could look around the city and see if it was somewhere he knew or somewhere else entirely. He didn’t get that, though. Instead, the room was pitch black, and he was forced to use a word of minor light just to get across the room without tripping over furniture.
The building he’d broken into had been a temple, but this looked like an anteroom or a small hall more than anything. “Maybe this is where they view the corpses before they bury them,” he said with a shrug as he moved to the door.
The music was definitely louder when he put his ear to it, but not so loud that he thought it was directly on the other side. So he waited a minute for his light to fade out in case someone was on the other side, and then he cracked it open to take a peek.
Simon’s caution turned out to be completely unwarranted. On the other side of the door was an empty hallway with several other doors branching off from it. It had clean stone floors and paintings on both walls of rich people dressed in their finest. It definitely wasn’t a dungeon or anything like that, so there probably wasn’t anything nefarious happening.
He breathed a sigh of relief and quietly shut the door behind him as he stepped into the hallway and moved toward the next door. “If I just…” he mumbled to himself.
“Can I help you?” someone asked.
Simon whirled at the sound of the unfamiliar voice and found someone thirty feet away near the other end of the hallway. He’d been expecting a guard, and though his hand was on the hilt of his mundane longsword, he’d refrained from drawing it. That proved to be a good move because instead of a guard, it turned out to be a manservant.