He quickly worked out that the fashionable place to be for slavering fanatics was down below. Aside from the sleepers, the upper story was deserted, the ground floor little better. There were a handful of monks cooking, black robes and all, and Lief had to dodge a few more who were bustling purposefully from place to place, often carrying various odds and sods of regalia. Everything had a ghoulishly festive feel to it, and all the Brotherhood were in obvious high spirits, practically buzzing with energy and joy. The time had come for their dour existences to have meaning, Lief guessed. He had no idea how long ago this Gamograth had made his pronouncements, but he had the feeling that waiting out the years had been a rather unfulfilling task. He wondered what most of the Brotherhood intended to do, when they had finished with Enth. Go home? Take up a trade? Or would they all crusade out of Armesion and ablate themselves against the armies of Darkness that stood between them and Darvezian, having killed the only creature who could possibly have led them past?

Lief located the stairs down to the cellar swiftly enough, as this was the bottleneck for most of the activity going on in the house. From below he could hear some rather tuneless chanting that was probably intended to be triumphant, and he could not help but notice the character of the material that was being taken down there. There was wood, lots of wood—of some fragrant and expensive kind—and there were plenty of sharp implements of a variety of shapes, and most with gold handles and gleamingly polished blades. His hands twitched again, but his gut did too. He didn’t like the look of any of it, save for its resale value.

He had, in his career, gone into many dangerous places, and come out of them too. Sometimes he had only just made it out, and sometimes he had only got out by talking very fast, or running very fast, or on one occasion taking an extremely foul potion and pretending to be dead. He did not much want to go into that cellar, though. No thief relishes somewhere with just the one exit.

So: improvise, and there was one major advantage to dealing with creepy cults. Infiltrating a bandit hideout or a noble’s castle or a townhouse crawling with servants, these tasks had their pros and cons, and the pro of the Brotherhood was that their flair for drama mandated nice concealing robes.