“There’s no way we are going to be able to carry that thing,” Serene said.
“We don’t have to,” Lena said. “We just need what’s inside.”
Three pairs of eyes turned and looked at Colm.
“Right,” he said. He knelt down in front of the chest, gingerly running his hand along its smooth top and then placing it on the lock itself. He immediately got a chill, a tingle that worked its way up the length of his arm and down his spine. He had felt it before.
In fact, this lock looked almost identical to lock twenty-four. Colm slumped backward, hands on his knees.
“Is there a problem?” Lena prodded.
“Well . . . yes and no,” he said. “I know how to pick it. Not too hard, really. It’s just that this particular lock happens to be . . . enchanted.”
“So?”
“So . . . enchanted locks need to be disenchanted. Which is usually the mage’s responsibility.” He looked at Quinn.
“Oh.” The mageling sighed. “Well, I c-c-could give it a tr-tr-try, I g-g-guess.”
Colm thought about Master Velmoth’s flaming robes, about the training hall going up in smoke. He was pretty sure Lena and Serene were thinking the same thing.
“Are there no other ways around it?” Lena asked.
“Sure. There are other ways. There are special keys, scrolls, Magic Dan’s Antimagic Paste . . .”
“Magic who?”
“You know,” Colm said, humming the tune. “‘Don’t trust your locks to any man; for magic locks, use Magic Dan’s.’ It’s this white stuff. Comes in a jar. Smells sweet. Looks like . . .”
Colm looked at Quinn. The boy was a mess. Eyes bloodshot. Face flushed. Little bits of frosting from breakfast still in the corners of his mouth. And on his chin. And his sleeve. Colm leaned over and sniffed the boy’s chin, the boy who had no magic today.
It smelled like wintergreen.
“Renny slipped some into Velmoth’s stew once, as a joke. Velmo couldn’t cast spells for a week.”
“That jerk,” Colm whispered to himself.
“Why are you sn-sniffing me?” Quinn wanted to know.
Colm shook his head. “Tyren was right. You missed some,” he said. Then he reached over and scraped the dollop of white paste that was stuck to the mageling’s sleeve.
“Just out of curiosity,” Lena began, “what the heck are you doing?”
“New rule,” Colm said. “Never choose the roll with the most frosting.” He rounded back on the chest and spread the white paste around the edges of the lock.
“Do you expect Quinn to eat his way through the lock?” Serene asked.
“It’s not frosting,” Colm replied. “We have to wait for the enchantment to dissolve.” Quinn still looked confused, scraping at another bit of frosting still sitting on his sleeve. Colm pressed his hand to the lock, felt the magical aura dissolve; then he reached in his bag for his picks, choosing the one that had worked before. The other three hunched around him.
“This is exciting,” Serene said, sounding a little surprised.
Colm licked his lips and felt each lever give in turn. With the enchantment gone, it was a matter of memory, his fingertips tracing over all the movements he’d made before. The lock sprang free. Colm hesitated, then felt Lena’s elbow in his ribs.
“What are you waiting for? Open it.”
Colm gingerly lifted the lid, lips pursed, eyes slit against what he assumed would be the blinding intensity of a pile of gold or a cache of glittering gemstones. He held his breath. This was the moment he had been training so hard for.
The chest was empty. Or almost empty. There was a single coin sitting at the bottom.
Silver.
Colm picked it up, reached for his pocket, then shook his head. He couldn’t help it. He started laughing, his laughter echoing off the stone walls.
“What is this? Some kind of joke?” Lena remarked, staring at the huge, hollow treasure chest that contained no treasure. Colm spun the silver coin in his palm.
“Inside joke,” he said. He looked again and noticed the small scrap of parchment sitting at the bottom of the chest. He dug it out and held it up to the torchlight to read. “It’s from Master Bloodclaw.” Colm read the message out loud: “‘You groped and moped and found your way around my little maze. You ducked the claw and dodged the tail and drove the beast away.’”
“That doesn’t even rhyme,” Lena said.
