by Ed Greenwood
The passage widened almost immediately, to end at two identical doors.
He hated pairs of identical doors. Usually one led to safe passage onward, and the other to a series of deathtraps.
The Masked let out a long sigh, then turned and went back the way he'd come.
He had a partner, they were in this together, and by all the sneering, laughing gods, they'd triumph or go down together.
∗ ∗ ∗
"Open them both," Tantaerra decreed. "At the same time. One door each and we leap back out of the way."
"Potentially letting two horrible beasts in to devour us," The Masked sighed. Then he shrugged and smiled. "All right. Both doors at once it is."
The two plain stone doors stood almost mockingly in front of them. The battered oil lantern that had belonged to Nesker flickered repeatedly, almost as if it was warning them of time's fleeting nature. It sat where they'd put it, on the floor well behind them.
"One of us has to carry the light. Leaving it there, right in the way of whatever charges out, is pure fool-headedness," The Masked commented.
"And we never indulge in fool-headedness, oh no." But Tantaerra still fetched the lamp. "I'll hold it. I'm closer to the floor, so less chance of anything breaking in a longer fall."
"Agreed. Stop stalling and open your door."
Tantaerra made a rude sound, lifted her chin in a defiant gesture, and swung her door wide.
Nothing happened.
By then, The Masked had his door open, too. Displaying the same dark, motionless silence.
"Lamp forward," he suggested gently, "and tell me what you see."
"Stone floor, walls, ceiling—a room much larger than this passage. Bare and empty, with no grinning beastie waiting for us. I'd have to go in to see more. Your turn."
The Masked leaned warily across the dark open doorway for the lamp, then peered in.
And almost immediately drew back and closed the door again, taking great care to make no sound.
"Six of those clockwork men," he reported. "Standing like statues, no smoke—but I'm not wagering any silver they'll stay that way if we go in."
"My door it is," Tantaerra concluded dryly. "Not that we shouldn't expect a trap or two. The wizard, or his trapmaster, or the scrape-knuckles who reset all the traps here all knew where to step and what not to touch. We don't."
"Granted," The Masked agreed. "Lead on."
The halfling peered warily at the doorframe, then gingerly stepped over the threshold and into the room. The first flagstone under her foot sank a little, and she heard a hiss.
"Dung," she snarled, drawing hastily back. "Poison gas!"
"Jetting from the ceiling out here, too," The Masked hissed in her ear. "Run forward, Tan! Get gone!"
The halfling launched herself across the new room, lantern swinging wildly. It was a big open space. How big she wasn't sure because she was looking only for doors, ways onward—
With a thunderous rattling of metal that ended in an ominous boom, a portcullis slammed down in front of her. It was a lattice of not-all-that-rusty metal bars, each of them thicker than a large man's leg, and seemed to stretch clear across the room, from wall to wall.
Tantaerra skidded to a halt to avoid running into it, because she'd heard of portcullises that had silent lightnings playing along them. There was another rattle and boom from behind her, a curse from The Masked, and ...
It seemed a cage was beginning to form around them.
A shorter portcullis came down to the right, forming a side wall. The stone wall of the room wasn't all that far off to the left. Both Tantaerra and The Masked peered up at the ceiling, but it appeared bare and unbroken—even as yet another portcullis slammed down through it, narrowing their prison.
So it was an illusion—the ceiling, that is, not these mighty bars. Tantaerra shoved against the newest one, finding it cold and very, very solid.
"So this is it?" Tantaerra snarled. "Gassed in a cage? Not very spectacular! Where're the mighty magical effects, the chance for the wizard to gloat, the—eeeep!"
The latest portcullis narrowed their cage to a tight passage between bars.
"Wall!" The Masked shouted. "Get to the wall, and check for hidden doors!"
The halfling flung him a disgusted look but launched herself at the wall as she was doing so, with Tarram right on her heels.
The smallest portcullis yet just missed them, slamming down across the narrow passage right behind them, dividing it into a small chamber next to the wall, and a larger central one—whose floor promptly fell away into a shaft opening down into darkness.
