“But half of them are not. And we have plenty of spare weapons inside the fence. You look like you’re ready to take us all on by yourself, Sir Croy. I’d know why, before I order your death.”
The wound in Croy’s back pulsed angrily. His body didn’t like being held so immobile. “I’ve come for the Burgrave’s crown. Thieves hid it here. If your master will give it up, I will leave you in peace. I’m not here to kill anyone, if I don’t have to.”
“I’d prefer to avoid it myself. The city watch will be here soon, I have no doubt. Half the city must have heard us fighting down here. When they do arrive, I don’t want to have to explain what a dead ogre—and a dead knight—are doing on my lawn. I don’t know anything about a crown. But if you leave right now, I’ll let you take your pet away with you. This can just . . . stop.” The captain stared in frustration at Croy. He knew very well it wouldn’t end that way. “Surely, Sir Croy, this is the best you can hope for!”
“I won’t leave without the crown,” Croy insisted.
The captain raised his hands in disgust. Then he turned on his heel and threw a hand gesture toward the archer.
The bowstring twanged, and the arrow shot through the air too quickly for human eyes to follow. It was headed straight at Gurrh’s uninjured eye. Simultaneously, the four guards around Croy stepped forward in perfectly drilled unison and lunged with their halberds and glaives.
Gurrh snatched the arrow out of the air a split fraction of a second before it pierced his eye. He snapped it in half between his fingers.
Even Croy’s senses, heightened by the thrill of combat and the onrushing specter of his own demise, could not follow everything that happened next. Luckily, he didn’t need to see or hear everything. He had run through this exact scenario a thousand times, back when he was training to become an Ancient Blade. His fencing master—Bikker—had known this day would come, when he was trapped in an unwinnable contest. He had trained Croy to be ready for it.
In such a situation there was only one course of action that could be countenanced. You defended against every attack that time allowed—and you minimized the damage done by those attacks you could not avoid.
Croy’s shield took a glaive blade in a glancing blow that sent the weapon up and away. His shortsword parried the axe blade of a halberd, the two weapons grinding together until the halberd was mired in the shortsword’s quillions. Croy threw his hips to one side, and a third attack—this one from behind—just grazed his side.
The fourth hit home, and six inches of iron buried themselves in his side.
Croy gasped in pain, but he knew the blow had missed his kidney. Which meant he would not die from the wound. At least not right away. That meant he still had some time. Time to counterattack.
The glaive his shield had deflected was pointed up in the air. The man who wielded it was changing his grasp on the haft, trying to bring it back under his control. Croy put his head down and rushed toward the man, while twisting his right hand around to free his shortsword from the halberd that fouled it.
He felt the sword slip free, but it was his shield that smashed the face of the glaive-bearer. That man went down with a grunt. Croy swung around and suddenly he was facing three opponents head on, rather than being surrounded by them.
A halberd red with Croy’s own blood came swinging at his face. He slapped that attack away with the shortsword’s foible, then swung his shield around to block a glaive blow that came sweeping up at him from the ground. He no longer saw the men who held the weapons—he was too busy watching the movement of the halberd points and axe blades and the curved, glinting cutting edge of the glaive.
A halberd drove point first toward his left leg. Croy brought the shield down and the point slammed into the oak, piercing it so he saw the point come through the inner side of the shield. Ignoring the pain in his back he threw his left arm wide, pulling the halberd out of the guard’s hands. He pressed his attack and brought the shortsword around to slice at the front of the disarmed man, cutting his tunic open and drawing a line of blood across his chest. The guard twisted to one side and fell away.
That left him with two opponents, both of whom stood with their weapons across their bodies in defensive positions. Croy pointed at one, then the other, with his shortsword.
“How much does Hazoth pay you?” he asked.
“Not enough,” one of them answered. He threw his halberd on the ground and ran. The other was not long behind him—though he took his glaive with him.
