Den of Thieves

Book One of The Ancient Blades Trilogy

David Chandler

For F.L., M.M., and R.E.H., the Grand Masters

Contents

Map

Prologue

Nearly one hundred thousand people lived in the Free City…

Part I

A Thief’s Ransom

Chapter One

There were evil little things skulking in the shadows, their…

Chapter Two

Inside the ruined building three old men dressed in rags…

Chapter Three

The darkness inside the box was a solid thing, as…

Chapter Four

Well. He knew what to do with locks.

Chapter Five

Beyond the locked door was a snug little office, heated…

Chapter Six

Neither of them spoke for a while, as the meaning…

Chapter Seven

He drank the whole bottle and got rather drunk and…

Chapter Eight

The accused was brought into the square on a hurdle,…

Chapter Nine

Malden pushed through the crowd, which tried to push back.

Chapter Ten

Approximately three hundred yards to the northwest, Market Square had…

Chapter Eleven

For a while Malden’s world was only a terrible ringing,…

Chapter Twelve

The sorcerer Aelbron Hazoth lived in an imposing four story…

Chapter Thirteen

The next day Malden spent in preparation.

Chapter Fourteen

As they hauled away from the Smoke and up the…

Chapter Fifteen

Malden had learned to climb almost from the time he…

Chapter Sixteen

Croy hated subterfuge, but sometimes the direct approach was just…

Chapter Seventeen

Malden listened to the clamor beyond the wall for only…

Chapter Eighteen

Malden found himself in a small bedroom that looked like…

Chapter Nineteen

Malden’s feet kicked wildly at nothing as his body dropped…

Chapter Twenty

“You’re—You’re mad,” Malden had said two days before, when Cythera…

Chapter Twenty-One

The crown—technically a coronet—was not a work of great art…

Chapter Twenty-Two

Bile rushed up Malden’s throat and his head swam. The…

Chapter Twenty-Three

A great crashing noise stopped Croy in his tracks. “That…

Chapter Twenty-Four

It was all Malden could do to hold on. His…

Chapter Twenty-Five

Croy’s blood thrummed with excitement, as if his veins were…

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Curse you, leave off,” Malden whimpered. His strength was nearly…

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Warm gusts of air chased up the shaft and made…

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Croy dashed into the shadows, keeping his head down as…

Chapter Twenty-Nine

As a child growing up in a brothel, Malden had…

Chapter Thirty

Malden rushed back through the arches, thinking Kemper must have…

Part II

An Unquiet Crown

Interlude

Chapter Thirty-One

Croy and Cythera spent much of the night in furtive…

Chapter Thirty-Two

It took Malden the better Part of the day to…

Chapter Thirty-Three

Finding Bikker was easily enough done, for a man with…

Chapter Thirty-Four

When the Seven Day Fire finally burned itself out, leaving…

Chapter Thirty-Five

The boy’s face was freckled and his chin weak, when…

Chapter Thirty-Six

Knightly interruptions notwithstanding, Malden’s preparations were finished long before midnight.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

An hour later Malden was fast, and finally, asleep.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The rough hands that dragged Malden inside the door threw…

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Wizardry was not technically illegal in Skrae. It was not…

Chapter Forty

“I’m half of a mind to string you up anyway,…

Chapter Forty-One

And then Cutbill was alone. For quite a while he…

Chapter Forty-Two

Sir Croy had been raised to be a knight, to…

Chapter Forty-Three

Malden needed a plan, desperately. He needed some stratagem that…

Chapter Forty-Four

Kemper drew too many stares after that to allow any…

Chapter Forty-Five

It was not difficult to get into the Burgrave’s palace,…

Chapter Forty-Six

It was not Anselm Vry who next approached Hazoth’s villa,…

Chapter Forty-Seven

When Malden’s eyes adjusted he found himself in a broad…

Chapter Forty-Eight

“So you can read, boy? I’m impressed.”

Chapter Forty-Nine

Hazoth rose from his chair and went over to one…

Chapter Fifty

Kemper had been reluctant to help Malden in his reconnaissance…

Part III

The Crew

Interlude

Chapter Fifty-One

There were many eyes watching Hazoth’s villa the next day,…

Chapter Fifty-Two

An hour or so later the watchmen trooped down the…

Chapter Fifty-Three

Despite the cool day, the palfrey was panting and its…

Chapter Fifty-Four

Ahead of him, at the main gate leading down into…

Chapter Fifty-Five

There was nothing Croy wanted more than to just lie…

Chapter Fifty-Six

“It’s just as I said, ha ha,” Tyron told them.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Croy didn’t die in the night. He didn’t wake up…

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Kemper held the sword as far away from himself as…

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Later that day, Malden climbed up on top of a…

Chapter Sixty

The button seller looked up with a broad smile as…

Chapter Sixty-One

Malden spent the day drawing crude maps of the villa,…

Chapter Sixty-Two

“Milady,” Malden said, bowing low. “I thank you from the…

Chapter Sixty-Three

“But … why?” Malden asked. He thought of the mural…

Chapter Sixty-Four

“I’m afraid I’ve been of little help, save to make…

Chapter Sixty-Five

Malden sent Kemper to keep an eye on Hazoth’s villa—discreetly—while…

Chapter Sixty-Six

“Where are we going?” Croy asked as they headed up…

Chapter Sixty-Seven

The river Skrait was the Free City’s lifeblood. It flowed…

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Malden looked to right and left, but there was nowhere…

Chapter Sixty-Nine

A new and much improved plan had begun to come…

Chapter Seventy

When Croy came in, an hour later, Malden and Cythera…

Part IV

The Job

Interlude

Chapter Seventy-One

It was the night before Ladymas, one of the most…

Chapter Seventy-Two

At the side of the house, Malden crouched with Kemper…

Chapter Seventy-Three

The second floor of the villa was as silent as…

Chapter Seventy-Four

Gurrh made no attempt to fight the guards, but they…

Chapter Seventy-Five

Croy’s wound throbbed as he strode across the grass. It…

Chapter Seventy-Six

Malden crept down a hallway that ran the length of…

Chapter Seventy-Seven

Gurrh dropped to one knee. The iron fencepost he’d been…

Chapter Seventy-Sight

Malden stepped through the doorway and into the trapped corridor,…

Chapter Seventy-Nine

The floor did not ripple or shimmer like liquid. It…

Chapter Eighty

Croy took a step forward and nearly collapsed. The wound…

Chapter Eighty-One

Hazoth’s sanctum was a long room with high vaulted ceilings…

Chapter Eighty-Two

Bikker made no move to draw Acidtongue from its glass-lined…

Chapter Eighty-Three

Malden scrubbed at his eyes with the balls of his…

Chapter Eighty-Four

“A fool, perhaps, but—”

Chapter Eighty-Five

Drops of acid hit Croy’s arm and seared right through…

Chapter Eighty-Six

Malden kept his eyes shut until he was sure the…

Chapter Eighty-Seven

“Glorious! When it is finally born, there will be no…

Chapter Eighty-Eight

Bikker was sweating. He wiped his brow with the back…

Chapter Eighty-Nine

The demon howled in agony, and Malden had to hang…

Chapter Ninety

Croy gritted his teeth.

Chapter Ninety-One

Malden hurried down the long corridor at the back of…

Chapter Ninety-Ttwo

A minute earlier, outside:

Chapter Ninety-Three

“Croy! Croy!” Malden called, racing around the side of the…

Chapter Ninety-Four

Malden rolled on the ground, his body coming to pieces…

Chapter Ninety-Five

Witchly light filled the sky over the common, and the…

Chapter Ninety-Six

“Lay easy,” Cythera said. She held Croy’s hand tight. His…

Chapter Ninety-Seven

Market Square was thick with crowds, people of every station…

Chapter Ninety-Eight

Earlier—just at dawn—Gurrh the ogre had brought the leaden coffer…

Chapter Ninety-Nine

Coruth, her own arm fully healed now, muttered to herself…

Chapter One Hundred

Cutbill made a single notation in his ledger, then crossed…

A Thief In the Night

Prologue

In a place of stone walls, attended by his acolytes

Chapter One

A thin crescent of moon lit up the rooftops of

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books By David Chandler

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

PROLOGUE

Nearly one hundred thousand people lived in the Free City of Ness, stuffed like rats in a sack too small to contain them all. The city was less than a mile across and filled every cranny of the hill encircled by its high defensive wall. At midnight, seen from a hill two miles to the north, it was the only light in the nighttime landscape, a bright ember smoldering in the midst of dark fields that rolled to the horizon. It looked, frankly, like all it needed was one good gust of wind to stir it up into a great whoosh of flame.

Bikker grinned to see it, though he knew it was only a trick of perspective. He was a giant of a man with a wild, coarse beard and a magic sword on his belt. He did not know how the other two members of the cabal felt, but for himself, he’d love to watch the Free City of Ness burn.

The lights he saw came from a thousand windows and the forges of a hundred workshops and manufactories. The city supplied the kingdom of Skrae with all the iron and steel it needed, most of the leather goods, and an endless river of spoons and buckles, as well as lanterns and combs made of horn. The guilds worked through the night, every night, filling the endless demand. Streamers of smoke rose from every chimney, rising like boiling columns of darkness that obliterated the stars, while half the windows in the city were illuminated by burning candles as an army of scribes, clerks, and accounters scratched at their ledger books.

On the near side of the river, gambling houses blazed with light, while whores marched up and down long avenues carrying lanterns to attract passersby. Half the city, it seemed, was still awake. “D’you suppose any of ’em know what’s coming?” Bikker asked.

“For the sake of our scheme, I pray they do not,” his employer said. Bikker had never seen the man. Even now the mastermind of the cabal was ensconced in a darkened carriage pulled by two white horses that pawed at the turf. The horses bore no brands or marks, and the driver wore no livery. The coach might have belonged to any number of fine houses—all its insignia had been removed.

A slender white hand emerged from a window of the coach, holding a purse of gold by its strings. Bikker took the payment—the latest of many such—and shoved it inside his chain mail shirt. “For your sake, I advise sealed lips.”

“Don’t worry, I can be discreet when I choose,” Bikker said with a laugh. “Though what a juicy tale I could tell! In a month the city will be torn in half, and the streets will be lined with the dead. How many lights do you think will show then? And no one will ever know what part I played in it all.”

“No, they will not,” the third member of the cabal said. Bikker turned to face Hazoth, whose visage was covered in a thick veil of black crepe. As much as Bikker disliked this business of unseen associates, he supposed he was glad for that veil. It was not good to look on the naked face of a sorcerer. “If you cannot maintain silence, I can enforce it on you. Don’t forget your place. Your part in this is minimal.”

Bikker shrugged. He knew that perfectly well. He’d been hired to perform a variety of small services, but mostly because he was probably the only person in the city who could stop these two, if he so chose. When he’d agreed to meet with them—and then agreed to their tentative, secretive offer—they’d been comically grateful. His reputation preceded him, and they didn’t dare offend his vanity. But they never truly let him forget that he was their lackey. “I do what I’m told … when I’m paid. Gold has a way of stifling the tongue. I know better than to ask of him,” Bikker said, jutting one thumb toward the occupant of the coach, “but what are you getting out of this, wizard? What could he pay you that you can’t just magic up on your own?”

“I’ve agreed to turn a blind eye to Hazoth’s … experiments,” the coach’s occupant said, “once I rule the city. Does that trouble you?”

There had been a time when that would have given Bikker pause, indeed. Sorcerers could be dangerous. Hazoth stank of brimstone and the pit, and he was capable of things mortal men should never try. Sometimes sorcerers made mistakes and the whole world paid. The sword at Bikker’s side was a testament to how high the price had once been—it was sworn to the defense of the realm against the demons a sorcerer could summon up but couldn’t always control.

There’d been a time when Bikker was sworn to that same defense. But the world had changed. Times had changed. He too had changed. Any belief he’d had in nobility or service was ground down by a mill wheel that moved very slowly, but never stopped. Once, he’d been a champion of humankind.

Now he only shrugged. He peered down at the city. From here, it might have been a nest of termites clambering over themselves and their dung heap. “Slaughter ’em all. Feed ’em to your pets, Hazoth, if you like! By then I’ll be far enough away not to care.”

“Indeed. The gold in that purse will take you far. And there is more to come, once you have fulfilled your part of our design. You know the next step?”

“Oh, aye,” Bikker said. He spat in the direction of the city as if he would put out all those fires with one gob. “Next thing to do is find our unwitting fourth.” A fool was required, someone who would have no idea what he was doing. Without such a pawn, the plan could go nowhere. “I need to scare us up a thief.”

CHAPTER ONE

There were evil little things skulking in the shadows, their eyes very bright in the gloom. In every burned-out shell of an old house, Malden could hear their tiny footsteps and the occasional whisper. No lights at all showed in this part of town, and the fog hid both moon and stars. The lantern Malden carried could paint a crumbling wall with yellow light, or show him where the cobblestones had been pried up and deep pools of mud awaited an unwary step. It could not, however, pierce the darkness that coiled inside the ruined houses and stables, nor show who was watching him so intently.

He didn’t like this.

He didn’t like the time of the meeting, an hour past midnight. He did not like the location: down by the wall, near the river gate, in the wasteland called the Ashes. In the same year he was born this whole district had been consumed by the Seven Day Fire. Because the doss-houses and knackeries down here belonged to the poorest of the poor, no effort was made since then to rebuild or even to tear down the gutted remains. No one lived here if they had any choice, and the Ashes had been abandoned to decay. Now limp weeds were sprouting from between the forgotten cobbles, while vines strangled the fallen roof timbers or slowly chewed on the ancient smoke-damaged bricks. Eventually nature would reclaim this zone entirely, and Malden, who had never set foot outside the city since he was born, found this distinctly uncomfortable—the concept that part of the city itself, which was his whole notion of permanence, could rot and die and be effaced.

Behind him something dashed across a forgotten street. He whirled to catch it with his light. Despite well-honed reflexes he was still not quick enough to see what it was, only that it disappeared through the gaping hole where a window had once looked out on the street. His hand went to the bodkin he kept at his hip but he dared not draw it. You never showed your weapon until you were ready to strike.

Malden stopped where he was and tried to prepare. If an attack was coming, it would come quickly, and being braced for it would make all the difference. His eyes showed him little—the scorched beams and the soot-stained street were all of a color by his little light. So he turned to his other senses in his search for signs. He heard nothing but the creaking of old, strained wood, the sifting of ash. He could smell the smoke of the fire, so many years gone.

Behind him he heard soft footsteps. The sound of bare feet slapping against charred timber. Only for a moment, before the sound stopped and he was left in silence again. Silence so profound—and so rare in the clamoring city. It sounded like a roaring in his ears.

He turned slowly on his heel, scanning the empty door frames on every side, the twisting little roads that curled between the buildings. He longed to get his back against something solid. There was a brick building up ahead, or at least the husk of one. Its roof was gone and one wall had come down. The other three still stood, however, and if he could get inside them, at least he would not have to worry about being attacked from behind. He hurried forward, his lantern held high—and then a noise from quite close by stopped him in his tracks.

One of the watchers had stepped out into the street behind him. He heard its feet splashing in a puddle. This time, however, it did not rush off as he turned to see it. This time it held its ground.

Even before he completed his turn his hand was on the hilt of his knife. He hesitated to draw, however, when he saw the creature he faced. It was a child, a girl no more than seven years old. She wore a stained shift of homespun and had rags wrapped around her feet in place of shoes. She also had a hammer clutched before her in both hands. Her eyes stayed on his face and they did not blink.

Malden spread his own hands wide, showing her they were empty. He took a step toward her, and when she did not flee, he took another. He reached down toward her—

—and suddenly the street was full of ragged children. They seemed to emerge from the mist as if generated spontaneously from the cold and the damp, like fungus from a rotting log. They were of both sexes, and varied in apparent age, but were dressed all alike in torn shirts and tunics too big for their skinny frames. And they all held makeshift weapons. One had a carpenter’s saw. Another held a cobbler’s awl. Bits of wood with protruding nails. A length of iron chain. One of them, a boy older than the rest, had a woodsman’s hatchet that he held down against his thigh as if he knew how to use it.

A gang of orphans, Malden thought. A band of urchins joined together in their poverty to waylay any traveler foolish enough to come here by night. A ragged little army. There were dozens of them, and though he was certain he could best even the older boy in a fair fight, he could see in their eyes they held no concept of fairness or justice, such things as impossible and mythical in their experience as the continents the sages claimed lay beyond the sea. They would be on him in a heap, slashing and hitting and pounding and mauling him until he was dead. They would offer no quarter or mercy.

They were waiting for him to make the first move. To try to run, or fight. Not because they were afraid to attack, but because they wanted him to make some mistake, to calculate the odds incorrectly. They would take advantage of whatever weakness he showed and make short work of him.

Malden licked his lips and turned slowly this way and that, looking for an opening. There was no way out, it seemed. Unless … unless there was another reason for their silent waiting, for their constant unblinking stares.

“You want some password or sign,” he said, “but all I have is this.” He reached inside his cloak. They moved toward him, closing the circle they formed around him. They were ready to attack at the first sign of aggression. But he was not reaching for his bodkin. Instead his nimble fingers reached into his purse and drew out the scrap of parchment that had beckoned him to this dreadful place at this beastly time. He unfolded it carefully—the old paper cracked down the middle but he held the pieces together—and showed them the message he had received:

This house is ONE OF OURS,

and its owner under my protection.

At next Witching Hour come ALONE

to the Ashes hard by Westwall—or

you’re DEAD before next Dawn.

“I found it tacked to the windowsill of a house I was in the process of burgling. This is what you want to see, yes?”

Could they read it? he wondered? But no, of course they couldn’t. It was foolish to think these children had ever been tutored or given even religious education. And yet they seemed entranced by the brief missive. Ah, he thought. They recognize the signature, a crude drawing of a heart transfixed by a key.

He did not know what that sign meant, not for certain, but its power on these children was intriguing. One by one they came close and touched the paper, as superstitious merchants will sometimes touch a statue of the Lady before sitting down to some tricky negotiation. When they had seen the sign for themselves and perhaps decided it was no forgery, they filed away, back into the darkness. All except the girl with the hammer, the first one he’d seen. She still held his eyes with her own. When they two were alone again, she finally broke his gaze and started walking toward the brick ruin he’d thought to shelter in. She led him right up to a doorway and then gestured inside with one hand. Then she made a perfect curtsy and ran off to join the others.