By the dank breeze that promptly wafted up, stinking of mildew and decay, he guessed the shaft went a long way down.
"Good," The Masked commented, "that'll take care of the gas. Any luck?"
"If you can call it that," Tantaerra murmured, as the wall swung away in front of her, revealing a dark way onward. "We could have just downed potions until we turned to ghostly gas, and got back out through all those bars and right out of Hurlandrun and then Nirmathas, like slightly less crazy people, but ..."
"Less talk, more walk," The Masked told her, almost shoving her through the secret door. "And give me the lamp."
"So you can get a better look at what's falling down on our heads to kill us?"
Tantaerra was still flinging those words at her partner when her foot came down on a flagstone that sank a little. "Uh-oh."
The Masked caught hold of her shoulder with one hand and pulled, even as he flung himself over backward.
They both bounced on their backs as, mere feet away, a block of stone the size of a large wagon plummeted from the ceiling to almost kiss the floor. It swayed, in a creaking of chains, perhaps the width of The Masked's hand above the flagstones, and then started to rattle slowly up into the ceiling again.
The Masked looked thoughtful. "You were heavy enough to trigger that. So if you wear the cord around your waist this time, and I stand ready to haul you back, and you traipse across the rest of this room ..."
Tantaerra sighed. "Let's do it."
Four flagstones and four falling blocks later, the room ended in an archway filled with a curtain of hanging chains. There was a strong, steady glow of light coming from beyond them.
"Those look all too much like tentacles to me," the halfling commented.
"Agreed. So let's start throwing gears into them, and see if—aha!"
The Masked's first missile had caused the chains to writhe and coil around it. He flung a second, and a third, and the chains were now darting about just like the tentacles of a hunting squid, stabbing and encoiling and—
They flung all the gears they'd salvaged, more than a dozen cogs and gear fragments in all, into the chains, which convulsed into crushing, strangling knots about them, leaving only three chains to wave and quest about. Tantaerra and The Masked slid under them feet-first at top speed ...
And found themselves in a room floored in gleaming black marble, that rose up in sweeping curves into a central plinth, on which stood the source of a steady pearly glow: an ornate catafalque of chased and carved white marble, grander than any coffin they'd yet seen.
Once safely out of the reach of the archway chains, the two partners peered at it hard and long.
It was a box carved out of one massive block of marble, with a sculpted lid that rose in arches and domes, into a narrowed replica of an ornate royal crown, its spires and winking gems rising almost The Masked's height above the upper lip of the coffin sides.
"Someone certainly thought a lot of himself," Tantaerra commented. "Those jewels are huge. I wonder if they're real."
The Masked wasn't looking at gems or carved furbelows. His attention was on a half-hidden iron frame under the lid, which thrust forth thick rings beyond the edges of the lid. From those rings stretched chains rising up to large pulleys affixed to the ceiling, and continuing from those pulleys around smaller pairs of guide-pulleys to run toward each other and down from ceiling to the far
wall, where they came together in a winch affixed there, beside a plain, closed door.
"Freshly oiled," he noted. "I wonder how often Mahalagris emerges for a stroll?"
"You want us to be stupid enough to lift the lid, don't you?"
The Masked shrugged. "Do you see a Fearsome Gauntlet anywhere? These gauntlets we've borrowed aren't even close. It's got to be on his body or with it, and ..."
"He's got to be lying in his coffin," Tantaerra sighed.
They kept well away from the coffin on its upswept plinth as they gingerly passed it, seeing nothing in the darker corners of the room except carvings of smiling human faces spaced around the room above the height of a tall door. No one wearing crowns or anything of the sort, and no faces they recognized. There were more women than men.
"Apprentices?" Tantaerra asked.
The Masked shrugged. "Who knows? Mahalagris, yes, but he's probably beyond asking. I hope."
The winch beside the door was the sort that had a spike an operator could thrust in through holes in the winch, to stop what had been winched up from falling again as its weight undid the winching.