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Malden stepped through the doorway and into the trapped corridor, careful to test his footing before he put his weight on the floor. It did not give way. He closed the cover of the hand lamp and closed his eyes tightly, then opened them wide again to adjust them to the darkness. He had expected some small amount of light in the corridor—surely at least a little would spill in from under the door or through the keyhole. Yet his eyes swam with the complete absence of light.
Well, almost complete.
The hallway was pitch-dark save for a blot of orange light high off in the distance. His eyes couldn’t seem to adapt to the gloom otherwise. He pulled back the hatch of his dark lantern, trying to see anything at all. A pale glow emanated from the lamp, but only for a moment before the candle inside the lantern sputtered and died.
Malden cursed silently and reached into his tunic to find his tinderbox. Before he could reach it, though, the distant orange light flared up and he looked toward it. What had been a shapeless glow was now a fiery orb with a black center, surrounded by a burning ring of gold. It looked a great deal like the eyeball of some enormous monster.
It looked at him. It looked into him. It looked through him. And then madness swept through him like a wind howling out of the pit.
Malden staggered and clenched his eyes shut. He dropped the dark lantern but didn’t hear it fall. He clutched at his head with his hands.
’Ware the eye, Lockjaw had said. And nothing more. What had the old thief known? Had Lockjaw broken into this villa once and fallen afoul of the same trap? Or had he only heard tale of it from someone else? Malden had realized long ago that Lockjaw’s silence didn’t only serve to guard his secrets. It made other people feel it was safe to tell him their own. Lockjaw was a great treasure trove of gossip. Yet if only he’d been a bit less stingy with it this time . . . well. What hadn’t Lockjaw told him?
Malden shook himself as if he were cold, though in truth he felt like he’d been singed by a firestorm. He opened his eyes, but shielded them with one hand so he wouldn’t meet the gaze of that hellish thing again.
He needn’t have bothered. The eye was gone. So was the darkness.
He was standing in 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.
He turned around and saw that the door he’d come through was gone. The wall there was smooth plaster and wood.
A corridor lined with windows, letting in moonlight—he knew this place. He’d been here before. It was the same corridor he’d crossed to reach the tower room where the crown slept, guarded by its tentacled horror. It was the twin of the moonlit corridor from the palace. A place of traps that he had bested through his skills, and this its perfect double, as if a team of dwarves had worked at copying that hallway down to the placement of each dust mote, the angle of every beam of light. It was as if he’d been transported bodily back to the palace, back to the place of his greatest success—and worst blunder—as a thief. He could almost believe that this was exactly what had happened.
Except—it couldn’t be. That hallway had been severely damaged in the demon’s magical enlargement. That hallway probably didn’t even exist anymore. Surely the Burgrave had no reason to rebuild it exactly as it had been. Which meant he was st
ill in Hazoth’s house. Yet there was no way such a hallway could exist in the villa, in this particular location.
There could be no windows in this hallway. The trapped hallway in Hazoth’s villa was surrounded on both sides by thick-walled chambers. There was no way the moon could come into this place.
So the moonlight, at least, was an illusion. A phantasm conjured by Hazoth’s sorcery. And yet—why did it look so maddeningly like the corridor in the palace? Why would the magician choose to make this place the replica of a corridor that only a handful of people had ever seen? It made no sense.
At least he knew the secret of the hallway. The shadows between the pools of moonlight would hide pressure plates that caused spring-loaded spears to shoot down and impale anyone foolish enough to step on them. The final patch of moonlight would have a collapsing floor, which opened on a shaft that led to the Burgrave’s dungeon, or its fell equivalent in the villa. Or—would it? Malden reviewed the plan of the villa in his head. The hallway lay at the center of the third floor. Below it was the gallery that overlooked the grand hall on the ground floor. So the shaft at the end of this hall would drop an unwitting thief onto the iron sphere.
Perhaps there were other differences, too. Perhaps that was the point.
Ah.
