A thief in the night abt-2

by David Chandler

  When he peered into the stockade and saw Malden and Cythera holding each other, a wicked smile twisted his thin lips. “If you were about to mate, please don’t let me stop you. I’ll just wait here and observe.”

  “Piss off,” Slag moaned, sitting up. The dwarf wiped sleep from his eyes and rose to his feet.

  The elf kicked the bars. Slag jumped backward and the elf laughed.

  “You,” the soldier said, pointing at Malden. “When we captured you, weren’t you wearing a sword?”

  Malden blinked at the elf but said nothing.

  “What is your name?”

  “You might as well tell him,” Cythera said. “What difference does it make?”

  “Malden,” the thief said.

  “What? Speak up. Is it Croy?”

  Cythera’s arms gripped him tighter.

  “No,” Malden said, raising his voice. “I’m Malden.”

  The soldier frowned. “How vexing. I’m supposed to fetch a Sir Croy. I was told he would be among the captives, and you were the only one with a sword, so-”

  “Well, you’ve fucking found me,” Slag announced.

  For a moment no one at all spoke.

  “You’re Sir Croy? You’re a knight?” the elf asked.

  “That’s right.”

  The elf laughed heartily. “You’re not tall enough!”

  “How dare you, sir,” Slag said, in a passable impersonation of Croy. “I may be short in stature but-”

  “You were wearing no armor when we caught you. Nor did you have a sword. Knights are supposed to have swords.” The soldier frowned. “Aren’t they?”

  “The boy was just holding my sword for me at the time. If I’d had it to hand, the lot of you would be so many spitted roasts right now. Well, you’ve got me. You fought dirty, but I suppose that’s what one expects from you dog-hearted elves. Take me away, you bastard. Do your worst.”

  The elf’s brows knitted together. But then he shrugged and unlocked the cage. “Things must have changed outside in the last eight centuries.” He pulled Slag out of the cage and then locked it again.

  “Might as well get it over with,” Slag said as he was marched up the stairs.

  Malden turned to Cythera with a look of horror. “They’re going to torture him to death,” he said.

  “But why?” Cythera looked deeply confused. “Why would he pretend to be Croy? He can’t hope to benefit from such a ruse. Was he trying to protect you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Malden told her, remembering what the dwarf had said earlier, while she was sleeping. “I think he just got tired of waiting.”

  Chapter Seventy-four

  Croy’s blood pounded in his temples. His fingers twitched and tapped at Ghostcutter’s pommel. He needed to fight. He needed to kill something.

  Balint had pushed him to this violent edge. She had bade him look over it, into the depths of his anger and his need for vengeance, and showed him there was no bottom to that gulf. There had been a time in Croy’s life when he thought mercy was a virtue, and that restraint had its place in battle.

  That was before Cythera was taken from him. Before he saw what bloodlust truly meant. He had possessed a future before he came to the Vincularium. He had seen a wife, and children, a family of his own. Heirs to pass his name to, and perhaps even a son who could lift his sword when he was gray and old and unable to carry the Ancient Blade himself. He had dreams then.

  Now he had a desire to kill, and not much else.

  Supposedly Balint had a plan. She had some scheme that would let him kill every last elf, and end their race forever. He barely listened to what she had to say. He would happily have run back down to the throne room and started hacking and slashing, but she had stepped him back from the abyss just enough to suggest there was a quicker if less direct route to sating his hunger for elfin blood.

  He was still considering whether to take her option and go for the surety of destruction, the total eradication of the elves-or follow his own instincts, which was only certain to be more gratifying.

  “If you kill them one by one, are you sure you can get them all?” she asked. “Are you quite sure you will finish what you start?”

  “Ghostcutter has never failed me yet,” Croy pointed out.

  “And if one of them does get away-worse, a pair of them, a male and a female. If they outlive you, and restart their generation. Rebuild their numbers. What then? If the elves survive your attack, will you be satisfied? Letting them have what they took away from you?”

