Andrew Rowe - Sufficiently Advanced Magic

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.

His hair was too dark, too long, but that could be explained by hair dye and the passage of time.

His skin was too light, but maybe he was sick from all this time in a cell…

I shook my head. The similarities were enough to trigger painful memories, but the differences were too pronounced. I wanted it to be my brother in there, but it wasn’t him. I’d have to find Tristan later.

On the far left was another prone figure, a boy. He looked a few years younger than me. His skin was even darker than the young woman’s, nearly pitch black. His head was shaved, and he had an extensive web-like tattoo in white ink across his forehead. No pool of blood around him, fortunately.

Upon seeing the woman continue to pound on the wall, I realized what I was seeing: prison cells. They were trapped inside.

And someone — possibly their jailor — was dead right outside.

Disconcerting.

I frowned, moving toward the corpse. The masked man raised a single hand while I approached, giving a curt shake of his head.

Was the body a trap? Or was he just saying that it was far too late for the victim?

Or maybe he didn’t want me to know how the man had been killed?

I glanced around the room, looking for anything vaguely cylindrically shaped on the walls. I didn’t find anything of the kind, but I did find a hexagonal panel on the floor, not far from where the man had fallen.

Was the dead man a candidate like me, someone who had stumbled upon the jail?

Resh.

Carefully, I went to the body, ignoring the masked man. I avoided the hexagonal shape, glancing from side to side as I knelt.

The woman who had been pounding on the wall gave me a curt nod.

I took that as sign that I was safe to continue, reached down, and rolled the body toward me.

I heard a click.

I jumped backward just in time to avoid the spear of light that flashed across the room from left to right, flickering and fading as it hit the opposite wall.

Shuddering where I stood, I looked down, finding a small depressed tile beneath the body I had just moved. I’d just re-triggered the trap that had killed him.

If I hadn’t seen the body, I might have died in the same way.

His eyes stared open in disbelief. I thought I recognized him from the line outside, but I was probably fooling myself. There were hundreds of candidates.

I had always known these tests had the potential to be fatal, but somehow, seeing this had finally made it real.

I leaned down and closed his eyes, shaking my head.

“I’m sorry you died like this. I hope your spirit finds peace.”

They were hollow words, and I knew it.

I searched through what he was carrying. It wouldn’t do him any good now.

There wasn’t much of use. He was wearing a sword and dagger on his belt. The dagger looked valuable, with the hilt being carved into a golden lion’s head. I left them both, instead taking the glove off his right hand. It had an unfamiliar symbol embroidered on it in gold, similar to my own glove. A family symbol.

I slipped it into my bag. I’d look for them.