A Thief in the Night

chapter Fifty

Croy went first down the secret tunnel, Ghostcutter drawn and held before him. The flame of the candle in his other hand streamed behind the wick and fluttered dangerously, but never quite went out.

Behind him Mörget had difficulty fitting through the narrow passage. He only had to stoop a little to avoid hitting his head, but he had to walk nearly sideways to get his broad shoulders through.

The passage took a winding course that went now down, now up by a sharp incline, so that Croy almost put Ghostcutter away so he could have his hands free to help him climb. He decided against it—who knew what waited for them just ahead?—and was forced to stumble forward by finding footholds in the rough stone.

Such were in plentiful supply. He had little time to spare for thoughts of who made this tunnel, or why, but he knew it was no dwarf. The rock was crudely cut, marked everywhere with the square white scratches of a chisel. The ceiling was uneven, and more than once he bashed his head on a place where the tunnel had not been properly excavated. In places it grew so narrow that he had to squeeze through sideways himself, and it was only with vigorous wriggling and much grunting that Mörget kept up with him.

Yet the barbarian never complained, nor suggested they turn back. He shared with Croy a certain outlook on enemies who ran away from you when you approached. It was highly unlikely they would just run and leave you alone—in all likelihood, the farm girl, or whatever it was that Mörget had startled, was going to seek help. Presumably armed and dangerous help. For a knight like Croy, that meant only one course of action was thinkable. You rushed in, as fast as you could, to find your enemies before they had a chance to regroup.

Croy was sweating and breathing hard by the time he reached the end of the passage. It terminated in a featureless brick wall, just like the one that had led to this secret way. He pushed at it, expecting it to open easily like the secret door they’d found back in the mushroom farm. When it failed to budge, his brow furrowed and he kicked at it and struck it with his shoulder and considered digging into the mortar between the bricks with his belt knife.

“Let me see,” Mörget insisted, shoving his way past Croy. There was no room for them to stand side by side in the narrow tunnel so Croy squeezed backward, coming into far more contact with Mörget’s flesh than he liked. Considering the fact that both of them were covered with manure, it was not a pleasant dance.

“It must open,” Mörget insisted. “We saw no side passages, or any other way for her to escape.”

“Unless there was another secret door, more cunningly hidden than the last,” Croy suggested. “It’s possible this door is false. A brick facade placed over a dead end in the tunnel.”

“A false door?” Mörget asked.

“A false secret door,” Croy agreed.

“A false secret door trap,” Mörget growled. “Intended to leave us with no retreat possible, boxed in where we can’t fight properly. Subtle! I like this not. I told you she was a sorceress. She’s playing tricks on us.”

Croy grunted in dissent. “I’m sure now she was no practitioner of magic at all,” he said. “Just a simple mushroom farmer.”

“She is a sorceress, and she must be destroyed,” Mörget demanded. His rage seemed poorly contained.

Croy remembered something then. He recalled that when Mörget had told his story of coming from the eastern steppes to Ness, he claimed to have fought many sorcerers along his way. It was how he’d learned to fight like an Ancient Blade.

Now Croy wondered how many of those foes had been actual magicians—and how many just appeared so to the barbarian. How many innocents he might have slain in his berserker fury. The thought made Croy’s blood run cold. Mörget seemed less than interested in rescuing Cythera and Slag as well—he was far more determined to find his demon, regardless of whether Croy’s friends survived the quest.

For the first time Croy began to wonder just how honorable a companion Mörget might be. Croy had spent time guarding the mountain passes against barbarian invasions. He’d always been told that the easterners were vicious, savage people, barely human and incapable of moral behavior. When he first met Mörget and saw he bore an Ancient Blade, he’d come to believe that was all just prejudice, that it was possible for a barbarian to be an honorable warrior and a good man.

He tried to fight off such doubts. They were no help at that particular moment. “Come,” he said. “Let’s go back. There must be another way up—some stairwell that will take us more directly to Cythera and Slag, and—”

Mörget was beyond talking, at that point.

