A Thief in the Night (22 page)

Chapter Thirty-nine

T
hey had not had the presence of mind to gather up any of the lanterns during their descent to the gallery. What little light Malden had to see by came from above, and after a short while the revenants must have smashed the lanterns and suddenly the three of them were in total darkness.

“Blast,” Slag swore. Malden heard him go through his pack. “I have candles, but no way to make a fucking light. Malden, do you have a tinderbox or—”

Green light burst from Cythera's palms. It was a sickly flame, a color no decent fire should ever be. “Quickly,” she said. “I'm using the magic I stole from the revenant. It won't last long.”

Slag rushed to get a candle's wick into the flame. Once it was burning—with a wholesome yellow light—Cythera let the green flame sputter out again.

“My thanks, lass,” the dwarf said. He held the candle up to show her face. It was streaked with tears but she seemed to have recovered a measure of composure.

“I'm fine,” she told him. She looked up at Malden next. “I'm sure he's still alive. But you're right, we can't get to him now. We don't have enough rope. So we need to find another way down.”

Malden inhaled deeply. “I think, perhaps, the best way to do that would be to follow his own advice. That we should find a way out of the Vincularium altogether. Slag, you said there would be more than one escape shaft. I'm sure they're all sealed tight, but with a little work, maybe we can—”

“I can't just leave Croy here,” Cythera said.

“Just so we can go and get some help,” Malden assured her. “Even if we just go and fetch Herward to help us look.”

“Croy sacrificed his own—” Cythera closed her eyes and breathed deeply for a minute. “He took a great risk for you. He might have died making sure you got down here safely. Will you run away now, when he needs the same consideration in return?”

“What good is his sacrifice, if we all get killed now?” Malden demanded.

“What good is a man, who will not risk a little to save his friend?”

“Are you calling me a coward?” Malden demanded. “Are you?”

“Everyone knows what you are,” Cythera seethed back.

Malden's eyes went wide with rage. “At least I'm sensible enough to know when a cause is lost, and to—”

“How dare you.” Her eyes flared with anger. She kept her lips pressed tightly together, as if afraid the next thing out of her mouth would be some devastating curse. She said nothing, though. She must have understood he was right. Saying nothing more, she turned away from him and strode off into the darkness. Only a few paces, though—not so far that he couldn't see her back.

“You're acting like a fool,” he told her, because he couldn't help himself.

She whirled around to face him, and he was certain he'd made a terrible mistake. Cythera was no witch but it didn't take much magic to curse someone. She could turn his guts to jelly, or his skin to glass, with just an oath.

It was Slag who saved him, since he was incapable of backing down himself. “Hold! Hold,” the dwarf said, coming between them. “Be at peace, both of you. Fucking humans. So swift to take offense. You should know that both of you want the same damn thing.”

Malden turned to face the dwarf. “We do?”

Cythera presented her back to them both.

Slag shook his head and looked out into the darkness. “She wants to go down below, to find her betrothed. You want to find an escape shaft. I can guarantee you there's none on this level. This place,” he said, waving behind him with his free hand, “is all shops. We need to descend, to where the dwarves had their homes. That's where the shafts will be.” He lifted the candle high.

For the first time, Malden actually looked at where he'd ended up.

The gallery was just a wide opening in the shaft, but beyond it lay a long, broad tunnel lined with low buildings. Each structure had only three walls and no roof—they were more stalls than true buildings. Inside most there stood a counter at waist height for a dwarf, about two feet off the ground. Each stall was festooned with multiple signs, engraved in dwarven runes that Malden couldn't read.

“So this is a dwarven marketplace?” he asked.

“It was, once,” Slag corrected. His face brightened a little, to see the traces of his ancestors. “Imagine the kinds of merchandise you could get in a place like this. Rare ores, clever tools, exotic fabrics . . . and the trade goods, things we would bargain for with the elves and then you humans. There would have been hundreds of dwarves here, any time of the day or night, driving hard bargains, making alliances for trade, speculating on prices—”

“Robbing each other blind,” Malden said. He lit a candle of his own and went to the nearest stall. “There's no security here at all. I can see three different ways to rob one of these shops while the proprietor was standing at his own counter.”