Clearly this was the place. Holding the scrap of parchment before him like a talisman, Malden stepped through the door.

CHAPTER TWO

Inside the ruined building three old men dressed in rags sat on a long wooden box. Two of them had long white beards, while the other was bald and clean-shaven. Age had withered their muscles but their eyes glinted with cunning—no dotards, these. Malden had the sense there was a great deal more to them than what he saw.

He nodded to the men but did not speak yet. First he studied the interior of the building—its fallen and shattered roof beams, the piles of scorched plaster in the corners. The floor was covered in a thick layer of debris. There did not seem to be anywhere an assassin could hide, though between the lack of light and the tendrils of mist that coiled around his lantern, it was hard to be sure.

“What if I had brought the city watch with me?” Malden asked, because he felt there was no need for polite small talk. He had, after all, been threatened with death.

The bald man smiled wickedly. “We would not be here. You would have never found this place. And before morning your throat would be slit.”

Malden nodded in understanding. “This isn’t a bad setup. The children out there keep an eye on the place for you, right? Make sure nobody gets in uninvited. I’m guessing that even now if I tried something, you’d be ready for it.”

One of the whitebeards raised a long, crooked finger and pointed into the air. With his eyes, Malden followed the direction of the finger until he could just see a spire looming out of the mist two blocks away. Most likely it had been the steeple of the local church, made of stone, so it survived the fire. While he was staring through the gloom, something whistled past his cheek and slammed into a charred wooden plank behind him. He glanced sideways and saw the shaft of an arrow there, still quivering. The arrow was as long as his arm and it had struck the wood so hard the iron point was completely embedded.

For a while after that Malden did not breathe. His lungs clamped shut and every muscle in his body went rigid. He waited patiently for the next arrow, the one that would find his guts or his throat. But it did not come.

He understood rationally what had happened, and why. The arrow was a message—a reminder that here not all was what it seemed, and that he was still in mortal danger. It was not a reminder he’d truly needed.

“I’ll pay you the courtesy of noticing you didn’t flinch,” the whitebeard said. “That’s good, lad. Very good.”

Malden gave him a brief bow, once he could move and breathe again. “I think I understand where I am. I’m not sure who you three are, but I assume you aren’t the ones I’m supposed to meet. Yet you can show me the way to my meeting. You’re the guardians of the doorway, yes? And more than that, certainly.”

The bald one touched his chest. “I am called ’Levenfingers. These,” he said, gesturing at the whitebeards, “are Loophole and Lockjaw.”

“Well met,” Malden said. “Wait. Wait … I’ve heard of him, of Loophole. It was a little before my time, but they still tell the story up in the Stink. If you’re the same man, then you got that name when you robbed the garrison house up by the palace. Is it true that you climbed in through an arrow slit, fifty feet up the curtain wall?”

Loophole wheezed as he laughed. “Another time, I’ll tell ye all, if you wish. Assuming you survive tonight.”

Malden nodded. “I’d be honored. And you—’Levenfingers—how’d you come by that name, if I might ask?”

“I was the king of the pickpockets in my day,” the bald man said with obvious pride. “They used to say no man with ten fingers could be so dab at it, so I must have eleven.” He held up his hands, which were gnarled and spotted with age but otherwise perfectly normal. “Just a nickname.”

Malden smiled at the third man, expecting an explanation of his name. It was Loophole who gave it, however. “Lockjaw? He holds his secrets well, that’s why. Never gives anything away for free.”

“Does he ever speak?”

“Not to the likes of you,” Lockjaw grumbled, in a hollow voice like a floorboard creaking in an empty house. “Not yet.”

“I see,” Malden said. He was impressed despite himself. Thievery was a dangerous occupation. If you didn’t die in some trap or under the spear of some overzealous guard, the law was always waiting. In the Free City of Ness, lifting even a copper penny from some fat merchant’s purse was punishable by hanging. These three men, daring rogues in their day, notorious for grand exploits, had survived long enough to grow old without being caught. That must mean they were very, very good in their prime. Malden wondered what they could teach him. Of course, there was more pressing business at hand. “I was called here to meet with someone.”

“Are you ready for your audience with our boss, then?”

“I suppose I’d better be,” Malden said.

Lockjaw grunted out a noise that might have been a laugh. The three of them stood up in unison, then moved aside to let Malden have a better look at the box they’d been sitting on. It was a coffin made of plain wood, tapering in width at both ends. ’Levenfingers lifted its lid and Loophole gestured for Malden to get inside.

Malden had never thought himself squeamish or, worse, superstitious. Yet a cold dread gripped his vitals at the thought of lying down in the coffin. “Only a fool or a dead man would get in there happily,” he said.

“If you don’t get in,” Loophole told him, “you’re both, anyway.”

Malden snuffed out the flame of his lantern, then placed it carefully on the ground. There would be no room for it. Then he clambered inside what, he assured himself, was truly no more fearful than a packing crate. The lid was closed and then nailed shut. He tried not to breathe too hard. He’d come this far, he told himself. He must see what would happen next.

CHAPTER THREE

The darkness inside the box was a solid thing, as if the air had turned to obsidian all around him. All sounds that came through the wood were muffled and thick. Malden hoped very much he would be let out soon. The same moment the lid was hammered shut, he found that he had trouble breathing inside—perhaps it was just his mind playing tricks on him, but it seemed there was not enough air in the coffin to support his life. He began to panic, to lose control of his faculties. It took a true effort of will to calm down and resign himself to what was happening.

One fact alone sustained him, one thing he was relatively sure of. The master of this place had already had many chances to kill him. Which meant that, for whatever reason and however temporarily, he was expected to survive this.

That kept most of the panic at bay. The fear tarried longer.

The box was lifted—the three oldsters must be stronger than they looked, or they had help—and carried a short distance before it was lowered again, foot end first, into some variety of chute. For a moment Malden had the sense of rapid downward movement, and then the box struck a solid surface very hard, hard enough to push all the air out of his lungs. Not knowing what to expect, he forced himself not to inhale again.

His body protested and he started to gasp for air but he managed to hold his breath a moment longer. The only way to determine where he’d ended up was by listening to his surroundings. Though the sounds that came to him were distorted by the wooden box, he was able to make out a few things. He could hear voices, people laughing among themselves. A woman’s giggle. So he was not alone.

Then there was a knock on the lid of the coffin, and he sucked in air at last. “Anyone home?” someone asked, the voice thick with mockery.

“Let yourself in and have a look around the place,” Malden replied.

The owner of the voice laughed wickedly but said no more.

It did not take Malden long to realize no one would come to release him from the coffin—that he would have to find his own way out. He was able to draw his bodkin easily enough, but then found it difficult to maneuver it within the coffin without stabbing himself. It was not much of a weapon, a triangular piece of iron that tapered to a sharp point. By law it was the largest knife he was allowed to own, the blade no longer than his hand from the ball of his thumb to the tip of his middle finger. It had no edge, just the point, and was only good for stabbing in a fight. But then, he wasn’t a violent man by nature, and the bodkin was more than it appeared to be. He’d found many uses for it in the past, and killing had so far not been one of them. It served him well as he jabbed the point into the thin seam between box and lid. Without leverage it took some time to pry the lid upward, but when he did he was rewarded by a thin stream of light and—much more blessedly—a new breath of air.

The nails in the lid shrieked as he worked to free himself. Eventually he had the lid open enough to push it outward with his hands. Returning the knife to its sheath, he sat up and looked around.

The room was broad but low, its ceiling propped up on stout beams so it looked not unlike a mine shaft. The walls were bare, close-packed earth that glistened with condensation. The place was well lit by more than a dozen candles, some backed by reflectors of copper that added a rosy tint to the light. On a divan on one side of the room sat a man in a leather jerkin and particolored hose. He had the thick shoulders of a warrior, not a thief. Upon his lap was a redheaded girl with her bodice unlaced. She laughed prettily as he tickled her. Neither of them spared him a glance. In another corner of the room a group of men in colorless cloaks were throwing dice against a wall and cheering or groaning the result.

The final occupant of the room was a dwarf who might have been the epitome of his people. Dwarves were rare in Ness—rare anywhere in Skrae—but enough of them had come down from their northern kingdom, looking for work, that Malden was jaded to their presence. They were master craftsmen, brilliant artificers who could make better tools and finer wares than any human artisan. Dwarves alone knew the secret of making proper steel and thus were highly prized and given special rights wherever they turned up in human lands. Like all his folk, this one was skinny, perhaps four feet tall, and his flesh was as white as the belly of a fish. He had a wild mop of filthy black hair and a tangled beard. He was dressed only in leather breeches and was sewing pieces of metal into a silk glove. He glanced up briefly at Malden, then shook his head and went back to work.

Malden looked away and turned in a slow circle to make sure he’d seen all of the room. He did not want to miss some hidden threat, not now. Directly behind him, he saw the chute through which he had descended, a construction of thin hammered tin. It had been smeared with brown grease that glimmered dully in the candlelight. He could probably get back up that way, given enough time—and assuming no one tried to stop him.

The man on the couch had a sword at his hip, and Malden did not doubt that the others were armed as well. Someone, he figured, would try to stop him. After all, he’d been summoned here for a reason. If he tried to run away now he would be thwarting that purpose. Based on what the oldsters had said aboveground, he would not be allowed to escape in one piece.

A little stiffly, Malden climbed out of the coffin and regained his feet. He dusted himself off and strode over to the divan, intent on learning what he was expected to do next. The bravo on the divan looked up expectantly. “You must have made an impression on the three masters above,” he said. Malden instantly recognized his voice as the one that had spoken to him when he was inside the coffin.

“Oh?” he asked.

“They let you keep your clothes and that knife at your belt. Sometimes the ones they send down here come naked.”

“I’m quite personable when you get to know me,” Malden said. “Now, if you’d be so kind as to direct me to your master? I’m told he wishes to speak with me.”

The bravo’s eyebrows drew together. “And what makes you think the master of this place is not here, right before you?”

Malden bowed in apology. “Organization like this, in such a secret place, leads me to believe only one man in the Free City might be master here. A man I know only by reputation, but that reputation leads me to believe certain things about him. I doubt he’s one of these gamblers, who kneel and dice for pennies. I am relatively certain he is no dwarf, and she—well …” Malden searched his memory. “Her name is Rhona. She’s one of Madam Herwig’s girls, from the House of Sighs up on the Royal Ditch.” The girl looked up at him with wide eyes, but he merely smiled at her in return. There were very few harlots in the city who Malden could not recognize on sight. “As for yourself, well, I do not think you are the chief here. While you cut a striking figure, sir, I will not believe you if you say your name is Cutbill.”

At the sound of the name everyone in the room glanced over their shoulder. Even the bravo and his playmate frowned. Yet in a moment all concerns were forgotten again and the bravo laughed boisterously, which got the girl giggling as well. “You’re smarter than we credited,” he said.

“Yet not so arrogant in that wisdom, as to have avoided this summons in the first place,” Malden said.

The bravo picked the girl up in his strong arms and put her back down on the divan as he rose and came bounding over to take Malden’s hand. “I’m Bellard. I serve the one you named on those occasions when subtlety has failed.”

“Well met. I’m called Malden.”

Bellard laughed again. “Oh, I know your name all right. And you’re correct, the master is waiting on your pleasure. He’s just through there.” Bellard made a sweeping gesture toward the far wall, where a stained curtain hung.

“So I just go through there, do I?” Malden asked.

The bravo smiled. “If you can, you’re well on your way.”

Malden bowed and headed to the curtain. Twitching it back, he found a wide door set into the wall, made of stout oak with massive iron hinges. A thick iron ring would open it. There was just one problem. A thick bar of iron passed through the ring and was anchored in either wall. It was held shut by the largest padlock he had ever seen.

CHAPTER FOUR

Well. He knew what to do with locks.

Malden drew his bodkin and held it by the blade. The grip was formed of a very long piece of stout cord wrapped countless times around the hilt, ostensibly to create a more comfortable handle for the weapon. In fact the cord served far less obvious purposes. He picked at it until one end came free, then spooled it out with a practiced motion. Woven into the cord were his tools: picks, rakes, hooks, and a pair of tension wrenches. Two different skeleton keys for different size locks. These tiny pieces of steel were the most valuable things Malden owned, worth far more than their weight in gold. Worth his life if he were ever caught with them, for they had no legal use—their only function was to allow locks to be opened by someone who lacked the proper key.

He placed the tools carefully in order on the floor beside him, then knelt before the door to examine the lock more closely.

“Right there’s a famous example of the locksmith’s art,” Bellard said from behind his shoulder. “Originally it secured the door of the seraglio of the northern chieftain Krölt. Imagine the exotic and untamed beauties it locked away, eh?”

Malden wondered if they had been half as comely as the lock itself. It was a thing of exquisite craftsmanship, no doubt—probably built by a dwarf, considering its complexity. The recurved case was wider than his two hands put together. It was made of bronze worked with copper, which sadly had grown furry with verdigris over the ages. The front was lined with rivets of brass sculpted to resemble handsome female faces. So profoundly intricate was the workmanship that each face had recognizably different features, and each was more lovely than the next.

The lock’s shackle, also of brass, was cast in the shape of a maiden’s braided hair. The massive keyhole was covered in a sliding plate to keep out dust and moisture that might foul the mechanism inside. When Malden drew the plate back he saw that the keyhole was big enough that he could reach inside with two fingers—if he dared. The key that opened this lock must have been the size of a shortsword.

The room’s fitful light did not permit him to see much inside the lock mechanism, but picking a lock was a skill of the fingers, not of the eyes. He selected a saw rake from his tools and the larger of his tension wrenches. He hoped it would be large enough. He willed his hands not to tremble as he inserted the rake most carefully inside the keyhole and began feeling around for wards or tumblers.

When his rake made contact, the entire lock seemed to thrum as if a spring had been released inside. He just had time to see the rivets move before he jumped backward and caught himself with his hands on the floor. His picks went flying and clanged musically on the stones, but for the moment he forgot all about them.

“You’re quicker than we credited, as well,” Bellard said. He did not laugh this time.

The rivets shaped like the faces of women were not rivets at all, Malden saw. They were more similar to the dust plate covering the keyhole in that they could slide away from concealed holes in the face of the lock. From each of these holes now emerged a needle as big as a carpentry nail. Had he not jumped back in time, those nails would have scratched his hands in a dozen places. He looked closer and saw that the tip of each nail was coated in a straw-colored fluid.

“Poison, of course,” he said.

“Old Krölt was a jealous cove, and he hated thieves. Of course, his poison dried up and flaked away centuries ago. The stuff we replaced it with isn’t lethal, since the lock is meant for training new recruits. Which is not to say it’s pleasant,” Bellard said with a shrug. “It would leave you in a fever for three days, during which time you would suffer such agonies you would most devoutly wish we’d used hemlock instead.”

Malden rubbed at the sweat rolling down into his eyes. Though he made his living at an occupation beset with certain risks, tonight he was being threatened with death and pain far too often for his liking.

And of course it wasn’t over yet. If he failed to get through this door and keep his appointment with Cutbill, his life remained forfeit. He needed to pick the lock—but in such a way that he touched none of the needles. He would have to take great care.

He recovered his picks and then gripped them tightly by their free ends, to give them as much reach as possible. He had hoped it might be enough to let him pick the lock without touching any of the needles. Yet no matter how he tried, no matter how he strained or bent his hands into uncomfortable angles, the tools still didn’t make it all the way inside the lock.

He sank back in frustration and anger and dropped his tools on the stone floor. What to do? What to do? He was not ready to give up. Sadu alone knew why he was being forced to this ordeal, to this series of gruesome tests, but there had to be some reason—he did not believe the master of this place would be such a sadist as to put him through so much just for grim amusement.

So there had to be some solution to the problem. Some simple, elegant answer that would lend itself to a man who knew how to think. Malden had always counted himself quite clever. He wasn’t very strong—a bad diet had seen to that—nor was he accounted particularly handsome. He had the kind of face that no one remarked on, or remembered for very long. What he was, was smart. Quick, like Bellard had said. His best weapon now was his brain, his ability to think this through.

There would be a solution. It must be in this room, since he was not permitted to leave. And it had to be something he could discover if he would just open his eyes. He looked around, trying to see what he had missed before.

He glanced over at the dwarf. He hadn’t paid the little creature much attention before. He had barely been aware of what the dwarf was doing. Now he gave the dwarf’s piece-work his full attention.

The dwarf was sewing pieces of metal onto a pair of silk gloves.

Malden went over to him with his friendliest expression on his face. “My, those are rather fetching.”

The dwarf sneered. “They might fetch a fair price,” he said.

Malden could feel all eyes in the room turned on his back. He ignored them. “May I?” he asked. He picked up one of the gloves and studied it. The dwarf had sewn several dozen small tin plates onto the back and palm of the glove. They wouldn’t work very well as armor in a fight, but they would be perfect for his current purpose. So perfect, in fact, that he could see no reason for their construction other than to help pick the poisoned lock. Malden opened his purse and took out a handful of farthings—copper coins cut into four pieces each. “I’m not sure how much you—”

“It’ll do,” the dwarf said, snatching them from his grasp. He counted them quickly, rolling the coins in his hand. “Miserly thieves. Half what they’re fucking worth.” He held out the gloves and Malden took them. “Now, that’s just for hire,” the dwarf informed him. “I take them back when I feel you’ve had ’em long enough.”

“But of course,” Malden said. He pulled on the gloves and hurried back to the lock. He had no doubt now they’d been made expressly for this purpose. The silk was quite delicate and would tear after even a little use, but it was also thin enough that it did not deaden the sensitivity in his fingers that was necessary for lock picking. The tin plates wouldn’t protect the hands from any but the feeblest blows—but when he attempted to pick the lock again, he found they easily blocked the needles from scratching his skin.

