A Thief in the Night

chapter Fifty-six

Malden lifted the lantern high and scanned the rest of the foundry for traps. He saw none, though he knew Balint’s skill now, and could never be sure she hadn’t hidden something so devious he would only discover it by stepping on it.

Time was precious now, however, so he moved quickly—if quietly—toward the lift. Much as he’d expected, the brass cage was not where he had left it. Balint must have gone that way.

Or, possibly, she had moved the lift to throw him off her track.

Such thinking had no end, though. If he doubted her every move, and thus dithered until he was paralyzed and unable to act, she would already have beaten him. He had to catch her before she escaped the Vincularium—and without letting her know that he was on her trail.

He risked shining a little light up and down the lift shaft. Far below, he could just make out a glint of brass—that must be the cage down there. He blew out his candle immediately, lest she see its light. In the darkness he grabbed hold of the lift’s main chain and slid down the shaft. The chain was well greased, and he fell faster than he’d meant to, but he managed to clutch it tight enough that when his feet struck the top of the cage they made only a little sound. Even so, he froze in place and listened carefully before he climbed down the side of the cage and dropped to the floor.

Now he was faced with a quandary. He could see nothing, hear nothing. Yet he dared not make any light until he was sure Balint wouldn’t see it. Fortunately, the chamber he was in proved almost identical to the one above, a round room of narrow diameter with a single exit. He moved along the wall, one hand on the smooth bricks, using caution every time he took a step. This meant moving at a slower pace than he liked, but it would make him all but invisible to any dwarf watching for pursuit.

Outside the lift chamber, he found himself on an open floor. He headed forward quietly, knowing he would soon have to make a light or risk stumbling and breaking his neck. He was unsure how to proceed, but he knew he had no choice but to keep moving. Slag’s life depended on what happened next.

In the utter darkness his ears grew keenly sensitive. It was not long before he heard a distant, patternless drumming. Surely it was the sound of the knocker’s fingers tapping on some wall or floor. He expected to see a light ahead at any moment, for Balint could see no better in the dark than he could. She would need a lamp to guide her to the exit shaft.

Yet when he did spy a light, it was not the color he expected, nor did it flicker like a candle flame or a torch. A red beam of radiance split the floor ahead of him. As he watched, it grew more intense and spread across the flagstones.

Malden saw that he stood on the central avenue of a warren of low structures, most likely the houses of dwarves long dead. In shape they were uniform to a surprising degree. He was used to cities where wealth and ostentation were celebrated, where having the biggest house made you the better man. Here all the houses were alike, drab huts no more than six feet high with flat roofs. In places, tiers of such houses had been piled atop each other to form misshapen towers, with ladders leading up to each doorway. Standing outside each tower was a high pole, topped with a globe a foot across. What function these standards once performed was an utter mystery to him, so he ignored them and instead studied the squat shapes of the houses.

They looked to Malden more like the chambers of a cut-open ant colony than the domiciles of a residential district. These were not homes in the human sense, places of warmth and security where families would gather around communal fires. It seemed to him more a place, simply, where workers went to sleep when their labors were done. The closest analog in his experience was a monastic dormitory.

Malden could make little sense of it. He knew dwarves wasted little thought on luxury or appearances, even though they prized gold and wealth above everything except good craftsmanship. But what did they want with money at all, if this was how they lived? The dwarven houses confused him deeply, as did most things concerning dwarves. One thing was clear, though. This must be the residential level—where Slag said the escape tunnel was located. Balint must be on her way out of the Vincularium, intending to leave as quickly as she might. Malden hardly blamed her. He could only wish his own egress would come so soon.

The red light continued to strengthen, showing more and more of the dwarven dormitory. He had no way to account for the light, and at the moment had no taste for mysteries. He’d assumed, on first seeing it, that Balint had some source of light more advanced than humble fire, some dwarven machine whose workings would be like unto magic as far as he was concerned. Yet this light resembled most the breaking dawn of a newly risen sun.

He crept forward, trying to stay always out of those red beams. They made the shadows deeper and he was thankful for that. His senses were tuned toward finding the dwarves, and it wasn’t long before he saw them ahead of him, turned to silhouettes by the crimson rays. There were but three dwarves, and of course the knocker. They cast long stripes of shadow behind them, like ribbons of darkness.

The Place of Long Shadows, Malden thought. The ancient dwarven name for the Vincularium suddenly made a great deal of sense.

If the idea of a sun rising underground was a marvel to the thief, it seemed no less awe-inspiring to Balint and her crew. The dwarves stood as if transfixed by the light. Balint and one of the others stared up through a broad opening before them, a gallery, Malden surmised, that looked out on the central shaft.

The third dwarf, however, kept staring at the shadows. In the new light, Malden could see that his eyes were enormous and he was trembling. “I tell you true, Balint—I saw somebody back there. Just for a second, and then it vanished again. Ducked back into the f*cking shadows or something. Weren’t one of your humans neither.”

“Shut your hole or I’ll stick something in it,” Balint said, and struck the trembling dwarf.

“It was wearing the most beautiful bronze armor, too,” he responded, flinching away from her blow.

“Don’t go jumping at fancies,” Balint told him.

Malden felt a chill fear creep down his back as he listened. Bronze armor—that could only mean one thing. The frightened dwarf must have seen a revenant. Had the undead elves really come this far down the shaft? If one had, and it discovered the dwarves, why hadn’t it attacked at once? The revenants had no reason to love Balint and her crew—in fact, they had every reason to hate dwarves more than they hated humans. It was the dwarves, after all, who betrayed the elves into coming down here. Now that they were undead spirits of justice, the elfin revenants must long bitterly for dwarven blood. Yet it sounded like this dwarf had seen one and it had hid from him.

Malden could make no sense of it. He told himself it didn’t matter, at least not in the immediate moment.

He snuck up behind the four of them, sticking close to the shadows they cast. He was certain that the knocker would hear him at any moment, but if he was fast enough—

Then new light, the same reddish hue but not as intense, burst into life behind him, and the shadows around him evaporated like morning mist. Malden glanced back to see the light came from the poles that stood outside the dormitory towers. The globe atop each pole proved to be a lamp of strange design. Most of them remained unlit, and he saw that some of the globes were cracked or even shattered. Yet they cast enough light to mimic bright day on the surface.

He sought around him for shadows to conceal him, but before he could move he heard the dwarves cry out. He was discovered.