A Thief in the Night (27 page)

Chapter Forty-nine

“N
o, damn you,” Slag wheezed. “No! The book was clear. It was clear as fucking crystal! The barrels were stored here, in the Place of Long Shadows, in the Hall of Masterpieces . . . this is impossible. Impossible! The book said it, in black and white!”

“Books can be misprinted,” Malden suggested, though the excuse sounded lame even to him. “Or perhaps someone moved your treasure after it was published.”

“No. No!” Slag exclaimed. The force of his frustration was enough to send him into a coughing fit. “Trust me, this wouldn't have been removed. It was supposed to still be here when the elves were sealed inside. Blast!”

“I'm so sorry, Slag,” Cythera said, and tried to rub the dwarf's back.

Slag would not be comforted. He pulled away from her and slumped forward across a display case. “It was going to . . . it would have . . . oh, sod it! My entire future was in those barrels. This was going to end all my miseries. It was going to put me back on fucking top. And it's gone. It's fucking . . . gone.”

“But what was it?” Malden asked. He bent low and studied the floor where the barrels had supposedly been stored. A layer of dust—thinner than he might have expected—lay on the floor, but there were five large circles of bare stone where no dust had collected. “Were the barrels full of gold dust? Or maybe assorted gems of various sizes and cuts?”

“It was . . . a weapon,” Slag explained. He sank down to sit on the floor. Dark rings surrounded his eyes and Malden could hear him wheezing from across the room. “I don't claim to know how it worked, only that—it was lethal beyond anything—anything that had been seen before. The dwarves who worked here invented it . . . just before they left.” He shook his head and cringed in pain for a while.

“Don't strain yourself,” Cythera said, squatting down next to the dwarf. She mopped his face with a kerchief.

Slag reached up to bat her hand away, but he was too weak to properly resist her. “We only have sketchy notes on what it was, what it . . . did. I won't bore you with the details, lad. I only know it could have killed a knight in full armor from so far away he'd never see you coming. We never told the humans about it, of course—imagine the fucking disaster that might have caused, if they got their hands on it. But when the treaty was signed, and we were forbidden from . . . from—” He started coughing then, long, nasty paroxysms that left his face red with congested blood.

“You didn't want us to have that kind of power. We'd already done enough harm,” Malden conjectured. “So you didn't want to make us more deadly? I suppose I can see that. So you sealed up this magic weapon forever, and forgot it existed. Or almost.”

“Not . . . not . . .”

“Malden, let him rest,” Cythera insisted.

The thief nodded, and decided to ask no more questions—for the nonce.

“Not magic,” Slag finally choked out. “Not . . . magic at all, or . . . I wouldn't . . .” He lowered his head to his chest.

“Just be quiet now,” Cythera said.

Slag shook his head again, though this time it was voluntary. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“What? You hardly need apologize for anything right now,” Malden told him.

Slag scowled. “I led you both here. For fucking . . . nothing. I owe you an explanation. Though I'm . . . I . . . I'm loath to say it. There's some things you don't know about me, lad. Embarrassing things I never shared. I think . . . think . . .”

Slag's face went white again and he stared up at the door.

Carefully, painfully, he leaned forward.

“Slag, really, you need to lie down,” Cythera suggested.

The dwarf fought her hands away and this time he had the strength to do it. “I heard something. Put out the light,” he demanded in a hoarse whisper.

“But—” Cythera started, but Slag ignored her protest. He brought his own hand down hard on the flame of the lantern, snuffing it with a hiss and a curl of smoke. Malden blew out his own candle and they were left in utter darkness.

Not, however, in silence.

When his eyes were rendered useless by the lack of light, Malden's other senses grew stronger. Specifically his sense of hearing. He could make out, now, what had startled the dwarf so. A faint rapping sound. Something tapping on stone, not very far away, with bony fingers.

Perhaps—Malden's guts clenched at the thought—the revenants had followed them down from the top level. Perhaps even now a legion of undead elves was making its way toward the Hall of Masterpieces.

He tried not to breathe.

The rhythmic sound came closer. It was not like the sound a human makes while rapping his knuckles on a door. A human knocks two or three times, then stops to listen for a response. This was like a steady drumming, a cascade of taps that never stopped. There seemed no regular pattern to the sound—it came in fits and starts,
tip-tip-tap-RAP-tip-RAP-tick
—but it never faded away.

It came closer, inch by inch, until it was sounding on the open door.

Tap-tip-tick-RAP-RAP-tap.

And then it stopped.

If they can't hear us in here, Malden thought, perhaps they'll just go away. Perhaps they'll leave us alone and return to their graves, perhaps—

A light appeared outside the door. Long yellow beams moved up and down the wall, and around the edge of the door the light was bright enough to dazzle Malden's dark-adapted eyes.

