she’d done. If there were anything less than Slag’s life at stake, it would have been unforgivable. The spirits she spoke of were demons, he was certain. Denizens of Sadu’s pit of souls. The creatures Croy was oath-bound to fight against. The demons Acidtongue had been made to slay.
“No,” she said, though it sounded like she wasn’t entirely sure. “I needed their knowledge, not their physical forms. I was able to convince them to tell me what I needed to know without freeing them.”
“Then you did the right thing,” Malden assured her.
“It was difficult. The dwarves spurn all nature of magic,” she said, her voice the whisper of a page in a book being turned by an index finger, nothing more. “The… spirits were loath to help. I didn’t have the strength to convince them. So I compelled them. I compelled them, Malden. A witch does not compel. A witch bargains, cajoles, begs, tricks, cheats-never compels. Mother taught me that much. She didn’t teach me this.”
Malden understood only a little of what she was saying, but he knew she was distressed by what she’d done. He placed a hand on her back, intending to comfort her.
She flinched away from his touch.
Then she turned to face him. He saw that a streak of white had appeared amidst her sable hair.
He had seen practitioners of magic-sorcerers, not witches-deformed by congress with demons. Their faces and bodies had been distorted to perversions of the human shape. This was a very mild alteration compared to some he’d seen. Yet he understood. These slight changes were only the beginning. The process was gradual, but irreversible. Every time she used this kind of power, the changes would become more salient.
“I had a father to teach me as well,” she said.
Malden remembered holding a dagger against her naked breast. He remembered Coruth’s command, that Cythera must be slain if she chose the path of sorcery instead of the path of witchcraft. Her father’s path, rather than her mother’s.
He remembered the words Coruth had whispered to him, after she and her daughter fought off the barbarians scaling the wall. Coruth had tried to warn him that Cythera might follow her father’s path. And tell him it was not too late, even now, to put that knife through her heart, to stop her from becoming like Hazoth.
“Cythera,” he breathed.
“Do you still find me beautiful, Malden?” she asked. “Can you even look me in the eye?”
Her voice was so harsh Malden was fearful that maybe he couldn’t-that maybe even meeting her gaze would kill him on the spot. He forced himself to take her by the shoulders and look into her face. He saw nothing diabolic there, nothing dangerous. She was still Cythera. Still the woman he loved. “You’re as beautiful as ever,” he said, and he meant it.
She gasped as if he’d utterly surprised her. Then she turned away and shook her head. “Soon I’ll have to start wearing a veil,” she told him. Veils were the traditional garb of sorcerers. Her father had worn one.
“No. Just promise me you’ll never use that power again.”
“What if it had been you lying on that table? Or Croy? I wouldn’t have hesitated. I won’t, when your time comes.”
Malden looked past her, to see Slag lying in a peaceful sleep on the table. His burns were still pink and tender, the color of fresh scar tissue. Many of his hurts were gone altogether. His skin was pale white, the color of a corpse-but that was just the skin tone of a healthy dwarf.
Where his left arm had been, where there was only ragged meat before, there was now smooth flesh, free of scars or blemishes. It looked like he’d been born with only one arm.
“You did what you had to do,” Malden said. “You did this because I asked you to.”
“He’s my friend, too,” she told him. He tried to hold her but she pushed him away. “Look,” she said.
Slag’s eyes fluttered open. For a moment they remained unfocused, and Malden thought the dwarf would lapse back into unconsciousness. Then a weird vitality seemed to wash through him, all his muscles jumping at once, his eyes rolling wildly in their sockets. His lips pressed together, then opened again. He sat up and started to babble.
“The vessel, it’s cast but-but I didn’t have time to sound its impurities, it could shatter under the stress. And no time to make the projectile, I’ll have to use-but the overpressure-wadding, maybe, perhaps a striking plate, except-except-the tunnels! We have to check the tunnels!”
Chapter One Hundred Six
Malden looked to Cythera. She was drained, and worse than that, she was wrestling with something inside her he couldn’t begin to comprehend. She couldn’t meet his eye, couldn’t so much as look at him. What had he done to her? What had he done to Slag? He had wanted to save Ness. Was it worth destroying everyone he loved?
“Lad! Come with me! We must check the tunnels-there was something-something,” Slag said, bubbling with new strength. With desperation, too. “Something different. We need to go. We need to go now.”
Malden reached for Cythera’s arm.
“Go with him, Malden. Go do what you do best,” she said.
“And what in the name of all that’s good in the world is that?” he asked her.
“Go be smart. Be devious. Find the way to save us all,” she told him.
“Lad! Come with me, now!” Slag insisted.
Malden went with the dwarf. What else could he do?
They hurried through the streets, Slag leading the way, still muttering to himself about dangers and fears and the rate at which burning gases expanded in a closed vessel. Malden heard none of it. He allowed himself to be led and asked no questions.
“Make a big show of it,” Slag said. Whatever foul magic Cythera had used to save his life seemed to be burning within him still, disordering his thoughts even as it filled him with boundless energy. “Maximize the surprise involved-only way to benefit from-they’ll think twice, is what it’s worth. My arm,” he said, suddenly. “I’m missing a fucking arm.”
Malden’s thoughts came to an abrupt stop. He stood there in the cold air and stared in horror at the dwarf. Had Slag just noticed his arm was missing? Perhaps he had forgotten all about the explosion. Perhaps it had been a mistake to wake him.
“There was a great fire in your workshop,” Malden explained. “Like an eruption of the pit. I pulled you out of there but you had already lost your arm. Cythera couldn’t give you a new one.”
Slag stared down at his shoulder for a while, as if he could find the arm there if he looked for it hard enough. Then he sighed, and some of his manic energy drained from him. “I remember, lad. I remember the light, the heat of it. This is what it cost me, eh?” Then he looked up at Malden with a wicked grin. “Good thing I have a spare. Come on, we’re wasting time.”
The entrance to Slag’s countertunnel was in the cellar of a house on the western edge of the city, hard by the Ryewall. Once, the cellar had been used for storing roots and preserved meat against winter’s hunger, but all that food had been commandeered long since. Now the room was given over entirely to sacks of dirt, tailings from the tunnel below. If the barbarians broke through into the countertunnel and tried to use it to enter the city, the sacks could be toppled down into the tunnel mouth, sealing it instantly.
Slag took a lantern from a pile by the mouth and held it while Malden lit it. Then the two of them headed down the steep slope into the countertunnel. Its ceiling was so low Malden had to stoop, its walls rough, as no effort had been made to smooth them. Tree roots reached out from those walls to snatch at his cloak as they hurried along, squeezing past the hastily placed timbers that kept the tunnel from collapsing under the weight of the earth above them.
The countertunnel was not particularly long. It didn’t need to be. The barbarian sappers had already tunneled under the city wall, and were working, Slag had told Malden, on digging a series of parallel tunnels that would further weaken the stones above. As they came to the end of the countertunnel, Malden saw a number of bowls full of wine set upon the floor.
Ripples formed on the surface of each, then the wine stilled again. After a moment new ripples formed, and then stilled. The pattern repeated without cease. “They’re digging right now,” Malden said.
“Aye,” Slag told him. The dwarf grabbed a pick from where it lay on the floor. “Day and night. They’re in a
