“That’s not precisely what I meant. Here, let me show you something I think will please you,” Slag said. He headed down the steps toward the river, where his latest creation was spinning freely on a massive steel axle. It looked like the Bloodgod’s own wagon wheel, twenty feet across and made of massive beams of wood. All along its circumference paddles stuck out like the oars of a war galley. The paddles dipped into the water, where the current pushed against them and sent them speeding upward again, water spilling from them in a constant torrent. “The force of the river, you see, is transmitted to the axle as angular moment, and from there to a reducing gear which-”
“I don’t speak dwarven, and you know it,” Malden said. He followed Slag up a rickety scaffolding to look down on what had once been a yard for the storage of tar barrels. Now it had been turned into a grain mill. The steel axle of the waterwheel was connected by some ingenious bit of clockwork to a wooden shaft as big as a tree trunk. This rotated constantly, turning as it did so a millstone busily churned out crushed wheat. The human millers down there looked afraid to touch the mechanism, but they worked spryly enough at gathering up the grain and scooping it into sacks.
“This rod turns that rod, which turns the arsing stone,” Slag explained, a bit testily. “It works, that’s the important thing.”
Yes. Yes, it was. As little grain as Ness still possessed, it was worthless if it couldn’t be ground into flour. Now, at least, that part of the problem was solved. Malden felt hope blossom in his chest for the first time in days. “Slag,” Malden said, “you’ve done it again. Is there no end to your invention?”
“Now, I can’t rightly claim to have thought this one up,” the dwarf admitted. “There’s wheels like this in Redweir, turned by the Strow. Or at least, there used to be. Who can say what’s come of that town?”
Malden nodded solemnly. News from the eastern half of Skrae was rare as hen’s teeth, but all of it was bad. Those few travelers who actually came as far as Ness now reported a countryside ravaged by barbarians, full of bandits and starving peasants too terrified to leave their homes in search of food.
“For the nonce, at least, we’ll have flour,” Malden said, because that was what Slag wanted to hear. “You’ve done a wonderful job here. The city will give you a medal, or some commendation. I’ll see to it.”
“Lad, bollocks on that. You know I don’t care for honors. I’m trying to help you, that’s all. And maybe I can offer you something else today, if you’ll step into my office.” The dwarf’s eyes burned with excitement as he led Malden into a shack at one corner of the millyard. It was cold inside, and cramped-the ceiling was far too low for Malden’s comfort-but once he saw what the dwarf had in mind, he could not look away.
A piece of parchment lay weighted on a table. On it was a message written in dwarven runes, with beneath each rune a character from the alphabet of Skrae. This second set of characters was grouped into individual words.
“You’ve deciphered it?” Malden asked, breathless. Cutbill’s message had become a touchstone for him, a hope he could cling to no matter how dark things got. He had convinced himself, with no evidence whatsoever, that if he could only read it, all his problems would be solved. In his more lucid moments he knew that was folly, but with so many people believing in him, he needed something he could believe in. “But no,” he said, glancing at the alphabetical marks. “No, it’s still gibberish.”
“Trust a guildmaster of thieves to be paranoid,” Slag said. “He used not one cipher, but three. First the symbols on the original ledger page, which were then revealed to be substitutes for dwarven runes. I had to convert the runes to your tongue, by comparing the sounds they stand for. That wasn’t simple! And even then the wrong man wouldn’t be able to read it, because he ciphered the runes as well.” Slag shook his head. “Crafty bastard.”
“One step closer,” Malden said. He had not expected it to be easy.
“More than that. Look here. This last word in the message-ASRZGJJ. Does it look familiar at all?”
“Not in the slightest.”
Slag groaned. “Think, lad! Use the damned skills Coruth gave you. It’s a substitution cipher. A rotation cipher, I warrant, or blind me with a stick. Seven letters. The last two the same. Think!”
Malden wished the dwarf would just tell him the answer. He hadn’t slept more than an hour or two in days. Every time he closed his eyes he saw only the fear in the priest’s eye as his food was taken away. He could use something easy, for once. But-all right, he thought. Work it through.
