“Tread carefully, boys, tread carefully,” I said to the skeletons as we advanced with caution.
I kept my eyes trained on the walls for signs of triggers and inched my way down the incline, making sure that my skeletons did the same.
When we were about halfway down the incline, I began to notice bits of bone on the sides of the passage. Then, as we edged our way forward, the shards became complete bones. A little further on, they were complete limbs. Some even still had bits of rusty armor attached to them. I walked past a skull, and then another that was half crushed. Something had hit these bodies with tremendous force, something very heavy; the impact had been powerful enough to smash these explorers to pieces.
As we progressed closer to the bottom, I saw a strange sight: a thin vertical beam of daylight was shining like a lone white reed in the darkness below. There had to be a skylight leading up to the surface, but it couldn’t have been more than a few inches in diameter. But why would there be a skylight all the way down here?
When we came to the beam of light, and I thought about climbing up onto one of my skeleton’s shoulders to investigate it more closely, my sixth sense piped up and stopped me from getting too close. And I had long learned to trust my sixth sense completely.
It took a moment for it to materialize into a full realization though. I was sure we had to stay the hell away from the light, but the lead skeleton stepped into its center before I could issue a mental command.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I felt it coming before I heard it, a subtle rush of cool air coming up the passage from the inky darkness below. And the second I felt it, I hurled myself down, squeezing my body as tightly as I could into the corner at the intersection of the floor and the wall. Then, I heard it: a twanging blast crashing through the passage. The instant I hit the ground, the projectile came tearing up the slope: a giant stone ball, launched from a powerful spring below.
I was only just able to avoid it, and the gigantic ball, its six-foot diameter almost the same width as the passage, came rushing past me like a galloping horse, obliterating my skeletons in the blink of an eye. As the shattered bone fragments of what used to be my skeletons came falling to the ground, the speeding ball was beginning to decelerate, until it finally came to a stop at the top of the slope.
“And now for fuckin’ part two,” I muttered, pressing myself tighter into the corner as the ball began rolling back down the slope, picking up momentum at a terrifying pace.
It tore past me with a rush of cold wind, missing my body by a hair’s breadth. It thundered down the slope until it finally crashed to a halt at the bottom with an impact that shook the floor and walls I lay pressed against.
“A light trigger,” I grunted as I jumped up onto my feet and dusted myself off. “A fucking light trigger. One of the rarest triggers… and one of the deadliest.”
I had to admit, even though this trap had destroyed my skeletons, I couldn’t help getting some kind of kick out of the expert design of the whole thing. I’d always heard about light triggers and how only the very best trapmakers were able to construct them. And I’d always wanted to see one, just for the challenge of overcoming it, and now I had. Even though I hadn’t exactly used my wits to survive the trap, the bottom line was that I had come up against a light trigger trap and survived. Another one to add to my list.
Now that it was disarmed, I made my way down to the bottom of the incline with a bit less worry dogging me. I was still extremely aware of my surroundings, of course, but I knew that it wasn’t too likely that there were any more traps in this section.
I got to the bottom and found the boulder, which had come to rest in the entrance of the tunnel—the barrel of the weapon, rather—from which it had been launched. The passage led off to the right here, and to a door, that bore the tornado sigil of Xayon. This was it; I had arrived.
I took out my trap probe and my lock-picking kit and knelt down to face the keyhole. I had no doubt that the door was trapped, and my initial tests with the probe proved this. I got to work disarming the trap, a job that took a few minutes because of the complexity of the trap trigger, but eventually, I neutralized it. After that, I got to work on the lock mechanism, which was equally complex. Still cautious, I opened the door and stepped through it.
I found myself at the top of a broad staircase that led down to a large hall with a vaulted ceiling, supported by stylized stone columns carved in the shape of tornados and lined with marble statues of heroes of past ages who had fought for the Wind Goddess. At the very end of the hall was an ornate altar, also carved from marble, and on the wall behind it was a carving that depicted Xayon driving her cloud chariot, pulled by the Four Winds, in the form of four mighty
