The Mists of Sorrow_ Book Seven of the Morcyth Saga - Brian S. Pratt [224]
“Hand me the orb,” he says. “Want to get a better look inside before we enter.” James hands him the orb and then he extends his arm past the doorway allowing the light from the orb to illuminate most of the room. Peering around the doorway, he sees that the room extends further away than the light from the orb can reach.
“It’s empty,” he says after a moment’s scrutiny.
“Maybe the annotations don’t mean anything here,” suggests Scar.
“Willing to bet your life on it?” Jiron asks as he turns his gaze on him.
“Not really, no,” Scar replies.
James moves forward and takes a look. “What do you think?” Jiron asks him.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Looks pretty normal.”
“I know,” he replies. “That’s what bothers me.” He starts to step into the room when James places a hand on his shoulder.
“I may need to lead here,” he says. A barrier envelopes him after he removes his hand from Jiron’s shoulder. Something about this room has a very Indiana Jones feel to it. If it weren’t for the annotations on the diagram, he probably wouldn’t be feeling nearly so nervous. But they have to mean something.
Jiron steps back and makes room for him to enter. “Hope they don’t sense that,” he says indicating the barrier.
“So do I,” replies James. Creating a second orb on his palm, he begins moving forward into the room. At first he moves cautiously. Every step he takes, expecting something to happen. But after the fourth step, the room remains quiet. At the sixth step, he gains confidence and begins moving a bit quicker.
Then it happens. He must have stepped on a pressure plate or something for a four foot iron spear shoots up out of the floor beneath him. It strikes the underside of the barrier and launches the barrier with him in it upward.
“James!” Miko exclaims from where he’s watching in the doorway.
As he and the barrier come to land back down on the floor with jarring impact, another trigger is activated. Directly beneath him, a spear shoots up out of the floor. Again he and the barrier are catapulted upward, this time James is thrown on his side within the barrier. “Ahhh!” James hollers as he’s thrown further into the room.
Then every time he lands, another spear shoots upward and propels him further down the long narrow room. Head over heels, he’s propelled as spear after spear launches him and his barrier further along until it finally hitting the wall at the end of the room and coming to rest.
“James!” Jiron hollers. “Are you okay?”
Sitting there in the barrier, he wonders the same thing himself. Doing a quick self check he finds nothing broken, just a few bruises from where he hit the ground hard a couple times. “Yeah!” he hollers back, “I’m fine.”
Glancing to the wall at the end of the room, he discovers another door. Between where he sits and the doorway Jiron and the others are standing at is a patchwork of iron spears sticking upright out of the floor. “There’s a door down here,” he hollers to the others. “Make your way down. Step as closely to the spears sticking out of the floor as you can and you should be okay.”
He dispels his barrier and gets to his feet as the others begin moving into the room. Following the same route the spears sped him along the first time, the others cross the room. He can hear Jiron say, “Step where I step”, as he leads the others from one spear to the next.
No further spears erupt from the floor and they finally join him at the far end of the room. “Secret door, now deadly spears,” comments Potbelly. “Can’t wait to see what we’ll discover when we reach the next set of annotations.”
“Probably a demon or something,” guesses Scar.
James produces the diagram and sees that another corridor extends from the other side of the door they’re standing next to. At the end it looks like a spiral staircase goes either up or down then another long corridor before they reach a round room with a circle drawn in the middle. In the corridor just before the round room is where the next set of annotations is noted.
As Jiron listens at the door for any sound coming from the other