C
roy kept his horse to a walk as they crept slowly through the fens north of Easthull. This was Greenmarsh, once the most politically influential district of Skrae. Now it was firmly entrenched with barbarian pickets. He had to maintain constant attention on the hunched trees around him, which could hide anything, and also the soft ground, lest he become trapped in the mire.
Bethane’s presence behind him did not help. They had been unable to find another mount for her—the barbarians had scoured this land for every bit of horseflesh they could find. Having to share wasn’t the problem, though. The girl was light enough not to overburden Croy’s horse, and she never complained about her uncomfortable position sitting on his cantle. She kept her arms wrapped around his waist, but not so tight that he couldn’t breathe.
No, the problem was that she kept talking. He had convinced her to keep her voice to a low whisper, but she was his queen, and he could not command her to be silent. He never responded to what she said, but that didn’t seem to dissuade her.
“When I am reinstated at Helstrow,” she said, excitement plain in her voice, “I will command a great tournament to honor the sacrifice of all our brave men. Knights will come from every land to prove their mettle and their honor. There will be bright pavilions all around the fortress, a great sea of them in every color. Of course, preference will go to the green tents, and the white.”
Croy had been following a deer trail through the swamp, a narrow track barely visible even by brightest daylight. His horse could find it better than he could himself, shying on its hooves whenever it stepped off the trail and into the thicker vegetation to either side. Now that the sun was setting, the horse seemed less sure of itself, and Croy wondered how he would find his way in the dark. But they could not stop now.
“There will be jongleurs, and fools, and the dwarves will demonstrate their marvelous creations. I will have a great fountain built, which will spray water ever so high in the air, so that men will delight to watch it go up, and wonder at how long it takes to come down again. There will be falcons, and much sport from their flights, and their handlers will be gallant men with steely eyes who never speak except to command their fierce birds.”
Up ahead something blocked the trail. Not a roadblock—the barbarians would never waste time closing off a path so far away from civilization. No, it looked perhaps like a massive deadfall, as if a cyclopean chestnut tree had fallen and its roots were sticking up in the air, thick with moist earth. Croy searched the ground around this obstacle with his eyes, looking for a way to circumvent it.
“The ladies of my court will be all in linen and velvet, and they will embroider teasing mottoes inside the sleeves of their gowns, so that any man who ventures to peek inside will find himself made a figure of fun. And there will be great competitions of skill. Archery contests that will go on all day. And men will try to climb greased poles, or capture chickens set loose in a paddock. Oh, it will be humorous to watch their antics.”
As they came closer, Croy finally made out the truth of the obstacle. It was no fallen tree. Instead, it was a pile of corpses clotted with gore, their bones picked at by birds. Even from a distance he could see the wounds that had slain these men. Axe cuts had lopped off arms and ears and faces. The bodies were still dressed in the colors of Skrae. Were these some men from his rabble, the one he’d lost on the road to Mörgain’s berserkers? Or were they simple deserters, thinking to save themselves from certain death, only to find it again here, in this forgotten place? Whoever slaughtered them had deemed them unworthy of even a simple burial. They had been left to rot where they lay. Croy’s shoulders stiffened at the sacrilege, and he felt Bethane lift her head.
“Is something wrong, Sir Croy?” she asked.
“No, your highness.” Croy tried to think of what to say. How would Malden handle this? The thief had always been a great flatterer, and very good at smoothing over unpleasantness. “I was only . . . struck by the grandeur of your vision. Please, close your eyes, the better to see such beauties, and the better to relate them.”
Bethane sighed and leaned against his back. “You’re right. I can see it better like this. Oh, Sir Croy! The place you will hold on that day. You’ll be by my side, of course. You will be my champion, when I am properly crowned and established in my station.”
Croy urged the horse forward, moving as carefully as he might around the pile of dead men. The animal snorted and balked at the smell of death, but Croy rubbed its neck and it settled down.
“You will be heaped with honors, of course,” Bethane went on. “Your colors will hang from the highest tower, next to mine, and every knight on the field that day will bow in recognition that whatever victory they may win, they shall never match your achievements.”