Then a beam struck him square in the eye and he flinched backward—right into a sheaf of pikestaffs that fell clattering to the floor.

The door creaked open wide, and two figures stepped through, silhouetted by their own light. They were both rail-thin, but neither of them were tall enough to be revenants. One was barely four feet tall. The other only a quarter that height, the size of a cat.

As Malden's eyes recovered from being dazzled, he saw the light touch first Cythera, then Slag. The taller of the two newcomers laughed excitedly when Slag held up one arm to block the light. Then it set down its lantern, and for the first time Malden could see them properly.

The short one looked somewhat akin to a goblin. It had long floppy ears and a mouth full of crooked teeth. Its eyes were enormous and milky in color, with no pupils or irises. Its mangy hair was a shocking blue, and ran down its back in a wide pelt. Its hands and feet looked too large to be supported by its sticklike limbs, and it never quite stood still, instead bobbing up and down and slapping its feet. It tapped on the floor with long bony fingers, knocking randomly on the flagstones as if it couldn't help itself.

The taller of the two was a dwarf, dressed in leather coveralls. A female. Malden had never seen a dwarf woman before, and that alone would have been shock enough. She was as thin as Slag, though her hips and breasts were of generous proportion. Her long black hair had been tied up in a dozen braids that stuck straight out from her scalp. Her eyebrows met without interruption over the bridge of her nose, and her upper lip was dark with sparse hair. She had the smaller creature on a leather leash.

Her eyes were bright with malice.

She couldn't seem to stop laughing. She walked over to Slag crouched against a display case and leaned over to laugh in his face. “Looking for something in particular?” she asked.

Chapter Fifty

C
roy went first down the secret tunnel, Ghostcutter drawn and held before him. The flame of the candle in his other hand streamed behind the wick and fluttered dangerously, but never quite went out.

Behind him Mörget had difficulty fitting through the narrow passage. He only had to stoop a little to avoid hitting his head, but he had to walk nearly sideways to get his broad shoulders through.

The passage took a winding course that went now down, now up by a sharp incline, so that Croy almost put Ghostcutter away so he could have his hands free to help him climb. He decided against it—who knew what waited for them just ahead?—and was forced to stumble forward by finding footholds in the rough stone.

Such were in plentiful supply. He had little time to spare for thoughts of who made this tunnel, or why, but he knew it was no dwarf. The rock was crudely cut, marked everywhere with the square white scratches of a chisel. The ceiling was uneven, and more than once he bashed his head on a place where the tunnel had not been properly excavated. In places it grew so narrow that he had to squeeze through sideways himself, and it was only with vigorous wriggling and much grunting that Mörget kept up with him.

Yet the barbarian never complained, nor suggested they turn back. He shared with Croy a certain outlook on enemies who ran away from you when you approached. It was highly unlikely they would just run and leave you alone—in all likelihood, the farm girl, or whatever it was that Mörget had startled, was going to seek help. Presumably armed and dangerous help. For a knight like Croy, that meant only one course of action was thinkable. You rushed in, as fast as you could, to find your enemies before they had a chance to regroup.

Croy was sweating and breathing hard by the time he reached the end of the passage. It terminated in a featureless brick wall, just like the one that had led to this secret way. He pushed at it, expecting it to open easily like the secret door they'd found back in the mushroom farm. When it failed to budge, his brow furrowed and he kicked at it and struck it with his shoulder and considered digging into the mortar between the bricks with his belt knife.

“Let me see,” Mörget insisted, shoving his way past Croy. There was no room for them to stand side by side in the narrow tunnel so Croy squeezed backward, coming into far more contact with Mörget's flesh than he liked. Considering the fact that both of them were covered with manure, it was not a pleasant dance.

“It must open,” Mörget insisted. “We saw no side passages, or any other way for her to escape.”

“Unless there was another secret door, more cunningly hidden than the last,” Croy suggested. “It's possible this door is false. A brick facade placed over a dead end in the tunnel.”

“A false door?” Mörget asked.

“A false secret door,” Croy agreed.

“A false secret door trap,” Mörget growled. “Intended to leave us with no retreat possible, boxed in where we can't fight properly. Subtle! I like this not. I told you she was a sorceress. She's playing tricks on us.”

Croy grunted in dissent. “I'm sure now she was no practitioner of magic at all,” he said. “Just a simple mushroom farmer.”

“She is a sorceress, and she must be destroyed,” Mörget demanded. His rage seemed poorly contained.

Croy remembered something then. He recalled that when Mörget had told his story of coming from the eastern steppes to Ness, he claimed to have fought many sorcerers along his way. It was how he'd learned to fight like an Ancient Blade.

Now Croy wondered how many of those foes had been actual magicians—and how many just appeared so to the barbarian. How many innocents he might have slain in his berserker fury. The thought made Croy's blood run cold. Mörget seemed less than interested in rescuing Cythera and Slag as well—he was far more determined to find his demon, regardless of whether Croy's friends survived the quest.

