A Thief in the Night

chapter Seventy-two

The elves led them down the spiral staircase to a dark room below. The walls were unadorned and the floor was covered in a thick layer of wet silt. They must be very near the bottom of the shaft, Malden thought—and this room must periodically flood with water. In the middle of the room was a cage made of wooden bars, large enough to hold a dozen prisoners.

His bladder started to give way when he saw where he’d be held. He forced himself not to soil his hose, but it wasn’t easy.

The gaolers came forward to receive the prisoners. There was no formal ceremony involved, which made sense since the gaolers were revenants. One was missing both eyes and part of his cheek. The other had no face at all. The living elf soldiers treated the revenants with a certain disdain that seemed odd to Malden—these were, after all, the undead remains of their own ancestors, and he’d been told the elves worshipped their forebears. Yet the soldiers spoke to the revenants the way a man would speak to his dog. It confused him, but he had other concerns to occupy him.

The gate of the gaol was opened and Cythera was forced inside. She grabbed at the bars and stared out at Malden, as if asking him silently to do something, to do something right now. To make some grand gesture of bravery and save them all.

He could do nothing. Without waiting to be pushed, he entered the cage. Slag followed, his head drooping against his chest.

The gate of the cage was closed and locked behind them. Then the living elves filed out of the room, while the two revenants took up positions on either side of the stairwell. Once they were in place, the gaolers remained utterly motionless. Each had a bronze sword held before him, its point touching the stone floor. They looked like grisly statues more than animate things.

There was no light in the room save what filtered down through the stairwell. Just a few stray beams to divide the shadows. There was no furniture in the stockade other than a pair of buckets. Malden could guess what those were for.

He went to the far side of the stockade and sat down in the silt. His breeches were instantly ruined but he couldn’t bear the thought of standing any longer. All strength seemed to have fled him as his fear transformed into despair.

Eventually Cythera came and joined him. She put her head on his shoulder but did not speak. Slag stood awhile longer, but Malden could see the dwarf swaying on his feet. Eventually weariness overcame Slag—he was still recovering from being poisoned, after all, and the violent purgative of the antidote—and he sat as well.

And then . . . nothing happened.

A great deal of nothing. A long span of nothing, not even talk. Time passed, though it felt like it did not.

They might have been hours in that place before anything occurred. Days might have passed down there—Malden had no way to measure the time, other than by how hungry he grew. The air around him seemed to hang as motionless as their revenant guards, and each breath he took was like some crime against the terrible timelessness of that place where nothing ever changed.

Eventually a loaf of mealy bread was brought down to them and tossed through the bars. Malden caught it before it landed in the muck, then broke it carefully in three pieces and shared it out.

When it was consumed, they went back to doing nothing.

In time Cythera began to snore. They had all gone a very long while without sleep. Malden made a pillow of his cloak and laid her head gently upon it, so her face would not be in the silt. Then he headed over toward where Slag sat by the gate. He could no longer stand the silence or the waiting. He intended to get a conversation going, regardless of what the dwarf might want.

The dwarf was picking at one of the bars with his fingernails. He stripped a long fibrous sliver of wood from the bar.

“Trying to escape, Slag?” Malden asked.

The dwarf didn’t answer. He studied his sliver intently.

“Slag,” Malden said again.

The dwarf pulled the sliver into tiny strips. “It’s not wood,” he said, though clearly he wasn’t addressing Malden. “I wondered where they could get wood from, down here. The answer is they f*cking don’t. It must be some kind of mushroom, perhaps those big tough growths we saw on the walls of the central shaft.”

“Slag,” Malden said, annoyed at being ignored. Still the dwarf didn’t look up. “Urin,” he tried.

That got a reaction. The dwarf stared at him with fierce eyes. “I don’t use that damned name anymore.”

“I can see why, since in the language of humans it sounds a great deal like—”

“It’s a proper dwarven name! Uri was the inventor of glass-blowing. My father was his direct descendant. For a hundred generations the men in my family have been named Urin, you human f*ck.”

“But now you’re Slag. A name my people gave you. You’ve turned your back on your ancestors.”

Slag scowled. “You heard Balint. I’m an exile. She doesn’t even consider me a dwarf at all.”

“You were exiled for being a debaser.”

“Aye,” Slag admitted. “A debaser of the coinage. I won’t deny it.”