  He frowned, liking none of this. “You want me to delay my revenge.”

  “I want you to be smart about it, you pillock! There are too many of them for a direct assault, surely even you can see that. We’d be slaughtered.”

  “If I die seeking vengeance, I die a noble death,” Croy told her.

  “No, no, no! We have to get all of them, or it doesn’t count. And that means we have to be a little sneaky. When you make love to a woman…” she said, looking Croy up and down. The knocker on her shoulder waved its fingers in his direction, too. She frowned before continuing. “Not you, of course-I imagine you don’t have much experience in that regard.” She turned to face Morget. “When you make love to a woman, do you just rip her dress off and bend her over whatever happens to be handy?”

  The barbarian laughed gleefully. His eyes grew wistful and he hugged himself.

  “I can see,” Balint said, “that I’ve picked the wrong metaphor. No matter. When a real dwarf wants to woo, he flatters his sweetheart, and gives her little gifts, and kisses her gently, first. He doesn’t make a rush for the goodies until she’s already begging for it.”

  “So your plan is to give the elves gifts, and tell them how beautiful they are before we slaughter them like pigs?” Croy asked. “That sounds like folly.”

  Balint sighed deeply. “Perhaps you two should just follow me, and do what I say. It’ll make this much easier if you don’t ask a lot of questions.”

  “Fine,” Croy said. “Just tell me when the time comes for vengeance.”

  The dwarf led them up a long ramp toward the level above. They emerged into a darkened infirmary, with rows of short beds lining the walls and in the middle a great slab marked with ancient bloodstains. Hundreds of iron tools-most gone to rust-hung by chains above the slab, knives and saws and pincers. Compared to the surgical equipment Croy knew, it all looked quite hygienic and advanced.

  Beyond the infirmary ward the hall opened up into a broad cobbled space that was empty save for a pile of wheeled carts, heaped up and left to fall apart and rot. Wide-mouthed passages led away from the main chamber in every direction, heading straight out into darkness, some tending upward, some down.

  “Mine shafts,” Balint explained, “probably long since played out.”

  The knocker jumped down from her shoulder and ran along the floor, tapping its fingers arrhythmically on the cobbles. It scurried away into the darkness, then hurried back and tapped out a complicated pattern on Balint’s leg.

  “Our way leads through there.” She pointed toward a stone arch at the far side of the big room. Beyond lay a staircase that curved away from view. “Up that way are the kitchens, and past them the leather works. Our destination’s there. But we have to be careful now. My blueling tells me there are revenants up those stairs, standing guard.”

  Croy nodded grimly. Then he glanced over at Morget.

  The barbarian met his eye and smiled broadly. He nodded and hefted his weapon.

  “Wait here,” Croy told Balint.

  “No! We must be circumspect as a whore with her hand in a man’s pocket, unsure if she’s found his purse or his pr-”

  Croy interrupted her foul figure of speech by dashing up the stairs. Morget came after, bringing a single candle to light their way. At the top of the stairs they found three revenants waiting for them, lipless mouths wide open in noiseless screams, hands and weapons already groping toward the two humans.

  Morget took one apart wi
th his axe before it could even reach for his throat. Croy brought Ghostcutter up and decapitated one, then sliced the hands off another with his backswing. The revenants kept coming, so he kept carving-hitting hard at their bony knees, slicing one in half and taking the arm off another. Morget took the other arm, then reached down and pulled the remaining bits to pieces with his bare hands.

  The two of them headed back down the stairs. Balint waited for them there. The knocker’s blind face was wide with astonishment.

  “The way is clear,” Croy told her. “Find me some living elves next time.”

  Chapter Seventy-five

  After Slag was taken away, the night passed without further incident.

  Malden slept, finally-after a fashion. He mostly drifted on dark currents of his own thoughts. Sometimes those thoughts grew bizarre in character, sometimes incomprehensible, and he would realize that he had been dreaming. Yet there was no sharp disconnection between wakefulness and slumber.

  Certainly he got little rest.

