A Thief in the Night (16 page)

Chapter Twenty-six

T
he five of them made a simple camp just outside the seal. There they ate a final meal in the sunlight before heading in. Mörget roasted the cave beetle steaks and served out large portions to each of them. “We'll need our strength,” he explained. “We may be in there for several hours before we find the demon.”

Malden stared at the meat he was given. It was white and stringy and still attached to a piece of shriveled shell. “I've always found it best to exercise on an empty stomach,” he protested.

“Don't be such a ninny,” Cythera said, laughing at him.

Malden felt his cheeks grow red. He took a small bite of the meat, and was surprised, to say the least. “Ha! This is actually pretty good. A little like crabmeat. And a bit like venison.” He ate it all, and then had another serving. There was none left by the time Herward came up to their camp, his nose twitching in the air.

“I smelled your repast,” the hermit said. “Not that I would ever consume flesh. Oh, no. Never. But I'll admit the odor was tempting.”

Croy shrugged. “Then I am glad to say we have nothing to offer you, for I would hate to lead any man to sin.”

“Yes . . . that is good.” Malden could hear Herward's stomach rumbling. “It is what She would want—”

The holy man stopped speaking then. He seemed transfixed as if by a vision.

Malden followed his gaze and saw him looking at the entrance to the Vincularium.

“The Lady be praised,” Herward said, staring in mortal dread at the opening in the seal. “She has ordained that what was closed, now may be opened.”

Malden rolled his eyes but said nothing. In his experience it was a bad idea to try to disillusion the religiously insane. Herward's cosmology depended on everything that happened making perfect sense in the context of his faith. Upsetting that turnip cart would do no one any good.

“The chains?” Herward asked. “They were enchanted . . .”

Cythera put a hand on the hermit's shoulder. “The crone of your vision allowed the enchantment to be removed,” she said. Malden silently applauded her tact. What she said was entirely true. It was Coruth who had appeared in that vision, and it was also Coruth who had given Cythera the power to drain the curses from the chains. “Clearly she approves of our enterprise.”

Herward nodded. His eyes weren't focusing, Malden saw—they were looking at something invisible. The hermit dropped to his knees, his hands clutched together before him. “The Lady be praised! How long have I waited for this! I've spent years of my life studying the Elders, winkling out their secrets. How many times have I dreamt of this, of walking up here and finding the way open. How much can I learn from this place? I cannot begin to tell you what this means!”

Mörget laughed. Cythera shot the barbarian a nasty look, but Mörget simply shrugged. “Why then, little man, it should be your honor to go inside before us!”

Herward turned toward the barbarian and for a moment his eyes cleared and Malden could tell he was gripped by a sudden fit of lucidity. “Inside?” he asked. “Actually . . . go inside?”

He turned to face the opening. That dark, forbidding hole in the seal where the breath of ancient times stirred restlessly. Anything could be in there, anything at all, but most likely nothing friendly.

Every eye was on Herward as he took a step forward, then another. Even from a distance Malden could see how badly the hermit's hands shook. Herward reached up carefully toward one of the chains, but his hand didn't make contact. Instead, he cleared his throat, and stood up straighter, and said, “No. No . . . the vision was clear. I am to aid you, not join you. Someone must stay here and see to your things, yes?”

Croy walked over to the hermit and nodded sagely. “It's what She would wish, I think.”

“Indeed. Her name be praised,” Herward said, and rushed back to stand behind Mörget and Slag, who were the farthest from the opening.

Croy stayed where he was. The knight bent down and looked into the hole, and Malden saw that he wasn't shaking at all. If anything, Croy looked like he was about to run forward and squeeze himself inside, to get at the demon in there as fast as possible.

Malden had to admit that Croy had courage. He supposed that was what made him a knight in the first place—that willingness to throw himself into danger for a noble cause. For the first time in a while, he realized he actually admired the man.

“Malden,” Croy said, “would you be so kind as to take a look, and say if we must proceed?”

“Me?” Malden asked.

