Author's note. Brynjolf would like to apologise to all Monty Python lovers for his comment in this chapter. :)

If the last chamber had seemed to be designed for a dragon to live rather than dwarves, then this one must have been the baby dragon nursery. Fallen rubble was tumbled everywhere in piles and individual blocks like the building bricks of an angry child thrown all over the playroom in disgust when the castle disintegrated. A network of high bridges across the room seemed still to be intact, though the delicate structures appeared to defy all the laws of engineering to even remain where they were.

And the Falmer were everywhere. It seemed like every shadow held its own skulking goblin, most of them armed with crude longbows, but one or two with the twisted staves that denoted shamans.

"There's more of them at ground level than on the bridges," Brynjolf said quietly to the other two as they all crouched in the shadow of a broken door. "We may be better taking the high road rather than the low road across this chamber - if we climb the rubble to the right we can get onto the first bridge from there."

Karliah shook her head. "They've got too many archers. The instant that one of us made enough noise to pinpoint where we are, every arrow in the place would be winging its way to us. Too risky."

"Your choice, lass. But I can't see we're going to be a lot better trying to cross at ground level with these numbers.

And that was the moment when the crash came from the far end of the room. For a terror-stricken moment it seemed that the whole ceiling was coming down; a cloud of white dust obscured half the room and stones ricocheting off other stones added a staccato counterpoint to the thunder. The Falmer in blind panic were scurrying to every exit they could find and Brynjolf dragged the two women away from the door just in time to avoid a head-on collision with one of them. Mena was already darting away towards the right wall and Brynjolf and Karliah swiftly followed her, trusting to the dust and noise to cover their movements.

What they saw at the far end of the room brought them all to a halt. One of the towers had simply collapsed, obscuring the far door. The last tumbling stones rolled down to floor level, and the room was silent. The Falmer had not come back.

Even so, Brynjolf spoke in an undertone. "So this is what we heard. The whole tower collapsed."

Karliah nodded. "It's Mercer. He's trying to block the pursuit."

"Gods above. How did he do that?" Brynjolf was looking at the tower, the dead bodies of two Falmer visible in the rubble.

Karliah shook her head. "Even now, you still haven't realised it, have you? It's the Key. While he has that, nothing is impossible. Nothing. If he could access the full power it unlocks he could tell the sun to stand still in the sky - and it would do so."

"It has such power?"

Karliah nodded. "We simply do not know what it would allow someone to do if they worked out how to use it. Nobody has ever used it in such a manner. We have taken great care that they should not. It has been lost and found before - there are stories from Morrowind that say that the Nerevarine had it in his possession for a while. But for someone who didn't know what power it had - well, it would seem a very good lockpick. An unbreakable lockpick. But no more."

Mena wiped dust from her bowshaft. "How do we know that the Nerevarine didn't use it? After all the stories - defeating Dagoth Ur and destroying the Heart of Lorkhan? Battling Almalexia? Perhaps it was the misuse of the Skeleton Key that gave him the power to do it?"

Karliah seemed doubtful. "It's such ancient history now, I doubt that we'll ever know. Nocturnal certainly never said anything about it having been used before. But she isn't a fountain of information at the best of times."

"You can say that again, lass." Brynjolf looked at the blocked doorway. "Well, one thing's certain - we're not going any further this way. High road it is - there's a door up there in the wall at the end of the second bridge. If we have any luck left to us at all, let's hope we're lucky enough that it leads on to the next room."

The door led to a passage that was littered with traps, all of them visible and easily inactivated with a well placed arrow. Somehow it all seemed too obvious for Mercer, but Karliah seemed to have another theory. "The traps may not have been placed here by Mercer at all." she said, nudging one aside with her foot. "If he went through the lower door before setting off the explosion that brought the tower down, then the traps here may be Falmer manufacture. They're crude and obvious, so I wonder what they were trying to trap."

"Skeevers, from the look of it," Mena said wryly. "Look."

At the end of the passage was a larger room, and there was indeed a skeever's body threaded onto a long narrow piece of metal. The makeshift spit had been set over a fire to roast, but whoever had been responsible for tending dinner had clearly run away with the other Falmer, and so one side of the huge rat was almost uncooked, the other half charred. The scent was less than appetising and Mena wrinkled her nose. "I'd have to be pretty hungry to make a meal out of that. Maybe Falmer have no sense of taste, as well as being blind."

"Tastes a bit like chicken," Karliah said unexpectedly.

Brynjolf raised his eyebrows. "You mean you've eaten skeever, lass?"

She gave him a half grin. "Bryn, I was on the run from Mercer and the guild for twenty five years. When you're hungry enough, you'll try anything. And it's amazing how many things taste like chicken if you're hungry enough."

Mena beckoned to them from the far end of the room. "I think we've got more trouble. What on earth is that?"

The high, narrow room came out onto a balcony. There were still no signs of any Falmer, whatever holes they had scurried away into must have been as far as possible from the fallen rubble in the huge hall they had left behind. But in the centre of the new room stood a dwemer construct unlike any other they had seen in the ruins so far. Over forty foot high, motionless, golden, suspended from a huge metal frame, it dominated the room in menacing immobility

Brynjolf let out a long breath. "Shor's bones, look at that monstrosity."

