David Chandler - A thief in the night

Cythera held the lantern high to look at a collection of objects at the far end of the room. Malden went to her side and then wondered why she bothered. Unlike the gold and gems in the cases, these works didn’t seem like treasures at all. Bolts of linen stood next to barrels of perfectly normal arrows. There were pieces of driftwood polished until they shone like glass, and plain bottles of clear liquids, and pieces of rotting parchment inscribed with simple runes. Yet these mundane pieces were mounted and displayed with as much care and ostentation as the finest jewels and the best gem-inlaid cloisonne. Most surprising were the stones. Simple, spherical stones-a lot of them-that shone in the light for the smoothness of their surfaces, but were made of common granite, basalt, or limestone. Malden accounted them little more valuable than pebbles washed smooth by a river.

“What’s this dross?” he asked. “It’s hardly treasure.”

“To the dwarves who made those things, they were worth more than all the fucking gilt and samite in this room,” Slag said, and nodded at Cythera. “Lass, you know your runes well enough, but you misread the name of this place. This ain’t the Hall of Treasures. It’s the Hall of Masterpieces. It’s understandable, though-in my language, the words are almost identical.”

“Masterpieces,” Malden said. “Like a journeyman would make?” In the guilds that ran Ness’s many workshops and yards, there were three basic ranks of worker: apprentice, journeyman, and master. To attain the rank of master a journeyman was required to create some piece of especially fine work-a perfectly balanced sword, a cloak dyed a new color, or the like-which proved he’d learned his trade.

“Exactly like that,” Slag agreed, “except we take it more serious. When a dwarf figures out what craft he’ll follow-stonework, goldsmithing, armoring, what have you-he spends five years’ time making a perfect specimen of skill and design.”

“Five years?” Malden said. “For one piece? The masters must be slave-drivers.”

“While working on his masterpiece, a dwarf has no master. He gets no pay-he lives with his family, if they’ll have him, and sleeps on stone, and eats crusts of bread.”

“The law requires this?”

“Fucking pride requires it! A dwarf with a second-rate masterpiece will never be able to look another dwarf in the eye. The masterpiece makes the man, do you see? Everyone knows how it turns out, and everyone judges the dwarf based on what they’ve seen. Reputation means everything to us. Yon shiny balls of stone you sneer at, Malden, are the credentials of a generation of the finest miners and sappers that ever lived. They were cut down from blocks bigger than this room, cut and worked and smoothed out until they were as round as the sodding moon. There’s a long tradition of dwarves competing to see who could carve the most perfect sphere.”

Cythera picked up one of the pieces of polished driftwood. “That this would even last eight hundred years without rotting is a miracle,” she said. She held it high so Malden could see it had been varnished so many times it seemed to be embedded in a thin layer of glass. “Five years of work, on this one piece…”

“Methinks that dwarf picked the wrong career,” Malden said, shrugging. He was a thief, and he found the thought of so much hard work depressing. “All right, Slag, we’re suitably awed. Now-which of these curios was it that made you cross half the world?”

The dwarf slumped against the case of glassware. “It should be over there,” he said. “Five enormous barrels worth. It should be right fucking… there.”

He pointed toward a corner of the room Malden had yet to explore.

An empty corner.

“No, damn you,” Slag wheezed. “No! The book was clear. It was clear as fucking crystal! The barrels were stored here, in the Place of Long Shadows, in the Hall of Masterpieces… this is impossible. Impossible! The book said it, in black and white!”

“Books can be misprinted,” Malden suggested, though the excuse sounded lame even to him. “Or perhaps someone moved your treasure after it was published.”

“No. No!” Slag exclaimed. The force of his frustration was enough to send him into a coughing fit. “Trust me, this wouldn’t have been removed. It was supposed to still be here when the elves were sealed inside. Blast!”

“I’m so sorry, Slag,” Cythera said, and tried to rub the dwarf’s back.

Slag would not be comforted. He pulled away from her and slumped forward across a display case. “It was going to… it would have

… oh, sod it! My entire future was in those barrels. This was going to end all my miseries. It was going to put me back on fucking top. And it’s gone. It’s fucking… gone.”

“But what was it?” Malden asked. He bent low and studied the floor where the barrels had supposedly been stored. A layer of dust-thinner than he might have expected-lay on the floor, but there were five large circles of bare stone where no dust had collected. “Were the barrels full of gold dust? Or maybe assorted gems of various sizes and cuts?”

“It was… a weapon,” Slag explained. He sank down to sit on the floor. Dark rings surrounded his eyes and Malden could hear him wheezing from across the room. “I don’t claim to know how it worked, only that-it was lethal beyond anything-anything that had been seen before. The dwarves who worked here invented it… just before they left.” He shook his head and cringed in pain for a while.

“Don’t strain yourself,” Cythera said, squatting down next to the dwarf. She mopped his face with a kerchief.

Slag reached up to bat her hand away, but he was too weak to properly resist her. “We only have sketchy notes on what it was, what it… did. I won’t bore you with the details, lad. I only know it could have killed a knight in full armor from so far away he’d never see you coming. We never told the humans about it, of course-imagine the fucking disaster that might have caused, if they got their hands on it. But when the treaty was signed, and we were forbidden from

… from-” He started coughing then, long, nasty paroxysms that left his face red with congested blood.

“You didn’t want us to have that kind of power. We’d already done enough harm,” Malden conjectured. “So you didn’t want to make us more deadly? I suppose I can see that. So you sealed up this magic weapon forever, and forgot it existed. Or almost.”

“Not… not…”

“Malden, let him rest,” Cythera insisted.

The thief nodded, and decided to ask no more questions-for the nonce.

“Not magic,” Slag finally choked out. “Not… magic at all, or

… I wouldn’t…” He lowered his head to his chest.

“Just be quiet now,” Cythera said.

Slag shook his head again, though this time it was voluntary. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“What? You hardly need apologize for anything right now,” Malden told him.

Slag scowled. “I led you both here. For fucking… nothing. I owe you an explanation. Though I’m… I… I’m loath to say it. There’s some things you don’t know about me, lad. Embarrassing things I never shared. I think… think…”

Slag’s face went white again and he stared up at the door.

Carefully, painfully, he leaned forward.

“Slag, really, you need to lie down,” Cythera suggested.

The dwarf fought her hands away and this time he had the strength to do it. “I heard something. Put out the light,” he demanded in a hoarse whisper.

“But-” Cythera started, but Slag ignored her protest. He brought his own hand down hard on the flame of the lantern, snuffing it with a hiss and a curl of smoke. Malden blew out his own candle and they were left in utter darkness.