Of course, I didn’t want to fall at all. Even if that liquid was really water and not acid, I didn’t know what other dangers lay within. Maybe a monster would come out of that grate as soon as the water drained, or acid would rise from the floor.
One hand in front of the other. Twice, I lost the grip with one of my hands and had to haul myself back into position… but I made it across.
I walked over to the other switch, the one I had broken, and pushed the remaining half of the handle.
Back where I had made my entrance, three doors appeared with gems of black, silver, and bronze coloring.
I didn’t have the faintest idea what those meant.
My arms ached. I felt something on my head — dust or tiny rocks, crumbling from the ceiling above me. That rumbling wasn’t illusory; the room was beginning to collapse.
I turned back to the chasm. The water was nearly gone now. I had hoped one of the switches would provide a bridge, but that was clearly too much to ask for.
Did I trust my arms to carry me back across the chasm to the new doors? The book had hinted that the exits nearest me were sub-optimal solutions, but it didn’t imply they’d be deadly. I might be better off taking the “easy” route out and testing myself in the next room.
I found myself making my way over to the pit’s edge, but not to cross it. Instead, I gripped the ladder, slowly climbing down.
I needed to know what was behind that grate.
The ladder was steel, slippery from contact with the water, but embedded in the wall similar to the handrails. It was sturdy and easy to climb.
I tested a foot against the ground before dropping off the ladder entirely. The floor itself seemed solid, and I didn’t see any signs of other traps.
I made my way to the grate. It was taller than I was and blocked by iron bars. I saw a keyhole on the right side of the gate, but it wasn’t marked with any specific color, nor was there a gem like on the doors above. Beyond the bars, I could see only darkness.
I stuck the back of the quill through the bars first. It came back perfectly intact. The blackness wasn’t some kind of annihilating field, at least.
I slowly tried a finger next. There was no pain, no wetness. Nothing uncomfortable.
The floor rumbled.
This may not be a gem-studded door, but I think it qualifies as a non-standard exit.
I readied the dueling cane, stepped back, and blasted the bars off the gate. I had chosen my exit.
I stepped into the dark.
Chapter III — Limited Options
I was immensely relieved when I found myself standing in an illuminated tunnel. The walls hugged close around me. The tunnel was roughly cylindrical, and barely wider than I was.
I turned around, finding a circular door behind me. There was no obvious lock, just a clear gemstone at the center.
Interesting.
I opened the door immediately. It led into a hexagonal chamber with pristine white walls. The walls were somewhat less important than the massive pendulums swinging back and forth throughout the room.
I was barely quick enough to step back before one of them swished out of the doorway. I’d been inches away from being pulverized — the swinging spheres were solid stone, maybe four feet in diameter, and moving fast enough to pulp me.
Odd that the trap swung outside of the door… I’ve never seen one of the traps exit the boundary of a room before. What was it doing before I walked in? Did the pendulums activate when I approached, or was that sphere slamming into the door before I opened it? I didn’t hear anything hitting the wall, but it could be covered in sound-proofing runes.
Now out of the pendulum’s swinging range, I took a deep breath and looked at the room a bit more closely. Five different pendulums, and for variety, a scythe-like blade swinging near the center. Each pendulum had a different trajectory.
One more swinging in parallel on the left side of the room.
Two swinging perpendicular to the first, located on the right side of the room.
One final pendulum swinging diagonally, near the rear of the left side.
More interestingly, there were square-shaped crystalline sections on various parts of the walls, roughly four feet across. A blue one on the ceiling, a red one on the right wall, and a yellow one on the floor below where one of the pendulums were swinging.
No doors, aside from the entrance. The crystalline sections were presumably the exits.
Evaluating the speed of the swinging balls of doom, I figured I could make it out of the doorway and onto the right side of the room between swings if I really wanted to.
I really didn’t.
I stepped further away from the door, allowing it to close. The pendulum cracked against the door a moment later, and I shuddered at the sound of the impact. Fortunately, the door remained intact. I didn’t see any signs of damage on my side of it, either.
I decided I’d consider this a potential exit route, but I was interested in seeing what was at the end of the hall. Also, I was even more interested in not getting stuck in a room filled with whirling death traps.
The hall was long enough that I managed to slip my dueling cane back on my belt and unsling my backpack to remove the book before I reached the end of it. I skipped to the last section with writing.
You shouldn’t have done that.
I blinked.
I put the book away.
The path terminated at a rectangular chamber, and I could immediately see why the book had been concerned.
First, there was the dead body.
Blood pooled around a corpse in the center of the chamber, some of it looking congealed. The victim was a man around my age, dressed in fancy clothes. His most distinctive characteristic was the hole in his chest, roughly the size of my fist. It went straight through his body, as perfectly cylindrical as the hallway I emerged from.
He wasn’t the only one there, however.
At the back of the room were three smaller chambers constructed from some sort of transparent material, likely a type of glass or crystal.
Each chamber held a single person.
Two of them were looking at me.
The chamber on the far right held a woman in her twenties, leaning forward against the transparent wall. I barely heard the banging; something seemed to be dampening the sound. She wore garb I’d associate with a traveling merchant: a lot of pouches; a couple necklaces; and heavy boots and gloves. From her dark brown skin, I assumed she was Caelish. After a moment, she knocked on the wall, frowning at me.
The central chamber held a black-haired man wearing a silver eye mask. The exposed section on the bottom of his face was light skinned and clean shaven, the latter point implying that he was either relatively young or hadn’t been in the cell for very long. He leaned against the back wall of the chamber, his arms folded. The hint of a long sheathed weapon, most likely a sword, was visible beneath his ornate overcoat.
My heart stopped for an instant when I looked at him. The masked man looked almost like my brother.
Tristan had seemed taller, but I’d been twelve years old when he’d left. Maybe that was just my memories playing a trick.
Their weight and build were about right. The figure in the cell looked a bit more athletic, but five years was a long time to potentially put on some muscle.