The barbarian roared and charged at the wall with his shoulder, hard enough, it seemed to Croy, to smash his own bones if the bricks didn’t yield.

Luckily, they did. The door shifted an inch or two, letting in a gust of foul-smelling air. Croy wrinkled his nose. At least this new reek didn’t smell of excrement. Instead it stank of rotting vegetables and spoiled meat.

“Damn your tricks, sorceress!” Mörget cursed, and then struck the door again, hard enough to make the tunnel shake. The door shrieked as it opened another few inches—and then Croy winced as he heard something heavy and metallic fall away from the door. It clattered and rang as it fell to crash on a floor on the far side.

“Now at least they know we’re coming,” Croy said. He was not prone to sarcasm, normally. Maybe Malden had been rubbing off on him.

“That just makes for a fairer fight,” Mörget replied. He pushed the door again and it opened easily. It must have been barred from the far side, that was all.

Mörget slipped through the opening and Croy followed close behind—just close enough that he could grab the barbarian’s shoulders and pull him back before he fell to his death. Beyond the brick door was a narrow ledge looking out over a vast room. The floor of the room was a good fifty feet below them.

Mörget shouted in anger and struck the wall behind him with a closed fist. The blow made an echoing boom that rolled around the big room for long seconds.

We may not surprise them, Croy thought, but if luck is with us we’ll scare them senseless.

Candlelight revealed few details of the room beyond, but enough at least to give Croy some idea of how to proceed. The ledge was only six inches wide, part of a stringcourse that ran along the wall. This at least was dwarven architecture—the stringcourse was made of carved dwarven runes, hundreds of them, with raised dots between every six or seven runes, probably to mark the end of one word and the start of another. Below the stringcourse someone had made a very crude ladder by chiseling holes into the wall for handholds.

Croy sheathed Ghostcutter and started down, lacking any better plan. He had never been a skilled climber, but he went down as quickly as he could, clinging desperately to the handholds.

They were too small for human hands, really, but he found he could grip them with a few fingers, and use other handholds for the tips of his boots. Carefully, and far slower than he would have liked, he climbed down the wall to the floor below. He was hampered in this by the need to hold his candle in one hand even as he climbed. He dropped the last five feet to the floor and unsheathed his sword the second he was standing on solid ground.

Behind him Mörget came down much faster, with Dawnbringer clamped tight between his teeth.

By the time the barbarian dropped light as a feather to the flagstones, Croy had made out more of the chamber. The room was perhaps a hundred feet long, and half that wide. Its walls were of fine marble veined with a deep green. No furniture, machinery, or other fixtures filled the space, but at one end a massive throne had been carved to abut the wall, a deep chair raised up on six steps of joined marble blocks. “An audience chamber. Or perhaps a place of judgment,” Croy said.

“Once upon a time. Now it’s a midden,” Mörget replied.

They were both correct. At their feet lay the iron bar that had barred the secret door above them. It had dug a shallow gouge in the floor when it struck. It was, however, far from the only thing strewn across the floor. Rags, bits of broken wood, and countless pieces of cave beetle shell had been dumped here without heed. The floor was thick with rotting meat and cut-up pieces of mushrooms. Entire fish skeletons crunched underfoot.

None of it was fresh—but it was new. This was not garbage dumped by dwarves in ages past. Someone living had used this chamber to store their refuse.

“Gah!” Mörget shouted, and lifted up one boot to stare at its underside. The sole was clotted with fish guts. “What’s next? Will we have to crawl through a charnel house before we find this demon? Or perhaps a latrine?”

“I don’t think so,” Croy said. He pointed with Ghostcutter at the far side of the chamber. A massive arched doorway stood there, open to darkness.

Oozing across the threshold was a thing perhaps fifteen feet in length, though its shape constantly changed so it was hard to tell. It had no fixed form, instead rolling forward like living water. Its skin looked slimy to the touch, and underneath could be seen shapes like organs and even faces, pressing upward against the skin in mute screams of torment.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Croy asked.

“Oh, aye!” Mörget said, and let out a booming laugh that made the whole marble chamber buzz.