Seven letters. Two the same, at the tail. Think of words that end with a double letter, most of them end in TT, SS, or-ah-LL…
“It’s a signature,” Malden exhaled. “It’s-”
“Cutbill’s name, ciphered!” Slag agreed. “And more than that, it’s a partial key to the whole fucking thing! Now I know every time the letter J appears in the message, it’s actually an L. Every A stands in place of a C. Fill in the rest, and we have it.”
“We… have it,” Malden said.
“Together we can solve this in an hour,” Slag said, nodding happily.
A strange fear gripped Malden. So close. He desperately wanted to read the message. And yet-if he did-his one hope would be gone. There couldn’t possibly be anything in the message to solve his problems. It just wasn’t long enough.
Yet he had to know. He must know what Cutbill had deemed so important it had to be kept so carefully secret.
“I’m supposed to go address a meeting of the wool carders’ guild right now,” Malden said. “After that I’m supposed to sit in judgment at the hall of justice. Velmont has my whole day sewn up with meetings and audiences.”
“So-you don’t want to work on this right now?”
“Blast you, no, that’s not what I meant at all. I meant bar the door, so when Velmont comes looking for me, he can’t get in. And hand me that quill!”
Chapter Seventy-Three
Croy kept his horse to a walk as they crept slowly through the fens north of Easthull. This was Greenmarsh, once the most politically influential district of Skrae. Now it was firmly entrenched with barbarian pickets. He had to maintain constant attention on the hunched trees around him, which could hide anything, and also the soft ground, lest he become trapped in the mire.
Bethane’s presence behind him did not help. They had been unable to find another mount for her-the barbarians had scoured this land for every bit of horseflesh they could find. Having to share wasn’t the problem, though. The girl was light enough not to overburden Croy’s horse, and she never complained about her uncomfortable position sitting on his cantle. She kept her arms wrapped around his waist, but not so tight that he couldn’t breathe.
No, the problem was that she kept talking. He had convinced her to keep her voice to a low whisper, but she was his queen, and he could not command her to be silent. He never responded to what she said, but that didn’t seem to dissuade her.
“When I am reinstated at Helstrow,” she said, excitement plain in her voice, “I will command a great tournament to honor the sacrifice of all our brave men. Knights will come from every land to prove their mettle and their honor. There will be bright pavilions all around the fortress, a great sea of them in every color. Of course, preference will go to the green tents, and the white.”
Croy had been following a deer trail through the swamp, a narrow track barely visible even by brightest daylight. His horse could find it better than he could himself, shying on its hooves whenever it stepped off the trail and into the thicker vegetation to either side. Now that the sun was setting, the horse seemed less sure of itself, and Croy wondered how he would find his way in the dark. But they could not stop now.
“There will be jongleurs, and fools, and the dwarves will demonstrate their marvelous creations. I will have a great fountain built, which will spray water ever so high in the air, so that men will delight to watch it go up, and wonder at how long it takes to come down again. There will be
falcons, and much sport from their flights, and their handlers will be gallant men with steely eyes who never speak except to command their fierce birds.”
Up ahead something blocked the trail. Not a roadblock-the barbarians would never waste time closing off a path so far away from civilization. No, it looked perhaps like a massive deadfall, as if a cyclopean chestnut tree had fallen and its roots were sticking up in the air, thick with moist earth. Croy searched the ground around this obstacle with his eyes, looking for a way to circumvent it.
“The ladies of my court will be all in linen and velvet, and they will embroider teasing mottoes inside the sleeves of their gowns, so that any man who ventures to peek inside will find himself made a figure of fun. And there will be great competitions of skill. Archery contests that will go on all day. And men will try to climb greased poles, or capture chickens set loose in a paddock. Oh, it will be humorous to watch their antics.”
