Croy laughed. He was glad to have the barbarian along. Mörget was right, too—the food in the wagon would only last so long and he imagined they would have to hunt before they reached their destination, if they didn’t want to starve.
Once everything was loaded they were ready to depart, and waited only on the two other members of their expedition. Slag the dwarf arrived first. Croy had been quite surprised when Slag had found him the night before and demanded to be included. Croy knew Slag only a little, through his connection to Malden, but from what he’d heard Slag was an unlikely traveling companion. For one thing, all dwarves were known for their hatred of travel, even those who worked as ambassadors for their king and had to move from place to place all the time. By contrast Slag was a city dwarf, accustomed to the refinements of Ness, and by Malden’s account he’d been a fixture in the city for many years. He had given little explanation for why he wanted to leave just now, or why he would want to go to the Vincularium, but Croy supposed little was needed. Dwarves had built the place, after all, though so long ago none alive could remember it, surely. Mörget had been enthusiastic about allowing Slag to come along, saying that the dwarf would be useful in overcoming the Vincularium’s many traps and blind passages. An important addition to their crew since their thief had refused to accompany them. Croy had offered no real objection. After all, Slag was a friend of Malden. That was enough to vouch for the diminutive man right there.
“Well met, friend,” Croy said, and bowed to clap hands with the dwarf. “We ride today toward true adventure!”
“Picked a lousy fucking day for it,” the dwarf replied. Without another word he climbed up under the leather cover on the wagon and curled around a barrel. In a few moments he was snoring.
Mörget and Croy exchanged a smile and went to get the horses. By the time they had them out of the stable, Cythera had arrived as well. Croy gave her a knowing look as she placed her own gear on the wagon. She was dressed in an old cloak with the hood up over her hair. It hid her eyes as well.
“Shall we get started?” she asked, when Croy opened his mouth.
He had been about to give her a chance to change her mind, and remain in the City until he returned. Clearly she still intended to go.
“Very well,” he said. “You take the palfrey. He’s gelded, and a good ambler. Mörget can have the rounsey for now. That’s a man’s horse.”
Cythera turned to face him and he saw she was glaring at him under her hood.
“I meant simply that the rounsey will better bear his weight, that’s all,” Croy said, desperate to mollify her. “I’ll drive the wagon for this first day.”
Cythera said nothing more but climbed onto the palfrey and kicked its flanks to get it moving. Croy had to hurry to jump up on the wagon and get the hackneys moving, just to keep up with her. She led them downhill, through the Stink toward King’s Gate, which opened on the road toward Helstrow. They passed by a fish market on their way there, where poor women braved the rain to get the freshest catch, and then past a small churchyard. Croy frowned—that was a bad omen, riding past graves on the way to danger—but he did not call for a change of course.
Soon he saw the wall rise up before them, sheer and white and looming over the buildings that crowded around its feet. The rain had flooded some of the side streets but the main way stayed clear. Croy leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and started lulling himself into the old familiar trance of the road. The rhythmic clop of the horses’ hooves and the grinding of the wagon’s wheels on the cobbles made a song of journeying. In a few minutes they would pass the gate and be on their way. The way would be long, and there would be obstacles to overcome, but he was on a quest again, a mission. How he had longed for—
—something heavy dropped onto the leather cover of the wagon behind him. Slag shouted out a curse as if he’d been struck. Croy pulled on the reins and the hackneys whinnied as he slowed them. Turning around, one hand already on Ghostcutter’s hilt, he stared with wide eyes.
“Room for one more?” Malden asked. He lay sprawled across the wagon’s cover, as if he’d fallen there out of the thin air. For some reason his face was badly bruised, and one of his eyelids was nearly swollen shut. “I have a sudden urge to get some country air,” the thief offered, by way of explanation.
INTERLUDE
Snurrin the dwarf armorer closed up his shop an hour early that day, sending his human employees home with a half-hearted excuse—he’d had too much sun, he told them, and needed to rest somewhere cool and dark or he’d be worthless for the next morning’s appointments. The humans didn’t seem to care why they were released early from their labors. As was typical of the gangly bastards they were just glad for a chance to spend the evening in a tavern drinking away their wages.