Colm continued: “‘You found the chest and broke the lock and think your task is done. But we still have a little time to have a lot of fun. So be proud of what you’ve done here, and hold your head up high. But if you dare, you should beware of the falling sky.’”
“What p-p-part of this was f-fun?” Quinn wanted to know.
“Whatever. Let’s just take the stupid coin and get out of here.” Lena slammed the lid of the treasure chest shut, the sound of it rebounding off the walls of the small chamber, causing Colm to jump.
“Careful!” Colm hissed, bringing his finger to his lips. There was another sound. One he recognized from his recent afternoons with Finn. The mechanical click of something being set in motion, sliding into place. Levers and gears suddenly animated, working in rhythm.
The sound of a trap.
Colm spun just in time to see a giant slab of stone sliding into place out of nowhere, sealing them inside the small chamber. They all rushed for the door, but too late. The mechanical sound didn’t stop, though. If anything, it intensified, transforming into a grinding, the sound of stone scraping against stone.
“Is that the ceiling?” Serene asked, pointing upward.
“And what are those tiny black bristles?” Quinn wanted to know.
Colm looked up. In the flicker of the torch, he could just make out the curved ceiling, slowly descending. He heard Quinn moan. He let the goblin’s terrible poem drop to the floor.
The sky was falling. And it was covered in spikes.
Colm’s first thought was of the Wolf Pack, the ones they had learned about from Master Fimbly. They were professionals, and they still fell victim to a trap just like this. At least Quinn was currently incapable of accidentally casting an enlarging spell on them. If they were going to get skewered, they would be their regular size.
His second thought was that it must have been the chest. When Lena closed it, she tripped a hidden lever, activating the trap. It wasn’t her fault. He should have looked. He should have been more careful.
His third thought—and the most pressing—was getting out of the room before the ceiling made pincushions of them all. All four of them started pounding on the stone slab door.
“Open it!”
“I can’t!”
“Then unlock it!”
“There’s no lock!” Colm ran his hands along the edges of the stone, feeling for something, anything. A notch. A release. A lever. There was nothing. He felt Lena shove him to the side.
“Then I’ll bust it down,” she said, driving her shoulder into it and rebounding off ineffectually. She reached to her belt and removed one of her hatchets, striking the door over and over until the handle of the hatchet splintered in her hand, its iron head clunking to the floor. She had only scratched the surface. Colm looked back at the dropping ceiling. There must be a hundred spikes jutting out of it. Lena kicked at the door with one steel-toed boot. “I swear when I get out of here, I’m going to grab that goblin and throw him down here, poke him full of little holes, and see how he likes it.”
Right, Colm thought. I’m sure Herren Bloodclaw would just love a taste of his own medicine. A goblin falling for his own trap.
Colm froze. “Lena, you’re a genius!”
“What does that have to do with anything?” she shouted.
“The fail-safe? Don’t you see? It’s a goblin trap, which means there’s probably an escape mechanism!” Colm snatched the torch out of Quinn’s hand and held it up to get a better look at the ceiling of pointy death. “Goblins who design traps like this usually p
ut in a release in case they accidentally wander into them. A lever or a button or something. Look around the walls or on the floor. Anything out of the ordinary. A loose stone or a knob or latch of some kind.” Lena and the others turned away from the door and started looking frantically around the room.
“There’s nothing here!” Serene shouted, angling her torch to illuminate the wall.
She was right. The walls were smooth. The stones were all even. The only thing that stuck out were the spikes in the ceiling, now only a spear’s length above them. At least a hundred barbs of black iron, each coming to a keen point that could easily bite through leather, skin, and metal alike. Colm was hunchbacked now. Serene and Quinn had both dropped to their knees, frantically feeling around, shaking their heads. Lena was trying to wedge her sword in between the ceiling and the wall.
“All right, Quinn. If ever there was a time to get your magic on and cast a spell of getting-us-the-heck-out-of-here, now is it!” Lena barked. Only four feet separated floor from spikes.
“He can’t cast spells,” Colm shouted. “He’s had too much to eat.”
“Well, then you do something!” Lena said. “I can’t fight a ceiling!”
