They’d only taken a couple of steps, though, when the light from their glowbottles reflected from something glittering in the middle of the floor. Shaun put his arm out to hold the others back while he took a cautious step closer, holding his glowbottle out ahead of him. The brighter light revealed a large gold coin. Matthew dashed eagerly forward to grab it, but Shaun grabbed his arm to hold him back.

      “Careful, you idiot!” he warned. “Remember where you are!” He examined the dusty floor under the coin. He studied the walls and the ceiling above it, still seeing nothing suspicious, but his naturally cautious nature made him step forward very carefully, keeping his weight on his rearmost foot, so that when the floor under the coin fell open, revealing a large trap door, he was able to scramble back onto firm ground. “Thought so,” he said in satisfaction, looking down into a pit at least ten feet deep with smooth sides, inescapable for a single man with no climbing equipment. “Some country bumpkin happens to come this way, somehow gets in past the door, then turns around to go home and tell all his friends about this place. That wouldn’t do at all, so they put a decoy on the floor to lure him into a trap, where he’s held until they find him and decide what to do with him. They exploited the lowest base instincts of the average human being. Greedy and impulsive.”

     “Hey!” protested Matthew indignantly. Shaun and Diana shared an amused look.

     “So what would they have done with him?” asked Lirenna. “What did they do with any intruders they caught? They couldn’t just let him go if they wanted this place kept secret.”

     “Amnesia spell, maybe,” suggested Thomas. “Zebulon was a wizard, after all. Maybe he put a spell on them to make them forget all about this place. They couldn’t just kill him, dump his body somewhere. People would have come looking for him, and maybe found this place.” The others nodded in agreement.

     "I'm beginning to have second thoughts about this place," admitted Shaun, suddenly serious again. "Who knows what other traps this wizard's left for us? If we get caught by one, there’s no-one to let us out now. We could starve to death here."

     "No," said Diana firmly. "I, for one, am going on, alone if I have to. I'm not going back now that I'm so close."

     "Once we're past this entrance corridor we should be quite safe," said Lirenna, unexpectedly supporting the young cleric. "After all, people had to live here. It can't be that dangerous. My guess is that this entrance corridor is loaded with traps, but that once we're past it we'll be all right."

     "Let's vote on it," said Shaun. "Who wants to go on?"

      Diana raised her hand at once, and the wizards glanced at each other before doing the same. Matthew gave a shrug and raised his hand as well. "Come on, brother," he said, grinning excitedly. "Aren't you curious?"

     "Of course I am," admitted Shaun, sounding annoyed and angry, but then he smiled. "Yeah, of course I am. Okay, let's go."

     He led the way again, tapping the floor ahead of him with the staff as he went. He found another trap door, not baited this time, but when he edged around the pit along a foot wide strip between it and the wall it suddenly tipped up, dropping him in. The others had to reach down to help him climb back up. “The floor’s soft,” he said as he got back to his feet. “Guess he didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

     The others crossed over carefully, taking care to avoid the pivoting area of floor, and a few moments later they were standing before the door at the other end of the corridor. Motioning the others to stand back, Shaun carefully opened the door at full arms length, and laughed in triumph as small darts shot out of holes in the wall, flying straight through the spot where he'd have been standing if he'd opened the door normally. "Made it," he said with satisfaction, stepping through into the stronghold proper. He picked up one of the darts and examined the tip. "It's coated with something," he said, sniffing it. "Some kind of poison, you think? Or a sleeping potion perhaps."

     “Sleeping potion, I’d bet,” said Lirenna, also picking one up. “Not that I’m going to put it to the test.” She dropped it, and the others crept through the door, wary and alert in case there were more darts. There weren’t, though, and they regrouped on the other side, laughing in relief as they relaxed against the walls of the corridor. They had beaten all of Zebulon's traps and entered Vantarestin.

☆☆☆

     They took a few moments to regain their composure, and then they set off to explore the wizard's stronghold. They had expected that Vantarestin would be quite similar to Dermakarak, both being underground homes for large numbers of people, but they soon noticed that the architecture was quite different. Apart from the obvious differences, for instance that the ceiling was higher and the niches for glowbottles replaced by wall brackets for torches and oil lamps, there was a much more subtle difference that they could feel rather than see, stemming from the fact that Vantarestin was strictly functional, excavated for a specific purpose and every feature designed with that purpose in mind.

     Dermakarak, on the other hand, had been built by trogs who took a pride in their work greater than any member of any other race could imagine, and they had tried to make it as beautiful as possible. It was a style of beauty that was barely recognisable as such by members of other races, but the extra design elements in every beam and pillar had clearly been purely aesthetic in nature and it had given the place the feeling of being a home rather than just a place of work, a feeling that had persisted despite the influence of its new occupants. In comparison, Vantarestin was soulless.

     It was also huge. They spent that whole day wandering through the seemingly endless corridors, poking around in the rooms they came across, and when evening came they had covered only a small part of the complex. It seemed too big to have just one entrance, and they postulated the existence of several others, each with its own entrance corridor filled with traps. In order to avoid becoming lost, Lirenna sketched a rough map of their progress on a spare sheet of paper she happened to have on her, resting it on the back of her spellbook. Unfortunately, she started too near the middle and soon ran out of space, so she turned it over and started again on the other side, with a much smaller scale.

     Most of the complex was taken up with the soldier's living quarters. They found exercise and training rooms, rest and recreational facilities, the occasional guardroom, storerooms, kitchens, dining rooms and the like, everything that would be needed for a full and happy life underground. There were no facilities for wives and families, though. The men must have turned up for a tour of duty, probably inventing some story rather than telling anyone where they were really going, and then returned to their wives and families in nearby towns and homesteads after a couple of weeks of fighting the evils that lurked in the surrounding wilderness.

     Everything had been left precisely as it had been when the inhabitants had left, further evidence that nothing evil had moved in in their absence. They found a few slightly valuable bits and pieces left around, a few of which ended up in their pockets, but only when Diana wasn't looking. Everything really valuable, however, had either been taken away by the inhabitants when they left, or was safely hidden away somewhere.

     They gave each room just the quickest looking over as they passed, before moving on to the next one. To search the entire complex fully and completely would have taken weeks, and it might still come to that if Diana had her way, but first they wanted a good overall picture of the place and, if possible, find Zebulon's quarters. Thomas in particular was keen to find it, and almost drooled at the thought of the treasures they might find there.

     As dusk came, they returned to their camp for the night. They realised that they would probably have been perfectly safe in one of the soldiers' barracks, as well as a good deal more comfortable, but they still didn't quite trust the place and felt a good deal more secure wrapped up in their own bedrolls around a friendly camp fire. They did take some food from one of Vantarestin's kitchens, however, preserved in some kind of magical freezer that kept it as fresh as the day it had been placed there over ten years before. The cold beef was particularly welcome after several days of unappetising trail rations, although Diana stuck to the bread and cheese, saying that her religion only allowed her to eat meat if there was no alternative.

     They spent an hour or two talking to each other in low voices as the sky grew dark above them. Telling jokes, exchanging anecdotes, gently poking fun at each other. Then, as the evening chill began to set in and full darkness fell, they snuggled down into their sleeping blankets, now lit only by the light of their dying camp fire, and one by one fell asleep.