Even with the gloves, though, opening the padlock wasn’t easy. The lock was enormous and had dozens of pin tumblers inside. He had to tease each one into the proper position with his hooks, then hold it there with a rake while he applied just the right amount of torque with his wrench. It required perfectly still hands, but if he did not lapse in concentration even for a moment … yes … there. When the lock clicked again, he nearly jumped away a second time—but there was something different about this click. It was weightier, more solid, more final.

The needles retracted into their holes with a series of soft thunks. The shackle came loose and the lock hung swinging from the iron bar.

It was open.

Malden wound his picks back up into the hilt of his bodkin, then sheathed the weapon with a sigh. He removed the lock from the bar, though it was so heavy he could barely lift it, and set it down carefully on the floor. He stripped off the gloves, turning them inside out in case any of the poison had transferred to the tin plates. He tossed the gloves to the dwarf, who caught them easily. Then, going back to the door, he slid the bar out of the ring and pushed gently. The door opened with a creak.

He looked back at Bellard.

“He doesn’t like to be kept waiting,” the bravo said.

Malden nodded and stepped inside.

CHAPTER FIVE

Beyond the locked door was a snug little office, heated by a charcoal brazier and kept insulated by heavy tapestries hanging on the walls. A massive desk faced the door, carved out of some expensive wood that had turned black over time, a very large and detailed map of the city posted behind the desk, a basin for washing one’s face and hands, and a sideboard with a flagon of wine and several goblets. No one sat behind the desk, however. Instead, the room’s sole occupant perched on a stool in the corner, scratching entries in a broad ledger held on a lectern before him.

He was a very thin man with long, mournful features and eyebrows that arched high onto his bare forehead. His black hair had receded well back onto his scalp and was shot through with two streaks of gray. His eyes were at once very dark and very bright—narrow, merciless eyes that did not look up at Malden as he came in.

Malden closed the door behind him and waited patiently for the man to finish his task. There were chairs, but he did not sit down, unsure what to expect inside this cozy room.

The man’s quill pen scratched out a few more figures and then stopped.

“Your mother was a whore,” he said, quite without inflection.

Malden’s chest clenched but he understood what was happening. The man—who was certainly Cutbill, whether he looked like a mastermind of thievery or not—was testing him. Attempting to see if he would come at him in a fury or perhaps merely whine in offense.

There was no denying the truth of the statement, however. “She was. A good woman in a bad situation, who did her best to raise me with care and patience. She died of the sailor’s pox when I was not yet a man.”

Cutbill nodded, as if merely accepting this new bit of information as something to enter into his account book. “Your father?”

“Half the men in this city might claim the title, yet none ever have.”

“Sit down. You may be here awhile,” Cutbill told him. Malden chose a chair near the door. “You lived in a bawdy house for most of your youth, performing small tasks and running errands for the madam. In that time you probably saw your fair share of illicit activity. I daresay you might have engaged in some yourself—rolling drunks, cheating paying clients—or at least tricking them into overpaying—procuring small quantities of various illegal drugs for the harlots. It wasn’t until after your mother died that you began extending your activities to the larger sphere of the city, though.”

“There wasn’t much choice in the matter,” Malden confirmed. “There’s not much room in a brothel for a young man—not when there are so many unwanted boys around to clean the place and run errands. I was given a few coins but told to go forth and find my own fortune. I decided I’d see how honest folk lived. It turned out the city had little use for a whoreson with no estate. This place isn’t kind to those who were born on the wrong side of the sheet.”

If he’d been hoping to evince sympathy from Cutbill, he was disappointed. The clerkish man didn’t even look up.

“I looked for work in various trades. I was too old already—no guild would take me on for prenticing at the advanced age of fifteen. I tried to find occupation as a bricklayer, as a carpenter, even as a stevedore down at the wharves. Each place turned me away—or demanded bribes. The gang bosses who organized such labor all wanted a cut of the pennies I would earn.”

“And you were unwilling to pay such fees.”

“How could I, and survive? It takes money to live in this world, money to eat, money for rent, money for taxes and tithes. The pay that work offered would have put me in debt the first week, and it would only have gotten worse. I’d seen this scheme before, and the ruin it caused.”

“Oh?”

“It is exactly how the pimps keep their stables of women in line.”

“Indeed,” Cutbill said.

Malden fidgeted with the sleeve of his shirt. “There were no opportunities for one like me. None at all. Yet I needed money to survive. I could go out on the streets and become a beggar. Or I could turn to a life of crime. You know which I chose.”

“And found you had a flair for it.”

“You wish to know my life story entire?”

“I already know it. I’m simply confirming it. For the last five years you’ve been making a paltry living pilfering coppers from the unwary. Occasionally you’ve run a trick of confidence, but your real skills seem to lie in your fingers, not your voice. It was only recently you turned to burglary. For only a few months now you’ve been breaking into houses. Care to tell my why you changed your game?”

“People in this city know better than to carry much money when they go out. They know no purse is ever safe. The real money they leave behind, at home. It only seemed logical to follow the money, not the people.”

The master of thieves made a small notation in his ledger. “You know who I am,” Cutbill said. “You spoke my name outside.”

Malden waved one hand in the air. “All of the Free City knows the exploits of great Cutbill, master of thieves, procurer extraordinaire, purveyor of unlawful euphoria, betrayer of confidences, extortionist to the high and mighty—”

“Spare me.”

Malden sat back in his chair, a little dumbfounded. He had not expected the man to speak so plainly—or so abruptly. It was all he could do to keep up.

“You know that I run this city, or, at least, the clandestine commerce within it. That I have organized and consolidated the criminal class. That I have taken in hand the scattered gangs and crews that exist in any city of this size and made of them something more cohesive, something efficient.” Cutbill put down his pen and sat up on his stool, lifting his chin in the air. “You know my reputation. I recounted your history to show I know yours as well.”

Malden held his peace.

“I do not appreciate arse-licking, nor false modesty, nor unplain speaking. So I will say this simply: I have kept a close and admiring eye on you, ever since I became aware of your activities. I keep accounts of all who commit crimes in the Free City of Ness, whether they work for me or not. But you, Malden—you I’ve watched quite closely. You have the skills of a born thief: the lightness of step, the deftness of hands, the ability to keep a secret. And you learned these things all on your own. No mentor guided you, no school drilled you up in the ways of our profession. I find this quite impressive. Or I did so, until tonight.

“Tonight, you went in secret into the house of Guthrun Whiteclay, a master of the worthy guild of potters, and took from him a quantity of silver plate, some fancy cutlery, and a sack of silver coin he had hidden under his bed. Yet you failed to prepare for this jaunt properly.”

Malden frowned. No one, he thought, could have been more prepared than he. “I cased the house for three days. Watched Whiteclay and his wife leave for a fete up at the moothall, saw him lock his front door but forget to latch a window at the side. I wrapped my shoes in cloth to deaden my footsteps. I studied the patrol patterns of the city watch and knew exactly how long I had to get in and out unseen. I even waited for a night when the fog would conceal the moon, and so darken the alley I used for my entrance and escape.”

“Yes,” Cutbill said, “but you forgot to ask anyone if Guthrun Whiteclay had protection. Do you even understand this concept? I have an arrangement with him. Nothing formal, nothing written down, of course. Yet I receive from him each month a certain sum of money. In exchange for this small payment, he is guaranteed against burglary, robbery, blackmail, and murder at the hands of his business rivals. You may think it easier to simply take all that is his and be done with it—but I assure you, over the years I have made many times as much money from this arrangement than you might ever see from reselling his household goods. Now you have cost me money, because I must send out my agents to recover the things you stole and have them returned to Whiteclay’s house before he notices they are missing. Do you understand the magnitude of that task? Do you understand what it will cost me if I fail in it?”

“I see,” Malden said, shifting in his chair. “So this is a shakedown. You wish me to return these things and to give you the silver I worked so hard to acquire. Well, I don’t like it—but what choice have I? You can have your pet swordsman out there skewer me like a pig on a spit if I refuse.”

Malden had the impression that Cutbill had never smiled in his life. One corner of his mouth did pucker, though, as if he were savoring some tasty morsel of knowledge that he had not chosen to share.

“Yes, yes, all of that. But more as well. I want you to join my operation.”

Malden frowned. “I’m sorry?”

“I wish to offer you a job.”

CHAPTER SIX

Neither of them spoke for a while, as the meaning of Cutbill’s words sank in. Malden had expected something quite different when he answered Cutbill’s summons. Mostly, he’d expected to have to pay back the money he’d taken, and then receive a savage beating (if not worse) by way of a receipt.

“I’ve always worked alone,” he said finally.

“And I cannot allow you to continue doing so. You are too good at this to be independent,” Cutbill informed him. “I don’t like competition. I’d much rather have you in my stable. There are compensations you’ll gain from accepting, of course. You know I have a considerable fraction of the city watch on my payroll, and more than one noble in the palace as well. Right now if you are caught stealing so much as one penny from a church collection box, you’ll be hanged for your trouble. Under my wing, you will have some measure of safety from that fate. Furthermore you’ll be allowed the services of my dwarf, Slag, who can provide tools of a fineness and quality you’ll never gain from any human blacksmith. You can continue to pick your own jobs, though of course you must abstain from burgling any of my clients. And I have something else to offer you.”

“Oh?”

“Your heart’s desire. The thing you truly covet. I can offer you freedom.”

“Every man in Ness is free. There are no slaves here,” Malden pointed out. It was what made Ness a Free City. Outside of its walls most men and women were villeins, peasants, cotters—little more than slaves. They owned neither land nor livestock nor the clothes on their backs. They could not be married without the approval of their lord, nor could they move away from their farms unless they were sold to some other liege—and even then they could take nothing with them but their children.

But in Ness a man was his own. He could work to make a life for himself and his family, or he could laze about and eventually starve in the street. But it was his own choice. The city’s charter guaranteed the right of a man to do either.

“I didn’t say you were a slave. Rather, you’re a prisoner. You have no family, no birthright. You dress like a common laborer and you have the accent of a peasant. If you tried to leave this city—if you stepped outside its walls—you would be scooped up by the first reeve who saw you. He would sell you to some petty baron and you’d spend the rest of your days tilling some field. Ness is a very large prison, Malden, and the door of your cell is wide open. But only because the powers that be know you’ll never leave.”

“If I had enough money—”

“But you don’t, and living the life you do, you never will. If you keep operating independently you’ll end up swinging from a rope or, if you’re lucky, dying in poverty in some hovel. Come work for me and we’ll change that. It will take time. You will work harder for me than you ever would for some shopkeeper. But your money will be your own. And with enough money, even the son of a whore can be a man of importance. He can go where he likes and live as he chooses. Freedom, Malden, is what I offer. True freedom.”

Malden found his heart was racing. Cutbill did know him, heart and soul. How many times had he thought the same thing? How many times had he cursed fate for making him his mother’s son?

“I will admit,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “that is a strong incentive. May I ask what you get out of this arrangement?”

“I’ll take a cut of everything you earn for my trouble. Let us say, nine parts of every ten.”

Malden gaped in surprise. That deal was shameless robbery—worse than any demand a pander would make. But of course he must consider its author. There was in Cutbill’s face a certain hardness of line that told Malden the numbers were non-negotiable. “And if I refuse your offer?”

“Then you are free to go, to walk out the door you came in by. Of course, in my disappointment I might forget to give Bellard the all-clear sign, and he may think you are trying to flee against my wishes.”

“Of course,” Malden said. “Well, in that case, I suppose my answer must be—”

Cutbill interrupted him. “You’re probably thinking, right now, that you can rob me in some way. That you can short the money you turn over to me. Find some way to make my terms more agreeable. You’ve proved you’re clever. Perhaps you think yourself more clever than me.”

“Perish the thought,” Malden said.

“I have no reason to believe you will play fair with me. So for a while, at least, you’ll be under probation. You may eventually earn full position in my organization. I fancy our business here to be like unto one of the trade guilds. Each new member must serve a period of apprenticeship, at the end of which he demonstrates his ability to perform the duties and the functions of the craft. For instance, one of Guthrun Whiteclay’s apprentices might make an especially elegant and large drinking vessel—which would be called his masterpiece, because he made it to impress his master.”

“I’m too old for prenticing,” Malden insisted.

“Agreed. And I think we can consider your burglary tonight your masterpiece, because it certainly did impress me. So we’ll start you off as if you were a journeyman, the next rank and title in our hypothetical guild. But there is another bar to entry at that level. One must pay one’s guild dues, to be considered a member in good standing. So I’ll expect a payment from you immediately, before you may enjoy any privilege of your new employment.”

Malden clamped his mouth shut. What he wanted to say was this:

Why, you loathsome double-dealing toothfish of a blasted cheat, is there no limit to the depths of your ignobility, your mendacity? You’ve held me here at threat of death, and bled me dry, and now you wish a gratuity for the service?

What he actually said was this:

“How much?”

Cutbill flipped through the pages of his ledger. He consulted an entry near the beginning of the book, then looked up and for the first time directly into Malden’s eyes. “I think one hundred and one golden royals should be enough. Or do you think that too little, after all the trouble you caused me tonight?”

“I …” Malden was briefly unable to speak. “I imagine … I think that I will laud your generosity to all I meet.”

“Good. You can go now.” Cutbill picked up his pen again and returned to writing in his book.

Malden rose from his chair. His legs shook. His hands had been steady when he picked the poisoned lock. He had not flinched when an arrow passed through his shadow. Yet now his body was rebellious to his commands. He turned toward the door. “You know, you never actually gave me the chance to say yes or no.”

“I never do. In any business negotiation, if the outcome is not certain before you even begin, then you are fated to get the lesser hand. Remember that, Malden. Oh, and don’t go through there.”

Malden looked at the door. It was the only exit from the room that he could see. “But of course. You haven’t given the all-clear signal.”

“There is no such signal. If you walk through that door, Bellard will run you through, no matter what I do or say. I think that might sadden him—he seems to have a liking for you. So go through there instead.” Cutbill flicked his pen toward one of the tapestries behind him. When Malden lifted it he found a very long corridor ending in a flight of stairs leading upward. Not looking back, he climbed until he found a trapdoor that opened on an alley in the Stink—the district of poor people’s homes that lay just inside the city wall. The neighborhood of his own home, though he still had a long walk ahead of him.

He had only one thought as he headed there.

One hundred and one royals.

It was a fortune. It was a bondage—until he paid it, he would be Cutbill’s slave, working for nothing but the payment of that blood price. It might take him a year to earn as much, even if he redoubled his efforts, even if he picked only the richest plums—plums, he was certain, that were already on Cutbill’s list of protection.

One hundred and one! Royals! Coins so valuable the average journeyman in an honest guild might earn but one for a year’s work. All of the plate and cutlery he’d taken from Guthrun Whiteclay, if sold to a very forgiving and generous fence, would earn him but two royals, perhaps three.

One hundred and one!

He reached his lodgings barely cognizant of the path he’d taken. He had a room above a waxchandler’s shop, not much at all, but it was clean. He had a mattress full of straw which he went to as soon as he arrived. The plates and silver he had stashed underneath, below a loose floorboard. He was not surprised to find them gone. One of Cutbill’s thieves must have broken in here to get them back. In their place was a bottle of cheap wine. A strip of paper was wound around its neck. When he unfolded the note he read:

Welcome to the guild.

It was signed, of course, with a crude drawing of a heart transfixed by a key.

CHAPTER SEVEN

He drank the whole bottle and got rather drunk and lay in his bed with the world whirling around him, alternately cursing and blessing Cutbill’s name. The guildmaster of thieves had held him to ransom—a ransom so large as to be absurd. Only a fool would take the offer, only an idiot would think he could make a hundred and one gold royals before he was stooped and old.

And yet … and yet … he kept coming back to what Cutbill had said. Freedom. Not a slave, but a prisoner. But he could break those shackles. Free himself, if he had the cash. Money meant everything in Ness, just as it meant everything the world around. A man with money was his own—he could buy fine clothes, buy a house of his own, buy, in short, respect. The good honest folk spat at him in the street now. With enough money they would tip their hats when he walked past. No, when he rode past, in a fine carriage, with a liveried servant driving the horses …

It was unimaginable. Impossible. And yes, alone, he could never do it. He could never be more than a petty thief, a second story man, fated to an ignominious death. But with Cutbill, with the power of the guild of thieves behind him …

His whole life could change. It could mean something, just like his mother had always wanted. Just like she’d dreamed of. Despaired of, on her deathbed.

All that was standing between him and that future was a stack of gold coins.

What could he do, then, but go back to work? But what kind of work, ah, there was the problem. His brain was seized by a fever of schemes and plans, but none of them paid off. At first he thought to burgle his way out of the debt, but that turned out to be … problematic. All the wealthiest citizens of the Free City were already on Cutbill’s protection list. His options were therefore limited, and a couple days later he was back at the old routine, in the city’s central Market Square. Right in the shadow of Castle Hill and its twenty foot wall.

No better place for the game he had planned.

“Forgive me, good sir, and the blessings of the Lady upon you!”

It was the oldest trick in the book, but that was how they got so old: they still worked. Malden had his right arm in a sling tied around his neck. Three mangled fingers and a fourth badly infected stump protruded beyond the edge of the cloth—a grotesque wound that would make most people look away rather than risk a closer inspection. With Market Square as crowded as it was that day, it was inevitable that the splinted arm would bump the occasional passerby. So far he had accidentally jostled a lady of quality with her hair in cauls at the sides of her head, the liveried servant of a noble house in black and green, and a fat merchant in a plumed hat wider than his shoulders.

“Pardon me, miss, it’s this blasted arm,” he would say, or “May the Lady save your grace, sir, I am sorry.” They would turn to sneer and perhaps kick him away, but once they saw the arm they tended to murmur some words of empty forgiveness and then hurry off before he could start begging.

By then, of course, he already had their purses open. The broken arm was a fakery. Slag the dwarf had carved it from wood and then painted it to perfectly match Malden’s skin tone. It was hollow inside and open at the bottom, so his real arm fit easily into the gap. In his actual right hand he had a tiny pair of sharpened shears and a square of damp felt. It was the work of a moment as his mark was turning away from him to cut open their fat purses and let the coins inside fall soundlessly into the cloth. Mostly he was securing pennies, groats, and farthings, nothing too worthy. At this rate, he calculated, he would pay off his debt to Cutbill in about twenty years.

