A Thief in the Night (49 page)

Chapter One Hundred

T
he danger wasn't over. Behind them the grotto began to collapse, even as the last elves pulled their way up through the tunnel and into the open air. Malden and Slag helped injured elves out of the cave mouth, while Croy and Aethil directed the others to head down the mountainside as fast as they could run.

The elves looked startled as they emerged, unable to understand where they were or what it meant. Malden figured that their confusion might just save them. If they stopped to think about what had just happened, they might despair and stop moving.

And that would be fatal. The whole mountain shook, again and again. High overhead snow and rocks were cascading down. The peak of the mountain looked far different to Malden than when he first saw it. Cloudblade, Croy had called it—now it looked more like a dozen blades, tilting against one another. As he watched, terrified, one of the blades collapsed and shattered as it struck the slope beneath.

“That's the last of them, son,” Slag shouted over the deafening rumble of a mountain taking itself to pieces. “Everyone's clear! Now, scarper for dear fucking life!”

Malden didn't have to be told twice. He ran down the slope, jumping over rocks and rolling every time the shaking earth threw him off his feet. He whooped in panic but kept moving, running, always downward, always away from the rocks that came bouncing and shooting past him. A stone the size of his fist shot past his ear fast as an arrow from a bow. Grit filled his mouth and nose so he could barely breathe.

He didn't stop running until he was suddenly going uphill again, and then only because he was at the end of his physical endurance. He kept climbing, as fast as his muscles would let him, even as the top of Cloudblade disappeared in a vast roil of dust and vapor, even as the earth bounced and heaved underneath him. He kept climbing long after his fingertips bled, long after the pain in his side, in his lungs, in his cuts and bruises and countless scrapes, had devoured every rational thought in his head.

And then—finally—he climbed up over one last rock and before him stood an open fortress gate, beyond which hundreds of angular elfin faces looked out at him. Elves, and Croy and Cythera, and Slag—and Herward.

He had made it to the fort that Herward the hermit called his home.

Malden hurried inside. The gate was slammed shut behind him. He threw himself full length on the ground. The world was still moving, though not as violently as before. And then he did nothing for a long while but breathe, and stare up at the smoke and dust in the air, and finally—finally—long after the rumbling and the shrieking of broken rock and the howling winds of dust had ground away, he looked up once more, and saw blue sky over his head.

Nothing but blue sky above him, as far as he could see.

When he could hear again, he heard the lamentation of the elves. They had lost everything—their home, their ancestors, their Hieromagus. Everything but their lives. He heard someone sobbing then and he turned his head to the side. Across the courtyard of the fortress he saw Cythera weeping by herself.

He went over and squatted next to her. He did not speak.

“He knew,” Cythera said quietly. “The Hieromagus had seen the future. He saw
this
, all of this. In his last moments, his mind spoke directly to my mind. For an instant I saw into his heart. He knew that what he'd seen could not be changed. That this was the only way for his people to survive.”

“What are you saying?” Malden asked her.

“He wasn't our enemy. He was never our enemy. Everything he did was to lead us to this moment. He was deeply confused, Malden, lost in time—so lost he couldn't just tell us what he was doing. So it looked like he was our enemy, but . . . no.”

“Then why did he resist us so fiercely?”

“But that's just it—he didn't. He helped us every way he could,” she explained. “It was he who gave Aethil the love potion—so that when the time came, when Slag called on her to be a true queen, she would listen. His idea to release us from the gaol, and let us see so much of his domain—so we would understand, and know his people were not evil. That once we lived together, and could again.” She shook her head. “Even at the end, even in the passage back there. He wasn't trying to hurt me when he poured those curses into me. Malden! He knew it was the only way to open the passage. He knew only I could do it. He spoke to me, in silence, with his last thought before he died.”

“What did he say?” Malden asked.

“ ‘Save my people. Show them a forest, and let them live there.' He knew, the whole time, how this would end. And he sacrificed everything to make sure we lived.”

Croy came over and held Cythera close and kissed the top of her head. “He was a true leader, willing to die for what he believed in. Not evil at all. Just like Mörget, who died to destroy the demon he'd pledged himself against. They were both heroes.”

“If you like,” Cythera said.

Malden watched them clutch each other tightly and tried not to let jealousy overcome him. He walked away, to a corner of the courtyard where he could be mostly alone. Then he took the piece of parchment out of his tunic. The one he'd found on Prestwicke's body.

He started to unfold it, but before he could Aethil stood up in the center of the courtyard and called out, “Sir Croy? Where is Sir Croy?”

Before Croy could answer her, Slag jumped up and waved his arms in the air. “Over here, darling,” he called back.

Aethil ran to the dwarf and lifted him off the ground in a passionate embrace. “Sir Croy, you are a noble knight indeed. You have saved my people from utter destruction. The time ahead will be fraught with difficulties. We will need to learn once more how to live above the ground. But we will live. We will live, thanks to you. My love, I cannot repay you, ever, for all you have done. Ask of me any reward you would have, any favor, any liberty you desire—”

The real Croy cleared his throat.

