The next morning, they went back in to continue their exploration. At first they only came across more of the same, but around midday they came to a new area with wider corridors and better workmanship. Decorative carvings adorned the walls, the floors were tiled with slabs of polished rock, the doors were made from smooth varnished mahogany, and polished spheres of white marble hung from the arched ceiling, glowing with continual light spells and illuminating the corridors as brightly as day. This was the first part of the complex they'd come to that hadn't been in darkness and it cheered them considerably.

     Unfortunately, however, it also allowed moss and mold to grow, and damp patches on the walls and floor were covered by a soft carpet of green, providing homes and food for a wide variety of little creepy crawly creatures. Diana shuddered in revulsion as she saw hundreds of shiny blue beetles scurrying around her, and gave a little shriek as something with lots of legs dropped from the ceiling into her hair, making the others titter with laughter. She flicked the offending creature onto the floor, gave them all a dirty look, and continued on with great dignity and aplomb.

     This appeared to be the heart of Vantarestin, and they had great hopes of finding something very interesting indeed around here somewhere. The first rooms they came to were luxuriously decorated guest rooms, beautiful to look upon but totally devoid of recent occupation, so they passed them by. They also came across the private quarters of some of the officers of Zebulon's army. The doors were locked, but Matthew turned out to have some lock picking skills and had them open in a trice. They were sparsely decorated except for a few war trophies, paintings depicting battle scenes and a few beautifully polished and decorated weapons hanging on the walls. One room had a collection of stuffed monster heads mounted above a writing desk, another had a twenty foot long silver lance hanging from the ceiling and a polished suit of slennhide armour standing in the corner, while a third had a scale model of the surrounding countryside carved out of clay on a table in the middle of the room. They examined it for several minutes, trying to guess its purpose, since nothing on it had any tactical or military significance that they could see, and then they moved on.

     Further down the corridor they came to a beautifully decorated temple dedicated to Samnos, the God of the fight against evil. Diana was delighted to see that there were smaller alcoves dedicated to several other Gods along the walls, and she stopped before the altar of Caroli the Healer to pray and meditate for a few minutes. She then suggested that the others take the opportunity to thank the Goddess for all the times Her power had healed them, which they did. They all knew that they would probably need Her help again sooner or later, and wanted to keep in Her good graces.

     Diana then went to the altar of Tizar, Goddess of wisdom, where she prayed for the wisdom to know the right thing to do when the Lady's holy mission was finally revealed, which she was confident would be very soon now. Finally, before she left, she gave thanks to Samnos, the custodian of this particular temple, for allowing her to use it. Samnos would probably not have been too offended if she'd not done so, but where Gods were concerned, particularly war Gods, you couldn't be too careful.

     She felt uplifted by her visit to the temple, ready to face anything that Vantarestin had to offer. The others, however, weren't so sure. They were approaching the very heart of the wizard's stronghold, and were concerned that he might have left a few more traps here, to protect his private quarters and laboratories from the inquisitive attentions of the enlisted men. From what they had seen so far, it would be perfectly in character for him to suspect that spies and saboteurs had infiltrated his army and take precautions against them. Shaun warned them of this, and they resolved to be extra careful for as long as they were there.

     The next few rooms were the living quarters of the priest and his assistants, and were spartan and bare. Priests of Samnos shunned all luxuries and comforts, believing that they weakened the mind and body. Their creed was one of strength through adversity, deliberately living uncomfortably and poorly with the very minimum of material possessions, often nothing more than their weapons and the clothes they stood up in. This one had allowed himself a mattress, a few blankets to sleep in and a cushion to kneel on while praying, but nothing more. Most of his room was a practice floor for weapons training, and some of his weapons still decorated the walls. A broad sword of real steel which Shaun and Matthew could barely lift. A heavy wooden mace spiked with ironwood nails. A warhammer and twenty identical throwing knives. A few items of slennhide armour also hung here and there, but not many. Priests of Samnos used very little armour, usually just a vest of chain mail and a helm, believing that their faith was all the armour they needed, which it often was. Samnos took a very dim view of anyone killing His priests.

