“Yes! I did. Or, rather, I told Croy to do that. I told Mörget I wasn’t the man he was looking for, but thanked him very much for considering me. I’m not stupid.”
“Hmm,” Cutbill mused. He flipped to an earlier page of his ledger. “Well, that’s settled, then. There are demons afoot once more. Of course, something will have to be done about that—we can’t have such creatures at large.”
“Yes, yes, it must be vanquished. But they hardly need my help with that. The two of them have their magical swords. They’re perfectly adequate to the task.”
Cutbill shrugged dismissively. “Still, I can see why they’d like to have someone along to take care of the traps. A sword—even a magical sword—is of little use to a man who has fallen into a bottomless pit. But you turned down their offer, quite reasonably. It does sound like a dangerous undertaking.”
“Positively foolhardy,” Malden agreed.
“Quite. Though I imagine that for Sir Croy the risk is half the reward. This will give him the chance to prove, once again, just how heroic he is. He’ll reap a great bounty of honor and glory.”
“I suppose such things are what you desire if you’re a titled man’s son, and there is no need to ever work a day in your life.”
“I imagine that would be nice,” Cutbill said.
“He’s going to get himself killed. Him and the barbarian both. As for Mörget, well, good riddance. That man is a threat to decent society. It’s just a matter of time before he kills someone just being here in the City.”
“It’s for the best, then, that he leaves soon.” Cutbill put down his pen and rubbed his chin. “And yet I do not wish him ill.”
“Well, of course not,” Malden said, raising one eyebrow. He wasn’t sure what Cutbill was on about but he could tell the man was already forming a scheme. “I mean, at the very least, I hope he survives long enough to save us all from the demon, but—”
Cutbill lifted his pen for silence. “Hmm. He wants someone to deal with the Vincularium’s traps. I’ll have to think of someone I could send his way. Just in the interest of getting him out of my town faster.”
“Much joy it gives them both, I hope. I’ll have nothing to do with this tomb. As I told them, in no uncertain terms. Of course, then Croy had to go and suggest the place was full of treasure. As if that was all it would take to make my ears prick up. There’s more to life than money.”
“There is?” Cutbill asked, as if he’d never considered the possibility.
Malden had to think about that for a moment. “Yes, there is. There’s living to spend it.”
“Interesting,” Cutbill said. He picked his pen back up. “Just the other day, you were telling me that you needed a large sum of money for a specific reason. Tell me, how is that project going?”
“I thought it was dashed to pieces,” Malden admitted, thinking of Cythera. She had not signed the banns of marriage, after all. “But there may be some new hope. All the same, there are easier ways to get the money to buy a house than crawling around in haunted tombs.”
“Most assuredly. Though … I might suggest, Malden, that you go and ask someone about the Vincularium. Specifically, about who is buried there.”
“Some moldy old king or other, I have no doubt,” Malden said.
Cutbill frowned. “The treasure is likely to be … considerable.”
“The entire interior of that mountain might be made of gold, for all I care. I’m no grave robber.”
“Ah. So it’s because of your deeply felt respect for the dead that you won’t go.”
Malden wrestled with himself. He didn’t ordinarily lie to Cutbill. The man had a way of seeing through to the truth no matter how honeyed a tale one spun. This time, however, he found himself completely incapable of telling the truth.
“Yes,” he said.
“Very good,” Cutbill said. If he believed Malden or not it didn’t seem to matter. He wrote in silence for a while, then put down his pen and folded his hands in his lap. Malden had worked for Cutbill long enough to know what that meant. He was about to do something devious. “Malden. Would you do me a favor? Go out to the common room and ask Slag if he would be kind enough to come in here for a moment.”
“Certainly,” Malden said. He was mostly just glad not to be the object of the guildmaster’s plotting. Outside, he found Slag constructing a boiled leather cuirass, laying long strips of hardened leather across a stiffened shirt and then affixing them in place with paste. When Malden approached him he cursed volubly, but after a moment the dwarf came trooping along after him into Cutbill’s chamber. He had a scowl on his face, as usual, but he had always been an obedient employee.
“This had better be good. My glue’s getting tacky.”
“It will only take a moment, I assure you,” Cutbill said. “Malden here has turned up a very interesting piece of information. It seems there’s a barbarian in town who is forming a crew to go and open the Vincularium. I thought that would be of some small interest to you.”
The scowl went slack on Slag’s face. “Huh,” he said.
Malden rubbed at his chin. He’d never heard the dwarf stymied for a curse before. What was Cutbill up to?
