A Thief in the Night (26 page)

Chapter Forty-seven

C
roy and Mörget moved forward silently, taking light steps to avoid splashing in the water that covered the floor. They both had their swords drawn but held low so they wouldn't glimmer in the light.

There was definitely light ahead of them, far down the tunnel. They had extinguished their candles. Croy could see very little. But his eyes weren't playing tricks on him—a flickering radiance came down the aisle, glinting on the wet floor.

He was unable to dispel a nagging thought. Nothing they'd seen so far required fire. Nothing they'd seen suggested there was a desire for warmth or light in this forgotten place. The fire might have been natural. The fungus they'd seen lining the walls of the central shaft might be flammable, and some strange alchemy of forgotten places might have started a blaze on its own. But he thought not—the fire was glowing too steadily, as if it had been tended with care. And a natural fire down here would have spread quickly, given enough fuel, while this fire seemed to be carefully contained.

Which left only one possible conclusion: they were not alone in the Vincularium.

He already knew that the demon haunted the place. He'd also seen the countless revenants up on the top level. He understood that the ancient city was not completely abandoned. Yet this fire suggested that things were far more complicated than he'd previously believed. The demon didn't seem intelligent enough to use fire. The revenants were creatures of the cold and the dark—they had shunned Dawnbringer's light, so why would they make a fire of their own? No, there must be living creatures here. Living people, who needed to stay warm.

He should have known earlier, he thought. The flock of beetles and then the farm of mushrooms should have spelled it out clearly. Farms did not prosper on their own. Someone had to be cultivating the fungus. If someone didn't come by periodically to harvest the yield, the crop of mushrooms would have died and rotted long since.

He looked back at Mörget and thought of how to proceed. There was no telling how many enemies might be waiting by that fire. Yet Croy knew he had to get through them. They'd found no other path toward the upper levels. If he wanted to go up, he had to go through whoever tended that fire. If he wanted to rescue Cythera and Slag, he needed to keep advancing.

The racks on either side provided excellent cover, but there was no way to move forward without heading up the center aisle. It was also their only path of retreat, should there be more resistance ahead than the two of them could handle.

“Do you see any other path but to charge forward?” he whispered to the barbarian.

“I've rarely needed any other,” the barbarian replied.

Croy nodded. He frowned and looked forward again. Shadows flowed along the ceiling, as if someone had moved around the fire. “Together we run up there, as fast as we can, and surprise them.”

Mörget nodded. “As it should be.”

Croy shifted his grip on Ghostcutter's hilt. Then he held up three fingers. Mörget looked at them in incomprehension, then shrugged and ran forward, bellowing a war cry and brandishing Dawnbringer over his head.

For a second Croy watched the barbarian recede before him, aghast at how much noise Mörget made. He supposed it was honorable to let your enemies know you were coming, but still—

Oh, enough, Croy thought. Then he screamed, “For Skrae and her king!” and followed the barbarian in his headlong rush up the tunnel.

Croy could see nothing but Mörget's back. His feet kept slipping on the wet floor and his breath plumed out before him in the damp. His brains felt like they were rattling in his skull as his boots came crashing down, again and again, on the hard flagstones.

He thought he must be running to certain death—at least, certain death for someone. The long tunnel sped past him, rack after rack of mushrooms in their ordure, and then suddenly the tunnel opened up, widening out into a broad antechamber.

Mörget staggered to a stop. Croy saw the barbarian standing over a very small campfire, turning his head back and forth as he sought something. Croy drew up beside him and looked down to see buckets of water sitting by the fire. Nothing else.

“He disappeared before I could cut him down,” Mörget said. He sounded like a gambler who had just discovered a card cheat.

“He? Who did you see? I saw nothing,” Croy told the barbarian.

Mörget frowned. “There was one person here. Small, perhaps a youth.”

“A warrior of some kind? Was he wearing armor?”

“No.”

“Was he armed?” Croy asked.

“I do not think so. I do not know if it was even a male. It might have been a girl. It was very small. Yes. Probably a girl, judging by the noise she made. She screeched a bit, then ran that way.” Mörget pointed with Dawnbringer toward the wall of the tunnel. Croy saw no door there, not even a wide crack between the mortared bricks. “She simply vanished.”

“Cythera can do that,” Croy said, rubbing his chin. “She can make herself invisible, but only for a few moments at a time. You . . . you don't think it was Cythera?”

Mörget shook his head violently. “Definitely not. Cythera is bigger. You know, taller. And dresses in finer clothes. This girl wore only a much-patched shift.”

Croy stepped over to the wall. He pounded on the bricks with the pommel of his sword. The hollow thud he made suggested there was an open space behind the wall—but what of it? What kind of girl could just walk through a solid wall?