Still, on a day like this, volume of business could make up for poor pickings. The Market Square was thronged from side to side, even though this was not a market day. The anonymity a big crowd offered made it easy, too.

Malden stopped for a while to take in the sights. It was impatient greed that carried more thieves up the gallows than any watchman or thief-taker. It was not wise to take too many purses even from so thick a crowd, lest someone raise the hue and cry and every man check their purse at once. Then it would be up to his feet and not his fingers to keep him alive. Anyway, even a working man like himself could enjoy the spectacle laid out for this day’s entertainment.

Where the shadow of Castle Hill best cut the sunlight and the heat of the day, a wooden viewing platform had been set up, and there the mightiest men of the city sat with goblets of mulled wine, waiting on their entertainment. Men whom even Malden recognized. Ommen Tarness, the Burgrave himself, had come. The ultimate ruler of the city sat on a carved wooden throne, his simple coronet of gold polished and gleaming at his temples. He was dressed in cloth-of-gold and brocade, with an ornamental brass key hung around his neck. Despite the gaudy clothes, his face was that of a man used to command, the stern-eyed countenance of a ruler. There was little of mercy in that face, and much of resolution.

On his right hand, under a canopy, sat Murdlin, envoy of the Dwarf Kingdom. It was quite rare to see a dwarf by daylight—they were subterranean creatures by wont, and hated the sun. Murdlin had a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes but still he seemed agitated. His legs kicked at the air where they dangled from the seat of a human-sized chair. The dwarf’s hair had been slicked down with bear fat for the occasion, and his beard had been braided in a hundred plaits, each set with a carnelian bead.

On the left of the Burgrave was the sorcerer Hazoth, his face veiled in black crape as befit one of his dread profession. There were stories about that man to chill the blood. It was said Hazoth had lived in Ness since ages past—no one knew exactly how old he was, but he had lived far past his allotted span. In the olden times supposedly he had summoned demons to save Skrae from the elves and then the dwarves in the endless wars that marked the kingdom’s early years; that he had made the earth quake and the sky rain fire. Of course he didn’t do things like that anymore. Summoning even a minor imp was enough to get a man burnt at the stake. Still, people drew back and turned their eyes aside wherever Hazoth went, and whispered stories that no one dared to disbelieve.

Behind these three stood the bailiff Anselm Vry and his reeves, the Burgrave’s retainers, minor nobles, knights, ladies, and countless servants, enough so the wooden platform groaned with all their weight.

Below them, standing on the cobbles of the square, were the grand people of the Golden Slope, the district of the city inhabited by merchants, burgesses, guildmasters, and those of independent means. A colorful lot in their fitted hoods and gathered tunics, their checked and particolored hose, their snoods and wimples and wide baldrics. None so gaudy, of course, as their liveried servants, who wore hues bright enough that anyone could tell them apart at a distance. There were a scattering of drab cloaks and doublets as well, of course, for any such gathering could not help but attract beggars and the hawkers of sweetmeats and wine. Then there were the bravos and the hired guards, who favored black silk or leather dress, to show how serious was their profession. Yet even these made some concession to the gaiety of the crowd by draping garlands of flowers around the brims of their kettle helmets or tying the favors of their ladies to the hafts and hilts of their weapons. Today, by decree, everyone was to show some sign of pomp and excitement.

After all, it wasn’t every day you got to see a public hanging.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The accused was brought into the square on a hurdle, hoodwinked and bound. He wore nothing but a pair of breeches and a white nightshirt. His hair was blond and cut very short, and his chin had been shaved for his execution. Even with a filthy cloth tied around his eyes, Malden could see he had the face of a poet but the body of a warrior. Under the loose shirt the man’s body rippled with muscle. More than one woman in the crowd turned to whisper excitedly to her neighbor as the cart trundled past on its voyage to the gibbet.

Malden hated the man instantly, just on principle.

Leaping down easily from the gallows, the masked hangman grabbed up the prisoner’s bound hands behind his back and heaved. The bound man’s back arched in pain and he grimaced (showing off perfect white teeth), but he refused to make a noise of agony. Struggling to stand up properly, he kicked out with his legs and found the first step of the gallows. Without hesitation he climbed to the top.

The crowd pressed close, murmuring with excitement. With barely checked glee. Up on the platform the criminal was on proud display, and the little chill of terror a hanging always evoked ran in waves ran through the people gathered to watch.

A list of charges was read out, but Malden didn’t listen. He was far too busy at that moment lifting purses. The real trick to it wasn’t deft fingers, really. It was choosing the perfect moment. You had to wait until your mark’s attention was fully on something else, until he was totally unaware of the people all around him.

Then it was child’s play. Snip-snip went the shears, and coins fell into Malden’s hands. The fat merchant in front of him didn’t even turn around to see who’d touched him.

Up on the gallows the show was just getting started, it seemed. Mouths fell open and eyes went wide as the condemned man lifted his chin and interrupted the reading of the charges. “May I not see my accuser, before I am put to death?” the prisoner asked in a voice as clear as a bell.

Over on the viewing stand the Burgrave rose from his throne. A sardonic smile twisted his lips. “I suppose you have that right, as a peer. Let him see me.”

The executioner pulled off the prisoner’s hoodwink, and for a moment the blond man simply blinked and squinted in the bright sunlight. Then he looked up and saw Ommen Tarness gazing silently in his direction.

“Ah,” the prisoner said. “Greetings, milord.”

“Exactly, Sir Croy,” the Burgrave replied. “I am still your lord.”

The crowd erupted in surprise. Apparently they had no idea that the man waiting to be hanged was, in fact, a knight of the realm. A man of property and good family—which made his execution that much juicier. Most interestingly, the dwarf envoy, Murdlin, jumped up on his seat at the news. The dwarf looked conflicted by varying emotions—in which state he mirrored the people who surrounded Malden on every side. A great chaos of voices and opinions raised itself, and it seemed no two citizens could agree on what this meant.

Tarness held up both hands for silence. “Croy, I warned you, when last we met, that I would not suffer you to return here. Yet you broke the letter of your banishment. I hope you have a very good reason.”

“I do,” the knight said, bowing his head. “I came for love.”

The crowd erupted in noise. Some jeered, some expressed the utter disbelief that Malden felt on hearing this. Others, many of them, cried out in sympathy. Tarness shook his head and sat down on his throne. “Enough of this nonsense. Proceed.”

“Wait! Let me speak in my defense, I beseech you!” the knight shouted. “When you hear my tale, I am sure—”

Tarness made a gesture with one hand and the hangman struck Croy across the face. The Burgrave looked away in disgust and said, “Gag him so I don’t have to listen to this. And then proceed.”

Even Malden had to admit he found that a trifle unfair. The man was about to die—he ought to be allowed to prattle on if he liked. He gave in to his instinct to join the chorus of boos and hissing that welled up from the crowd.

Still, he had not come to see the knight’s final distress, but only to do a little hard labor and reap a harvest of coin. He looked away from the scene on the gibbet and moved through the boisterous crowd, now looking for a final victim before he retired for the day. It would be easy to take a purse at the moment the hanged man dropped. At that moment every eye in the square would be turned to the same place. Few easy marks presented themselves, however, and suddenly Malden was in danger of being trampled. Some among the crowd had begun to shout for the prisoner’s release, raising their fists in the air. They drew closer to the gallows, as if they might storm it and save the man themselves. The bailiff waved for the watch. The town’s policing force, dressed alike in cloaks patterned with embroidered eyes, rushed into the throng and pushed back with their quarterstaffs until the crowd gave some way.

Knowing it would be folly to try to take another purse right under the noses of the city watch, Malden shrank back, away from the gallows, and stumbled backward directly into what felt like a wall of jangling iron.

He whirled about, a curse on his lips, but this he forestalled as he saw whom he’d tripped over. A man much broader and taller than himself who loitered at the back of the crowd, aloof from it as if immune to its bloodlust. He wore a hauberk of chain mail covered by a jerkin of black leather. His head was covered in a wild tangle of brown hair that didn’t end until it wrapped around his chin in a full and glorious beard. The man peered down at him as if from a considerable height. A jagged scar crossed the bridge of his nose, nearly bisecting his face.

“Steady on there, boy,” the big man said. “Are you hurt? Ah, but now I see you are. I’m a blasted pillock for not seeing you there.”

Malden licked his lips. He’d been ready to call the man far worse than that until he saw the massive sword strapped to his back. So instead he kept his mouth shut, because he had a brain in his head. He never argued with a man wearing a sword. He held his peace for another reason as well. Under his sling, his long thin fingers had touched a fat purse on the swordsman’s belt. By the way it hung low and heavy, it must contain something more precious than copper.

Up on the viewing platform the dwarf Murdlin was trying desperately to get the Burgrave’s attention. Malden was barely aware that anyone else in the square existed. He was too busy running his fingertip across the milled edge of a coin inside the swordsman’s purse. It must be silver, he thought, just based on how it felt.

It was folly to steal from a man so heavily armed, recklessness of a sort Malden never permitted himself. Yet the oaf had bruised him. Malden feigned unsteadiness and let the swordsman grasp his left arm. With his right hand he made a quick pass with his shears and felt the weight of the coins that dripped from the cut purse. They were heavy enough to be gold, even though he wouldn’t know until later when he could examine them in private.

“The fault was mine, and I will beg your pardon, rather than insult you further,” Malden said. He reached up and touched the cowl of his cloak in salute, then twisted away and pushed into the crowd before the swordsman could say another word.

Up on the gallows, the hangman draped the noose around the knight’s neck, then pulled it fast. Better you than me, Malden thought. Best to get away now in the noise when the poor fool dropped. He took no more than a few steps into the comforting anonymity of the throng, however, before the swordsman behind him spoke the two words Malden dreaded most.

“Hold! Thief!” the man shouted.

From no more than five strides away, a watchman in an eye-covered cloak looked up and right into Malden’s eyes. The watchman took a step toward him—but then something miraculous happened.

“Wait!” the dwarf envoy bellowed, up on the viewing platform. “I cannot let this go on. This man is beloved by the king of my people. Lord Burgrave, I demand you spare his life!”

It was enough to turn the square into a bedlam. The watchman had all he could do to hold the crowd back from tearing the gallows down with their own hands. Long before he and his fellows had the mob under control, Malden was off and away, his scrawny legs flashing under his cloak. It was the best chance he would get to make good his escape, and he planned on milking the opportunity for every drop of grace. Yet his luck was not unalloyed at that moment. As he fled he glanced behind him only once—and then only to confirm what he dreaded. The watch had lost sight of him, but the swordsman had not. The big man was right behind him.

CHAPTER NINE

Malden pushed through the crowd, which tried to push back. He was a slippery fish, though, and ducked easily under raised arms or around fat bellies and even between skinny legs. His small size was an asset in a life spent always running away from something. He ducked around a party of student scholars too drunk to react as he whipped past them, then clambered on top of a cart full of fruit before the vendor could grab him. He plucked up a skinned melon, overripe and bursting with juice after being out in the hot sun all day, and waited for his moment.

“You there,” the vendor began to shout, “come down and—”

Malden flipped the vendor a thruppence and the hawker turned away as if he’d never seen him. It was a dozen times what the melon was worth.

The bearded swordsman shoved his way through the students, knocking half of them down like ninepins. “Thief, hold, I only want to—”

Malden hurled the melon with pinpoint accuracy. It exploded across the swordsman’s face and chest, the pulp forming great yellow clots in his beard and across his eyes. By the time he recovered from his shock and started scraping the mess off his face, Malden was off and running again.

Market Square was a central location from which one could reach anywhere in the Free City of Ness. Malden chose none of the half-dozen streets that led away from the square. He knew a better road, a kind of highway, where he could make much better speed: across the rooftops, where few could follow.

First, though, he had to get up above the crowd.

Along the south edge of the square there was a massive multitiered fountain, a gift from the third Burgrave to the people. It was in the shape of a series of bowls held by the handmaidens of the Lady, the Burgrave’s favorite deity. Malden dashed for it and then leapt up one tier after another, his feet barely getting wet as he stepped on the stone rims of the bowls. Balanced precariously at the top, one foot on a handmaiden’s cocked elbow, he looked back to see if his ascent was drawing the ire of the watch. He needn’t have bothered. The people had mobbed the gallows en masse and were busy cutting down the imprisoned knight, while the Burgrave and the dwarf envoy bellowed conflicting orders at their various servants and retainers. Malden easily made the leap from the top of the fountain to a pitched roof beyond, dropping to all fours to get a better grip on the slick lead shingles. He had landed on the top of the civic armory, which normally bristled with guards, but they were busy rushing out to join the general melee in the square. He clambered over the roofline of the armory and up one of its many spires to leap over to another roof, this the top of the tax and customs house.

It wasn’t the first time he’d climbed these heights. The district around Market Square was full of old temples, public buildings, and the palatial homes of guildmasters and minor nobility. It was called the Spires for its most common architectural detail—all of which were so heavily ornamented, carved, and perforated they were easier to climb than a spreading oak. Combined with how close the buildings pressed to one another, Malden could move through the Spires almost as easily as he could walk on flat cobbles.

Arms spread for balance, he hurried down the roofline of the customs house, one foot in front of the other like he was walking a tightrope. The sun glared on the pale shingles of the roof, made from slabs of stone cut thin as paper. At the end of the roof he slid down the steeply pitched shingles and sprang up onto a rain gutter, then launched himself across the narrow gap of the Needle’s Eye, an alley that curled around the back of the university cloisters. The cloisters had a nearly flat rooftop running a hundred yards away from him, an easy place to gain some time in case he was still being pursued. Of course, that was impossible. There was no way a man wearing thirty pounds of chain mail on his back could—

“Oh, that’s unfair,” Malden breathed.

A puffing, roaring noise like the bellow of an exhausted bull chased him across the roof, and then the clanking noise of chain mail slapping on shingles. The swordsman clambered up on top of the customs house, dragging himself upward despite all the weight he carried. The bastard must be as strong as a warhorse, Malden thought.

“Just—want—to—talk,” the swordsman grunted, hauling himself up onto the steeply peaked roof, staring at Malden across the alley between them. “Listen, thief,” he said, “you needn’t run—any further. I just—just want to talk.”

“Is your tongue as sharp as your sword?” Malden asked. “Come no closer.” Witty banter wasn’t coming as easily as he’d hoped. Maybe he was too terrified to crack jokes. Well. Never mind. He drew his weapon. “This,” he said, “is a bodkin.”

“So it is,” the swordsman replied, the way a tutor might speak to a student who had just mastered the first declension of a regular verb.

Malden sneered. “It may not look like much. But it’s designed for one thing, and one alone. It has a wickedly sharp tip so it can punch right through chain mail and into an armored man’s vitals.” Of course, of the hundred odd uses Malden had come up with for his knife, that was the one he’d never actually tried. He imagined it would take a lot of strength to push it through the fine mesh of metal links. He would have to get his back into it. Assuming the swordsman hadn’t cut his own spine in half before he had a chance to try. “If you attempt to follow me further—”

“I don’t want to follow you over there. Bloodgod’s armpits! That’s the last thing I want to have to do today. I just want to talk to you. Truly.”

Malden pointed the weapon directly toward the swordsman’s midsection.

The swordsman responded by getting a running start and then leaping over the gap between the customs house and the roof of the university cloister. As the enormous man came flying toward him, Malden let out a yelp and broke into a run. Behind him the swordsman came down hard on the lead tiles of the cloister’s roof and landed altogether wrong on his leading foot. He slipped and twisted around and fell with a great clanging noise that must have alarmed every student and scholar inside the cloister—unless they were all up in the square. The students of the university famously loved a good riot. The swordsman’s legs and then his lower half slid over the edge and dangled in space, while his hands scrabbled at the roof tiles, looking for any kind of purchase. It was all the swordsman could do to keep from rolling over the edge and dropping into the Needle’s Eye. From that height the impact would almost certainly break bones.

“Blast,” the swordsman said. Then he shouted, “Cythera! Stop him!”

Malden was already running down the long lane of the cloister’s rooftop. At its far end, he knew, was the Cornmarket Bridge, which was lined in allegorical statues. If he launched himself off the edge of the roof and angled it just right, he could easily snag the top of the Bounties of Harvest Time. That particular statue had wide hips and a cornucopia full of fruits and grains, which would give him plenty of handholds to climb down to safety on—

Malden had to stop short when a woman in a velvet cloak materialized out of thin air, directly in his path.

He gawped like a fish on a pier, from the shock of her appearance, of course, but also—also—from the nature of her appearance. His mind felt like it had slammed into a brick wall, and his eyes felt pinned to the spot. He could not look away from her.

The woman was astonishingly beautiful, though it was hard to tell. Dark, complicated, disturbing tattoos covered her cheeks and forehead and the bare arms she revealed as she swept the cloak back over her shoulders. Her eyes were very large, very blue, and altogether too heartbreakingly sorrowful to look at for more than a moment.

She smelled of some perfume Malden had never smelled before. Her hair looked softer than sable, and despite the circumstances, he took a moment to imagine what it would be like to bury his face in her curls.

It would be … very pleasant, he thought.

“Are you Cythera?” Malden asked, because he could think of nothing else to say to this bewitching woman. He knew he should be running, knew that the swordsman would be right behind him. Yet if he ran away now, that would mean tearing his eyes away from her exotic beauty.

She smiled. It was the single least mirthful smile Malden had ever seen. “I am.” She took a step closer. That was when he realized what was so disturbing about her tattoos. They were moving. The complex patterns of interweaving tendrils, leaves, briars, thorns, flowers, and the like were slowly rearranging themselves on her face, seeking out new arrangements and complications, forming arabesques and elegant knots that resolved themselves while he watched into wholly new patterns, which … it was quite mesmerizing, really, just watching them. Just—

Malden tore his gaze away. He’d felt entranced, and well he should have. Something about the tattoos had dazzled him, clouding his mind. He never enjoyed being tricked—he was the one who was supposed to trick other people. He roared as he brought his bodkin around, the point angled toward her throat.

“That,” she told him, “would be a singularly bad idea.” It was not a threat. Somehow the tone of her voice conveyed the sense that she wanted nothing less than to see him hurt, that she really didn’t wish him ill, but that he was playing with fire all the same. Or was that just another illusion? Perhaps she was some kind of witch and was quite happy about leading him to his doom.