“We don't fucking steal from each other, lad,” Slag said.

Malden turned to face him and raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Never. It's unthinkable for a dwarf to turn to crime. Why would he? There's always work to be done in the mines, for any that needs money. Good, honest work. I've never understood why you humans would breed so fast you had excess people just lying around, not a thing to do, and not enough food to feed 'em.” He shook his head. “Why, crime's unknown in
our
cities. I suppose we murder each other, now and again, when some bastard deserves it. But thievery's not in our nature.”

Malden gave him a sly smile. “It's in yours, though. You work for Cutbill.”

“Not as a thief,” the dwarf insisted.

“No, you just make the tools that human thieves use.”

Slag grunted in displeasure. “We make swords and spears, too, but we don't kill folk.”

“That just makes you an accomplice.” Malden wouldn't let it go. He was still burning with anger from when Cythera had called him a coward. “You're leaving something out, Slag. There's something you're not telling me.”

“Oh, be still, lad,” Slag said, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

“Every liar has a tell. Some small twitch of the mouth as if the lie stings them on the way out. A tendency to tap their foot in fear of being discovered. Or perhaps they close their eyes when they deviate from the truth. I'm not sure exactly what yours is, but I know you're giving me half-truths.”

“Enough of this,” Cythera said. She shrugged her pack onto her shoulders and headed down the double row of stalls. “You think the way down is through here?” she asked.

“Aye,” Slag confirmed.

“Then let's get moving. Malden, you can insult and bully us when it's time to rest. Right now I expect you to walk.”

Malden winced. He didn't care for this change of disposition in Cythera, not at all. “As milady wishes, of course,” he said, and sketched a courtly bow.

“Save the flattery for later as well.”

Chapter Forty

T
he marketplace corridor led hundreds of feet back from the shaft. In its center it widened into a broad plaza where the stalls gave way to larger, more elaborate shops—shops with four walls, and even some tall enough to reach the ceiling. Their doorways stood open, showing only darkness inside.

“There would have been curtains in the door frames,” Slag said, gesturing at one gaping portal. “They rotted away centuries ago, of course. Fucking time steals everything of value.”

“Time's the greatest thief of all,” Malden agreed. “What's that?”

He pointed at a massive pillar that stood in the exact center of the plaza, wider around than any of the shops. It did not run straight from the floor to the ceiling, but arced in a subtle curve. Thousands of brass tacks had been driven into the stone, at eye level for a dwarf.

“The tacks? The dwarves who lived here would post messages to one another by tacking them to yon pillar. The bits of parchment are long gone.”

“No,” Malden said, “the—the thing the tacks are driven into.”

“Hmm? Oh. That, son, is one of three main support columns of the entire city.” Slag went over to pat it with one hand. “Now this is something. I did a little mathematics in my head before and the numbers are just beautiful. This place is a masterpiece. A fucking jewel. The whole weight of the mountain rests on those three pillars. They run all the way up and down—we saw their top ends on the cemetery level, where we came in.”

“Only three columns to hold up so much?” Malden asked, feeling like the ceiling might come crashing down at any moment.

“They must be reinforced, somehow.”

“By magic?” Cythera asked.

“Nah, lass, we never relied on anything so damnably fickle. They're reinforced with . . . I don't know, on the inside—maybe there's solid metal inside the stone. How they got it in, how they could forge beams so long, or how they could move them once they cooled . . . I'll admit I don't know the specifics. This is far beyond anything my people could build today.”

“If it holds up so much,” Malden asked, “shouldn't it be straight? Even I know a bent pillar won't carry much weight.”

“Ah, but that's part of the genius! That's to take the strain when they're shifted.”

Malden frowned. “Shifted? What could possibly move something so big? And if they're rooted in the rock of the mountain, surely they're as stable as the ground itself.”

“But that's the thing of it, lad. The ground moves all the time. In winter ice builds up and cracks open rocks. In summer the sun heats the outside of Cloudblade and the rocks expand.”