"Dwemer centurion - very tough and very deadly," Karliah said. "We can sneak around or take it on. Frankly, I'd suggest the former. While we've got the Falmer all running for their lives, the best thing we can do is get across here as fast as possible. We know we must be getting close to Mercer because he brought the tower down in the last room - he wouldn't have bothered to delay us like that if we weren't close on his heels now."

Brynjolf nodded. "I agree. There's a maze of bridges up there, if we stick to the ones nearest to the wall we should stay far enough from the centurion not to set it off."

Mena peered at the far side of the room. "There's giant spiders there too, near the western wall. Stay to the east side and they shouldn't sense us, they're short-range hunters usually."

One pace towards the wall, and this was seen to be a false hope. Whatever had alerted the centurion, their movement or something else, the golden monster took a pace out of its supporting frame and stood rocking as its ruby eyes flared to life. At present it did not seem to be looking at them, but if they moved again the luck could not hold.

"Now what in Oblivion do we do?" Brynjolf hissed under his breath.

Karliah was already fumbling in her pouch. "There's a poison that works on these, but it's hard to get an arrow in a place where it'll work. Mena, smear this on your arrows and aim for the leg and arm joints - there's no soul gem in these to knock loose, only a dynamo core deep in the chest. Bryn, you're going to have to get its attention to give us a clear shot. Go and yell insults at it, and don't get in range of its arms."

Brynjolf grimaced. "So what am I supposed to tell it, lass? That its father was a skeever and its mother smelled of snowberries?"

"If you can't think of anything better." Karliah leapt to a broken strut on the wall and drew back her bowstring. "Go!"

Brynjolf ran along the top of the rubble piles and dropped lightly to the floor. The insults didn't seem to be necessary, before his feet had even touched the floor the centurion had turned towards him and was lumbering in his direction with a frightening speed. He hoisted the largest lump of rubble he could lift, and lobbed it in the direction of the metal giant, the boulder reverberated uselessly off the construct's shoulder but distracted it from the arrow of Karliah's that lodged in a joint of its left arm. Mena's arrow landed less than a handspan from Karliah's and bounced off. He didn't dare look at the two women, but threw himself forward, tucking and rolling under the arm that smashed down less than a foot from his head. The creature turned again as another glass arrow sank into its knee joint. None of them seemed to be having any effect.

Brynjolf lobbed another rock and then ran for a rubble pile. "I can't keep this up forever, lass," he called urgently. "How long does this take to work?" Another crash of the centurion's arm reduced the rubble pile to dust as he leapt off it.

"Not long," Karliah shouted. "Keep it turning!"

He sprinted for the opposite corner, aware of the centurion on his heels, then suddenly dodged and turned back on himself, running back towards the two women. This time as the centurion turned there was a terrible grating noise, and then the monster crashed to its knees as its joints appeared to seize. There was one moment where nothing at all was moving, then it tumbled onto its face and lay motionless.

Brynjolf wiped sweat from his face as Karliah and Mena climbed down to join him. "Close. Too close by half. Karliah, just how do you poison a clockwork?"

She showed him a small vial. "Won't work on the little ones, but those centurions have a system of pipes that keep lubricating fluid running round the body. This is a strong corrosive, you can only use it on glass or ebony tipped arrows, never metal. Get an arrow with this on it deep into the joint and it'll be transported all round the body in the pipes, the joints seize up in the end." She turned to look at Mena. "And you missed both your shots - and I've never seen you do that before. Is that wound in your shoulder giving you trouble?"

Mena nodded. "I can't get full draw on this bow. I think I've split some of the stitches open. If we survive this and make it home alive, Herluin is going to kill me."

Karliah nodded. "Stick to short range targets only, half draw. Spare that shoulder as much as you can. Once we get out of this place we can do something about it, but here we can't get you out of your armour, you'd be a sitting target for the first Falmer archer that got lucky."

"Let alone what Mercer might do," Brynjolf added. "We surely have to be almost to the heart of the ruin now."

"Next room, if Gallus's directions are correct." Karliah said. "He reckoned that this ruin was a mirror image of another one that he and I cleared out many years ago. If so, the next room will hold the statue - but I can't promise. We've been working on guesswork for most of this."

"And," Brynjolf added grimly, "we can be pretty sure there will be some other nasty surprise that Mercer has set up for us. Mena, lass, if you can't use your bow properly stay behind the two of us, and try to set up for a short range shot if you can when his attention is on us."

She nodded, and they picked their way to the far doors. A stray spider fell to one of Karliah's arrows and the other spiders seemed to think that they would wait for easier prey, no more of the eight legged monsters came out of the web-festooned corner.

Brynjolf tested the lock on the doors. "Unlocked already. Are you both ready?"

Mena nodded silently. Karliah's stare was fixed on the doors and she spoke quietly. "As ready as we'll ever be. Open the door, Bryn, and Nocturnal's luck go with us. We'll need it."

He nodded back, took a deep breath, and threw the doors open.