Best, he thought, to break the spell and flee.

Slowly he lowered the bodkin. “I don’t know what manner of creature you are,” he told her, “but I really must be going.”

“Oh no you don’t,” the swordsman said, coming upon Malden from behind. He grabbed Malden’s head under one massive arm and squeezed. Apparently the swordsman had recovered from his stumbling fall. There was no way for Malden to break the hold: the oaf had the strength of a bear. He rather smelled like one, too. “You and I,” the swordsman said, giving Malden’s head another squeeze, “are going to have our talk now. All right? Promise me you won’t,” yet another squeeze, “run off?”

“I promise, of course, how could I have been so rash as to—as to—I promise! Just stop that! Your mail is digging into my neck.”

“Very good,” the swordsman said. He let Malden loose to stagger around on the roof, grasping at his throat. “My name, by the way, is Bikker. We weren’t properly introduced before.”

“I’m Malden.” The thief bent over double for a moment. “Well met.”

“Indeed. So. Malden?”

“Yes?” Malden said, lifting his head.

“This is for the melon,” Bikker said, just before punching him right in the face with one massive mailed fist.

CHAPTER TEN

Approximately three hundred yards to the northwest, Market Square had erupted into a melee as angered citizens brawled with the watch in their eye-patterned cloaks. It didn’t take much to start a riot in a city of this size. The students of the university were deep in the thick of it, laying into the watch with bare fists, fueled by strong drink and the excitement of a day away from their dry and dusty studies. Most of the wealthier folk were attempting to flee the square, with varying degrees of luck.

To Sir Croy, up on the gibbet, it was like looking into the pit. He could not believe that all of these people were battling because of him. He had spent his whole life defending these people, keeping them safe, and now they were warring amongst themselves. That they were arguing over his fate was too much to bear.

“Friends! Please, I beg you, peace!” Sir Croy shouted. He wanted to wave his hands in the air to gain the attention of the throng, but of course could not, as his hands were bound. The noose around his neck didn’t help either. The executioner beside him looked confused, uncertain as to whether he should release the trapdoor that would drop Croy to his fate.

Somehow Anselm Vry managed to climb up onto the gallows. The bailiff was the city’s chief administrator and keeper of the peace, answerable only to the Burgrave. Sallow-skinned and lean of features, Vry looked like the kind of man who should spend his whole life with his nose in a book, but Croy had known him once and could see beyond the man’s looks. Vry was an able administrator, a skilled organizer of men and matériel. He was above all a rational man. Croy couldn’t resist beaming at someone whom he had once called his friend. The bailiff whispered in the executioner’s ear, and at once the hooded man jumped down from the gallows and waded into the riot, aiding the watch.

“Anselm!” Croy called. “I knew you wouldn’t let this—Oh.”

Vry had taken up the executioner’s post, his hand on the lever that would release the trapdoor.

“I see,” Croy said. “You’ve come to see me off personally.”

“Indeed,” Vry said, shaking his head in disgust. “I hope you understand this was not my choosing. I pleaded with Tarness not to slay you, in fact.”

“I’m much obliged.”

Vry snorted. “I told him we could simply give you a commission and ship you off to fight barbarians in the eastern mountains. They would have killed you for us. But that wouldn’t have worked, would it? You would have deserted your post and returned here in haste.”

“Defy a commission of duty? Never!”

“Oh? Truly, you would have gone away and never returned?”

Sir Croy was not a man for deep thoughts or meditations on the future. He pondered this for a moment, then smiled. “I would have whipped the barbarians in six months. Then I could have come back here with a clear conscience.”

Vry rubbed at his eyes with one hand. “Croy, please, for once in your life try to be realistic. Whatever quest is driving you this time won’t let you stay away. Yet Tarness cannot allow you inside the city walls. You know things he wishes kept secret. I know you would never betray him, but there’s always the chance someone would get the information out of you—if not by torture, then by wizardry. Banishing you the first time was an act of great mercy on his part, and it will not be repeated.”

“I understand. Well, I forgive you old friend. We serve the same masters, you and I, and perhaps you are simply more loyal than me. That’s hardly a quality to be condemned. Now, if you must—obey your orders.” Croy lifted his chin and straightened his back. If he was going to die he would do so with proper posture.

“Noble as you ever were,” Vry said, “and just as stupid.” He started to pull the lever.

His hand was stayed, however, at the last possible moment. There was a flash of light that was instantly swallowed up by a thick cloud of yellow smoke. Croy’s lungs filled and he was overwhelmed by a powerful reek of rotten eggs that made him gag and cough. He tried to stay upright and maintain his composure but the stench was just too great. He worried he might vomit—not exactly what the people would expect of a knight of the realm, not in public—

“Hold still, you freakishly large livestock copulator,” someone hissed in the midst of the yellow cloud. The noose was lifted away from his throat, then a knife cut through the rope holding Croy’s hands together. Small hands pushed him from behind. He went staggering forward and over the edge of the gallows platform. It was all he could do to land on his feet. Down at ground level the yellow smoke was rarefied and he could breathe again, but still he could see nothing.

Fortunately a figure with a cloth across its face was there to guide him. He was dimly aware that the figure was only about four feet tall. A child? Some magical sprite, with the appearance of a child?

“Stop standing there manipulating yourself in an erotic fashion. We don’t have much time before the feces-smelling watch is upon us!”

Ah. No child. There was only one sort of creature in the world with such a vulgar tongue, yet such an academic grasp of human language. “Murdlin?” Croy asked. “Is that you?”

“It won’t be either of us in a moment, if we’re both dead as horse urine!”

They wasted no more time. Using the melee as cover, the man and the dwarf hurried out of the square. Once they were clear of the yellow smoke, Croy was able to understand why Murdlin had covered his face with cloth. It must have filtered out the worst of the stinking smoke and allowed the dwarf to breathe easy even in its midst. Was there no end to the cleverness of the diminutive folk?

“Murdlin, I am deep in your debt now,” Croy said as he was led around a corner into Greenhall Street.

“Considering what you did for the dwarf king’s daughter, the debt is crossed out,” Murdlin told him.

“I only did my duty, as bid by my king,” Croy pointed out. A year earlier the dwarf princess had been traveling to Helstrow, to be received at the royal court of Skrae. Along the way she’d been abducted by bandits who intended to hold her for ransom. Croy had spent six weeks tracking the bandits down and eventually rescued the princess. The dwarf king offered him anything he desired—steel, gold, even the princess in marriage—but Croy had never considered there might be a reward. A crime was committed, and someone had to put it right, that was all.

Clearly Murdlin felt some recompense was still owed.

“This way, most hurriedly, like a rabbit making love,” Murdlin called.

Even as they dashed across the cobblestones, a wagon full of hay pulled up beside them. The driver was a dwarf with a hood pulled low across his face to keep out the sun. The wagon rolled to a stop as soon as it reached them.

“By the Lady, you work fast,” Croy said.

“The moment I realized it was you on the gallows, I knew what course things must take. I sent one of my servants at once to fetch this conveyance. Now please, get into this body-odor stinking hay. It will hide you from view. The wagon will take you outside the walls. By the time you arrive I’ll have a horse waiting for you, so you may run off like a goblin that has fouled its own pants.”

“You make escape sound less sweet that I would have thought it an hour ago,” Croy admitted.

“It’s only a figure of speech. A common expression in my first language,” Murdlin told him. “I am taking a great risk doing this, Croy. Now, please! Into the hay that itches like pubic lice.”

Croy rubbed at his chafed wrists. Then he started walking backward, away from the dwarf, almost breaking into a run. “You have my eternal thanks, envoy. But I’ve work to do yet, here in the Free City. My lady is still enslaved. What is freedom to me when she is in chains? Fare thee well!”

The dwarf cursed him and shook his small fists in the air, but Croy was already on his way, turning a corner into Brasenose Street and back into danger.

Just the way he liked it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

For a while Malden’s world was only a terrible ringing, as if a bell were struck right next to his ear, and darkness, a kind of darkness that hurt. He could feel his body being moved about, but only from a distance, as if he were watching some other poor bastard being carted around. The pain he felt made no sense, really, and he kept probing at it with mental fingers, trying to remember what had happened.

Eventually he heard sounds over the ringing in his head. Gasps and shouts, and then the shriek of chairs being pulled back. His poor body was dumped without ceremony on a flat surface, and suddenly he rushed back into it, though that just made things hurt more. Gradually he managed to tease out voices from the noise all around him.

“—might have killed him with a punch like that. And we’d be back where we started. You really ought to learn some discipline.”

“What? That little tap? I’ve hit flies harder than that. Look, he’s already waking up. I couldn’t possibly have done more than jiggled his brains a bit.”

The voices were vaguely familiar. Malden couldn’t quite place them, though. He was having a lot of trouble stringing thoughts together, even though the horrible ringing noise had faded away from his ears. He attempted to make a catalog of the things he knew for sure. He was certain, for instance, that he was lying on a very hard surface. Also, that his face hurt.

Suddenly his face hurt a very great deal.

“Oh,” he moaned. “Oh, by the Bloodgod. Oh …”

“Open your eyes now, boy,” Bikker said. “There’s a good lad.”

Malden looked around without sitting up. He was in a tavern, lit by smoking oil lamps. The few patrons present at that time of day were all staring at him. The alewife, a heavyset woman of middle age, was coming toward them with a tankard full of beer.

“Which one of you is paying for this?” she asked. “This isn’t a sickhouse.”

Slowly, Malden got his elbows under him and sat up. He had been laid out flat on a long table, a slab of oak that felt as hard as stone. It was patterned with old dark rings where tankards had overflowed, and was held together with strips of iron that dug into his back and legs.

Cythera—the tattooed woman—handed the alewife a farthing and passed the tankard to Malden. It was of the kind that had a lid on a hinge, to keep out flies, an earthenware vessel sealed at the bottom with pewter. An expensive bit of crockery. That told Malden roughly where he had to be—on the Golden Slope, the region of rich houses and expensive shops just downhill from the Spires. Had to be, as there were no taverns in the Spires, while if his two strange captors had carried him any farther downhill, the tankard would have been made of leather sealed with pitch. Knowing that was important. When he made his escape from this place, he would need to know where to run to first.

Wherever he was, though, he had to admit he was very thirsty. He lifted the lid and sipped carefully at the contents, thinking it must be some medicinal draught—but in fact it was only small beer. A drink fit for children.

“You like that, boy?” Bikker asked.

“I’m not an infant,” Malden said, taking a long drink. “I’m almost twenty. Please stop calling me ‘boy.’”

Bikker smiled broadly, showing off the gaps where some of his teeth used to be. “You going to try to run off again, boy, as soon as you can stand? Or are you going to talk to me now?”

Cythera glanced around the room. Whenever her blue eyes passed over one of the staring patrons, they flinched and looked away. “Bikker,” she said, “we need more privacy than this. Where should we go?”

“I’m tired out after chasing this cur,” Bikker told her. “I like this place just fine. You lot, out now. Barkeep, you can go, too.”

“By Sadu’s eight elbows, I will not,” the barkeep told him. “Just run off like a scolded brat, and leave you here with my till and all my stock?” She snorted in derision.

Bikker shrugged hugely. Then he reached behind him and drew his sword.

It made a strange slick sound as it came out of its scabbard, and when revealed, was not the shiny length of steel Malden had expected. Instead it looked like a bar of iron, three feet long, with no real edge. The iron was pitted and rough, like something that had been left in a tomb for centuries before it was picked up again. It looked a little slick, too—and as Malden watched, bubbles formed on its surface, then congregated in thick clots until it looked like the sword was drooling. A drop of the clear fluid ran down the sword’s edge and dripped on the dirt floor, where it hissed and smoked on the packed earth.

“You may wish to move aside,” Bikker said to Malden, who jumped off the table quickly, ignoring the throbbing pain in his face and head. Bikker swung the sword around in a wide arc that brought it crashing down on the oak table. With an explosive hiss like a dozen angry snakes striking at once, the blade sank through the thick wood and through the other side. The table fell in two halves, split clean down the middle, against the grain of the wood. The wetness of the blade—it must be vitriol, Malden realized, of some very potent type—gave off foul vapors that stung his nose. For a moment he could do naught but look at the sundered table. It was still bubbling and dissolving wherever the acid sword had touched it. Then he looked up and saw that everyone—patrons and barkeep alike—had fled the room.

“There,” Bikker said. “Privacy.”

Cythera sighed deeply, though there was an affectation to the sound that made Malden think she was accustomed to being annoyed with Bikker’s antics. “They’ll be back soon enough. And they’ll probably bring the watch.”

Bikker shrugged. He sheathed his sword. Malden saw that the interior of the scabbard was lined with glass, no doubt to keep the acid from burning its way through. The big man said, then, “So let us speak quickly to the boy, and then we can all be on our way. Boy,” Bikker called.

“Malden. At least use my name.”

“Boy,” Bikker said, walking over behind the bar and pouring himself a pitcher full of strong ale, “you are a thief, is that correct? This wasn’t the first time you ever cut a purse. Judging by the way you scampered up those rooftops, I imagine you’ve done this sort of thing before.”

“Listen,” Malden said, “the silver I took from you, it’s all—it’s here somewhere.” He reached down across his chest and realized that his sling and his fake arm had been removed. Looking up, he saw that Cythera held them—and his bodkin, too. “I’ll give it back, right? And everything else I took today, you can have that as well. Just let me go.”

“Bugger the silver! There’s plenty more where it came from!” Bikker shouted. He lifted his pitcher and drank lustily from it until foam drenched his beard.

“We don’t wish to punish you,” Cythera said. “We wish to hire a skilled thief for … well, our purposes must remain unspoken, of course. We wish to hire a master thief for a certain job.”

More where it came from, Malden thought. More silver. Enough the brute didn’t even bother keeping hold of the pittance he’d had with him. More. “Are you?” he said. “Well, luck is with you, for I—”

“Can you recommend anyone like that?” Cythera asked.

“I—I can indeed,” Malden said, and raised himself up to his full height. “I know a thief with no equal in the Free City. One more than up to whatever task you set him.” He gave her his most dashing look.

“Yes?” she said patiently.

“Milady, I am at your service.”

She frowned. “No, I mean, what is his name, this paragon of thieves?”

“It’s—well, me.”

Bikker laughed so hard he spilled his ale. Cythera’s face didn’t change, but her icy blue eyes looked Malden up and down and then flicked away.

“We don’t want a pickpocket, boy! We want a thief. A … a burglar, a … second story man, a—”

“And I tell you, you’ve found him.” Malden brushed past Cythera—she gave a short gasp as he nearly touched her—and over to stand before Bikker. He had to look up to meet the swordsman’s gaze but he held it. “Why, just the other day, Cutbill, the master of thieves, expressed his deep admiration for my skills. He listened to the story of how I stole plate and silver from Guthrun Whiteclay’s house and said he’d never heard of a finer scheme enacted so skillfully. And he should know.”

“Cutbill.” Bikker glanced across at Cythera. “You’re one of his crew?”

“Indeed,” Malden said.

“Only—we need this to stay between us. It can’t get back to him, or the world will know our business. At least, it will if it has the coppers to buy the information.”

“Discretion is my watchword. Though it does cost extra.”

Bikker shook his head and quaffed more ale.

“You’ve seen how quick I am,” Malden insisted.

“We did, at that,” Cythera agreed. “He would have gotten away from you, Bikker, if I hadn’t been there to distract him. And the man we need will have to know how to climb. He showed us that as well.”

The swordsman hunched his shoulders. He was half convinced, Malden knew, and he already had Cythera on his side. Time to close the deal, before Bikker could reconsider.

“For this job I will require the sum of one hundred and one gold royals,” Malden announced.

Bikker smiled. “You haven’t yet heard what it entails. We might be getting a bargain for that price.”

A bargain at one hundred and one royals? More silver where that came from, Bikker had said. How much more? “Of course, that does not include incidentals, the fees of the dwarf who makes my gear, bribe money, hazard bonuses, surcharges for quick resolution, gratuities—”

Bikker leaned back against the bar. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Malden.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The sorcerer Aelbron Hazoth lived in an imposing four story edifice where the Lady’s sacred parklands abutted the city wall, most of the way downhill from the palace, in the district called Parkwall.

It was not the safest district in town, though it had its recommending features. Like the Ashes, it had originally been a residential district for the poor until it burned down in the Seven Day Fire. Unlike that wasteland, Parkwall had been laboriously cleared, the remains of the old houses scraped away and the land allowed to go to seed. Now Parkwall was a zone of lush grass, a green common kept cropped by the sheep and goats of the people of the Stink, a spacious greensward in a city that had very little green space. The tall crowded houses of the Stink drew away on either side to let in the air. It was rumored to be the healthiest place in town—the plagues that swept through Ness every few winters often skipped Parkwall entirely—but its openness and lack of well-lighted streets had drawn footpads and thieves, and it was counted terribly dangerous by night. A few fine houses had been built in Parkwall to take advantage of the pleasantly rustic environs, but these were all surrounded by their own walls and wrought-iron fences to keep out the uninvited.

Such as Sir Croy, for instance.

The knight had found lodging at a nearby villa. After escaping from the gibbet, he thought he would be a hunted man, that no place would be safe for him, but in fact it did not take long before he had a place of refuge. He did not lack for friends in the Free City, some of whom were stalwart enough to hide him from the watch. A rich merchant had found him wandering in the Golden Slope and begged to bring him home. Croy accepted, though he had no money to pay the man. The merchant insisted none was required, and Croy had praised his good heart in all the words he knew. The merchant assured him that Croy would bring him great fame and social status, but Croy knew the man was just being kind. He gave Croy a suite of rooms all to himself and ordered his servants to see to his every wish.

This night he was laying spread out on a bench in a roof garden, pretending to take his ease. It was a likely enough occupation. This close to Ladymas and the hottest time of year, anyone with sense was up on a rooftop or in a garden, trying to catch a breeze. Anyone who saw him might think him yet another pampered noble attempting to stay cool. In truth, he had come up to the roof garden to watch Hazoth’s house. Croy was a man of action, but this evening he had spent almost motionless on the bench, taking only a little wine and some nuts for sustenance. One thing only would bid him tarry so. For hours he had kept an eye on the place, watching who came and who went, hoping to spy a glimpse of Cythera.

