A Thief in the Night

chapter Sixty-eight

“I’m Balint, by the way,” the female dwarf announced when the two warriors had accepted that their demon had gotten away.

“Well met, milady,” Croy said, bowing low. “I am Sir Croy, a knight of Skrae, and this—” He turned to indicate Mörget, but the barbarian was halfway across the room, pouncing on something. Croy thought he must have found one of the demon’s animate pieces, but when Mörget stood up with a nasty grin, he held something small and wriggling and humanoid in his clenched hand.

“Got you!” the barbarian announced. “Croy, look what I found!”

“That would be mine,” Balint said, sounding annoyed.

Croy shook his head. “It’s all right,” he told Mörget.

“Some kind of cave imp! It was spying on us!”

Croy smiled as politely as he could. “It’s just a knocker,” he explained. “The dwarves use them to scout their tunnels.”

The barbarian stared at the blue-haired thing he clutched. It was tapping frenziedly at his forearm with its long fingers.

“You can put it down now,” Croy said.

Mörget scowled, but he dropped the thing. It came running over to Balint and hid behind her legs. Croy bent low to pat it on the head, but it snapped at his fingers with its nasty teeth.

“Does it have a name?” he asked.

Balint stared at him. “It’s not a p-ssycat,” she said. “It’s a tool. I don’t name my hammers either.”

“I see.” Croy glanced at the barbarian, who had crouched down and was staring at the knocker with the shrewd eye of a hunter. “Ah, this would be Mörget,” he told the dwarf.

“We’ve met before,” Mörget said. He turned his head and spat copiously on the ground.

“You . . . have?” Croy asked.

“Briefly,” Balint concurred. “Though our meeting was approximately as enjoyable as having the skin flayed off my buttocks.”

“Oh,” Croy said.

“At Redweir,” Mörget explained, “I sought information on this place, and on my demon. The dwarves there were less than helpful. She is the lieutenant of the dwarven envoy there.”

“Ah,” Croy said, “so you must be of noble blood. Well, milady, I—”

“F*ck nobility,” Balint said, scratching one armpit. “My father was a bricklayer, and my mother a cook. I got my job by being more useful than the dwarf who had it before me.”

“I see. And what do you do for the envoy? See to his appointments, watch his accounts, that sort of thing?”

Balint laughed. “Mostly I go in for surprising his enemies with nasty traps.” She shrugged. “It’s what I’m good at.”

“And . . . is that what you came here to do?” Croy asked. “Forgive me, but I’ve never heard any dwarf mention a desire to enter the Vincularium before. Those of my experience always seemed willing to leave the past alone. Yet you came here, facing terrible dangers, and—here’s the rub—at exactly the same time as we did. I suspect that might not be a coincidence.”

Balint glared over at Mörget, who refused steadfastly to look back. The female dwarf squinted one eye, but when she failed to cause Mörget to so much as turn his back on her, she sighed. “In my line of work secrets are a valuable commodity, but I don’t suppose that matters now. All right. When yon friend of yours came to Redweir, we could tell he wasn’t the sort to be turned away by a friendly warning. He was going to come to the Vincularium, open it up and stir up the past, whether we liked it or not. There are some old secrets buried here we didn’t want disturbed, and a lot of history we didn’t like thinking on. The history of this place ain’t something to be proud of.”

“I suppose not,” Croy admitted.

Balint scowled. “I was sent here, tell the truth, to keep an eye on your barbarian. Make sure he didn’t find some things we didn’t want found. The dwarven king had no idea this place was as full of squatters as a goblin’s larder is full of roaches. We didn’t know anything about the squishy bastards, for one thing.”

The knocker climbed up her arm and perched on her shoulder. Balint headed back to the body of her fellow dwarf. Croy saw that much of the corpse had been devoured by the demon despite her efforts. She wasted no time on tears, however, nor did she offer any prayers for the dead dwarf’s soul. Instead she merely picked up his remains and hauled them into one of the nearest houses. “We need to make haste. One of those wet farts will come soon enough—the little ones that got away will come back, or send one of his brothers. There are more of them out there than I have traps to deal with.”

“You’ve seen more of the demons?” Croy asked. “We thought there might only be three. One of which we already slew.”

