He might as well make it worth his while. Just below him, on the top floor of the palace, a balcony projected from the wall. He could see no lights down there, so he dropped easily to the railing, then pushed open the doors and darted inside.
Chapter Eighteen
Malden found himself in a small bedroom that looked like it belonged to a lady-in-waiting, with a canopied bed and a large clothing chest. Rushes were strewn on the floor and perfume had been sprinkled around liberally to hide any odors. There was no one inside, so he hurried to the door and pressed his ear against the keyhole. When he was sure no one was patrolling the corridor outside, he slipped out the door and down a hallway lit with oil lamps.
Cythera had told him that what he sought was in the tower, on the same level as this top floor of the palace. “It is in a room that once served as the first Burgrave’s bedchamber. It is placed there every night while the current Burgrave sleeps. Beware: it will be guarded well.” One layer of its defense, at least, had been removed. Malden imagined that normally this hallway would have been full of soldiers, but Bikker’s diversion had drawn them to the courtyard.
“They’ll be away from their posts, but don’t think that’s the only way to guard a treasure. Men at arms are too easily overcome. Walls can be climbed, and locks picked. The Burgrave knows as much. So he’ll have other defenses waiting for you.”
He had paid close attention to her words. Now, he kept his eyelids stretched as he hurried down the corridor and around the el of the building, into the wing that led to the tower room. As he approached the door at its end he was already unraveling the grip of his bodkin and removing his picks and wrenches. A lock with a dead bolt had been built into the massive iron-bound door, but it gave him little trouble.
“Will there be spells on it, enchantments of protection?” he had asked.
“Unlikely. Magic is too unreliable under the best of circumstances. Not to mention expensive to maintain. No, it is not the handiwork of enchanters you need fear. It is the work of dwarves.”
Beyond the door lay a corridor perhaps twenty-five feet long. Tall windows stood every ten feet or so down its length, and moonlight spilled in to form pools of silver on the wooden floor. Between each patch of light lay impenetrable shadows. It was as if the hall were one column of a game board with alternating spaces of light and dark.
“I cannot tell you what traps you may find,” Cythera had said. “I can only tell you to beware any room that seems unused. The palace is a busy and a crowded place, so dust on a floor, or rooms that seem completely empty, are avoided for a reason.”
There were no doors leading off the moonlit corridor, nor any furniture within it. At its far end he could just see the glint of something metallic. Malden stayed outside, beyond the door, and pondered what lay before him. No dust lay on the floor here, at least none he could see in the pale light. Yet there was a sense about the corridor, a feeling of distinct absence he couldn’t quite explain. It didn’t have the feel of a place that was used often. Ness was an old city, overcrowded even in its infancy. Every stone had been touched by a million hands over the years, every wall brushed by clothing until it was smooth and worn. This hallway, in contrast, looked as if it had been just constructed-by skilled and masterful hands.
Which of course was the hallmark of a dwarf’s handiwork. Yes. This was the place.
Cythera had been quite clear. “There are more than three score dwarves living in this city. Their services are sought by all the wealthiest citizens, for they alone can build the cunning devices which are proof against thieves and murderers in the night. A human engineer might devise these fiendish pitfalls, but only a dwarf could build them. The Burgrave will have employed the services of the best among them, and the traps he has laid will be of unusual cunning and danger.”
Well, he had a dwarf on his side, as well. Slag had raised an eyebrow when told what he required, but then, for the first time, Cutbill’s dwarf had looked at him with something other than disdain. It wasn’t exactly respect he had seen glowing in the dwarf’s eyes, but it was at least an acceptance that he wasn’t a complete fool.
Malden reached into a pouch at his belt and took out a lead ball wrapped in leather. It was as heavy as a cobblestone in his hand. With an underhand motion he rolled the ball down the hallway, then quickly took a step back from the doorway.
For a moment he felt quite foolish, like a boy playing games in an alley. The ball rolled merrily along through the first pool of moonlight, then disappeared into the darkness beyond.
Malden’s heart pounded, however, when a moment later a portcullis gate crashed down from the ceiling, right where his leaden ball was rolling. Six long bars of iron crashed down and smashed into the floor.
He did not so much as breathe as he watched them slowly retract back into the ceiling. There was the ratcheting sound of a spring reloading itself, and then a click as the portcullis snapped back into place.
He peered through the half-dark hallway. The leaden ball he’d rolled was pierced right through its middle, nearly cleaved in two by one of the falling iron spears. Its end must have been razor sharp.
He took another ball from his pouch and threw it with a little more force this time, lofting it so it landed in the midst of the second pool of moonlight. It bounced once, without triggering anything, then rolled into another patch of shadow. A second portcullis identical to the first crashed down, jarring his senses.
“There will be a way through,” Cythera had told him. “Every night the castellan must bring the treasure to the tower room, and every morning he must recover it. For his convenience, the route must not be impossible, nor even onerous. If you know the trick of it, it should be quite easy to make your way through the traps.”
