Motherlode

The last bearer’s death went mourned most of all, as it meant there was finally nobody else to share the danger. He yanked the bagged supplies off the man’s back from where he was lodged in the tunnel.

Very clever, really. He thought it was just perspective at work when he flashed a dim light down it, as he was supposed to. The darkness hid the passage’s narrowing, and more importantly, its throat-shredding obsidian collar.

There wasn’t anything else to do for it but take note of his example and soldier onward. There couldn’t be more than a room or two left before the reliquary was finally his, with its promised hundredweights of treasure. The deaths of three bearers could be ignored or justified, and the previous murders were already hidden. Librarians were an easy breed to miss.

He drank much of his water and left the supplies cached at the tunnel’s mouth. Some blind groping with a tent’s support strut found the obsidian blades, which tinkled brightly as they snapped off. He kept sweeping the walls as he crawled forward, finding no other blades. There was a brief huffing silence as he wound up the flashlight batteries; the dull glow confirmed his thoughts. It was safe to enter the next chamber.

It was infested with traps, of course, but here their designs had failed. The traps with moving parts and limited supplies had long since rotted to inoperability. Obsidian spikes kept their edge, false floors crumbled just as readily, and the contact poison was still potent enough to blind the man who’d brushed a hand across his eyes; he’d broken his neck in a fall down a well. Yet the crossbows, deadfalls and trapdoors were nothing but jammed annoyances.

He pulled a centuries-old leather thong from its housing in scorn as he advanced through the gallery, kicking piles of rat dung aside. The treasure was waiting in the chests ahead, just as the suppressed old journals had hinted. He could see them: thirty wooden containers the size of a man, thickly waxed against decay.

The chests could be valuable, so he refrained from breaking them apart in his glee. For decades had he waited; ten minutes longer wouldn’t kill him. This lock was inoperable despite the grease drizzled through it by the last visitors. His breath shuddered as he finally cracked open the first chest.

He should have been more expansive in his reading, he thought after the first numb shock cleared his mind. Instead of paying thousands for obscure maps and scribbled reminders of ages gone, he could have opened an encyclopedia and discovered what treasure could mean.

After all, if he had found the treasure when it was first laid to rest, he could have retired in unthinkable splendor. One chest alone could have paid for every bit of debt he incurred. Men back then, when the treasure was laid to rest, would kill for a single bar of what was more precious than silver: pure, refined aluminum.

Hours later, he got up from his sprawl, every chest opened around him. He had come this far. Moreover, though the treasure was utterly worthless, he could still be rewarded for his efforts, for every penny spent on old documents and in paying off the families of the dead.

It took even more money to install lighting through the many rooms of the treasure caves and add handrails. Fortunately, he was out of debt before the year was out. The ticket revenues were princely.