For one terrible moment he hung there, gently swaying back and forth. Then he kicked out once, twice, finding the wall with the balls of his feet.
Hand over hand, like he’d practiced in the Clave, Rags lowered himself down the vine.
It was like being swallowed, traveling down the gullet of an enormous beast. Folklore said the fae had lived alongside the Ancient Ones, made dwellings from their bones. Those massive creatures who had roamed the world in its infancy and left their remains to fortify mountains, channel streams, cup the oceans, seed the forests.
Rags wasn’t superstitious about the dead, but a bad feeling followed him in this place like eyes on the back of his neck.
He’d only wriggled down the height of two men before the dark gobbled him whole, abruptly shutting out the sight of Morien and the Queensguard. A lesser thief might’ve yelped in surprise. Rags held his tongue by biting its tip, sharpening his focus with a touch of pain. Cold, clammy under the collar, like a first-year pickpocket. It followed that he’d revert to one of their tricks, distracting himself from his nerves with a bit of verse.
Oberon comes when the moons are high—
No, that wasn’t the kind of rhyme that brought comfort in the bowels of a fae ruin. His bootsoles scraped the pit wall as he rappelled down. Grit fell and vanished into the darkness. The vine flexed, metal supple under his fingers. What would a single polished leaf be worth?
Time for another rhyme, one about shiny secrets, not a litany of terrible things Oberon could do to lesser creatures.
Rags hummed to hear the sound echoing downward into silence. Not every bit of doggerel about the fae was a warning. Some were promise.
He buried fae treasure, all silver and blood,
Deep in the earth, where sleeping things grow.
Measure by measure comes Oberon’s flood,
More precious than gold, so final the blow.
A hidden fortune sleeping beneath the earth was something Rags could get behind.
Pleased with himself and unused to the sensation, he nearly missed the hairline fracture in the wall. He stopped sharp, already past it, running the sensitive pads of his fingers back over the space. The seam traveled in a perfect line.
Cut, not cracked.
Few others would have noticed it, but Rags’s fingers were smarter, more sensitive. He’d trained them to pick out intricate but minute differences in any surface. He’d found an important one here, a groove in the stone. A thin, thin break, traveling down.
Rags chased it down to where it stopped at a pointed tip, drawn upward again on either side in a sharp V.
Didn’t need to be a genius thief and expert lockpick to recognize the shape.
An arrow.
Rags lowered himself down the vine after it, found a circle of slippery-smooth stone below its point. When he settled his thumb against it, it depressed. Lights flooded on around him.
A lot of them.
His eyes adjusted to the shape the lights made: more arrows. Everywhere. Glowing seams in the stone walls. They filled the pit, flowing together and apart, a flock of identical geometries carved into the rock. Each of them pointed down.
The vine that was Rags’s lifeline shifted, stretched, a breathing thing. He yelped as it slithered around his arm and away, spooling out beneath him in clockwork circles around the pit’s walls. Rags dropped, scrambling for purchase, before landing on a jutting ledge of stone barely wide enough to hold him.
A narrow crack in the rocky wall to squeeze through.
An obvious pathway. How hospitable.
His time on the streets had taught him to be wary of too much help.
“Little eager for me to head that way, aren’t you?” Rags said aloud.
In response, a real arrow shot through the air. Made entirely of silver, it narrowly missed taking off the end of his crooked nose.
“Shit,” Rags said.
All he had breath for.
The arrows came in volleys of three, fired from every direction. Rags had scarcely ducked one before the next whisked past him, nicking his sleeve, lodging in stone.
The metal barbs left behind something black and sticky on his shirt. Poison? Rags sniffed it, then flared his nostrils at the acrid scent. Hawkshade.
If it got into his blood, he’d rot from the inside out.
Rags knew a man in the Clave who dabbled in toxins. The stuff messed with his head and he was always rattling off distracted ditties about his flowers. Silverseal caused shakes and blindness. Powdered redbell could make someone bleed to death inside before they showed a single outward symptom. Felltooth, a tasteless paralytic, stopped the heart last, kept it beating so a man could feel each part of himself die.
Hawkshade offered a quick end, without subtlety or suffering.
Morien wouldn’t save Rags if he were poisoned. He’d find another thief, had probably left the bodies of Rags’s predecessors to prove that.
Fine.
Rags could save himself. He always did. He squeezed through the crack in the wall, stumbling out into a tunnel.
More arrows.
Bent double at the waist to avoid the first volley, half falling into a crouch and weaving to avoid the next.
Where were they coming from? The walls themselves?
“Poison,” Rags reminded himself sharply as he dodged another arrow, this one tearing his shirt at the small of his back. The refrain kept him keen. “Poison, poison, poisonpoisonpoison.”
Scrambling down the narrow path, moving without looking at his feet—had to keep his eyes on the arrows—Rags stumbled as the ground evened out under him.
At the bottom already?
Glancing up to see where he’d come from, Rags snapped into a roll that saved him from a skewering. Arrows pinged too close to his face. He rolled back onto his feet and plunged forward, past an archway of glowing arrow shapes cut into the walls, a volley of real arrows firing from them.
No light at the end of the tunnel. The door there sealed shut, same as Corpse-y’s door. The constant assault of projectiles meant no opportunity for thoughtful examination. Rags was in constant motion, rappelling off the walls and floors, leaping like a flea from one orphan to the next.
There had to be something that triggered the arrows. They hadn’t been firing when he first descended. His presence had tripped the attack.
How?
Rags shifted his attention to the walls and ceiling, spaces visible between the paths carved through the air by silver-fleet arrows.
There was a pattern to their firing. Like the steps of a complicated dance, they kept their own time. Rags breathed with their rhythm, fell into it, bobbing and lunging toward the end of the tunnel.
There was a pattern on the walls, too. What had once been a series of jagged V’s pointing haphazardly in the same direction now looked like a series of right angles on the left-hand side only. They were still V’s, but their tilt and order had grown, mimicking steps carved sideways into the rock.
Rags flung himself toward the nearest one, arms out, hands searching. His fingers caught a groove.
An arrow pinged off the wall near his elbow.
This was either stupid or brilliant. Rags ascended sideways along the wall, not his most graceful climb, until he’d risen bare inches above the many paths the arrows charted. One wrong placement of his hands and he’d drop back into their ceaseless volleying.
“There’d better be something incredible at the end of this,” he wheezed.
His hands were slippery with sweat as he dug his fingers in tight to the stone grooves, holding on for dear life. No thief wanted to die in the dark, speared like a prize boar.