A Thief in the Night

chapter Eighty-six

On their way back to Aethil’s chambers they were stopped by an elfin soldier who gasped for breath. He took the queen aside and gave her some desperate message that clouded her face with worry. When she came back to them, she looked confused and hurt. “Something terrible has happened,” she told them. “A group of our soldiers has returned from patrol, with only half their numbers—and that half terribly wounded.” She shook her head. “The messenger did not know what befell them. It must have been a cave-in in one of the tunnels. I’m sorry, my friends, but I must go help tend to the injured. I’ll see you again, Sir Croy, before you—before—well, I’ll see you tonight. Perhaps . . . perhaps you’ll give me some token of your esteem, to strengthen me for the ordeal I am about to face.”

“To be sure, lass, if you want my kerchief to wear, or—”

Aethil bowed low and grabbed the dwarf by the beard. Without further warning she pressed her mouth to his, kissing him long and deeply. Her arms wrapped around his neck and she sank against him, pushing Slag back until his back collided with the cave wall. “There,” she said when she broke the embrace. “That will sustain me. Until later . . . my love.”

She departed then, with many a backward glance over her shoulder. When she was gone, Slag rubbed at his face and combed out his beard with his fingers.

“Like being sucked dry by a moray eel,” he said.

The messenger remained behind to take them back to the royal apartments. At least, Malden thought, they wouldn’t have to wait for their doom in the elfin gaol. When the messenger brought them to Aethil’s door, he saluted the guards stationed there and said, “The queen’s pets are your responsibility now. Make sure they don’t leave this room.”

The soldiers leered and shoved the humans and the dwarf through the door. It was bolted behind them, and though Malden knocked again and again on the door, demanding food and drink, there was no answer.

Out of options, the three of them made themselves as comfortable as they might. Slag sat down to pick at the rotten pages of his book, laying out pieces of time-browned paper carefully on a table, as if assembling some puzzle. Cythera dropped heavily into a cushioned chair and put her hands over her eyes, as though the lamplight in the room was too strong for her.

“Tomorrow, she said.” Malden paced back and forth across the floorboards, feeling like a fox caught in a trap. “Tomorrow we’ll be fed to that demon.”

“No,” Cythera said. She looked distracted.

“I misheard her? We’re not going to be dropped into that mass, to dissolve into goo ourselves?”

Cythera sighed. “No, I meant it’s not a demon. More like a god.”

“I will make sure to be suitably reverent, then, when it chews on my flesh tomorrow, and sucks my soul to wash down my giblets.”

Cythera got up and went to a side table to pour herself some mushroom wine. “I should have realized, when I heard Mörget’s description of the creature he saw in the mountains. It’s not a pit-spawned abomination. Sorcery didn’t draw it up from the Bloodgod’s domain. In substance it much resembled ectoplasm, the immanentized stuff of psychic energy. I imagine a powerful enough witch could generate a gallon of the fluid during a trance session, but—”

Malden had been staring at her in incomprehension for a while before she noticed.

“If you like, you may think of it as a more-solid kind of ghost,” she said. “It is made, truly, of the memories and thoughts of Aethil’s ancestors. All those elves who have gone before. It’s strange, though. There was never any mention of such a mass in the legends of the elves I’ve read. There were old stories of their ancestors living in the trees, of how we angered them by chopping down their sacred groves, but that . . . that made it sound more like ghosts, more like immaterial beings. This is different—something has changed. Something has changed in the very nature of their life force. It must have been emanated only after they came here. Perhaps, in their desperation—when they realized they were sealed in and could not escape—their fear and their anger reified the etheric currents of the—”

Malden stared at her again.

“Oh, fie! Malden, why must you look at me like that?”

“Because I care very little what that thing is. I care very much about how to avoid being eaten by it. We need a plan. We need to think of how we’re going to escape, and we need to think of it now.”

Cythera inhaled deeply. “Yes. Of course. Slag?”

“Hmm?” The dwarf didn’t look up from his scraps of paper. “Ah!” he said, and moved one to lie next to another. “Yes . . . there . . .”

“Slag,” Malden said. “Sir Croy. Urin!”

“Busy,” the dwarf told him. With trembling hands, Slag picked another scrap of paper from a pile by his elbow and turned it sideways, then laid it down atop the others. “Hah!” he shouted, and jumped off his chair.

“Are you all right, Slag?” Malden asked.

“I have it! So simple! Lad, lass, this is a wonder! Three ingredients only, all readily available. Why this was lost so long—why no one stumbled on it since—I will never know. Huzzah! F*cking huzzah!”

Malden looked at Cythera. She shrugged.

“I have it! I have it precisely—when I saw this book, I knew there would be secrets inside. It’s the Manual of Applied Combinations. One of the greatest works of all dwarven literature, a compendium of formulae for creating various substances of use to dwarvenkind. It’s been lost for centuries. No copy is known to exist in any dwarven library, but here, here in this musty old deathtrap, this f*cking hole—I have it!”

“What have you?” Malden asked.

“The nature of the powder. The recipe for its admixture. I don’t need those barrels. Balint can bloody have them! I can make as much of it as I like, for farthings on the hogshead. F*cking brilliant—I’m going to be rich, lad. Exile be damned, I’ll be richer than the dwarven king. I’ll buy the f*cking crown off the top of his head, and we’ll see who’s a real dwarf then!” Slag pounded on the table merrily. Malden had never seen him so happy. “Rich!”

Malden sighed in exasperation and pushed a hand through his hair. “Both of you! You’re lost in mysteries and might-bes! Cythera, everything we learned today, everything we saw, will mean nothing tomorrow. Slag—this discovery of yours—”

“Means we have to escape,” Slag said, nearly jumping up and down with excitement. “Money’s no use to a dwarf who’s been et by a demon. Lad, lass, stop your moping. We must come up with an escape plan—and we must have it now. I have to get out of here and start formulating the compound, if I’m ever going to make any money from this.” His lips curled into an irrepressible smile and he burbled with laughter. “Rich!”