Malden saw Slag's face flush red. “Aethil, my, uh, my dear, sweet, forgiving Aethil,” the dwarf said. “Let's go somewhere private.”

“Oh, yes!” Aethil exclaimed.

“To . . . talk. There's something I need to tell you.”

Malden smiled, but could not bring himself to laugh.

He had other thoughts on his mind. Carefully, he unfolded the parchment, and studied the words written on it. There weren't many. There was a short description of his own physical appearance, and a list of the taverns in Ness he was known to frequent, and that was all. Information that might be useful to an assassin looking to track his target. There was no formal warrant for the thief's death, no flowery language about why it was justified. No explanation at all as to why he had to die.

Nor was there any signature. Yet at the bottom of the page there was a small mark, a crude drawing. It showed a heart, transfixed by a key.

Epilogue

T
he water surged furiously, smashing its way back and forth through the submerged shaft. Pebbles and small stones went streaming past like shots from a thousand slings, smashing into his body and cutting his skin to ribbons. The last trapped breath in his lungs, long since gone stale, sought desperately to get out. It pushed at his battered rib cage and filled his mouth, yet opening his lips now would mean certain death by drowning.

It was impossible to swim up the shaft. It shook wildly every second, and he could feel the immense pressure of water building behind him as parts of it collapsed. His cloak wrapped around him like the coils of a constricting serpent. He tore it away and kicked to propel himself up the passage, the water pushing him from behind like the cork in a bottle of shaken beer.

He bounced off the walls of the shaft many times, hard enough that he could barely feel his arms as he was launched out of the mouth of the shaft, back into the clean sunlight of the surface world. The shaft was set into the face of a sheer cliff, and the water that came spurting out fell away into open air. It was all he could do to grab at the edges of the shaft's mouth to avoid being hurled into the chasm below. With fingers like iron claws, he dug into the rock and held on for dear life. He could only watch as the body of a dead elf was ejected from the shaft and went spinning down into empty space below. When he heard the crunch of the elf's eventual impact, he winced and looked down to see the corpse in a heap on the rocks far below.

Eventually the water subsided, filling the shaft but no longer lapping over its edge. He climbed down the cliff face, finding easy handholds in the broken rock.

He knew this cliff.

When he had thrown himself into the central shaft of the Vincularium, a bare moment after he'd touched flame to the black powder in the ancient dwarven barrels, he had not expected to live. He'd been thrown this way and that by the explosions and the shifting ground, tossed about with the water until he couldn't even think straight. He had fully expected to die. Yet somehow his body had been sucked into one of the emergency escape shafts—the same one, in fact, that he had watched the demon slither through years earlier. The pressure of the water behind him had been enough to shoot him free just before the mountain collapsed inward on itself.

And now—now he was still alive.

The landscape before him he knew. It was the land of his birth, the eastern steppes of the clans. He turned and looked back, and looked for the familiar shape of the mountain Cloudblade, that stood as a sentinel between this land and the more civilized kingdom of Skrae, to the west.

The mountain was gone.

Utterly gone.

In its place was a wide valley of broken rock, filled with smoke and roiling dust. When the Vincularium collapsed, it had taken Cloudblade with it. Now there was a gap in the Whitewall. What had been an impassible barrier of rock and snow that no man could climb was now . . . open. The mountain had fallen and become a pass. A serviceable, if rugged, new pass through the mountains. A pass so wide that an army could march through it.

Looking out on what he'd wrought, Mörget tilted his head back and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

Acknowledgments

A criminal mastermind is only as good as his co-conspirators. The usual suspects are responsible for the contents of this book as much as me: Alex Lencicki (wheels), Russell Galen (the bagman), Diana Gill (demolitions expert), and Will Hinton (eagle-eyed lookout) aided and abetted its creation. Fred Van Lente was the perfect inside man. I could not have asked for a better crew of accomplices.

D
AVID
C
HANDLER

New York City, 2011

If you enjoyed DEN OF THIEVES and

A THIEF IN THE NIGHT,

don't miss the next adventure in

The Ancient Blades Trilogy,

HONOR AMONG THIEVES

Prologue

T
he
Free City of Ness was known around the world as a hotbed of thievery, and one
man alone was responsible for that reputation. Cutbill, master of that city's
guild of thieves, controlled almost every aspect of clandestine commerce within
its walls—from extortion to pickpocketing, from blackmail to shoplifting he
oversaw a great empire of crime. His fingers were in far more pies than anyone
even realized, and his ambitions far greater than simple acquisition of
wealth—and far broader-reaching than the affairs of just one city. His interests
lay in every corner of the globe and his spies were everywhere.

