A Thief in the Night (31 page)

Chapter Fifty-six

M
alden lifted the lantern high and scanned the rest of the foundry for traps. He saw none, though he knew Balint's skill now, and could never be sure she hadn't hidden something so devious he would only discover it by stepping on it.

Time was precious now, however, so he moved quickly—if quietly—toward the lift. Much as he'd expected, the brass cage was not where he had left it. Balint must have gone that way.

Or, possibly, she had moved the lift to throw him off her track.

Such thinking had no end, though. If he doubted her every move, and thus dithered until he was paralyzed and unable to act, she would already have beaten him. He had to catch her before she escaped the Vincularium—and without letting her know that he was on her trail.

He risked shining a little light up and down the lift shaft. Far below, he could just make out a glint of brass—that must be the cage down there. He blew out his candle immediately, lest she see its light. In the darkness he grabbed hold of the lift's main chain and slid down the shaft. The chain was well greased, and he fell faster than he'd meant to, but he managed to clutch it tight enough that when his feet struck the top of the cage they made only a little sound. Even so, he froze in place and listened carefully before he climbed down the side of the cage and dropped to the floor.

Now he was faced with a quandary. He could see nothing, hear nothing. Yet he dared not make any light until he was sure Balint wouldn't see it. Fortunately, the chamber he was in proved almost identical to the one above, a round room of narrow diameter with a single exit. He moved along the wall, one hand on the smooth bricks, using caution every time he took a step. This meant moving at a slower pace than he liked, but it would make him all but invisible to any dwarf watching for pursuit.

Outside the lift chamber, he found himself on an open floor. He headed forward quietly, knowing he would soon have to make a light or risk stumbling and breaking his neck. He was unsure how to proceed, but he knew he had no choice but to keep moving. Slag's life depended on what happened next.

In the utter darkness his ears grew keenly sensitive. It was not long before he heard a distant, patternless drumming. Surely it was the sound of the knocker's fingers tapping on some wall or floor. He expected to see a light ahead at any moment, for Balint could see no better in the dark than he could. She would need a lamp to guide her to the exit shaft.

Yet when he did spy a light, it was not the color he expected, nor did it flicker like a candle flame or a torch. A red beam of radiance split the floor ahead of him. As he watched, it grew more intense and spread across the flagstones.

Malden saw that he stood on the central avenue of a warren of low structures, most likely the houses of dwarves long dead. In shape they were uniform to a surprising degree. He was used to cities where wealth and ostentation were celebrated, where having the biggest house made you the better man. Here all the houses were alike, drab huts no more than six feet high with flat roofs. In places, tiers of such houses had been piled atop each other to form misshapen towers, with ladders leading up to each doorway. Standing outside each tower was a high pole, topped with a globe a foot across. What function these standards once performed was an utter mystery to him, so he ignored them and instead studied the squat shapes of the houses.

They looked to Malden more like the chambers of a cut-open ant colony than the domiciles of a residential district. These were not homes in the human sense, places of warmth and security where families would gather around communal fires. It seemed to him more a place, simply, where workers went to sleep when their labors were done. The closest analog in his experience was a monastic dormitory.

Malden could make little sense of it. He knew dwarves wasted little thought on luxury or appearances, even though they prized gold and wealth above everything except good craftsmanship. But what did they want with money at all, if this was how they lived? The dwarven houses confused him deeply, as did most things concerning dwarves. One thing was clear, though. This must be the residential level—where Slag said the escape tunnel was located. Balint must be on her way out of the Vincularium, intending to leave as quickly as she might. Malden hardly blamed her. He could only wish his own egress would come so soon.

The red light continued to strengthen, showing more and more of the dwarven dormitory. He had no way to account for the light, and at the moment had no taste for mysteries. He'd assumed, on first seeing it, that Balint had some source of light more advanced than humble fire, some dwarven machine whose workings would be like unto magic as far as he was concerned. Yet this light resembled most the breaking dawn of a newly risen sun.

He crept forward, trying to stay always out of those red beams. They made the shadows deeper and he was thankful for that. His senses were tuned toward finding the dwarves, and it wasn't long before he saw them ahead of him, turned to silhouettes by the crimson rays. There were but three dwarves, and of course the knocker. They cast long stripes of shadow behind them, like ribbons of darkness.

The Place of Long Shadows, Malden thought. The ancient dwarven name for the Vincularium suddenly made a great deal of sense.