But then he remembered why he'd been brought along on this journey. He was the one who was supposed to clear the Vincularium of its deadly traps.

Maybe he should have run off for Helstrow after all, and taken his chances with the law. Nothing for it now, though. He came up next to Croy and then crouched down to look at the hole. “It looks big enough for us to crawl through,” he said, rubbing his chin. He reached up to touch the stone where it had warped and flowed. It was cool to the touch now. “And I suppose there are worse ways to enter a place than through the front door.”

“Not your usual method of ingress, eh?” Slag asked. The dwarf peered into the darkness beyond the opening and pulled at his beard.

“In my line, the back door is often preferred, yes. Let's take a look.” Malden lit a lantern and shone its light inside. He saw dull-colored rock, mostly. A wraith of mist swirled inside the opening, droplets of water catching some subterranean breeze and then flinging themselves outward, through his light. Nothing moved in there. Most like, nothing had moved in there for centuries.

He started to crawl inside, but Croy grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back. “Herward is saying a prayer for us,” the knight told him.

“Oh, good. I'd hate to go in there without divine sanction.”

The prayer was a long one, but Malden consoled himself with the knowledge that the holy man would be taking care of his horse while he was inside. For free. When it was done, Malden looked at Mörget, who was sharpening his axe with a whetstone. At Slag, who was trying to peer around Malden's arm for a better look inside. At Cythera, who failed to meet his gaze. And then at Croy, who set his jaw in a determined angle.

“Shall we go inside now?” Malden asked, and gestured toward the opening.

“You first,” Slag suggested.

Chapter Twenty-seven

M
alden crawled forward on his hands and knees a few feet and then slowly stood up. The light coming in through the fissure behind him illuminated no more than a patch of marble floor. On either side, and as far above him as he could imagine, lay nothing but darkness and stale air.

His eyes burned with the dark almost at once. His skin tingled and the hair on the back of his neck stood up. Because his vision was next to useless, his other senses leapt to fill the gap in what he could perceive. He heard water dripping, somewhere far off. The echoes it made seemed to roll across vast smooth expanses of stone. He smelled the must of centuries, old dust and a hint of decay. His fingertips felt extremely sensitive, as if he could reach for the great darkness before him and stroke it like fur.

Not that he would probably want to.

No one had been in that room for centuries, he thought. And the last people to come through this way—the elves—had good reason to regret it. They must have believed they'd found a safe haven, a place they could fortify in their war against humanity. Instead they'd found their deaths.

Would the darkness in such a place, abandoned for so long, begin to congeal? Would it take on some semblance of life—or at least, harbor some emotion? Malden told himself he was just being silly. That the still air inside the Vincularium could not become angry on its own. There were probably ghosts inside, remnants of the elves who'd perished here. There was certainly a demon in there. But the Vincularium itself was just a pile of old stone. It could not resent his presence. It couldn't hate him, or want him to leave.

No matter how much it felt that way.

“Is it safe?” Croy said from behind him.

Malden couldn't help but jump. He didn't turn around—he imagined the daylight outside would be blinding after his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Instead he fought to control his breathing and said, “Nothing has jumped out to devour me yet.”

He was aware of the others coming in behind him. He could hear them grunting and scraping their way through the narrow opening, each of them in their turn struck dumb once they were inside by the profundity of the darkness. Mörget took a step forward to put down one of their crates of supplies, and the rustling of the barbarian's clothes was like summer thunder reverberating off rain-lashed hills.

Croy lit a lantern, a great flaring light that made Malden blink as his eyes watered. The candle inside the lantern flickered wildly in some unfelt breeze and then steadied, and light streamed out across the open space of stone.

The marble floor stretched ahead as far as the light showed. A pair of stout, twisted columns held up a roof that was high enough that the light couldn't show it, leaving it shrouded in pitch-darkness. Something moved on one of the columns, inching through the lantern's glow, and Malden nearly turned and dashed back out of the Vincularium, but then he saw it was only a millipede, no longer than his finger. Its glossy shell was translucent and he could see its clear blood surging through its body. Lifting feathery antennae into the dusty air, the insect turned and started crawling away from the light.

