Following is Chapter 15 of the sequel to the Skirmisher Publishing LLC fantasy novel Swords of Kos: Necropolis!
Herein our heroes seek out and enter a favorable tomb, discover some of the wonders it contains, but pretty quickly get in over their heads ...
Join alchemical rogue Paros, Elven barbarian Parthenia, transmuting wizard Pumayo, and moon priestess Selene in their Return to the Necropolis!
Read "Return to the Necropolis: Chapter 14"
None of what the party members had accomplished since arriving at the necropolis had been to their satisfaction; some of it had blurred the lines between tragedy and comedy, they had already been there much longer than they had wanted, and they had not accumulated anything approaching the kind of treasure they had expected.
Continuing in the same vein threatened to produce the same dismal results and so the companions decided to do something completely different and, with that in mind, once again crossed the stream of the Styx and headed into the catacombs. There, they planned to find an unopened large tomb like the one of the Anemoi family and to breach and pillage it, figuring that even if it had similar traps and guardians the payoff would be worth it if they survived.
"These are the names of some of the most prominent Koan families from the old days," Paros said, a few sheets of handwritten notes clutched in his hand. "Most of them were mercantile houses and, as prominent members of the Theran League and well within its sphere of influence, very rich. So, while other families might have been able to afford to have their loved ones interred in this place, these are ones who could also afford to bury valuable things with them."
While there were large family tombs at the ends of most of the subsidiary passageways leading off of the main trunk corridors to the north and west, the latter direction seemed to have more newer and ostentatious ones, like that of the Anemoi. Presumably, the tombs to the north were older, and predated Kos's economic peak, which Paros's research indicated had been right at the time of the great cataclysm, one hundred years before. The rogue had made some notes and a few rough stick maps during their previous expedition and was trying to figure out what he had meant by them; he was thinking that one of the names on his list had appeared on a tomb in one of the secondary corridors toward the far end of the western trunk and had thus directed the party in that direction.
"There we go!" Paros said triumphantly when they came to the end of the second minor passageway they checked. He referred to his notes and then glanced back up at the name etched into the lintel of the blue marble doorway. "'Eptaeinai.' They had one of the biggest fleets in Kos a century ago and plied their trade to lands across all of the Seven Seas."
The rogue stepped up to the blue-enameled metal door, unpacked and spread out the various picks and other tools he would need for his examination of the portal, and then proceeded to thoroughly search it for the diabolical trap he was certain he would find. Pumayo assisted in this operation by casting the cantrip that would allow him to detect the presence of magic and began to carefully scan first the door and then the floor and walls surrounding it.
"Huh!" Paros said presently. He had thoroughly searched the portal and the areas around it for hazards and had found nothing, which gave him a sense of disquiet. "Pumayo, anything?" The wizard shook his head and shrugged.
"Ugh!" Paros said. "Alright, I suppose I should be grateful, and maybe they have saved their worst for whatever individual vaults lay within. But don't be disappointed, ladies," he said turning toward Parthenia and Selene, "if this ends up being a bust as well. I am not sensing our big payoff but we're here and might as well knock this out as quickly as we can and then move on to something else."
There were, however, a full seven locks of moderate complexity set into various parts of the door, and Paros began the methodical process of unlocking each of them. It was slow going and the women became irritable and bored, imagining as usual that the rogue was somehow prolonging the process and, for reasons they could not fathom and he would not admit to, taking longer with it than he actually needed to. Their demeanor did not improve when he asked them to forego rolling their dice so that he could better concentrate on his task and hear the movement of the mechanisms he was attempting to disengage.
After considerable effort and time, however, the locksmith had succeeded in defeating just five of the locks but was not able to unlock two of them. He sighed and stepped back from the door in annoyance.
"Pumayo, you boasted that you could assist in situations like this ..." Paros said, turning to his friend.
"No," Pumayo replied, eliciting looks of disappointment from the others before he continued. "It would only be a boast if it was something I claimed to be able to do but could not. You say there are two locks you cannot manage? Yes, I can most assuredly 'assist' with this." Facing the door, the wizard uttered a brief string of arcane words and, as he completed them, there was a pair of clicking sounds as the final two locks disengaged. He stepped back to make way for Paros and made an inviting gesture toward the door, whereupon the rogue nodded his thanks, stepped forward, and grasped the handle of the door. As he did, the women moved up to either side of the portal, their weapons readied.
Cautiously, Paros stood as much to one side of the door as he could and then pushed it open. He was surprised to see, however, not the tomb-filled sepulcher that he had expected, but rather a small, five-foot wide landing and, beyond it, a flight of stairs leading downward. The walls were painted to look like a seascape, with skies in various states of weather and the sun rising to his right, on the eastern wall. Thrusting his sunrod into the opening, he could see the sun motif repeated a number of times on the walls and ceilings as the stairs descended, each in a position corresponding to progressively later points in the day.
The stairs were only wide enough for the party to proceed in single file, prompting Paros to lead the way so that he could search for hazards as they went, and he was followed successively by Parthenia, Pumayo, and Selene. As they descended, it became cooler and damper and, toward the bottom of the stairs, the sun was depicted setting on the west wall — and, just beyond it, the moon appeared. The five-foot-wide passageway continued for another ten feet and ended in a metal door.
