Den of thieves

Chapter Twenty-One

The crown-technically a coronet-was not a work of great art in itself. It was a plain circlet of gold, crenellated in the same pattern as the Free City’s walls. No jewels adorned it, nor was it lined in fur, nor was anything engraved upon it. It was the crown of a leader of free men, not a king who ruled serfs, and so it was not meant to glorify unduly its wearer or set him apart from the common weal.

Honestly, to Malden it looked a little cheap. Even the head of the fuller’s guild wore more ceremonial gold than was in the city’s coronet.

But of course the crown had far more symbolic value. It could only be worn by a Burgrave. It was the symbol of his lordship, the image of his right to rule the city as he pleased. It was what separated him from the citizens, what imbued him with all of his power. The Burgrave wore it every time he went out in public-when he led civic processions, when he sat to watch a tourney, when he handed down judgments in the law courts. He’d worn it the day Malden saw him in Market Square, the day he’d condemned that blond fool to death. The crown was the Burgrave’s power.

Malden was dimly aware in his untutored way that he lived in a kingdom called Skrae, that beyond the Free City’s walls there was a grand feudal system of nobility with, at its head, a single monarch who had granted the city its charter and appointed the Burgrave’s great-great-etcetera-grandfather to be the city’s ultimate ruler. He had never paid taxes to that particular king, and had certainly never seen him. Even the portrait stamped on the larger denominations of money in the Free City was not that of the king, but of one of said king’s distant ancestors. Inside the city’s walls, the Burgrave was the only power that mattered, and Malden didn’t care a jot for anything outside them.

The Burgrave ruled by the authority invested in the crown. A thief who could take the crown away would be sending a message: that the Burgrave’s authority was not sacrosanct. That in Ness, in the so-called Free City, every man was vulnerable and no man was truly better-superior-to another.

Malden kind of liked that idea. He’d grown up the son of a whore, a man with no status whatsoever. A man who wasn’t even respectable enough to clean the Burgrave’s privy. That he could strike such a blow was a great triumph for the equality of men. It would be justice, of a sort. Of course, no one could ever know that he had achieved the theft, more’s the pity.

As for the Burgrave, how much would he pay to keep its theft a secret? Surely that was the point of this ridiculous scheme. To extort the Burgrave for as much as his position was worth. It was certainly a dangerous plan, no matter what Bikker said, but still it seemed like it could be quite lucrative.

Malden was now close enough to the crown to reach out and grab it. The tower room was almost empty. Its walls were lined with old campaign banners and tattered flags. Its floor was strewn with sand that ground noisily under his feet. Of furniture, the room possessed a single piece, set exactly in its center: a simple stone pedestal, atop which sat a crystal bowl three feet in diameter.

The bowl was full to its brim with clear water. Inside the bowl, magnified strangely by its curvature, was the crown-and something else.

Cythera had given him one last piece of advice when they planned this theft together. “Such a treasure will always be guarded, of course. It cannot be left alone and unsupervised at any time. Yet I doubt you will find human guardians inside the chamber. Most likely it will be some variety of cursed beast or even a demon, bound to the defense of the crown. Such a creature will perhaps be the hardest obstacle you must overcome.”

“Is this what you meant?” Malden asked now, whispering to himself as he watched the thing in the bowl squirm around in its tiny prison. It was a pulpy thing, with leprous skin and long boneless arms. It looked somewhat like an octopus, though it had no head that he could see, nor suckers on its tentacles. A particularly flexible starfish, perhaps.

Malden could easily have held it in his hand. As he watched, it writhed its way through the crown, wrapping one oozing arm around the golden band. He supposed, if he were feeling especially fearful (and he was, after his near brush with the pit in the corridor outside), that the beast might possess deadly venom. Or teeth-somewhere-sharp enough to take his finger at the joint, should he be so foolish as to reach into the bowl with a bare hand.

He had a better idea. He took the grappling hook from where it hung on his belt and paid out a few feet of rope. Then he dipped the hook into the bowl and fished for the crown. The spineless creature attacked the hook immediately, grasping at it with all of its legs at once, thrashing so hard at this intruder that it caused the bowl to rock back and forth on its pedestal. Malden tried to pull the hook free but the little monster’s grip was strong as steel. Struggling against it merely aggravated the bowl’s swaying motion.

“Release, you tiny bastard,” he grunted, and yanked the hook free of its assailant. It came clear-but not without knocking the bowl completely off its perch. It fell from the far side of the pedestal and crashed upon the sandy floor with a noise so enormous that Malden was certain it must have alerted half the guards on Castle Hill.

He held his breath. He closed his eyes to try to hear better. No shout came to his ears, however, nor any sound of men rushing toward the tower. When he was certain it was safe, he opened his eyes and stepped around the pedestal to retrieve the crown.

The tentacle creature still had it, however, gripped in one unsolid arm. It flopped impotently on the floor in the wreckage of its bowl and a puddle of water that was already soaking into the sand. It was strange-but had the thing not looked smaller when it was in the bowl? Now it was larger than the crown it held, whereas before it had appeared smaller.

No matter. Malden drew his bodkin from its sheath. He did not wish to have it sting or bite him, so he supposed he would have to just kill it and take its prize by force. Not the way he normally chose to operate, but It was definitely bigger. Even as he watched, it seemed to swell. It was hard to say for certain with such an amorphous blob of a creature, but he was certain it was as big now as a dog. One of its flailing arms brushed across his shoe and he jumped back. It was like a sponge, which grows when full of water, Malden thought. With every squirming undulation of its being, it seemed to expand in size. Its arms were long enough to grasp the top of the pedestal, now. To grab Malden’s belt if he wasn’t careful.

He stepped quickly around it, looking for something to stab. It had no head, nor any eyes, nor even a body in the proper sense. It was more like a clutch of snakes all tied together in knots than a singular being. He took a swipe at one of its arms and connected but did it no injury-its flesh was rubbery and shied away from the point of his bodkin without so much as a scratch appearing on its mottled skin.

Not like a sponge placed in water, he realized, but the opposite. Water kept the foul thing in a manageable size, hence the crystal bowl. When it was exposed to air instead, it swelled-and the larger it got, the faster it seemed to grow.

It was as big as a horse suddenly. Much bigger than himself. Its arms smashed across his shoulder, his knee, his face. Battered and confused, Malden staggered backward, back against one wall.

The thing grabbed him around the waist and squeezed.