A Thief in the Night

chapter Forty

The marketplace corridor led hundreds of feet back from the shaft. In its center it widened into a broad plaza where the stalls gave way to larger, more elaborate shops—shops with four walls, and even some tall enough to reach the ceiling. Their doorways stood open, showing only darkness inside.

“There would have been curtains in the door frames,” Slag said, gesturing at one gaping portal. “They rotted away centuries ago, of course. F*cking time steals everything of value.”

“Time’s the greatest thief of all,” Malden agreed. “What’s that?”

He pointed at a massive pillar that stood in the exact center of the plaza, wider around than any of the shops. It did not run straight from the floor to the ceiling, but arced in a subtle curve. Thousands of brass tacks had been driven into the stone, at eye level for a dwarf.

“The tacks? The dwarves who lived here would post messages to one another by tacking them to yon pillar. The bits of parchment are long gone.”

“No,” Malden said, “the—the thing the tacks are driven into.”

“Hmm? Oh. That, son, is one of three main support columns of the entire city.” Slag went over to pat it with one hand. “Now this is something. I did a little mathematics in my head before and the numbers are just beautiful. This place is a masterpiece. A f*cking jewel. The whole weight of the mountain rests on those three pillars. They run all the way up and down—we saw their top ends on the cemetery level, where we came in.”

“Only three columns to hold up so much?” Malden asked, feeling like the ceiling might come crashing down at any moment.

“They must be reinforced, somehow.”

“By magic?” Cythera asked.

“Nah, lass, we never relied on anything so damnably fickle. They’re reinforced with . . . I don’t know, on the inside—maybe there’s solid metal inside the stone. How they got it in, how they could forge beams so long, or how they could move them once they cooled . . . I’ll admit I don’t know the specifics. This is far beyond anything my people could build today.”

“If it holds up so much,” Malden asked, “shouldn’t it be straight? Even I know a bent pillar won’t carry much weight.”

“Ah, but that’s part of the genius! That’s to take the strain when they’re shifted.”

Malden frowned. “Shifted? What could possibly move something so big? And if they’re rooted in the rock of the mountain, surely they’re as stable as the ground itself.”

“But that’s the thing of it, lad. The ground moves all the time. In winter ice builds up and cracks open rocks. In summer the sun heats the outside of Cloudblade and the rocks expand.”

“Rocks . . . expand?”

Slag threw his head back and looked up at the ceiling. “Just take my word for it. The whole mountain moves, all the time. It’s moving right now, just so slowly you can’t see it. I know I’m not making this clear, but—you know how a drumhead needs to be tightened, ever so often?”

“I’ve never been very musical,” Malden confessed.

Slag grunted in frustration. “Again, take my word for it. Most things expand when they get hot, and contract when they get cold.”

“What kind of things?”

“Every f*cking thing!” Slag threw up his hands in disgust. “Well, water doesn’t. Water expands when it gets colder. But—everything else, more or less. All right?” The candle he held guttered and nearly went out. “There’s no use explaining. Just know the mountain moves. If it rested on straight columns, it would just collapse whenever it moved up and down. The curved columns have a little give in ’em. They compress, just a little, to take the strain, then release that pressure when the forces equalize. Like the springs I mounted under our wagon, a couple days ago.”

Malden was utterly lost. “Does it work?”

“This place ain’t collapsed in a thousand f*cking years. So yes.”

“Ah. Good, then.”

Cythera lifted her candle high and pointed farther down the marketplace corridor. Ahead of them it narrowed again. “Now that’s settled, can we get on with this? Slag, you said there was a stairway leading down to the next floor, through here.”

“Should be. Only it’s not a stairway.”

“I’ll slide down a pole if I have to.” Cythera led them down the corridor until they reached its end. The corridor emptied into a circular room with a vaulted ceiling. In the center of the room a round hole had been cut in the floor, and an identical hole opened above it in the ceiling. A thick chain ran through one and out the other.

“The House of Chains indeed,” Malden said.

“This is a lift. It operates by the principle of—”

Malden’s eyes went wide as he expected the dwarf to give him another lecture on whatever kind of magic the dwarves had invented here, which he was sure wasn’t magic because everyone knew that dwarves didn’t use magic. Except it would sound like magic, and work like magic. Rocks expanding in the sun. Ice cracking open the entire world. He could study a hundred years, he imagined, and not understand a word.

“Oh, never f*cking mind. Take this.” Slag handed Malden his candle. Then the dwarf grabbed the chain and heaved downward on it. It took his weight but didn’t move. “It’s stuck. Not too surprising, but damned inconvenient. You two wait here—I’ll be right back.” He climbed up the chain, hand over hand, and disappeared into the hole in the ceiling.

Leaving Malden and Cythera alone.

Malden knew he should say nothing. Cythera was sick with worry for Croy, and he should have let her be. The silence between them was unbearable, though. He was almost able to convince himself he was helping when he said, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but there’s a chance Croy is dead.”

She stabbed one finger in his face. “If you say that again—”

He held up his hand for peace. “Cythera, believe me, I don’t want him to be dead. I’m merely suggesting it might be worth considering what that means, just in case.” He grimaced. “On the off chance.”

“Liar,” she said.

“I didn’t say he was, just that he might be d—”

“You lied when you said you didn’t want him to be dead.” She stepped close to him and he expected her to slap him across the face. She didn’t, though. She looked too angry to lift her hand. “Croy,” she said, quite slowly, quite deliberately, “was in your way. You persist in this delusion that I’m secretly in love with you, and that I’m only betrothed to Croy for his money. You must imagine that if he was dead, then you could just scoop me up. Steal me away from him with no consequences.”

“That’s not fair,” he insisted.

“It’s true. The truth doesn’t have to be fair.”

“Damn you, woman. I—”

Malden stopped talking when the chain in the middle of the room started to rattle. He stepped back and his free hand went to the hilt of Acidtongue. Then a very strange thing happened, wholly outside the realm of Malden’s experience.

A little room came down out of the ceiling and stopped exactly flush with the floor. Perhaps “room” was the wrong word. It was a cage of bronze bars, about five feet high and eight feet across. It had a door in the front that swung open, so they could see Slag standing inside. His hands were covered in grease that he wiped on a piece of rag. “Come in, then,” he said, “if you’re in such a bloody rush to go down. This is faster than any stairway.”