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 …"