A thief in the night abt-2

by David Chandler

  “Who knows what dark magic she was about?” Morget 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!” Morget 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

  Malden 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 cloisonne. 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.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  “No, 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 laug
hed 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

  Croy 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 Morget 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.