“Stand back.”

  Konstans didn’t look around to check if his two charges were following instructions. By this point in the trip he’d learned that they might be clever in book learning, and annoyingly talkative, but they were gratifyingly obedient in following their guide’s instructions. To the best of their ability. The ascent of the Screaming Wall had taken a torturously long time, and he’d been forced to climb down and coax the younger but distinctly unathletic Alberic up the final third of the way. Professor Astridottar had required a rope sling, and the combined efforts of both Konstans and Alberic to hoist her up. She was effusively apologetic once they’d all reached the top.

  “I’m not as young as I once was,” she’d said at the top. Possibly. They had all plugged their ears to deal with the screaming, so Konstans had guessed at what she might have been saying. He reckoned it was a good guess, though: it was what she’d been saying for most of the three hours they’d spent in the catacombs.

  Neither of his charges looked like they should be down there. Professor Astridottar had reached her mid-sixties, at least, and had clearly put on quite a bit of weight in her last few years. She wore decent gear, strong boots with thick woollen culottes and a shirt beneath a tougher leather overtunic. The clothes were well made, and seemed old, but little used. There were signs of alterations: extra panels had been stitched into the sides of the overtunic to compensate for Astridottar’s increased mass. A peasant’s thick woollen hood had appeared from the woman’s pack and had covered up her steel-grey bun of hair as the temperature dropped closer to the tomb, but her face still peeked out. A lined and round face, given to seriousness, but not unfriendly. She was also short-sighted, and wore a curious pair of goggles.

  Konstans was sure he had taken her into the catacombs before, perhaps around eight years ago when he was first starting out as a guide. She was definitely not there for the first time, and the goggles in particular seemed familiar.

  By contrast, it was very definitely Alberic’s first time. His clothes were cheaper, but brand new, and worn beneath by a long vest made from some thick linen which stretched to his knees. It was covered in pockets, and probably cost as much as every other item that Alberic was wearing. Despite the pockets, he still carried a large pack that forced him to bend over as he walked.

  Also, like many first-timers, Alberic was always looking around. More than just looking around, in fact. He stared at everything, as if trying to fix it into his memory. At first, Konstans had felt a little insulted: did the skinny man think he might abandon them there? But after the first rest, he decided that it was just Alberic’s nature. In that first rest stop, while his professor had lain back against the tunnel wall and drank mouthfuls of what was probably water from her skin, Alberic had instead produced a sketchbook from one of the vest pockets and created a remarkably accurate drawing of some fungus he had found nearby.

  Konstans had known the fungus was there, of course: the fungus was dotted here and there throughout the catacombs. It was so common he’d stopped noticing it. But Alberic had noticed it, told him its name (Grave’s Bonecap), its other names (something long and foreign sounding that Konstans had immediately forgotten), and a recipe for drying it and frying it with garlic which he just had to try. It was the most animated Konstans had seen him. Which was strange, as he was definitely not here to study mushrooms.

  As they got up to leave that first stop, Konstans had produced his knife to cut out a bit of the fungus and try the recipe. And then, worriedly, Alberic had added that he had to be careful to dry the fungus correctly. It would still taste absolutely delicious of course, but he would spend most of the next day running to the outhouse, and Alberic hadn’t wanted him to think that he had been tricked. Konstans left the Bonecap behind, but decided he quite liked the earnest young man after all.

  That was all several hours ago. Now they had reached the penultimate obstacle, and the last one which required some effort on his part.

  Standing at the edge of the rough hewn corridor, Konstans thrust the flaming torch out ahead of himself and through the archway. The chamber ahead was carved inelegantly from the stone of the mountainside here, like much of the rest of the catacombs. Four blocky pillars arranged around the centre of the room helped to support the vaulted roof. Unlike previous rooms, this one was paved by a multitude of hexagons of varying shades of grey. Flickering torchlight just barely showed three long gashes in the ceiling, one before the pillars, one running between them, and the final one before the ornate double doors carved into the rock of the far wall. He jammed the torch into a sconce crudely screwed into the wall.

  All was as it should be.

  He shrugged the pack off his shoulder, and began to rummage through the equipment he had brought. The two academics began to talk again, but he had long since got the knack of only listening with half an ear to what any of his charges said. He was listening out for warning phrases (‘I’ll go first,’ ‘that looks easy,’ ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’) and tuned out the rest of their conversation.

  “Almost there, now. I tell you, Alberic, I’m not as young as I used to be. I think next time it’ll be somebody else going on these trips, don’t you?” Professor Astridottar had dropped her own pack on the floor. It was much smaller and lighter than Konstans’ but the professor was still out of breath and gasping. To her tired mind it seemed like it would make an excellent makeshift chair.

