I reached out to touch the dusty idol.
“Really?” Jason said, beside me. “You weren’t even going to give me a minute to hide, before you triggered whatever foul death you’re about to succumb to?”
“We’ve checked for mechanical traps. We’ve no way to check for magical ones, but we’ve gone this far without hitting one and we have to be, what, six levels deep?”
“You don’t consider the undead guardians magical?”
“Magical in origin, but entirely mechanical in effect. All they did was try to eat our brains. The murder hole trap tried to fill us with poison darts. The gas trap with poison gas. The maze trap with confusion. What does that tell you?”
“That we’re quick on our feet?”
“That whoever hid the idol here wasn’t a mage. Maybe they had a scroll to animate dead or something.”
“Or maybe the idol itself did that.”
“Okay, let’s compromise.”
He nodded, satisfied. That was his role in our partnership. We still do all kinds of crazy things. Witness our having won our way to the situation we were now in. But he keeps me from going that one reckless step too far that will surely maim or kill me. I looked around, found an arm from one of the undead minions we’d decapitated, and picked it up. Jason took the sleeping roll from his pack and half unrolled it onto the floor. We didn’t need words. He knew my plan as soon as he saw me pick the arm up. I used the arm to knock the idol off the stand it sat atop, onto the folded up sleeping bag. It landed with a muffled thud. The zombie arm didn’t explode. Iron bars didn’t slam down across the entrances. Water didn’t start flooding into the chamber. We both looked at the object.
“Okay, then,” Jason said. “Phase two.” He cleaned dust off the idol with a gloved hand, still not touching it with his skin. He rolled it over to get the other side, making a mess of his sleeping bag, and turned it face up. It was almost all head, and quite a beautiful one at that. A woman, with large eyes and lips, and a strong nose. Regal. Just how I’d have expected a goddess to look, if I’d ever thought about it. We didn’t even know what the idol was carved from, but we were sure it was worth more money than either of us had ever seen in our lives.
“Is that what this is all about? Money?”
Jason and I both spun around, looking wildly around the chamber, then back at each other.
“You heard tha —,” we both started to ask each other, then stopped, since the answer was obvious.
May be used for any purpose, without attribution.