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.