A Thief in the Night

chapter Fifty-four

Malden stepped carefully outside the door, watching the floor carefully for trip wires or pressure plates before he put a foot down. He had Slag’s makeshift lantern in one hand, the other free to react to whatever he found.

It did not take long to find the trap. Indeed, it had clearly been designed to be seen immediately. That fact made Malden’s heart sink. Clever, easily avoided traps relied on subterfuge—the hidden dart, the covered pit. Traps that drew attention to themselves tended to be far more deadly and far, far more difficult to circumvent.

Balint’s men had filled the entire foundry with this one.

Eyelets had been hammered into the walls, and between them were strung countless lengths of woolly red yarn. They crisscrossed each other from the floor to the ceiling, like the laces of an unbelievably complicated corset. They reminded Malden of a far more delicate version of the chains strung across the entrance to the Vincularium.

Of course, this was a dwarvish trap, which meant the threads would not be cursed. He would not be burned alive if he touched them. Yet they were taut as lute strings and he knew something ugly would happen should he disturb them in any way. Escape could not possibly be so simple as cutting or burning them either.

He sighed and looked for what they might be attached to. In the dim light he could only make out the square lines of a machine erected at the far end of the room. The threads all converged on a lever sticking up from its side. A shim had been jammed into the lever’s pivot so it couldn’t move, but it looked like the slightest motion would knock the shim loose. So if he tugged the threads, they would pull that lever. And then . . . ? He could not say what would happen then. But he was certain it would be lethal.

Looking up, he could see the threads reached all the way to the ceiling. So he couldn’t just climb up there and somehow traverse the room above the threads. No, he was going to have to make his way through them.

It was not impossible. Though when viewed head on the threads seemed to cross every cubic inch of the foundry, in fact they were far enough apart that he could slip between them if he was very deft and very careful. Malden knew he was at least one of those things. Tentatively, convinced he might set the trap off merely by breathing on it, he ducked under one of the threads and stood up on the far side.

The hair on the top of his head brushed a thread and set it vibrating.

Malden ducked low and covered his eyes. When nothing exploded or caught on fire or rained boulders down on his head, he allowed himself to breathe once more.

The next thread ran across the room at ankle height. It was easy to step over it, but he had to lean back to avoid catching another thread with his throat. Twisting at the waist, he passed under that one, then held his left foot still in the air so as not to trod on the thread beyond.

With infinite care he slid his hand and shoulder between two threads, then braced himself against the floor as he lifted his legs carefully through the gap. Directly ahead, three threads crossed the room, close enough together that he could not pass between them. He moved sideways, walking like a crab, watching always what was ahead of and behind him, until he found the place where the three threads crossed each other. There was a gap underneath just big enough for him to roll through. He passed his sword and lantern over, then tucked and rolled forward, coming to an abrupt halt when something touched his face.

Every muscle in his body locked at once. His bones held his tremulous flesh back as he tried, desperately, not to twitch in his fear. He could feel something fuzzy stretched taut against his left cheek. His left eye saw nothing—but his eyelashes felt it.

Moving absolutely nothing but his arm, Malden reached over and picked up the lantern. He lifted it by inches toward his face, taking great pains not to let the candle flame touch a single thread.

When the light came within a foot or so of his face, Malden saw what he was touching. A thread, just like the others, stretched across the room. Except that where the others were bright red, this one was dyed black. It had been invisible in the dark room. Which was the point. Anyone foolhardy enough to try to climb through the red threads wouldn’t be expecting a thread they couldn’t see.

Malden would have laughed in admiration, if he dared move at all. Balint truly was a master—she had hidden a cunning and undetectable trap by concealing it inside a blatant one.

Moving very slowly, he craned his neck back to release the pressure he’d put on the black thread. Then he stood up, making sure to look above his head for any more black threads he might have missed.

There was one right above him.

Looking to the sides, he spotted more of them—and those were only the ones his light could illuminate.

