A Thief in the Night (17 page)

Chapter Twenty-eight

T
he door opened easily on its hinges. It didn't even creak. After eight hundred years, that was a small miracle—but Malden knew that dwarves built things to last.

Beyond lay a passage with smooth walls that curved down. A bronze handrail ran along the wall at waist height for a dwarf. Its shine was gone with age, but it ran unbroken as far as Malden could see. He stepped into the passage, and when nothing tried to kill him, exhaled deeply. Then he started downward. The others followed more slowly.

“Take care,” Cythera said.

“My eyes are open. Yet most likely,” Malden said, “we won't run into a trap for a while.” He was expecting to find traps near the entrance, because they would have been needed back when this place was closed up. Something was required to keep the elves inside long enough for the exit to be sealed behind them. He was trying to think like a human general who died centuries before he was born. How would you layer your defenses? You expected the elves to try to break out en masse. “The barrier Cythera brought down would have been more effective if you weren't expecting it—if the elves thought the way to freedom was clear. So there should be a good open run between the chains and the next trap. Also, we're going the wrong direction, as far as the trap-makers were concerned. They
wanted
the elves to come down here unhindered. They just also wanted to make sure they didn't get out again. So the traps will be laid to stop elves coming from inside, heading out. So it's possible we'll walk right past a trap without setting it off, because it only works one way. Of course, we need to find that trap anyway, since we'll be coming back this way on our way out.”

Croy looked skeptical. “What makes you think there will be any more traps at all? There was enough power in those chains to decimate an army.”

Malden laughed. “I suppose there was. But you're a soldier, Croy. Tell me, do you put all your troops in one formation and just assume the enemy will attack head on? If you did that and they simply flanked you, you would lose every time. No, you need to have multiple ways of stopping your enemy. Herward said the elves were famous for fighting dirty, and we know the people who sealed them in here were terrified of them ever getting out. Fear can be good sometimes. Paranoia makes you think of everything. There will definitely be another trap. And it won't be magical.”

“No?” Mörget asked. He looked a little foolish, ducking down to keep from striking his head on the ceiling. “Why not? Magic works.”

It was Cythera who answered that. “Magic was a good choice for the trap outside—it doesn't wear off or rust or fall apart over time. But it isn't perfect. Anyone with arcane training and enough power can defeat a magical trap. And we know the elves were gifted in that regard.”

Malden nodded. He lifted his lantern high and looked back. The corridor had curved enough that he could no longer see the door behind him, nor anything in front of him. Judging by the echoes of his footfalls, the downward passage went on quite a ways. “It'll be a mechanical trap. That was one advantage the humans had over the elves, superior tools and metals.” He thought of something then, something nasty. “And of course, they had the dwarves helping them, didn't they?”

Slag looked away from his gaze. “Aye,” he said.

“I thought so. Humans didn't put those dwarven runes on the entrance and on the block in Mörget's shaft. So the humans who drove the elves in here had dwarven allies. Which begs the question of why the elves thought they would be safe in a dwarf city.”

Slag fidgeted with a piece of wire in his hands, but eventually he answered. “For a couple reasons,” he said. “For one, we'd already abandoned this place. The whole dwarven race had moved north by then. We knew the bloody humans were going to take this whole land, so we just got out of their way rather than fighting them for it.”

“You said there were a couple of reasons,” Malden pointed out.”

“Well,” Slag said, “I suppose the elves didn't know whose side we were on.”

“They thought you would be opposed to human intrusion as well,” Croy said, running one hand along the smooth wall of the passage.

“It probably helped that we told them as much.” Slag sighed deeply.

“What?” Malden asked, surprised.

“Eight hundred years ago, my people signed a treaty with yours. You didn't kill us, and we wouldn't fight you. There was more to it, of course, things we had to offer to keep you off our necks. We agreed to make steel for you, for instance. Truth be told it was a pretty lousy deal for us. We gave up a lot. But we knew it was the only fucking way we could survive.” He sighed again. Malden could tell he didn't want to say any of this aloud, but felt he owed them all an explanation for some reason. “Before that, before we signed the treaty, we were actually allied with the elves.”

“You were?” Croy asked.

“You have to understand,” Slag went on, “when you first showed up, looking like bloody apes, waving your iron spears around and claiming this land was yours, it didn't look like you had a chance. The elves had held this land for ten thousand years, or so the story went. We figured they'd make fucking mincemeat out of you and that would be that. So of course we allied with them. We're a practical people, in case you missed that fact. But once you started winning—when the elves started losing battles and such—maybe we switched teams. And maybe we did it in secret, all right?”

“So when the elves came here, looking for shelter,” Malden said, “they thought you were still their allies.”

“I'm not proud of what my ancestors did, except in how if they hadn't, I wouldn't fucking be here right now. The elves came to us for assistance when they knew they were going to lose. When there were so few of them left that they couldn't keep fighting. They asked us for counsel. We told them to come down here. It was a good defensible position to make a stand. It also had a back door.”