’Ware the eye. Malden thought he understood a little now. The eye had seen into his mind, and made this place from his memories. That was the only explanation for how it could look so exactly the same. It was a subtle spell, and a shrewd one. It could have made him think he was standing in a field of flowers, or at the bottom of the ocean, or in the pit itself. But he would have known instantly that those were illusions. The eye knew he expected to find a hallway full of traps—so it provided one. The illusion was so complete, and so convincing—the color of the moonlight was a wan silver, the air smelled of old stone and the clean air of Castle Hill. If he had not known better, he might have thought that the disorientation he felt was simply his eyes adjusting to the moonlight. He might have believed utterly in the hallway before him. Without Lockjaw’s warning, he probably would have thought all those things. The old man might just have saved his life.
The hallway was based on his memory of the place. There was no reason it would play fair with those recollections. He looked around him for his dark lantern but could not find it. Perhaps it was still there but the illusion concealed it.
In a pouch at his belt he had three of Slag’s most reliable creations. Leaden balls, wrapped in leather to keep them from clinking together. He drew one out of the pouch and hefted its weight, then tossed it down the hallway. It landed in a patch of moonlight with a dull thud, then rolled into the darkness beyond where he couldn’t see it. If this hallway obeyed the rules that Malden remembered, a trio of brass spears should drop downward from the ceiling like a portcullis and impale the ball in place.
Except that wasn’t what happened at all.
Instead the darkness opened wide, and enormous white teeth flashed in stray moonlight. The teeth crashed together on the ball and shredded it. Then the teeth flew open again. A tongue as thick as Malden’s arm, forked at its end, flopped out of the mouth/pit and licked at the floor around the teeth like a hungry dog searching for a stray morsel of food. When it found nothing, it flicked back inside the teeth, which closed together and disappeared until only darkness remained on the floor.
Malden thought of the teeth inside the lock he’d just picked, which had chewed at his rake and wrench. Those teeth had disappeared as soon as the lock opened, but they’d left very real marks on his tools. So whether this set of teeth—many, many times larger—were illusory or not, they would certainly make short work of him should he fall into their grasp.
He didn’t like the look of that tongue either. If he jumped over the dark sections of the hallway floor—a tactic that had worked admirably in the palace—could he be sure the maw wouldn’t open anyway? That tongue could grab him out of the air and pull him into its teeth before he reached the next spot of light.
This was going to take some care and thought. He knew he didn’t have a lot of time left. He would have to be quick about this. But if he was too quick, it would be his doom.
He wanted to see just how close he could get to the maw in the floor without causing it to open. Keeping near the wall by the windows where the light was best, he walked out into the first patch of moonlight. He watched the darkness beyond quite closely, looking for any sign that it was aware of him. Thus, when his feet started sinking into the floor, he thought only that he was walking on a thick carpet.
He didn’t notice that the moonlit floor was not solid, but as yielding and viscous as porridge, until it had already sucked him in up to the ankles.
Chapter Seventy-Nine
The floor did not ripple or shimmer like liquid. It looked as solid and flat as stone. Yet it sucked him downward, little by little, and Malden could feel its substance filling his shoes and sticking to the hairs on his legs.
He tried to pull his left foot free of the floor and found only that this threw him off balance—his right foot had nothing to brace against. He kicked and flailed, but that only sped his descent until the floor sucked hungrily at his knees. He started to fall backward, and knew that if he didn’t stop himself he would be sucked down into the floor until his face was covered, until the silvery moonlight stuff filled his nose and mouth and he drowned.
Up and down the hallway the patches of darkness between the pools of moonlight came alive, toothy maws opening and quivering with laughter while long tongues snaked and licked at the air. The hallway was mocking him.
Malden refused to let a patch of floor think him a figure of fun. He had no real honor, as he’d told Croy, and he’d never let pride get in the way of a job before. But no gods-damned inanimate object was going to laugh at him and get away with it.
