darkness beyond him in every direction.
He turned to look behind him and could just see the door he’d come through. Standing next to it was its twin. Morget stood framed by the light coming in through that door-it seemed both doors opened on the same chamber. Croy wanted to call Morget out to join him but dared not make noise. He could hear nothing but the omnipresent sound of dripping water and the roaring of the air as it rushed past his ears. There could be a host of demons all around him, with slavering jaws and squirming tentacles, but if so they were not pressing their attack.
After considering his options for a moment, he headed back to the barricade room. “All right,” he whispered, “everyone, come with me. But we must remain absolutely silent!”
He had no idea what was out there in the enormous room. Yet it would be foolish to simply wait in the barricade room for the enemy to arrive. He would look for another defensible spot, one the unseen opponents wouldn’t be watching.
The five of them moved in absolute silence-or as close as they could manage. Morget’s arsenal rattled and clanged under his cloak, and Slag’s tools jangled in his purse. They headed left, along the one wall Croy had found, the outer wall of the barricade room. The wall was made of white brick, roughened here and there by centuries of dripping water. Croy had expected to follow it to another wall soon enough, but after a hundred feet or so he found nothing. The wall seemed to go on forever, featureless and unchanging save that every twenty feet it was braced with a massive column, ten feet square, that ran straight up into the darkness over their heads.
He kept going. After passing another five columns, he saw Malden waving to get his attention. Croy nodded, but placed a finger across his lips to indicate the thief should remain silent.
Malden grimaced in annoyance, then set his lantern down and pantomimed what he’d wanted to say. He held up one hand flat, the fingers pointing straight ahead, then pushed his other hand past it, curving away from it.
Croy frowned and tried to puzzle out the meaning. Then he had it. Malden was saying that the wall they followed was curved.
The knight ran his hands along the smooth bricks, trying to feel the distortion. It was very slight, and very subtle, but once he saw it, it was obvious. The wall was definitely concave. They must be inside some enormous circular room, and he had been hunting for a corner. Had he kept going, he would eventually have returned to the two doors leading into the barricade room.
Slag, watching the interplay of gestures, nodded eagerly. He took a piece of charcoal from his purse and drew a large circle on the wall. Croy nodded in approval. Yes, he thought, we are in a round room, very good.
Slag next took out a ball of string dyed with spots along its length. Croy had seen similar strings used to measure out parcels of land-the spots would be a precise distance apart, and if you knew the distance you could tell how long a given piece of property was, or how wide. The dwarf handed one end of the string to Malden, then reached up to close his fingers around Malden’s hand, indicating that the thief should hold the string tight. Then, lantern held high, Slag walked back the way they had come until Croy could barely see the dwarf’s light swinging in the distance. Slag stopped at some arbitrary-seeming point, then hurried back and drew some dwarven runes on the wall with his charcoal. Croy couldn’t read most of them but recognized some numbers.
The dwarf pulled at his beard for a while, then wrote a number along the outside of his circle. Some strange notation was involved, but Croy saw the figure 1570, and near it the fraction 22/7. Slag next drew a line across the circle, neatly bisecting it. Along this line he wrote 500. Cythera, excited by the numbers on the wall, tapped the 500 with her finger several times, and Slag nodded happily.
Then Croy understood a little of what they were doing. Slag had somehow worked out that the circular room must be five hundred feet-or yards-across. He didn’t understand enough mathematics to know how they’d reached that conclusion, but he didn’t doubt it was correct.
Cythera ran her finger along the bisecting line, stopped right in the middle and shrugged. She was asking what was in the middle of the room.
Slag frowned, then drew the dwarven spiral rune where she’d pointed. The rune of uncertainty and doubt. Cythera stood up and pointed out into the darkness, directly away from the wall.
Slag shrugged, and started walking where she’d indicated.
Croy almost called out to stop him, but caught himself in time. Instead, he set off after the dwarf. What else could he do?
Chapter Thirty-two
The five of them moved cautiously toward the center of the room. Morget moved restlessly around the rest of them, his axe always pointed toward the darkness. Slag moved forward as if there was nothing at all to worry about.
Croy wished he could feel as confident.
The Vincularium was supposed to be empty. That had been a fact of life for as long as he could remember. Every knight of Skrae knew the story of the place, and that it was shunned. The king-and the king’s father, and all his antecedents, as far as Croy knew-had always treated the place as something to be forgotten about, a legacy of a dark past no one wanted to dredge up. Everyone agreed there was no need to guard it, because no one would be foolish enough to go inside. Whether or not it was haunted was a question of theology rather than anything practical.
Yet Morget had tracked his demon here, and now they had proof they were not alone. It was not a question of whether they were in danger inside the abandoned dwarven city. It was only a question of what form that danger would take.
The weathered cobblestones under their feet were the only thing Croy could see in that dark place. His lantern illuminated nothing else for a long while as they moved, so that he almost felt they were wandering through a limitless space with a floor and no other features whatsoever-some other realm, like the pit of the Bloodgod but with less tortured souls and more of the emptiness of pointless existence. He could imagine such a place as the afterlife for those who had been neither good nor evil while alive, those who had accomplished nothing at all. The thought sent a shiver down his back. For a man like Croy, who endeavored always to make the world a better place, such inactivity and pointlessness was the ultimate sin.
Such thoughts did little to ease his anticipations.
When he first spotted a faint pale outline in the distance, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. Yet as they approached, it became more distinct. Something square and light in color, maybe five feet high. When they came close enough to see it in detail, Croy thought it looked like a very small house. It had a peaked roof and plain walls. Dwarven runes were inscribed on one wall, but they were in a formal, overwrought script he could not decipher at all.
Slag saw Croy’s interest and waved to get his attention. Then the dwarf pressed his hands together as if in prayer and closed his eyes.
Thinking he understood, Croy drew a small medallion from inside his tunic. The golden cornucopia was the symbol of the Lady, and he wore it always on a chain around his neck. He had received it when he made a pilgrimage to Her shrine at Strayburn. Now, he was asking if the little house was a dwarven shrine or altar.
Slag looked confused. Then he rolled his eyes. With a sigh that sounded like a windstorm in that silent place, he lay down on the cobbles and repeated his earlier gesture, hands pressed together and eyes closed.
Croy understood then, and took an immediate step backward. The little house was a dwarven sarcophagus. Definitely something he wanted to avoid.
Unfortunately he had little choice. As they proceeded farther toward the center of the enormous chamber, more of the mausoleums appeared in their light. First a rare scattering, then more and more until they had to wind their way between the closely spaced tombs, climbing over some in places. They came in a variety of shapes and sizes-some were just slabs set into the cobbles, others stout obelisks, and one was even spherical, standing on four stout legs. Yet they were alike in their plainness and height. None were so high Croy could not see over them.
A city of dwarven dead, a field of ancient bones hidden away in the darkness under the world.
Such a place could not help but be haunted. The hair on Croy’s neck stood on end, and he wanted to be away as quickly as possible. Yet the demon must lie somewhere beyond. Only duty could get him through that terrible place.