As they came closer, Croy finally made out the truth of the obstacle. It was no fallen tree. Instead, it was a pile of corpses clotted with gore, their bones picked at by birds. Even from a distance he could see the wounds that had slain these men. Axe cuts had lopped off arms and ears and faces. The bodies were still dressed in the colors of Skrae. Were these some men from his rabble, the one he’d lost on the road to Morgain’s berserkers? Or were they simple deserters, thinking to save themselves from certain death, only to find it again here, in this forgotten place? Whoever slaughtered them had deemed them unworthy of even a simple burial. They had been left to rot where they lay. Croy’s shoulders stiffened at the sacrilege, and he felt Bethane lift her head.
“Is something wrong, Sir Croy?” she asked.
“No, your highness.” Croy tried to think of what to say. How would Malden handle this? The thief had always been a great flatterer, and very good at smoothing over unpleasantness. “I was only… struck by the grandeur of your vision. Please, close your eyes, the better to see such beauties, and the better to relate them.”
Bethane sighed and leaned against his back. “You’re right. I can see it better like this. Oh, Sir Croy! The place you will hold on that day. You’ll be by my side, of course. You will be my champion, when I am properly crowned and established in my station.”
Croy urged the horse forward, moving as carefully as he might around the pile of dead men. The animal snorted and balked at the smell of death, but Croy rubbed its neck and it settled down.
“You will be heaped with honors, of course,” Bethane went on. “Your colors will hang from the highest tower, next to mine, and every knight on the field that day will bow in recognition that whatever victory they may win, they shall never match your achievements.”
Croy had fought in tourneys, once. He had jousted with lance and spear, fought in mock melees with wooden swords. Like a child playing at war. He had won great honors and tributes from lords and ladies. He had held himself up as an example of honor and virtue, and thought everyone would gain from just seeing him, that he would inspire them to make the world a finer place.
Now he was a man on a horse, with a girl clutching to his back. The horse was near death and the two of them were dirty and saddle sore and so very hungry. The world she spoke of had never existed, not really. There had only ever been this muddy place where death waited around every turn in the road. The sun had been a little brighter in summertime, that was all, and it fooled him into thinking the green grass and the blue sky would last forever.
To the north, he thought. He must take Bethane far to the north, as far as the Northern Kingdoms, where she would be safe. She would reign in exile while the barbarians despoiled her own country. But she would live. And perhaps someday some descendant of hers would travel south again, with a proper army, and take Skrae back. Or what was left of it.
“I see the groaning boards, Sir Croy! Laden with every kind of roasted meat, and every succulent dainty my cooks can make. I see the boats on the river Strow, their flags snapping in the breeze…”
Chapter Seventy-Four
Malden reached up and grasped the snout of a gargoyle. It started to pull free but the iron staple that held it to the wall was still strong, even after so many years of neglect, and it took his weight. He clambered up onto its stone back and rested for a moment.
He’d had steadier climbs. He’d gone places in Ness he felt more easy. The Chapterhouse did not have a good reputation.
An octagonal building with a high spire, it was an anomaly in the Stink-one place in all that stew of humanity that no one ever went, a massive stone pile in a sea of wood and thatch, forlorn and shunned. It was supposed to be the most haunted building in the Free City, with a far more dire reputation than even the Isle of Horses, because its evil had continued to take victims long after the tragedy that cursed it.
In the early days of Ness-in the early history of Skrae-the Learned Brothers of the Lady had been a strong institution, a beacon of reason and erudition in a benighted land. They had tended to the sick and fed the poor in a time when the priests of the Bloodgod could do nothing but demand larger and more savage sacrifices. The Brotherhood had brought thousands of converts to the then new religion of the Lady. It was also rumored they possessed secrets even the dwarves had never plumbed. At Redweir they had built the Sacred Library, the greatest concentration of books and manuscripts outside of the Old Empire. In Ness they built the Chapterhouse, a meeting place for all seekers of knowledge and enlightenment. It originally stood outside the city’s precincts, protected by its own high wall. When the Free City grew, it swallowed the Chapterhouse, but the building remained cloistered and aloof. Inside its towering edifice the Learned Brothers had kept the rules of their order, and no Burgrave ever dared intrude upon their laws or customs. Rich merchants had sent their more bookish sons to the Chapterhouse to be tutored, and it became tradition that these scholars would become the distinguished professors of Ness’s burgeoning university.