“Fucking layabouts,” Snurrin muttered once they were gone. It felt good to be able to swear like a proper dwarf, something he never did when humans were around. Humans, he thought, were so very tall and brutish, and so very good at killing one another, but they acted liked strong language was more dangerous than any weapon in his shop. Utter one good profanity and half of them just fainted dead away.
He locked up the day’s take in his strongbox, then cleaned up the workshop where he’d spent most of the day fletching crossbow bolts. When he was done he headed up to the top floor of his shop where he kept his living quarters. Heavy velvet drapes covered all the windows there, blocking out the fierce sunlight. They were tacked in place but still a few errant beams of light broke into his room. More than enough to see by. Snurrin went to his desk and took out a long thin strip of paper. Using a heavy stylus of white lead, he wrote out a message in dwarven runes. When he was done the paper still looked blank, but if it were held over the proper sort of oil lamp for a few moments the runes would be revealed, as the particles of smoke adhered to the paper but not to the lead. What he had written was not for every eye to see.
Snurrin was no stranger to spycraft. Every dwarf living in Skrae—or at least every one loyal to the dwarven king—was expected to keep an eye on what the humans did, and report as necessary. The treaty between the crown of Skrae and the kingdom of dwarves was ironclad and made their two nations fast allies. That didn’t mean they trusted each other for a moment.
When the message was ready Snurrin headed up to the roof where he kept a wooden box sealed with a good stout padlock. Inside were a dozen bats each as big as his forearm, still asleep with their wings folded over them like cloaks. He picked one with three black dots painted on its back and rolled his message around its leg. The bat kicked and squealed in its sleep but it was unable to shake the slip of paper loose. When Snurrin was sure it was done properly he locked the box again and went back downstairs to take his supper. His work was done.
The city of Redweir lay over a hundred miles away, far to the southeast on the Bay of Serpents. It would take a human rider three days to cover that distance, even if he rode through the night and assuming he had fresh horses waiting for him at every stop on the way. A fast ship sailing with a fair wind might make it there in half the time. But even if the entire Free City of Ness had been swallowed up by a crack in the earth and dragged down to the pit of souls, no human in Redweir would hear of it and quicker than that.
The dwarves had a far more convenient method of getting messages back and forth between the two cities. That night when darkness fell, the bat would clamber out of a thin slot in the side of the box and wing toward Redweir. It knew the only way to get the objectionable piece of paper off its leg was to present itself to a certain dwarf who lived there. It would fly at full speed and arrive by dawn, when a minor clerk in the dwarven embassy at Redweir would find it just as he was headed for bed. The clerk would take the message—unread—directly to the Envoy of that city, who would know exactly how to make it legible. The Envoy would also know exactly what to do with the information Snurrin had provided:
BARBARIAN LEAVING TODAY FOR VINC MUST NOT FIND WHAT IS HIDDEN THERE THE KING GIVES THIS UTMOST PRIORITY HUMAN CASUALTIES ARE ACCEPTABLE SEND BALINT
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The band of adventurers passed through King’s Gate without any trouble—none of the guards were interested in stopping such a dangerous-looking crew from leaving the City—and before Malden knew it he was out in the world.
His reaction was immediate, and visceral.
Never, in his entire life, had he set so much as a foot outside the walls of the Free City of Ness. He was for the first time seeing that there even was a world beyond.
And it terrified him.
The land rolled like the waves of a vast ocean, a sea of tawny grain that never stopped moving under the lowering gray sky. In the distance the clouds broke and sunlight streamed down in impossibly long, straight rays to flicker on golden fields. A small army of peasants worked out there, bent over with sickles to harvest the glowing treasure. To the northeast a church stood white and straight, its spire pointing upwards like an accusing finger. It looked terribly alone in that open space, its right angles and distinct shape like some piece of Malden’s life cut loose and cast down carelessly like a plaything by some cyclopean child.
