As if in response, the vines stirred, despite the still air. Rags shoved his hands into his pockets. “If that’s true, this place won’t be easy to rob.”
“This isn’t the place. It’s the first doorway.”
Rags peered through the archway. “Aren’t the rest of the gang coming?”
“They’ll follow when it’s safe.”
“Any advice from past failures?”
Morien shrugged lightly beneath the bower. “There are doorways, and we aren’t sure how many. Your predecessors have made it past the first five. When one is opened”—Morien handed him a polished pocket mirror—“let me know.”
“What’s this for?” Rags took the slender compact between two fingers. “Can’t you wiggle your fingers and make me dance?”
The second he said it, Rags wished he hadn’t.
Morien’s eyes betrayed nothing but boredom. “This connection will prove most reliable once you are in the depths of the ruins” was all he said.
So it was true. Not only the fae themselves, but their buildings—their ruins—were magic. What else but magic could interfere with a sorcerer’s power?
Rags regretted his quick decision to hunt Lord Faolan’s treasure.
Not that he’d had another choice.
“Not gonna tell me how the others made it through the first two doors, huh?”
“Figure it out yourself and consider it practice.”
Something twinged in Rags’s chest. It hurt, but he wouldn’t show how bad. On the streets, any sign of weakness was a signal to others: Easy pickings.
He shrugged and stepped under the archway. There he found an enormous flagstone, the first in a path. Veins of ore in the marbled rock thinned into age rings.
There were a lot of rings.
Surrounding him, like judgmental sentinels, the tall trees’ needle-thin branches twisted in unnatural shapes, embracing nothing but damp, woodsy air. Like an empty frame, its painting stolen.
There had been something grand here once. The archway he’d stepped under had only been the outer gate of something much, much bigger, the shape of which could still be traced by the way branches bent out of the way of its memory. As Rags followed the path, he tried to imagine the ancient structure, now less than ruin, that had so warped the trees. He stepped lightly, expecting the first trap immediately, but the path carried him forward, footfall by footfall, without trying to kill him.
Lull him into a false sense of security. Get him to drop his guard.
Not going to happen.
A stone missing from the path gave Rags pause, made him look back over his shoulder. Morien waited on the other side of the arch. He hadn’t followed Rags through.
Back to the break in the pathway. Rags poked it lightly with one toe, testing if it would hold or open up beneath his weight, if the vines and roots would snarl out at him and drag him away.
Nothing.
Rags stepped over it onto the next stone.
The silence in the ruins wasn’t bad compared to the nothingness of Morien’s blindfold. Rags could hear the sounds his boots made when they touched the ground. He was fine.
Then the earth began to rise around him and he stopped short. He was descending, the ground he stood on a platform, slowly lowering him. The earth was swallowing him, sort of. Flanking him on both sides were walls of dirt veined with silver and slabs of ghost-white rock. Arches like ribs, or teeth. It was like being guided into the warm, open mouth of a beast from legend. And the beams, or bones, whatever they were, glowed in spots, lighting his way forward.
He wouldn’t have objected to having a sorcerer with him for this.
Rags licked his lips, prodding the scabbed-over split with his tongue. The old itch to touch, to feel everything around him so he could learn what made it tick had his fingertips twitching, but years of training and better instincts kept his hands at his side. In a place where the vines would kill you for fondling them, he couldn’t be reckless. Not even to see if the ribbed wall arches were as smooth as they looked.
Fae-work. Definitely. The real deal, not the knockoffs you could buy for cheap in back alleys: Chunk off the base stones of the fabled Lone Tower, prevents colds, wards off the plague, cures back trouble, wear it around your neck and impress your friends!
Swindlers, preying on the superstitious. Not like Rags, who stole honestly, never pretended to be anything more than a thief.
Which had led him here, into this dark cavern, glints of blue light drawing him deeper into the ruin. The shapes they formed were like eye sockets in skulls, rows of teeth, long fingers pointing him on.
A crypt, Rags suspected. Where the dead were buried with their treasures. Legends told of the fae’s last stand at the Lone Tower, and plenty of dead fae warriors meant plenty of unguarded treasure.
Treasure Rags was here to find, take, and trade for his life.
Rags didn’t know where in the lost fae lands Morien had led him, but wouldn’t it be a sidesplitter if he was actually exploring the real Lone Tower—a sneaky flea crawling through the stacked pages of ancient history?
Until the path stopped—was stopped—by a solid silver door. To its left, a few-months-old corpse slumped into itself, knees to chest.
The first test.
Rags folded his legs under him and sat. The door had the answers. Somewhere.
And Rags had to find them, unless he wanted to join Corpse-y over there in lifeless eternity.
8
Rags
Rags knew better than to simply push the door open. After a few proper once-overs, he noticed handprints etched into its silver filigree, a pattern so fine he had to tilt his head to one side, squint hard, to see it. Four pairs of handprints overlapped at the top of the door, while a pair in the center touched fingertip to fingertip, all of them significantly larger than Rags’s hands. None of them revealed a clue—not one Rags could read, at least—to how to open the door and not die. Or how to open the door at all, death included.
Rags held his hand up to the last of the prints without touching the surface of the door. His thumb pointed downward, like a sign for no luck, you’re fucked.
Hands. It had something to do with hands. It didn’t take a genius to land on that hope, since there was no visible lock, nothing to pick. Rags gingerly felt his way around the frame without touching the door itself to see whether there were loose parts or a stone he needed to push, like the one he’d stepped on to lower him into the earth.
Nothing.
He was going to have to touch the door eventually.
He glanced, not for the first time, at the corpse. “Wouldn’t mind some help.”
The corpse, being dead, had no answer. But a worm inched out of its hair, down the fall of black, onto its shoulder.
The corpse was dressed well. Most corpses of Rags’s acquaintance weren’t. In Cheapside, the dead were covered with whatever cloth scraps their neighbors had to spare. A tattered shirt, a stained old handkerchief, someone’s torn trousers. It was traditional to shroud the dead until they were carted off for burial.
It gave the corpses some dignity back after being picked clean by thieves.
The worm approached Rags’s boot, then started back slowly the way it had come, inching up a leg and into the folds of the corpse’s sleeve. Rags told himself he was better than this, better than getting stuck at only the first doorway.