A Thief in the Night

chapter Twenty-three

Croy and Mörget studied a map for a while, then they all mounted their horses and headed to the northeast. The way led up a slope, at first gradual but ever steepening. At times they crested a ridge of land and could see out beyond the trees and across great vistas of green valleys to hills in the distance. Then the trees began to grow thinner on the ground, and shorter of stature, and soon the sunlight that burst through the gaps between their branches was strong enough that Slag could not bear it. He put on a wide-brimmed hat and rubbed burnt cork under his eyes to cut the glare, but eventually he was forced to throw a cloak over himself and allowed Croy to lead his pony on a line. To keep the horse from panicking, the dwarf rigged up an ingenious device—a set of square iron plates mounted on the colt’s bridle, which kept it from looking to either side or behind. It could only see Croy’s horse ahead of it, and instinctively stayed in line.

Malden kept an eye on his own horse, not wishing to be separated from the others again. The jennet seemed badly spooked after her encounter with the giant beetle. It didn’t seem to help that Malden still stank of the thing’s thick blood. He had to whisper soothing words to her constantly lest she panic and run off. He was barely aware, then, when they crossed some invisible border and suddenly were out of the forest. It was not until Croy called for them all to look up that he raised his eyes from the ground.

He saw at once they had climbed a great hill that stood at the foot of a great towering mass of rock—the Whitewall, the chain of mountains that separated the land into eastern steppes and western plains.

Beyond that wall lay the land of Mörget’s people. It was better than any fortress wall could be at keeping the two countries apart. The mountains were too tall to be climbed—Malden had heard that men who tried climbed up above the air itself and smothered, drowning for lack of breath. The mountains were so high that their peaks were swathed always in snow, for which fact the range was given its name. Only in a few places was the terrain low enough to be passable—places that were heavily guarded for that reason.

Tallest of those mountains was the one called Cloudblade, which formed the keystone of that endless range. Its jagged top, like the roots of an extracted and upturned tooth, did indeed cut through the clouds overhead, and pennons of mist streamed from its rocks. Above a certain height nothing grew on its slopes, and only the pale rock that formed it was to be seen.

About a third of the way up the slope, the vestiges of an ancient road ended at a pair of massive stones carved into the shape of upright menhirs. It was hard to judge their height from such a distance but Malden thought they had to be taller than the spires of the Ladychapel. Strung between them like the laces of a corset were countless chains, brown and red with ancient rust.

“The House of Chains,” Malden said aloud.

“What do you see, lad? Tell me what you f*cking see,” Slag demanded from underneath his cloak.

“A doorway tall enough for the Bloodgod to walk through without bowing. Chains as thick as Mörget’s waist, unbroken for centuries.”

“Aye, that’s the place.” Slag wrestled with the cloak until one of his eyes peered out of the shadows. “Oh, aye.”

They climbed as high as the horses could take them, intending to reach the entrance before sunset. The hills refused to make it easy. They had to force their mounts over long stretches of broken rock and up through a defile where some house-sized stone had cracked in half, leaving a passage as narrow as a man’s outstretched arms. They emerged into a barren waste of stones that shifted dangerously underfoot, where only a few sparse clumps of grass grew up through the scree.

It was as desolate a waste as Malden could imagine. A thin cold wind touched the rocks with icy fingers, while thin rivulets of water trickled past below the fallen stones. Had he been told no human being had entered that land in a thousand years, Malden would not have been surprised.

He was quite startled, then—as was Croy’s horse—when an emaciated man wearing nothing but a loincloth stood up from behind a rock and hailed them all.

Croy wheeled his horse around to keep it from bolting. One of his hands reached down to touch the pommel of Ghostcutter. The other he raised in a gesture of greeting.

“Well met, Sir Croy,” the stranger said. His voice was scratchy and thin, as if he had not used it in many months. “I am Herward, a humble servant of the Lady.”

“You know me?” Croy asked.

Malden didn’t like this at all.

The hermit bowed low and touched the stones. “We have never before met,” he said, as if this were a small, unimportant detail. “Yet I know you! For one night, as I lay in my stony bower, a vision came to me in my sleep. A dream, you may well call it! Yet ’twas as clear as day, and as vivid. I was told of your coming.”

Malden tried to catch Mörget’s eye, but the barbarian had backed his horse a few steps and was focused entirely on the hermit.

“A knight of honor, bent on holy quest. With him a mighty warrior of the East, and a lady who must be protected at all cost.”

“Don’t forget a pissed-off dwarf,” Slag insisted, “and a thi—” He glanced at Malden, who realized he’d been about to say “thief.” “An, erm, a whatever the hell this idiot is.”

“Well met, Herward,” Croy said. He took his hand off the pommel of his sword and reached out with both hands, as if he would embrace the hermit. “If you serve the Lady, you are my friend, and I thank you for this welcome. What else did She say, in this vision? It may be crucially important to our task.”

Herward scratched viciously at his armpit. Malden could see that the skin there was already badly irritated. Now that he’d had a chance to look at the holy man, he saw just how unhealthy the poor fool was. His wild hair and beard had fallen out in patches where ringworm and probably mange had afflicted him. His sun-baked skin was so dry it cracked around his nails and in other places looked as scaly as snakeskin. His eyes were as yellow as his teeth.

How long had this man been living in these rocks, with no human company at all? Malden couldn’t guess. Yet he had heard tales before of madmen, seized by holy zeal, who sought out the truly desolate places, there to worship in silence and utter privacy. He’d heard there were holy men who went to live at the bottom of abandoned dwarven mines, so they could be closer to the Bloodgod and his pit. Then there was supposed to be a hermit in the hills above Redweir who only came out to scream obscenities and throw his own waste at passing caravans. The drovers who passed that way considered it good luck to be so assaulted.

From what he could see, Herward was just as crazy. Malden tried to get the jennet to take a step back, out of range of flying excrement.

The hermit stared at Croy for a long while, saying nothing. Then he pulled at his beard and said, “She showed me your face, and his, and hers. She said I must aid you in any way I could, and allow you to pass as high as the gates of the House of Chains. She said I would be rewarded.”

“In what aspect did She appear to you?” Croy asked.

Malden’s eyes widened. Was the knight really taking this seriously?

Herward bent low and placed his forehead against the rocks. He was certainly limber for someone who probably lived on lichens and whatever grubs he could dig out of the stones. “She appeared to me in the form of the Crone. As an aged women, bent with the blessings of motherhood and the bounty of long years. She had hair the color of old iron, and a fearsome cast to her eyes.”

Cythera slumped in her saddle and covered her mouth with one hand. “Oh, Mother, tell me you didn’t . . .” she moaned, though not so loud that Herward might hear.