And now Malden thought he had the lay of the thing. The floor was rigged, designed to register any amount of weight that fell on it, but only in the dark sections. Those touched by moonlight would be safe. He got a good run-up, then jumped into the hallway, bounding from one pool of light to the next, careful to never let his feet touch any patch of shadow. One leap, two-he was feeling very pleased with himself for figuring it out-a third leap, directly to the final pool of moonlight at the corridor’s end. And that was when he remembered something else Cythera had said.
“These traps are not made to be circumvented, they are made to kill thieves. The dwarf who designs them will know what you are thinking, and will find ways to confound your logic, to surprise you when you least expect it.”
Despite heeding her advice in all other things, he was still not ready when his feet came down on the final pool of moonlight-and the floor gave way. A trapdoor there had been set to hinge open when any weight fell on it, and though Malden was slender and short of stature, he was more than heavy enough to trigger it.
Chapter Nineteen
Malden’s feet kicked wildly at nothing as his body dropped like a stone into the pit. His blood sang in his ears and his heart galloped in his chest as he felt himself falling, plummeting. It was all he could do to keep a shriek from bursting out of him. His arms flailed out to his sides for balance and his fingers just barely grasped the edge of the pit. His body slammed forward into the wall of the pit, and that hurt so much it made him gasp and lose the grip of one hand.
But the other one held.
Gasping to refill his lungs, his face pressed up tight against the pit wall, he glanced down. There was a flickering light from below, not enough to see much but it showed him that it was a very, very long way down if he let go.
Carefully he reached up and grasped the lip of the pit with both hands. His fingers protested at taking all his weight. They were still sore and swollen from the long climb up the palace wall from the Skrait. He ignored their pain.
From below a distant sound came up, echoing in the shaft of the pit so it sounded distorted and hollow. Yet he could not mistake it: a scream of agony. It was followed by the noise of a great wheel turning, and then more sounds of pain. The pit must lead
straight down to the dungeon, far below the palace. Should he fall now, he would be saving the Burgrave the trouble of having guards drag him thence. He doubted very much there was a pile of soft straw at the bottom either.
Very, very slowly he pulled himself up and out of the pit. Once he had a shoulder above its edge it was much easier, and once he had a leg up and out of the shaft, he was able to just roll out and lie on the floor a moment. He was about to spread out his aching arms when he realized that would put his hand down in one of the shadowy zones of the hallway floor.
He was very fond of that hand. He did not wish to see it pierced by a razor-sharp iron spear. So he kept it by his side and just shook for a while, letting the fear drain out of him. He had expected danger on this job-any burglary was a risky proposition. He had never met such devious hazards before, though. Well, he supposed that should be expected, considering the value of the thing he’d come to steal.
Eventually he recovered his feet and stood up, at the end of the hall.
He must be very close to the tower room he sought. It must indeed lie beyond the very wall ahead of him. Yet he saw no door. Instead he found a niche that held a bronze statue of Sadu, the Bloodgod.
He searched the wall around the niche, looking for some hidden panel that would open to admit him to the tower. He could find none. He tapped the wall with the pommel of his bodkin, thinking to find any kind of hollow or thin place in the wall through which he might break through, but the wall seemed to be made of solid stone, of the same thickness throughout.
It was only after this exhaustive and pointless search that he chose to look at the floor, and noticed an obvious seam in the wood. The crack formed a semicircle five feet in diameter. He was standing within its bound, in fact. He tapped the floor in several places but found it as solid as the wall. Perhaps-yes, perhaps this was a door after all. If somehow the floor could be made to rotate, and the whole wall with it… but there must be some trigger, some way of activating the change.
The statue of the Bloodgod, of course.
The Burgrave was known to be a devout of the Lady of Abundance. Sadu was a much older god, one whose worship was not officially forbidden in the Free City but certainly frowned upon. The Bloodgod was the patron deity of the poor and the oppressed, a symbol of ultimate justice and even vindictive revenge. Sadu punished all men alike in the afterlife, and each according to his sins. He was hardly the sort of god a man like the Burgrave would ever want to meet.
The Bloodgod did have eight arms, though, and that leant itself to the obvious purpose of this particular idol.
The bronze statue depicted Sadu in the typical fashion, as he was worshipped in tiny shrines all over the city. The idol had seven arms on the left side of its body, each holding a different weapon: a sword, a falchion, a spear, a trident, a net, a flail, and an arrow. Different images of the Bloodgod always had different weapons in his hands, since Sadu was the master of them all. On the right side he had only one arm, holding an ornate crown, as it always did. Sadu’s face was depicted as that of a snarling demon with massive tusklike teeth and wide, staring eyes. Malden had seen more terrifying versions, though this was a common depiction. Yet as he examined the statue quite carefully he noticed two things that were unique to this image in all his experience.
For one, the eyes were not just open-they had been hollowed out. Two sharp points of metal glinted from within their depths. Malden thought of the needles that sprang from Cutbill’s lock. Perhaps these were the same-or worse, tiny darts that would fly through the air to poison him if they pierced his flesh. And of course this time the poison would be fatal.
