A thief in the night abt-2

by David Chandler

  Not that he would probably want to.

  No one had been in that room for centuries, he thought. And the last people to come through this way-the elves-had good reason to regret it. They must have believed they’d found a safe haven, a place they could fortify in their war against humanity. Instead they’d found their deaths.

  Would the darkness in such a place, abandoned for so long, begin to congeal? Would it take on some semblance of life-or at least, harbor some emotion? Malden told himself he was just being silly. That the still air inside the Vincularium could not become angry on its own. There were probably ghosts inside, remnants of the elves who’d perished here. There was certainly a demon in there. But the Vincularium itself was just a pile of old stone. It could not resent his presence. It couldn’t hate him, or want him to leave.

  No matter how much it felt that way.

  “Is it safe?” Croy said from behind him.

  Malden couldn’t help but jump. He didn’t turn around-he imagined the daylight outside would be blinding after his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Instead he fought to control his breathing and said, “Nothing has jumped out to devour me yet.”

  He was aware of the others coming in behind him. He could hear them grunting and scraping their way through the narrow opening, each of them in their turn struck dumb once they were inside by the profundity of the darkness. Morget took a step forward to put down one of their crates of supplies, and the rustling of the barbarian’s clothes was like summer thunder reverberating off rain-lashed hills.

  Croy lit a lantern, a great flaring light that made Malden blink as his eyes watered. The candle inside the lantern flickered wildly in some unfelt breeze and then steadied, and light streamed out across the open space of stone.

  The marble floor stretched ahead as far as the light showed. A pair of stout, twisted columns held up a roof that was high enough that the light couldn’t show it, leaving it shrouded in pitch-darkness. Something moved on one of the columns, inching through the lantern’s glow, and Malden nearly turned and dashed back out of the Vincularium, but then he saw it was only a millipede, no longer than his finger. Its glossy shell was translucent and he could see its clear blood surging through its body. Lifting feathery antennae into the dusty air, the insect turned and started crawling away from the light.

  Morget started forward, one fist raised as if he would smash the thing.

  “Be careful,” Croy whispered. “We don’t know what we’re walking into.”

  Morget grumbled with impatience, but he stepped back again.

  Cythera lit another lantern and pressed it into Malden’s hand. It had a looping handle on one side and he gripped it hard, like a man dying of thirst will grab onto a tankard of ale.

  “So far so good,” Cythera said. She smiled at him. Obviously she meant to reassure him, but the light streaming upward across her face made dark pools of her eyes and made her look much more like a witch than Coruth ever had. He expected her to start cackling at any moment.

  “There should be an exit from this room straight ahead,” Slag said, gesturing into the dark.

  “All right,” Malden said. “I’ll make sure it’s safe.”

  He was known in certain discreet circles as a master at evading traps. He’d bested the houses of sorcerers and the palaces of nobles because he could keep his wits about him and he knew when to step lightly. In all the Free City of Ness there was no one more qualified for it. And only a fool would think the way into the Vincularium would be free of pitfalls or snares. Dwarves were famous for their mistrust of interlopers and trespassers. The places they built underground were never meant for human intrusion, and over the centuries they’d become geniuses at constructing deadly surprises as a way of safeguarding their premises.

  They also tended to have a lot of treasure, which attracted thieves. Over time those of Malden’s profession had learned ways to overcome or simply avoid dwarven traps. Of course, the traditional way to do that was to send one person forward ahead of the group, and if they didn’t die screaming in some horrible contraption, then you knew the way was safe. It looked to Malden like had been chosen for that honorable role.

  He stepped out between the columns, careful to test the marble under his feet with each step. More columns loomed out of the darkness, perhaps a whole row of them. That was the obvious path, the way anyone coming inside would be expected to take. Safer to take the long way around. He turned to his left and raised his lantern high. There was a wall in that direction, so he moved slowly toward it and then reached out to touch it with one finger. The wall shone under his light, and he saw it was made of the same polished marble as the floor. A frieze ran along the wall just a little above Malden’s eye level, carved with dwarven runes he couldn’t read.

  “Slag,” he called, and his voice boomed in the stone hall so much that he ducked his head and pressed his back against the stones. “Slag,” he said, in a much softer voice, “can you read this inscription?”

  The dwarf came out of the dark toward him and peered upward at the frieze. His mouth moved silently for a while as he read. “Names, that’s all. It’s a standard formula,” Slag said, when he’d read enough. “It lists the dwarves who built this place, as well as the names of their fathers.”

  “I was worried it might be warning us that only death awaited those who passed through this hall,” Malden said. That was the kind of thing he expected to find in a forbidden crypt.

  “This was a city, before it was a tomb,” Slag told him. “When we lived here, there would have been fires burning all day and night in this room, and cups so full of mead you would never see their bottoms. This room would have been used for receiving visitors from the surface-elves or humans, anyone willing to trade with us.” He shook his head. “No, this was not a place of death, lad. Not till later.”

  Malden nodded and headed forward, along the wall. He was trying to get a sense of its dimensions, but that proved difficult when his light couldn’t reach all the corners at once. The columns ran beside him, one every fifteen feet or so. Then he came to the far wall, and turned to his right, and moved forward again. Eventually he came to a wide stone door, no more than six feet high, mounted in a stone arch. The latch of the door was simply designed and had no lock. Cool air streamed through the crack between the bottom of the door and its jamb. He checked its hinges and all along its top, and found nothing to worry him.

  “All right,” he said, “come the way I did, all of you. I think it’s safe.”

  Croy, Cythera, and Morget came quickly to join him. Slag seemed to be taking his time. Before he entered the circle of light shed by Malden’s lantern, they heard him snuffling, and when the light touched him it gleamed on the tears in the corners of his eyes.

  Malden panicked a little, but fought his fear back down. “Slag-what is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, lad, nothing. I just feel like I’ve come home, is all.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The 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 h
ave 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?” Morget 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 Morget’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,” Morget 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.”

  Morget 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,” Morget insisted. “That’s all. You win a war any way you can, and worry about the casualties later.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  When 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 Morget before the barbarian could set foot on the bridge.

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

  Morget 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.”