After midnight he got his chance. She and Bikker came traipsing over the grassy common. The place had a reputation for being full of footpads after dark, but the two seemed to pay no special heed to their surroundings. Instead they were deep in conversation. Croy even got the sense they might be arguing.

He placed a salted almond between his lips and bit down hard. He longed—oh, how he desired it!—to call out, to wave, to get her attention somehow. He longed to jump down from his perch and run to her side, to catch her up in his strong arms (even knowing what a mistake that would be) and carry her off to his castle. Failing that, he would have been glad even for a moment’s soft conversation, for a renewed exchange of promises and honeyed words.

But it would not happen tonight. Tonight he could only watch.

The guards at Hazoth’s door challenged the pair, but Bikker reached for his sword’s hilt and the armored sentries fell back. The two of them stopped just inside the sorcerer’s gate, however, and waited for something Croy could not see. When it came, he felt it instead. There was a sudden change in air pressure, or perhaps merely the crickets in the grass all fell silent at once. It was like the night itself held its breath.

It lasted a bare moment. Then it was over, and Cythera and Bikker entered the villa’s grounds and went their separate ways. He, toward a low shed at the side of the house that Croy knew served as barracks for the sorcerer’s guards. She, into the house through the stables—like a common servant.

How he felt the need to rush down there and follow her, to reach—quite gently, of course—for her hand in the shadows, to breathe her name and see recognition in her eyes. But not tonight.

Not while the house was shielded so patently by some spell—a spell even she must wait to pass.

Not tonight. Not until he could get his weapons back.

It was time to find out what friends, if any, he had left in the palace.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The next day Malden spent in preparation.

It was mad even to consider going through with this. The job he’d been hired for was, if not impossible, distinctly ill-advised. It was going to make of him a pigeon in the midst of a pack of dogs. If the plan failed in the slightest particular, it would mean a quick but nasty death, a spear through his lights, or an axe through his skull. Cutbill’s influence could not protect him from that.

Yet if it worked—it couldn’t, of course, it was the worst kind of folly, but—if it worked, he would be clear of his debt to the guildmaster of thieves before the sun rose tomorrow morning. He would be a full member of the guild, with all the rights and privileges thereunto pertaining. He would be a free man again. Better, by far, because he would be on his way to wealth. On his way to being a man of means.

In the Free City of Ness, that was the only thing that counted.

He made his way to the Ashes early, just as the sun was rising over the city’s wall. The gang of children that guarded Cutbill’s headquarters did not show themselves—they already knew he belonged there. Loophole, Lockjaw, and ’Levenfingers were inside the ruin already, though. As far as he knew, they were there all day, every day, sitting on the empty coffin. The old men greeted him warmly and asked him what schemes he had planned for the day. They asked every time he visited. “A little of the same,” he told them. “Though to be honest, my heart’s not in it.”

“Be of good cheer, lad,” Loophole told him. “Money comes to them that keep their eyes open.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” Malden would gladly have spoken with the old men, for he’d learned they were a sure font of wisdom. If any of them knew how this job could be done, this fantastically impossible job, surely it was one of them. Yet he knew that anything he said to them—even to Lockjaw—would be reported to Cutbill at once. In addition, Bikker and Cythera were quite clear that his fee included a hefty sum to make sure Cutbill never learned of the plan. So he kept his peace and headed inside.

He had learned on his second visit, some days ago, that it was not necessary to travel by coffin every time you visited Cutbill’s burrow. That was just for new arrivals, a kind of object lesson to remind them their lives were forfeit if they crossed Cutbill in any way. Actual employees had their own entrance through a trapdoor hidden in the debris of the fallen house. It led to a door below, hidden behind a curtain. There were many doors in Cutbill’s domain, and all of them were hidden. Malden was certain he’d seen only a fraction of the guildhall in his visits.

In the main room, Bellard was throwing darts at a target on one wall. The permanent dice game was going on in the corner, but only two players had risen so early. There were others there, thieves like himself, pimps come to pay their tithe to the master, procurers dividing up their stash, and one fellow dressed in dusty traveling clothes that Malden did not recognize. There was something odd about the man, but in the dim light he couldn’t get a good look.

The traveler was sleeping on the divan when Malden came in, but before he could take two steps into the room, the man bolted upright and reached inside his tunic, probably for a knife. His beady eyes twinkled in the candlelight as he shot them back and forth, and his lips pulled back in a sneer as if he expected Malden to attack him.

“Be at ease,” Bellard said. The dust-covered man nodded, lay back down and immediately returned to sleep.

Malden glanced over at Bellard, who nodded and said, “That’s Kemper. An unsavory character if there ever was one.”

“He’s a thief, like me?” Malden asked.

Bellard cocked his head to one side. “Hardly. Little more than a sharper—a card cheat. A vagabond by nature, never stays in any one place for long.”

“What’s he doing here? Is he one of Cutbill’s?”

Bellard snorted in derision. “He’s no member of this guild but he pays his respects when he passes through. We wouldn’t abide his sort at all if we had a choice, as he’s wanted by the reeves of every village within a hundred miles of here. He’s called on an old tradition of sanctuary, though, so we must let him lie here until he thinks it’s safe to head out again. Of course, the tradition doesn’t preclude Cutbill from charging him rent.”

Malden shrugged. Good to know such a tradition existed, he supposed—who knew when he might need it himself? Yet his business was with Slag, the dwarf, so he made his way quickly to the workbench and brazier at the far side of the room.

“Need somewhat?” the dwarf demanded, looking up as Malden approached. He was no less ugly in daytime, though of course the sun never shone down in Cutbill’s hiding hole. “Or you just wanted a kiss?”

Malden smiled. “There’s a job I’m casing right now,” he said, “and it’s going to be tricky. I need a few things to see it out.”

“If I can’t build it, you’re not good enough to need it,” Slag replied.

Malden listed his requirements and the dwarf nodded. He said he had everything in stock—the items Malden requested were not too exceptional—and would provide them for hire, for a price. The price was steep, but Malden could cover it with the coins in his purse, just barely. Good thing, too, as the dwarf expected payment in advance.

“That way, when your arse is killed on the job, I don’t have to go down into the fucking Bloodgod’s underworld to get what you owe me.”

“Your confidence in me is inspiring,” Malden said. He waited for the dwarf to go to his storeroom and fetch the things. It took quite a while, so he played at darts with Bellard to pass the time. He managed to lose another tuppence before the dwarf returned. Malden had deft hands, but Bellard had the keener eye.

The tools came wrapped in sailcloth that had been treated with tar to make it waterproof. It would keep the rust off. “Return ’em in the shape you found ’em, or there’s an extra fee,” Slag told him.

“And so I shall. Farewell, Bellard. Farewell, all.” Bellard grunted a response but no one else even looked up as Malden headed back to the light of day. The three old masters were a bit more cordial, but he didn’t spend long speaking to them.

He had some time to squander, so he walked all the way uphill to the old Chapterhouse of the Learned Brothers, which was said to be haunted, before heading south around the curve of the city wall, down through the warren of close-spaced houses that marked the eastern extent of the Stink, then farther south to the homes of the fishermen and sailors who took the goods of Ness to ports around the world. It was a very long and pointless route, but it kept him always in the broad streets where most honest people traveled, and away from dark alleys and sheltered closes.

It also led him past the King’s Gate, so called because it opened on the road to the royal fortress of Helstrow, a hundred miles away. Malden paused a moment to muse that Helstrow might as well be on the far side of the moon. He had never traveled more than a mile in any given direction in his life. He could not, bound as he was by the city’s walls.

The gate stood twenty feet high—tall enough for knights to ride through with their lances raised. It was made of the same bluish stone as the city wall, and on this side was fronted by a massive triumphal arch celebrating some military victory or other. Malden doubted anyone living in the Stink could have told him what battle it commemorated. He let his gaze wander briefly over the carved figures of soldiers fighting wicked elves, but what really drew his eye was the land beyond the gate.

It was green, for one thing. Green grass grew out there, catching the sun. It was so wide and open, and not a soul in sight. Malden took a few steps into the narrow tunnel of the gate and found the guards there didn’t even look at him. No, of course not—they had no brief to keep people from leaving. The people of Ness were free to go outside if they pleased. They just weren’t free to come back in.

The sun on the grass out there looked so warm and inviting. A summer breeze played with the blades of it, stirring them gently, then letting them fall back. Behind Malden, in the Stink, all was noise and grime and desperation. Out there it would be quiet, he thought. Quiet and peaceful and—

“Make way, you little fuck!” someone shouted, and suddenly a brown and black dog was snarling at him, its wet teeth snapping shut on his cloak. Malden looked up in startlement and just had time to jump back as a mounted man came thundering through the gate, heedless of where his horse’s hooves fell. The owner of the dog, a footman wearing the same coat of arms as the rider, shoved Malden back against the wall of the gate with a cudgel. “There’s people of importance trying to use this gate, and you’re just standing here gawking?”

Malden tried to stammer out a reply. “I assure you, I was simply—”

The footman knocked him down with the cudgel, and probably would have beaten him senseless if he hadn’t needed to run off then, to keep up with his master. Down in the dust Malden felt at his ear where the footman had struck him. He was glad his fingers didn’t come away bloody.

“Oh, just get out of there,” a guard said, grabbing his arm and pulling him away from the gate. “You’re lucky I don’t dump you outside and let the reeve take you.”

Lucky indeed. The green grass out there might look inviting, but the second he trod on it he would have legally become a villein. A slave, in all but name.

But if he had a little money to his name—if he could purchase even a small plot of land in some cheap place …the story would be different. And that was what Cutbill had promised him, wasn’t it?

Cutbill had said he was a prisoner in Ness. Malden had never felt that way before—now he could think of himself in no other terms. A prisoner. And Cutbill had the means to set him free.

It could happen tonight, for the price of a little risk.

The rest of the morning he spent cutting purses down at the fish market by Eastpool. He needed to earn back all he’d spent or be penniless by nightfall. He supped on cockles at a little shack by the river gate and then rented a room in a doss-house frequented by sailors. He would gladly have gone back to his own rooms above the waxchandler’s but he had to make sure none of Cutbill’s people saw him when he met Cythera later.

Much of his movement during the day had been for this purpose. He knew that Cutbill would have spies watching him, especially if he seemed bent on some specific task. Then there would be the unaligned thieves, the pickpockets and grifters of too small account to join the guild. They tended to follow Cutbill’s people around the way gulls will follow a galleon, hoping to pick up scraps left behind by the more established thieves. Malden knew he had to make sure none of either sort were aware of what he was doing, so he spent the day acting as if he had nothing planned at all. There had been no reason to rise early, and in fact he spent the afternoon asleep in his rented bed. It was just past midsummer, with the festival of Ladymas less than a fortnight away, and the sun would not set until well into the evening.

When he rose, he brushed the bed’s freight of insects from his hair and clothes, then climbed out the window and up onto the roof of the doss-house. He was relatively certain no one was following him, but to be sure he crossed three streets by the rooftops, leaping silently from one building to another. When he dropped down to street level again he was at the very edge of the river Skrait. He traveled northward again, upriver, by moving from pier to dock to wharf—hundreds of them stuck out from the riverbank, as each house along the Skrait had its own. He ended up deep in the Smoke, the region of manufactories and workshops where tanners, papermakers and bookbinders, hatters, blacksmiths, brewers, and bakers all plied their trades. The shops stained the air with their fumes and turned the river black with their dumping, and the smell was intense—the region downwind of the Smoke was called the Stink for good reason. It was here that Malden was to meet Cythera.

He had time to consider what he was doing. He had time to wonder if he was mad, or if he truly expected to live through this. He had time to think of that green grass beyond the gate, and how good it would feel under his feet. Eventually the sun went down and he had no more time to think.

When she came for him, gliding out of the vapors in a tiny boat she rowed herself, she asked him if he was ready. He spoke no word, but simply dropped into the boat and grabbed a pair of oars.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

As they hauled away from the Smoke and up the river toward the Golden Slope and the Spires, the docks and piers that stuck out into the water grew fewer in number. The river narrowed and grew faster, so they had to row all the harder. The water turned clean again, with only the occasional floating bit of sewage or debris to mar its churning surface. The river Skrait had driven its channel right through the northern half of Castle Hill, creating a winding canyon through half the Free City. Conforming to the slope of the hill, the ground along the riverbanks grew higher until it had to be held back by retaining walls, so that eventually they traveled between two high and sloping walls of ancient brick, with moss slowly eating away its mortar. Here and there a tree had taken root directly into the bricks, and its branches swayed over them, its leaves making the moonlight flicker through the mist that hung over the water.

The river bent away from them, concealed by the rising wall. Malden saw a glimmer of light. “Hold, someone’s coming,” he whispered, and reached back to grab Cythera’s arm. He was strangely hurt when she yanked her arm away before he could touch it.

What he saw took all his concentration and kept him from thinking why. A long boat came nosing around the corner—little more than a dugout, really, its sides well-patched. An old woman stood in the stern, poling the boat downriver, while half a dozen children leaned over the thwarts. They skimmed the water with long hooks, snatching at every piece of jetsam they passed. One held an oil lamp just above the surface, illuminating a milky patch of water.

“Move aside and let them go past,” Malden said. Cythera steered her boat over toward the last of the docks on the southern side of the Skrait. One of the children raised his dripping hook in thanks.

“What are they looking for?” Cythera asked, her voice a tight whisper, no louder than the rustling of leaves.

“Anything they can sell. A cloak dropped into the water from the bank of the Royal Ditch. Waste leather from one of the tanneries in the Smoke.” Malden shrugged. “A dead body that might still have a purse on its belt.”

He heard Cythera gasp. “Truly? They might find such a gruesome haul? Those poor children!”

Malden frowned. He knew she had money to spare, but could she really be so sheltered by it that she didn’t understand basic necessities? “They would cherish it. It would mean they could eat for a week.”

The old woman waved cheerily at them as she pushed past. Malden waited until the boat of mudlarks was gone from view, then signaled to Cythera that they could move again.

“It’s not well that they saw us,” she suggested, but as if she hoped he would reassure her.

“Even if the city watch found them and asked what they saw this night,” he said, “they’d never describe us. They know if we’re abroad this late we’re of their kind—of the great confraternity of desperate folk. They’d never betray us.”

Behind him, he heard her sigh in relief. He wished he could assure himself so easily. But there was nothing for it—they couldn’t turn back now. Pushing on, they made their way up the river until the walls surrounded them on either side.

There was no sound but the dripping and knocking of their oars. They saw no more boats, not at that late hour. Malden kept an eye on the tops of the retaining walls, making sure no one was looking down to follow their progress. He did not see anyone.

It was hard work, rowing upriver, and for a while they did it in silence. It was boring work, too, however, and eventually Malden started talking just to have something to do. He kept his voice very low, knowing that sound travels far over water, but she did not try to silence him.

“I’d pay good coin to know how you pulled that trick yesterday. When you just appeared like that on the roof of the university. It was magic, was it not?”

“If you could define what magic is, and what it is not, you would be wiser than the world’s great sages,” she told him. “It was simply what you called it. A trick.”

“Hmm. And do you know many such?”

“Not many.”

Malden saw that up ahead a zigzagging set of stairs had been carved through the wall, which at this point was nearly thirty feet high. The stairs ended at a solitary dock, but there were no boats at it. All the same, he held his tongue until they were well past.

“And the way you held my gaze? I could not look away, even with that great mountain of a man coming up behind me. Surely that was wizardry.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked. There was no guile in her eyes.

“You charmed me,” he said, looking over his shoulder, intending to take her to task for enchanting him. Yet she looked as puzzled as he. “You used some spell.”

“You give me too much credit. I know no such incantation.”

Yet of course it had to be a spell she’d cast on him. Didn’t it? What else could have explained his sudden interest in her eyes, her hair? What explanation would satisfy the facts, other than that she had ensorcelled him?

Malden had grown up in the company of harlots, and knew well the ways of physical love. He’d often heard them talk of the other kind, of romance and true love. They’d even talked of the fabled love-at-first-sight, though most had considered it a myth. He himself had never considered he might feel that way about another human being, much less an enchantress covered in tattoos.

So it must have been magic. There was no other possibility. Was there?

He decided to talk of anything but, rather than continue in that line of thought.

“You intrigue me, Cythera. You seem a lady of quality, yet you associate with the likes of Bikker.”

“He’s not so bad. Honest, in his way.”

“He’s a ruffian. Cheerful, perhaps, but uncouth. I don’t think you chose his company. You work with him because you were ordered to do so. I think you both work for someone else. Someone who wants my services, who—”

“Who shall remain nameless.”

“Very well. Though the number of citizens who could afford your services must be small.”

“Not every wage is paid in coin.”

It was a funny kind of thing to say, and it birthed all manner of questions in Malden’s mind. But it was clear it pained her to speak of it, so he let it go. He had another thing to ask her about anyway.

“Those tattoos on your face and your arms—”

“They are not tattoos.” Her voice grew sharp when she said it.

“The designs, then. Did I really see them move?”

“Yes. They are never still.”

“What artist paints them? What kind of pigment does he use?”

Cythera sighed. “No artist. No paints. They are a curse. Or rather, they were imposed on me as a gift by my mother. Or perhaps she meant to curse another.”

“Your mother was a sorceress? I can believe that, for you certainly enchanted me.” There it was again. That thought he couldn’t explain.

She seemed unwilling to discuss it herself. “You’ll hold that scoundrel tongue of yours, if you know what’s good for you. My mother was never a sorceress. And she still lives. She is a witch.”

“Naturally,” Malden said.

Cythera sighed. “Must you always be so glib?”

“It’s part of my charm.”

“Oh, you have charm? I hadn’t noticed.” But she was smiling.

“You wound me to the heart,” he said. “But it’s all right. We’ll find some way you can make it up to me. When this is over, what say you we both—”

“Stop,” she said, interrupting his half-serious attempt at courting. “Ship your oars.”

He did as she said. “Is this the place? Have we really come so far?”