The second thing he noticed was that all eight arms of the Bloodgod were attached to the body by stout hinges. One could move them, if one desired, independently from the rest of the statue.
Clearly he would have to push the correct arm to open the way to the tower room, while pushing any other would result in instant death.
He rejected the crown arm immediately. It was far too obvious.
Of the weapon arms, the net appealed to him first. It was the least deadly of the weapons, while the others could all kill you easily. The arrow was a bit confusing-it really should have been a bow Sadu held, should it not? But the arrow was also very similar to the darts hidden in the eyes.
Yet wouldn’t that appeal to some dwarf artificer’s twisted sense of irony? Perhaps you pushed the arrow arm to say you did not wish the darts to fire.
It was a gamble, but it seemed most likely. Malden stood well back of the statue, but still within the circular seam on the floor, and reached over to tap at the arm that held the arrow. Nothing happened. He applied more pressure, bending the arm backward.
There was a rumbling of massive gears, a shrieking of poorly oiled metal-and then the whole wall swung on its axis, propelling him directly into the tower room. The place where the Burgrave kept his crown when he wasn’t wearing it.
Chapter Twenty
“You’re-You’re mad,” Malden had said two days before, when Cythera finally revealed what she was after. “The crown of the Burgrave? What possible reason could you have to steal that? Why would anyone? If I’m caught with it, I’d be drawn and quartered!”
“You needn’t be caught, if you stick to our plan,” Cythera said. Though he could see in her eyes that she knew no plan was ever perfect, that events could always conspire to catch a thief. She was asking him to take an enormous risk.
“But-why? It’s made of gold, to be sure, but it’s only so big. Melted down, it isn’t worth a tenth of what you’re paying. And you would have to melt it down. No fence would ever touch it. If you so much as showed it to a fence, they would have no choice but to call in the watch.”
“We have our reasons for wanting it. Intact,” Cythera said.
“As soon as it goes missing, every watchman in the city will come looking for it.” Malden shook his head. “They’ll tear down the Stink looking for it, and for me. I don’t-”
“No, they won’t,” Bikker said. He’d been standing by the fire, staring down into the flames. They danced in his eyes like light from the Bloodgod’s pit. He came clanking over to where Malden sat and loomed over him, his face split by a grin. “That’s the best part. As you say, there’s not much to the crown on its own. A good goldsmith can make a replacement in a day. If the Burgrave appears in public without the crown even once, he’ll look a fool. Everyone will ask where it is, and what will he say? That he just forgot to put it on that morning?”
Malden had to admit he had never seen the Burgrave without it.
“That’s the heart of the plan,” Bikker said, thumping the back of Malden’s chair so he nearly fell out of it. “Do you see? He and his advisors will be too embarrassed by its absence to say a word. They won’t call out the watch-they’ll keep this a secret, from everyone they can. They will never let it be known, anywhere, that the crown was ever stolen. They won’t even dare to come looking for it, because then they’d have to tell the watch what to look for. Do you really believe every watchman in the city would keep such a thing secret? No, the bailiff and the Burgrave will just pretend it was never stolen. They’ll trot out a replacement, and that will be the end of it.”
Bikker squatted down in front of Malden and cuffed him lightly on the shoulder. Just hard enough to leave marks. “So what do you say?” he asked, his eyes bright. “Are you the man for this job?”
Chapter Twenty-One
The crown-technically a coronet-was not a work of great art in itself. It was a plain circlet of gold, crenellated in the same pattern as the Free City’s walls. No jewels adorned it, nor was it lined in fur, nor was anything engraved upon it. It was the crown of a leader of free men, not a king who ruled serfs, and so it was not meant to glorify unduly its wearer or set him apart from the common weal.
Honestly, to Malden it looked a little cheap. Even the head of the fuller’s guild wore more ceremonial gold than was in the city’s coronet.
But of course the
crown had far more symbolic value. It could only be worn by a Burgrave. It was the symbol of his lordship, the image of his right to rule the city as he pleased. It was what separated him from the citizens, what imbued him with all of his power. The Burgrave wore it every time he went out in public-when he led civic processions, when he sat to watch a tourney, when he handed down judgments in the law courts. He’d worn it the day Malden saw him in Market Square, the day he’d condemned that blond fool to death. The crown was the Burgrave’s power.
Malden was dimly aware in his untutored way that he lived in a kingdom called Skrae, that beyond the Free City’s walls there was a grand feudal system of nobility with, at its head, a single monarch who had granted the city its charter and appointed the Burgrave’s great-great-etcetera-grandfather to be the city’s ultimate ruler. He had never paid taxes to that particular king, and had certainly never seen him. Even the portrait stamped on the larger denominations of money in the Free City was not that of the king, but of one of said king’s distant ancestors. Inside the city’s walls, the Burgrave was the only power that mattered, and Malden didn’t care a jot for anything outside them.
The Burgrave ruled by the authority invested in the crown. A thief who could take the crown away would be sending a message: that the Burgrave’s authority was not sacrosanct. That in Ness, in the so-called Free City, every man was vulnerable and no man was truly better-superior-to another.
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