Orena bit her lip as she thought, her back still snug against the hard stone wall behind her. Just to her side there was a corridor where Cirro appeared to be fighting with a door, and if the man who had tried to get her back on a stone altar was to be believed, Cirro was at least partly responsible for her being in this mess.

She sighed, she needed answers and even if Cirro had helped, she wasn't sure she could just imprison him into the mirror. She slipped it back into her bodice as she weighed up the pros and cons between using the fire poker or her new dagger.

She hefted the fire poker between her hands as she decided her dagger was easy enough to retrieve if this did turn nasty, and the poker was enough to convince him to talk.

She hoped.

After all, she now knew that she hadn't known the man as well as she thought, but she was taking a chance that some of it was true. The only mitigating factor was that if she was wrong she was aware that she might be.

She quietly rounded the corner to creep along the wall, hoping his attention was too firmly on what he was doing to notice her if she was stealthy. Especially when the door he was working on was on the other side of the corridor, and the lanterns providing the small amount of light available caused flickering shadows for him to have long since started ignoring his peripheral vision.

She hoped.

Orena had almost reached him when he seemed to sense something was up, and the distance was small enough for her to leap forward to press the flat of the poker against his neck as he turned.

"Orena!?"

"Don't you 'Orena' me!" She hissed. "What did you do to my drink?"

"What drink?"

Her eyes narrowed at him, but he was not forthcoming.

"I wake up on a stone slab after drinking with you, only for a mage to enter and threaten me with a knife... He said you'd got careless," she figured that if she gave a little, he might too.

Cirro dropped his gaze from hers. "Okay, you got me, I drugged the wine." Without even realising it she pressed the fire poker harder against his neck. "Ow! Ease up will you!"

"You just admitted to handing me over to someone who was gonna kill me!"

"Well..." Cirro was clearly considering if he should try and use his well honed charisma on her. She raised a pointed eyebrow at him, which - due to the proximity - he could see even in the dim light. "Okay, full story?"

"That would be a good idea, yes," Orena agreed. "But so help me Cirro if you even try to lie to me..."

He nodded once. They both knew he had been able to get away with lying to her before, but it was rare that she didn't spot it. It was a testament to just how charismatic he was and how shrewd she was.

Some risks came down to luck because the odds were too even.

"I've been trying to gain access to this tower for years, but never had much success. This floor is full of traps. I've never been this far up before. On one of my attempts the guards got ahold of me and dragged me in front of Sax - the mage you've already met - and he said the only way I could keep my life was if I procured individuals for his experiments."

"This isn't exactly endearing you to me," Orena warned.

"At least I'm being honest, though, right?" He retorted.

"So let me guess, all those lovely ladies you've been seducing have ended up in this tower?"

"Well not all of them," he corrected, before adding, "you were never supposed to be one of them."

"Supposed to be?"

"All the ones I brought to Sax were stupid, vacuous fools. No one would miss them, in fact I know at least one whose father remarked that this way he was saved a dowry trying to rid himself of the wretch."

"Charming," Orena muttered. "But they were still people! They deserved better than this."

"Maybe, but I survive, you know that."

"So why am I entangled in your mess?"

"Sax was getting annoyed with the quality - his word! - of person I was providing. He told me to bring you."

"Me?"

"I may have accidentally let slip that the woman betrothed to my brother was the smartest person I knew. He wanted someone intelligent. I didn't ask why, though I did ask why it had to be you."

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Let me guess, he said that if it wasn't me he'd kill you instead."

"See, I said you were smart."

Orena considered slapping him. "So why should I let you live?"

"Because you know handing me over to my brother is the worst punishment you could provide?" Cirro suggested hopefully. Orena raised an eyebrow at him again. "Or, more practically, I can help you through the traps on this floor."

"And how do I know you won't try and give me to Sax a second time this evening?"

His eyes dropped. "I guess you'll just have to trust me."

"I've never trusted you, Cirro."

They both knew that wasn't entirely true, she had simply trusted him more than some of the other people in their social circles. They slipped away from some of the balls together when they both got too bored. Though she had never allowed herself to be one of his conquests, even before politics engaged her to his brother.

"Fine," she decided. "But if you put so much as a toe out of line, and I won't even kill you, I'll add you to the growing collection of things that have tried to kill me inside the mirror."

"I don't even want to know," he decided.

Orena nodded and took a step back, lowering the fire poker to the relief of her aching arms. "Which way is out?"

Cirro beckoned down the corridor they were on. And they'd taken barely three steps when a fluttering of wings announced Orena's unwanted companion.

Orena sighed in irritation, she had hoped that the familiar had given up following her. Cirro, on the other hand, looked rather more alarmed. He took a step forward and in a fluid motion pulled a leather pouch over the creature and pulled the drawstring tight. Based on the way the material almost rippled with it's efforts to free itself, it was not impressed with it's new situation.

