Den of thieves

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Warm gusts of air chased up the shaft and made Malden’s hands sweat until he could barely hang onto the rope. The shaft was narrow enough that he could walk his way down, keeping his feet pressed against one wall while he climbed down hand over hand, but the walls were slick with condensation and gave little purchase to his soft shoes. For the first fifty feet or so of the descent he was in near total darkness, but as he passed the halfway point, the light from below grew strong enough that he could see the water forming thick, greasy droplets that held for a moment, then streaked down the walls around him.

From below he could hear the roaring of warm air as it rushed up the shaft. And something else-something he had dreaded as he came down the narrow chimney, something he had formed a fledgling hope he would not hear at all. A quiet moaning, the fatigued sighs of a prisoner. He had hoped that the clamor in the courtyard would have brought the gaolers of the dungeon running. That when he reached the dungeon, he would find it empty of guards. Judging by the continued sounds of torment issuing from below, that hope was forlorn. Getting down into the dungeon was going to be the easy part. Dealing with its occupants might be decidedly more difficult.

One problem at a time, he told himself, and kept descending.

The light was not enough to reveal the bottom of the shaft until he was almost upon it. When he reached the last few feet of his rope and peered down with great curiosity to see where he would land if he just let go, his heart flipped over his chest.

The floor at the bottom of the shaft was studded with spikes. Iron spikes mounted securely, three feet long and worked to nasty sharpness.

Reaching the end of the rope, he hung onto it by one hand with his feet stretched down as far as they could go. Seven feet of empty air still remained between him and those wicked points. If he just let go, the fall would not break his legs but he was like to be skewered.

He had no more rope to tie to the end, nor anything to extend his descent. Twenty feet of good stout cord were wrapped around the hilt of his bodkin, but it was not strong enough to hold his weight.

Malden ran one hand down the wall of the shaft next to him. It had been cut through solid rock with metal tools that left marks in its surface, no more than shallow dents-hardly enough to get his fingers or toes into. Yet perhaps if his strength had not completely left him

…

He braced his feet against one wall as best he could, then pushed against the opposite wall with one hand. If he kept his legs bent and his arm straight, he could just about hold his weight up against the force of gravity. And if he used both hands, and if he was headed downward-it would not be a graceful descent. It would be more like a barely controlled fall. But that was better than an uncontrolled plummet.

It took a great deal of courage to let go of the rope. Malden might have been indolent, and not a valiant fighter, but when his life was in jeopardy, he rarely lacked for boldness. He let go of the rope and thrust both hands out against the wall at the same time, bracing himself in the shaft. The impact of his hands on the wall made a wet slapping sound that echoed up and down the walls, but he did not have time at that point to stop and listen to hear if anyone remarked on the sound. He was too busy rushing down toward the spikes, his feet and hands clutching at the tool marks on the walls for whatever small purchase they offered.

The rough wall tore and picked at his hands, already sore from the long climb up the wall of Castle Hill. The air rushing past him whispered of doom and folly and why there were so few old thieves. His teeth pulled back in a terrible rictus as he smashed his feet and hands again and again into the walls, trying anything, anything at all, to slow his descent.

The spikes hurtled toward him like javelins. If he didn’t time this perfectly Just as his hands reached the bottom of the shaft and ran out of wall to grip, Malden ducked his head and kicked hard with his legs against the stone. He shot forward through the air, narrowly clearing the spikes, and curled himself into a ball as he made contact with the floor beyond them, to perform a perfect somersault and wind up sitting on the floor, his breath whooping in and out of his lungs.

“Wuzzat?” someone said. Someone nearby. Someone whose voice suggested to Malden that he would be quite a bit larger than himself. A slow shuffling step started toward him, drowning out the tired wails of the unseen prisoner.

Malden looked around him in a panic, searching for a place to hide. There was none whatsoever. He had dropped into a narrow room with a vaulted ceiling-a ceiling from which hung sundry articles of iron, many of them with sharp points, others made of heavy chain. The tools of a torturer. The shaft’s opening was just a square of darkness on the ceiling, the spikes inconspicuous among so much hardware. Arches led away in four directions, with light coming from cressets set between each arch. Beyond one arch lay a flight of stairs heading up-surely the normal method for accessing this underground hell. The echoing footsteps came from another arch. He could have gone left or right and hoped the torturer was slow enough in chasing him-but he saw a better idea and took it. Jumping to his feet, he ran backward up the stairs until he reached the first landing, then walked back down them at a more leisurely rate.

As the torturer ducked through the arch, the man would only see him coming down the stairs as if he had just arrived.

“Who the blazes’re you?” the torturer asked when they came face-to-face. He was an enormous man, though not overly tall, his body bloated and lumpy, his hair falling out in clumps. He looked half like an ogre and half like something that should not have been able to crawl out of its sickbed.

“The new kitchen boy,” Malden said. “I was sent down to fetch you. Fire’s broken out above, and they need every man to help put it out. Hurry, you must get up there at once! Are there any others down here who can also help?”

“Just me.” The torturer’s mouth fell open and his eyes turned to slits. Malden had the impression he was squinting at him. The big man already had a massive wen over his left eye, so it was hard to tell. Other purplish growths adorned his chin and one side of his neck, like a grotesque beard half shaved. “Fire, you say? No great concern of mine, that. Naught to burn down here.”

“Nor any other way out but these stairs,” Malden insisted, hoping very much this was not true. “If the palace falls down on top of us-”

“Oh,” the torturer said, his right eye opening wide. “Oh! Fire! I’d best get up there, see what I can do to help!”

He rushed past Malden on his way up the stairs, nearly knocking him down. Malden cheered him on as he thundered up the risers. Then he darted through the arch the torturer had just vacated, intent on finding another way out before the brutish man thought to wonder why a man of his age was working as a kitchen boy.

He had not gotten more than a dozen strides into the dungeon, however, before someone called out to him.

“You! Yes, you-ye’re Cutbill’s man, ain’t you? Thank the Lady, ye’ve come to rescue me!”

Malden considered keeping on, ignoring the cry for aid. Had he truly been one of Cutbill’s thieves, those honorless blackguards (whom he had been doing his level best lately to emulate), he would not have faltered in a single step. But he was, in some ways, still his mother’s son. He turned aside from his path and went to look for the man who’d called him.