A Thief in the Night

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 have 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?” Mörget 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 Mörget’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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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,” Mörget 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 f*cking time.”

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