Jimmy had seen many unsavory characters in his former occupation, and this Jaccon would have fitted in perfectly. Jimmy lay flat and rolled the corpse over. As the dead mans weight landed upon the other stone before the door, there was a faint snapping sound and something sped overhead. Jimmy examined Jaccon and found a small dart stuck in the man’s chest near the collarbone. Jimmy didn’t touch it; he didn’t have to: he knew it contained a quick-acting poison. Another item of interest on the fellow was a beautifully carved dagger with a jeweled hilt. Jimmy plucked it from the man’s belt and stuck it inside his tunic.
Jimmy sat back upon his heels. He had walked through a long, blank hall, with no doors, down into a subterranean level of the building. He judged he stood less than a hundred yards from the caverns where Arutha and the others waited. He had stumbled upon the corpse at the only door leaving the hall. The stone slab directly beyond the door was ever so slightly depressed.
He rose and stepped through the door, diagonally to the stone next to the one before the door. The trap was so obvious it shouted for caution, but this fool, in his rush toward fabled wealth, had walked into it. And paid the price.
Something bothered Jimmy. The trap was too obvious. It was as if someone wanted him to feel confident in defeating it. He shook his head. Whatever tendency toward incaution he’d had was gone. Now he was fully professional, a thief who understood that any misstep would likely be his last.
Jimmy wished for more light than was provided by the single torch he had brought along. He inspected the floor below Jaccon and saw another displaced stone. He ran his hand along the doorjamb and found no trip wire or other triggering device. Stepping across the threshold, avoiding the stones before the door, Jimmy passed the corpse and continued on toward the heart of the building.
It was a circular room. In the center of it a slender pedestal rose. Upon the pedestal sat a crystal sphere, lit from above by some unseen light source. And within the sphere rested a single branch with silver-green leaves, red berries, and silver thorns. Jimmy walked cautiously. He looked everywhere but where the pedestal rested. He explored every inch of the room he could reach without entering the pool of light about the sphere, and found nothing resembling a trap-springing device. But the nagging at the back of Jimmy’s mind, which had been with him all along, kept shouting that something was wrong about this place. Since discovering Jaccon, he had avoided three different traps, all easy enough for any competent thief to spot. Now here, where he expected the last trap to be, he found none.
Jimmy sat down on the floor and began to think.
Arutha and the others came alert. Jimmy came scrambling back down into the crevice, to land with a thud on the floor of the cave. “What did you find?” asked Arutha.
“It’s a big place. It’s got lots of empty rooms, all cleverly fashioned so that you can only move one way from the door to the center of the building and out. There’s nothing in there but some sort of little shrine in the center. There’re a few traps, simple enough ones to get around.
“But the whole thing’s too off-center. Something’s not right. The building’s a fake.”
“What?” said Arutha.
“Just suppose you wanted to catch you, and you were worried about you being very clever. Don’t you think you might just add one last catchall in case all the bright lads you hired to catch you were a mite slow?”
“You think the building’s a trap?” said Martin.
“Yes, a big elaborate, clever trap. Look, suppose you got this mystic lake and all your tribe comes here to make magic or get power from the dead or whatever it is the Dark Brothers do up here? You want to add this one last catchall, so you think like a human. Maybe Dragon Lords don’t build buildings, but humans do, so you build this building, this big building with nothing in it. Then you put a sprig of Silverthorn in some place, like in a shrine inside, and you rig a trap. Someone finds the little hellos you put along the way, gets around them, thinking they’re being very, very clever, wanders about, finds the Silverthorn, pulls it, and . . .”
“And the trap springs,” said Laurie, his tone appreciative of the boy’s logic.
“And the trap springs,” said Jimmy. “I don’t know how they did it, but I’ll bet the last trap is magic of some sort. The rest were too easy to find, then, at the end, nothing. I bet you touch the sphere with the Silverthorn in it and a dozen doors between you and the outside slam shut, a hundred of those dead warriors come out of the walls, or the whole building simply falls on you.”
Arutha said, “I’m not convinced.”
“Look, you’ve got a greedy pack of bandits up there. Most of them aren’t very smart or they wouldn’t be outlaws living in the mountains. They’d be self-respecting thieves in a city.