A Thief in the Night

chapter Forty-four

Slag’s path led them through the largest forge Malden had ever seen—a cyclopean vault the dimensions of which could only be vaguely hinted at by their paltry candlelight. Molds for casting iron stood in great tidy pyramids, some of lead and some of moldering wax that collapsed into greasy dust when he touched them. Farther along, a wide channel had been cut through the floor, then lined with bricks that glimmered eerily as Malden climbed over them. One whole wall had been constructed of iron plates thirty feet high. The plates were designed to be retractable with the use of long, stout poles. One plate hung crooked on a rusted hinge, and beyond them he could see a round space as big as a house, lined everywhere with the same shiny bricks. It must have been a furnace capable of generating unearthly amounts of heat, he decided. Strangely, there were no ashes on its floor, nor remnants of charcoal or other spent fuel. Instead a complicated array of pipes emerged from the floor, with holes bored in a regular pattern along their top sides. Above the network of pipes, stout chains held up a mammoth iron cauldron. Bright metal slag stained its sides.

“Is this where steel was made?” Malden asked. Steel—good steel—was the most valuable thing the dwarves made, and it remained a great mystery to Malden’s people. Human blacksmiths could work wonders with iron, twisting it into fantastic shapes and objects of great utility. Yet iron could not bend like steel, nor was it half as strong. Iron blades lost their edge too quickly and could never cut through steel armor. If humans could make steel they would turn their hands to little else, he imagined, yet every time they tried, they produced only a brittle facsimile that shattered as soon as it was struck with a hammer. No human had ever seen the foundries where the dwarves made their strongest metal—the very process by which steel was forged remained a closely guarded secret. Any human who learned how it was done could become a very rich man in very short order.

Sadly, he was not to be that man. Slag snorted in derision. “Don’t be a simpleton. Steel wasn’t invented until long after this place was abandoned. Anyway, you don’t need a forge that size for casting a few f*cking swords. This was for the more exotic alloys. Come along away from there, please. And don’t touch a f*cking thing!”

It was too late. Malden had already bent to examine a pile of metal scrap, thinking he’d seen a glint of silver at its base. He reached for it, then jumped back in fear as the whole pile creaked forward and spilled out over the floor in a cloud of dust and flakes of rust. The noise was deafening as the metal clattered and bounced against the flagstones.

When the heap had settled down into a new shape, Malden straightened up and tried to regain some composure while Slag stared daggers at him. “Lesson learned,” he claimed.

Slag spat in disgust. He led them past enormous presses and hammer mills, water-driven machines that he explained could take a piece of raw iron and flatten it into plates by row after row of trip-hammers. Malden had seen similar devices in human workshops in the Smoke back in Ness, but nothing on such a scale or so cleverly designed. Other machines, he didn’t recognize at all, which hardly surprised him. “The guild of smiths would pay a fortune for this equipment,” he pointed out.

Slag shrugged. “None of this would work anymore, even if you could get it out of here somehow.” Malden saw he was correct. The iron parts had rusted clean through in places, and anywhere the wood remained it was crumbling to dust and riddled with wormcast.

Still, the technical expertise on display put anything he had seen before to shame. Ness was a working city, a place where goods were manufactured in huge yards and works, but compared to the dilapidated machinery they passed, even the finest and most up-to-date mills in the Free City might as well have been devoted to bashing rocks together to make stone axes.

“You could outfit an army with these works,” Malden said, keeping his candle high so he could see everything. “Several armies.”

“They did,” Cythera told him. “The war between our people and the elves went on for decades. For us it was a time of unparalleled bloodshed and suffering. For the dwarves it was an era of great prosperity.”

The dwarf shrugged. “Soldiers need iron they can trust. Bronze, too.”

“Sadu’s knucklebones. Slag—don’t tell me your people sold to both sides.” Malden was somewhat offended by the idea.

“It wasn’t our war,” Slag said. It was not an apology.

“But you were our allies!” Malden exclaimed. He knew that much of history.

“Aye, lad—once we knew you were going to win. This way.”

The dwarf took them past a slightly more tidy version of the junkyard they’d originally come through. Here, piles of metal scrap were heaped against the walls, piled to the ceiling, sorted by type of metal. Malden recognized lead and copper and iron—all of them succumbing to inevitable corrosion. He saw piles of tin and pewter and brass. Some were comprised of far more exotic metals—they were perhaps alloys he’d only heard mentioned, like hepatizon or corinthiacum. There were many piles as well that he could not identify at all. There were metals that looked blue in the candlelight, and—most interestingly to a thief—others very nearly the color of gold.

