“This is way deeper than I thought it would be.” Mika said. “I’m still not at the end of the tunnel.”

  “How far down are you?” Maggie asked, as excited about this as we were.

  “’Round a hundred and fifty feet down. It gets tighter after a certain point, but there’s pickax marks all over the walls. I passed a wheelbarrow filled with stone a little while back, too.”

  Rather than send a torch down with Mika we let the natural glow of the runes as they flared and activated illuminate the path. As far away as he was, every time he moved the golem, we could see the tunnel beneath the hatch grow a little brighter.

  ~~~***~~~

  It was ten minutes later before Mika had something new to announce.

  “I think I found something.”

  “Well, what is it?” Ellen asked, irritation crept into her voice.

  “Looks like the tunnel drops a couple feet ahead of me and there’s a small alcove off to the side.”

  “Check the alcove first!” Nora said.

  “Huh, looks like it was still under construction. There’s not much here besides a half empty wheelbarrow, lantern, and a pick.”

  Next to me, I noticed Maggie take on a pensive frown as she tapped her lip and stared down at the hatch.

  “What about the drop?” Maggie asked.

  Mika said nothing, and he was far enough away at this point that the light from the tunnel didn’t flash with each movement anymore.

  “Gods, that’s far.” Mika whispered.

  “What?”

  “The drop. I couldn’t see the end of it, so I dropped a pebble down there. I didn’t hear it hit for almost eight seconds.”

  “What about the far wall? Can you see that?” Maggie asked, a tinge of something in her tone now.

  “No. It’s just open air. My light doesn’t reach the end.”

  “What about the sides?” That tinge was growing.

  “Same thing. I can see for a while, but eventually it gets too dark for me to see anything farther.”

  “Gods.” Maggie whispered.

  She was quiet enough that I was the only one to hear her. Even then, if I hadn’t been looking at her, I wouldn’t have made out the murmur.

  “Mika, get your golem out of there now.”

  Confusion flashed across Mika’s face, but worry replaced it when he registered the concern in Maggie’s voice.

  “Maggie, what’s wrong?” Nora asked, a protective hand on Mika’s shoulder.

  Before Maggie answered, I took a step forward to place my shield between the tunnel and the rest of the group.

  “That isn’t some stash, that’s an entrance to the Under Tunnels.” Maggie said, voice as grim as if she’d just sentenced us to execution.

  “Okay… but what does that mean?”

  “I’ll tell you once we get back to the Guild. Right now, we need to close the hatch and leave.”

  Nora looked both put out Maggie hadn’t answered, and concerned. So did Mika and Ellen. I had a brief flash of irritation that Maggie was treating us like kids to be corralled; but I trusted her. She was our steward and we, her flagship. Our best interest was hers, and she’d done nothing to betray that trust so far.

  It took ten minutes for the light from Mika’s golem to illuminate the tunnel again and another ten before his golem appeared back in the entrance and lifted the loop of rope over its head and down onto its waist.

  It only took another minute and a half after that for us to extract the golem and seal the hatch once more.

  Our hasty exodus from the warehouse marked another hour-plus long trek through the city that saw the sun dip over the walled horizon by the time we reached the Guild Hall. The green glow of the walls winning their fight for dominance of the sky.

  Once we entered the common room, Maggie took us up to the bar where she flashed a hand sign at the [Bartender], who nodded and pointed us towards a booth near the back of the room. Plush leather and greeted me as I took a seat and moved over to the wall to let Nora in.

  Mounted above the table on the wall, I noticed a fist sized piece of mesa stone shaped like a clenched eagle’s talon. Once Maggie sat down, she took out a small blue river stone from her storage ring and placed it on the edge of the table. Whatever the stone was, it was clearly magical. Faintly, I could see some runes across the erosion smoothed edge of the stone, but I recognized none of them. Mika was a different story, however.

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  “The only runes I can decipher are for projection and intake. What is that?”

  “Silence stone. Basic military tool. All it does is create a small bubble of isolated sound around us. Noise can’t get in, and nose can’t get out.”

  “So, the third rune is for silence. I take it.” Mika said and pointed to a rune on the edge shaped like a angled spiral was a dual sided arrow through the middle.

  “A lesser version of it, but still a silence rune.” Maggie said, impatience clear.

  “Would you mind if I study it for a bit, try to copy it down?”

  “Later, we –“

  “Why the secrecy?” Ellen asked, interrupting the pair’s almost private conversation.

