The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

Towers stood, their windows empty and open as the eye sockets of sun-bleached skulls.
    They knew they were coming close when they found the bodies.
    The first bones had been a massive beast once, its jaw as long as Marcus’s arm. Three rows of teeth, serrated edges still as sharp as knives, littered the paving stones, a scattering of pale bone on lichen black. Marcus knelt. Thin bits of gristle still clung in the depths of the joints, but the time that had cleaned away the flesh had replaced it with moss. He brushed it off with his fingers.
    “What was it, do you think?” Kit asked.
    “Big. You see the notches in the bone here and right there? That’s where spears took it.”
    “A guardian, perhaps,” Kit said. “A sentry set to watch over the reliquary for the ages.”
    Marcus rubbed the back of his hand against his chin.
    “Would have been on the old side,” he said.
    “Assian Bey was said to be an engineer for the dragon Asteril,” Kit said. “There are tales of the dragons setting guards who could sleep away years until they were disturbed.”
    “A trap with teeth, then,” Marcus said. “Well, the good news is that someone’s killed it for us.”
    “And the bad?”
    Marcus didn’t answer.
    The chambers beneath the ruins were dim as night, and the improvised torches of tree branch and moss smoked badly. They walked carefully through a hall larger than the grandest ballroom in Northcoast. The walls were complex with carved designs, and high above them, almost obscured by the shadows, the ceiling seemed to have claws and teeth. It might have been carved stone or stalactites built from the soft fungus of the invading jungle, but it gave Marcus the sense of stepping into the maw of a vast animal. He walked slowly, watching for traps and dangers, and so it was almost an hour before they found the next bones.
    The ten men had died quickly and lay where they had fallen. If there had been survivors, they hadn’t buried their dead or raised cairns. A vast bronze door stood before them, its seals broken. Marcus and Kit stepped carefully among the dead.
    “Dartinae,” Marcus said. “One over here that might have been a Cinnae or a very young Firstblood, but most of these were Dartinae.”
    “I suspect we’ve found where Akad Silas died. I think I would feel better if I knew what had killed him.”
    “Poison’s my bet,” Marcus said, poking his head through the opening of the great bronze door and peering into the inky darkness beyond. “Fill the chamber here with bad air, and when someone opens it, all the swordsmanship in the world won’t help you.”
    “I am beginning to think Assian Bey might perhaps have been a bit overfond of his own cleverness,” Kit said sourly.
    “It is a vice. Come on. This is as far as they got. Whatever comes next is our problem.”
    Despite everything they had seen, despite the warnings of bone and flesh, Marcus very nearly didn’t see the third guardian of the reliquary before it was too late.
    The corridor had narrowed, the ceiling dropping down so low that Marcus could touch it with his fingertips. The statues of dragons clung to the walls, shifting evilly in the dim torchlight. Kit walked beside him, humming tunelessly under his breath. Ahead of them, something glittered in the darkness. And then it moved. Marcus froze, and half a heartbeat later, Kit did as well. Something like massive eyes blinked in the gloom ahead and a low, reedy sound like the breath of a vast animal filled the narrow space. Another beast, Marcus thought, only that seemed wrong. Repeating the same sort of trap didn’t seem the thing an overly clever engineer in the last days of the Dragon Empire would do. And anyone who’d come this far would be expecting another trap, would be watching for it. Marcus’s blood went cold.
    It was a distraction.
    He whirled, drawing his sword by instinct, as the massive toothed blade descended from above. He pushed Kit forward and down with the back of his arm, and swung in a desperate parry. The ancient steel met the new and snapped. The evil blades drove in toward Marcus’s belly, rusted spikes scraping his sides. The impact knocked the breath out of him but the mechanism would not let him fall. For a moment, Marcus stood in the darkness, uncertain whether he’d just been impaled, waiting for the shock to fade and the pain to come in. He looked down at his belly.
    The spike that would have ended him, weakened by centuries of rust, had been broken