He searched the wall around the niche, looking for some hidden panel that would open to admit him to the tower. He could find none. He tapped the wall with the pommel of his bodkin, thinking to find any kind of hollow or thin place in the wall through which he might break through, but the wall seemed to be made of solid stone, of the same thickness throughout.
It was only after this exhaustive and pointless search that he chose to look at the floor, and noticed an obvious seam in the wood. The crack formed a semicircle five feet in diameter. He was standing within its bound, in fact. He tapped the floor in several places but found it as solid as the wall. Perhaps—yes, perhaps this was a door after all. If somehow the floor could be made to rotate, and the whole wall with it … but there must be some trigger, some way of activating the change.
The statue of the Bloodgod, of course.
The Burgrave was known to be a devout of the Lady of Abundance. Sadu was a much older god, one whose worship was not officially forbidden in the Free City but certainly frowned upon. The Bloodgod was the patron deity of the poor and the oppressed, a symbol of ultimate justice and even vindictive revenge. Sadu punished all men alike in the afterlife, and each according to his sins. He was hardly the sort of god a man like the Burgrave would ever want to meet.
The Bloodgod did have eight arms, though, and that leant itself to the obvious purpose of this particular idol.
The bronze statue depicted Sadu in the typical fashion, as he was worshipped in tiny shrines all over the city. The idol had seven arms on the left side of its body, each holding a different weapon: a sword, a falchion, a spear, a trident, a net, a flail, and an arrow. Different images of the Bloodgod always had different weapons in his hands, since Sadu was the master of them all. On the right side he had only one arm, holding an ornate crown, as it always did. Sadu’s face was depicted as that of a snarling demon with massive tusklike teeth and wide, staring eyes. Malden had seen more terrifying versions, though this was a common depiction. Yet as he examined the statue quite carefully he noticed two things that were unique to this image in all his experience.
For one, the eyes were not just open—they had been hollowed out. Two sharp points of metal glinted from within their depths. Malden thought of the needles that sprang from Cutbill’s lock. Perhaps these were the same—or worse, tiny darts that would fly through the air to poison him if they pierced his flesh. And of course this time the poison would be fatal.
The second thing he noticed was that all eight arms of the Bloodgod were attached to the body by stout hinges. One could move them, if one desired, independently from the rest of the statue.
Clearly he would have to push the correct arm to open the way to the tower room, while pushing any other would result in instant death.
He rejected the crown arm immediately. It was far too obvious.
Of the weapon arms, the net appealed to him first. It was the least deadly of the weapons, while the others could all kill you easily. The arrow was a bit confusing—it really should have been a bow Sadu held, should it not? But the arrow was also very similar to the darts hidden in the eyes.
Yet wouldn’t that appeal to some dwarf artificer’s twisted sense of irony? Perhaps you pushed the arrow arm to say you did not wish the darts to fire.
It was a gamble, but it seemed most likely. Malden stood well back of the statue, but still within the circular seam on the floor, and reached over to tap at the arm that held the arrow. Nothing happened. He applied more pressure, bending the arm backward.
There was a rumbling of massive gears, a shrieking of poorly oiled metal—and then the whole wall swung on its axis, propelling him directly into the tower room. The place where the Burgrave kept his crown when he wasn’t wearing it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“You’re—You’re mad,” Malden had said two days before, when Cythera finally revealed what she was after. “The crown of the Burgrave? What possible reason could you have to steal that? Why would anyone? If I’m caught with it, I’d be drawn and quartered!”
“You needn’t be caught, if you stick to our plan,” Cythera said. Though he could see in her eyes that she knew no plan was ever perfect, that events could always conspire to catch a thief. She was asking him to take an enormous risk.
“But—why? It’s made of gold, to be sure, but it’s only so big. Melted down, it isn’t worth a tenth of what you’re paying. And you would have to melt it down. No fence would ever touch it. If you so much as showed it to a fence, they would have no choice but to call in the watch.”
“We have our reasons for wanting it. Intact,” Cythera said.
“As soon as it goes missing, every watchman in the city will come looking for it.” Malden shook his head. “They’ll tear down the Stink looking for it, and for me. I don’t—”
“No, they won’t,” Bikker said. He’d been standing by the fire, staring down into the flames. They danced in his eyes like light from the Bloodgod’s pit. He came clanking over to where Malden sat and loomed over him, his face split by a grin. “That’s the best part. As you say, there’s not much to the crown on its own. A good goldsmith can make a replacement in a day. If the Burgrave appears in public without the crown even once, he’ll look a fool. Everyone will ask where it is, and what will he say? That he just forgot to put it on that morning?”
Malden had to admit he had never seen the Burgrave without it.
“That’s the heart of the plan,” Bikker said, thumping the back of Malden’s chair so he nearly fell out of it. “Do you see? He and his advisors will be too embarrassed by its absence to say a word. They won’t call out the watch—they’ll keep this a secret, from everyone they can. They will never let it be known, anywhere, that the crown was ever stolen. They won’t even dare to come looking for it, because then they’d have to tell the watch what to look for. Do you really believe every watchman in the city would keep such a thing secret? No, the bailiff and the Burgrave will just pretend it was never stolen. They’ll trot out a replacement, and that will be the end of it.”
Bikker squatted down in front of Malden and cuffed him lightly on the shoulder. Just hard enough to leave marks. “So what do you say?” he asked, his eyes bright. “Are you the man for this job?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The crown—technically a coronet—was not a work of great art in itself. It was a plain circlet of gold, crenellated in the same pattern as the Free City’s walls. No jewels adorned it, nor was it lined in fur, nor was anything engraved upon it. It was the crown of a leader of free men, not a king who ruled serfs, and so it was not meant to glorify unduly its wearer or set him apart from the common weal.
Honestly, to Malden it looked a little cheap. Even the head of the fuller’s guild wore more ceremonial gold than was in the city’s coronet.
But of course the crown had far more symbolic value. It could only be worn by a Burgrave. It was the symbol of his lordship, the image of his right to rule the city as he pleased. It was what separated him from the citizens, what imbued him with all of his power. The Burgrave wore it every time he went out in public—when he led civic processions, when he sat to watch a tourney, when he handed down judgments in the law courts. He’d worn it the day Malden saw him in Market Square, the day he’d condemned that blond fool to death. The crown was the Burgrave’s power.
Malden was dimly
