"He hired me for my experience in recovering powerful artifacts," said Dougal.
Gyda let out a deep chuckle. "Robbing tombs, you mean."
Dougal ignored her. "Does anyone have something helpful to add?" Dougal asked.
"The petal-head's comment stands," said Clagg, prim as a schoolmaster, "That is why we brought you along, human. We know the trap is there. Now take care of it."
Dougal reached down and picked up a skull, trying not to think about if this was an ancestor. He aimed for a spot about in the middle of the room and touched the locket beneath his shirt for luck. Then he pitched the skull underhand into the room.
Nothing. He pitched another skull to a different area. Nothing again. He pitched a third.
Gyda rolled her eyes at his uselessness and folded her thick arms with impatience. Clagg shook his head at him as if Dougal were an addled child.
"Not set off by noise," said Dougal. "Not vibration or motion, either. That leaves weight. We should send in something heavy." He looked at Gyda.
"I will not be an experiment for you," said the norn quietly, her face clouded.
"Well, then, the golem," said Dougal.
"Strike that suggestion," snapped Clagg, "I did not craft Breaker from scratch just to see it blown to smithereens. This is your problem, human."
"You care more for that walking statue than you do for the rest of us," said Gyda.
"Untrue," said the asura. "I just have less invested in you than in it."
Killeen brightened, her eyes glowing a faint green. "Perhaps I can help."
The sylvari set her chin and concentrated on a patch of the bones lining the left side of the passage. She swung her arms and fingers in a complex pattern and spoke words that made Dougal's head ache slightly. A greenish glow formed in the wall of bones and coalesced around a human-sized set of remains.
As Dougal watched, the bones detached from the surrounding patch and assembled themselves into a coherent skeleton. The deep-green glow, rather than sinew and tendons, held it together. The right side of its skull had been bashed in, and its jaw was missing, as was the lower part of its right arm, which terminated in a pair of jagged breaks. It stood before them like a servant presenting itself to its betters.
Dougal shuddered as Killeen gave the creature a satisfied smile. She gestured again, and the skeleton tottered around and stumbled off down the passage toward the room beyond.
Dougal glanced up at the bone-covered ceiling and reminded himself there had to be some stone and earth up there somewhere behind the remains-that they weren't just moving through a tunnel carved out of a mountain of bones. "Hold on," he said, reaching toward Killeen as she smiled at the way her creation shambled away. "We should back up and take-"
The explosion cut him off. The animated skeleton disappeared in a cloud of flame and smoke.
Dougal ducked down and wrapped his arms over his head as a cascade of bone fragments rained down on him, bouncing and clattering on the floor. One flying shard of their animated helper shot into Dougal's heavy leather shirt and stuck there like a revenant's fang.
Dougal stood up and saw Clagg gazing into the cavern, pursing his lips. "Crude," the asura said. "But effective."
Gyda shouldered past Dougal and laughed. As she strode into the chamber beyond, she grinned at the scorch mark where the skeleton once stood. "Well done, sapling," she said to Killeen. "At least you are earning your pay."
Dougal winced at the implicit insult. To the group at large he said, "We need to press on. It may take minutes or days for this trap to reset. It may just be a single use, but we have no way of knowing."
Now Gyda laughed. "He means to say, 'Thank you, sylvari, for doing my job.' "
Killeen's cheeks blushed a deeper green. "My apologies," she said to Dougal. "I did not mean to upstage you. I did remove the trap without hurting anyone."
Dougal grimaced. He didn't doubt that her apology was heartfelt, but that made it feel even worse. He said, perhaps not as kindly as he could, "You could have given us more fair warning, or time to back out of the explosion. As it was, you could have brought the ceiling down on top of us."
"I see," Killeen said, thoughtful for a moment. "I did not intend to endanger our quest."
"Of course not," Dougal said, feeling bad for upbraiding her. Despite himself, he couldn't help but enjoy her sincerity.
"Perhaps it's the wonder of this place," the sylvari said, raising her chin once again. "It's fascinating. To my people, death is an integral part of life. We revere it wholly, even the darkest parts of it. But we don't quite understand it-yet." She gazed around the chamber, her eyes wide with wonder. "And even so, we would never build a monument like this to it."
"It is not a monument to the dead but rather a testament to those who lived," Dougal said gently. He felt his irritation ebbing away-toward her, at least. "Let's go." Then, raising his voice to the others: "Let's be careful moving forward. We should see more traps like this."
"You are such an old woman, human," Gyda snorted. "My great-granddame Ulrica would not hesitate as much as you do, and she's been dead for seven years." She kicked aside a pile of bones and held aloft a torch. "You worry too much. What's life without danger?"
"Longer," Dougal said.
He followed the norn as she strode through the exploded room and into the chambers beyond. He'd worked with other norn before. They were larger than life in many ways, but norn bullies were just like everyone else's. Gyda's bluster was meant to cover some other deficiency. Dougal didn't mention the norn's own reluctance to enter the trapped room, despite her bragging.
"Bah. Such a life only seems longer, like a tasteless meal," concluded Gyda. As Dougal followed her, he noticed that the air had grown slightly cooler. Once they were all inside the next chamber, both he and the norn held their torches aloft. The light found something thick and gray hanging among the bones at the apex of the room's high-arched ceiling.
Dougal held up a hand to shade his eyes against the torch and peered at the substance. At first he thought it hanging moss, but suddenly it was clear what it was.
Webbing.
Dougal cursed. He shouted out a warning, but Killeen's high-pitched scream behind him cut him off. He spun about just in time to see the sylvari disappear into a hole in the ground.
In an instant Dougal knew what had happened. Killeen's assailant had waited as the larger forms of Dougal and the norn had passed over its concealed hiding place, and sprung its trap on the lighter footfalls of the sylvari. And in that moment Killeen was gone, pulled into a hollowed-out space beneath the ancient flagstones, a trapdoor made of webs and bones slamming down after her, blending once more into the bone-littered floor.
Gyda spun around, too, and scanned the room for any sign of Killeen behind her. "The necromancer! Where is she?"
"Down there!" Clagg shouted, pointing at the trapdoor. "Spider!"
Dougal raced toward the trapdoor, dropping his torch and drawing his sword as he went. He smashed at the disguised covering with his blade, and the trapdoor shattered as if he'd struck a dinner plate.
Killeen screamed again as she popped back up out of the hole, like a swimmer breaching the surface. She flung out her hands and scrabbled for a handhold among the bones before her, but they pulled away loose in her hands.
A black-haired spider the size of a small wolf appeared on the sylvari's shoulders and reared back to strike her on the neck. Dougal made a desperate stab at it. His blade sliced through one of the creature's legs and lodged itself in its side. The beast hissed in pain, its twitching mandibles dripping with viscous venom.
Before Dougal could pull back his blade for another strike, though, he heard Clagg shout at him. "Stand back, you fool!"
Dougal turned in time to see Breaker's boulder of a fist coming down at him. He threw himself to the side, leaving his sword buried in the spider's abdomen. The golem's stone fist narrowly missed both the thrashing spider and the sylvari but smashed Dougal's blade to pieces.