“Rocks . . . expand?”

Slag threw his head back and looked up at the ceiling. “Just take my word for it. The whole mountain moves, all the time. It's moving right now, just so slowly you can't see it. I know I'm not making this clear, but—you know how a drumhead needs to be tightened, ever so often?”

“I've never been very musical,” Malden confessed.

Slag grunted in frustration. “Again, take my word for it. Most things expand when they get hot, and contract when they get cold.”

“What kind of things?”

“Every fucking thing!” Slag threw up his hands in disgust. “Well, water doesn't. Water expands when it gets colder. But—everything else, more or less. All right?” The candle he held guttered and nearly went out. “There's no use explaining. Just know the mountain moves. If it rested on straight columns, it would just collapse whenever it moved up and down. The curved columns have a little give in 'em. They compress, just a little, to take the strain, then release that pressure when the forces equalize. Like the springs I mounted under our wagon, a couple days ago.”

Malden was utterly lost. “Does it work?”

“This place ain't collapsed in a thousand fucking years. So yes.”

“Ah. Good, then.”

Cythera lifted her candle high and pointed farther down the marketplace corridor. Ahead of them it narrowed again. “Now that's settled, can we get on with this? Slag, you said there was a stairway leading down to the next floor, through here.”

“Should be. Only it's not a stairway.”

“I'll slide down a pole if I have to.” Cythera led them down the corridor until they reached its end. The corridor emptied into a circular room with a vaulted ceiling. In the center of the room a round hole had been cut in the floor, and an identical hole opened above it in the ceiling. A thick chain ran through one and out the other.

“The House of Chains indeed,” Malden said.

“This is a lift. It operates by the principle of—”

Malden's eyes went wide as he expected the dwarf to give him another lecture on whatever kind of magic the dwarves had invented here, which he was sure wasn't magic because everyone knew that dwarves didn't use magic. Except it would sound like magic, and work like magic. Rocks expanding in the sun. Ice cracking open the entire world. He could study a hundred years, he imagined, and not understand a word.

“Oh, never fucking mind. Take this.” Slag handed Malden his candle. Then the dwarf grabbed the chain and heaved downward on it. It took his weight but didn't move. “It's stuck. Not too surprising, but damned inconvenient. You two wait here—I'll be right back.” He climbed up the chain, hand over hand, and disappeared into the hole in the ceiling.

Leaving Malden and Cythera alone.

Malden knew he should say nothing. Cythera was sick with worry for Croy, and he should have let her be. The silence between them was unbearable, though. He was almost able to convince himself he was helping when he said, “I know you don't want to hear this, but there's a chance Croy is dead.”

She stabbed one finger in his face. “If you say that again—”

He held up his hand for peace. “Cythera, believe me, I don't want him to be dead. I'm merely suggesting it might be worth considering what that means, just in case.” He grimaced. “On the off chance.”

“Liar,” she said.

“I didn't say he
was
, just that he
might
be d—”

“You lied when you said you didn't want him to be dead.” She stepped close to him and he expected her to slap him across the face. She didn't, though. She looked too angry to lift her hand. “Croy,” she said, quite slowly, quite deliberately, “was in your way. You persist in this delusion that I'm secretly in love with you, and that I'm only betrothed to Croy for his money. You must imagine that if he was dead, then you could just scoop me up. Steal me away from him with no consequences.”

“That's not fair,” he insisted.

“It's true. The truth doesn't have to be fair.”

“Damn you, woman. I—”

Malden stopped talking when the chain in the middle of the room started to rattle. He stepped back and his free hand went to the hilt of Acidtongue. Then a very strange thing happened, wholly outside the realm of Malden's experience.

A little room came down out of the ceiling and stopped exactly flush with the floor. Perhaps “room” was the wrong word. It was a cage of bronze bars, about five feet high and eight feet across. It had a door in the front that swung open, so they could see Slag standing inside. His hands were covered in grease that he wiped on a piece of rag. “Come in, then,” he said, “if you're in such a bloody rush to go down. This is faster than any stairway.”