Any organization of celibate men, however, will eventually fall under suspicion from more cosmopolitan minds, and the Chapterhouse was no exception. Tales were told of initiation rites that went beyond harmless hazing, of license and formalized pederasty. The once-honored title “Chapterhouse Pupil” came to be slang for a catamite. The Learned Brotherhood gained a bad reputation. How much of it the monks had actually earned was unknown, but two hundred years before Malden was born, one Jarald of Omburg came to be High Scholiast of the place, and within a year it was empty and abandoned, its doors chained shut and its fires of learning quenched.
The Burgraves had never revealed the true account of Jarald’s crimes, but Malden grew up hearing tales of hundreds of monks being driven from the city in chains, of watchmen fainting dead away at the discovery of dismembered boys inside, their wounds violated in horrible fashion. His mother had used the Chapterhouse as a bogey, warning him that if he did not behave he’d be sent there to become a student of Jarald’s ghost. It was not a toothless threat. Those few thieves or vagabonds desperate enough to try to break into the Chapterhouse had vanished without trace, and even vandals who besmirched its outer wall with graffiti were said to have been punished by spectral forces.
It took a lot to keep thieves away from any building in Ness. The city was famous for its thrice-locked doors and the dwarven traps that protected the houses of wealthy men. The Chapterhouse needed no such protections-thieves shunned it the way they shunned the gallows.
And now Malden knew he must enter its deadly confines, and plumb its darkest corners. He had been taken aback when he finally read the message Cutbill left for him. He’d seriously considered tearing up the letter and forgetting its contents. Yet it promised so much he could not resist. Properly deciphered, the
message read: FOR MALDEN SHOULD HE RETURN YOU HAVE MANY QUESTIONS I HAVE BUT ONE ANSWER COME LET US TRADE IF YOU LIKE THE TERMS I SET CLIMB TO THE ONE HEIGHT YOU NEVER YET SCALED IN ALL THE FREE CITY AND YOU WILL FIND MY TRAIL FOLLOW IT WITH CARE FOR I AM NOT UNPROTECTED FOLLOW IT AND FIND ME I WILL AWAIT
YOU THERE CUTBILL
On his gargoyle perch, Malden studied the transcribed parchment one last time. It confused him more than ever, even more than when it had been a meaningless clutter of symbols. Just like Cutbill to be so cryptic-and so forbidding. Just like Cutbill to put such obstacles in his way, knowing full well he would have no choice but to overcome them. And yet how unlike Cutbill to put himself at such risk. Malden had assumed the guildmaster of thieves had fled the city like every sane man wealthy enough to do so. He had assumed Cutbill was willing to donate his entire enterprise to a young and untried thief, rather than stick around and take his chances with fate and the barbarians.
The message suggested otherwise. It suggested that Cutbill had gone into hiding-right in the middle of his own city. That Cutbill he’d been in Ness the whole time, just waiting for him to track him down.
Cutbill was playing a deeper game than mere survival. That, Malden should have expected.
He climbed higher. The steeple of the Chapterhouse was one of the highest places in Ness, even though it was well downslope from Castle Hill. The building must be twelve stories high, not including its superstructures. All of its windows and doors had been sealed off quite firmly, but Malden was certain once he reached the top he would find a way in.
Nor was he disappointed. The peak of the spire had been blasted by lightning and never repaired. One whole side of its apex had fallen away. Malden slipped inside the remaining three walls and found himself in a narrow space full of the droppings of bats, the walls woolly with cobwebs. No furniture or appurtenances remained in the room, but there was a simple trapdoor set in its floorboards. He tried lifting this portal and found that its hinges had completely rusted away. The square door fell through its jamb and clattered down through rafters and support beams below, into total darkness. Echoing up through that open space, he heard the clattering sound of gears and clockwork lurch sluggishly to life.
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