     The next room excited them all. The thick imposing wooden door had a large brass plaque screwed to it, on which a large elegant letter ‘R' was engraved. "This must be Rhanov's room," said Shaun excitedly. He tried the door but, as expected, it was locked. "Get on it, Matt," he said.

     Matthew went to work on the door, but it turned out to have a much more sophisticated lock than those of the officers' quarters and it took him much longer to open it. Open it he did, however, as the more difficult the lock, the greater the challenge and the more determined he was to defeat it. Matthew was a less physical, more cerebral person than Shaun, and took greater pleasure in solving problems of skill, such as lock picking, than in defeating an opponent in combat. Diana generally frowned on this ‘hobby' of his, doing her best to discourage him, but on this occasion she urged him on, willing him to succeed and remove another barrier between herself and her holy mission.

     Eventually, there came a click as the tumblers fell into place and he opened the door with great satisfaction and a sense of triumph. Shaun clapped him on the back and congratulated him before preceding him in. Inside, the room was sparsely furnished with bare rock walls, except where they were covered by large elegant tapestries depicting battle scenes. One, in particular, interested them more than the others. It showed a wizard and a warrior standing on top of a tall hill and putting a small army of enemies to flight, the warrior waving a golden glowing sword and the wizard shooting bolts of lightning at them. Their faces were sufficiently detailed that they were left in no doubt that they were intended to be Zebulon and Rhanov themselves. Zebulon was an elderly grey haired man with a neatly trimmed white beard, wearing long flowing robes and holding a gnarled wooden staff, while Rhanov was a heavily muscled man somewhere in his late thirties wearing a heavy metal breast plate, a skirt of ring mail and a dented helm, but with bare arms and legs.

     This tapestry, however, was the most impressive thing in the room. Apart from that, Rhanov's room was simple and spartan, with only a plain woven rug on the floor and unimpressive carved wooden furniture. Some shelves and cabinets had a few little odds and ends on them, probably souvenirs of his many adventures, and a row of about a dozen books lay between two ogre skulls. A bed made of maple wood stood at the far end of the room, with an engraved letter ‘R' on the headboard, but otherwise devoid of any exceptional detail. Despite the lack of any really interesting discoveries, though, Thomas found himself fascinated by the chamber, by the fact that he was looking at a private place, a privileged place that only a handful of people would have had access to, and all of them intimates of the famous warrior. It was the fascination of prying into other people's secrets, the excitement of violating someone's privacy. The wizard was shocked and ashamed to find himself feeling this way, but it didn't stop him wanting to explore further, to look for cupboards and drawers he could open to see what was inside. Looking at the others, he could read on their faces that they were feeling the same way. Even Diana wasn't immune to the temptations of curiosity.

     “Wonder what’s in that,” said Shaun, going to the other end of the room where a large wooden chest was standing. It was bound with straps of iron and carved with frilly ornamentation. He tried to open it but it was locked. “Stand aside,” said Matthew, kneeling in front of it and examining the lock carefully. He placed his makeshift lock pick in front of the keyhole, ready to insert it, but then hissed with alarm and leapt to his feet. “Trapped!” he said. “There’s something in the lock, something sharp, probably deadly.”

     The others gathered around to look. “Lucky you spotted it,” said Thomas. “Can Di heal poison?”

     “Snakebites, things that take hours or days to kill you,” replied the cleric. “But some poisons can kill in seconds. Channelling the power of a God takes time, and once your soul has left your body, that’s it.” She looked seriously unnerved by how close her brother had come to death, and urged them all to leave the room straight away.

     “Not until we’ve seen what’s in there,” said Shaun though. “If we can’t pick the lock we’ll just break it open...”

