For the moment, Rags gave up on the door and knelt nearer to the corpse instead, drawn by the movement of fabric that the worm managed to stir. Barely perceptible, but there.
The corpse’s pale, silken sheet of long hair spilled like a waterfall over its face, its knees. A bit much for a common thief. All flash and no substance. No wonder they hadn’t made it far.
Rags brushed the hair out of the way, then recoiled as he met empty eye sockets and black—black?—bone.
He gasped and fell backward onto his ass.
Black-boned.
It couldn’t be Oberon himself, but did that make Rags feel better?
He was staring at a dead fae.
The corpse wasn’t mere months old. Its clothing only appeared to be. There was nothing but more black bone under its sleeves, while its silver gloves, which glistened like wet flesh at the right angle, in this lighting, had deceived Rags for not yet completely rotted hands. They perched and met, fingertip to fingertip, on top of the corpse’s bony knees.
Hands.
He didn’t have to touch the door. Not risking his own fingers.
Rags grinned, calming the racing of his heart after the shock of meeting a fae skeleton. Without flinching—he knew his share of corpses and they didn’t spook him, since the dead wouldn’t fight you for a day’s earnings—he pinched the sleeve between his fingertips. The fabric was cool and sleek, light as gossamer. Some kind of Lost-Lands fae bullshit.
This place was the real deal.
No wonder a sorcerer and an Ever-Noble were so obsessed with it, needed a master thief to break them into the place.
Rags stomped on the urge to shiver. Fae stories were hundreds of years old. No living fae, no new tales to tell.
Plundering a fae tomb should be simple enough. But being in this place gnawed on him like teeth on a bone.
In a setting best suited for myths and legends, Rags was an ant scuttling through a palace.
Keep moving.
He rolled the corpse’s sleeves up to its black elbows and noticed neat silver hinges attaching them to the next bones. The metal was warm, as if it had recently been touched. Rags ran his thumb around the circumference, finding and flattening a silver disc. The forearm slid free with a sigh. Flopped into Rags’s lap soft as a kiss. Rags set it aside, freed the second forearm, then held both by the wrists as he approached the door.
The gloved hands were unusually large, the perfect size to match the etchings. Rags held them up to the handprints, took a steadying breath, and pressed forward, bony palms to empty outlines.
The door swallowed the gloves like he’d poured water onto hot sand.
9
Rags
After the door disappeared into the surrounding wall with the same liquid dissolution as the gloves, Rags was left holding two bare bone hands. Warm wind blew over him from the newly exposed path.
Though calling it a “path” was generous.
The room ahead was a chasm once spanned by a broken bridge now little more than a jagged platform. A crooked tooth in an otherwise empty mouth. The walls were decorated with the same style of arches that had surrounded Rags on his descent, only now he was going deeper, and there was nothing glowing to light his way. He could barely make out the knobbed shapes of twisting, metallic vines clinging to the stone.
Rags returned the arms to their owner—not like their owner missed them—and watched with grudging amazement as a force like magnetism drew them back, clicked to lock them into place. He set the hands on the corpse’s knees the way they had been. No point in making things hard for the next guy. Isn’t going to be a next guy. Then he rubbed his chest in thought.
When one is opened . . . let me know.
He fished the mirror out of his pocket, breathed on the glass. Wiped it clean.
“Uh,” Rags said. “I’m letting you know?”
Silence followed. Rags couldn’t make sense of whatever the connection was. Morien could reach into his head to talk outside the ruins—but not here. And he didn’t seem to know what Rags was thinking. Good. Rags couldn’t manage politeness inside and out, not at the same time.
“Hello?” Rags tapped the glass with one finger, feeling like a wet-brained idiot, when the sound of footsteps in heavy, single-file march revealed his success.
Rags turned to meet Morien and Lord Faolan’s retinue of six Queensguard, still blindfolded.
“Funny idea of company you sorcerers have.” Rags couldn’t help himself, figured he’d earned a smart remark by passing through the first door. “All those swords can’t be for me. You expecting we’ll run into something else that’ll need all that steel?”
Although Morien’s scarves swathed only the bottom half of his face, his eyes were as cool and blank as mask-glaze as he regarded Rags.
Not impressed.
“I trust you have something of value to show me.”
If there was this much secrecy to the venture, could a single shard of sorcery be enough to ensure Rags’s silence? No. There was no reason to believe death didn’t wait for him at the end of this, even if he managed to triumph where the others had failed.
Rags grimaced, pessimism having been his closest companion for the past sixteen years.
“There’s a big hole.” Rags jerked his chin toward it. “Should have brought a circus acrobat along, too. For jumping.”
Trust the fae to lock a door that opened onto nothing. From every whispered rumor and legend about the fae bastards, Rags wasn’t surprised they’d let him feel like he’d progressed, only to have him slam headfirst into another blockade.
“You’ve been nimble in past endeavors,” Morien said.
Yeah, without an audience.
Rags turned his back on the sorcerer, facing the next chamber. Pit of agony? It was too dark to tell how deep down the hole went. He edged onto the silver path. Impossible to figure out what supported it. What supported him. Rags eyed the vines on the wall. He was slender, skinny. This had aided him in his chosen profession on many occasions in the past. No reason that couldn’t continue.
“Question,” Rags said. Morien’s silence encouraged him to proceed. “How murderous are those vines?”
The sorcerer didn’t deign to respond.
“Guess I’ll find out for myself,” Rags said, and reached for the nearest one.
10
Rags
The vine he chose didn’t try to kill him.
But the edges of the leaves were sharp, almost serrated, like a torturer’s knife. They also folded, which Rags only discovered after he’d nicked his thumb at first touch. A warning before he discovered the trick to not slicing himself into ribbons.
Lovely and deadly, in keeping with what Rags knew about the fae.
Rags gave the vine a sample tug to see if it would hold—it held—then stepped onto the broken bridge. Its surface was slippery-smooth, like glass. He took a deep breath, wrapped the vine around one arm at the elbow, the wrist.
“This is nothing,” Rags lied to himself.
He’d scaled Ever-House spires, their walls slick, purchaseless polished marble. He’d danced around the wrought-iron spikes lining their tiled roofs.
Climbing up was ten times easier than going down.
But there was no preparation adequate for leaping into a fae-made precipice toward your apparent doom. Rags closed his eyes before realizing that didn’t help, either, and finally eased himself backward off the silvery edge of the half bridge into the darkness below.