A Thief in the Night

chapter Forty-five

Malden dropped the bar instantly. He grabbed up a candle and peered at the wall next to the door. It didn’t take long to find what he was looking for—a hole bored into the stone, as wide across as his little finger, drilled at exactly neck height for a dwarf. It was hard to tell by candlelight but he thought there might be a spring inside.

A classic trap, and one he would have seen instantly if it had been set for a victim of human height. The hole would be drilled all the way through the wall, and the spring latched in place. On the far side of the wall there would be a bit of wire running from the door to the spring. When they opened the door, the wire snapped, releasing the spring. Anyone standing near the door would be shot with the dart.

As to who had set the dart, Malden had no clue—though he supposed it must be the same unknown person who had placed the spike trap back in the barricade room.

“Damn,” he said. “So obvious, when you know it’s there!”

“Aye, lad,” Slag said. He pulled the dart free and threw it to the floor. “Smarts a bit.” He looked up at Malden. When their eyes met, Malden knew instantly that something was wrong. He had a pretty clear idea what it was, too.

“I got so f*cking close,” Slag whispered.

“Oh, no,” Malden said. “It can’t be. I—I’m sorry, old man.”

The dwarf nodded and looked away. Then he took two steps away from the door and let out a scream of pain that echoed around the abandoned foundry. The agony must have been excruciating, for he doubled over and his whole body shook.

Cythera looked over at Malden with wide eyes, then rushed forward with her light. “Slag—are you all right?”

“What a f*cking daft question,” the dwarf told her. “No, I’m not.”

“Poison,” Cythera cried as she bent down by Slag’s side. The dwarf put an arm around her waist and let her help him off his feet. Gently, she laid him down on the floor, then emptied her pack and wadded it up to make a pillow for his head. He tried to sit up but she pushed him back down. “No, Slag,” she said, “don’t move, just—just rest.”

“No,” Malden said, clenching his eyes shut. “No, damn you. Not like this.”

There was little he could do. He wrapped the end of his cloak around his hand and picked up the dart. It was made of very light wood and fletched with pigeon feathers. The point looked very sharp. There was no doubt in his mind that it had not been sitting there, waiting to kill someone, for eight hundred years. The mechanism would have rusted away or the dart itself would have rotted. Someone had laid that trap recently, within the last couple of days. And it didn’t seem at all like the work of revenants. They longed to kill the living, true enough, but they had far less subtle methods at their disposal.

A droplet of straw-colored liquid ran down the shaft of the dart, and he sniffed at it before dropping it again. “It doesn’t smell like hemlock,” he said.

“Lad,” the dwarf said, staring up at Malden. “Lad, I’m f*cking cold.”

Malden nodded and took off his cloak. Laying it across the dwarf’s body, he knelt down beside him.

Slag gave him a wry smile. He tried to say something more but then his body seized up and he could only tilt his head to the side before he started retching.

Cythera dropped to her knees by the dwarf’s side. “Hold him,” she told Malden. “He might hurt himself.”

Malden clutched the dwarf’s arms as Slag began to shake violently. Convulsions wracked his slight frame and his back arched unnaturally.

“There must be something we can do for him,” Malden insisted.

“Just—Just hold him!” Cythera said, grabbing Slag’s ankles. “This won’t last very long. Not this time, I think.”

Slag’s body gave one last buck and then he fell back and lay still.

“Oooh,” the dwarf said. “My back hurts.”

Cythera brought her hand up to her mouth and gnawed anxiously on one fingernail. “You said it didn’t smell like hemlock. The poison on the dart. What did it smell like? Did it smell of almonds? Or perhaps garlic?”

Malden shook his head. “No smell at all, really. It was the color of straw.”

“Was it liquid, or was it pasty?”

The thief stared at her. “Liquid,” he said. “What are you getting at? You knew he would have that fit. What do you know of poisons?”

She waved one hand in the air. “I mentioned that my mother’s a witch, Malden.”

“I have met her, you know,” he protested. Then he shook his head and said, “She taught you something of poisons?”

“There are more reagents, tinctures, and orpiments in her larder than you’d find in an apothecary’s shop. She uses them to brew potions, to make healing salves, special ointments—she taught me a little of the plants and compounds that heal, and, yes, a little of those that kill.”

She jumped up and ran to where the dart lay. She studied it carefully, then took a droplet of the poison between two fingertips and rubbed them together briskly. “It’s not hemlock, you’re right. Nor hebon of yew, though the symptoms are close . . . maybe henbane? He’s too lucid for it to be deadly nightshade.”

Malden looked down at the dwarf. Sweat slicked across Slag’s face, and his skin was a rosy pink—which looked decidedly unhealthy, since normally a dwarf’s skin was whiter than snow. Slag writhed and pushed Malden’s cloak off him, as if he had grown too hot. Consciousness had nearly fled him.

Malden ran over to where Cythera stood and whispered, “Will he perish?”

“Yes,” she said, looking him right in the eye. “Whether it happens in the next few minutes, though, or as much as a day from now, I can’t say. Not without knowing what kind of poison was on this dart, how much of a dose he received—and a hundred other things I can’t begin to guess at.”

“You must know an antidote, though. Surely there is one!”

“If I could get him out of here—if I could bring him to Coruth, perhaps. But she’s hundreds of miles away.”

“We have to try. If he has any chance at all.” He reached over and took her hand. “Cythera, I know you won’t want to hear it. But this means we have to escape from the Vincularium as fast as we can. We can’t go looking for Croy.”

Her mouth formed a hard line but she didn’t look away from his eyes.

“You’re right,” she said. The words came as if they’d been dragged out of her.

Malden nodded and turned around, intending to build some kind of litter out of the tents they carried in their packs. He stopped, though, when he saw that Slag was crawling across the floor.

“Stop that this instant,” Cythera said.

Slag halted his forward progress. Yet he looked up at them and said, “F*ck off. I know I’m dying. You don’t have to f*cking whisper about it. Before I go, though, I have to see what’s behind that door. I have to know if it’s still there.”