Honor among thieves

Chapter Seventy-Four

Malden reached up and grasped the snout of a gargoyle. It started to pull free but the iron staple that held it to the wall was still strong, even after so many years of neglect, and it took his weight. He clambered up onto its stone back and rested for a moment.

He’d had steadier climbs. He’d gone places in Ness he felt more easy. The Chapterhouse did not have a good reputation.

An octagonal building with a high spire, it was an anomaly in the Stink-one place in all that stew of humanity that no one ever went, a massive stone pile in a sea of wood and thatch, forlorn and shunned. It was supposed to be the most haunted building in the Free City, with a far more dire reputation than even the Isle of Horses, because its evil had continued to take victims long after the tragedy that cursed it.

In the early days of Ness-in the early history of Skrae-the Learned Brothers of the Lady had been a strong institution, a beacon of reason and erudition in a benighted land. They had tended to the sick and fed the poor in a time when the priests of the Bloodgod could do nothing but demand larger and more savage sacrifices. The Brotherhood had brought thousands of converts to the then new religion of the Lady. It was also rumored they possessed secrets even the dwarves had never plumbed. At Redweir they had built the Sacred Library, the greatest concentration of books and manuscripts outside of the Old Empire. In Ness they built the Chapterhouse, a meeting place for all seekers of knowledge and enlightenment. It originally stood outside the city’s precincts, protected by its own high wall. When the Free City grew, it swallowed the Chapterhouse, but the building remained cloistered and aloof. Inside its towering edifice the Learned Brothers had kept the rules of their order, and no Burgrave ever dared intrude upon their laws or customs. Rich merchants had sent their more bookish sons to the Chapterhouse to be tutored, and it became tradition that these scholars would become the distinguished professors of Ness’s burgeoning university.

Any organization of celibate men, however, will eventually fall under suspicion from more cosmopolitan minds, and the Chapterhouse was no exception. Tales were told of initiation rites that went beyond harmless hazing, of license and formalized pederasty. The once-honored title “Chapterhouse Pupil” came to be slang for a catamite. The Learned Brotherhood gained a bad reputation. How much of it the monks had actually earned was unknown, but two hundred years before Malden was born, one Jarald of Omburg came to be High Scholiast of the place, and within a year it was empty and abandoned, its doors chained shut and its fires of learning quenched.

The Burgraves had never revealed the true account of Jarald’s crimes, but Malden grew up hearing tales of hundreds of monks being driven from the city in chains, of watchmen fainting dead away at the discovery of dismembered boys inside, their wounds violated in horrible fashion. His mother had used the Chapterhouse as a bogey, warning him that if he did not behave he’d be sent there to become a student of Jarald’s ghost. It was not a toothless threat. Those few thieves or vagabonds desperate enough to try to break into the Chapterhouse had vanished without trace, and even vandals who besmirched its outer wall with graffiti were said to have been punished by spectral forces.

It took a lot to keep thieves away from any building in Ness. The city was famous for its thrice-locked doors and the dwarven traps that protected the houses of wealthy men. The Chapterhouse needed no such protections-thieves shunned it the way they shunned the gallows.

And now Malden knew he must enter its deadly confines, and plumb its darkest corners. He had been taken aback when he finally read the message Cutbill left for him. He’d seriously considered tearing up the letter and forgetting its contents. Yet it promised so much he could not resist. Properly deciphered, the

message read: FOR MALDEN SHOULD HE RETURN YOU HAVE MANY QUESTIONS I HAVE BUT ONE ANSWER COME LET US TRADE IF YOU LIKE THE TERMS I SET CLIMB TO THE ONE HEIGHT YOU NEVER YET SCALED IN ALL THE FREE CITY AND YOU WILL FIND MY TRAIL FOLLOW IT WITH CARE FOR I AM NOT UNPROTECTED FOLLOW IT AND FIND ME I WILL AWAIT YOU THERE CUTBILL

On his gargoyle perch, Malden studied the transcribed parchment one last time. It confused him more than ever, even more than when it had been a meaningless clutter of symbols. Just like Cutbill to be so cryptic-and so forbidding. Just like Cutbill to put such obstacles in his way, knowing full well he would have no choice but to overcome them. And yet how unlike Cutbill to put himself at such risk. Malden had assumed the guildmaster of thieves had fled the city like every sane man wealthy enough to do so. He had assumed Cutbill was willing to donate his entire enterprise to a young and untried thief, rather than stick around and take his chances with fate and the barbarians.

The message suggested otherwise. It suggested that Cutbill had gone into hiding-right in the middle of his own city. That Cutbill he’d been in Ness the whole time, just waiting for him to track him down.

Cutbill was playing a deeper game than mere survival. That, Malden should have expected.

He climbed higher. The steeple of the Chapterhouse was one of the highest places in Ness, even though it was well downslope from Castle Hill. The building must be twelve stories high, not including its superstructures. All of its windows and doors had been sealed off quite firmly, but Malden was certain once he reached the top he would find a way in.

Nor was he disappointed. The peak of the spire had been blasted by lightning and never repaired. One whole side of its apex had fallen away. Malden slipped inside the remaining three walls and found himself in a narrow space full of the droppings of bats, the walls woolly with cobwebs. No furniture or appurtenances remained in the room, but there was a simple trapdoor set in its floorboards. He tried lifting this portal and found that its hinges had completely rusted away. The square door fell through its jamb and clattered down through rafters and support beams below, into total darkness. Echoing up through that open space, he heard the clattering sound of gears and clockwork lurch sluggishly to life.

He had expected the Chapterhouse to be dead inside-empty, its furnishings long since rotted away, even its ghosts having eventually given up in boredom. The last thing he’d expected was the sound of well-oiled machinery turning and cranking away. What in the Bloodgod’s sacred name had Cutbill found inside? Or what had he built there himself, to confound his disciple?

Malden knew better than to expect Cutbill to come climbing up through the trapdoor and welcome him with a hearty smile. But what was down there? What game was the guildmaster of thieves playing this time?

Only one way to find out.