  “Somebody else, Professor?” Alberic’s voice had a note of caution to it that Konstans had come to recognise as habitual. The young, painfully thin, man was intelligent, but insecure about it. He had spent the whole trip with the air of somebody who was about to be asked a series of questions to which he did not know all the answers. The only time it had vanished was during the mushroom discussion.

  There was no shame in not knowing things, in Konstans’ view. There was much he did not know himself. But he did know what needed to be done next, as he brought a length of rope and a heavy sandbag from his pack.

  “I’m glad you carried that, and not me, eh, Konstans?” Astridottar puffed out the comment in a cheerful manner which was undercut slightly by a groan. The two academics had non-local accents, but were clear enough to understand. And it wasn’t as if Konstans was from around those parts anyway.

  Konstans grunted a polite affirmative, but she was already continuing.

  “Sitting down was a mistake. Could you... Alberic, could you?” She flapped a hand at her still standing student. The skinny man did his best to get behind his professor and help her lever herself upright, but the weight difference was so much he was not a very stable assistant. Nevertheless, they were both upright after a fashion by the time Konstans had securely tied one end of the rope to the sandbag. The two of them looked away from each other in mild embarrassment. Alberic cleared his throat.

  “I assume that’s for the pressure plates?” By the end of the question, it sounded like Alberic had lost so much confidence in his guess that he was no longer even sure of the existence of pressure plates anywhere, let alone in the room ahead. But Konstans grinned back in a way that he thought of as reassuring as he looped the free end of the rope around his wrist.

  “Better than setting them off with my foot, eh?” he said, and winked as he threw the sandbag out in front of him with a slight grunt. It fell to the floor with a soft woomph noise before the air was rent by the screeching of metal. Several semi-circular blades, gleaming and oiled as if fresh from the armourer, swooped out from the slots on the ceiling on retractable metal arms, and swooshed through the air over and around the sandbag. Despite the condition of the blades themselves, and indeed the smoothness of the motion, each arm creaked and squeaked like a suit of armour left out in the rain for a year.

  “My goodness!”

  Konstans turned to reassure Alberic. Many a visitor to the tomb had thought themselves brave and tough, and every one of them had been unnerved when they came to the blade chamber. Even Konstans himself had had serious reservations about his work at first. But Alberic’s eyes were shining, and he had even leaned forward. Not dangerously close, of course, but he had moved to just behind Konstans. His hands were scrabbling blindly at his pockets whilst he spoke quickly and intently, his gaze flitting between the blades, the sandbag, and what little was visible of their mechanisms.

  “...I’d read about the blades of course, but actually seeing them is another thing entirely. The blades must be enchanted to have retained that lustre after all the centuries... I must remember to check their sharpness before we leave, I wonder what would be the best time for it? And the noise! Maybe deliberate, certainly shocking to the unprepared, but maybe an enchantment failure, or partial failure? But then why would they be able to move at all? I wonder, could you replicate that sound through enchantment alone, or is it a combination of the magic pushing against corroded metal? I should...”

  He trailed off, looked at Konstans, and flushed.

  “Sorry,” he murmured, eyes dropping to the floor.

  Konstans just laughed. “I’ve been bringing people to this room for years, boy, seen some men faint, some decide to turn back and many, many men soil themselves! But you’re the first one who has reacted like that! You look like you want to rush in there and, well... don’t do it, whatever it is you want to do!”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “No! I won’t, I wouldn’t, I’ll stay back.” There was a pause of a heartbeat, and then he continued, “You said some people decided to turn back. I don’t suppose you know how many? Roughly? Or whether it was the sight of the blades, or that noise, or... Sorry, no, I’ll let you do your job... But could I ask you some questions when we’re done?”

  “Questions!? Ha! It’s nice to be appreciated! Normally people don’t care about my job, they’re just here to talk to Mr. Big Dead Hero at the end, or so they can tell people they’ve made it through the dangerous catacombs below Red Wolf Peak. And I bet they don’t mention me in those stories, either! Ask away, Young Alberic!”

  Alberic glanced back at Professor Astridottar. Konstans saw her smiling at her student like a proud mother hen. “Don’t hold back on my account. It’s good to see you so eager about it! I’ll just have a bit of a rest here.” She looked around for somewhere to sit. “Somewhere around here, anyway.”

  Alberic struggled out of the straps and buckles of his pack, and propped it against the corridor wall. “If you want to sit on the pack, Professor...”

  Konstans tuned his attention back to the chamber, and started to haul on the rope attached to the sandbag. Once he had it in his arms, he threw it out again, and again the blades swung out to dismember anybody who might have been stood or crouched around the sandbag. Every time he threw the sandbag out the blades swung out just a little bit slower. It was arduous work, the worst part of the job, Konstans usually thought, but that time the tedium was alleviated by Alberic’s conversation.