Colm took a focusing breath and held it, tried to summon Finn’s voice in his head. “It’s all about the little things. The way the grass bends when you walk on it. The whistle of the wind changing direction. The way the light flashes off the surface of polished stone.”
The light.
More specifically, the torchlight. It didn’t reflect off any of the spikes; the coal-black iron was too dull to offer a shine.
Except for one.
Crawling on all fours now, Colm scrambled across the floor like Mr. Tickletoes. He reached out and touched the spike, the only one with a glossy reflection. The one that was simply painted black to match the others but was made of an entirely different material. He gave it a sharp tug, and it snapped off in his hands, wooden and hollow.
The ceiling suddenly ground to a stop.
Everyone froze, not even daring to breathe. There was a hesitation, pure silence, and then the spikes began to retreat, crawling back up the walls into the darkness.
Colm felt something lasso around his neck, nearly strangling him to death—Serene’s dark, thin, tattooed arm choking him in relief. Quinn lay on the floor, panting. “P-please t-t-tell me it w-would’ve stopped anyway,” he said.
“It would have stopped,” Colm said. The floor would have stopped it, at least. After it ground our bones.
“Look,” Lena shouted, pointing to the back of the room, to a dark tunnel that had appeared behind the treasure chest with its meager bounty—a secret door that had revealed itself only after the trap was disarmed.
“Do you think it’s an exit?” Serene asked.
“If so, it’s even b-better than a chest full of g-g-gold,” Quinn muttered.
Colm wasn’t sure he agreed, but he took the torch and inspected the new entry, a short hallway leading to a set of stone stairs. He felt Lena’s hand on his shoulder.
“Could be more scorpions,” Lena suggested. She turned to Serene. “What does the spider think?”
“Mr. Tickletoes says we are bad for his health and that as soon as he gets out of here he is going back home to his wife and his three hundred children,” Serene said with a pout.
Colm palmed the silver coin and cautiously stepped into the corridor, scanning every cranny and crevice. He had already missed the trap on the chest and hadn’t noticed the secret door recessed into the wall. He couldn’t afford to make any more mistakes. He made it to the foot of the stairs and looked up. It could still be a dead end. Worse still, it could just be another trap. The stairs could collapse about halfway up. A giant boulder might come rolling down. There was really no telling what possible horrors awaited them at the top.
A door creaked open, flooding the staircase with dull white light, revealing another monster with yellow eyes and even yellower teeth, staring down at them menacingly.
”Well. What are you waiting for? Come up and have a gloat,” the goblin said.
When he stepped out into the great hall, through an entrance that had been concealed by one of Tye Thwodin’s giant paintings, the crowd of dungeoneers in training erupted with applause. Colm’s eyes instantly darted over to the hourglasses along the wall, hunting for the one that had turned the moment the carpet slipped out from beneath them. There was still a little sand at the top. That meant that Team Tickletoes had made it through the dungeon in less than half the allotted time.
Colm felt Lena’s gauntleted fist punch him in the shoulder, much harder than he would have liked. Behind him, Serene and Quinn were dancing in circles. Colm felt a strange sensation work its way through him, warming him from the inside.
Tye Thwodin stepped up to them, face deadly serious, the other masters in tow. His grunt silenced the room. The warm sensation vanished.
“You have the treasure, I presume.” He held out his hand, large enough, it seemed, to crush Colm’s skull with one squeeze. Colm opened his own hand to reveal the silver coin.
Tye Thwodin turned to Herren and Finn. “I thought it was supposed to be gold? Are you skimping on me, Argos?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Master Thwodin,” Finn explained. “It’s just a little joke among us rogues. I can fully attest that that is the very coin I put in the chest this morning. This team has successfully retrieved the treasure.”
Master Thwodin nodded, satisfied. “Then to the victors go the spoils.” He flipped the silver coin back to Colm, who caught it against his chest. Then the guild’s founder proceeded to pound Quinn on the back, nearly knocking him over before turning to the room full of recruits. “And as for the rest of you—mark this time. It is the one to beat.”