  Maggie scanned the room and deliberately turned to face the wall so no one could read her lips.

  “Before I say anything, I am going to need a System-backed, or Divine-backed, oath that you will not reveal what is said here without permission from the entire party.”

  I looked to the rest of the party to see how they felt, but swore either way. Through our connection I felt the Grace Mother almost lazily acknowledge my oath and then retract her attention back to whatever matter held it within the forest.

  Nora and Mika were a little slower at swearing, but they eventually did as well. Mika doing so to the System, and Nora doing so to a goddess named ‘Our Lady of Passion’. Ellen had a conflicted look, but eventually under the weight of our stares she swore, doing so under the System as well.

  “Perfect. I know you’re confused, but that’s only because you don’t realize just how valuable what you found in the warehouse is.” Maggie said, still facing the towards us and the wall.

  “What do you mean?” Ellen asked.

  “So far, in centuries of history, we’ve only found four entrances into the Under Tunnels; and each one is so valuable they’re guarded by a fort and an army.”

  Maggie said that a paused, like she expected us to rock back into our seats with shock. Instead, the table was thoughtful, each of us working over the issue on our own.

  “I can understand why they’re valuable, but what are the specifics?” Mika asked.

  “This isn’t the time to get into all the economics of it; but there are resources, trade and training opportunities you won’t find anywhere else in Teles. Each tunnel becomes a massive revenue stream for the faction that holds them. Not to mention if the tunnel y’all found is some undiscovered cavern, there’s going to be a gold rush of people trying to exploit all the things hidden down there.”

  “So we’re rich.” I said. If what Maggie was saying was correct, then we’d just stumbled onto a gold mine, and something we could milk others for too.

  “You’re not rich; you have the potential to get rich.” Maggie corrected. “However, right now, the odds of you ever leveraging that potential are slim to none.”

  “What, why?” Nora asked, almost sounding hurt.

  “Well, first, y’all don’t have the money to manage the logistics of running an entrance into the Under Tunnels to begin with. Second, we have no idea how valuable the tunnel will be. It could be completely barren down there for all we know. Most importantly, what do you think is going to happen to you all when the aristocracy finds out a bunch of children are attempting to monopolize one of the most valuable resources in the empire?”

  There was no doubt to what she was implying. We’d be killed.

  “What about the honor that stopped Mrs. Farfield from killing the ‘children’ of the Ivory Band?” I asked. It was hard to hear about the insane wealth you’ve just stumbled on, only for that hope to be ripped away. With the money Maggie was talking about, I could have done so much to help my people thrive.

  “Honor only matters to those in power so long as they lose nothing from upholding it.” Ellen answered for Maggie. Her words weren’t bitter and there was no heat behind them. Ellen simply spoke as if it was an empirical fact.

  “So we’re not going to get anything from the tunnel. What do we do with it, then?” Nora asked.

  “Correction. You’ll still get plenty for it. It just won’t be in the way you’re thinking.”

  We all waited for Maggie to continue and Ellen even glared at the woman, tired of all the leading statements.

  “You won’t be able to actually run the tunnel, but if you sell the knowledge of its location and the warehouse, you’re all going to be very well compensated by whoever the buyer ends up being. Though biasedly I think you should sell to the Guild.”

  “Why the Guild?” Nora asked.

  “For starters, the Guild has the same, if not more, financial power than any noble house in Teles; including the royal family. So you’ll get a good amount of gold for this. Next y’all are going to spend probably around a decade at least working within the Guild so it wouldn’t hurt to be in good favor with them.

  “However, personally, the reason I think you should choose the Guild is that they have the best trainers available in the world. I guarantee we can negotiate for trainers in any field you want, not to mention it would give Nora and I chances to make connections with the top brass of the Guild.”

  Maggie sat back into the plush leather of the booth and waited for any of us to debate her or ask a question.

  “Why haven’t they found more entrances?” I asked instead.

  It was a thought that had been gathering at the back of my mind for a while now. Since the entrances were so valuable even with the inability to use divination through the stone, people would have scoured the mesa for more.

  “People have tried. Hells, they’re still trying.” Maggie said. “I’d bet my life savings that there are at least five teams within the city searching for entrances, and another dozen searching for more on the rest of the mesa.”

  “So, why haven’t they found them then? Surely enough high tier people could have found it.”