     “We will do no such thing!” said Diana however. “Remember that we are trespassing in someone's home. Technically, what we are doing is sinful. The fact that we are here at the instructions of My Lady is an extenuating circumstance, but only if we do not cause any deliberate damage to private property."

     "I seem to remember that it was your idea to come here in the first place," said Matthew. "We just followed you in."

     "It was My Lady's will that we come here," countered Diana. "She trusted us not to damage anything we didn't have to, and we won't. I am confident that we will find what we are looking for in plain view, where we will notice it immediately. There will be no need to smash anything up."

     Shaun gave Matthew an exasperated look. These wild swings in her character could be quite infuriating at times. Another time, she might have demanded that they smash open every locked chest and drawer in the place in the search for her holy mission, and turn the whole room upside down in search of secret trap-doors and safes. It was impossible to know how to please her. In truth, Shaun had been longing to find out what treasures and valuables Rhanov had hidden here. He was sure to have collected an enormous store of wealth during his lifetime of adventuring, as the man who'd given them the map had said, and it could all be hidden right here, in this very room! There must be a fortune somewhere, to pay the wages of all the soldiers, buy all the food and pay all the other expenses that a complex this size demanded. The possibility of being so close to it frustrated him intolerably, but she was in no mood to be openly defied, and there was also the Goddess Caroli to consider. He tried to put the chest out of his mind, therefore, while at the same time keeping an eye open for any small, valuable looking objects he could slip into his pockets while she wasn’t looking.

     A couple of small items also fell into Matthew's pockets. After all, he reasoned, their previous owner doesn't need them any more. It's silly to just let them go to waste. One desk that had quite a few small bits and pieces on it stood next to an extra large floor length tapestry hanging from the ceiling, a tapestry that showed a scene of Rhanov and Zebulon shaking hands on a hilltop with mountains in the distance. Its position in the room bothered Matthew a little. It didn't seem quite right for it to be there, and so, acting on an impulse, he gently pulled it aside to look at the wall behind it. Maybe it was hiding something, he thought.

     It was. There was a door in the wall behind it. A door made from plain beechwood without any design or marking on it. Intrigued, he tried it, and found that it opened easily into another room. Matthew started to enter, but Shaun stopped him. "Hold it," he said. “Let me go first,”

     “Because your extra year in the world makes all the difference in skill and experience,” said Matthew testily. “My youthful inexperience might get me killed.”

     “Just humour an old man,” said Shaun with an apologetic smile. He cautiously entered with his sword drawn, Diana close behind him.

     It was a practice room, almost completely empty except for some ladders attached to one wall. A full length mirror ran completely along the opposite wall, and a stuffed mannequin holding a sword and wearing full plate armour stood in one corner. In addition, there were some thick ropes hanging from the ceiling, for what purpose they couldn’t imagine. What held their attention, however, was a sword mounted halfway up the wall opposite the door. It was a beautiful weapon of the very finest workmanship, the blade of real steel polished to a mirror finish and bearing incredibly fine and delicate lettering in a foreign language. On the wrist guard was a fancifully elaborate letter ‘Z'. It was love at first sight for Shaun. He took it down and tested its edge with his thumb, finding it sharper than he had imagined possible and cutting himself even though he had barely touched it.

     "Put it back!" hissed Diana quietly, as if afraid Rhanov might hear and come storming in demanding to know what in the Nine Hells they thought they were doing. "It's not yours!"

     Shaun, however, knew that he could not bear to part with it. It felt right in his hand, as though it belonged there, as though it had been made just for him. He swung it experimentally a few times, getting the feel of it. "Shaun!" said Diana, louder. "What do you think you're doing?"

     "I'm taking it," said Shaun, defiantly. "It's silly to just leave it here to go rusty when we can make good use of it. This sword is special somehow. I know it."

     "All the more reason not to take it," said Diana firmly. "We're not thieves. Now put it back."

