by Ed Greenwood
The masked man nodded slowly. "You have the right of it. Hmm. What else could you see of the room that has these clockwork men steaming around it?"
"It's rectangular, long axis across our path, fifty feet or more across and at least three times that long. There's a narrow opening in the center of its far wall that looks to be a long, narrow passage. High ceiling, room and passage both."
"Windows, perching gargoyles, anything on the ceiling?"
"No. Bare and bland—from where I was standing, mind, not in the room yet to trigger any interesting nastinesses into appearing."
"Did you leave the door wedged open? And is it large enough for these metal men to walk through?"
"No, and I've no idea. If they can't bend and stoop, no, but they looked to me very much as if they can."
The Masked paced slowly away, then turned and came back to Tantaerra. "So we'll have to do this the hard way. Triggering the big doors to fall again and seeing if we can't wedge them open somehow."
"To ...what? Give us a way to climb into the room of death on the other side of this wall? Or give those metal men freedom to depart it to come in here, with us?"
The Masked shrugged. "Either will do."
Tantaerra stared up at him. "May I remind you that it's just the two of us, and neither of us are wizards with spells that can blast down castles, or even plate-armored knights with some decent swords? You do like to live dangerously, don't you?"
"It's what's got me through life so far. To end up here in this ruined city, inside the front step of what looks like a formidable death trap, with you."
"You, masked man, are crazy."
The Masked shrugged again. "That has been said before. And is almost certainly correct. So what are we waiting for?"
Chapter Fifteen
Death, Death Everywhere
We're looking," The Masked announced, as they walked out into the dweomercats—and watched the blue horde melt away from them almost magically, leaving them a clear space to walk in—"for a stone block or spar at least as long as my arm, that doesn't look cracked or as if it will easily crumble. It will be heavy."
Tantaerra gave him a withering look. "Halflings are small, not stupid. Of course it'll be heavy! And if it doesn't wedge those doors open?"
"We try something else. This isn't a race. Oh, and if we find something hard that looks like it will fit through one of the links of the chains that hauled the doors back up, we bring it, too."
"Jam the chain-spool if we can't wedge the doors," Tantaerra interpreted. "I just hope we aren't going to have to go trotting out here on new scavenger prowls with every new room we reach. Tell me—though I suspect those metal men will stay inside the Tomb, what if they come trundling out here after us?"
The Masked chuckled. "Remember what happened to Valorn the Healer? And his coffin?"
"We collapse a roof on them. Why doesn't that sound as tidy and easy to me as it obviously does to you?"
"You're halfling crazy, not Tarram Armistrade crazy."
"Ah. Well, as long as there's a reasonable explanation. Wh—there!"
Tantaerra pointed at what she'd just caught sight of, behind some tall and tangled weeds. A broken cylinder of stone, probably a section of fallen stone pillar.
The Masked eyed it. "Either we roll it, or I drag it with your cord. There's no way I'm hefting and carrying that back to the Tomb."
"Heavy," Tantaerra agreed.
So it proved to be. The Masked was sweating by the time they were standing in front of the Shattered Tomb again.
He was sweating still more by the time he'd muscled the cylinder of stone through the doors and around the corner, along the wall.
"From here," he announced, "we roll it. Right across the floor."
He undid the improvised harness and returned the cord to Tantaerra, then sat down against the wall, drew up his legs, and straightened them in a hard kick.
The cylinder rumbled across the floor toward the inner doors.
Halfway there, a flagstone sank under its passage. There came a grating sound from two places in the ceiling, and rather rusty axe-blades swung down on chains to crisscross at about the height of a man's torso in the center of the room.
"Such bright imagination," Tantaerra commented, watching them. "It'll be a big rolling ball chasing us, next."
The blades went back and forth tirelessly as The Masked struggled to stand the stone cylinder upright against the wall, beside the doors.
"I'm going to ...have to move pretty sharp-like...to not get crushed by the doors yet get back to shove this in time," he panted.
"You won't have to," Tantaerra told him. "If I stand atop this, rest assured I can make it fall in the right direction when I jump off."
The Masked looked at her a little disbelievingly, then nodded, grinned, and replied, "Let's be doing this, then!"
So do it they did.
The doors toppled as before, Tantaerra got the cylinder to fall almost before The Masked was clear of the falling doors, and the air was filled with the grinding, whirring, and ticking of countless gears as three lumbering metal figures came to the doorway to stand in a line, trailing puffs of green steam.
"So they stay in their room," The Masked panted. "Right."
Tantaerra eyed the three metal guardians. They looked huge, this close. "So, Masked Brilliance, what next?"
The doors started to rise again, chains rattling.
The Masked said a dirty word, then snatched up his pole and trotted along the wall. "Where's this door of yours?"
"Right here, and opens thus. Now, what are you—"
"Don't know yet," The Masked informed her merrily. "Now, those things can outrun you, so it'll have to be me. Wait here."
And he burst through the door, ducked around the stone block and treasure chest, and sprinted across the room patrolled by the clockwork men, heading straight for the narrow passage opening out of the far wall.