  He asked about how long the traps took to reset, about whether it needed the same number of sandbag tosses each time to wear out the enchantment, whether they kept records in the guides’ lodge of those sort of things. He asked about the people who had been turned back by the thought of the blades (“Idiots, who didn’t listen when I said it would be fine”), how they knew the size and shape of the sandbag to use (“I don’t know, probably just tried it with different things, and this one worked best”), what happened if they threw two sandbags out at the same time (“I don’t know, we can try next time, but you’ll be carrying the second bag!” at which Alberic nodded, and Konstans wondered what he’d just promised). Each of these things Alberic jotted down in another little notebook pulled from one of his numerous vest pockets.

  It wasn’t all one way (although as Konstans had said, he liked the interest). After a while, Alberic took turns hauling in the sandbag, and once Konstans had adjudged the blades to have slowed down enough, he even let him have a turn throwing the sandbag out. It didn’t go very far, barely setting off the blades, but Alberic had looked so excited about doing it that Konstans didn’t begrudge him the experience.

  Alberic had also talked about other catacombs. Sometimes his charges did that, trying to impress him (or their accompanying friends) with their experiences and their bravery. Alberic, however, talked about the hows and whys of the other places. How the Water Tombs of King Guthroyd had been constructed to take advantage of the intermittent floodings in that region of Borriale, meaning that guides had to know different ways around the obstacles depending on the season, recent weather and phase of the moon. How the Whispering Gallery around the grave of Archmage Rollos the Gluttonous would bring back echoes of things members of your party had said earlier in the expedition, but somehow reworked into recipes for rice pudding, each more delicious than the last. How the Uncompleted Tomb was abandoned when its intended occupant either vanished, ascended to a demigod status or was eaten by goats, depending on which local legend one believed.

  Eventually, the sandbag was thrown out (nowhere near as far as the first few throws: even Konstans was growing tired), and the blades just sort of dropped from the ceiling and hung there, swaying slightly. The mechanical arms tried weakly to retract the central blade, but gave up after a few moments as the enchantment collapsed, its magic temporarily worn out by too frequent use. The only sounds that could be heard was the scritching of Alberic’s pencil on his notebook, the professor’s soft snores and Konstans’ heavy breathing. Konstans replaced the torch in the sconce with a fresh one and gestured across the room with the guttering end of the dying firebrand.

  “Okay, okay. We’ve got probably five minutes before the enchantment starts up again. Do you want to rouse your professor? We’ll pick up the sandbag as we go across.”

  The sensation of the pressure plates in the floor was always unnerving, even after all this time. Konstans kept a careful eyes on the dangling blades as he crossed the room. Professor Astridottar seemed to wake up quickly, and also crossed the chamber with commendable speed. Alberic, on the other hand, seemed to try to stand on as many plates as possible, comparing their reaction, whether it changed if he tried to step on two at once. Konstans knew it was safe, but even so...

  “Can I touch them? The blades, I mean?”

  “You want to touch them?”

  “Just a bit. To see if they’re as sharp as they look. Or maybe it’d be better if...” Alberic tore a sheet of paper from his notebook and moved it towards one of the blades before stopping and looking beseechingly at Konstans.

  “I... don’t know what will happen...” Konstans looked around to check the professor had reached the large, smooth flagstones by the double doors. He hoisted the retrieved sandbag more comfortably over his shoulder and went to join her. “Careful,” he cautioned.

  Almost immediately, Alberic moved the paper against the edge of the semi-circular blade hanging from the ceiling. Konstans’ eyes widened as he saw it cut cleanly in two. More worryingly, he saw the mechanism holding that blade begin to shiver and strain like muscles convulsing. Alberic stared, fascinated.

  “I think that’s enough, now, Mr. Hasker. If you could come over here now. Quickly please.”

  Just as Konstans began to worry that the skinny man had more curiosity than sense, Alberic seemed to shake himself from his reverie at the twitching and shaking blade. He stepped back again, and again, before turning to the double doors. Konstans could swear he heard Alberic whisper the word “amazing,” before with a creak the blade behind him slowly raised itself into the air. He must have felt the movement, or heard it, because he dashed forwards to the safety of the area around the double doors in the blink of an eye. Seconds later, the blade that he had touched the paper against swept half-heartedly where he had stood.

  “We can get on with opening the doors and entering Ulthunc’s tomb now, yes?”

  “Did you see that? It responded to my presence! Has that happened before?”

  “I don’t think anybody has ever done that before, so no.” Konstans rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “Please, don’t do it again.”

