Sell you a Bridge chapter 276

June 12th 2016 The Nightside 10:00 PM EDT

It took them a bit less than an hour to dissolve a portion of the wards  for us to slip in through. Once it was open, we all hurried through,  with only Tommy staying behind to keep the wards from noticing us, and  Suzie staying with him as a guard. She seemed actively annoyed that  Sindella was going to be going in with Taylor, but she also obviously  knew that letting our conceptual 'don't look here' master get popped  because he was too focused on keeping us all from getting axe murdered  would probably kill us all anyway.

Once we got past the  wards, we spent about twenty minutes walking to the house before we  realized there was a second layer of protections elongating the space as  we tried to approach. I was able to help Jim break this one, because it  was closer to void magic than any normal wards. Jim called it spatial  folding, and said it was expensive and annoying to break through, so he  was glad to have me here.

After that we ran into several  secondary and tertiary protections, door curses, hallway traps,  paintings that tries to grab us and drag us in, a lantern that  hypnotized anyone who looked at it. A rug that was secretly some sort of  quicksand liquid held in stasis, three pitfall traps, four ghost  sentries, and no less than ELEVEN mimics pretending to be high class  furniture. And all of this was on the first fucking floor. Without the  eye of odin we would have been screwed, and by the time we reached the  stairs, everyone was on a hair trigger.

When we stopped to  rest a bit in a safe zone, I turned to glare up the steps at the second  floor. "Ok, this is ri-goddamn-diculous. Who LIVES in a place like  this? Get a text at the wrong time and you might get butchered by lamp  ghouls. That's not even a random example, I SAW a lamp ghoul. It was  hiding in the shade of one of the table lamps we passed. I mean,  granted, it's fancy, but imagine surrounding yourself with this much  protection. Not all of this shit can be tuned to the people living here  right? Some of these are active traps they would need to avoid."

I  could not fathom the amount of paranoia and distrust needed to force  yourself to spend all your time in conditions like this. It was a  beautiful house, with dark wood paneling, sprawling hallways, high,  vaulted ceilings, marble floors lined with finely woven persian rugs,  and a host of fancy amenities. Hell, I'd seen three or four Picassos  hanging on the walls, mixed in the the paintings that tried to murder  anyone who came within arms reach, and I was pretty sure some of the  vases on those tables had been Ming Dynasty. I'd even seen a Faberge egg  or two lying around.

That didn't change the fact that  even existing in this fucking hellscape was violently dangerous, and  that without some means of avoiding all these traps, some of which, from  what the eye showed me of their construction, had neither scanning  functions NOR the ability to turn off, would turn anyone into a  gibbering nervous wreck. What the hell was the Griffin AFRAID enough of  to arrange this level of security on his own home. It wasn't fucking  death, that was for sure, he faced a gruesome and horrible one of those  every time he got up to go take a piss at night. Not to mention I was  pretty sure he had kids. Them making it past childhood was a miracle.

"You  would be surprised what people can get used to." Jim snickered. "But  yes, living here is probably horrendously dangerous, even for people  with the requisite permissions. I've seen men cloister themselves in  fortresses like this before, and they're almost always running from  something or someone terrible. We're not even getting the worst of it,  there are several layers of internal traps and protections that have  been deactivated by our method of entry. It's lucky we brought Tommy and  the eye, because trying to brute force our way into this place would  have ended in our agonizing deaths."

I winced, looking  around. "I don't suppose whatever the fuck these are supposed to keep  out might have followed us in here? Because between the traps and what I  saw outside this place looks like you could use it as a fallout shelter  for some sort of dark god apocalypse. Granted, the Nightside is  dangerous, but this level of protection goes past caution and circles  back around to lunacy. I mean the cost alone for all of this. For the  amount he must have paid for this much warding he could literally just  BUY all of his enemies wholesale."

The outside wards had  been impressive as hell, but as an external layer they had just seemed a  bit excessive, nothing crazy. Knowing those were just the primary layer  and there were multiple wards tied into the internal systems we'd  lucked into bypassing? I was kind of worried me might catch the  attention of whatever was terrifying enough to make someone at this  level so afraid they had to live like THIS. You could have told me it  was literally Cthulu and I would have believed it, but whatever it was,  if it followed us in we'd be trapped with it, and that was a hard pass  for me.

Jim chuckled. "Doubtful. Our entrance was quiet as  a whisper. One of the first rules of being a master thief is that no  one should know you've arrived until you've already left. I've long  since taught you this, my boy. Even if whatever the old man is afraid of  was watching the outside uninterrupted, I took great pains to get us  past all forms of surveillance on approach. We're going to be delving  into the memories of one of the secret masters of the world after all.  Can't have him finding out and swearing vengeance, otherwise why the  subterfuge to begin with?"

