A Thief in the Night

chapter Forty-seven

Croy and Mörget moved forward silently, taking light steps to avoid splashing in the water that covered the floor. They both had their swords drawn but held low so they wouldn’t glimmer in the light.

There was definitely light ahead of them, far down the tunnel. They had extinguished their candles. Croy could see very little. But his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him—a flickering radiance came down the aisle, glinting on the wet floor.

He was unable to dispel a nagging thought. Nothing they’d seen so far required fire. Nothing they’d seen suggested there was a desire for warmth or light in this forgotten place. The fire might have been natural. The fungus they’d seen lining the walls of the central shaft might be flammable, and some strange alchemy of forgotten places might have started a blaze on its own. But he thought not—the fire was glowing too steadily, as if it had been tended with care. And a natural fire down here would have spread quickly, given enough fuel, while this fire seemed to be carefully contained.

Which left only one possible conclusion: they were not alone in the Vincularium.

He already knew that the demon haunted the place. He’d also seen the countless revenants up on the top level. He understood that the ancient city was not completely abandoned. Yet this fire suggested that things were far more complicated than he’d previously believed. The demon didn’t seem intelligent enough to use fire. The revenants were creatures of the cold and the dark—they had shunned Dawnbringer’s light, so why would they make a fire of their own? No, there must be living creatures here. Living people, who needed to stay warm.

He should have known earlier, he thought. The flock of beetles and then the farm of mushrooms should have spelled it out clearly. Farms did not prosper on their own. Someone had to be cultivating the fungus. If someone didn’t come by periodically to harvest the yield, the crop of mushrooms would have died and rotted long since.

He looked back at Mörget and thought of how to proceed. There was no telling how many enemies might be waiting by that fire. Yet Croy knew he had to get through them. They’d found no other path toward the upper levels. If he wanted to go up, he had to go through whoever tended that fire. If he wanted to rescue Cythera and Slag, he needed to keep advancing.

The racks on either side provided excellent cover, but there was no way to move forward without heading up the center aisle. It was also their only path of retreat, should there be more resistance ahead than the two of them could handle.

“Do you see any other path but to charge forward?” he whispered to the barbarian.

“I’ve rarely needed any other,” the barbarian replied.

Croy nodded. He frowned and looked forward again. Shadows flowed along the ceiling, as if someone had moved around the fire. “Together we run up there, as fast as we can, and surprise them.”

Mörget nodded. “As it should be.”

Croy shifted his grip on Ghostcutter’s hilt. Then he held up three fingers. Mörget looked at them in incomprehension, then shrugged and ran forward, bellowing a war cry and brandishing Dawnbringer over his head.

For a second Croy watched the barbarian recede before him, aghast at how much noise Mörget made. He supposed it was honorable to let your enemies know you were coming, but still—

Oh, enough, Croy thought. Then he screamed, “For Skrae and her king!” and followed the barbarian in his headlong rush up the tunnel.

Croy could see nothing but Mörget’s back. His feet kept slipping on the wet floor and his breath plumed out before him in the damp. His brains felt like they were rattling in his skull as his boots came crashing down, again and again, on the hard flagstones.

He thought he must be running to certain death—at least, certain death for someone. The long tunnel sped past him, rack after rack of mushrooms in their ordure, and then suddenly the tunnel opened up, widening out into a broad antechamber.

Mörget staggered to a stop. Croy saw the barbarian standing over a very small campfire, turning his head back and forth as he sought something. Croy drew up beside him and looked down to see buckets of water sitting by the fire. Nothing else.

“He disappeared before I could cut him down,” Mörget said. He sounded like a gambler who had just discovered a card cheat.

“He? Who did you see? I saw nothing,” Croy told the barbarian.

Mörget frowned. “There was one person here. Small, perhaps a youth.”

“A warrior of some kind? Was he wearing armor?”

“No.”

“Was he armed?” Croy asked.

“I do not think so. I do not know if it was even a male. It might have been a girl. It was very small. Yes. Probably a girl, judging by the noise she made. She screeched a bit, then ran that way.” Mörget pointed with Dawnbringer toward the wall of the tunnel. Croy saw no door there, not even a wide crack between the mortared bricks. “She simply vanished.”

“Cythera can do that,” Croy said, rubbing his chin. “She can make herself invisible, but only for a few moments at a time. You . . . you don’t think it was Cythera?”

Mörget shook his head violently. “Definitely not. Cythera is bigger. You know, taller. And dresses in finer clothes. This girl wore only a much-patched shift.”

Croy stepped over to the wall. He pounded on the bricks with the pommel of his sword. The hollow thud he made suggested there was an open space behind the wall—but what of it? What kind of girl could just walk through a solid wall?

“Whoever she was, she’s gone now.” Croy shook his head. He glanced down at the buckets by the fire. “I don’t think she was a warrior at all.”

Mörget turned to stare at him. “No. No. She was . . . very small.”

Croy stared back. Was Mörget suffering a pang of conscience? If the girl had not fled, Croy was certain Mörget would have cut her down just on principle. Maybe he was doubting his whole philosophy, maybe he was wondering why he had devoted his life to mindless violence, and—

“I have not killed anything in days,” Mörget said. “Now, I am cheated!” He bellowed in rage at the unfairness of it all. “Magic! She must have used magic, to vanish in thin air like that. She must have been a sorceress. And I could not reach her in time.”

Croy frowned. He looked down at the buckets. They were simple, and crudely made from hammered sheets of tin. They leaked. “A witch, perhaps,” he admitted.

“Who knows what dark magic she was about?” Mörget thundered. “At least, I can say I kept her from practicing her foul art.”

Croy shook his head. The buckets didn’t look like witch’s cauldrons. They looked like the kind of simple implements one might find on a farm. He was pretty sure the girl had been tending the mushrooms, not some arcane ritual. “She must have been sent to wet down the floor of the farm tunnels. Mushrooms like the damp.”

“She was just here! And then she was gone. Magic, I swear!” Mörget looked farther up the tunnel where it ran ahead into darkness. There were more racks that way, identical to the ones behind them. “She did not go that way. She did not hide behind one of the racks. She was just—gone.”

“Hardly a wonder, in the dark like this,” Croy protested. He leaned against the brick wall. “We had no light ourselves, and—”

Behind him the wall shifted. He thought at first it was collapsing under his weight, and he jumped away. When he looked back, however, he saw that a whole section of the wall was mounted on hinges. It was a hidden door. It must not have been closed properly, and now it had popped open on its hinges.

He reached forward and got his fingernails around the edge of the door. With a simple tug it swung open before him, revealing a side tunnel—just wide and tall enough for one person to walk through at a time. A secret passage.

A fresh breeze ruffled Croy’s hair.

“It smells better in there, at least.”