He was almost halfway there when the men of gears saw or sensed him. They swung around, let out huge snorting gouts of smoke like old men blowing hard to get their pipes to catch alight, and charged.
Clank whirr wheeze tiktiktik. Clank whirr wheeze tiktiktik. CLANK whirr wheeze—
The floor was fairly shaking underfoot as The Masked raced down the passage, keeping as low as possible. When he felt flagstones give under his boots, he flung himself forward in a skidding dive that left the concealed crossbows in the walls hurling bolts at empty air, and came up in a racing crawl that brought him to the expected plain, ring-handled door at the end of the passage. He flung it open and moved with it, keeping just behind it.
Which was a good thing. The edges of the doorframe suddenly sprouted a row of sword blades with a loud clakkk.
The Masked ducked low to the floor and peered around the door. If this was anything like that old tomb in Cheliax, all was well and good. If not, he was likely to be very dead, very soon ...
He caught sight of heavy chain, up at the ceiling of the space beyond the blade-adorned door, and hope leaped within him.
A moment later, there was a loud clacking sound from beyond the door, and what he'd dared to hope would happen started to unfold.
The men of steam and gears—clockwork golems, they had to be—were all in the passage now, heads leaning forward, arms drawing back to deliver hammer blows, legs striding hard.
And swinging to meet them, in a great arc that would make it sweep through the doorframe from ankle level up to chest level on these metal men, was a huge spiked iron block, tallish and with flattened sides so it would fit through the door and swing a long way down the passage. It was easily three times as thick as one of the metal men—and it smashed into the foremost one with a satisfyingly teeth-shaking crash.
The Masked ducked behind the door, but kept on holding it open, just as the shattered golem exploded. The door shuddered, and him with it.
The blast caused the second golem to whirr and click and start to unfold itself across the passage, int
o a wall of moving, spinning gears that looked impressive for a few moments—until the swinging hammer smashed into the midst of it.
Gears shrieked and rang like bells off the ceiling and back along the walls of the passage, out into the room with the treasure chest as the second golem exploded, too, erupting in a great spray of interlocked cogs and teeth and oil.
All of which smashed holes in the final golem even before the iron block slammed into it and sent it flying in a spray of myriad cogs and gear fragments that flew all over the treasure chest room.
The golem struck the bottom of the jammed double doors with a boom, and broke The Masked's section of pillar in two. One half fell out of the doors, which resumed closing with a snarl of straining chain—and the other rolled under the remnant of clockwork golem and slid it back out across the floor in a grinding and shrieking of bent and battered gears.
That lurched laboriously upright again, belching steam from a dozen ruptured joints and valves, and started to stump back toward the passage.
The iron hammer had preceded it, swinging back through its arc past the door The Masked was so considerately still holding open. It reached where it had come from, another dimly lit room deeper inside the Tomb, and headed back out through the door while the golem's slow, lopsided progress was still bringing it back inside the passage.
The two met with a satisfyingly solid impact.
Solid for the hammer, that is. The golem exploded in a death burst that peppered the walls, floor, and ceiling of the passage and the treasure chest room with shrapnel, gears and their axles and the interlocking sockets in which axles had so lately been mounted.
As they bounced and ricocheted, The Masked kept his attention on the swinging block. If he shoved the door closed again now, wedged it that way with his pole, and raced back along the passage like a wind in a hurry to be elsewhere—
Along the way, he rediscovered the sinking flagstones worked into the passage floor. The first sent crossbow bolts raining down from directly above, too slowly to catch a man in The Masked's sort of hurry. The second brought them up from directly below—and one shot right up his leg and agonizingly into him. The third caused them to fire down at an angle from the ceiling of the treasure chest room, into the passage.
Luckily the swinging hammer intercepted that last volley—and as The Masked staggered out of the passage and fell, rolling sideways and clawing out a vial, the pendulum slammed into the stone door he'd closed with a room-shaking BurOOOUM.
The door shattered, causing a fresh rains of crossbow bolts in the passage.
The Masked lay on the floor, gulping the contents of a vial that seemed intent on making him glow pink rather than healing him, and watched the mayhem. Specifically, he peered hard at whatever was beyond the door. It seemed to be another room or passage very like the one he'd just redecorated.
He was glowing pink. Damn it.
He bit open another vial, gulped down its contents, and knew blessed relief. Got to tug out that bolt, before the healing was done ...
Ahhh. Much better.
An errant cog rolled past him, making little burping bounces as its teeth struck the stone floor. The Masked chuckled. Must remember to scoop up a handful of those, to jam other things we meet with, deeper in.
"We're coming, wizard," he told the ceiling, tossing the blood-drenched crossbow bolt aside and shaking drops of his own blood off his fingers. "And here goes your mighty and menacing stronghold."
∗ ∗ ∗
"You are so noisy," Tantaerra had complained, when the rather battered masked man had trudged up to her. "Next time, I'm not waiting."
He'd merely shrugged and waved his hands, indicating she should please herself. That had been three rooms back, now.
