Chapter 126: Traps and the Fall
The corridor was a throat of darkness. The air grew colder the deeper we went. The floor was thick with dust and debris, hiding the original tiles. Every step felt like a gamble.
Lashley took the lead, following the pull of the dense mana he sensed. Neralia was behind him, the map and compass clutched tightly, her eyes wide as she tried to reconcile the parchment with the crumbling reality. I brought up the rear, my neck prickling, my hand never leaving my sword.
The first trap was for Lashley.
He stepped on a section of floor that looked no different from the rest. There was a soft, dry click, like a giant insect snapping its mandibles. A section of the wall to his left slid open with a grating shriek of stone on stone. From the black slot, a rusted iron pendulum blade swung out in a wide, shrieking arc, aimed to bisect him at the waist.
He froze. His noble training hadn't covered imperial murder-holes.
I was already moving. My body, lighter and more responsive from the integration, reacted before my mind fully processed the threat. I didn't think. I lunged forward, my shoulder slamming into Lashley's side. We both crashed into the opposite wall in a heap of limbs and armor as the blade whistled through the space where he had stood. It embedded itself into the stone wall with a final, shuddering *thunk*, then went still.
Silence, broken by our ragged breathing.
Lashley pushed himself off me, his face pale. He looked from the blade to me, his usual arrogance replaced by stunned gratitude. "I… thank you."
"Don't thank me yet," I grunted, getting up. "Watch the floor. Look for lines, for different colored tiles. They liked pressure plates."
We moved on, slower now. The corridor turned, opening into what might have been a gallery. Broken statues lined the walls. The ceiling here was higher, lost in shadow.
The second trap was for both of us, and it was Lashley's turn.
Neralia, focused on the map, stepped into the center of the room. "This should be the reception gallery. The atrium is just beyond those…"
A series of sharp *twangs* echoed from the darkness above. I looked up in time to see a net, weighted with black stones and woven with rusty barbs, drop straight down toward her head.
"Neralia!" Lashley shouted.
He didn't shove her. He moved with a desperate speed I hadn't seen in him before. He tackled her around the waist, driving them both forward in a stumbling roll. The net crashed down behind them, raising a cloud of ancient dust and sealing off the way we had come.
Neralia coughed, spitting out dust, her fine clothes now filthy. Lashley helped her up, his hands trembling slightly. She didn't complain. She just gave him a tight, wordless nod.
We were learning. The mansion wasn't just a ruin. It was a tomb with teeth.
The third trap was subtle. The corridor beyond the gallery narrowed. The walls here were lined with what looked like sconces for torches, shaped like open-mouthed demon faces. As I passed one, my Ki sense, which had been so muted, gave a faint, discordant pulse. A warning.
"Stop," I said, throwing out an arm.
Lashley and Neralia froze. I pointed at the demon face sconce ahead of Lashley. "Don't walk directly in front of it. Step wide."
He eyed it skeptically but did as I said, pressing himself against the far wall. As he passed by the sconce, there was a hiss of compressed air. A fine, greenish mist shot from the demon's mouth, spraying across the empty corridor. Where it touched the opposite wall, the stone sizzled and pitted instantly.
"Acid vapor," Neralia breathed, her scholar's mind recognizing it even through her fear. "A breath trap."
We avoided the other sconces by giving them a wide berth. The tension was a wire pulled so tight it hummed. Every shadow was a threat. Every sound was a trigger being pulled.
Finally, we reached a set of tall, double doors. They were made of dark, heavy wood, banded with black iron. One door hung crooked on its hinges. Through the gap, we could see a larger space.
Lashley placed a hand on the wood. "The mana… it's strongest here. Just beyond."
This was it. The lord's study.
I pushed the broken door open slowly, expecting another trap. Nothing happened. We filed inside.
The study was a disaster. It was a large, rectangular room. One entire wall was floor to ceiling bookshelves, but they had collapsed long ago, spilling a river of mildewed, ancient books and scrolls across the floor in a soggy, leathery landslide. A massive desk of dark wood dominated the center of the room, its surface scarred and buried under chunks of fallen plaster from the cracked ceiling. The wall opposite the bookshelves had a giant, shattered window that once must have looked over the town, now just a gaping hole looking out onto darkness and the creeping purple vines. The room smelled of old paper, wet rot, and that persistent metallic tang.
"Spread out," I said quietly. "Look for anything that doesn't belong. A safe, a strongbox, a pedestal. The Stone might not be sitting on the desk."
We began to search, moving carefully through the wreckage. Neralia went straight for the desk, brushing aside debris. Lashley started poking through the less sodden piles of books near the edges of the collapse, using the tip of his sword to lift covers. I moved toward the far corner, where a large, overturned chair and a moldy tapestry might hide something.
I found nothing but more decay. I heard Lashley mutter about "worthless tactical ledgers" and Neralia sigh in frustration as she found only broken inkwells and petrified sealing wax in the desk drawers.
The countdown ticked in my vision, a silent scream in the quiet room.
195:22:47… 46… 45…
"There is nothing here," Lashley finally said, his voice tight with frustration and rising fear. "The mana is everywhere, it's confusing the source. It could be in the walls, under the floor…"
"It has to be here," Neralia insisted, a desperate edge to her voice. She knelt down behind the massive desk, pushing aside a large piece of fallen ceiling stone. "The resonance is absolute. It's in this room. Maybe there's a…"
Her sentence ended in a sharp *click*.
It was a different sound from the pressure plate. This was crisper, a definitive snap of a mechanism engaging.
Time seemed to slow.
From slots hidden in the ornate molding near the ceiling, a dozen short, heavy crossbow bolts shot into the room. They weren't aimed at random. They were aimed at the space behind the desk. At Neralia.
I was already moving. The hours of Ki circulation, the lightness in my limbs, it all came together in a single burst of desperate speed. I wasn't faster than the bolts. But I was faster than Neralia's shock.
I crossed the room in two long strides and crashed into her, wrapping my arms around her and driving us both sideways, behind the thick leg of the massive desk.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
The bolts slammed into the wood of the desk and the wall behind where she had been kneeling, quivering with the impact.
We hit the floor hard. Neralia gasped, the wind knocked out of her. I was on top of her, shielding her with my body.
And then the floor gave way.
It was the desk leg. The one I had shoved us behind. It wasn't just a leg. It was another trigger, weighted to activate when the primary trap was avoided.
With a groan of tortured wood and stone, a section of the floor directly beneath us and the desk's corner dropped away. There was no time to scream, to react, to grab onto anything.
One moment we were on solid ground. The next, we were falling.
Neralia's shriek and my own shout of surprise were swallowed by the roaring rush of air and the sound of crumbling masonry. We tumbled into absolute blackness, down a wide, smooth stone shaft, the light from the study vanishing above us as the trapdoor, or whatever it was, began to grind shut.
The last thing I saw was Lashley's horrified face, leaning over the new edge, his hand outstretched, his mouth open in a silent cry.
Then there was only the dark, the fall, and the cold.