For the first time Croy began to wonder just how honorable a companion Mörget might be. Croy had spent time guarding the mountain passes against barbarian invasions. He'd always been told that the easterners were vicious, savage people, barely human and incapable of moral behavior. When he first met Mörget and saw he bore an Ancient Blade, he'd come to believe that was all just prejudice, that it was possible for a barbarian to be an honorable warrior and a good man.

He tried to fight off such doubts. They were no help at that particular moment. “Come,” he said. “Let's go back. There must be another way up—some stairwell that will take us more directly to Cythera and Slag, and—”

Mörget was beyond talking, at that point.

The barbarian roared and charged at the wall with his shoulder, hard enough, it seemed to Croy, to smash his own bones if the bricks didn't yield.

Luckily, they did. The door shifted an inch or two, letting in a gust of foul-smelling air. Croy wrinkled his nose. At least this new reek didn't smell of excrement. Instead it stank of rotting vegetables and spoiled meat.

“Damn your tricks, sorceress!” Mörget cursed, and then struck the door again, hard enough to make the tunnel shake. The door shrieked as it opened another few inches—and then Croy winced as he heard something heavy and metallic fall away from the door. It clattered and rang as it fell to crash on a floor on the far side.

“Now at least they know we're coming,” Croy said. He was not prone to sarcasm, normally. Maybe Malden had been rubbing off on him.

“That just makes for a fairer fight,” Mörget replied. He pushed the door again and it opened easily. It must have been barred from the far side, that was all.

Mörget slipped through the opening and Croy followed close behind—just close enough that he could grab the barbarian's shoulders and pull him back before he fell to his death. Beyond the brick door was a narrow ledge looking out over a vast room. The floor of the room was a good fifty feet below them.

Mörget shouted in anger and struck the wall behind him with a closed fist. The blow made an echoing boom that rolled around the big room for long seconds.

We may not surprise them, Croy thought, but if luck is with us we'll scare them senseless.

Candlelight revealed few details of the room beyond, but enough at least to give Croy some idea of how to proceed. The ledge was only six inches wide, part of a stringcourse that ran along the wall. This at least was dwarven architecture—the stringcourse was made of carved dwarven runes, hundreds of them, with raised dots between every six or seven runes, probably to mark the end of one word and the start of another. Below the stringcourse someone had made a very crude ladder by chiseling holes into the wall for handholds.

Croy sheathed Ghostcutter and started down, lacking any better plan. He had never been a skilled climber, but he went down as quickly as he could, clinging desperately to the handholds.

They were too small for human hands, really, but he found he could grip them with a few fingers, and use other handholds for the tips of his boots. Carefully, and far slower than he would have liked, he climbed down the wall to the floor below. He was hampered in this by the need to hold his candle in one hand even as he climbed. He dropped the last five feet to the floor and unsheathed his sword the second he was standing on solid ground.

Behind him Mörget came down much faster, with Dawnbringer clamped tight between his teeth.

By the time the barbarian dropped light as a feather to the flagstones, Croy had made out more of the chamber. The room was perhaps a hundred feet long, and half that wide. Its walls were of fine marble veined with a deep green. No furniture, machinery, or other fixtures filled the space, but at one end a massive throne had been carved to abut the wall, a deep chair raised up on six steps of joined marble blocks. “An audience chamber. Or perhaps a place of judgment,” Croy said.

“Once upon a time. Now it's a midden,” Mörget replied.

They were both correct. At their feet lay the iron bar that had barred the secret door above them. It had dug a shallow gouge in the floor when it struck. It was, however, far from the only thing strewn across the floor. Rags, bits of broken wood, and countless pieces of cave beetle shell had been dumped here without heed. The floor was thick with rotting meat and cut-up pieces of mushrooms. Entire fish skeletons crunched underfoot.

None of it was fresh—but it was new. This was not garbage dumped by dwarves in ages past. Someone living had used this chamber to store their refuse.

“Gah!” Mörget shouted, and lifted up one boot to stare at its underside. The sole was clotted with fish guts. “What's next? Will we have to crawl through a charnel house before we find this demon? Or perhaps a latrine?”

“I don't think so,” Croy said. He pointed with Ghostcutter at the far side of the chamber. A massive arched doorway stood there, open to darkness.

Oozing across the threshold was a thing perhaps fifteen feet in length, though its shape constantly changed so it was hard to tell. It had no fixed form, instead rolling forward like living water. Its skin looked slimy to the touch, and underneath could be seen shapes like organs and even faces, pressing upward against the skin in mute screams of torment.

“That's it, isn't it?” Croy asked.

“Oh, aye!” Mörget said, and let out a booming laugh that made the whole marble chamber buzz.