Desperate for anything to hold onto, his hands shot out and his fingers latched onto the sill of the window. He was embedded in the floor up to his waist, but he could hold himself up if he used all the strength in his arms. That strength was not, unfortunately, enough to haul him free.
He was stuck facing the window. He looked out through the glass and saw the palace grounds—the wall of Castle Hill no more than a hundred yards away, the moon high in the sky. A thin finger of cloud was nearly bisecting the full moon. As he watched, though, Malden saw that it never moved. The stars around the moon never twinkled.
This was all an illusion. The moon, the viscous floor, the mouths that gibbered and guffawed. All created by that orange eye he’d seen in the darkness. It could affect him—it could kill him, he was certain—but none of it was real.
Heaving, pulling with all his might, he managed to lift himself a few inches. Enough to get his right elbow up onto the windowsill. He braced himself there, resting most of his weight against the wall. Then he released the fingers of his left hand from their death-grip on the sill. He nearly fell back into the liquid moonlight, but just managed to keep steady. The window, he saw, was made up of a dozen long panes of glass leaded into a frame of solid wood. He reached up with his left hand and bashed at the closest pane. It did not shatter (for which he was somewhat glad—he’d worried the breaking glass would shred the flesh of his hand), but instead splashed away from him, as fluid as the floor. He reached through the opening he’d made and felt the air outside. Except it wasn’t really air. It felt the same as when he tried to shake Kemper’s hand. Cold and clammy, a nothingness that could not exist according to his other senses. His mind could not accept that absence and thus made of it a presence, gave it texture and sensation where none existed.
For all the misery and misfortune he’d experienced since agreeing to steal the crown, Malden was grateful then for the education those misadventures had given him. Most thieves, he knew, avoided magic and the supernatural like the pox, and for good reason. A common man no matter how deft or agile had little chance against even the simplest wizardry. But he was a fast learner, and because he’d had
no choice, he learned something of magic in the last week or so. He learned it operated by rules. Not—by definition—the same rules the natural world obeyed. Magic was a perversion of those fundamental laws. Yet like any perversion, it must mirror the original, if only in a distorted fashion. Magic was never just arbitrary, though it could seem that way. There had to be an inherent logic to it, a set of boundaries beyond which it would not pass. Light and glass might act like liquids here, but they would always act like liquids. Solid objects here seemed as strong as steel. For the nonce, at least, he thought he had the hallway’s measure.
He reached up through that wet nothingness and grabbed at the wooden frame that held the panes of glass in place. Another pane splashed and dripped away from his touch and his hand closed on the wood, which thankfully was as solid as it looked. More so—it felt as solid as iron in his palm. He thought it might hold his weight.
Thus anchored, he carefully brought his right hand up to grab at the frame as well. He pulled himself up the frame as if climbing a ladder. Little by little his legs came free of the floor. The moonlight did not stick to them or hang in droplets from his breeches, nor did the moonlight shift or flow as he pulled free of it.
In time he climbed up onto the frame of the window altogether, and got his feet up on the sill so he could stand there and let his legs take his weight. Then he looked down.
The floor below him looked as solid as ever. The mouths in the shadows had shut themselves again and showed only darkness. The hall was exactly as it had been when he first entered it. He had progressed about six feet down its length.
Well. That was something. He also had the measure of the place now. He knew its rules—at least some of them.
The next patch of moonlight was ten feet away. He needed to cross over a maw of darkness to get there, and when he arrived he would have to deal with its floor trying to swallow him whole. He thought he might know a way to handle that. Taking the rope from around his waist—the same one he and Kemper had used to get inside the villa, with its end dipped in silver—he tied it to the highest part of the window frame. He gave the rope a couple hard tugs until he was sure it would not come unknotted when he put his weight on it. Then, holding to its silver end, he leapt back to the featureless wall behind him, where the door had been when he came in. The floor there was solid and did not have teeth. It was perhaps the only patch of ground he could stand on safely in the entire hallway.
Den of Thieves Page 37
