Walls!
Gefikst could have punched through the wall in about thirty seconds, but that would have just ended with us eventually fleeing Schmoditten-Schloditten with a host — well, at least a mort — of soldiers after us. Worse, and more importantly, we’d be doing so in public. The idea was to be discreet in our burglary. Making a splash wouldn’t help any of us. That’s why the golem was instead carefully vibrating one finger through the mortar holding the bricks together. Once it had one brick cleared, it would gently yank it out, and give it to me to be carefully stacked on the ground. Francesco ignored the work entirely, but then we didn’t really mind. Honestly, I couldn’t trust him not to drop a damned brick on his foot.
It wasn’t as slow as it sounds, and we didn’t need to take the whole brick wall down, but it was still a nerve-wracking ten minutes of tense work. Yes, nobody was likely to patrol the basements, and yes, security for this building was lax at best, and yes, they weren’t supposed to have even a hint that we were coming, but you wouldn’t believe the things that can happen in even a small caper. At least I was able to hear if someone was coming, once the first brick was out. I’d have trusted Gefikst’s echolocation trick a good deal more if I was the one who was imitating a bat.