"You're the boss." I said with a  shrug. "Now, how about you bring out the eye again, because even I can  feel the magic pouring off these steps like a furnace. I don't think any  of us would survive stepping onto them unprepared." I paused. "Well, I  might be able to tank whatever that is in my armor, but there's no way  in hell it would remain this quiet in here. Even Tommy can't obscure  everything." Jim pressed the eye to his invisible face opposite his  monocle, then sucked air through his teeth and passed it to Sindella.

She  winced, and I waited for them to talk a bit before I finally managed to  get the thing so I could look and..."What the fuck?" I stared at the  steps in horror. Every single stair was cursed. Nasty curses, and they  stacked. Each curse redoubled and reinforced the one before it on top of  being its own curse, and the total result got exponentially worse as  you went along. It took me a bit of reading and deciphering before I  realized that the whole staircase had one giant segmented uber curse on  it, made up of all the little curses. Even that I only managed to puzzle  out because of my experience reading that insanely complex void script.  I turned to Jim. "What the fuck is that?"

"That." He  said, his voice worried. "Is trouble. The individual curses are a  variety of nasty things. Glass bones, soul burning, and about twenty  others that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy." He paused. "Wait, no,  I'd wish several of these on Blood. Not most of them though. Point is,  it's the big one that's a problem. It doesn't just kill you. It's a  curse of karmic torment. A massive boulder tied to your soul that will  follow you through every reincarnation. A perpetual murphys law that  will hound you to death in every single life you live for the rest of  eternity, at least once its out of other terrible things to do to you."

Sindella  looked appalled. "It's an abomination. It shouldn't even exist, I can't  imagine the prices that were paid to make this. The number of people  who were killed and tortured to accrue this much karmic debt. Even  looking at it makes me feel dirtier, like the knowledge taints my head  by being in it. This is...this is dark magic on a level of never even  seen before. A grand working of blasphemy against nature itself. It  wouldn't even let off gods, several of these are curses of immortal  slaying. Anyone killed by this would be cast into the cycle of  reincarnation, and their new role in life would be the worst they could  possible return as."

I swallowed and took a long step away  from the stairs. "Ok, so no using clones I take it. So how the fuck do  we get up the steps. Can I just teleport us past it?" I tried a shadow  portal before answering my own question. "No. Space is locked here. I  can't open any portals." That was kind of a no brainer now that I  thought about it. What kind of paranoid lunatic allows his house to be  reached through teleportation. I reached out for the darkness between  worlds though, and I felt the fingers of my soul brush a corridor. Dark  corridors didn't work through space principles, that was why I could go  anywhere with them regardless of distance.

Turning  to my friends, I cleared my throat. "Looks like I'll have to go it  alone from here folks. I can slip back down here the same way, so as  long as I have the eye I should be safe enough. I can come back and  consult if I get stuck, but the corridors of darkness that I have to use  to bypass the spatial lock aren't something people can withstand  experiencing." I paused. "Though, now that I think about it, given Jim's  absurd connection to death and darkness he might be ok."

All  eyes went to my mentor, who started stroking his invisible chin. "I'd  never considered that. You were so adamant that anyone but you going  through there was a disaster I didn't want to bother with the risk, but  now that you mention it that does sound like something I could handle.  I've been through most of the worst parts of the Underworld at one time  or another, as well as walked the void. Being dead does have its  advantages."

"I  have a friend you would get along swimmingly with." Taylor said with an  amused snort. "But that sounds like a plan. The rest of us will wait  here for you so we can flee together once you're done. Plus I'm not sure  we can handle all the traps without you on the way out. We left them  intact for the most part, and were planning to repair what we took apart  on the way back, but you were a big part of those plans. Sindy is  impressive as hell, but she's no master thief, I think waiting down here  for the both of you is our safest option."

Sindella  nodded hurriedly in agreement, and that was that. I kissed Zee and Drea  goodbye and headed over to put a hand on Jim's shoulder. I wasn't  actually sure he could survive intact, but I also wasn't sure he  couldn't, which meant my power had room to work. I should be able to  make that uncertainty work in our favor with my ability as we traveled,  and I trusted my power enough to keep him safe for a trip that short. I  pulled him aside to try to tell him, but he cut me off. "I know what  you're going to say, but don't tell me. If you're not sure it'll make it  easier f.r this to work."

Once  he gave the nod of approval, I focused hard. I opened the corridor, but  as I did, I changed it. I made the lie of his safety, a lie born of  ignorance and false possibility, a truth, and since it sounded so  plausible, it was all the easier to force it to work as I pulled us  through the darkness and out the other side on the landing at the top of  the steps. We'd used the eye to identify a dead zone to land in, and  when we stepped out, Jim caught me as I staggered against him, my head  splitting from the effort. Upon asking though, he was fine. I was glad. I  was going to need him for this next part.