“What does that mean?”

“I worked in a mint, before I came to Ness. Back when I lived in a proper town, down in a tin mine. I had a life back then, and work to do. I know you humans are all shiftless bastards, but for a dwarf, having a profession means everything. I was proud of what I did. I oversaw the production of gold coins. It was good work, but in the end it didn’t pay enough. I had debts, and when a dwarf owes money, he pays it back one way or another. There’s no mercy for the lazy in our land.”

“What kind of debts?”

Slag stared at Malden with angry eyes. “Gambling debts, if you must know. That’s something that never used to happen. We didn’t go in for games of chance, back in the old days—we stuck to sure things. One more damned vice we learned from you humans. Not that I trusted my luck. I thought I had a system, and I could bet on the fall of the dice and make some coin if I was careful. It turned out I was dead wrong.”

“I had no idea,” Malden said.

“What you don’t know about us, lad, is—” He sighed. Malden could tell the dwarf had been working up a powerful obscenity but lacked the strength to finish it. “I needed money in a hurry. It occurred to me one day that if I added small impurities to the gold I worked with, I could make more coins out of less gold. I thought I was so brilliant. That no one had ever thought of that before.”

“Most thieves feel like that, on their first job,” Malden sympathized. “Most learn otherwise to their dismay.”

“I was no thief! At least, I didn’t think of myself that way. I thought I was improving efficiency. That’s all.”

“So what happened?”

Slag sighed deeply. “Nothing, at first. My coins were accepted by the f*cking exchequer, same as always. It wasn’t till later that I was found out. Dwarven coins are never counterfeited, so it’s rare anyone would want to test one. But human merchants aren’t quite as trusting. A big buggering miner came to our city, looking to sell some iron he’d dug up. When he was paid, he bit into one of my coins, the way humans do.”

“That’s how we know it’s real gold, and not polished brass. Real gold is soft enough to take an impression.”

“Aye, I know it too f*cking well, lad. This miner broke his tooth.”

Malden chuckled.

“You can’t imagine the uproar! Dwarves are honest folk, everybody knows that. It’s something they count on. If there’s ever even the slightest whiff of corruption in our dealings with humans it could be a f*cking catastrophe. There was an investigation, and all the evidence led straight back to me. I was tumbled, all right.”

“And so they exiled you. There are worse punishments?”

“We don’t do capital punishment, not my people. There aren’t enough of us left for that,” Slag said. “And we consider exile bad enough. It’s different for us than for humans, ain’t it? It’s f*cking worse. An exiled human just goes to the Northern Kingdoms and starts a new life. There is no other dwarven land. You have to go live among humans, finding what work you may. Never to see your family again. Never to marry, never to have a family of your own.” He sighed deeply. “It’s worse’n hanging, frankly. I’m like the opposite of one of yon undead bastards. They’re dead but refuse to accept it. I’m still alive, but I feel half the time like I’m already dead.”

“I had no idea that living in Ness was so hard on you. There are plenty of dwarves living there, and they don’t seem to mind it as much.”

Slag shrugged. “It was worse for me than for others. They know that once they make some money they can go home again. When they turned me out I had no choice but to head south. Even in Ness, though, no other dwarf would hire me. They couldn’t trust me, you see? Never again. That’s how I ended up with Cutbill.” Slag looked Malden up and down. “Cutbill takes any old baggage that comes along.”

“Did he know this story?”

“Much of it. That’s why when you told him you were going to the bloody Vincularium, he thought I’d be interested. He knew I was always looking for a way back home. Figured there’d be something here I could trade for forgiveness. Our people are the same as yours in one way—if you’re rich enough, nobody asks how you came by the money.”

“Oh, aye,” Malden said. “A rich man can buy his way out of a noose.”

“Or out of exile, mayhap. But you heard what Balint said about that. You were there. I’ve got an arsehole’s chance of ever going home. And now—well, if I’m still alive this time tomorrow, I’ll probably be wishing I weren’t. This whole venture was one colossal cock-up. I’ve got nothing left.”

“Which means nothing to lose,” Malden said. “So you’re trying to break this bar.” He ran a finger along the surface where Slag had peeled off his sliver. “So we can escape.”

“No, lad. I was thinking if I could get a piece of it sharp enough, I could cut my own throat and get this over with faster.”