Mörget started forward, one fist raised as if he would smash the thing.

“Be careful,” Croy whispered. “We don't know what we're walking into.”

Mörget grumbled with impatience, but he stepped back again.

Cythera lit another lantern and pressed it into Malden's hand. It had a looping handle on one side and he gripped it hard, like a man dying of thirst will grab onto a tankard of ale.

“So far so good,” Cythera said. She smiled at him. Obviously she meant to reassure him, but the light streaming upward across her face made dark pools of her eyes and made her look much more like a witch than Coruth ever had. He expected her to start cackling at any moment.

“There should be an exit from this room straight ahead,” Slag said, gesturing into the dark.

“All right,” Malden said. “I'll make sure it's safe.”

He was known in certain discreet circles as a master at evading traps. He'd bested the houses of sorcerers and the palaces of nobles because he could keep his wits about him and he knew when to step lightly. In all the Free City of Ness there was no one more qualified for it. And only a fool would think the way into the Vincularium would be free of pitfalls or snares. Dwarves were famous for their mistrust of interlopers and trespassers. The places they built underground were never meant for human intrusion, and over the centuries they'd become geniuses at constructing deadly surprises as a way of safeguarding their premises.

They also tended to have a lot of treasure, which attracted thieves. Over time those of Malden's profession had learned ways to overcome or simply avoid dwarven traps. Of course, the traditional way to do that was to send one person forward ahead of the group, and if they didn't die screaming in some horrible contraption, then you knew the way was safe. It looked to Malden like had been chosen for that honorable role.

He stepped out between the columns, careful to test the marble under his feet with each step. More columns loomed out of the darkness, perhaps a whole row of them. That was the obvious path, the way anyone coming inside would be expected to take. Safer to take the long way around. He turned to his left and raised his lantern high. There was a wall in that direction, so he moved slowly toward it and then reached out to touch it with one finger. The wall shone under his light, and he saw it was made of the same polished marble as the floor. A frieze ran along the wall just a little above Malden's eye level, carved with dwarven runes he couldn't read.

“Slag,” he called, and his voice boomed in the stone hall so much that he ducked his head and pressed his back against the stones. “Slag,” he said, in a much softer voice, “can you read this inscription?”

The dwarf came out of the dark toward him and peered upward at the frieze. His mouth moved silently for a while as he read. “Names, that's all. It's a standard formula,” Slag said, when he'd read enough. “It lists the dwarves who built this place, as well as the names of their fathers.”

“I was worried it might be warning us that only death awaited those who passed through this hall,” Malden said. That was the kind of thing he expected to find in a forbidden crypt.

“This was a city, before it was a tomb,” Slag told him. “When we lived here, there would have been fires burning all day and night in this room, and cups so full of mead you would never see their bottoms. This room would have been used for receiving visitors from the surface—elves or humans, anyone willing to trade with us.” He shook his head. “No, this was not a place of death, lad. Not till later.”

Malden nodded and headed forward, along the wall. He was trying to get a sense of its dimensions, but that proved difficult when his light couldn't reach all the corners at once. The columns ran beside him, one every fifteen feet or so. Then he came to the far wall, and turned to his right, and moved forward again. Eventually he came to a wide stone door, no more than six feet high, mounted in a stone arch. The latch of the door was simply designed and had no lock. Cool air streamed through the crack between the bottom of the door and its jamb. He checked its hinges and all along its top, and found nothing to worry him.

“All right,” he said, “come the way I did, all of you. I think it's safe.”

Croy, Cythera, and Mörget came quickly to join him. Slag seemed to be taking his time. Before he entered the circle of light shed by Malden's lantern, they heard him snuffling, and when the light touched him it gleamed on the tears in the corners of his eyes.

Malden panicked a little, but fought his fear back down. “Slag—what is it?” he asked. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing, lad, nothing. I just feel like I've come home, is all.”