Finder started working faster, excited by the nearness of their goal.
Olive slipped down to the floor to give the bard room to work. He piled stones up on either side of the tunnel to shore up the ceiling as he dug into the dirt. Olive watched him wriggle like a snake into the hole he’d created and disappear. If he wanted to go first, she had no objections. If there was something waiting on the other side, Finder was a bigger target and made a good shield.
“I need the torch,” his muffled voice called out.
Olive took up Finder’s torch and scrambled up to the hole. She thrust it through as far her halfling arm could reach and leaned it against the stones the bard had positioned. Finder reached back carefully and pulled it the rest of the way through. Olive slipped her shovel into her knapsack and slid back down the rubble to fetch her own torch. “Damn!” Finder growled from the other side of the rubble.
“What is it?” Olive called out with alarm.
Finder did not reply.
Olive froze in horror. “Finder?” she whispered. From the other side of the rubble, she heard the sound of rattling iron. Olive snatched up her torch and scrabbled to the hole. “Finder!” she shouted.
“No need to shout, Olive girl,” Finder called back. “I can hear you.”
“Why did you say ‘damn’?” she asked angrily, thrusting her torch into the hole.
“Someone’s put an iron grate across the passage,” the bard explained. “Nothing I can’t handle, though.”
As Olive crawled through the hole toward the light, she heard the sound of a wire jiggling in a lock. As she poked her head out of the hole, she saw the iron grate ten feet away. There was a door with a simple-looking lock set in it. The bard was bent over it, picking at it with a bit of wire. Why, Olive wondered, would anyone seal the passages with cave-ins and then put up an iron grate with a door in it? That is, unless they had some insidious reason to want someone to open the door.… “Finder, wait!” the halfling cried urgently. “Let me have a look first!”
A distinct click echoed down the passageway. Finder pushed on the grate. It swung open on squeaky hinges. The bard turned around, grinning at Olive with amusement. “I told you I could handle it,” he said.
Olive rolled her eyes. “You can never have too many people check a lock,” she snapped. “Suppose it had been trapped?”
Finder shrugged. “It wasn’t. No harm done,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
Sometimes, Olive thought, he’s just like a little boy. She slid down the pile of dirt and stone on the other side and picked up her torch.
“After you, my dear,” Finder said, motioning for her to go through the doorway.
Olive eyed the passage cautiously. It was too dim to pick out any really well-hidden traps. “Age before beauty,” she replied.
A rueful look flickered across the bard’s face, but he turned and stepped across the threshold into the passage beyond.
Olive understood that look. Now that Finder was no longer living on the boundary of the plane of life, his body was feeling his great age more, and Finder had never liked anything that reminded him of his mortality. The younger halfling couldn’t bring herself to tease him about it. She remembered all too well her mother’s own groaning complaints when her body began to fail. No doubt, Olive realized, I’ll be just as annoyed when I get old—providing I live long enough, she amended, though she suspected the odds of that decreased the longer she stayed with Finder.
She trotted after the bard anyway. “So, where’s this workshop?” she asked when she caught up with him.
“Straight ahead, Olive,” Finder said, pointing down the dim corridor.
Olive held her torch higher and peered into the darkness. Two dim torchlights shone somewhere farther down the passage. “Someone’s coming,” she hissed, halting in her tracks.
Finder chuckled. He moved his torch up and down, and one of the lights ahead of them rose and fell as if in reply. “It’s just our reflection, Olive. The door is enchanted, made of polished steel. Keeps it from being disintegrated.”
Olive paced behind Finder. Halfway down the passage, a strand of her hair blew across her face. Olive halted again and turned sideways. From a gap in the wall large enough for a human to pass through, warm air, stinking of garbage, blew into the corridor. The quarried stone that had covered the gap lay smashed in pieces about the passageway floor, crunching under their feet. Beyond the gap was a tunnel stretching farther than the torchlight could reveal.
“This must be where whatever it was that disintegrated those arches broke in,” Olive said.
Finder turned and walked back to inspect the gap. “Yes,” he said slowly. “The hillside is riddled with natural caves and galleries. I had this gap sealed off to keep cave monsters out. I should have filled in the tunnel behind the gap, too. Well, it can’t be helped now,” he said with a shrug and continued down the corridor, intent on his goal.
Olive stared down the tunnel behind the gap, wondering what sort of creature, possessing the power to disintegrate things, would live with that smell. Something without a nose, she thought, an idea that did not comfort her any. For a brief moment, she thought she saw tiny points of red light, but they blinked out immediately. She stepped closer to the hole.
From down the corridor Finder had followed came the rattle of another iron grate. With a start, Olive realized they had fallen into a trap—one undoubtedly set by the unknown thing that had disintegrated the ceilings. Her heart pounding with fear, she raced down the corridor toward the bard. Ten feet from the steel door to his underground workshop, someone had set up a second iron grate with a door. Finder had wedged his torch in the grating and was already bent over the door’s lock with his wire pick.
“Must be something to keep the children out,” the bard muttered disdainfully, but Olive could see at a glance that the lock on this second door was far more complicated than that on the first.
“Finder,” she whispered nervously, tugging on his sleeve, “it’s a trap. Something’s coming from the caves back there. We have to get out of here. Now!”
“Don’t be silly, Olive,” the bard said. “I’ll only be a moment; then we can seal ourselves in the workshop. Ouch!” Finder drew his hand up to his mouth and sucked on his knuckle. “Scratched myself,” he said with a touch of embarrassment.
Olive’s eyes widened with horror. “Spit!” she ordered him.
“What?” the bard asked with amusement.
“Spit, you idiot! You’ve been jabbed by a poison needle! Don’t swallow!”
Finder’s brow wrinkled with concern. He turned his head and spat on the floor while Olive pulled out a flask and shoved it into his hands.
“Rinse your mouth and your hand,” she ordered, looking back down the corridor anxiously.
Finder took a swig from the flask and spat it out, gagging and coughing. “What is this?” he asked.
“Luiren Rivengut,” the halfling said. “Best whiskey there is.”
“Tymora! If the poison doesn’t get me, this stuff will!” Finder muttered.
“Wash out the scratch,” Olive ordered.
Finder splashed some of the whiskey on his knuckle.
“Let’s go,” Olive said.
“Olive, now that I’ve sprung the trap, we’ve nothing to lose,” Finder said, bending back over the lock with his pick. “It will be a snap to get this grate open and get into the workshop.”
“No, it won’t,” the halfling insisted, growing more frantic with each passing moment. “This is a tee-trap,” she explained. “The first lock had a silent alarm. This lock will be so complicated it will detain us long enough for guards to reach us from that tunnel back there. We’ll be trapped long before we can get the door open.”