The Temptation of Elminster - Ed Greenwood [2]
She was almost in under the shadow of the walls when something moved in the waiting darkness ahead of her. Nuressa swept her blade up and back, ready to cut down viciously, but the face grinning at her out of the gloom belonged to Amandarn.
"I knew you were annoyed with me," the thief said, eyeing her raised steel, "but I'm quite short enough already, thank you."
He jerked his thumb at the darkness behind him. "It's a tomb, all right," he said, "old and crawling with runes. They probably say something along the lines of 'Zurmapyxapetyl, a mage of Netheril, sleeps here,' but reading Old High Netherese, or whatever it's properly called, is more Iyrik's skill than mine."
"Any guardians?" Nuressa asked, not taking her eyes off the darkness beyond Amandarn for an instant.
"None that I saw, but a glowblade's pretty dim…"
"Safe to throw in a torch?"
The thief shrugged. "Should be. Everything's made of stone."
Wordlessly Nuressa extended an open, gauntleted hand behind her. After a few scrambling minutes, Folossan put a lit torch into it. The warrior looked at him, dipped her jaw in wordless thanks, and threw.
Flames whup-whup-whuppedinto the darkness. The torchlight guttered when it landed, then recovered and danced brightly once more. Nuressa stepped forward to fill the opening with her body, barring the way, and asked simply, "Traps?"
"None near the entrance," Amandarn replied, "and this place doesn't feel like we'll find any. Yet… I don't like those runes. You can hide anything in runes."
"True enough," the dwarf agreed in a low voice. "Are you satisfied, Nessa? Are you going to stand aside and let us in or play at being a closed door until nightfall?"
The armored woman gave him a withering look, then silently stood aside and gestured grandly at him to proceed.
Folossan put his head down and scuttled past, not quite daring to whoop. The normally gloomy-looking Iyriklaunavan was hard on his heels, trotting forward with fluid grace and maroon robes held high to avoid tripping. It would not do to tumble and fall helplessly into a tomb where just about any sort of snake or other foe might be lurking.
Amandarn wasn't far behind. In exasperated silence Nuressa watched them storm past and shook her head. Did they think this was some sort of pleasure outing?
She followed more cautiously, looking for doors that might be shut to imprison them, traps Amandarn might have missed, even some sort of lurking foes, hitherto unnoticed…
"Gods on their glittering thrones!" Folossan gasped, somewhere ahead. He made of the curse a slow, measured bricklaying of awe, building a wall of utter astonishment that seemed to echo around the dark tomb chamber for just an instant before something swallowed it.
Nuressa shouldered her way out of the sunlight, war sword ready. Trust them to cry no warning to tell her what peril awaited.
The chamber was high and dusty and dark, the torch dying a slow, sullen death at its heart. There was a space that bore some sort of circular design in the floor tiles, framed by four smooth, dark stone pillars that soared from the pave to the lofty, unseen ceiling.
Away beyond those ever feebler flames rose dark steps crowned by what could only be the casket of someone great and important…or a true giant, so large was the massive black stone, blotched with deep emerald green, its curves aglitter with golden runes that flashed in time with the pulsing, fading light of the torch. Two empty braziers taller than she was flanked this dais, and over it hung the dusty-shrouded ends of what looked like a curtain of mail but could, under the dust, be almost anything that would drape like fabric, hanging motionless from the distant, scarcely seen ceiling.
It was not the tomb that the gruff elf mage, the awed dwarf, and the boyish thief were staring at. It was something else, rather nearer than that, and above them. Nuressa shot a hard glance up at it, then all around the tomb chamber,