There was a murmur in the crowd. Colm caught sight of Ravena standing at the edge of it, away from her own party, away from everyone. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought maybe, just maybe, she looked concerned. He smiled in her direction and offered a shrug. She turned her back on him.
“Time to beat indeed,” Herren Bloodclaw spit. “No way a bunch of green cave crawlers like you could make it through so fast. Not without cheating somehow.”
Colm’s smile disappeared. He instantly thought of the stimsickle leaves. The earmarked book. Lock twenty-four. Colm looked at Finn, but the rogue didn’t return his glance.
“Or maybe you’re just getting soft in your old age,” Finn said to the goblin instead.
“No sense getting all bent out of shape over it, Renny,” Tye Thwodin boomed. “Obviously this just shows what outstanding mentors you both are. Now go reset the dungeon so we can throw someone else down there. I’m getting hungry already.”
As Tye Thwodin and the other masters turned back to the stage, Finn grabbed Colm’s arm and leaned in close, whispering in his ear.
“Remember our motto,” he said. “Ready for anything . . .”
Guilty of nothing, Colm finished in his own head as the rogue turned to follow the others. Colm watched him go, then flinched as Lena put her face in his, eyes bright and beaming. “See. I told you. Nothing the four of us can’t handle.” She reached out and took his four-fingered hand, squeezing tight. “You were almost as awesome as I was down there.”
“Yeah,” Colm said.
In his other hand he squeezed the silver coin even tighter.
13
THE FOOT RUB OF VENGEANCE
Well, at least nobody died.
That was what the masters kept saying to one another as the last party was rescued from Renny’s dungeon after a full day of trials that stretched well into the night. Nobody died and, somewhat surprisingly, only a few young dungeoneers were injured. It was a splendid success.
Precautions had been taken, of course. The scorpions Master Bloodclaw had used had been handpicked for the nonfatal toxin in their stingers before being enlarged through magical means. And the spiked floor was engineered to stop with two feet to spare so that trapped dungeone
ers could lie down and await rescue if they couldn’t trigger the escape. The magic-imbued lock gave a nasty shock to anyone who tried to pick it without disenchanting it first, causing one young dungeoneer to smoke from the ears and experience some short-term memory loss. Another had a leg broken by the scorpion’s claw, and a third tripped while climbing the stairs at the end, knocking himself unconscious and earning his party a penalty for having to carry him out, causing Tye Thwodin to joke that stairs were “the worst.”
The other surprise, besides the dearth of injuries, was that the odds-on favorite, the party of Tyren Troge, didn’t break the record as anticipated. They might have, if it hadn’t been for the chest. While she broke through the enchantment with ease, using a counterspell of her own devising, Ravena Heartfall struggled with the lock itself, taking a full ten minutes to pick it. She emerged from the dungeon scowling, clearly disappointed, slapping the gold coin—everyone else got gold—into Master Thwodin’s hands and then disappearing to her chambers without a word while Tyren raged and attacked the floor, resulting only in a scratched floor and a bent sword. It was an excellent run, Tye Thwodin said in consolation, and one that they should be proud of.
It just wasn’t the best.
Colm wasn’t sure what to expect.
He woke to the splatter of fat raindrops, set loose by a dark gray sky, bursting against his window. Not necessarily a good sign, but he wasn’t going to let a little rain dampen his spirits. Not today. Not after what had happened. Nervous hands fumbled at his bootlaces as he quickly got dressed and made his way down to breakfast. Working his way through the halls, he noticed strange things happening.
“Hi, Colm.”
“Hey, Colm.”
“Nice run, rogue.”
People talking to him. Trainees of all ages. He knew their faces and maybe could guess at some of their names, but he didn’t know them well enough yet to call them out, to speak to them. And yet here they were, slapping him on the back or giving him sly winks, as if they shared some secret. By the time he made it to breakfast, he was sure it was a trap. They were all up to something. His sisters always smiled and said “Hi” in a sweet voice before they gang-tackled him too. He worked his way past the greetings and entered the dining hall, looking for his friends.
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