Remembering the price of the silver choice, Salt directed her unseen servant to take the golden end of the scepter and touch it to the mithril doors. There was no lightning. The doors opened.
Beyond lay what appeared to be a funerary treasure
chamber, bright beneath a silvered ceiling that reflected light much as the
stair chamber had done. The walls were ivory inlaid with gold. The floor was
polished agate—common stone, but worked to a mirror sheen.
In each corner stood a nine-foot iron statue, black
as pitch and radiating both magic and evil. Each bore a different weapon: a
saw-toothed greatsword, a spiked mace, a vicious morning star, and a voulge.
Their faces were monstrous and deeply unsettling.
They did nothing.
Salt and Bo-Jing soon learned why. The room was lined
with lead and suffused with anti-magic. Spells failed. Magic items fell
silent. Even the unseen servant winked out of existence.
Bo-Jing, convinced the statues would animate at any moment,
tried to wrench weapons from their grasp or deface them. The iron would not
yield—though disturbingly, the statues did shift slightly, as if
resisting.
Against one wall stood a granite sarcophagus, its lid
inlaid with platinum glyphs spelling ACERERAK. The far end had been
smashed open long ago. Inside were rotted remains: fragments of bone, torn
wrappings, ruined jewelry, dust, and the unmistakable wreckage of a magic staff
. When Salt probed further, a cracked skull rolled free.
Whatever had once lain here was gone.
There were also massive iron chests, triple-locked
and set directly into the stone. They did not yield.
And then there was the bronze urn—large, ornate,
sealed with gold fill, a thin thread of smoke escaping from a tiny vent.
On a whim—perhaps out of frustration, perhaps out of instinct—Bo-Jing
opened it.
Fire poured out of the urn and resolved itself into a
towering efreeti, a being of living flame and intelligence. It demanded
to know who had opened its prison.
When Bo-Jing stepped forward, the efreeti surprised them
all.
It owed him three services before returning to the
Elemental Plane of Fire.
Chastened by what wishing had already done to Lao Ren, Salt
and Bo-Jing deliberated carefully.
Their first request was cautious: a map of the tomb.
The efreeti vanished in a puff of smoke and returned moments later with a
singed parchment. Compared against the crude map they had found earlier, this
one proved to be essentially perfect.
For the second service, they asked for a list of the twenty
things needed to defeat Acererak. This disappointed Bo-Jing: the list was
mostly mundane preparations—ten-foot poles, methods to counter gravity, potions
of flight. Sensible. Practical. Unheroic. He already had a magic broom. Or at
least, he used to.
The third service required the most care.
They wanted their equipment back. Their weapons, armor,
clothes. Their companions. Their strength.
Before they could finalize the wording, the efreeti
interrupted:
“Are you living in my dream, or am I living in your
dream?”
Salt and Bo-Jing admitted they did not know. They
acknowledged that whatever freedom they were offering him was likely
temporary—illusory, even—contained within a vision.
Then Salt said something different.
“We are coming to destroy Acererak.
We are coming back for real.
And when we return, we will free you for real.”
The efreeti considered this. He could not reshape reality.
But he could reshape a dream.
If that was what they wanted.
It was.
In an instant, Salt and Bo-Jing found themselves outside
the tomb, reunited with Bangqiu and Lao Ren. They were clothed, healed,
armed. Spells returned to memory. Strength returned to limbs.
But the crown, the scepter, the efreeti’s map, and every
other artifact taken from within the tomb were gone.
They were in a dream inside a dream—but they
remembered some things from the first dream.
For instance: do not take the northwest tunnel where the
rocks fall.
This time, rather than digging through the middle entrance
with swords, they used passwall, tunneling through the mud and into the
now-obscenely familiar mosaic corridor with the green devil mouth at its end.
Bangqiu could not remember what had happened to him inside that mouth—but he
knew, with absolute certainty, that he did not want to return.
Between the four of them, they had enough magic to move
quickly. They evaded the pit traps, ignored the temptations, and at the end of
the corridor phase doored through the wall.
They emerged once more into the throne room.
The place where, in another dream, they had found the crown
and the scepter. And the glowing gem. Once again, all these deadly tools were
waiting.
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