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“This place is full of them,” Ellie said in slow horror. “We can’t touch anything without the risk of being shredded.”

“Didn’t you say Xibalba had a cave of razors?” Adam asked.

“The House of Knives,” Ellie replied uncomfortably.

“Gotta admire their attention to detail,” he muttered.

Ellie gazed out at the labyrinth, chilled with fear. The path was a veritable tightrope. They would have to squeeze between stalagmites, duck under veils of stone, and edge around boulders, all of which were lined with blades… and that was just what she could see from where she stood.

Adam’s wound was nasty enough, but as long as they could keep it from becoming infected, it wouldn’t be life threatening.

A cut to a wrist or thigh could have them bleeding out within minutes on the floor of the cave.

“How are we supposed to get through this?” Ellie burst out nervously.

“Very damned carefully,” Adam retorted as he gazed at the death trap before them.

?

Adam set the pace, and they picked their way forward through the maze. He held the torch overhead as he moved with the slow, careful tread of a stalking panther. Ellie kept her own steps just as painstaking, wary of the glinting daggers of stone that flashed at her in the torchlight from every angle.

Ellie wondered if she and Adam might avoid the obstacle course more readily if they simply left the path. A glance at the black shards shimmering at her from the further reaches of the cave killed that notion dead. The people who had built this place had done their work thoroughly.

Built it, Ellie thought with wonder as she squeezed her way between two close-set rows of knives. All of this had been deliberately constructed by the people of Tulan. The challenges she walked through had likely been pulled from their now-lost myths of heroism and kingship. Those stories had carried such importance that whispers of them had filtered down into the annals of the neighboring cultures across hundreds of years.

“It really is quite fascinating,” Ellie said as she lay down on the ground and allowed Adam to drag her under a rippling limestone veil edged with obsidian scalpels.

“I’ll appreciate it a bit more when it isn’t trying to kill us,” Adam replied. He picked up the torch again and turned to see what came next.

The light flickered across another stretch of claustrophobic knife-edged stone formations—but beyond them, a wide black mouth revealed the way to the next chamber.

Adam took a big step over a fallen column.

“Well, that’s a relie—” he began.

His words were cut short as the ground beneath his boot gave out a loud, ominous crack.

Adam froze as he looked down. Beneath his foot, the stone of the cavern floor had snapped, revealing itself to be no more than a thin veneer disguised by a few centuries of dust and rubble.

Even as Ellie watched, a few more hairline cracks opened along the edges. The ground Adam stood on jarred another half-inch lower.

He sighed as he looked down.

“What’s the betting this opens onto a nice big pit of those razors?” he said.

Ellie swallowed thickly.

“I should say it is probably likely,” she replied.

“I’ll jump for it,” he announced.

“No!” Ellie burst out as she threw up a warning hand. “You’ll put more pressure on the fracture.”

He met her eyes evenly across the short distance that separated them.

“Then I’m going to step off it. Very carefully,” he added.

“I would assume that any change in the dispersion of your weight could be problematic,” she snapped back.