  Cythera woke when they were brought food so they could break their fast. More mealy bread, this time accompanied by small beer with a distinct mushroomy flavor. It occurred to him to wonder how the bread was made without wheat flour. Probably ground bits of mushroom.

  He wondered what had happened to Slag.

  He was almost certain he didn’t want to know.

  Cythera said little that morning, and moved less. She mostly sat watching the gaolers, the revenants who were themselves motionless. Malden wondered if she were doing something witchy. Trying to take control of their rotting brains with the hypnotic power of her gaze, perhaps. Or cause them to erupt into flame with an ancient incantation in some language lost in the mists of time.

  Perhaps-maybe just perhaps possibly-she was coming up with some way of freeing them from the gaol. Maybe she had some brilliant idea. Maybe she could spring them from the stockade. Together they could make it up those stairs, slip past the guards that were sure to wait at the top. Find some way through the maze of elfin tunnels, then past the demons and the revenants. Perhaps together the two of them could make it back to the surface. To real daylight, to freedom.

  He started sweating just thinking about it. He wanted out. He wanted out so badly he started convincing himself she was going to say something, that at any moment she would speak and tell him what she’d realized, what she had discovered, that would save them both.

  He watched her face more carefully than he’d ever watched a guard patrolling outside a warehouse, with more rapt attention than he’d ever wasted on a fat purse he planned to snatch or a lock he planned to pick. He watched every twitch of her mouth, watched her eyes move from one revenant to another. When she was about to speak, he was ready, he could see her tongue start to form the words, and he nodded in excitement, in anticipation.

  “That one’s taller,” she said finally.

  Malden shook himself out of his reverie. “I beg your pardon?”

  “The one on the left is taller. They look like they’re exactly the same height. But there-look. The floor isn’t quite level, so the one on the left is actually a hair taller than the one on the right.”

  Malden’s entire body sagged with disappointment, every one of his muscles giving up a little more hope. “I think you have something there,” he said, and decided not to rely on her for any daring escape plans.

  He’d gotten himself so worked up that when an elfin soldier came down the stairs, he jumped up and grabbed at the bars with white knuckles. It was probably just their next meal being delivered, he told himself. This soldier didn’t look nearly as bored as the others had, though. One of his pupils was larger than the other, as if he’d stolen a taste of the Hieromagus’s sacrament.

  “Are you… Malton?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Oh.” The soldier looked confused and stared through the bars for a moment as if he couldn’t remember why he’d come. Then he turned and started to head back up the stairs.

  “Wait,” Malden said. “We need blankets. It got very cold last night. And we can’t live on just mushrooms. We need better food.”

  The soldier turned around slowly. “You,” he said.

  Malden waited for something more. Eventually he grew tired of waiting. “Yes?” he asked.

  “Are you Sir Croy’s squire?”

  “No,” Malden said again.

  “Oh.” The soldier went away, back up the stairs without another word.

  He came back an hour later. This time he asked no questions, but threw open the gate of the cage and grabbed Malden. Cythera screamed and begged him not to take Malden away, but the soldier ignored her.

  “It’s all right,” Malden told her. “You’ll be all right. Croy is coming. Croy will save you,” he told her. Croy is dead, he thought. If he was coming, he’d be here by now. “Cythera. When I die-your name will be on my lips.”

  She was still screaming when he was pushed up the stairs. As he was marched down the hallway, he could hear her.

  The soldier dragged Malden down a side passage, then pushed him through a door. The room beyond could not have shown a greater contrast to the stockade, a riot of color and sound and fragrant smoke of incense, and the transition was so jarring that Malden fell to the rich carpet and barely caught himself on his hands.

  Slowly he looked up to see where he was. The room’s walls were lined with tapestries in every color imaginable, its furniture of varied styles and bizarre forms. A group of elfin musicians up in a choir loft played very loud. In the center of the room, the Hieromagus lay on a bright yellow divan, his shapeless robe spilling out across the floor.