  For the first time in their brief acquaintance, Alberic looked ready to argue.

  The double doors were the last barrier to the tomb. They were carved directly into the stone of the mountain, and portrayed the famous defeat of the Three-Legged Wyrm. Ulthunc the Slayer was chiselled at twice life size, wielding his enchanted sword that was as tall as Alberic was long, and twice as wide. Other groups would be regaled by the story of how the sword would always return to Ulthunc’s side by the next moonrise, even in his tomb (with the underlying message of ‘it’s not worth stealing’). But Konstans was feeling a little flustered at this point and desperately wanted to get the doors open so that he could have a quiet sit down and smoke his pipe. Besides, he suspected both his companions already knew that tale at least as well as he.

  But Alberic insisted on inspecting the doors before Konstans started, and the guide was only too happy to have his enthusiasm directed at something a little less sharp and deadly. Under the indulgent eye of his professor, Alberic examined the lack of any visible crack in the door (“A fairly standard enchantment, as these things go”), the riddle carved on the lintel of the door, the twelve hollows along the ground before it and the dozen figurines on their identical stone bases that resided on a stone plinth to the side.

  Finally, Konstans could get down to his work.

  “You know, I always wondered about this,” he commented, as he placed each figurine next to a hollow, checking them off against a scrap of ragged parchment he pulled from an inside pocket. “The labyrinth, I get, and the Screaming Wall. They put people off. And then, the blades. They really put people off. Or, cut you into bits if you don’t know the sandbag trick. But then, this,” He gestured with the last figurine, a six inch high carving of a stag on a two inch high hexagonal base. “It’s just a child’s riddle. You get it wrong, and the tomb locks itself for a week and the chamber fills with spiders, but it’s just a bit dull after the swinging axes. Oh, do you want to put the figurines in? They’re in the right order now.”

  Alberic nodded with childlike glee, and bent down to put the first figurine into its hollow. The carved hound fitted into place with a satisfying click.

  “Well, there’s a couple of things. Firstly, it’s traditional. Pretty much every tomb has a riddle to open the final door. And, I mean, there’s only so many riddles that you can set.” The second carving, a fox, clicked into place. “But this one’s special. You know the riddle, of course?”

  “Of course!

  ‘Through the stars they run,

  Since ever time begun,

  Faithful friend to sing,

  To forest’s crownéd king,

  Reversed here in our play:

  Let hunter be chased by prey!’”

  Konstans recited it by heart, although he noticed that the Professor’s eyes flicked up to the carving on the wall. Alberic placed the statuette of the sparrow in the next hollow, and picked up the hawk.

  “So its the signs of the zodiac of Western Galantys, usually set out in the order of beast, and its hunter. But here it is reversed. So cat,” he placed down the carving, “is followed by mouse,” and he picked up the small mouse dwarfed by the block in which it was set.

  “I still don’t see why it is special.”

  “Because this one has a trick: what’s the order of the zodiac?”

  Konstans felt like there was something obvious he wasn’t seeing, but that the young man, who had never been down into the catacombs before, had spotted. It gave him a feeling which he wasn't certain he liked.

  “Stag, huntsman, sheep, wolf, fish, otter, mouse, cat, sparrow, hawk, fox, hound.” Konstans’ eyes tracked along the figurines as he said them, then glanced again at the parchment to double check. He heard an intake of breath from Professor Astridottar, which worried him.

  “Almost! That’s the answer to the riddle, of course, but it’s not the zodiac order. Mouse and cat should be after sparrow and hawk, not before! So,” he put the sheep into its slot, “there’s another layer here to the puzzle. Somebody who doesn’t know the trick, somebody not with the knowledge of Ulthunc’s followers would confidently put the animals in place in reverse order. And when they come to the last one,” the huntsman slotted into place, bow raised to aim at the final figurine, “the doors lock themselves, the room fills with spiders, and they have to go back through the recharged enchantments on the blades very quickly or drown in arachnids!” Triumphantly, Alberic placed the stag in place.

  There was something in his expression which reminded Konstans of when he had approached the blades. Nervously, he looked back the way they had come. All the arms had retracted and the trap had reset. He shivered and though of spiders.

  All the figurines lit up with an aquamarine glow. The glow intensified until the carvings were too bright to see, and then vanished, revealing twelve empty hollows. Konstans knew the figurines had reappeared on their plinth.

  Silently, the doors opened to the tomb of Ulthunc.

  Konstans let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding and forced a laugh. “I’ll have to remember that for my next groups!”

  Alberic wasn’t listening.

  “I wonder... would they glow the same colour if I’d put them in wrong?”

  Konstans quickly ushered him into the safety of the tomb.