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.
Hanging in place to catch his breath, surveying the lay of the land, he noticed what hadn’t been visible to him below. A narrow ledge overhung the door at the end of the tunnel. A quiet, shadowed alcove. One spot the arrows weren’t firing toward.
Rags jumped. Weightless, breathless. Then he landed, half crouched, half kneeling, on the slate.
His knee throbbed, having taken most of his weight. But he quickly forgot about the pain.
Before him, tucked into a second alcove within the first one, was a strange silver sculpture, intricate as the skeletal insides of a termite nest. Every part of it moved, ticking ahead and around with miniature mechanical parts. The effect made it look alive with crawling metal beetles.
Despite the danger below, Morien’s mirror in his pocket, and Morien’s shitting shard in his heart, Rags couldn’t help himself.
He poked the thing.
Delicate clockwork pinched his finger, almost immediately providing the expected punishment for his stupidity. Rags tugged, then began to pry carefully at the spindly teeth that held his finger in place.
Rags had once found a broken, but quality, pocket watch on the street, its casing shattered, the back popped apart. The smooth inner workings of the silver termite nest resembled the inside of that watch, writ large in interlocking silver gears and rotating discs of polished crystal. Each piece flowed in seeming independence