“Conversation makes any night fly. Yes—look. There is the pipe I was told to seek out. This is exactly the right spot.”

The pipe in question stuck directly out of the wall. Filthy water drained from its end in a constant trickle. It was big enough around for a man to climb through, if it hadn’t been closed by an iron grating. Such a man would have been a fool, of course, for the pipe led nowhere but into the dungeons of the Burgrave.

Malden looked up—and up. The gentle cambered wall above him rose no less than one hundred and fifty feet into the air. Straight to the top of Castle Hill. Up there, far, far in the air, was the Burgrave’s palace.

Malden knew one thing for certain. On Cutbill’s secret protection list, the Burgrave’s name did not appear. The Burgrave, of course, had his own garrison of troops for protection and did not need the aid of the master of thieves.

Malden had never been given a reason why he could not break into the house of the ultimate ruler of the Free City of Ness and pilfer his most prized possession. Most likely this was because no one had ever thought him so stupid as to try it.

At least not until Bikker and Cythera had come along.

“When you reach the top, do not scamper over the parapets directly,” Cythera whispered. “Remember—Bikker will create a diversion in the courtyard. The guards up there will rush to investigate. That is your only chance to get in unseen. Move quickly, though not so quickly you fall prey to a trap. Recover the … the item we asked for, then come back here as fast as you can. Do not take anything else. It is critical that you do not leave any evidence you were there, or create any suspicion that the thing is gone.”

He was very aware she would not say aloud what it was she wanted, not now when they were so close to it. He filed that away under the myriad things about her he found curious and interesting.

“Start your climb now. I’ll make sure Bikker knows when to do his part.”

“How about a kiss for luck, before I go?” Malden asked.

Cythera laughed.

“From me, such a kiss would token anything but good luck. Quickly, now!”

Malden carefully stood up in the back of the boat. He waited for Cythera to brace herself, both her oars in the water to steady the tiny craft. Then he took a quick step and jumped at the wall, his hands out and fingers spread to find whatever purchase was there.

It was not difficult. The bricks were sturdy, but the mortar between them had crumbled away over time. His fingers fit easily between each row of bricks, so that it was like grabbing at the rungs of a ladder.

Once she saw him dangling from the wall like a lizard, Cythera bent to her oars and got her boat moving away from the wall. Malden didn’t waste time watching where she went. Instead he started to climb, hand over hand.

Straight up.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Malden had learned to climb almost from the time he could walk.

He was not so unusual in that—every child in Ness learned to climb, since so much of the city was on a hillside. The streets were so winding and switch-backed that often the fastest way from one house to another was to go over the house in between rather than around. It was easy enough to move around up on the rooftops, in a city where the streets were so narrow and the second floors of houses almost came together over the alleys. There were places in Ness where if a woman left a pie cooling on a second-story windowsill, the man across the street could reach through his own window and help himself to it. Even small children could jump from one house to another with little danger of falling. A relatively nimble child could run from one end of the Stink to the other across the rooftops without having to do more than occasionally hop. There were few enough opportunities to play in the crowded streets, so children often headed upward to find space for their games.

Malden had shown a real talent for climbing at an early age. He’d had no fear of heights and a love of clean, fresh air, so the tops of the city proved his natural element. His few friends always dared him to climb to the top of a steeple or dance atop a high chimney. Later, when he turned to crime for his livelihood, he found that a man who could run across the rooftops was a man rarely caught by the watch. So he trained himself to climb faster and jump farther than anyone else.

This climb was like many he’d made before, he told himself. It didn’t matter what was up top—hanging on and not looking down were all it would really take.

The wall of Castle Hill leaned away from him, so instead of a sheer surface it was like a very steep slope. Only a few of the bricks had crumbled with time, though many were cracked. It was not so hard a climb, or rather, it would not have been, if it weren’t so long. Taking his time, choosing every handhold carefully, pausing now and again to rest, all kept Malden from falling, but nothing could keep the cramp out of his fingers forever. He looked always for features of the wall to aid him, and found a few. Here and there a dripping pipe emerged from the bricks. On occasion he passed a narrow window, wider than an arrow slit but never so big he could have fit through. These allowed him good spots to stand and massage his hands, to ready them for further climbing. Such spots were far apart and few in number, but they helped. They even gave him a chance to free his hands long enough to take a drink of wine from the flask he kept on his belt.

By the time he was sixty feet up in the air, however, his hands were pained claws. Another ten feet and he could no longer feel his fingertips. The whole front of his tunic was stained with brick dust, and sweat had begun to pour down the back of his neck.

At seventy-five feet up he had a new peril to worry about. Across the river’s channel, the opposite wall gave out—the hill was lower over there, and topped with a strip of parkland thick with chestnut and oak trees called the Royal Ditch. Lanterns hung from some of the lower branches, tended by the proprietors of the gambling houses and expensive taverns that lined the Goshawk Road there. He could hear music playing and occasional bursts of raucous laughter carried across by the wind. Should anyone there chance to look over, toward Castle Hill, he would be quite visible—and he had no doubt they would sound some alarm. The Free City of Ness was eight hundred years old and had never been properly sacked by invaders, but there was always a first time.

He had his cloak turned inside out, to show its paler side. It was like a hawthorn leaf in color, a deep forest green on one side, a lighter sage green on the other. The lighter hue would make him harder to spot against the wall, but still, when he moved he would certainly give himself away.

There was nothing for it, however. He would have to trust to luck that no one would chance to look across the water.

His luck was with him in that, at least.

Starting at eighty feet up the wall had been carved by ancient hands. A row of human figures was sculpted into the brick, each of them twelve feet tall so they could be seen easily from the Royal Ditch. Malden had seen them often from that not-so-distant vantage, but they looked smaller at the time. They represented the direct male descendants of Juring Tarness, the first Burgrave of the Free City of Ness. Each of them had been Burgrave in his turn. They were crude images at best, and the artists who carved them had made one foolish choice in their designs. The Burgraves were depicted each in full armor, their heads hooded with chain mail and square helmets mounted with the crown of the Burgravate. As a result it was almost impossible to tell them apart. One had a mustache, another a full beard—perhaps such facial hair had been fashionable in their day. Malden had never cared to learn their names or the dates of their respective reigns. He did not care to learn them now, though he was grateful to them for one simple reason: the carvings were even easier to climb than had been the bare bricks. He made a silent apology to the ancient Burgrave whose shoulder he trod upon, and made for the top without pausing.

One hundred feet up and his hands were frozen in the shape of hooks. He jammed them again and again into the cracks between bricks and continued hauling himself upward. One hundred twenty feet and he felt like all his toes were broken from repeatedly pushing them into gaps too small to admit them.

One hundred thirty feet—and he heard a voice from above. Instantly he froze in place, pressing himself as close as possible to the bricks. Not twenty feet over his up-stretched arms a guard was walking patrol along the wall of the palace grounds. If they should look over the crenellations, if they looked down—

“Tell me if anyone’s coming,” the voice said. Clearly the owner of the voice must be speaking to someone.

“No, no, it’s clear,” a second voice said, proving Malden’s suspicion.

Then came a grunt, and a noise like chain mail rattling. And then something caught the moonlight as it fell past Malden at incredible speed.

He came very close to falling off the wall then and there. He was so desperately afraid of being hit by the jetsam from above that he pulled one hand free of the wall and swung away from his perch. A moment later he realized what was happening and cursed himself silently for his lack of forbearance.

A stream of foul-smelling liquid was coming down from on high, a stream that spread out and turned to mist a few dozen feet below his position. The guard was pissing over the side.

Malden’s lip curled in disgust. Was the man too lazy to find a privy? But there was nothing he could do but hold tight, and wait, and hope the wind didn’t change. He spared a quick glance down to make sure Cythera was well clear. He couldn’t see her little boat down there, though he was mightily impressed by how far down it was. He had no fear of heights, but it would take a man of far greater courage than himself to look down into that abyss and feel no vertigo.

When the guard had finished and moved on, Malden looked back up, toward the top of the wall. It was close now. One quick sprint and he would be on top. But his hands were so painfully cramped he knew he would arrive unable to use them for anything but climbing. He needed to rest a moment, to rub the blood back into his whitened fingers. He also needed to make sure he would not be seen when he reached the top. Looking around, he saw a window off to his left, no more than a dozen feet away. Moving carefully, as silently as a cat on a carpet, he shifted himself over in that direction. The window was broader than the others he’d seen, though it was also lined with iron bars. Still, it would make a great place to stand for a while. Just a few minutes, he promised himself. Just until he could feel something in the balls of his thumbs.

Yet as he approached the window he heard someone moving around inside. He had to freeze in place again and wait for the people there to go away. And that could have been when his luck ran out.

For exactly at that moment Bikker provided the promised distraction.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Croy hated subterfuge, but sometimes the direct approach was just not appropriate. For instance, when one needs to recover one’s property from a locked room inside the palace, and one is under an order of execution, it behooves one to act in a clandestine fashion.

So instead of marching up to the Burgrave’s door and asking politely, he had come to this. Masquerading as the lover of a lady-in-waiting, and then sneaking into the most secure room in the city.

“I have the key here, somewhere on my person,” Lady Hilde said, and placed a hand on the bodice of her gown. She seemed to be breathing very hard and her eyes were wide as she stared into Croy’s face. “It wasn’t easy to get, you know. I had to wait until the castellan fell asleep at his desk. Luckily for you he’s so old and decrepit, he didn’t wake up even when I took it from his belt. But now—where did I put it?”

He supposed she might be frightened. It was an understandable emotion. They were inside the Burgrave’s counting house, a place no one of any rank was permitted to enter after it was locked up for the night. Even by day only the castellan and the bailiff had keys to the place. It was so secure that the castellan hadn’t bothered posting guards out front—after all, anyone approaching it from the courtyard would have had to pass dozens of guards already.

Of course, if you had access to one of the Burgravine’s ladies-in-waiting, and she was willing to do you a favor, there weren’t a lot of places in Ness that were off-limits. Croy felt distinctly uneasy about what he was doing. This was very much counter to his moral code, and he was a man for whom ethics meant everything. Still, he was able to assuage his conscience a bit. He wasn’t hear to steal—he was no thief. He had only come here to recover that which belonged to him. That which he was pledged to honor and uphold, in fact: the sword he counted as his soul.

The counting house was built into the wall that surrounded the palace grounds, and had to be the most secure structure in the Free City, because it was where the Burgrave kept his gold when he wasn’t spending it. It was a vast trove, stuffed full of bags of coin, coffers overflowing with silver plate, great heaps of gems, and the jewelry of Ommen Tarness’s wife, the Burgravine.

None of which was what Croy had come for. His swords had been taken from him when he was arrested, and brought here, placed with the most important relics and treasures of the Free City of Ness. Just behind the locked door he faced. Hilde had claimed she could get the key for him only if he brought her inside with him so she could see the treasures for herself. Lacking a better plan, he had agreed.

“I seem to be having trouble finding the key,” she told him. “Perhaps you can help me look?”

He knelt with his lamp and looked around the floor at her feet.

“No, you foolish man,” she said. “It’s somewhere in my dress.”

He opened his mouth to speak, and then found he could not close it again. Hilde was unlacing her corset. “Well? You were so handsome yesterday in Market Square, Croy. So dashing. It made my knees tremble. And other parts of me as well. Of course, it might just be that I haven’t had a man all year. My mistress keeps me so busy. Maybe if the Burgrave could perform better his own husbandly duties, I could slip away more often. Oh, no, that’s exactly where I want you,” she said, as he began to rise to his feet. She giggled and put a finger on his shoulder, pressing him back down to a kneeling posture.

“Milady,” he said, jumping up, “I fear I misheard you.”

Hilde rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those men who doesn’t know what to do with a naked woman.” She twitched her shoulders and her kirtle fell to the floor. Underneath it she was wearing nothing but a chemise and knee-length hose.

Croy blushed and averted his eyes. “Milady, I would never spurn, ah, true affection from your quarter, but … my heart belongs to another.”

“You’re … serious.”

He bowed his head and tried to keep his thoughts pure. It was not easy with Hilde’s underthings rustling so close to his face.

“Here,” she said, and pressed a long iron key into his hand. “Do what you have to, while I put all this back on. I have no idea how I’m going to lace up this corset without a big, strong man to help, but—oh, never mind.”

“Thank you,” Croy said, and quickly opened the locked door. Beyond was a tiny room with a barred window. For a split second he thought he saw a shoe outside the bars, but that was quite impossible—outside that window would be a sheer drop to the river Skrait, more than a hundred feet down. He turned to look around the room, expecting to have to search high and low for his swords.

In fact, they were the only things present. Where were the religious relics the Burgrave was required to parade through the streets every Ladymas? Where the city’s charter, for that matter? Perhaps they’d gone to the same place as the city’s gold reserves. The swords lay perfectly alone on a shelf below the window, two long blades in shagreen scabbards. They were all he’d brought with him when he returned to the Free City. He hung them in their proper places on his baldric and stepped back out of the room.

Hilde waited for him near the door, tapping her foot with impatience. “Come along,” she said. “I’ll take you through the kitchens so no one sees you. Though it would probably do my reputation some good to be seen in connection with you.”

“I’m a wanted criminal,” he protested.

“You don’t understand this city at all, do you?” she asked. “Surely you—”

A high-pitched scream of terror and pain split the darkness outside the door. Croy leaned over Hilde’s shoulder to look out into the courtyard just in time to see a man of the city watch come staggering through the main palace gate. A dark stain spread across his cloak-of-eyes as he clutched at an arrow sticking in his side. Before he’d taken a dozen steps he collapsed face first onto the flagstones.

A second scream followed close, and a guard toppled from the battlements of the palace wall. An arrow had pierced him through the neck.

“Murder!” someone shouted. “Murder!” And then an alarm bell started to ring, high-pitched and wild.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Malden listened to the clamor beyond the wall for only a moment, then scurried up over the last twenty feet of bricks faster than a spider. He slipped over the crenellations at the top of the wall and found himself on a broad walkway. No guards were in sight. He crept to the far side of the wall and peered through an embrasure, down into the courtyard.

Castle Hill was the residence of the Burgrave and the seat of his administrative functions. It was also a fortress, a keep designed to forestall any invading horde. Within its walls stood the garrison where the Burgrave’s personal retinue of soldiers lived, and the central Watch Hall from which the bailiff’s civic guardians were dispatched. Both these structures were alive with light now as men in various states of uniform dress came pouring out of their gates to fill the broad courtyard and parade ground. There was a great deal of shouting and confusion, and knots of watchmen in their cloaks-of-eyes were gathered around two bodies that lay lifeless in the grass. A klaxon bell rang with a deafening strident tone. Meanwhile, a detachment of soldiers were storming up and around the walls and towers on the far side of the hill, over where it looked down on Market Square. They were thrusting torches into every shadow, stabbing their iron swords into troughs and haylofts, looking for whoever had shot the two men with arrows.

What, in the Bloodgod’s name, had Bikker done? He’d killed two men in cold blood—just to create a moment of chaos.

Of course, Malden had to admit it made a most excellent diversion. Not a single soldier or watch man remained in the northern half of the courtyard. The counting house, the Burgrave’s private chapel, and the kitchens were all deserted. So was the palace.

This last was a tall, el-shaped structure made of quarried stone elegantly carved and pierced on its lower level with many arches and broad windows of fine glass. It was airy and light and held up with slender flying buttresses, topped with gargoyles and peaked gables. Even the Ladychapel, the great church that stood across Market Square, was not so delicate in appearance nor more refined in ornament. The palace was a masterpiece of architectural skill. One determined barbarian with a sledgehammer could probably bring it crashing down. It was built around a much older and more sturdy structure that looked like a wart on the face of a princess.

Malden surmised that the tower at the end of the el shape probably supported most of the palace’s weight. It stood five stories high and he guessed that its walls were five feet thick, pierced only by a few narrow arrow-slits. This was the original holdfast of Castle Hill’s first inhabitants, where the first few settlers had fled whenever the elves came a-raiding. It had stood up against those bloodthirsty devils and the dwarves who came after them (back when the dwarves still had some fight in them), and even the human barbarians who scourged Skrae three hundred years ago, back before King Garwulf the Merciful had swept their tribes across the mountains far to the east. It stood as strong as it had ever been, and was still the highest structure in the Free City.

The tower was where he happened to be headed that night. He was going to break into it, when elves, dwarves, and barbarians had never been able to. Of course, back then the palace hadn’t been there. It looked like an anemic toddler could break into that airy confection.

The palace stood about thirty feet clear of the wall, separated from Malden’s perch by a wide patch of manicured garden. It was that gap he needed to cross.

He ran along the top of the wall to where he could stand directly opposite the palace roof. He took a moment to reverse his cloak so its darker side was outward, then took one of Slag’s tools from his belt. It was a grappling hook made in two parts joined by a central hinge. Folded, it could lie flat on his hip, but when he opened its arms fully the two parts locked into place. The prongs were wrapped in padded leather so that when it connected with stone, the hook would not clang or rattle, but make no more sound than a dull thud.

Of course, with the alarm claxon sounding and the shouts of the men in the courtyard, Malden thought it unlikely that he would be heard if he were beating a drum. But it never hurt to be quiet.

He paid out a long double length of rope through the ring in the grapple’s haft, then started to swing it back and forth. When he had the momentum right, he made his toss and watched it arc through the moonlight to kiss the palace roof. It slid for a while, then came to a stop.

Slowly, he drew it back to him by tugging on the doubled rope, twitching it now and again to try to get the hook to catch on a chimney pot or the leg of a gargoyle. The best purchase it found was in the join between two lead roof tiles. It wasn’t as secure as he might have liked, but he thought it would hold his weight. Though he tugged and yanked at the rope to make sure, there was only one way to test the grapple’s hold. He took the two ends of the rope and tied them tight around the nearest crenellation of the wall. Then he climbed out onto the rope—and hung from it like a monkey, crossing his legs around it and holding on with both hands so his back dangled toward the Burgrave’s rose garden, twenty feet below.

