Dougal shuddered as Killeen gave the creature a satisfied smile. She gestured again, and the skeleton tottered around and stumbled off down the passage toward the room beyond.
Dougal glanced up at the bone-covered ceiling and reminded himself there had to be some stone and earth up there somewhere behind the remains-that they weren't just moving through a tunnel carved out of a mountain of bones. "Hold on," he said, reaching toward Killeen as she smiled at the way her creation shambled away. "We should back up and take-"
The explosion cut him off. The animated skeleton disappeared in a cloud of flame and smoke.
Dougal ducked down and wrapped his arms over his head as a cascade of bone fragments rained down on him, bouncing and clattering on the floor. One flying shard of their animated helper shot into Dougal's heavy leather shirt and stuck there like a revenant's fang.
Dougal stood up and saw Clagg gazing into the cavern, pursing his lips. "Crude," the asura said. "But effective."
Gyda shouldered past Dougal and laughed. As she strode into the chamber beyond, she grinned at the scorch mark where the skeleton once stood. "Well done, sapling," she said to Killeen. "At least you are earning your pay."
Dougal winced at the implicit insult. To the group at large he said, "We need to press on. It may take minutes or days for this trap to reset. It may just be a single use, but we have no way of knowing."
Now Gyda laughed. "He means to say, 'Thank you, sylvari, for doing my job.' "
Killeen's cheeks blushed a deeper green. "My apologies," she said to Dougal. "I did not mean to upstage you. I did remove the trap without hurting anyone."
Dougal grimaced. He didn't doubt that her apology was heartfelt, but that made it feel even worse. He said, perhaps not as kindly as he could, "You could have given us more fair warning, or time to back out of the explosion. As it was, you could have brought the ceiling down on top of us."
"I see," Killeen said, thoughtful for a moment. "I did not intend to endanger our quest."
"Of course not," Dougal said, feeling bad for upbraiding her. Despite himself, he couldn't help but enjoy her sincerity.
"Perhaps it's the wonder of this place," the sylvari said, raising her chin once again. "It's fascinating. To my people, death is an integral part of life. We revere it wholly, even the darkest parts of it. But we don't quite understand it-yet." She gazed around the chamber, her eyes wide with wonder. "And even so, we would never build a monument like this to it."
"It is not a monument to the dead but rather a testament to those who lived," Dougal said gently. He felt his irritation ebbing away-toward her, at least. "Let's go." Then, raising his voice to the others: "Let's be careful moving forward. We should see more traps like this."
"You are such an old woman, human," Gyda snorted. "My great-granddame Ulrica would not hesitate as much as you do, and she's been dead for seven years." She kicked aside a pile of bones and held aloft a torch. "You worry too much. What's life without danger?"
"Longer," Dougal said.
He followed the norn as she strode through the exploded room and into the chambers beyond. He'd worked with other norn before. They were larger than life in many ways, but norn bullies were just like everyone else's. Gyda's bluster was meant to cover some other deficiency. Dougal didn't mention the norn's own reluctance to enter the trapped room, despite her bragging.
"Bah. Such a life only seems longer, like a tasteless meal," concluded Gyda. As Dougal followed her, he noticed that the air had grown slightly cooler. Once they were all inside the next chamber, both he and the norn held their torches aloft. The light found something thick and gray hanging among the bones at the apex of the room's high-arched ceiling.
Dougal held up a hand to shade his eyes against the torch and peered at the substance. At first he thought it hanging moss, but suddenly it was clear what it was.
Webbing.
Dougal cursed. He shouted out a warning, but Killeen's high-pitched scream behind him cut him off. He spun about just in time to see the sylvari disappear into a hole in the ground.
In an instant Dougal knew what had happened. Killeen's assailant had waited as the larger forms of Dougal and the norn had passed over its concealed hiding place, and sprung its trap on the lighter footfalls of the sylvari. And in that moment Killeen was gone, pulled into a hollowed-out space beneath the ancient flagstones, a trapdoor made of webs and bones slamming down after her, blending once more into the bone-littered floor.
Gyda spun around, too, and scanned the room for any sign of Killeen behind her. "The necromancer! Where is she?"
"Down there!" Clagg shouted, pointing at the trapdoor. "Spider!"
Dougal raced toward the trapdoor, dropping his torch and drawing his sword as he went. He smashed at the disguised covering with his blade, and the trapdoor shattered as if he'd struck a dinner plate.
