The Wizard's Mask

Chapter Fifteen

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, into 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 is 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.

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?"