The rope sagged a bit but held. Malden exhaled all the air in his lungs. He made his way across hand over hand, sliding his feet forward as he went. In short order he was able to clamber up onto the roof of the palace, where he waited a moment for his heart to stop racing. Then he recovered his grapple and his rope. By doubling the line and tying it off, he’d made a very long loop and was able to pull on one side of the rope until the knot came to his hands. It was a simple matter to untie the knot, then draw the whole rope toward him until he could coil it around his waist. He would have much preferred to leave it in place, and thus have a ready escape route, but couldn’t dare leave it where it might be discovered. Looking down into the courtyard, he could see that the soldiers were already extending their search to the northern part of the fortress—it would not be long before they came to search the wall where he had just been.

The diversion had served its purpose well enough. Yet now it was having the opposite effect. Before Bikker started peppering the place with arrows, probably the bulk of the guards had been asleep or otherwise distracted. Now every man in the palace grounds was wide-awake and looking for a furtive trespasser. Malden knew that if they caught him, they would assume he was the phantom bowman—and would kill him before he could even speak in his defense. He cursed Bikker under his breath. Getting in had been easy enough: all told, simply a matter of the strength in his fingers and a little talent at throwing a hook. Getting out would be a great deal harder.

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.

Malden kind of liked that idea. He’d grown up the son of a whore, a man with no status whatsoever. A man who wasn’t even respectable enough to clean the Burgrave’s privy. That he could strike such a blow was a great triumph for the equality of men. It would be justice, of a sort. Of course, no one could ever know that he had achieved the theft, more’s the pity.

As for the Burgrave, how much would he pay to keep its theft a secret? Surely that was the point of this ridiculous scheme. To extort the Burgrave for as much as his position was worth. It was certainly a dangerous plan, no matter what Bikker said, but still it seemed like it could be quite lucrative.

Malden was now close enough to the crown to reach out and grab it. The tower room was almost empty. Its walls were lined with old campaign banners and tattered flags. Its floor was strewn with sand that ground noisily under his feet. Of furniture, the room possessed a single piece, set exactly in its center: a simple stone pedestal, atop which sat a crystal bowl three feet in diameter.

The bowl was full to its brim with clear water. Inside the bowl, magnified strangely by its curvature, was the crown—and something else.

Cythera had given him one last piece of advice when they planned this theft together. “Such a treasure will always be guarded, of course. It cannot be left alone and unsupervised at any time. Yet I doubt you will find human guardians inside the chamber. Most likely it will be some variety of cursed beast or even a demon, bound to the defense of the crown. Such a creature will perhaps be the hardest obstacle you must overcome.”

“Is this what you meant?” Malden asked now, whispering to himself as he watched the thing in the bowl squirm around in its tiny prison. It was a pulpy thing, with leprous skin and long boneless arms. It looked somewhat like an octopus, though it had no head that he could see, nor suckers on its tentacles. A particularly flexible starfish, perhaps.

Malden could easily have held it in his hand. As he watched, it writhed its way through the crown, wrapping one oozing arm around the golden band. He supposed, if he were feeling especially fearful (and he was, after his near brush with the pit in the corridor outside), that the beast might possess deadly venom. Or teeth—somewhere—sharp enough to take his finger at the joint, should he be so foolish as to reach into the bowl with a bare hand.

He had a better idea. He took the grappling hook from where it hung on his belt and paid out a few feet of rope. Then he dipped the hook into the bowl and fished for the crown. The spineless creature attacked the hook immediately, grasping at it with all of its legs at once, thrashing so hard at this intruder that it caused the bowl to rock back and forth on its pedestal. Malden tried to pull the hook free but the little monster’s grip was strong as steel. Struggling against it merely aggravated the bowl’s swaying motion.

“Release, you tiny bastard,” he grunted, and yanked the hook free of its assailant. It came clear—but not without knocking the bowl completely off its perch. It fell from the far side of the pedestal and crashed upon the sandy floor with a noise so enormous that Malden was certain it must have alerted half the guards on Castle Hill.

He held his breath. He closed his eyes to try to hear better. No shout came to his ears, however, nor any sound of men rushing toward the tower. When he was certain it was safe, he opened his eyes and stepped around the pedestal to retrieve the crown.

The tentacle creature still had it, however, gripped in one unsolid arm. It flopped impotently on the floor in the wreckage of its bowl and a puddle of water that was already soaking into the sand. It was strange—but had the thing not looked smaller when it was in the bowl? Now it was larger than the crown it held, whereas before it had appeared smaller.

No matter. Malden drew his bodkin from its sheath. He did not wish to have it sting or bite him, so he supposed he would have to just kill it and take its prize by force. Not the way he normally chose to operate, but—

It was definitely bigger. Even as he watched, it seemed to swell. It was hard to say for certain with such an amorphous blob of a creature, but he was certain it was as big now as a dog. One of its flailing arms brushed across his shoe and he jumped back. It was like a sponge, which grows when full of water, Malden thought. With every squirming undulation of its being, it seemed to expand in size. Its arms were long enough to grasp the top of the pedestal, now. To grab Malden’s belt if he wasn’t careful.

He stepped quickly around it, looking for something to stab. It had no head, nor any eyes, nor even a body in the proper sense. It was more like a clutch of snakes all tied together in knots than a singular being. He took a swipe at one of its arms and connected but did it no injury—its flesh was rubbery and shied away from the point of his bodkin without so much as a scratch appearing on its mottled skin.

Not like a sponge placed in water, he realized, but the opposite. Water kept the foul thing in a manageable size, hence the crystal bowl. When it was exposed to air instead, it swelled—and the larger it got, the faster it seemed to grow.

It was as big as a horse suddenly. Much bigger than himself. Its arms smashed across his shoulder, his knee, his face. Battered and confused, Malden staggered backward, back against one wall.

The thing grabbed him around the waist and squeezed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Bile rushed up Malden’s throat and his head swam. The breath exploded out of him and he nearly let go of his bodkin. The demon’s arm throbbed around his midsection and constricted his guts until he thought for sure he would be pinched in half.

Then it picked him up off the floor and slammed him against the ceiling of the tower room. His vision went black for a moment and when he came to his ears were ringing like bells.

It had grown still larger, until it nearly filled the room. Its myriad arms waved limply in the air and slapped against the stone walls. One of its arms still held the crown, gripped carefully in a thin twist of flesh. It held the thing well clear of Malden’s reach, even if he’d had the presence of mind to make a grab for it.

Malden stabbed wildly around him with the bodkin, but even when his knife struck true it merely sank into the pulpy flesh, then came out again without leaving so much as a mark on the creature’s arms. The thing was sickeningly fluid, barely solid enough to keep a form, it seemed. Yet where it held him, its muscles were like ropes of steel. The thing was … unnatural. Unworldly.

Now Malden understood why the room was guarded by a statue of the Bloodgod. This was no natural beast. It must be a very demon, loosed from out of Sadu’s pit of souls. It did not belong in the world of light and air. Whatever sorcerer had summoned it from its natural environment must have understood that. He or she must have known that it would grow, and continue to grow, when exposed to air. They had placed it in the crystal bowl of water to keep its size small. If he could submerge it again in water, perhaps it would shrink once more and—

It thrust him against the walls again and again, trying to batter him to death. For a while he could not think or even see clearly as he was lashed against the flags and banners that lined the walls of the tower room. Pennons and standards crashed to the floor as his body knocked them free of their pegs. His left shoulder struck the stone wall hard and went instantly numb, and he could barely feel his legs.

Water—there must be some water—somewhere—

He could hardly think straight. He could hardly think at all. There had been water in the bowl, but it soaked into the sand that covered the floor. That must be what the sand was there for. The river was nearby, if he could somehow trick the beast into climbing over the wall and falling into the canyon beyond—but how he would manage that when he could not free himself from its grip was past his imagining.

Water! He must have it! He—

He had no water. But he had wine. The flask at his belt was still half full. Would it have the same effect on the creature? He could not be sure.

The beast had grown still larger. It filled the tower room entire now, and was crushing him against the walls with its bulk. As it waved its arms around, it smashed the stones to powder—its arms were as thick around as tree trunks now. Would it keep growing, would it grow so large it burst the walls of the tower? Would that be enough to kill it, when the upper stories of the tower collapsed upon it?

Malden doubted it. But he was certain of one thing—he, himself, would never survive such a collapse.

There was no more time for thinking. He reached around the tentacle at his waist and grabbed the flask of wine. It was leather sewn together with gut, the seams worked with wax to make them waterproof. It sloshed as he lifted it up to see it. When he bought the thing, he’d chosen shrewdly, picking a vessel that wouldn’t leak, that would stand up to rough treatment. Now he cursed himself that he hadn’t just bought some cheap skin he could burst with one hand. The damned flask was too sturdy. He brought his bodkin around and stabbed it. Wine squirted out of the hole he’d made and red drops ran down the back of his hand.

One drop fell onto the beast’s skin. The arm that held him pulsed wildly and he was thrown hither and yon, but the grip around his waist eased a trifle. Yes! The wine had some effect on the thing. He held the flask toward the tentacle and squeezed it as hard as he could, spraying wine all over its pulpy flesh.

Suddenly, blood rushed down into his legs and they burned with new sensation. His guts relaxed inside his abdomen and he belched as his stomach nearly loosed its contents. He squeezed the flask again and he was free, flying through the air as if the demon had thrown him like a ball.

The wall of the tower came toward him very fast, and he nearly crashed into it head first. He threw his arms up in front of him and managed to catch the wall with his sore fingers and then cling there like a spider before he fell back into the demon’s arms.

Below him the beast thrashed like a mad thing, bashing against the walls convulsively. Stone crumbled and shattered and pulverized. A wide crack opened in the wall and then a whole section of the tower’s stonework fell away, letting in a rush of cold night air.

The tentacles snapped at Malden’s ankles and back, trying to get a grip, but they were slow and he was able to avoid being grabbed up once again. The main problem he faced was that the beast had grown so large there was precious little room in the tower it didn’t fill, little enough that Malden had to press himself against the wall to keep from being crushed by its sheer bulk.

More of the wall fell away. The tower above began to groan as its timbers shifted, no longer able to support the weight. The tower that stood for so many centuries, that seemed eternal, now lurched and swayed like a ship in a gale. In a moment the room would collapse and he would be crushed. He had escaped one gruesome fate only to befall another, it seemed. And yet—perhaps—

Malden looked down and saw that he was very close to the statue of Sadu that was the secret lock to this room. The creature had enough respect for its creator, it seemed, not to smash the idol or even brush it with its tentacles. Malden waited until the tentacles were as far from him as possible, then dropped to his feet next to the image. He wasted no time pushing down on the arm-lever that controlled the door.

The pivoting section of floor and wall began to turn, and Malden readied himself to dash through it as it revealed the moonlit hallway beyond. Yet when the wall had swiveled only a few degrees through its arc, with only a sliver of moonlight coming through from the other side, the motion stopped.

The cause was immediately apparent. The tentacled beast’s mass was pressing against the wall, keeping it from swinging open. Malden pushed at the wall, trying to force it to open, trying to squeeze his shoulders through the small gap, but to no avail. “No!” he screamed at it. “Get back, you infernal bastard! Let me go!”

The beast made no response but to redouble its thrashing motion. Malden laid into it with his bodkin, stabbing and thrusting wildly at its ever-moving arms. It was no use, though, because the thing was still growing, still expanding to fill more and ever more of the available space—

—and then the tower began to rumble, as if it were being shaken to pieces. Rock dust sifted down from the ceiling and the stone walls began to give way.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A great crashing noise stopped Croy in his tracks. “That came from the palace,” he whispered. “From the tower—did it not? And so soon after those two men were killed. Something’s wrong here.”

Hilde grasped his hand and dragged him farther into the shadows beside the kitchens. “It’s nothing to do with me or you. Come quickly. We can’t let the guards see you here.”

Croy held his ground, though, as another thunderous sound issued from the tower. The edifice began to shake and a block of stone fell from its top to crack the flagstones below. Then a fissure appeared in the side of the tower, about halfway up. The men of the watch who were out in force in the courtyard all turned to look as one, and there was a cry of surprise and alarm that could be heard even over the ear-shattering klaxon.

“It’s going to collapse,” he said, just before the tower’s wall exploded outward, showering the courtyard with broken chunks of stone. The upper floors of the tower tottered over with a most horrible slowness, then all at once collapsed in a massive cloud of dust and debris. The watch were everywhere at once, shouting and calling for each other, for the guards, for anyone who was close enough to help.

“There might have been people in there,” Croy said, turning toward the lady-in-waiting. “Hilde, you go seek shelter in the—” He didn’t bother to finish, as she was already gone. She hadn’t stopped to let him save her, but instead ran for dear life. Well, that was probably wise. He hoped she would find safety, and quickly. She might be a little confused, but she was a good woman at heart and he wished her luck.

The moral qualities of ladies-in-waiting was suddenly less important to Croy, though, than the groaning rumble that shook the very mass of Castle Hill and threatened to knock him off his feet, as the tower collapsed further and massive stones went bouncing and rolling across the courtyard.

Was it an earthquake? He’d never heard of such a thing in the Free City. Perhaps some sorcerer had attacked the palace? But Hazoth was the only sorcerer in a hundred miles who had the power for such a thing, and this hardly seemed like his handiwork. Croy drew the smaller of his two swords and made to run for the tower, either to rescue anyone inside the ruin or to slay whoever had knocked the tower down, he wasn’t exactly sure which. He got no more than two steps, however, before a hand wrapped in chain mail grabbed his baldric. It threw him off balance and his sword went flying.

He rolled across the flagstones and got his elbows under him, bending his knees so he could leap back to his feet. Then an all-too-familiar face loomed out of the shadows and put a boot on his chest. The big swordsman pressed down hard enough that Croy could barely breathe.

Bikker.

Croy could hardly believe his eyes. He’d known, certainly, that the two of them would meet again. It was destiny. But here? At this time? It seemed fantastic.

“What in the name of Sadu’s flaming arse are you doing here?” Bikker asked.

Croy could only stare up at the massive warrior. “I might ask you the same.”

“I live here. This is my city,” Bikker snarled.

“I meant—”

“I find myself in no position to answer your questions, Croy. But I will have answers to mine. I say again, what are you doing here? You were banished from Ness, never to return. I remember it well, since I was the one tasked with riding you out of the city gates on a rail.”

Croy remembered that moment himself. The rail had been tied to the back of Bikker’s horse at the time. He had been left bruised and abraded ten miles north of the city with nothing but his swords—even his clothes were ruined by the rough treatment.

“I returned for Cythera, of course,” Croy said. “Once I have guaranteed her safety and her freedom, and once I take care of a few other standing engagements, I’ll leave in peace. You have my word.”

“Doubtful,” Bikker said. “Oh, don’t look so shocked. I know you’re telling the truth. I also know that by ‘standing engagements’ you mean me. You mean my death. And since that’s not likely to happen, well … Never mind. Tell me what you’re doing here, tonight. Your presence is most inconvenient to my plans.”

In the courtyard something crashed to the ground with a thud that shook Croy’s teeth in his skull. He tried to rise and see what had happened but Bikker just pressed him down again.

He decided the best way to recover his feet was to answer Bikker. “I came to get my swords back. The Burgrave took them from me when he sentenced me to death. I imagine you were there at my hanging—surely you wouldn’t have missed that.”

“I had to leave early,” Bikker said. He wasn’t looking at Croy, but at the ruins of the tower. “I hear it didn’t end well.”

“Oh?” Croy asked.

“You got away. Croy, please do me a favor and keep reaching for the hilt of Ghostcutter. Please, please, try to draw your sword. It will give me the excuse I need to hack you to pieces right now.”

Croy opened his hands wide and stretched them out at his sides. He had known Bikker for a long time. He was quite certain the man was willing to stab him where he lay on the ground, to take his life without the slightest shred of honor or dignity. And yet … he hadn’t so far. He had every opportunity but still let him live. Was it just because Bikker wanted information? Or was it possible there was something still alive in Bikker, some shred of the honor he’d cast off like a stained tunic?

“Surely Hazoth didn’t send you here to kill me,” Croy said. “He could not have known I was here—unless he has been following my movements with a spell.”

Bikker snorted in derision. “The wizard? I doubt he even remembers your name. He has no interest in you one way or another. He has ordered me to be discreet when I’m out in the city. Which is enough to save your life, at least for tonight. Blind me, what is that thing?”

Croy turned his head to look as best he was able at the fresh ruins. He gasped at what he saw. It was as if a nest of gigantic blind asps or equally large worms had been crammed inside one room of the tower and now they were writhing and striking at the air. Yet by the way they moved in concert, he could tell it was a single beast with many arms. Some of its numerous appendages grabbed at the fallen rocks in the courtyard and threw them at the guards that rushed toward it. Other sinuous limbs pushed against what remained of the tower as it tried to drag its enormous bulk out into the night. It made no sound other than a wet slithering.

“Fiend from the pit, do you think?” Bikker asked, with professional interest.

“Or a sorcerous abomination, at the very least,” Croy confirmed. A thought occurred to him. Maybe he had a way of getting back on his feet. “Between Ghostcutter and Acidtongue, we’d stand a chance against it.”

“Just like old times, hmm?” Bikker asked. “Is that what you’re thinking?” He pulled at his beard, the way he always did when he was unable to make a decision. Croy understood, despite himself. The old times had never seemed older. Yet the two of them took an oath once, an oath on their souls. Such things died hard.

“That, and that we could save a number of innocent lives,” Croy said.

“Bah,” Bikker said, but Croy could tell his heart wasn’t fully in the disdain.

The guards and the men of the watch were already peppering the demon with arrows. The missiles seemed without effect, so a detachment of guards were approaching it with halberds at the ready. As they watched, a tentacle lashed out and threw one poor guardsman half across the courtyard. The man landed in a crump of dented mail and broken bones from which he did not rise.

“Both you and I have good reason to flee this place before our faces are seen,” Bikker said.

“And better reason to stay,” Croy insisted. “When was the last time Acidtongue did what it was made for? A bloodied sword—”

“Is a sword that doesn’t rust,” Bikker finished. He looked disgusted for a moment. Disgusted, perhaps, with himself. Then he took his boot off Croy’s chest and offered him a hand up.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

It was all Malden could do to hold on. His strength was no match for the demon’s, even with half its arms crushed under the fallen tower.

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