If the idea of a sun rising underground was a marvel to the thief, it seemed no less awe-inspiring to Balint and her crew. The dwarves stood as if transfixed by the light. Balint and one of the others stared up through a broad opening before them, a gallery, Malden surmised, that looked out on the central shaft.

The third dwarf, however, kept staring at the shadows. In the new light, Malden could see that his eyes were enormous and he was trembling. “I tell you true, Balint—I saw somebody back there. Just for a second, and then it vanished again. Ducked back into the fucking shadows or something. Weren't one of your humans neither.”

“Shut your hole or I'll stick something in it,” Balint said, and struck the trembling dwarf.

“It was wearing the most beautiful bronze armor, too,” he responded, flinching away from her blow.

“Don't go jumping at fancies,” Balint told him.

Malden felt a chill fear creep down his back as he listened. Bronze armor—that could only mean one thing. The frightened dwarf must have seen a revenant. Had the undead elves really come this far down the shaft? If one had, and it discovered the dwarves, why hadn't it attacked at once? The revenants had no reason to love Balint and her crew—in fact, they had every reason to hate dwarves more than they hated humans. It was the dwarves, after all, who betrayed the elves into coming down here. Now that they were undead spirits of justice, the elfin revenants must long bitterly for dwarven blood. Yet it sounded like this dwarf had seen one and it had hid from him.

Malden could make no sense of it. He told himself it didn't matter, at least not in the immediate moment.

He snuck up behind the four of them, sticking close to the shadows they cast. He was certain that the knocker would hear him at any moment, but if he was fast enough—

Then new light, the same reddish hue but not as intense, burst into life behind him, and the shadows around him evaporated like morning mist. Malden glanced back to see the light came from the poles that stood outside the dormitory towers. The globe atop each pole proved to be a lamp of strange design. Most of them remained unlit, and he saw that some of the globes were cracked or even shattered. Yet they cast enough light to mimic bright day on the surface.

He sought around him for shadows to conceal him, but before he could move he heard the dwarves cry out. He was discovered.

Chapter Fifty-seven

“T
here!” one of the dwarves shouted.

Balint spun around, her eyes wide in surprise. “You survived that trap? How?”

“Did you leave a trap for me?” Malden asked, his face a mask of nonchalance. He blew out the candle of his lantern, since there was plenty of light to see by now. “I didn't notice.”

Balint turned to her confederates. “Make sure he doesn't get past the next one,” she told them.

Malden started to rush forward, intending to grab Balint and force her to give him the antidote. It was the best plan he could come up with, having no time to think anything through.

It nearly got him killed.

The law said Balint could not use any weapon, even in her own defense. Over the centuries the dwarves had found more than one creative loophole in the treaty. Before Malden even got up to speed she took a glass flask from off her belt and smashed it against the floor between them. Pungent liquid splashed across the flagstones. She must have drilled her men in what to do next, as one of them tossed a lit taper into the midst of the puddle thus formed.

Malden reared back as a wall of flames leapt up at him. He overbalanced and fell on his posterior, his hands stretched out behind him to catch his fall. Scuttling like a crab, he raced backward, away from the spreading fire.

In a moment the fuel was all consumed and the fire died, but it left a thick bank of greasy smoke hanging in the air. By the time Malden batted away the fumes the dwarves and the knocker were nowhere to be seen.

Cursing silently, he jumped to his feet and raced for the few remaining shadows in the dormitory level. He had no doubt the dwarves had done the same. They could be anywhere around him, hiding perhaps in one of the drab houses of their ancestors—or they could be even now running down a side passage, away from him. There were far too many such avenues to choose from. The dormitory was a maze of narrow lanes with nothing to recommend one or another.

He tried to think what Balint would do next. Retreating was certainly what he would have done—he was an expert on running away from trouble. Though he had always felt most comfortable running along rooftops, high above his pursuers, up where he could observe them without being seen himself—

He clamped his eyes shut and listened.

Yes.

He could just make out the faint tapping of the knocker. The creature was blind, Slag had said. Its only method of sensing its environment was to listen to the echoes of its own drumming.

After a split second the tapping stopped—perhaps Balint had silenced her creature to better hide her escape—but Malden knew where to head next. He raced up a ladder, heading to the top of one of the towers. When he reached its highest level, he grabbed the edge of its flat roof and pulled himself up to catch a glimpse over the edge.

Immediately he dropped back, as a mouth full of peglike teeth and two white, blind eyes came screaming toward him. The knocker wasn't constrained by the law. It came scampering over the edge of the roof, its long fingers reaching to grab and rend Malden's face.