“Whoever she was, she's gone now.” Croy shook his head. He glanced down at the buckets by the fire. “I don't think she was a warrior at all.”

Mörget turned to stare at him. “No. No. She was . . . very small.”

Croy stared back. Was Mörget suffering a pang of conscience? If the girl had not fled, Croy was certain Mörget would have cut her down just on principle. Maybe he was doubting his whole philosophy, maybe he was wondering why he had devoted his life to mindless violence, and—

“I have not killed anything in days,” Mörget said. “Now, I am cheated!” He bellowed in rage at the unfairness of it all. “Magic! She must have used magic, to vanish in thin air like that. She must have been a sorceress. And I could not reach her in time.”

Croy frowned. He looked down at the buckets. They were simple, and crudely made from hammered sheets of tin. They leaked. “A witch, perhaps,” he admitted.

“Who knows what dark magic she was about?” Mörget thundered. “At least, I can say I kept her from practicing her foul art.”

Croy shook his head. The buckets didn't look like witch's cauldrons. They looked like the kind of simple implements one might find on a farm. He was pretty sure the girl had been tending the mushrooms, not some arcane ritual. “She must have been sent to wet down the floor of the farm tunnels. Mushrooms like the damp.”

“She was just here! And then she was gone. Magic, I swear!” Mörget looked farther up the tunnel where it ran ahead into darkness. There were more racks that way, identical to the ones behind them. “She did not go that way. She did not hide behind one of the racks. She was just—gone.”

“Hardly a wonder, in the dark like this,” Croy protested. He leaned against the brick wall. “We had no light ourselves, and—”

Behind him the wall shifted. He thought at first it was collapsing under his weight, and he jumped away. When he looked back, however, he saw that a whole section of the wall was mounted on hinges. It was a hidden door. It must not have been closed properly, and now it had popped open on its hinges.

He reached forward and got his fingernails around the edge of the door. With a simple tug it swung open before him, revealing a side tunnel—just wide and tall enough for one person to walk through at a time. A secret passage.

A fresh breeze ruffled Croy's hair.

“It smells better in there, at least.”

Chapter Forty-eight

M
alden heaved at the iron bar again, and the stone door grated against the floor. He put his back into it and grunted in frustration. Sweat made his hands slip and he jumped backward as the bar flew, spinning, to clatter on the floor once again.

He stripped off his cloak and pushed back the sleeves of his tunic.

“Do you want me to have a try?” Cythera asked.

Malden glanced over at Slag. The dwarf was lying on the floor, curled in a ball by the pain that wracked his muscles. His eyes were clamped shut and he was moaning softly. Better that than the screaming that came before, Malden supposed.

“I'm to blame for this,” Malden said, running his hands across his breeches to dry them. “If I'd been thinking clearly I would have seen that dart before it struck him.” He looked at Cythera's face, hoping to find compassion there.
No, there is no fault
, he expected her to say.
No, you are not to blame
.

“Yes,” she said instead. “His death is on your hands.”

Anger and guilt surged through Malden's chest. He grabbed up the bar and shoved it into the door frame once more. He braced his feet and pulled, and pulled, and—

—fell over backward as the door stopped resisting him and flew open on its hinges. The bar struck Malden's foot as it dropped to the flagstones, and he cried out as sudden pain raced up his leg.

“Damn! I think I might have broken a toe,” he said, hugging the foot toward him.

Cythera ignored him and walked over the threshold into the Hall of Treasures.

“Wait!” the thief called. “What if there are more traps?”

But she was already inside, carrying Slag's makeshift lantern with her. Malden rose to his feet—the toe hurt, but he doubted that it was really broken. He bent over Slag and helped the dwarf stand on shaky legs.

“Can you walk?” he asked.

“For this I can.” Slag stumbled forward, barely keeping his feet. Malden pulled the dwarf's arm around his waist and helped as best he could.

The room beyond the door was not large, at least by the standards of the rest of the Vincularium. It went back perhaps sixty feet and was a third as wide. Its ceiling was barely ten feet over Malden's head, and was vaulted with graceful stonework that looked more ornamental than functional.

The hall was filled with gold.

Each item in the room had its own pedestal or case. They all deserved special display. A wooden stand the size of a wardrobe but fronted with glass held a selection of crowns as delicate as birds' nests—woven of filigree, of gold and silver wire that held hundreds of gems aloft. A long case made entirely of crystal held rings in the shape of towers or horses or swords that curved around until their points touched their pommels. Each ring held a single perfect gem the size of a robin's egg. Along one wall hung tapestries made of cloth of platinum, cunningly worked with shining copper wire for contrast. The scenes the tapestries showed—including a view of the Vincularium from the top of the central shaft—were so finely detailed they might have been windows into a shimmering world.