“The shaft that I found on the eastern side of the mountain,” Mörget said.

“Aye. Every dwarven city has its secret exits. Usually dozens of 'em. We told the elves they could pretend to hide here, then slip out to the east. There weren't so many humans on that side, back then. The only thing they didn't realize was that when we abandoned this city it started flooding almost immediately. The exit shaft was already under the water table. If they wanted to get out that way, they were going to need to hold their breath for a long fucking time.”

Mörget scowled. “I lost good men in that shaft. But it wasn't enough to flood the exit,” he said.

“No. The humans didn't think so. They didn't want even one elf to get out. So they told us to block the shafts. We slid stone blocks down from above, just to make bloody sure no elf got out. Now, an elf might be able to swim enough to get to the shaft, but nobody could hold their breath long enough to knock their way through fifty tons of granite.”

Malden cast his mind back through the ages and shivered. They came down this way full of hope, he thought. They marched down this very corridor thinking they were on their way to a new life. And all they found was darkness and death.

He was on the threshold of the scene of a great crime, he thought. How had his ancestors slept at night, afterward?

Probably just fine. As far as they were concerned, they had finally won a long and bitter war. One act of monumental treachery meant peace and safety for all their children. Yet surely, when they thought about what they'd done . . .

“The poor elves,” Cythera said, her voice thick with emotion. Clearly her thoughts had tended the same way Malden's had.

“Don't pity them overmuch,” Croy insisted. “They were evil, after all. A decadent and cruel race. They slaughtered our missionaries in ways I won't describe while a lady is listening. They worshipped nothing but their own ancestors. They even sacrificed their own people for magical power.”

Malden thought of what Slag had said, how he defined evil. It was what you called your vanquished enemies when you wrote the scrolls of history later. How much of what Croy said was true, and how much was made up after the fact, as an excuse for what had been done?

“What needed to be done, was done,” Mörget insisted. “That's all. You win a war any way you can, and worry about the casualties later.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

W
hen Malden found the trap, he had to smile. It was the most elegant kind of trap, and often the hardest to find—a hazard hidden in plain sight.

The spiral passage led downward for hundreds of feet and then opened into a wide arch looking out on a natural cavern far larger than their paltry light could limn. The walls on either side of the arch were of uncut rock, rough to the touch and streaked with mineral deposits that glittered when he moved his lantern over them. The floor of the cavern was made of blocks of rough-cut basalt. He could feel how uneven they were through his soft leather shoes. It looked like the dwarves hadn't cared enough about this chamber to ever bother finishing its construction. Malden knew how thorough dwarves were, though, and he was sure that was an intentional semblance.

Running through the middle of the cavern was an enormous crevasse in the rock, a canyon carved by some turbulent subterranean river aeons ago. He could hear water rushing by at the bottom of this defile, perhaps fifty feet below. It looked like a perfectly natural feature, a crack in the earth that even the dwarves could not heal. Malden wondered if it was more than met the eye. He tied his lantern to a rope and lowered it carefully down into the crack to get a look at its walls.

Just as he'd thought, the sides of the crevasse were smoothed out by dwarven tools. Every ledge had been rounded off, every crevice filled in with mortar. If you fell down into the crack, it would be impossible to climb back up. Yet to an uninquisitive eye, it looked perfectly natural.

The dwarves had placed a bridge across it, a wide, inviting path with high rails on either side to keep passersby from falling off the edge. A dozen men could walk abreast on the bridge—or rather, a dozen soldiers could march side by side. It looked like it could easily hold their weight. Nor was it a particularly long bridge, as the crevasse was only ten feet across.

To someone like Malden, who had spent years learning to look for subtle and carefully hidden traps, it positively screamed of danger.

He stopped Mörget before the barbarian could set foot on the bridge.

“Hold,” he said. “Let me take a look, first.”

Mörget scowled and studied the bridge. “It looks more sound than many a bridge I've crossed over in my time.”

“I have no doubt it will hold your weight—for a time,” Malden said. He tied off the rope holding his lantern so both his hands would be free, then picked another rope from the supplies. “Slag, drive a spike into that stone there,” he said, pointing at one of the basalt blocks, “and tie this rope to it. I trust your knots.”

“Oh, any knot I tie will hold the fucking moon down,” Slag insisted, perhaps thinking his workmanship was under question. He did as Malden asked, then handed the free end of the line to the thief.

“Look,” Malden said, “how this end of the bridge is so well supported.” He lay down on the basalt and peered underneath the bridge. A buttress of ornate stone scrollwork held it up. “Yet on the far side—it's not as strong.” The buttress there was cunningly carved to look much the same as its brother, but a close inspection showed it was made of thinner beams and the scrollwork looked lighter and finer. “Mörget,” he said, “take hold of this line and pay it out as I instruct.”