     "No," said Shaun. "Look, if we're going on a dangerous holy mission, then we'll probably be facing all kinds of dangers. We'll need every advantage we can get. Don't you think your Goddess would want us to have as good a chance of success as possible? I bet She meant for us to find it, and arranged things so that we would. "

     Diana was put off her stride by this outright defiance, and was confused by the possibility that maybe Shaun was right. Maybe it was her Lady's intention that Shaun have the sword. Maybe they had been led here deliberately for that purpose. In her uncertainty, she resorted to first principles. "It's wrong to steal. There's no excuse for it. She wouldn't want us to resort to a life of crime in Her name, in fact, it would probably make Her very angry."

     "It's not theft, it's salvaging. Rhanov's almost certainly dead, and if the legends are true, he had no family, so nothing here has an owner. Therefore, it belongs to the first person to find it."

     "We don't know that he's dead. He might be coming back even now to reclaim his property. He won't be very pleased to find that you've run off with it."

     Shaun tried to think of a moral argument that would allow him to keep the sword, but decided not to try to fight her on her own ground. "Look, I'm keeping it, so that's that. Rhanov's dead, he's got no further use for it, so I'm taking it, and if you don't like it then that's just too bad. I'll leave my own sword here in its place. Fair exchange is no robbery."

     "Fair exchange!" spluttered Diana. She started to say something else, but Matthew jumped in before things got completely out of hand. "He's right, Di," he said. "It's crazy to leave a beautiful sword like that lying around for ever because of a million to one chance that its previous owner might still be alive. Someone will eventually come to claim it, so it might as well be us. At least we'll be using it in a good cause."

     Diana stared at him, amazed that he was taking sides against her, then turned her back on them and stalked out of the room. "I will pray for you both," she shot back as she left.

     "Don't worry, she'll get over it," said Matthew. "She was half convinced we were right anyway, I could tell by the tone of her voice." He came over and examined the marvelous sword Shaun held. "It's a beauty, isn't it?"

     "Yes," said Shaun. "Just one thing puzzles me, though. If this was Rhanov's sword, how come it's got Zebulon's symbol on it?"

     "Search me," said Matthew, looking at the ‘Z' on the wrist guard. "Maybe Zebulon made it. Maybe it's a magic sword."

     "Hey, yes!" cried Shaun. "That must be it!" He held it up so that it caught and reflected the light of the glowbottles and looked at it with new appreciation. Magical weapons were known to exist, but for most people they were nothing more than the mainstay of fireside stories, wielded by mighty heroes. Neither of the bothers had ever actually seen one, nor ever expected to. Neither had anyone they’d ever met. To think they might actually be holding one… They both stared at it in fascination and adoration.

     According to the stories, magical weapons ranged from blades with only a slight enchantment that helped them to penetrate armour and bite more deeply into enemy flesh, to weapons so magical that they had a life and intelligence all their own. Some swords were reputed to have so much willpower that they completely dominated the person holding them, turning them into mere puppets whose sole purpose in life was to carry the sword and use it as the sword directed. It was unlikely that this particular sword was very magical, if it had any magical charge at all, as it had been left behind when Rhanov went off. Most probably it was his second best sword, with only a slight enchantment on it, at best. Even so, though, it was still a great find, probably the most valuable thing in the whole complex outside Zebulon's rooms.

     Shaun drew his ironwood sword, hung it from the brackets on the wall, and sheathed the new sword in the vacant scabbard. It fitted perfectly, and hung by his thigh as though it belonged there. "Maybe the wizards can tell us more about it," he said.

     They followed Diana back into Rhanov's main living chamber, and found her reading one of his books. She looked around as they entered and scowled at the sight of the new sword in Shaun's scabbard, but said nothing. "Where are the wizards?" asked Matthew.

     "They've been gone for ages," said Diana. "They slipped out shortly after we first came in here. They're probably looking for Zebulon's rooms.

     "We'd better find them," said Shaun, leading the way back out into the corridor. "Come on."