A row of suits of armor lined the other wall, with additional suits mounted higher up to make a second array. One panoply was painted with black enamel, then worked with silver leaf to form a floral pattern so convoluted the eye could get lost in its twists and turns. Another suit was covered in gold-tipped spikes to give a fearsome aspect. Yet another looked to Malden as if it had been carved from stone.

Then there were the weapons. Axes and pikestaffs rose from the floor, gathered together by the hafts until they looked like deadly trees. The blades of some were inscribed with runes in a script so flowing, so elaborated with curlicues and sharply barbed serifs, that a single thorn rune could fill the entire available space. Others were engraved all over with characters so tiny Malden could not make out the individual runes.

There were cases of swords with blades so delicate and thin they looked like they would snap if they were lifted, or hilts so heavily encrusted with jewels that surely no hand could hold them. There were doubly recurved bows of laminated horn fitted with half a dozen strings—they looked like fairy harps to Malden.

The armor and weapons were so grand it took him a while to realize they all shared something in common, which was their small size. They were not made for humans, but for dwarves.

“It's illegal for a dwarf to use a weapon,” Malden said, admiring a sheaf of perfect daggers that stood like pins in a velvet cushion. The pommel of one was a ruby as big as his fist.

“It is now,” Slag explained. “Before we signed that damned treaty my people were hardy warriors. Lad, help me over to yon case of glassware. I'd stand on my own feet in this place.”

Malden brought Slag to the case in question, which was full of fantastically elaborate bottles, decanters, and ewers.

“When we left the Vincularium, we had to leave all our weapons behind. That was part of the agreement we made with your king.” Slag shook his head—a gesture that made him wince with pain. “We gave up a great deal.”

Cythera held the lantern high to look at a collection of objects at the far end of the room. Malden went to her side and then wondered why she bothered. Unlike the gold and gems in the cases, these works didn't seem like treasures at all. Bolts of linen stood next to barrels of perfectly normal arrows. There were pieces of driftwood polished until they shone like glass, and plain bottles of clear liquids, and pieces of rotting parchment inscribed with simple runes. Yet these mundane pieces were mounted and displayed with as much care and ostentation as the finest jewels and the best gem-inlaid cloisonné. Most surprising were the stones. Simple, spherical stones—a lot of them—that shone in the light for the smoothness of their surfaces, but were made of common granite, basalt, or limestone. Malden accounted them little more valuable than pebbles washed smooth by a river.

“What's this dross?” he asked. “It's hardly treasure.”

“To the dwarves who made those things, they were worth more than all the fucking gilt and samite in this room,” Slag said, and nodded at Cythera. “Lass, you know your runes well enough, but you misread the name of this place. This ain't the Hall of Treasures. It's the Hall of Masterpieces. It's understandable, though—in my language, the words are almost identical.”

“Masterpieces,” Malden said. “Like a journeyman would make?” In the guilds that ran Ness's many workshops and yards, there were three basic ranks of worker: apprentice, journeyman, and master. To attain the rank of master a journeyman was required to create some piece of especially fine work—a perfectly balanced sword, a cloak dyed a new color, or the like—which proved he'd learned his trade.

“Exactly like that,” Slag agreed, “except we take it more serious. When a dwarf figures out what craft he'll follow—stonework, goldsmithing, armoring, what have you—he spends five years' time making a perfect specimen of skill and design.”

“Five years?” Malden said. “For one piece? The masters must be slave-drivers.”

“While working on his masterpiece, a dwarf has no master. He gets no pay—he lives with his family, if they'll have him, and sleeps on stone, and eats crusts of bread.”

“The law requires this?”

“Fucking pride requires it! A dwarf with a second-rate masterpiece will never be able to look another dwarf in the eye. The masterpiece makes the man, do you see? Everyone knows how it turns out, and everyone judges the dwarf based on what they've seen. Reputation means everything to us. Yon shiny balls of stone you sneer at, Malden, are the credentials of a generation of the finest miners and sappers that ever lived. They were cut down from blocks bigger than this room, cut and worked and smoothed out until they were as round as the sodding moon. There's a long tradition of dwarves competing to see who could carve the most perfect sphere.”

Cythera picked up one of the pieces of polished driftwood. “That this would even last eight hundred years without rotting is a miracle,” she said. She held it high so Malden could see it had been varnished so many times it seemed to be embedded in a thin layer of glass. “Five years of work, on this one piece . . .”

“Methinks that dwarf picked the wrong career,” Malden said, shrugging. He was a thief, and he found the thought of so much hard work depressing. “All right, Slag, we're suitably awed. Now—which of these curios was it that made you cross half the world?”

The dwarf slumped against the case of glassware. “It should be over there,” he said. “Five enormous barrels worth. It should be right fucking . . . there.”

He pointed toward a corner of the room Malden had yet to explore.

An empty corner.