The barbarian did as he was told. Malden crawled forward and lowered himself carefully over the edge of the crevasse. Just as he'd thought, he was unable to find handholds in the smooth rock, and could only hang from the rope like a sinker on a fishing line. As he dangled, one foot against the wall to keep himself from spinning, he looked up at the near buttress from underneath.

In his lantern light there were clear seams in the scrollwork.

Also just as he'd thought.

“Give me six more feet of line,” he called, and his body jerked as the barbarian let the rope slacken and he dropped another six feet into the fissure. He had a moment of panic as he heard the hemp rope creak, but it held his weight. “All right, that should be enough.”

He put both of his feet against the stone wall of the crevasse and bent his knees up to his chest. Then with one quick spring he pushed against the wall and swung out on the rope, toward the far side of the gap. His fingers splayed outward to try to grab the far buttress, but he missed entirely and swung back, barely catching himself against the near wall before he smashed his teeth out on the rock.

“Malden!” Cythera cried, her face popping over the edge so she could look down at him.

He smiled with all the bravado he could muster and gave her a cheery wave.

“All's well,” he said. “I just misjudged the distance. Mörget, give me another three feet.”

The rope creaked again as Malden dropped deeper into the fissure. He braced his feet once more and pushed hard for another swing. This time he managed to grab onto the far side of the crevasse and haul himself up onto its rim before the rope swung back. “More rope,” he called, “and Slag, toss me a spike and your mallet.” Mörget paid out the line and Malden tied it off on the far side, yanking it tight so it stretched across the fissure like a bowstring. “Now,” he said, “everyone stand back.”

On the far side the others did as he said. Malden approached the bridge and tapped it with his toes. It held—he expected it to—but he made a point of not putting his full weight on it. He found his balance and struck it with his foot again, this time bringing his foot down as hard as he dared.

The bridge dropped under his blow, the whole span of it falling away as it swung down into the crevasse. The side of the bridge closest to Malden had been held up by only a weak latch, while the scrollwork buttress on the other side was in fact a massive hinge.

Malden looked down into the crevasse and saw swirling darkness below. Twenty, maybe thirty soldiers could have gotten onto the bridge before it fell, and all of them would have fallen to their deaths. They would have been the best knights the elves could muster, the vanguard of their army. The message would have been very clear.

Malden walked back across the crevasse on the tight rope he'd strung between the two spikes. Foot over foot, his arms held out at his sides for balance. He'd done it before a million times. He made a point of bowing toward Cythera before he leapt back to the safety of the basalt.

“The rest of you will have to go hand over hand, I'm afraid. A less dignified method to get across, but far safer,” he said.

They divided up the supplies into five knapsacks. Mörget took the largest share without complaint. Anything they couldn't carry they left behind as a cache for later. That significantly increased their mobility, but still it took the better part of an hour to get everyone across, each of them crawling along the rope, hand over hand, helping each other as much as they could. Cythera, surprisingly, had the hardest time of it. She was nimble enough, and so light the rope barely sagged under her weight, but she had to cross with her eyes clenched tightly shut. Malden knew the signs of someone with a fear of heights, and he spoke gentle words to urge her across before she opened her eyes and looked down. If she did that, he knew she would freeze up and be unable to cross at all.

He had a bad moment when Mörget started swinging across like a monkey, hand over hand with his legs dangling over the drop. The rope creaked and sagged as he stretched out its fibers and Malden worried it might just snap. Which he found he truly didn't want it to do. True, if Mörget fell here and perished in the water below, then his own life would become a jot less dangerous. But it would also mean he would have one less warrior on his side when they eventually met the demon.

No, let Mörget kill his beast—and then all bets were off, and the barbarian could get himself killed however he pleased. Until then, Malden thought, he would do his best to keep him alive.

The rope held, despite Mörget's antics. It was stout, strong stuff from the best of Ness's ropewalks, and it had never gotten wet or been coiled improperly. Malden had taken care of it himself during their journey—every thief knows that his life will some day depend on a strong rope, just as he knows he may one day swing from one. All of Cutbill's employees treated ropes with respect.

However, when they were all across, Croy looked back with skeptical eyes.

“It'll be hard getting back across the same way on our way out,” he said. “Especially if we're in a hurry.”

“You expect ghosts to chase us off?” Malden asked.

“Just considering all possibilities. That's something I learned from you.”

Malden sketched a bow in his direction. “You are too kind. All right, from here I think we'll be safe. That should be the last of the traps.” He strode across the basalt flagstones to a door in the far wall. This one stood barely five feet high. As Malden flung it open, he stepped back to bow and gesture through the door with one hand. “Mörget,” he said, “do watch your head.”

Had he not been so cavalier, he would have walked right through the doorway—and impaled himself on the iron spikes that came slamming through to meet him.