"Good!" thought Paros; here was their vault and whatever rewards it might or might not contain. After ascertaining that it did not appear to be trapped or locked in any way, he pushed it open — and was once again surprised to see not a tomb but yet another passageway. It was even more intriguing and fascinatingly painted than the ones they had just passed through, however, and that, along with the fact that there was a door at the end of it and therefore still a promise of loot, helped contain any disappointment he might have felt.
All around them, the walls were decorated with detailed images of fish, squid, and other marine creatures, beds of seaweed and formations of coral, and any number of other details to create the illusion that they were underwater. Some ten feet above them the ceiling was painted so that it seemed as if they were looking up at the surface of the sea from below, and even included details like gulls, rendered tiny so that they appeared to be far up in the sky. And, in the center of the ceiling, at about three-quarters of the way along its forty-foot length, they could see a likeness of the golden disk of the sun.
There did not appear to be anything in the corridor and so Paros entered, followed by the others, and began to carefully make his way toward the other end, keeping a careful eye on the floor for tripwires, concealed pits, pressure plates, or other dangers. Doing so gave him the opportunity to appreciate the beautifully tiled and mosaicked floor, which had been formed to look like a seabed, complete with details like oysters, giant clams, and starfish. As he approached the metal door at the far end of the passageway, he began to consider which tools he would need in his attempt to open it; like the one they had just come through, it appeared to open into this corridor, which meant he would end up pulling rather than pushing it.
Suddenly, Paros was stunned by a flash and an exploding sound directly above him and looked up to see the disk of the sun plummeting toward him. Pumayo saw this, too, and guessed that he was looking at a magical trap similar to the glyph Selene had laid for the Dwarves, the main difference being that this one was traced on the ceiling. What the trap had done was to shatter the bolts holding the round, sun-painted disk in place on the ceiling, causing it to plummet to the floor — and, as it did, a torrent of water gushed through the hole it had left.
Paros leapt forward toward the door and Parthenia stumbled backward and, as they did, the round slab of painted stone hit the floor between them and shattered, sending big chunks of rock scattering in every direction. Water surged across the floor and began lapping around their shins as the party tried to react to the quickly-changing situation. Paros could see that the door they had come through had slammed shut and suspected that the trap mechanism had probably done this and also caused it to relock, as Selene was tugging at the handle fruitlessly. He turned to the door they had been heading to and waded toward it through the knee-deep water, fumbling for the tools he would use to open it.
"Pumayo, if you can use your magic to open this door, you should!" he cried to the mage as the water rose up onto his thighs.
"Can't!" the wizard yelled back. "Could only cast it once today!"
Parthenia pushed past Paros and grasped the metal handle of the door, yanking hard on it, but it did not budge; if it had only opened away from them she surely would have been able to smash it open with her shoulder but that was not the case (probably a deliberate decision by the trapmakers, Paros thought). The rogue moved up to the keyhole with a pair of quickly-selected picks and jammed them into the aperture and began trying to work it; normally, he would have knelt so that he could look straight into the keyhole, maybe even using a jeweler's loupe and more direct light to aid him in his operations, but the dark, brackish water had already risen up past the point where that was possible. There was now truly a sense of the sea in the room, although that part of it suggestive of death or corruption, like a salt marsh along a stretch of leeward coast.
Paros was not making good progress on the lock and, as the water slopped up over his chest, he struggled to contain his panic and focus on his task; it had never before seemed to take so long to open a lock, had never mattered so much that he do so in a limited period of time. He was relieved to see that the sunrod tied off to his armored pauldron was not extinguished as the rising water immersed it, was irrationally embarrassed that he had not known this or even thought it bore checking previously, felt his heart leap when he considered how much more of a nightmare this would be if he was blinded by darkness.
Presently, the water rose up to Paros's mouth and nose and, as it did, he took a big gulp of air and then by force of will submerged himself and brought his face close to the keyhole he was working on. He did not know how long he would be able to hold his breath, fought the urge to swim for the air in the space that had not yet been filled by water, but knew that would just prolong an inevitable and horrible doom and that his only hope, the sole hope for his friends, was for him to get this door open.
As he struggled with the lock, in the sputtering shadows cast by the sunrod Paros caught glances of movement in the water around him: Parthenia, held fast to the floor by the weight of her heavy armor, was digging at the edge of the door with a dagger, trying to pry back at least the upper corner of it; the last time he had seen Selene, she was making similarly futile efforts with the door they had used to enter this deathtrap; and, out of the corner of his eye, he could see Pumayo, physically probably the least tough of any of them, floating by naked but for a breechcloth, apparently having shrugged off his sodden and movement-inhibiting robes, his snake drifting by in the water beside him.
Paros could feel pressure building up in his lungs, felt them start to burn, and realized that he was having trouble seeing what he was doing because black spots were filling his field of vision. The damned lock would not cooperate and, finally, Paros could not bear the pain in his lungs and released his breath, allowing a hot stream of bubbles to billow out of his mouth. Paros knew it meant that he would drown but could not fight the desperate physical urge to gasp for breath and closed his eyes as he inhaled.