He swung aside, balancing all his weight on one foot on the top of the ladder. The knocker went hurtling past him, gibbering horrible curses Malden couldn't understand. It fell nearly all the way to the flagstones below before catching a rung of the ladder and bouncing there like a ball on a string.

Its momentum shook the ladder and Malden nearly fell himself. His arms out wide, wheeling for balance, he felt his foot begin to slip on the rung. It was all he could do to get his other leg jammed between two rungs so he didn't slip and fall to his death.

When his heart stopped hammering in his chest he took a deep breath and started up again. This time when he got his eyes above the edge he saw what he'd been looking for—Balint's back, running away from him at speed.

He hauled himself over the edge of the roof and ran across its flat expanse. There was no rain in the underground city, and no snow, so the dwarves had built their houses without sloped rooftops. Malden found the going much easier than what his legs were trained for: the shingled roofs of Ness. His legs were much longer than Balint's as well. It wasn't long before he reached the far side of the roof and saw her crossing a rope to the next roof over. He looked down and saw she'd thrown a grapple to make herself a bridge. As small as she was, it was easy for her to swing across, hand over hand.

“You won't get away that easy,” he called.

Balint glared at him over her shoulder and spat out a curse in a language he didn't know. Exactly as he'd hoped, his taunting had slowed her down. He reached the near end of the rope before she was even halfway across.

This end of the rope was tied to a narrow chimney pipe. It would be child's play to cut the knot and let her fall. It was a good forty feet down. He doubted even a dwarf as tough as Balint could survive a plummet like that.

Of course, the antidote she carried was probably held in some fragile bottle. If she fell it might shatter. He left the knot alone. Instead he danced forward along the rope, one foot in front of the other. As easy as breathing, he thought, making sure not to look down. I can do this, I can—

Balint got to the far side and started cutting through the rope while he was still running on air between two buildings.

Malden felt the rope twang and shudder beneath him, knew that he only had a split second before he fell himself. At this height he wouldn't just break his neck when he hit the ground. He would splatter.

He had no choice but to jump. He timed his leap just as the rope went slack beneath him. His hands shot forward and grabbed the ledge of the far roof, and he pulled himself over, rolling away in case Balint had any more traps waiting for him. When no metal jaws clamped shut on his face and no bursts of fire singed his eyebrows, he leapt to his feet and found her cowering away from him, her eyes hard as she waited for him to attack. “You have something I want,” he told her.

She looked him up and down. “Do I? But what's in it for me? I doubt you could satisfy a bedbug.”

It took him a moment to work out what she was saying. Then he growled in anger and stepped toward her—

—and right into a rope snare lying before him on the rooftop.

Malden threw his hands out to his sides, expecting the rope to close around his ankle and haul him up into the air while Balint made a clean getaway.

Instead he just stared down at a length of rope that didn't move at all. He didn't understand. It was an obvious trap. He'd fallen for it like a novice at this game. Yet for some reason it hadn't triggered.

Balint's eyes burned with fury. Ignoring him, she ran to the side of the rooftop and stared down at the street. “Murin! I told you to secure that fucking line!”

There was no response from below.

“Murin! You answer me right now!” She ran to the other side of the roof. “Slurri! Get your thumb out of your arse and come up here!”

“They don't seem to hear you,” Malden said, stepping toward her. “Perhaps they grew tired of listening to your curses. Or maybe something else found them. Something in bronze armor. Something that isn't bound by any laws or treaties.”

Balint turned and glared at him. Then she looked behind her. She had very little room to back up, and no more grappling hooks to throw. Her trap had failed—and now she was snared herself. She had nowhere to go. Malden took another step toward her.

“They're probably already dead,” he said, thinking revenants must have come down to this level. Thinking that even if they were still alive, he had to keep her thinking she was out of options. “Come, Balint. The antidote. And then we can go our separate ways. Maybe you'll even make it out of here alive.”

She took a half step backward and nearly fell off the roof. He saw her teetering, her arms flying outward, and he rushed forward to grab her and pull her back.

“Fucking get off of me,” she said, batting at his hands as soon as she was steady on the roof again.

“Damn you, Balint, I just saved your life! Be reasonable!”

“No human gets the better of me! I'll suck your eyes out and fuck your skull!” she shrieked.

Then she drew the wrench from its scabbard at her hip, and smacked him across the jaw with it.