  “Your exalted presence radiates the light of the soul, Hieromagus,” the soldier said. “This is Malton, as you requested.”

  “My name isn’t Malton!” the thief shouted.

  The Hieromagus slowly sat up. As distracting as the room’s contents might be, his gaze was fixed on something wholly elsewhere. “He’s telling the truth. You brought the wrong one.”

  The soldier dropped to his knees. “My honor, my allegiance, my life, my love, all for you. This was the only male remaining in the stockade.”

  “He must serve, then,” the Hieromagus said. “Come closer, child.”

  “I’m no child either,” Malden protested.

  “To the Elders, all other races are children,” the Hieromagus said. He was smiling with real warmth. “Come a little closer. I need to make sure you will not run away. Sir Croy gave me his word, which is good enough from a noble man. From a commoner, I’m afraid I need better assurances.”

  Malden guessed what was about to happen a moment before it was too late to run away. The Hieromagus shot one impossibly thin hand out from under his robe and grasped Malden’s ankle.

  An invisible serpent wrapped around Malden’s leg and sank its fangs deep in the meat of his calf. The muscle there stretched painfully and refused to relax, no matter how hard Malden tried to command it.

  He attempted to draw back, to get away from the evil touch of the Hieromagus. It didn’t work. His leg was frozen in a stranglehold of pain. He could barely walk on it, and he knew he would never be able to run until that muscle was released. Which, of course, was the point.

  He had been hobbled.

  Chapter Seventy-six

  “Good,” the Hieromagus said, sinking back on his couch once more. “It is done. Take him to… the… why do I keep seeing-my own reflection? But not one reflection. Hundreds of them, everywhere… in mirrors of crystal… is it time for my sacrament?”

  “Your grace be remembered until the earth boils away at the end of time,” the soldier said, “if it please you my orders were to take him to the queen.”

  “Ah. Yes, they were. I see it,” the Hieromagus agreed. “I remember. I remember… so much.” Then he looked away, into the middle distance, and Malden felt like he had left the room.

  “Let us go,” the soldier said, and shoved Malden forward.

  Malden swung his
hobbled leg out in front of him, to catch his fall. It was an automatic act, with no thought behind it.

  When his boot touched the floor, he howled in agony and fell to the flagstones flopping and screaming.

  The elf soldier waited for him to finish and to rise again.

  When he did, pulling himself upward on an ornate carved armoire, sweat poured down the back of his neck and he felt his lips shiver.

  “Now, Malton,” the soldier said, “let us go.”

  “I told you,” Malden spat, “that’s not-my name.”

  With infinite care, expecting blinding pain at any moment, he put his foot down again. A tingling feeling, as if he were being jabbed with thousands of tiny needles, started to run up his leg. He held his calf perfectly still and hopped forward on the other foot, staring the whole time at the soldier.

  The elf returned his stare, looking bored. How many times had he performed this duty? Yet certainly he’d never been in charge of a human prisoner before. Malden wondered how common crime was in elfin society-and how often this elf had performed this particular service.

  “Do you like this job?” he asked, taking another careful hop forward. Doing so made his ankle move and sent pain lancing up as far as his knee.

  “Sorry?” the elf said, when Malden had stopped grimacing. “You mean being a soldier?”

  “Yes,” Malden said. “Do you take satisfaction in your work?”

  “What an odd question. I was born into harness. My father was a soldier. So, too, will my sons be.”

  “You have no hope of being a commander someday? Then you could torture other soldiers, instead of poor bastards like me.”

  “I don’t understand you at all. Not altogether surprising, I suppose. Now, walk. I have other duties to perform before I can take my supper, and I’m already getting hungry.”

  Malden found, by process of trial and error, that if he did not bend or flex his ankle in any way, he could walk. It was a slow, limping gait, but it did not cause him undue pain. He headed in the direction the soldier indicated, stumping along until he came to another room. This place had bare stone walls and was simply furnished with a table and a large basin. An elf dressed in patchwork stood at one side of the table holding a pitcher.