A Thief in the Night

chapter Forty-three

Malden climbed into the brazen cage and braced himself by holding on to one of the bars. He had to stoop or bash his head against the top of the cage. Cythera, standing beside him, looked as uneasy as he felt. “This—device—travels upward and down along its chain?” he asked. “Like a bucket on a rope, lowered into a well, and then brought back up by winding a windlass. Only—instead of water, this carries people.”

“Brilliant deductive powers, oh gormless human,” Slag said, rolling his eyes.

“But—what if the chain breaks under our weight?” Cythera asked.

“Then my ancestors built it wrong,” Slag told her. “You’re going to insult my ancestors now?” The dwarf closed the door of the cage, its hinges making a hideous squeal. “Malden, help me with this.” A loop of chain dangled between them—not the same chain that held the cage in its shaft, but a much finer one that looped around a complicated arrangement of gears in the ceiling. “Just pull down, and keep pulling. Normally there would be a team of huge cave beetles at the bottom of the main chain, walking a wheel to make it move. This is just for emergencies, but it’ll serve our purpose. No, no, no,” the dwarf grumbled, “you’re doing it wrong. Just take hold of one length of chain and pull down.”

The chain Malden held was actually joined to itself in a loop. He pulled down on it and the gears in the ceiling creaked. The whole cage dropped a fraction of an inch—far too fast for Malden’s liking. Slag grabbed the chain as well and together they pulled until the cage moved smoothly down through the hole in the floor.

It was not magic that moved the cage. Malden understood that. The chain he pulled somehow did the work, and it was his own muscles that moved the chain. Yet the chain moved so freely in its gears, and there was some strange proportion to it—he had to pull it a very long way, very fast, before the cage moved even a bit—that he knew he would never grasp the principles involved. The cage might as well be enchanted, for all he understood.

Yet it worked, he could not deny that. They descended through the floor below without stopping. Slag claimed it was a level of workshops and smithies. Malden could see very little of that floor by the stray beams of candlelight thrown from within their cage.

What he could see didn’t please him much. Beyond the bars lay a vast expanse of dust and stone. He could make out walls of ancient brick, and a doorway, the door hanging loose by one hinge. The candlelight reflected dully from every surface, casting long shadows that danced around the stillness. There was nothing there to alarm him, nothing that looked like it would come racing out to snatch at his face. Yet the very quiet of the place, the sense of vast time and stone left undisturbed for centuries, was somehow worse than the sudden fear and desperate action of the fight with the revenants. Anything could hide back there. Great treasures piled in heaps, maybe—but far more likely dead things, laying sprawled on the floor like inert piles of bones, just waiting for a reason to rise again. A reason to climb stiffly to their bony feet and come forward.

He’d known he was a fool to come here. It was far too dangerous, and the constant fear was preying on him, making him act like a dullard. Making him angry and snappish, so that he’d fought with Cythera when he should have been comforting her. Reassuring her (despite the obvious fact they were far from safety), telling her everything would be all right.

Cythera pressed her face against the bars and peered out into the darkness. Perhaps she was thinking exactly the same thoughts. But he didn’t dare ask. As angry as she was with him right now, he thought that saying anything might be a bad idea.

Yet he was glad when she spoke, if only because it broke the silence. “I am very glad to have you with us, Slag,” she said. “I fear we would be utterly lost without you. You seem to know this place, though you say you’ve never been here before. Do you have some map of the Vincularium you haven’t shared with us?”

“I don’t need one,” the dwarf said, grunting from the effort of constantly pulling the chain. “It’s all f*cking standardized.”

“I don’t know that word,” Malden said.

“Big f*cking surprise.” Slag considered it for a moment, puffing his breath through his black beard. “Well—you know Kingsgate High Street, in Ness?”

“Yes, of course,” the thief replied. A silly question. It was one of the main streets in the city where he’d spent his entire life.

“Well, would you be surprised to know there’s a Kingsgate High Street in Redweir as well? And one in Strowbury?”

“Not very.”

“Let me ask you another question—would you be surprised to learn that, in any of those cities, if you were to follow Kingsgate High Street all the way to the city wall, you would find it led to a road that took you to Helstrow, where your king lives?”

“That’s what ‘Kingsgate’ means.”

Slag nodded. “Now, imagine if every road in Ness had a counterpart in Redweir and Strowbury, and once you knew where, say, Pokekirtle Lane led in one of those cities, you could find a whorehouse anywhere you went. And every one of those brothels had the same name, and the same password to get in, and charged the same fee for a quick f*ck.”

“Slag—there’s a lady present,” Malden insisted.

“A lady who has walked past the bawdy house on Pokekirtle Lane many times,” Cythera said, giving Malden an icy look. “Though of course I’ve never been inside.”

Malden wondered if that was meant as an insult about his parentage—his mother had worked in a bawdy house, after all. He shook off the offense and looked back at Slag. “I think I grasp your point,” he said. “So every dwarven city is built to the same plan. If you know where the marketplace is in the dwarven capital, you can find a similar marketplace in a dwarven city halfway across the world—or in a dwarven city that has been abandoned for centuries.”

“Huzzah. You’ve finally f*cking got it, lad.”

Malden shook his head. “It seems that would take half the charm out of life. And Cutbill would lose half his custom if no one ever got lost in the Stink, back home, and needed an apparently friendly local guide to direct them back to the high street.”

“Maybe so. Our way’s a damn sight more efficient, though. For instance—I can tell, without even looking, that this is where we get off.”

Malden looked outside the cage and saw another floor rising up to meet them. It was as dark as any other and he could see nothing to distinguish it. Slag showed him how to bring the cage to a gentle stop just even with the floor, and then he pushed open the cage door. “Let’s go,” he said. “Bring that candle over here.”

Malden and Cythera followed him out into the darkness. This level seemed in far less pristine condition than those above. Piles of loose stone and rusting iron lay all about, and here and there a forgotten tool lay in the middle of the floor, as if it had been dropped in a hurry and never put away properly. Giant gears with stripped teeth leaned up against the walls, and everywhere chains hung down from the ceiling like rusting stalactites.

“I’ll admit to a certain ignorance regarding dwarven living arrangements,” Cythera said, her voice thick with suspicion. “Yet I have to remark—this does not look like a residential level, where we might find an escape shaft. And I know for a fact we haven’t descended far enough to reach Croy.”

“Er—yeah,” Slag said, rummaging about in one of the piles of old iron. He found a piece of tin only lightly mottled with corrosion, and began bending it into a new shape. “This is still one of the workshop levels. But it’s where we want to be right now, I promise. I know a shortcut.”

“Do you?” Cythera asked. “A shortcut that leads to the residential levels, or one that will take us to the bottom of the shaft?”

The dwarf frowned and cursed as the sharp-edged tin bit into his hands. Then he let go and reached into the pile of scrap for a short iron spike. “Both,” he told her. “Here, give me that candle.”

She handed him the candle stub she held. He wedged it onto the iron spike and then stood up straight. He had improvised a simple lantern, using the tin as a reflector. The candle’s light was almost doubled, and he even had a sort of handle to hold it by. “Come on. It’s not far now.”

He set off at a good pace, wending a course through the piles of refuse, farther into the darkness.

Malden glanced at Cythera, who looked intensely skeptical. Then he shrugged and followed the dwarf.