As a result he received a fair volume of mail
every day.

In his office under the streets of Ness he went
through this pile of correspondence with the aid of only one assistant. Lockjaw,
an elderly thief with a legendary reputation was always there when Cutbill
opened his letters. There were two reasons why Lockjaw held this privileged
responsibility—for one, Lockjaw was famous for his discretion. He'd received his
sobriquet for the fact he never revealed a secret. The other reason was that
he'd never learned to read.

It was Lockjaw's duty to receive the
correspondence, usually from messengers who stuck around only long enough to get
paid, and to comment on each message as Cutbill told him its contents. If
Lockjaw wondered why such a clever man wanted his untutored opinion, he never
asked.

“Interesting,” Cutbill said, holding a piece of
parchment up to the light. “This is from the dwarven kingdom. It seems they've
invented a new machine up there. Some kind of winepress that churns out books
instead of vintage.”

The old thief scowled. “That right? Do they
come out soaking wet?”

“I imagine that would be a defect in the
process,” Cutbill agreed. “Still. If it works, it could produce books at a
fraction of the cost a copyist charges now.”

“Bad news, then,” Lockjaw said.

“Oh?”

“Books is expensive,” the thief explained.
“There's good money in stealing 'em. If they go cheap all of a sudden we'd be
out of a profitable racket.”

Cutbill nodded and put the letter aside, taking
up another. “It'll probably come to nothing, this book press.” He slit open the
letter in his hand with a knife and scanned its contents. “News from our friend
in the north. It looks like Maelfing will be at war with Skilfing by next
summer. Over fishing rights, of course.”

“That lot in the northern kingdoms is always
fighting about something,” Lockjaw pointed out. “You'd figure they'd have sorted
everything out by now.”

“The king of Skrae certainly hopes they never
do,” Cutbill told him. “As long as they keep at each other's throats, our
northern border will remain secure. Pass me that packet, will you?”

The letter in question was written on a scroll
of vellum wrapped in thin leather. Cutbill broke its seal and spread it out
across his desk, peering at it from only a few inches away. “This is from our
man in the high pass of the Whitewall Mountains.”

“What could possibly happen in a desolated
place like that?” Lockjaw asked.

“Nothing, nothing at all,” Cutbill said. He
looked up at the thief. “I pay my man there to make sure it stays that way. He
read some more, and opened his mouth to make another comment—and then closed it
again, his teeth clicking together. “Oh,” he said.

Lockjaw held his peace and waited to hear what
Cutbill had found.

The master of the guild of thieves, however,
was unforthcoming. He rolled the scroll back up and shoved the whole thing in a
charcoal brazier used to keep the office warm. Soon the scroll had caught flame
and in a moment it was nothing but ashes.

Lockjaw raised an eyebrow, but said
nothing.

Whatever was on that scroll clearly wasn't
meant to be shared, even with Cutbill's most trusted associate. Which meant it
had to be pretty important, Lockjaw figured. More so than who was stealing from
whom or where the bodies were buried.

Cutbill went over to his ledger—the master
account of all his dealings, and one of the most secret books on the continent.
It contained every detail of all the crime that took place in Ness, as well as
many things no one had ever heard of outside of this room. He opened it to a
page near the back, then laid his knife across one of the pages, perhaps to keep
it from fluttering out of place. Lockjaw noticed that this page was different
from the others. Those were filled with columns of neat figures, endless rows of
numbers. This page only held a single block of text, like a short message.

“Old man,” Cutbill said, then, “could you do me
a favor and pour me a cup of wine? My throat feels suddenly raw.”

Cutbill had never asked for such a thing
before. The man had enough enemies in the world that he made a point of always
pouring his own wine—or having someone taste it before him. Lockjaw wondered
what had changed, but he shrugged and did as he was told. He was getting paid
for his time. He went to a table over by the door and poured a generous cup,
then turned around again to hand it to his boss.

Except Cutbill wasn't there anymore.

That in itself wasn't so surprising. There were
dozens of secret passages in Cutbill's lair, and only the guildmaster knew them
all or where they led. Nor was it surprising that Cutbill would leave the room
so abruptly. Cautious to a nicety, he always kept his movements secret.

No, what was surprising was that he didn't come
back.

He had effectively vanished from the face of
the world.

Day after day Lockjaw—and the rest of Ness's
thieves—waited for his return. No sign of him was found, nor any message
received. Cutbill's operation began to falter in his absence—thieves stopped
paying their dues to the guild, citizens under Cutbill's protection were
suddenly vulnerable to theft, what coin did come in piled up uncounted and was
spent on frivolous expenditures. Half of these excesses were committed in the
belief that Cutbill, who had always run a tight ship, would be so offended he
would have to come back just to put things in order.

But Cutbill left no trace, wherever he'd
traveled.

It was quite a while before anyone thought to
check the ledger, and the message Cutbill had so carefully marked.