Croy had fought in tourneys, once. He had jousted with lance and spear, fought in mock melees with wooden swords. Like a child playing at war. He had won great honors and tributes from lords and ladies. He had held himself up as an example of honor and virtue, and thought everyone would gain from just seeing him, that he would inspire them to make the world a finer place.
Now he was a man on a horse, with a girl clutching to his back. The horse was near death and the two of them were dirty and saddle sore and so very hungry. The world she spoke of had never existed, not really. There had only ever been this muddy place where death waited around every turn in the road. The sun had been a little brighter in summertime, that was all, and it fooled him into thinking the green grass and the blue sky would last forever.
To the north, he thought. He must take Bethane far to the north, as far as the Northern Kingdoms, where she would be safe. She would reign in exile while the barbarians despoiled her own country. But she would live. And perhaps someday some descendant of hers would travel south again, with a proper army, and take Skrae back. Or what was left of it.
“I see the groaning boards, Sir Croy! Laden with every kind of roasted meat, and every succulent dainty my cooks can make. I see the boats on the river Strow, their flags snapping in the breeze . . .”
M
alden reached up and grasped the snout of a gargoyle. It started to pull free but the iron staple that held it to the wall was still strong, even after so many years of neglect, and it took his weight. He clambered up onto its stone back and rested for a moment.
He’d had steadier climbs. He’d gone places in Ness he felt more easy. The Chapterhouse did not have a good reputation.
An octagonal building with a high spire, it was an anomaly in the Stink—one place in all that stew of humanity that no one ever went, a massive stone pile in a sea of wood and thatch, forlorn and shunned. It was supposed to be the most haunted building in the Free City, with a far more dire reputation than even the Isle of Horses, because its evil had continued to take victims long after the tragedy that cursed it.
In the early days of Ness—in the early history of Skrae—the Learned Brothers of the Lady had been a strong institution, a beacon of reason and erudition in a benighted land. They had tended to the sick and fed the poor in a time when the priests of the Bloodgod could do nothing but demand larger and more savage sacrifices. The Brotherhood had brought thousands of converts to the then new religion of the Lady. It was also rumored they possessed secrets even the dwarves had never plumbed. At Redweir they had built the Sacred Library, the greatest concentration of books and manuscripts outside of the Old Empire. In Ness they built the Chapterhouse, a meeting place for all seekers of knowledge and enlightenment. It originally stood outside the city’s precincts, protected by its own high wall. When the Free City grew, it swallowed the Chapterhouse, but the building remained cloistered and aloof. Inside its towering edifice the Learned Brothers had kept the rules of their order, and no Burgrave ever dared intrude upon their laws or customs. Rich merchants had sent their more bookish sons to the Chapterhouse to be tutored, and it became tradition that these scholars would become the distinguished professors of Ness’s burgeoning university.
Any organization of celibate men, however, will eventually fall under suspicion from more cosmopolitan minds, and the Chapterhouse was no exception. Tales were told of initiation rites that went beyond harmless hazing, of license and formalized pederasty. The once-honored title “Chapterhouse Pupil” came to be slang for a catamite. The Learned Brotherhood gained a bad reputation. How much of it the monks had actually earned was unknown, but two hundred years before Malden was born, one Jarald of Omburg came to be High Scholiast of the place, and within a year it was empty and abandoned, its doors chained shut and its fires of learning quenched.
The Burgraves had never revealed the true account of Jarald’s crimes, but Malden grew up hearing tales of hundreds of monks being driven from the city in chains, of watchmen fainting dead away at the discovery of dismembered boys inside, their wounds violated in horrible fashion. His mother had used the Chapterhouse as a bogey, warning him that if he did not behave he’d be sent there to become a student of Jarald’s ghost. It was not a toothless threat. Those few thieves or vagabonds desperate enough to try to break into the Chapterhouse had vanished without trace, and even vandals who besmirched its outer wall with graffiti were said to have been punished by spectral forces.
