
that Belagren had never had the time or the patience to examine.
About thirty feet into the tunnel, she was forced to step over the remains of a twisted doorway. Neris’s
first trap. It had killed three of her people when they broke through. She could almost hear him laughing
at her from beyond the grave when they’d brought out the bodies, sliced to shreds by the deadly rain of
shards he had loaded in his trap. That was the day that Belagren had truly begun to fear for her future.
The lingering apprehension in the pit of her belly never truly let her rest.
The screams grew louder as they approached the next obstacle, some fifty feet past the first trap. It was
followed by several more gates that had proved to be nothing more than false traps. They’d wasted
months, sometimes years, carefully studying and dismantling the next four gates, only to discover there
was nothing sinister about them at all. She’d grown lax by the time they broke through the sixth gate.
Fortunately it had only killed one man—Lester Somebody-or-other—and then only because of his
arrogance. A nobleman by birth, he fancied himself equal to any problem set by a mere peasant. The
peasant had proved him wrong. He was crushed under the weight of a large slab of masonry that fell
from the ceiling right at the moment of his triumphant declaration of victory.
Belagren climbed carefully over the huge granite slab and glanced down. As far as she knew, they had
never been able to move the slab, and Lord Lester the Long Forgotten was still underneath it.
As they neared the seventh of Neris’s deadly traps, the workers moved aside to let the High Priestess
through, bowing as she passed, averting their eyes for fear of being singled out. She reached a narrow
bridge that had been constructed over the gaping hole in the floor, caused when four more of her people
had accidentally triggered the seventh trap.
Belagren forced herself not to slow her pace as she crossed the rickety bridge in the wake of her young
escort. This trap, of all Neris’s diabolical devices, was the one that had come closest to killing her.
Expecting the traps to follow the same pattern as the first six gates, her people were confident that after
the death at the previous gate, the next four gates should be more of the previous four—false traps that
looked impressive but were little more than elaborate devices to slow down the workers trying to get
through the labyrinth. A few minutes before the floor section had collapsed, she had been standing on it,
studying the figures etched into the barricade, as the old scholar from Nova University on Grannon Rock,
Kellor Highman, and his bright young assistants had explained the problem to her. The lock on this gate
was simply a series of numbers, they assured her. All they had to do was discover the sequence and
press the tiles in the right order, and the door would open for them.
She had stood back to watch them work. She had watched them die instead.
Once past the collapsed floor and the uncomfortable memories it evoked, Belagren hurried on past the
next four gates, each of which had proved to be harmless. She was no longer prepared to make that
assumption, however. They had treated each gate as if it were deadly. Belagren privately expected every
gate to cause the whole mountain to come down on top of them, which actually concerned her more than
the lives lost trying to break through. She could replace a few scholars and laborers. But if the Labyrinth
was destroyed; if she was denied access to the cavern at the end of it...
The results—for her—would be catastrophic.
The screams were beginning to fade, thankfully. Whoever was making such an awful noise was either on
the brink of exhaustion, or—and this was the more likely explanation, given where they were coming
from—on the brink of death.
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