Killeen screamed again as she popped back up out of the hole, like a swimmer breaching the surface. She flung out her hands and scrabbled for a handhold among the bones before her, but they pulled away loose in her hands.
A black-haired spider the size of a small wolf appeared on the sylvari's shoulders and reared back to strike her on the neck. Dougal made a desperate stab at it. His blade sliced through one of the creature's legs and lodged itself in its side. The beast hissed in pain, its twitching mandibles dripping with viscous venom.
Before Dougal could pull back his blade for another strike, though, he heard Clagg shout at him. "Stand back, you fool!"
Dougal turned in time to see Breaker's boulder of a fist coming down at him. He threw himself to the side, leaving his sword buried in the spider's abdomen. The golem's stone fist narrowly missed both the thrashing spider and the sylvari but smashed Dougal's blade to pieces.
Gyda stormed up then. She grabbed Killeen by her arms and hauled her out of the hole. The sylvari wailed in pain as the spider sank its fur-covered fangs into her back.
Swordless, Dougal snatched a knife from his belt. He wondered how much good it would do him. The spider's fangs were longer than his blade.
Gyda dropped Killeen to the ground, then snatched the spider from the sylvari's back with one hand. The black thing struggled in the norn's grasp, its legs twitching helplessly in the air. Ichor flowed around the shard of Dougal's broken blade, still stuck in the creature's side, and hot blue fluid trickled down Gyda's heavily tattooed arm.
With a flick of her wrist, the norn flung the beast toward Breaker and Clagg. A moment later, the golem's heavy foot had smashed it into paste.
Clagg, from the safety of his harness, snapped, "Watch it! It has a brood in here!"
"Watch over the plant-girl," Gyda ordered Dougal. "I will take care of this beast's spawn." And the norn turned back to the web-filled room, not caring if Dougal followed her orders or not.
Dougal scrambled over to Killeen to examine her wounds. Her back was covered in a warm bluish blood, most of which he hoped had come from the spider. He'd never seen a sylvari hurt before, and had no idea what might leak out of one that had been injured.
Dougal wiped the liquid off of Killeen's shoulder with his sleeve, uncovering a pair of puncture wounds from which spilled a golden fluid that sparkled with life. Most of the mess had come from the spider, then. The holes in Killeen's shoulder hadn't bled much, but the skin around them had already started to swell a bright yellow. Her skin was firm, like the shell of a horse chestnut. She was cold but not clammy. Was that good or bad? Dougal didn't even know if she could sweat.
"It hurts a bit," Killeen said as she craned her neck around, the glow in her large eyes dimming. Then she noticed the grim look on Dougal's face, and she blinked and rallied herself enough to ask questions.
"Do you think I'm dying? How can you tell? Is there some special way to know?" She tried to ask more, but a coughing fit stopped her. Her skin was lightening to a pale yellow around the wound and spreading to the rest of her body.
While Dougal turned her over and held her, the norn and the golem began smashing a pack of spider-shaped shadows into a blue-black paste. Dougal hunkered down over the weakened sylvari to protect her from the flying bits of dried bone and arachnid with his body. He looked down at her face, golden and pale.
Dougal realized he had violated his first rule. He was going to feel horrible if she died.
He glanced back to see Gyda breathing hard and holding her hammer in a two-handed grip. Splats of spider corpses formed a ring around her. Clagg's golem had ground out a mushy blue mixture beneath its stone feet.
Once the slaughter ended, Dougal saw that the sylvari had passed out, and he beckoned the others to her side.
"Raven's wings," Gyda said, barely breathing hard from all the exertion. "She's getting paler than you, little man."
"It's the poison," Dougal said. "It's working fast."
Clagg climbed down from the harness on Breaker's front to get a better look at the sylvari. "I estimate she has only a few minutes remaining before the venom takes her. Do either of you have a potion, poultice, or spell that could aid her?"
Gyda shrugged. Dougal grimaced and said, "Do I look like an alchemist to you?"
"Given your background," Clagg said, "I thought you might have stolen one somewhere. No matter: I have something that should do the trick right here."
Clagg rummaged around in a pack he wore strapped diagonally over one shoulder and across his chest, producing a clear vial filled with a viscous blue liquid. He dribbled the contents of the vial into Killeen's pale mouth, past lips that had gone dry as autumn leaves.