Every hour of Malden’s life to that point had been spent in narrow lanes, or climbing over rooftops, or in well-mannered parkland hampered by walls. Now there was nothing on any side of him that he could reach out and touch. If I were plucked up into the sky by some violent wind, Malden thought, and tossed out into the middle of the ocean with no land in sight, this is how it would feel. He felt exposed, naked, vulnerable in a way he distinctly disliked.
Over time this unease ebbed, though it never left him.
For hours they ambled through the fields under the blustery rain, never seeing more than the occasional distant group of laborers. The only way to measure the distance they covered was to count the mile markers that stood by the side of the road, simple piles of stones marked with the sigil of the local nobility: a crudely drawn stork or a pair of chevrons or just a simple crown. To Malden the symbols meant only one thing, really: all this land belonged to someone else. He was trespassing on someone else’s property, and if they wanted to, they could run him off.
It seemed there was no place outside the city where a man could be free, after all.
Despite his unease Malden soon found himself drowsing in his seat. He worried that if he fell unconscious he would slump and fall from the swaying wagon, and so he was almost grateful when Croy began to sing a traveling song. It was a rather sentimental tune about a knight who went out riding to do battle for his lady’s honor. Malden knew a far different version, a much lustier tale of a farmer’s lovely daughters and dragons that disguised themselves as naked women (and only gave themselves away by a certain scaliness of their skin), but he knew there would be plenty of time to sing his version later. This journey was likely to take more than a week, after all—no need to use up all his songs on the first day.
After about an hour’s travel Cythera dropped back to ride beside the wagon. “I’m surprised to see you here,” she told him, “though I’ll admit I’m rather glad.” She reached across to touch Malden’s face. “Oh. You’re hurt,” she said.
Malden shrugged, even though it pained him to do so. “’Tis a trifle only,” he told her.
“What happened?” she asked.
Malden puffed himself up and said, “A host of villainous assassins came upon me in the dark. Now, normally I would have been ready for them, but I was busy at that moment stealing the silver out of the moon, so they got first licks in before I knew what they were about. After that, of course, it was a done deal, and I left them in far worse shape than I found them.”
She laughed, which made him smile for the first time in a day.
“Boasting’s not your strength, thief,” she said. “Regardless, I’m glad you weren’t killed. Or arrested, for that matter. Was there much silver in the moon? It looks no bigger than a single coin held out at arm’s reach.”
“When matched with the gold I took from the sun, that’s still a sum worth stealing.” He glanced sideways at Croy but the knight made a good show of paying no attention to their talk. He was busy singing, anyway, and was deep into a verse about the virtue of courtly love, so Malden felt he had a little liberty to spend. “I must say, if you’re surprised to see me, I’m doubly so to see you. I didn’t think you were prone to Croy’s nature of folly.”
“I’ve spent my whole life working for my father or my mother, almost every day of it inside Ness’s walls. I wished to see the world one time before I was married. Once I am pregnant with Croy’s get, there will be no more opportunities of this sort.” She looked away from him and added, “Besides, there were certain temptations I wished to leave behind me,” she said.
“Like me,” he said.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she told him, looking straight ahead.
Malden shook his head. “I saw the way you hesitated when you tried to sign the banns. You aren’t sure of your own heart, are you?”
“Malden … we’ve spoken of this before. You know my mind’s made up. When we return to Ness I’ll marry Croy. My life’s course is sure and steady before me, straighter even than this road.”
“I’ll believe it when I see you wed,” he told her.
Her eyes flashed when she turned to look at him. Her mouth set in an angry line. If she’d possessed her mother’s gift for magic, he imagined she might have cursed him until his skin turned inside out, then and there. Instead she could only glare.
He met her gaze, measure for measure. When she refused to take the bait, however, he eventually looked away. After a bit of riding in silence alongside him, she spurred her horse and went back to riding in front of the wagon, by Mörget’s side. It seemed their conversation was done.
The day passed, as days spent traveling in the rain will, with little talk and much brooding. When no one joined his song, Croy eventually fell quiet, though still he smiled as the road passed beneath them. Malden had never seen the knight happier. Even Mörget seemed listless and irritable when faced with the prospect of endless miles of plodding through mud and cultivated fields. Of them all, only Croy kept his spirits high, despite the rain.
