Matt Forbeck - Ghosts of Ascalon

And it must be older than the charr invasion itself, made for earlier rulers. He could not imagine Adelbern ever using a tunnel to escape.

Dougal threw himself backward, spinning about and throwing himself flat on his face and covering his head with his arms.

The trap sprang as Dougal's weight left the pressure plate. Fire did not engulf the passage. The floor did not drop away. Instead, he heard something come crashing down into the passage, right where he would have been if he'd walked blithely past the trap.

Dougal sat up and looked back up the passageway. In the light from the tiny lantern still hanging from his chest, he saw a series of spiked poles that had stabbed down from a set of concealed holes in the ceiling. These would have run him through and left him impaled on the poles until he either bled to death or died of thirst.

Despite that, there was just enough room around the spikes for Dougal to squeeze his way past. "I'm all right!" he shouted back toward the entrance, but Riona said nothing. Perhaps she could no longer hear him.

Dougal snaked his way through the catacomb. There were multiple passages now, some doorways crushed, others as open as spoiled tombs. The Foefire had twisted the catacombs when it struck. The darkened halls here had probably stood tall and unshaken once, but now the place was littered with bricks that had fallen from the ceiling and walls. In some sections the roof had caved in entirely, and in others it looked as if it might do so in an instant.

Finally he reached the site of the vault on his mental map. It was a slab of stone that seemed solid enough to serve as the foundation for a castle. It showed no hinges, knobs, or other features, only a dark hole in its exact center, just a little bigger than the size of his fist.

Five years. It had taken him five years to get to this point.

Dougal scanned the door with his eyes and his fingertips, hoping to find some flaw in it, some hint of what he needed to do to make it swing open. Finding nothing, he knelt down, brought his light up to the hole in the middle of the door, and peered into it.

He started cursing right away. "It's a Thief's Nightmare," he said to himself. To work this sort of lock, you have to put your entire hand into the hole, grab the handle, and then turn it in the proper sequence. If you screw it up, a blade springs out to remove your hand at the wrist. Worse, you can't see what you're doing. Your arm blocks the way. Barbaric. And effective.

Dougal steeled himself and stuck his hand into the black hole, hoping that it would still be attached to him the next time he saw it. The metallic handle felt cool in his hand as he grabbed it.

He turned the handle counterclockwise until it reached a point of resistance, and there was a click. There was no sudden pain, no blade dropping. He had unfastened the first tumbler. Sweating now, he began to turn the handle in the other direction, past the original point. There was a bit of resistance. Was that the second tumbler, or was it the trap about to spring?

"Stop," said a voice in Dougal's ear, and for a moment he thought Riona had followed him down. He craned his head around, but he was alone before the stone door. Still, he had heard something. Or perhaps it was his own imagination, translating some shifting of the stone into words.

Nevertheless, his gut said he had gone far enough. He brought the handle back to where it had been, then started turning it counterclockwise again. Soon he felt the handle click into place. Yes. It had been the second tumbler.

Dougal adjusted his grip on the handle and turned it clockwise now. When Dougal reached the point of resistance this time, he felt something sharp push up against his wrist. He stopped cold.

"Good," the phantom voice seemed to say in his ear.

Screwing up his courage, Dougal took a deep breath. If he got this wrong, he'd soon be missing his favorite hand. He could only hope that he'd be able to open the door with his other hand before he passed out from a lack of blood.

Dougal cranked the handle with a sharp twist. The blade that had been pressed against his wrist moved away. Within the stone slab there was a grumbling as iron bolts were withdrawn.

Dougal turned and looked behind him, but there was no one there, only a blue-white mist that curled around a statue of a female warrior and then was gone.

Dougal pulled on the handle, and the door swung outward on well-oiled hinges.

The vault of King Adelbern lay open to him at last.

Dougal stepped through the door and into a large room lined with shelves. Magical lights illuminated the place from ceiling to floor, glowing with a bluish hue that cast everything in an otherworldly light. The walls and ceiling of the room were made of perfectly fitted cut stone bound together with crisscrossing strips of iron. These had no doubt been made to keep thieves from drilling into the vault, but by the way the iron bands sagged violently in the center of the ceiling, Dougal knew that they'd also kept the room from collapsing under the pressure from the fallen tower above.

He hoped they'd hold just a few minutes longer.

The shelves on both sides were filled with terra-cotta jars, each filled to overflowing with gold coins and jewelry. At the base of the shelves were piles of ornate swords and armor salvaged by King Adelbern from the wreckage above and tucked away, much like an elderly woman might hide silver pieces throughout the house in case of burglars. Rough sacks of gold and platinum were tucked into every nook and cranny.

A particularly large, ironbound chest sat on the far side of the polished marble floor, its lid unlocked and flipped back to rest against the wall behind it. A few gold coins lay scattered about the place where they had spilled out of a single sack that sprawled open on the floor next to the chest.

Dougal slipped into the vault, moving carefully and scanning for traps of any kind. The adrenaline coursing through his veins magnified his senses. While he didn't expect to find any more dangers located behind such a complicated and lethal lock, he'd known many people who'd died from making such assumptions.

He reached the chest and looked inside.

The Claw of the Khan-Ur sat inside the chest, atop a bed of gold coins and precious gems. Diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, and rubies sparkled back at him in the tiny lantern's light.

But the Claw held Dougal's attention. Two blades pointing forward, two pointed back, a handgrip in the middle. An ungue. It was set with four gems-red, black, gray, and golden-for the four children of the imperator, and the four founders of the modern legions.

There was something else, though, hanging from the forward, upward-turned blade. A simple golden chain, and hanging from that chain, a locket, twin to Dougal's own.

Dougal picked up the locket and held it up to the light, then opened it, although he knew what he would find. His own cameo, jet, set in ivory.

He thought of the soft voice in the hallway. "Thank you, Vala," he said, not sure if she could hear and not caring if she didn't. He pocketed the locket and turned to the Claw itself.

Dougal reached into the chest and carefully grasped the Claw by its jewel-encrusted handle. No trap was sprung. He didn't expect that Adelbern would have the desire or knowledge to construct a trap in the chest, but he couldn't be sure. Time was wasting, though, and he needed to move fast. Steadying himself, he yanked the weapon from the chest with a single sharp movement.

The Claw came out of the chest without incident, and Dougal examined it in the light. It seemed undamaged, despite having survived the Foefire and the intervening centuries. It looked exactly as he'd described it to the others, right down to the gold plating and the colors of the four jewels embedded in its handle.