A Thief in the Night

chapter Forty-nine

“No, damn you,” Slag wheezed. “No! The book was clear. It was clear as f*cking crystal! The barrels were stored here, in the Place of Long Shadows, in the Hall of Masterpieces . . . this is impossible. Impossible! The book said it, in black and white!”

“Books can be misprinted,” Malden suggested, though the excuse sounded lame even to him. “Or perhaps someone moved your treasure after it was published.”

“No. No!” Slag exclaimed. The force of his frustration was enough to send him into a coughing fit. “Trust me, this wouldn’t have been removed. It was supposed to still be here when the elves were sealed inside. Blast!”

“I’m so sorry, Slag,” Cythera said, and tried to rub the dwarf’s back.

Slag would not be comforted. He pulled away from her and slumped forward across a display case. “It was going to . . . it would have . . . oh, sod it! My entire future was in those barrels. This was going to end all my miseries. It was going to put me back on f*cking top. And it’s gone. It’s f*cking . . . gone.”

“But what was it?” Malden asked. He bent low and studied the floor where the barrels had supposedly been stored. A layer of dust—thinner than he might have expected—lay on the floor, but there were five large circles of bare stone where no dust had collected. “Were the barrels full of gold dust? Or maybe assorted gems of various sizes and cuts?”

“It was . . . a weapon,” Slag explained. He sank down to sit on the floor. Dark rings surrounded his eyes and Malden could hear him wheezing from across the room. “I don’t claim to know how it worked, only that—it was lethal beyond anything—anything that had been seen before. The dwarves who worked here invented it . . . just before they left.” He shook his head and cringed in pain for a while.

“Don’t strain yourself,” Cythera said, squatting down next to the dwarf. She mopped his face with a kerchief.

Slag reached up to bat her hand away, but he was too weak to properly resist her. “We only have sketchy notes on what it was, what it . . . did. I won’t bore you with the details, lad. I only know it could have killed a knight in full armor from so far away he’d never see you coming. We never told the humans about it, of course—imagine the f*cking disaster that might have caused, if they got their hands on it. But when the treaty was signed, and we were forbidden from . . . from—” He started coughing then, long, nasty paroxysms that left his face red with congested blood.

“You didn’t want us to have that kind of power. We’d already done enough harm,” Malden conjectured. “So you didn’t want to make us more deadly? I suppose I can see that. So you sealed up this magic weapon forever, and forgot it existed. Or almost.”

“Not . . . not . . .”

“Malden, let him rest,” Cythera insisted.

The thief nodded, and decided to ask no more questions—for the nonce.

“Not magic,” Slag finally choked out. “Not . . . magic at all, or . . . I wouldn’t . . .” He lowered his head to his chest.

“Just be quiet now,” Cythera said.

Slag shook his head again, though this time it was voluntary. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“What? You hardly need apologize for anything right now,” Malden told him.

Slag scowled. “I led you both here. For f*cking . . . nothing. I owe you an explanation. Though I’m . . . I . . . I’m loath to say it. There’s some things you don’t know about me, lad. Embarrassing things I never shared. I think . . . think . . .”

Slag’s face went white again and he stared up at the door.

Carefully, painfully, he leaned forward.

“Slag, really, you need to lie down,” Cythera suggested.

The dwarf fought her hands away and this time he had the strength to do it. “I heard something. Put out the light,” he demanded in a hoarse whisper.

“But—” Cythera started, but Slag ignored her protest. He brought his own hand down hard on the flame of the lantern, snuffing it with a hiss and a curl of smoke. Malden blew out his own candle and they were left in utter darkness.

Not, however, in silence.

When his eyes were rendered useless by the lack of light, Malden’s other senses grew stronger. Specifically his sense of hearing. He could make out, now, what had startled the dwarf so. A faint rapping sound. Something tapping on stone, not very far away, with bony fingers.

Perhaps—Malden’s guts clenched at the thought—the revenants had followed them down from the top level. Perhaps even now a legion of undead elves was making its way toward the Hall of Masterpieces.

He tried not to breathe.

The rhythmic sound came closer. It was not like the sound a human makes while rapping his knuckles on a door. A human knocks two or three times, then stops to listen for a response. This was like a steady drumming, a cascade of taps that never stopped. There seemed no regular pattern to the sound—it came in fits and starts, tip-tip-tap-RAP-tip-RAP-tick—but it never faded away.

It came closer, inch by inch, until it was sounding on the open door.

Tap-tip-tick-RAP-RAP-tap.

And then it stopped.

If they can’t hear us in here, Malden thought, perhaps they’ll just go away. Perhaps they’ll leave us alone and return to their graves, perhaps—

A light appeared outside the door. Long yellow beams moved up and down the wall, and around the edge of the door the light was bright enough to dazzle Malden’s dark-adapted eyes.

Then a beam struck him square in the eye and he flinched backward—right into a sheaf of pikestaffs that fell clattering to the floor.

The door creaked open wide, and two figures stepped through, silhouetted by their own light. They were both rail-thin, but neither of them were tall enough to be revenants. One was barely four feet tall. The other only a quarter that height, the size of a cat.

As Malden’s eyes recovered from being dazzled, he saw the light touch first Cythera, then Slag. The taller of the two newcomers laughed excitedly when Slag held up one arm to block the light. Then it set down its lantern, and for the first time Malden could see them properly.

The short one looked somewhat akin to a goblin. It had long floppy ears and a mouth full of crooked teeth. Its eyes were enormous and milky in color, with no pupils or irises. Its mangy hair was a shocking blue, and ran down its back in a wide pelt. Its hands and feet looked too large to be supported by its sticklike limbs, and it never quite stood still, instead bobbing up and down and slapping its feet. It tapped on the floor with long bony fingers, knocking randomly on the flagstones as if it couldn’t help itself.

The taller of the two was a dwarf, dressed in leather coveralls. A female. Malden had never seen a dwarf woman before, and that alone would have been shock enough. She was as thin as Slag, though her hips and breasts were of generous proportion. Her long black hair had been tied up in a dozen braids that stuck straight out from her scalp. Her eyebrows met without interruption over the bridge of her nose, and her upper lip was dark with sparse hair. She had the smaller creature on a leather leash.

Her eyes were bright with malice.

She couldn’t seem to stop laughing. She walked over to Slag crouched against a display case and leaned over to laugh in his face. “Looking for something in particular?” she asked.