Slag failed to give the game away. He stood there looking pensive but said nothing more. Eventually Cutbill looked up and gave the dwarf a pointed look. “That’s all. You may return to your work.”
Slag nodded and turned to go. He stopped before he reached the door, however, and turned to address Cutbill. “Sir,” he said. Malden had never heard the dwarf use an honorific before. Interesting. “Sir, if it’s alright with you. Well. You know I’m in here every fucking day, and most nights. I work hard, don’t I? And I serve you well. I haven’t even been sick a day for—how long?”
Cutbill tilted his head to one side as if trying to remember. Then he stuck his thumb in the ledger book and opened it to a page quite near its beginning. “Seventeen years,” he said, after consulting a column of numbers.
The dwarf nodded. “Aye. Well. I think, suddenly, I might be coming down with somewhat. Somewhat lingering.”
“That is unfortunate,” Cutbill said. The look on his face was not what Malden would call sympathetic, but then he couldn’t imagine Cutbill showing fellow feeling for anyone. “You’d better go home then, until you feel well again. Take as much time as you need. I don’t care if it takes weeks and weeks.”
“Thank ye, sir,” Slag said, and left the room.
When he was gone Malden stared at the guildmaster of thieves. “What was that about? What’s he after?”
“Like I said, Malden, you might do some asking around about the Vincularium. In this case, it might interest you to know who built it. Of course,” Cutbill said, and flipped back to his current page, “it matters not. Since you have already made up your mind not to go.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Croy and Mörget set about at once outfitting themselves for the journey. There were so many things to buy—a wagon to carry their gear, supplies to make camp in the wilderness, lanterns and climbing gear for inside the Vincularium. Croy had rarely been as happy or excited as he looked over the growing pile of equipment.
Of course, Mörget had no money, so Croy had to pay for everything, but that did little to dampen his enthusiasm. He’d always considered money to be something you spent, not something you hoarded. He was glad to foot the bill for such an important endeavor.
While he arranged for the pack horses they would require, he was approached by a messenger with a letter from Cythera. He blushed, having almost forgotten the events of the previous day, when he’d come close to marrying her. Her message said she wished to meet with him and discuss a matter of importance—almost certainly about the banns, he decided. He sent the messenger back with instructions on where she should meet him.
He was just trying on a new brigantine when Cythera arrived at the armorer’s shop. He glanced up at her with a smile and turned the doublet inside out, showing her the thin plates of bright case-hardened iron inside the canvas.
“Of course, this will be little use against a demon,” he said, as she came and took his hands in greeting. “Especially this one, which can simply flow through the cracks between the plates. Yet there may be bandits along the way, and other dangers yet unguessed once we get inside the Vincularium.” He everted the doublet again and showed her the elaborate pattern of brazen rivets that held the plates fast. “Rather beautiful in its way, hmm? But of course, one doesn’t choose armor for how it looks.”
“Perhaps you’ll marry me in it,” she told him, then leaned close to whisper, “of course, you must remove it before the wedding night, or I shall be quite sore the next morning.”
He flushed red and stepped away from her. Picking up a round shield, he held it high between them. “Now, this will stop any blow. Yet it’s light as a buckler, made of basswood in overlapping strips, then faced with boiled leather. Truly exquisite craftsmanship. As you would expect from a dwarf of Snurrin’s reputation.”
The proprietor of the shop bowed low, his head dropping nearly to the level of Croy’s ankles. “Your very presence in my shop only serves to enhance my meager fame, sir knight.”
The armorer looked like any other dwarf from Croy’s experience, with corpse-pale skin (dwarves shunned the sun’s rays, being subterranean by natural inclination) and a tangled mass of dark hair sticking up from his scalp. Yet he had never heard a dwarf speak so prettily—or with such couth. Normally they swore oaths and laced their sentences with profanity as much as did sailors. There was a reason Croy patronized Snurrin. Though the dwarf was known to be the most expensive armorer in the Free City, Croy knew he wouldn’t be embarrassed by strong language while picking out his panoply.
“I’ll want to see this brigantine proofed, of course, but I think it will suit,” Croy said. He smiled sheepishly and then let out a little laugh. “Ha, I have made a jest, I think. This suit of armor, you see, will—”
“Fie!” the barbarian shouted, coming out of a fitting room near the back of the shop. He was naked save for a pair of faulds that wouldn’t quite buckle around his waist. For a man as large as Mörget that was a lot of nudity. “Have you nothing big enough for a real man? Or do you make armor only for tiny creatures like yourself, shopkeep?”
