A Thief in the Night

chapter Fifty-five

Croy desperately needed to rest. Yet he would not, not until Cythera and the others were safe.

Mörget, on the other hand, had never seemed so vital. “I am a hero now!” he exclaimed, hefting Dawnbringer over his head. “I will be a great chieftain. You will see. Everyone will see!” he proclaimed.

“I’m sure your reign will be a glorious one,” Croy agreed. He glanced up at the ledge, high overhead, through which he had entered the throne room. He did not relish the prospect of climbing up there again. The only other option meant proceeding through the arch ahead of him—through which the demon had entered. One way was as good as another, he supposed.

“Many nations will fall before me,” Mörget told him. “Men will bow when I approach. Women will want to make love to me.”

“That’s often more trouble than you’d think,” Croy warned him. He had some experience in that realm. “Especially when they’re already married to other people. Hark at this arch—do you think it will take us back toward the central shaft?”

“They will clamor for my central shaft,” Mörget laughed. “Yet I promise you this, brother. No matter how she begs, I will lay no finger on your bride.”

Croy inhaled deeply. That was coming very close to impugning Cythera’s honor. If Mörget took his jest any further, he would be required by his own honor to respond. He had no desire to have to duel Mörget just then, however. He wasn’t sure he could lift Ghostcutter without exhausting his meager reserves of strength. “We should be quiet now,” he told the barbarian. “The girl you saw will have had time to reach others by now. We could walk into an ambush in the next room.”

“I will be as silent as death, my mother,” Mörget assured him with a great bloodcurdling laugh. “I promise.”

Croy shook his head but said nothing. He headed through the arch, the tiny light of his candle throwing long shadows into the room beyond. He could not see the walls of this new chamber at all, nor its ceiling. Just as on the top level, where they’d faced the revenants, the light made a small island in a sea of darkness.

Yet as he pressed forward, he thought his eyes must be playing tricks on him. It seemed almost as if the sun was coming up. He stared and closed one eye, then the other. He knew from past experience that when one spent too long underground sometimes one’s eyes became differently adapted to the lack of illumination. Yet both of his eyes agreed, and he could doubt the evidence of his senses no longer.

A ray of red light stretched along the floor, flickering in and out of existence at first, then growing stronger. This was no beam shed by a lantern or a torch—even a bonfire would have given less steady light, and certainly the light of a normal fire would be a different color. Yet even as Croy watched, the light strengthened and grew more clear. Huge shapes loomed toward him out of the darkness—big, blocky silhouettes that he soon realized must be the walls of buildings. The red light grew even stronger, and it was just like watching the sun rise over the walls of Ness.

“Mörget,” he whispered, “do you see this?”

“Aye,” the barbarian answered.

Croy moved forward toward the light, uncertain of the dangers but needing desperately to know its source. This new light made long shadows of everything it touched. It made him think there must be some magic afoot, and he wondered if maybe Mörget hadn’t been right after all, and the girl they’d chased was, in fact, some kind of magician. They had slain her pet demon—what mischief could she be making for them now?

Croy’s skin prickled and he grew very, very aware of his surroundings.

In the new light, he could see they had entered a massive courtyard, an open space full of low buildings—houses, temples, granaries, who could say?—with, high overhead, a vaulted ceiling held up by stout pillars. Ahead, the red light came from between two buildings with massive marble walls. Behind him, he saw that the throne room was just one more of these large structures.

Up to this point the Vincularium had shown him only tunnels and enclosed spaces, but now it was like he had walked into a mammoth city, and he felt as if he had fallen through some magical portal and wound up outside of the Vincularium, perhaps hundreds of miles or more away. Only the vaulted ceiling assured him that he was still underground.

He passed between the two columned facades and crossed another hundred feet of flagstones before he came to the far end of the courtyard. It ended in a ledge over the central shaft, a broad viewing platform with a marble and bronze railing. He had been searching for the central shaft for hours now, it felt like, and he’d finally discovered it. Yet it was so wondrous in appearance he barely noticed where he was.