“Did your ancestors ever work in precious metals here?” Malden asked. “Silver, say, or orichalcum? Maybe electrum?”

Slag sighed and turned to give him a nasty look. “Yes, they did. But not in this foundry. Gold’s rarer than ghost shit. You work it in small quantities, under special conditions, to make sure you don’t waste so much as a speck of dust. If you’re looking for treasure here you’re wasting your time, I’m afraid. Anyway, when they left here, the dwarves would have been sure to take every damned ingot of— Malden! Away from there!”

Malden had been about to pick up a piece of straw-colored metal from one of the piles. He stopped with his hand a hairbreadth from it and looked up in surprise. “Why?” he asked. “Is this some secretly valuable metal you don’t want me pilfering?”

“No,” the dwarf said. “It’s yellow arsenic.”

The thief yanked his hand back at once. “Like the poison?”

“The deadliest kind, refined and purified. That piece right there is enough to kill half a f*cking village.”

“And it’s just been left here, out in the open?”

Slag’s eyes were wide with fear. “Out in the open? When this place was in use, only trained smiths were allowed in this room. Did you expect this place to be safe and friendly to any thief who broke in and made himself at home?”

“Hardly,” Malden said. “Yet I didn’t expect it to be as poisonous as a nest of vipers either. What were your ancestors doing with arsenic? Making tainted weapons for the elves to turn against my ancestors?”

Slag grunted in frustration. “When alloyed properly with copper, arsenic makes an incredibly hard bronze. Really now, lad, don’t touch anything in here. This place wasn’t meant for a playroom.”

Malden moved as quickly as he could away from the piles of scrap metal. It seemed he couldn’t do anything right. At least Cythera didn’t comment on his foolhardiness.

The foundry complex didn’t go on much farther. Slag led them past a workshop used for polishing metals, where the brick walls had been etched by noxious fumes. The place still smelled of rotting eggs, even eight hundred years after it had ceased to be used. Beyond that, the foundry ended in a massive stone door inscribed with dwarven runes.

“We need to get this open, and it’ll take some work,” Slag said. “Here, Cythera, hold the light so. Malden, find a bar of iron we can use to pry this. Something not too rusted, please.”

“I’m not touching a thing,” Malden insisted.

“Fine,” Slag said, and sought out the iron bar himself. When he returned with a stout rod about seven feet long, Cythera was waiting for him with a look of suspicion. Malden was glad he wasn’t the dwarf.

“Your shortcut goes through this door, does it?” she asked.

“Yes, lass,” the dwarf said.

Malden was impressed. He’d seen card cheats bluff their way to riches with less innocent expressions.

“Is that why the door is labeled, ‘Hall of Treasures’?”

“Ah,” Slag said. “I, uh, I didn’t—”

“You didn’t know I could read dwarven runes.”

“Not as such, no.”

“I’m the daughter of a witch and a sorcerer. I was taught to read so I could decipher ancient manuscripts and grimoires. Dwarven runes are easy compared to some of the weird alphabets I’ve mastered.” Cythera sighed and set her candle down on the floor. “I’m sure you have an excellent reason to waste our time. Well, get on with it—but I want to know everything when this is done. I want to know exactly why you’re willing to let Croy die for what’s in that room. Is the treasure truly worth that?”

Slag frowned. “I doubt you’ll approve, honestly. But to me, well, I’d sacrifice about a hundred dimwit knights for this.”

She turned her face away from him. “Just be quick.”

Malden, however, reached eagerly for the iron bar. “Let’s get to it, shall we?” he asked, with newfound enthusiasm. He shoved one end of the bar into the massive doorjamb and started to heave. Slag grabbed the bar as well, and together they started to make headway. The door ground noisily against the floor, as if it had swollen in its jamb, but it moved, inch by inch.

The door was almost open when Malden heard what sounded like an insect fly past his ear. Slag suddenly let go of the bar. Its weight doubled in Malden’s hands without warning and it was all he could do to jump back as it fell clattering to the floor.

“Got too heavy for you?” Malden asked, wheeling around to face the dwarf.

Slag didn’t answer. He was too busy trying to pull a dart out of his neck.