  “I’m sure there are a couple that have, but people kept them private. Take the one we found. Hardbuckle would never announce he had a tunnel, and I’d bet his parents were the ones to find that entrance.

  “I’m sure that if you could completely scour the city without stepping on the toes or offending a hundred sleeping giants, you’d find at least half a dozen secret or forgotten entrances into the Under Tunnels. And the same goes for the towns on the Mesa that aren’t Dustreach.”

  Maggie paused and tapped her knuckles against the table as she took us all in, the steady mana light above illuminating us in blue tinted light that fought off the green from the window.

  “But we can’t scour the city that way, and even if we could, there’s no guarantee there would be more. This mesa sure as hell isn’t natural, because of the treaty with the aranae and goblins we can’t mine too deep, and even if both things aren’t true, no one alive knows enough about the mesa to guarantee they’d find an entrance into the large cavern systems.”

  “What are our other options for sale?” Mika asked after a brief lull in the conversation.

  Maggie hid it well, but I could almost feel her sigh in her aura.

  “There are a couple. You could sell it to a local aristocratic family, the crown, a powerful merchant house, a church, one of the crime families. You could sell the location to literally anyone with enough money. The problem is that no other faction has a guarantee for your safety divinely secured before you even sit down at the negotiation table. The Guild does.”

  “You’re saying we wouldn’t even be safe negotiating to sell to these people?” I asked.

  “I really don’t think you understand just how insanely valuable this entrance is, and how precarious your situations are right now. In a perfect world, anyone you sat down with would deal with you fairly. And both parties could leave the table content with the fact they each got the best deal possible. This isn’t the real world, however.

  “None of you have the background required to ensure your safety off name alone. For the low cost of five deaths, any faction we took this to without a secured guarantee for our safety could pretend to agree to a deal, kill us after we reveal it, or just torture the information out of us. The Guild is different.”

  “How so?” Nora asked.

  “Scale. This isn’t the most widespread thing, but I think it’s important you guys know this. The Guild isn’t just restricted to our world. There are thousands of other plants under the influence of the System and in every single one of them, the Guild maintains a strong presence. Thousands of worlds, millions of Guild Halls, billions of members. Aside from Mera’s clergy, the Guild is the biggest organization across the explored material plane.”

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise at the scale Maggie was talking about, but the fact the Guild was on other planets wasn’t very surprising. Every child knows the Material Plane expands eternally, so it wasn’t exactly shocking to me that new worlds would emerge in Her expansion.

  “All that to say.” Maggie continued. “Erhard isn’t some petty local god. No offense Bran. He could not care less about the Under Tunnels or its resources. He has a million other natural magical landscapes to exploit for wealth, and above that is his faith. The Guild has so much wealth every Hall on the planet could lose money for a hundred years and not even be a rounding error overall.

  “What Erhard cares about, however, is faith. The Guild is his church, the vessel he uses to extract faith from us. The very last thing Erhard would do, or even allow to happen, is for someone to violate the laws of his church for monetary gain so petty it isn’t the rounding error on a rounding error.”

  Maggie made a good speech, but I wasn’t convinced. Sure, I didn’t doubt that a god could grow their influence past the point of needing material wealth for its continuation. I was probably more knowledgeable about progression amongst the divine than most thanks to my connection to the Grace Mother and knew how much Divinities could expand their power. What I doubted is that a god stretched so thin would notice or care if someone took advantage of us. And I asked as such.

  “How would he even notice if someone took advantage?”

  “Because it’s one of his clergy members we’ll be negotiating with. Since we’re selling ‘loot’ that’s so valuable we get to seek an audience with the [Hall Mistress] herself who, as a part of her vow to Erhard, cannot take the rightful loot of another adventurer without fair compensation. Should she break that vow, well, have you guys heard of Mathias Greenwalt?”

  The four of us cast our eyes at one another to see if anyone had, but nope. The name was an unknown. Maggie took our ignorance in stride and continued on.

  “Should she break her vow, every class she has relating to the Guild or any positions within it will revert to the Tier one class [Oath Breaker], and one of [Erhard’s Hands] is dispatched to make an example of the Hall Mistress in front of her previous Hall.”

  “How come I’ve never heard of this before?” Ellen asked.

  “The Guild tries not to advertise this policy too much. They’ve found that people tend to find ways to exploit this to get better prices. A few have even found creative ways to get clergy members to accidentally break their oaths. As such, admin gets told to only mention this in cases like yours where people with a high value piece of loot need reassurance of fair dealings with the Guild.”