trap. And we know the elves were gifted in that regard.”
Malden nodded. He lifted his lantern high and looked back. The corridor had curved enough that he could no longer see the door behind him, nor anything in front of him. Judging by the echoes of his footfalls, the downward passage went on quite a ways. “It’ll be a mechanical trap. That was one advantage the humans had over the elves, superior tools and metals.” He thought of something then, something nasty. “And of course, they had the dwarves helping them, didn’t they?”
Slag looked away from his gaze. “Aye,” he said.
“I thought so. Humans didn’t put those dwarven runes on the entrance and on the block in Morget’s shaft. So the humans who drove the elves in here had dwarven allies. Which begs the question of why the elves thought they would be safe in a dwarf city.”
Slag fidgeted with a piece of wire in his hands, but eventually he answered. “For a couple reasons,” he said. “For one, we’d already abandoned this place. The whole dwarven race had moved north by then. We knew the bloody humans were going to take this whole land, so we just got out of their way rather than fighting them for it.”
“You said there were a couple of reasons,” Malden pointed out.”
“Well,” Slag said, “I suppose the elves didn’t know whose side we were on.”
“They thought you would be opposed to human intrusion as well,” Croy said, running one hand along the smooth wall of the passage.
“It probably helped that we told them as much.” Slag sighed deeply.
“What?” Malden asked, surprised.
“Eight hundred years ago, my people signed a treaty with yours. You didn’t kill us, and we wouldn’t fight you. There was more to it, of course, things we had to offer to keep you off our necks. We agreed to make steel for you, for instance. Truth be told it was a pretty lousy deal for us. We gave up a lot. But we knew it was the only fucking way we could survive.” He sighed again. Malden could tell he didn’t want to say any of this aloud, but felt he owed them all an explanation for some reason. “Before that, before we signed the treaty, we were actually allied with the elves.”
“You were?” Croy asked.
“You have to understand,” Slag went on, “when you first showed up, looking like bloody apes, waving your iron spears around and claiming this land was yours, it didn’t look like you had a chance. The elves had held this land for ten thousand years, or so the story went. We figured they’d make fucking mincemeat out of you and that would be that. So of course we allied with them. We’re a practical people, in case you missed that fact. But once you started winning-when the elves started losing battles and such-maybe we switched teams. And maybe we did it in secret, all right?”
“So when the elves came here, looking for shelter,” Malden said, “they thought you were still their allies.”
“I’m not proud of what my ancestors did, except in how if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t fucking be here right now. The elves came to us for assistance when they knew they were going to lose. When there were so few of them left that they couldn’t keep fighting. They asked us for counsel. We told them to come down here. It was a good defensible position to make a stand. It also had a back door.”
“The shaft that I found on the eastern side of the mountain,” Morget said.
“Aye. Every dwarven city has its secret exits. Usually dozens of ’em. We told the elves they could pretend to hide here, then slip out to the east. There weren’t so many humans on that side, back then. The only thing they didn’t realize was that when we abandoned this city it started flooding almost immediately. The exit shaft was already under the water table. If they wanted to get out that way, they were going to need to hold their breath for a long fucking time.”
Morget scowled. “I lost good men in that shaft. But it wasn’t enough to flood the exit,” he said.
“No. The humans didn’t think so. They didn’t want even one elf to get out. So they told us to block the shafts. We slid stone blocks down from above, just to make bloody sure no elf got out. Now, an elf might be able to swim enough to get to the shaft, but nobody could hold their breath long enough to knock their way through fifty tons of granite.”
Malden cast his mind back through the ages and shivered. They came down this way full of hope, he thought. They marched down this very corridor thinking they were on their way to a new life. And all they found was darkness and death.
He was on the threshold of the scene of a great crime, he thought. How had his ancestors slept at night, afterward?
Probably just fine. As far as they were concerned, they had finally won a long and bitter war. One act of monumental treachery meant peace and safety for all their children. Yet surely, when they thought about what they’d done…
“The poor elves,” Cythera said, her voice thick with emotion. Clearly her thoughts had tended the same way Malden’s had.
“Don’t pity them overmuch,” Croy insisted. “They were evil, after all. A decadent and cruel race. They slaughtered our missionaries in ways I won’t describe while a lady is listening. They worshipped nothing but their own ancestors. They even sacrificed their own people for magical power.”
Malden thought of what Slag had said, how he defined evil. It was what you called your vanquished enemies when you wrote the scrolls of history later. How much of what Croy said was true, and how much was made up after the fact, as an excuse for what had been done?
“What needed to be done, was done,” Morget insisted. “That’s all. You win a war any way you can, and worry about the casualties later.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
When Malden found the trap, he had to smile. It was the most elegant kind of trap, and often the hardest to find-a hazard hidden in plain sight.
The spiral passage led downward for hundreds of feet and then opened into a wide arch looking out on a natural cavern far larger than their paltry light could limn. The walls on either side of the arch were of uncut rock, rough to the touch and streaked with mineral deposits that glittered when he moved his lantern over them. The floor of the cavern was made of blocks of rough-cut basalt. He could feel how uneven they were through his soft leather shoes. It looked like the dwarves hadn’t cared enough about this chamber to ever bother finishing its construction. Malden knew how thorough dwarves were, though, and he was sure that was an intentional semblance.
Running through the middle of the cavern was an enormous crevasse in the rock, a canyon carved by some turbulent subterranean river aeons ago. He could hear water rushing by at the bottom of this defile, perhaps fifty feet below. It looked like a perfectly natural feature, a crack in the earth that even the dwarves could not heal. Malden wondered if it was more than met the eye. He tied his lantern to a rope and lowered it carefully down into the crack to get a look at its walls.
Just as he’d thought, the sides of the crevasse were smoothed out by dwarven tools. Every ledge had been rounded off, every crevice filled in with mortar. If you fell down into the crack, it would be impossible to climb back up. Yet to an uninquisitive eye, it looked perfectly natural.
The dwarves had placed a bridge across it, a wide, inviting path with high rails on either side to keep passersby from falling off the edge. A dozen men could walk abreast on the bridge-or rather, a dozen soldiers could march side by side. It looked like it could easily hold their weight. Nor was it a particularly long bridge, as the crevasse was only ten feet across.
To someone like Malden, who had spent years learning to look for subtle and carefully hidden traps, it positively screamed of danger.
He stopped Morget before the barbarian could set foot on the bridge.
“Hold,” he said. “Let me take a look, first.”
Morget scowled and studied the bridge. “It looks more sound than many a bridge I’ve crossed over in my