The chamber beyond the passage had held nothing but the huddled bones of what looked like a party of adventurers. Tantaerra had been pleased to augment her collection of lockpicks with some that were much better than her own, and they both now had swords, helms (though Tantaerra's was large enough for three of her heads, and was being carried along more to serve as a bucket than anything else), and spears.
The room after that chamber had featured more sinking flagstones, tied to visible waiting crossbows. Which meant they were obvious misdirection. Tantaerra had almost missed the massive stone deadfall waiting beyond them, by the exit door—but neither she nor The Masked had been fooled in the slightest by the knotted-every-three-feet climbing rope dangling invitingly from a hole in the ceiling, from which soft light streamed.
"Ten silver weights yon rope is attached to a block of not quite your weight," she'd told him. "That'll shift as you climb—and when you're halfway up, come right down on your head."
He shook his head. "That's not a wager I'll take. You're not getting your silver back that easily."
It took six handfuls of gears to make a heap heavy enough to trip the stone piston trap, but at least the thing rose again very slowly. Giving them almost enough time to deal with the annoying door beyond it.
It had a small, ordinary-looking knob rather than a ring or another large flared mushroom handle—but when Tantaerra reached for it, the knob moved, skittering silently away from her across the surface of the door. She'd grabbed for it much more quickly—and her fingers had closed on a razor-sharp blade that turned and moved away from her with sickeningly sharp speed, leaving her trying to hold badly sliced fingers in place.
The Masked fed her vials until she was healed.
Of course, by then she was naked, having hastily doffed her clothes to keep them from being destroyed by her fresh pelt of burning fur, but waiting for that to fade away again gave them ample time to collect gauntlets from the dead adventurers, renew their choice collection of gears, and trigger the stone piston trap several times more. Thanks to the smoke from Tantaerra's burning fur, they discovered a faint breeze coming from inside the tomb and lower than the floor they were standing on, drifting past to where they'd come in. The fur that hadn't fallen to ash finally faded, its flames with it, and Tantaerra got dressed again—adding the smallest pair of salvaged gauntlets.
This time, when they grabbed the illusion-cloaked blades with their borrowed gauntlets, it took only a moment of straining to twist, undo the catch, and fling the door wide.
As they hurled themselves back against the walls, of course.
The war ballista set up in the room beyond to fire large metal spears in a deadly volley the length of their room let fly noisily but harmlessly. The Masked was particularly intrigued by the way the floor back there dropped to let the spears slide down out of sight, presumably for reuse.
"Must be nice to have the coin to waste on mere tidiness," he murmured. "I've always had to pick up dropped things and trundle them back where they go with my own two hands."
"You should've been a wizard," Tantaerra murmured. "Still got that rock?"
"Yes."
"Well, toss it through the door so it angles around the corner, to land in the part of the room where we can't see."
"As you command," he replied, almost fondly.
The rock bounced on hard floor, skidded—and nothing happened.
So The Masked risked leaping past the doorway, from side to side rather than across the threshold, to peer at whatever might be hidden from view.
Nothing. Aside from the rock, lying there on bare stone floor, there was just the ballista. Bare ceiling above. No doorway onward, either.
"Well, now," he pondered aloud, "I think we should tie my waist to the stone piston with your cord before I step over this threshold."
"No doors?"
"No doors."
"I agree. If we have to search all around the room, there's probably some danger or other, waiting in some part of the floor. A pit trap or something nastier."
"Death, death everywhere," The Masked agreed. "And our supply of little vials that give us burning fur and make us pink is not inexhaustible."
Tantaerra held out one end of the cord. "Be quick. This hammer i
s going to reset itself again—and you'll look rather comical, dangling from it in midair."
∗ ∗ ∗
Their precautions proved to be wise. After Tarram moved beyond a certain point, the entire floor started to descend in front of him and rise up behind him, becoming a ramp down into a forest of rusty spikes that looked to be salvaged sword blades and spearheads.
Secure against sliding down into them for the moment, he looked to left and right along the creaking pivot-point. One of those spots almost had to be a secret door.
Ah. The one on the left. He poked, pulled, rapped, tapped, and finally kicked at the door—and it sprang open, outward into his face, revealing a dark, narrow passage with a low, arched, stone-block ceiling.
Ah, dank and sordid at last. This looked promising.
He mistrusted large rooms that seemed to be watching and waiting for intruders—to entrap them, sneer at them, and spit them out. Dirty little back passages were somehow more reassuring, as if one had penetrated to the backstage areas, where servants scuttled and workers ...well, in a dungeon, reset traps.
It also hinted reassuringly that this Mahalagris wasn't all-powerful. Dead or alive, he couldn't do everything with mighty spells. He relied on servants, like everyone else grand and airy. Passages like this were ducking behind the wizard's cloak, so to speak.
Only a real dark-hearted bastard would put traps in servants' passages. But then, if even half the tales could be believed, Mahalagris had been a real dark-hearted...well, nothing to be done. Tarram reached the end of the cord, undid it, and tossed it back to where his halfling partner was watching. And starting to glare at him. "Don't you leave me behind again, you—" Without waiting to hear the rest, he gave her a cheery wave and set off down the narrow passage.
Only to come to an abrupt halt. Damn.