Hadrian looked to Royce.
“I think she’s right. We’ll get to choose only one.” His partner said, shaking his head in disgust. “By Mar, I hate this short bastard. First Manzant prison and now this—I’m really starting to develop a dislike for dwarves.”
“So it’s another trap?” Hadrian asked.
“What are we gonna do?” Wilmer’s voice was rising in octaves again. The man was a human teakettle always on boil.
BOOM!
Something hit the little door and it shook, kicking out a cloud of dust.
Wilmer screamed.
“Shut up!” Royce ordered, and Wilmer clamped both hands over his own mouth.
“This is all his fault,” Myra said. “We were doing fine until he screamed and announced us to everything in the area. He screams at everything! We should never have brought him.”
“We had to,” Hadrian said. “He had the last piece of the map. Besides, Wilmer only started screaming because you turned that statue to the left and made the floor disappear.”
Myra smirked. “I didn’t have a choice. Have you forgotten about the snakes? And Royce wasn’t doing anything.”
“I was busy trying to stop the walls from closing in,” Royce said absently, his sight fixed on the chest, and if Hadrian had to guess, the lock. Anything requiring a key must be like a loose tooth to his partner. “And stopping them was more important than a few snakes.”
“A few? Where’d you learn to count?”
BOOM!
Hadrian felt the impact through the floor that time, and it made one of Myra’s candles wobble. “We’ve got a choice to make, people.” Hadrian leaned against one of the carved walls. “Door, chest, or lever?”
“We came here for the treasure,” Myra pointed out. “We have to open the chest, or what was the point of all this?”
“How can you even think that?” Wilmer shouted. He alone faced the little wooden door. “That—that thing is out there. A tiny door won’t hold it! But that one might.” He pointed across the room. “We gotta get to the other side now!”
“You’re just panicking.” Myra dismissed him with a wave of her hand that the farmer didn’t see. Nothing could pry his sight from the entrance.
“’Course I’m panicking!” Wilmer balled his hands in fists. “Panicking is what a body does in a spot like this!”
“Why did you even come?” Myra shook her head in disgust and moved away from Wilmer—or was it the door she was getting distance from? Perhaps she was heeding the old adage that one doesn’t need to outrun a monster, just the terrified pig farmer and the guy with the broken leg. Whatever her motives, Myra began following Royce as he approached the chest. She was careful not to pass him and stepped only where he had. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.
“And here I thought you was a smart lady,” Wilmer responded to Myra’s rhetorical question. “You said you had the rest of a map leading to some amazing treasure. Why in Maribor’s name do you think I came along?”
“Royce?” Hadrian called to him. “What’s your choice?”
The thief didn’t answer. Instead, he tilted his head once more, and Hadrian thought his heart might stop. This time, however, the familiar scowl didn’t appear.
“What is it?”
“It’s quiet,” the thief told them.
They all turned to look at the little door and waited. Hadrian was holding his breath without realizing it until he had to take another. By then it was obvious Royce was right. It was quiet. The pounding had stopped.
Hadrian limped closer to the door. Placing a hand on it, he felt the bristles of the stressed wood where it had begun to snap. He listened. Nothing.
“What does that mean?”
Royce shrugged. “I don’t even know what the blazes that thing is out there.”
“Well, it don’t like us,” Wilmer said, his voice down an octave. Turning to look at Myra he added, “And that weren’t my fault. It was yours.”
Myra looked embarrassed and turned away. Setting her pack down on the stone dais in front of the chest, she drew her wet hair out of her face and softly said, “I don’t like spiders.”
Royce, who was on the dais studying the lock, turned and shook his head in disbelief. “Are you joking?”
“No, I’m deathly afraid of them.”
“Anyone is,” Hadrian said, “when they have teeth and are as big as a river barge.”