Taking a deep breath, he started forward again, climbing through the threads while avoiding so much as touching any of them. Checking for black threads slowed his progress to a crawl—and with every minute that passed, Balint and her men were getting farther away.

He kept expecting Cythera to call to him, demanding to know what was taking so long. Worse, the slow pace was taking a toll on his muscles. Malden had trained his body to be a fine instrument. He had spent years climbing spires, jumping across rooftops, and most importantly, running very fast whenever the authorities came for him. Yet he had spent little time training himself to hold perfectly still in contorted positions. His legs were beginning to cramp from being held in unnatural attitudes, and his arms had started to shake.

It was not much farther, he could see. The threads stopped directly before the machine they controlled, and presumably after that he would be able to move normally again. Still, he just wasn’t sure he would make it. He stopped to rest for a moment—only a moment, he promised himself—and to study the threads.

He was close enough now to see the deadly component of Balint’s trap. The machine looked like an oversized wine press, of the kind that used a screw to push a wooden plate down on a pile of grapes. This one seemed to have far more gears and counterweights than any wine press he’d ever seen, however, and the plate was made of metal and lined on its crushing side with thick pyramidal teeth. Underneath the crushing plate lay a piece of corroded yellowish metal, presumably taken from one of the scrap piles along the walls.

Malden couldn’t figure it out until he remembered what Slag had said about not touching anything. That yellowish metal piece of junk was made of pure arsenic.

If he put too much pressure on one of the threads, it would dislodge the shim and thereby the lever on the side of the press. The crushing plate would come down and pulverize the arsenic. Malden had enough imagination to envision what would happen then—the arsenic would be reduced to a fine powder that would billow through the foundry and hang in the air as dust. Extremely poisonous dust. He would breathe in enough of it to render him completely, irrevocably, and mercilessly dead.

He went back to searching for black threads.

His next move required him to bend double and lift one leg over a thread, then squeeze his torso through the gap between two more. He sucked in his stomach and swiveled through the air, then put his free hand down on the floor and twisted his legs up, through the air, and between the threads. Next came a place where he had to lie down all the way on the floor and roll sideways under a black thread, and then—

Malden heard a sizzling sound, and looked up to see that one of the threads was glowing a dull orange.

He stared at his lantern and realized the awful truth. He must have inadvertently gotten the candle flame too close to one of the threads. Now it was smoldering. In the span of a heartbeat or two it would burn clean through—and release.

“No!” he shouted, and reached for the burning thread so fast he completely missed seeing a black thread next to his free hand. It caught between two of his fingers and he tugged it hard as he tried to extricate himself.

The shim popped free and hit the floor with a dull sound. Instantly the lever on the side of the rock press swung forward, then flew back on a spring. The mechanical parts of the machine began to ratchet and whir. The crushing plate, with terrible slowness, began to descend toward the lump of arsenic.

Malden yanked Acidtongue out of its scabbard and ran forward screaming. Threads both red and black parted before him with a sound like bowstrings twanging. His feet pounded at the floor as he poured on more speed.

The crushing plate was only inches from the scrap metal. It was moving faster now, as the gears and counterweights added force to its descent.

Malden jumped forward, Acidtongue pushed out in front of him like an extension of his arms. His feet left the ground and he arced through the dark air, and after that there was nothing he could do but hold the sword out straight, as far as it would go—

—so that its point smacked against the piece of arsenic a bare instant before the crushing plate made contact. The chunk of metal flew out of the press and slid across the floor. Malden yanked the sword backward, tiny droplets of acid flecking his tunic. The crushing plate slammed down with stunning force on nothing at all.

Malden’s body completed its arc through the air by smashing him, face first, into the side of the rock press. His skull rang inside his head like a bell as he reared back, unable to believe he was still alive. That the air around him was not deadly poison.

Then his heart started beating again, and he whooped in triumph.