The shaft itself was lit up like full daylight. Croy could see all the way to the top level where he had entered the Vincularium, and up at that dizzying height stood the source of the reddish light. It was the crystalline orb that hung in the center of the shaft, suspended on its three massive chains. It burned now, with a roiling fire that almost hurt his eyes to look at, an incredible conflagration contained entirely within the transparent globe. He could see now that dozens of pipes crowned the orb, running away into the domed ceiling of the dwarven city.

Dawn had come to the Vincularium.

“Like an enormous oil lamp,” he said, trying to puzzle it out. “But how—what— Ah, of course. It’s magic.”

No other explanation satisfied Croy’s view of the world. It had to be magic that made the light burn. He marveled at it, having fit it neatly into his simple philosophy. If you saw something you couldn’t explain, if it seemed to have no rational explanation, then it was undeniably magical in nature, and therefore it couldn’t be explained, so you didn’t need to worry about it. It was a common enough attitude in Skrae, at least among the human population. Dwarves, Croy knew, found this rationale endlessly frustrating, but then dwarves rarely needed much justification to be frustrated with humanity.

While he stood gaping at it, the light of the orb grew suddenly stronger and he had to look away with a gasp. If he tried to look at it a moment longer, he felt his eyes would be seared from his head. He blinked away blotchy afterimages of green and purple and looked down into the pool of water at the bottom of the shaft.

And then he got his next shock. A naked woman was swimming through the dark water, her limbs parting the surface with a languid motion. Her skin was as pale as ivory, and she struck him as being too slender to be human—though what he saw of her angular form did not make him think of emaciation and hunger, but of a sublime beauty. Starvation hadn’t made her so thin. He’d seen human women who had gone too long without food, and it made them cadaverous and ugly. This woman looked like she was born to be willow-thin. Even her bones looked more slender than a human’s. As she swam, her dark hair flowed behind her, buoyed by the water.

Croy stood enchanted, watching her stroke her way across the pool. He might have stood there and watched forever—had Mörget not grabbed his shoulder and hauled him bodily around.

“Brother—come quickly. Such wonders must wait.”

“But—” Croy shook himself to break his reverie. The sight of the swimming woman had bewitched him. “What is it, Mörget? Why do you look like that?”

The barbarian had gone pale, even under the red ink that masked the bottom half of his face. His eyes stood out from their sockets as if he’d seen a ghost. “Just come with me,” he said. “And have your sword ready.”

He took Croy back to the center of the courtyard and shoved him behind one of the marble buildings. Together they peered around a twisted column of cyclopean blocks. “Behold,” Mörget whispered, and pointed into the long shadows between the buildings.

At first Croy could see nothing. His eyes had adapted to the light of the Vincularium’s artificial sun, and the shadows in contrast were too absolute. Then he spied a pair of figures emerging from the reddish light. They wore armor of bronze, and they were as rail-thin as the woman he’d seen swimming in the pool. Revenants, he thought. They must have tracked him and the barbarian all the way down from the top level. Well, he could still fight such, though—

His hand stopped before he could get his sword free of its scabbard. Moving between the two revenants was . . . something else. A creature of no fixed form, five feet in general diameter. Howling faces pressed outward from inside its skin.

“Another one?” Croy asked. “Another demon? The little brother of your beast—or perhaps its child?” Whatever it was, it chilled Croy’s blood. If there was more than one—far worse, if this demon could somehow multiply—it was a far greater threat than he had ever imagined. He’d thought a demon so close to the border of Skrae could be a thing that undid the world if it wasn’t stopped. Yet if there were more than the two, if the demon had been down here for centuries, reproducing, creating an army of itself—how could even the Ancient Blades ever resist it? How could they possibly win?

This could mean the end of the world.

Mörget, who should have shared Croy’s apprehensions—the barbarian was an Ancient Blade as well, sworn as Croy was to checking the advance of demons—seemed more concerned with his own singular destiny. He seethed with anger, and Croy imagined he would start roaring at any moment. Yet when he spoke it was with the cool tones of a man estimating a job of work. “I know only this—my labor here is not yet done.”