"I want to open this door and just move on," Tantaerra muttered. "What are we going to do when we get the lid up, hey? Are we ready to battle some sort of undead wizard hurling the-gods-alone-know-what sort of horrid spells at us?"
"Of course not," The Masked replied. "So we'll just...improvise." He laid hands on the winch handle.
And as he started cranking, his mask started to glow.
∗ ∗ ∗
Tantaerra peered at the mask on her partner's face—now blazing an eerie blue—and backed away.
"Tarram?" she asked. "Masked man?"
He kept on cranking the winch, the oiled chains rattling smoothly.
"Tarram?" Tantaerra asked, more sharply.
"Yes?"
"Your mask."
"Is glowing, yes. I did notice; my eyes are looking out through it, remember? Worry not—I'm still Tarram Armistrade, not some mind-mazed minion of a dead wizard. So far."
Tantaerra didn't laugh.
The next turn of the crank caused a chime to sound somewhere nearby beyond the walls, metal clashing on metal. Then another. And another.
Silently, in the far corner of the room, one of those carved faces started to glow. Tantaerra watched it intently, but it didn't move or change expression or anything else, just started to glow as brightly as a lamp.
Her partner kept on cranking, and another face started to shine.
She spun around with a little chill of fear. What was she doing staring at glowing faces when she should be watching the catafalque—and what might just be starting to rise out of it, as the lid ascended?
Nothing was, that she could see. The lid was rising slowly but steadily as The Masked worked the winch, but the coffin just seemed to be ...sitting there.
Which was very much a good and favorable state of affairs, she reminded herself, though what she felt was disappointment.
Around the room, face after carved face started to glow, forming a row of rather eerie lamps.
"High enough?" the masked man called, dog-spike poised to jam the winch with the lid at its current height, about twice his height above the coffin, and not far beneath the pulley.
"I'm no palace decorator," Tantaerra replied. "Looks fine to me." She went on staring at the coffin for a moment and then added, "You're going to want me to climb up and look inside, aren't you?"
"Stand on my shoulders," The Masked told her. "Seeing as we've lost both pole and rock."
She gave him a wry grin. "Isn't it your turn to smile fetchingly at evil, rotting undead wizards?"
"Not with what I'm wearing on what's left of this face," he reminded her darkly, and strode to a stop right beside the plinth. "So start climbing."
"I'm not going to be tall enough," Tantaerra complained, on her way up his back. "I'm going to have to jump high—so step back and catch me, hey?"
"Done," The Masked replied, turning sideways on to the catafalque and backing to one end of it, so her jump would give her a good look at its inner depths.
"I'm afraid we might well be," she replied grimly, standing up on his left shoulder. No, she was much too short. This was going to have to be a spectacular jump—or a grapnel, cord, and climb task. "Ready?"
"For what? Standing here?"
"Ha ha," Tantaerra replied—and leaped high.
The Masked caught her neatly by the hips and set her down gently on the floor. "Well?"
"It's empty."
A door closed—the door, beside the winch. They both whirled.
"Of course it's empty," said the tall man who'd just come through it. "I'm much too busy to spend time lying in my own coffin in the dark, wallowing in endless boredom. There is, after all, so much still to do."
He took a step closer. "So many scores to settle."
Another step. Mahalagris the Mighty loomed over them, seven feet tall or more, hollow-cheeked and sallow, his eyes blazing brilliant blue. One of his hands was hidden in a copper-hued gauntlet that had rubies inset into every knuckle joint, but the other had impossibly long, cruel-taloned red fingers that held a curved, naked sword glowing with emerald light.
"Right, Tarram Armistrade?"
Chapter Sixteen
Unmaskings
The Masked did not answer the wizard, but took a step back from that curved blade and muttered warningly to Tantaerra, "Undead. Don't let it touch you."
"Gee, you think?" Tantaerra spat.
Mahalagris lifted his blade and took another step forward, its point following the retreating man—whose mask was now a steady blue, as bright as any beacon.
Fear me not, the sword whispered, both aloud and inside Tantaerra's head. I heal, not harm.
