A Thief in the Night

chapter Forty-eight

Malden heaved at the iron bar again, and the stone door grated against the floor. He put his back into it and grunted in frustration. Sweat made his hands slip and he jumped backward as the bar flew, spinning, to clatter on the floor once again.

He stripped off his cloak and pushed back the sleeves of his tunic.

“Do you want me to have a try?” Cythera asked.

Malden glanced over at Slag. The dwarf was lying on the floor, curled in a ball by the pain that wracked his muscles. His eyes were clamped shut and he was moaning softly. Better that than the screaming that came before, Malden supposed.

“I’m to blame for this,” Malden said, running his hands across his breeches to dry them. “If I’d been thinking clearly I would have seen that dart before it struck him.” He looked at Cythera’s face, hoping to find compassion there. No, there is no fault, he expected her to say. No, you are not to blame.

“Yes,” she said instead. “His death is on your hands.”

Anger and guilt surged through Malden’s chest. He grabbed up the bar and shoved it into the door frame once more. He braced his feet and pulled, and pulled, and—

—fell over backward as the door stopped resisting him and flew open on its hinges. The bar struck Malden’s foot as it dropped to the flagstones, and he cried out as sudden pain raced up his leg.

“Damn! I think I might have broken a toe,” he said, hugging the foot toward him.

Cythera ignored him and walked over the threshold into the Hall of Treasures.

“Wait!” the thief called. “What if there are more traps?”

But she was already inside, carrying Slag’s makeshift lantern with her. Malden rose to his feet—the toe hurt, but he doubted that it was really broken. He bent over Slag and helped the dwarf stand on shaky legs.

“Can you walk?” he asked.

“For this I can.” Slag stumbled forward, barely keeping his feet. Malden pulled the dwarf’s arm around his waist and helped as best he could.

The room beyond the door was not large, at least by the standards of the rest of the Vincularium. It went back perhaps sixty feet and was a third as wide. Its ceiling was barely ten feet over Malden’s head, and was vaulted with graceful stonework that looked more ornamental than functional.

The hall was filled with gold.

Each item in the room had its own pedestal or case. They all deserved special display. A wooden stand the size of a wardrobe but fronted with glass held a selection of crowns as delicate as birds’ nests—woven of filigree, of gold and silver wire that held hundreds of gems aloft. A long case made entirely of crystal held rings in the shape of towers or horses or swords that curved around until their points touched their pommels. Each ring held a single perfect gem the size of a robin’s egg. Along one wall hung tapestries made of cloth of platinum, cunningly worked with shining copper wire for contrast. The scenes the tapestries showed—including a view of the Vincularium from the top of the central shaft—were so finely detailed they might have been windows into a shimmering world.

A row of suits of armor lined the other wall, with additional suits mounted higher up to make a second array. One panoply was painted with black enamel, then worked with silver leaf to form a floral pattern so convoluted the eye could get lost in its twists and turns. Another suit was covered in gold-tipped spikes to give a fearsome aspect. Yet another looked to Malden as if it had been carved from stone.

Then there were the weapons. Axes and pikestaffs rose from the floor, gathered together by the hafts until they looked like deadly trees. The blades of some were inscribed with runes in a script so flowing, so elaborated with curlicues and sharply barbed serifs, that a single thorn rune could fill the entire available space. Others were engraved all over with characters so tiny Malden could not make out the individual runes.

There were cases of swords with blades so delicate and thin they looked like they would snap if they were lifted, or hilts so heavily encrusted with jewels that surely no hand could hold them. There were doubly recurved bows of laminated horn fitted with half a dozen strings—they looked like fairy harps to Malden.

The armor and weapons were so grand it took him a while to realize they all shared something in common, which was their small size. They were not made for humans, but for dwarves.

“It’s illegal for a dwarf to use a weapon,” Malden said, admiring a sheaf of perfect daggers that stood like pins in a velvet cushion. The pommel of one was a ruby as big as his fist.

“It is now,” Slag explained. “Before we signed that damned treaty my people were hardy warriors. Lad, help me over to yon case of glassware. I’d stand on my own feet in this place.”

Malden brought Slag to the case in question, which was full of fantastically elaborate bottles, decanters, and ewers.

“When we left the Vincularium, we had to leave all our weapons behind. That was part of the agreement we made with your king.” Slag shook his head—a gesture that made him wince with pain. “We gave up a great deal.”

Cythera held the lantern high to look at a collection of objects at the far end of the room. Malden went to her side and then wondered why she bothered. Unlike the gold and gems in the cases, these works didn’t seem like treasures at all. Bolts of linen stood next to barrels of perfectly normal arrows. There were pieces of driftwood polished until they shone like glass, and plain bottles of clear liquids, and pieces of rotting parchment inscribed with simple runes. Yet these mundane pieces were mounted and displayed with as much care and ostentation as the finest jewels and the best gem-inlaid cloisonné. Most surprising were the stones. Simple, spherical stones—a lot of them—that shone in the light for the smoothness of their surfaces, but were made of common granite, basalt, or limestone. Malden accounted them little more valuable than pebbles washed smooth by a river.

“What’s this dross?” he asked. “It’s hardly treasure.”

“To the dwarves who made those things, they were worth more than all the f*cking gilt and samite in this room,” Slag said, and nodded at Cythera. “Lass, you know your runes well enough, but you misread the name of this place. This ain’t the Hall of Treasures. It’s the Hall of Masterpieces. It’s understandable, though—in my language, the words are almost identical.”

“Masterpieces,” Malden said. “Like a journeyman would make?” In the guilds that ran Ness’s many workshops and yards, there were three basic ranks of worker: apprentice, journeyman, and master. To attain the rank of master a journeyman was required to create some piece of especially fine work—a perfectly balanced sword, a cloak dyed a new color, or the like—which proved he’d learned his trade.

“Exactly like that,” Slag agreed, “except we take it more serious. When a dwarf figures out what craft he’ll follow—stonework, goldsmithing, armoring, what have you—he spends five years’ time making a perfect specimen of skill and design.”

“Five years?” Malden said. “For one piece? The masters must be slave-drivers.”

“While working on his masterpiece, a dwarf has no master. He gets no pay—he lives with his family, if they’ll have him, and sleeps on stone, and eats crusts of bread.”

“The law requires this?”

“F*cking pride requires it! A dwarf with a second-rate masterpiece will never be able to look another dwarf in the eye. The masterpiece makes the man, do you see? Everyone knows how it turns out, and everyone judges the dwarf based on what they’ve seen. Reputation means everything to us. Yon shiny balls of stone you sneer at, Malden, are the credentials of a generation of the finest miners and sappers that ever lived. They were cut down from blocks bigger than this room, cut and worked and smoothed out until they were as round as the sodding moon. There’s a long tradition of dwarves competing to see who could carve the most perfect sphere.”

Cythera picked up one of the pieces of polished driftwood. “That this would even last eight hundred years without rotting is a miracle,” she said. She held it high so Malden could see it had been varnished so many times it seemed to be embedded in a thin layer of glass. “Five years of work, on this one piece . . .”

“Methinks that dwarf picked the wrong career,” Malden said, shrugging. He was a thief, and he found the thought of so much hard work depressing. “All right, Slag, we’re suitably awed. Now—which of these curios was it that made you cross half the world?”

The dwarf slumped against the case of glassware. “It should be over there,” he said. “Five enormous barrels worth. It should be right f*cking . . . there.”

He pointed toward a corner of the room Malden had yet to explore.

An empty corner.