It took a lot to keep thieves away from any building in Ness. The city was famous for its thrice-locked doors and the dwarven traps that protected the houses of wealthy men. The Chapterhouse needed no such protections—thieves shunned it the way they shunned the gallows.
And now Malden knew he must enter its deadly confines, and plumb its darkest corners. He had been taken aback when he finally read the message Cutbill left for him. He’d seriously considered tearing up the letter and forgetting its contents. Yet it promised so much he could not resist. Properly deciphered, the message read:
FOR MALDEN SHOULD HE RETURN
YOU HAVE MANY QUESTIONS I HAVE BUT ONE ANSWER
COME LET US TRADE IF YOU LIKE THE TERMS I SET
CLIMB TO THE ONE HEIGHT YOU NEVER YET SCALED
IN ALL THE FREE CITY AND YOU WILL FIND MY TRAIL
FOLLOW IT WITH CARE FOR I AM NOT UNPROTECTED
FOLLOW IT AND FIND ME I WILL AWAIT YOU THERE
CUTBILL
On his gargoyle perch, Malden studied the transcribed parchment one last time. It confused him more than ever, even more than when it had been a meaningless clutter of symbols. Just like Cutbill to be so cryptic—and so forbidding. Just like Cutbill to put such obstacles in his way, knowing full well he would have no choice but to overcome them. And yet how unlike Cutbill to put himself at such risk. Malden had assumed the guildmaster of thieves had fled the city like every sane man wealthy enough to do so. He had assumed Cutbill was willing to donate his entire enterprise to a young and untried thief, rather than stick around and take his chances with fate and the barbarians.
The message suggested otherwise. It suggested that Cutbill had gone into hiding—right in the middle of his own city. That Cutbill he’d been in Ness the whole time, just waiting for him to track him down.
Cutbill was playing a deeper game than mere survival. That, Malden should have expected.
He climbed higher. The steeple of the Chapterhouse was one of the highest places in Ness, even though it was well downslope from Castle Hill. The building must be twelve stories high, not including its superstructures. All of its windows and doors had been sealed off quite firmly, but Malden was certain once he reached the top he would find a way in.
Nor was he disappointed. The peak of the spire had been blasted by lightning and never repaired. One whole side of its apex had fallen away. Malden slipped inside the remaining three walls and found himself in a narrow space full of the droppings of bats, the walls woolly with cobwebs. No furniture or appurtenances remained in the room, but there was a simple trapdoor set in its floorboards. He tried lifting this portal and found that its hinges had completely rusted away. The square door fell through its jamb and clattered down through rafters and support beams below, into total darkness. Echoing up through that open space, he heard the clattering sound of gears and clockwork lurch sluggishly to life.
He had expected the Chapterhouse to be dead inside—empty, its furnishings long since rotted away, even its ghosts having eventually given up in boredom. The last thing he’d expected was the sound of well-oiled machinery turning and cranking away. What in the Bloodgod’s sacred name had Cutbill found inside? Or what had he built there himself, to confound his disciple?
Malden knew better than to expect Cutbill to come climbing up through the trapdoor and welcome him with a hearty smile. But what
was
down there? What game was the guildmaster of thieves playing this time?
Only one way to find out.
M
alden lowered himself through the trapdoor by his hands. He swung his feet back and forth until they came in contact with a solid surface that felt like it would hold his weight, then jumped to crouch atop it. He pulled a candle from his tunic and lit it with steel and flint. When the wick caught, he placed the candle in a tin reflector that Slag had made for him. It gave him a good beam of yellow light he could direct wherever he liked.
Aiming the beam downward, he saw that the inside of the steeple and much of the spire was open space, some of the floors below having fallen away over the years so that he was inside a high shaft leading down into darkness. He crouched atop one of the few remaining support beams that hadn’t rotted or burned away over time.
He could hear gears churning below, and a rhythmic whirring sound as of something very large spinning very quickly.
