Golems!
Safe in those lodgings, I contemplated my companion. Gefikst was bulky, with heavy steel plates on everything that wasn’t a joint. That, coupled with an old, faded France-over-Sea sigil on its left shoulder, suggested to me that it had fought in the War, twenty years back. Or possibly the sigil was disinformation, or just a suggestion that it liked the Bonaparte dynasty – ah, sorry: the ‘de Gaulle’ dynasty. Old habit. Still, the first and third possibilities weren’t really contradictory. After all, the French were allies with the re-forged Khazaria, these days. For that matter, so were we.
“We don’t actually need him,” Gefikst reminded me. “That safe might have been uncrackable during the war, but it has hinges. If it has hinges, I can pop them off.”
“No doubt.” I gave it a smile. “And if I can disarm the traps in time, we could even get the treasure before it melts, or ignites. But there’ll be alarms without a doubt, and then everything gets messy. Ideally, we want to be in, out, and over the border before anyone notices we’re even there. A quick heist, even if it’s not a simple one.”
“Fair enough, Mr. Weld. How do you know that the cellars won’t be alarms, too? Surely they must have considered that people might try to dig their way in from the sewers.”
I shrugged. “If they did, they would assume the digging would be done by humans. When it comes to little jobs like these, your people don’t come cheap.”