"I know it's annoying, but is that really necessary?" Orena asked.

"Do you not know what it is?"

"One of the guards called it a homunculus."

"Yes, it belongs to Sax, he created it," Cirro explained. Orena half shrugged at him as if to ask why that mattered. "A homunculus can basically act as eyes and ears for its master. Anything it senses it can pass back to Sax."

Orena really hoped that Sax was still unconscious. She also decided that Cirro didn't need to know that she'd hit the mage on the head with a paperweight.

"Then I suppose we better hide it."

"Yes," Cirro agreed, before turning to her with suspicious eyes. "Why is it following you anyway?"

Orena shrugged as she tried to look as innocent and clueless as possible. Cirro, however, didn't buy it for a second and he let her know as much. Orena sighed. "I think it wants this back," she explained as she picked up the compact to show him, though keeping it well out of his reach.

"Zerac," Cirro breathed. "You said magic mirror but I didn't think... That's one of Sax's most powerful and prized artefacts, if he finds out you took it -"

"Well then, he shouldn't have forced me to defend myself."

"Wait, Sax isn't in there, is he?"

Orena shook her head. "No, just a mummified corpse and a guard. From my use anyway." She paused as a thought occurred to her. "You said you'd never been this far before, how do you know what this is?"

"What do you think Sax threatened me with?" Orena had to admit that made far too much sense.

Cirro nodded to himself as Orena put the pocket mirror away again. "We still need to get rid of this thing," he said.

"Well, what's in these rooms?"

"No idea, I've never been able to get into them."

Orena rolled her eyes. "You never were any good at picking locks," she replied holding out her hand.

He passed her his lock picks and she instantly knelt to get to work. "I always said you were too good for my brother."

"You're just jealous I never agreed to join you in your bed," Orena retorted.

"You're not married yet."

"And you handed me over to a mage to experiment upon, I'd give it up if I were you."

"You've known me too long to think I'm that sensible."

"True," Orena agreed as the lock opened for her. "There."

Once she'd stepped back, Cirro pushed open the door just enough to see what was inside, and saw nothing to cause them much trouble, so tossed the bag inside and pulled the door shut again so Orena could lock it.

After it clicked into place Orena turned to Cirro. "Okay, since you've got rid of the homunculus, if you give me a detailed lay out of the traps on this floor, I'll tell you where the gold is."

Cirro gaped at her. "You already found the vaults?" He didn't need to ask how she knew that's what he was after. They had known each other a long time.

Orena nodded.

"Okay," Cirro started. "Well, unfortunately a lot of them are enchanted so it's not like I could disable them on my way through. But simply, follow this corridor and you'll come to one that branches off. Square chamber on one side, hexagonal on the other and both are full of pressure plates. In the hexagonal room they'll cause the sconces to light or extinguish so as to make traversing the various moving blades more difficult. In the square room they'll affect the floor directly, by either revealing spike pits or oozing slime."

"Okay, so my choice is blind blade dodging or blind blade dodging?" Orena summarised far too flippantly for the situation.

Cirro considered her words before realising she had a point, either way she couldn't necessarily predict where she needed to be at any given moment. "Yes," he agreed. "Also tripwires, not sure what most do, I only triggered one and it caused an almighty howl in my head so that I couldn't hear a damn thing. Very disorientating."

"Anything else?"

"Apart from the first corridor that links them, there's a second, I think it's easier to reach than either of the proper ways out, so it's used to further confuse would be trespassers. There's also at least one false door that just dumps you at a random point amongst that whole set up."

Orena nodded as she absorbed what he was saying. "So how do the guards get through?"

"I have absolutely no idea," Cirro admitted. "I looked for any kind of switch or plate or lever that might be used to deactivate them - at least temporarily - but couldn't find anything. Maybe Sax uses his magic to get them through?"

Something about his answer gave Orena a foreboding feeling, as if she was missing something and that by even half trusting someone else she was setting herself up, but she couldn't deny that everything he said made some kind of perverse sense. Even if a pair of rooms chock full of traps in the middle of a tower seemed completely ridiculous.

Orena took a steadying breath, after all, a deal is a deal. "Okay, down there, take a left to find the stairs. From there you'll pretty much arrive at the armoury, take the door on the far wall. That will take you to an antechamber - there was a guard standing watch there at one point - and then take the left door. In the corridor there'll be a door immediately opposite the one you just left. It's locked, but I could see through the keyhole, it was full of treasure."

"What's the catch?" Cirro asked.

"Apart from the locked door?" Orena asked far too sweetly for him to trust. "You use this opportunity to double cross me again, and I will zerac you."