Balint gave him a nasty look. “Really, now? And how did you manage that?”

Croy looked away. “We . . . allowed it to swallow me, and then Mörget stabbed its . . . heart.”

“Sounds like a wonderful plan,” she told him. “Here, help me, will you? Or did you just want to watch me break a sweat? Maybe that’s what gets you stiff, sweaty dwarf girls.”

Croy frowned, deeply discomfited by Balint’s words. Yet he knew that she meant no real offense. Dwarves made an art of vulgar oaths and blasphemous curses. Instead of poetry they wrote bawdy farces, and instead of high-minded rhetoric and grand speeches they tended to tell jokes about—well, about bodily functions.

So he did not chide her for unladylike speech, but helped her move the other body—the one with the ruined face—inside the house as well. Then she started to wall off the doorway with paving stones that she pried up from the floor, gluing them in place with paste from a pot affixed to her belt.

“You wish to give them a proper tomb,” Croy said, admiring her quick and thorough work.

“I just don’t want them getting eaten and then shat out by the likes of that thing,” she told him. “Murin and Slurri were layabouts and scum, honestly, and not worth the salt they put in their soup. Just two fools I picked up in Redweir who needed a quick bit of coin. Still, I’d hate to see them end up as luncheon for those snot monsters. Murin knew some jokes even I thought were nasty, and they were both at least adequate at f*cking.”

Croy tried not to let her see him blush. Instead he turned to look at Mörget, who was busy sharpening his weapons over by the fountain. Apparently the barbarian had no desire to renew his acquaintance with Balint.

Croy watched as she put the last stone in place, sealing the doorway. Then she stepped back and dusted off her hands. On her shoulder the knocker mimicked her gesture.

When she spoke again, her voice was very different—almost reverent. “Anyroad, there aren’t enough of us dwarves left not to show each other a little respect. Barely ten thousand of us now, in the whole wide world. There were five times that many living in just this city, back in its heyday.”

“We humans try to protect you as best we can,” Croy said. He needed to ask her a very delicate question, and he was looking for a way to lead into it.

“That’s the law,” she replied. “And like most human laws, if you put what it’s worth on a scale and balanced it against a fly’s turd, you’d still find it wanting.”

She walked away from the impromptu tomb and started gathering up lengths of rope from her various traps. These went into a pack she wore on her back.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Croy said. “But I swear on my honor I won’t let you be harmed again. I’m afraid we can’t leave just yet, not until we find our friends. But I’ll make sure you get out of here as soon as possible.”

“You think of leaving now?” Mörget said, looking up from his axe. “While the demons still live?”

“The thing we came here for seems undoable now.” Croy sighed. “We came to slay one demon and we find an army of them. I think a judicious retreat is our best option. We’ll go to Helstrow, summon the rest of the Ancient Blades. Maybe raise an army. Then we’ll come back here and purge this place of them all.” He turned back to Balint. “You must have seen one of our friends here. The, ah—the man with the sword. I need to know. Was it him who killed your crew?” Malden was his friend, and he had no desire to be obligated to chase him down like a common murderer. Yet the law—and his duty—was clear.

“That sheep dropping? Hardly,” Balint snorted. “He hadn’t the guts to carve a roasted chicken. I dealt with him handily.”

“Oh, thank the Lady,” Croy said, though he’d meant not to speak. It was such a relief to learn that Malden was no dwarf-killer.

“No, it was them that came later. They appeared out of nowhere. Right out of the wall—dozens of them, skinny as a whore’s breakfast and paler than mother’s milk. I thought they were ghosts, to start with. They cut down Murin and Slurri without so much as a by-your-leave. Then they came for me. I took my licks, then did what a human girl does on her wedding night: lie down, pretend it isn’t happening, and wait for it to stop. They must have thought I was dead, too. I bled enough.”

“You mean the elves,” Croy said. “Were they living elves, or the undead kind?”

“Living,” Balint told him.

“Did these elves kill our friend?” Croy asked.

“No. He was too busy running back to the others. That moping slattern of his, and the debaser, Slag.”

“You know where they are?” Croy asked, his eyes growing wide.

“What’s left of them, more like,” she told him.