Tantaerra looked up at its wielder, tall and grinning, his eyes gleeful.
And full of hate.
"I—I don't believe we've been introduced," she observed as she backed away, too, managing to get the words out with only the slightest of quavers.
Mahalagris looked down at her for a moment, then returned his attention to The Masked. "An amusing pet," he croaked. "Housebroken, no doubt, but truly preferable to a human wench, when nights are cold? Hmm?"
"How is it that you know me?" Tarram asked softly. "Do you watch the world outside this tomb of yours with the mask, or magic of your own?"
"Both," Mahalagris replied smugly. "I've been waiting for you for some time, Tarram Armistrade. Or do you prefer Dusker Bellowbar? Morim Jalosker? Or perhaps Taluth Markant? I knew you'd have to come here. A properly crafted curse is like a hook no fish can shake loose. You took your time, though. Schemed, thought up stratagems. Then threw them all away when seeming mischance handed you an excuse to visit ruined Hurlandrun."
"Mischance?" The Masked asked, almost mockingly.
Mahalagris smiled and took a step closer. "At last."
My touch will make you tall and strong, the glittering sword in its hand murmured. My kiss hurts not at all.
"I'll just bet," Tantaerra told it bitterly, backing away. "Does the Fearsome Gauntlet talk, too?"
The corpse ignored her.
"None have reached me, all these years," he told The Masked, almost mournfully. "None have got farther than the third chamber. I have been so bored."
The wizard wasn't even looking at her when it lunged, that whispering blade lashing out with a swift suddenness that terrified her.
Tantaerra flung herself headlong. An instant later and she'd have lost an ear, not just the tress of neatly severed hair that was now sighing floorward.
Guts and garters, but the sword must be sharp!
Mahalagris could have beheaded her, she realized with a chill. He had let her escape being slain. This time.
So the dance begins, the sword told her, as tenderly as a lover.
"At last, after so long idle ..." Mahalagris purred. "Fresh foes, excitement once more ...sport that must be made to last."
"And if we don't
play?" The Masked asked the undead wizard.
Mahalagris shrugged. "Then you die faster."
"Faster?"
The wizard sighed. "Dullards, just as I feared." He raised his sword, and explained as if to a child, "A slaying stroke, rather than slowly hewing you to pieces." Then he raised the Fearsome Gauntlet. "Or I'll use this, rather than just wearing it."
Tantaerra took three swift steps sideways, farther from The Masked. Was the creature now far enough from the door that she could scuttle past it and have time to get the door open?
The Masked sidestepped too, moving farther from her. Giving her a better chance to try, she realized.
Instead, she rushed at Mahalagris.
At last, the blade purred, gliding up into an almost liquid arc to race down and across at her in a wicked slash.
The Masked charged Mahalagris, and the corpse-thing turned with frightening speed, the slash becoming a parry that—
Tantaerra didn't wait to see more, but swerved away from the creature and launched herself into a pounding run, faster than she'd ever sprinted before.
The door seemed to rush up to meet her, as blood pounded in her ears. It didn't look to be locked, and the handle was a simple protruding lever, metal cast in the shape of an undulating serpent. She was going to manage this!
She caught hold of the lever, pulled it sharply down, felt the latch disengage, kicked off from the wall to propel the door open—
And found herself slamming hard into the floor and rolling, sudden burning agony in her left wrist. There was blood everywhere, spurting and glistening wet and dark, and she was—she was—
Lying on the floor, writhing in pain and clutching at her wrist, where her body now abruptly ended.
Her left hand was missing.
Four fingers fewer, and a thumb, the wizard's blade whispered gloatingly, as it glided over her, trailing drops of her own blood. A triumphant reddish-purple light was flaring from it.
Mahalagris was floating above her as well, wearing a gleeful smile as wide as the door she'd failed to open. "Such a valiant little fool! Need a hand, halfling?"
Tantaerra wept, rolling over and over and curling up around her pain. Her hand was severed and gone, somewhere in the room behind her, but she could feel pain in her lost fingers, a burning that—