The interior walls of the spire provided ample footholds and handholds to make an easy descent, at least for the first fifteen feet down. Where the floors had fallen away, little more remained than narrow ledges now fringed with broken bits of floorboard. As rudimentary as they looked, they would give him plenty of purchase. Beyond that the space opened out and became far more regular. He could see little more than that by candlelight. He climbed quickly down to a place where a corner of ruined floor remained, still braced by rotting beams. Looking down farther, he finally saw the source of the whirring noise.
Where the spire ended and the main building began, a wide circular opening separated the two. Filling that opening was a massive iron blade that spun around and around, forbidding all access to the lower floors. It moved so quickly he could not see how many vanes this obstruction possessed. Not that it mattered. He knew if he tried to jump through it he would end up shredded.
Yet there had to be a way to pass it.
He found a place where the plaster had come away from the wall. Underneath, the laths that once held the plaster were exposed. He was able to tear one free, a good strip of wood an inch wide and six feet long. Creeping down as far as he could get, he thrust the lath into the whirling blade.
He was not surprised when it was torn out of his hand and then cut into splinters. It had not been thick enough to jam the mechanism. He wondered if this blade explained the vanishing of every thief who’d tried to enter the Chapterhouse before him. Then he rejected the idea. He’d spent enough time around Slag to know that such complicated devices couldn’t remain in working order for two hundred years, not without someone to periodically clean and repair them. Cutbill had put this blade in motion, not the long-passed monks who’d built the Chapterhouse.
Malden still needed a way to stop the blade. He had Acidtongue at his belt, and supposed it would be strong enough, but he didn’t want to risk the blade on such a risky enterprise—especially since he thought he might need it later. There must be something else, though, something he could use. He sought around him for something better than a lath and quickly found it.
A series of stone columns ribbed the interior of the spire, some of which had cracked and broken. One had fallen away entirely and lay in pieces on a corner of broken flooring. It almost looked like it was left there intentionally for him to find.
That wouldn’t surprise him. When Cutbill created a puzzle, he always managed to leave the solution somewhere in plain sight. This was not simply a way to keep trespassers out of the Chapterhouse. It was a test.
The broken section of pillar was too heavy for Malden to lift. It was three feet long, as thick as his arm, and made of very solid stone. He considered rolling it over the edge to crash down on the blade, but knew he would only get one chance at this—if the stone fell through the gaps between the vanes of the blade he would be out of luck. He needed a way to lower the pillar into the blade, a way he could control.
He had brought along a length of rope—he never went climbing in new places without a line. Now it was kept coiled around his waist like a sash. It was strong enough to hold his own weight, but he wasn’t sure if it could support the pillar. There was, as usual, only one way to find out. He lashed one end of the rope around the fluted end of the pillar, then carefully rolled the stone over the edge of the broken floor. The rope creaked and complained and started to fray almost at once. In a few moments, Malden knew, it would snap.
Perhaps not before he made use of it, however. He paid out the rope as quickly as he dared, careful not to let the pillar jerk too much at its end. Foot by foot, second by second, as the rope twisted and frayed, he sent the pillar down toward the deadly blade.
It made contact just as the rope broke. The pillar bounced off one vane of the blade and then fell away into the darkness below. Malden cursed in rage for a moment—then stopped himself as he saw what happened next.
With a horrible clanging whine, the blade slowed and then ground to a shuddering stop. The pillar had bent the blade out of true, and it no longer fit inside its prescribed mechanism. Still it tried to turn, but could only grind slowly around its arc as it dragged against its own rim.
Malden scurried down through a gap between two of the blade’s six vanes before it could start again. Underneath the blade was a small square room almost entirely filled with huge iron gears and an enormous coiled mainspring that drove the blade. A lever stuck up out of the floor, clearly a controller for the deadly engine. Had Cutbill stood here only minutes before and pulled that lever to start the whirling blade?
Thinking it best to stop the blade for good and all—he might have to climb back out this way—Malden grasped the lever and pulled it toward him.
He had only himself to blame when the entire floor of the small room fell away on a hinge, dropping him into darkness.