“Step exactly where I step,” she’d. He’d thought it was a cliche, if he’d ever heard one, but good advice nonetheless in a place like this. It had reminded him of the sort of thing that the hero of a Pierce novel would say the moment before the bumbling fool of a side-kick stepped into a trap.

  “I thought you spent a day disarming all the traps,” Brinn had said as he carefully tiptoed after her. Somehow, he’d had trouble keeping pace.

  “It was more about understanding the traps at all,” she’d said. “Each of the plates are connected.”

  “That’s comforting.” he’d said.

  Now, there he was, wincing each time his foot fell on a pressure plate. His heart was hammering in his chest. This was so much worse than getting chased through the labyrinths halls by the portrait mimic. It was slow, anxious, methodical. His breathing was starting to get heavy again.

  Despite the little gnome’s short stature, Spinny took every step with a confidence Brinn just couldn’t muster. Alchemy could be explosive, sure, but at least you had to put mana into it first. Brinn couldn’t shake the feeling that there been a hundred crossbows pointed at his chest. For all he knew, there could have been. He tried to keep still, but the constant arpeggios were digging into his brain. The entire room was some ridiculously over engineered puzzle. Tapestries lined the walls, covering who knows what kind of machinery behind. It clacked, and groaned, and under it all was that constant music. He realized, now, this must have been the music he’d first noticed before the party had been separated.

  It wasn’t about avoiding the pressure plates—every single tile on the checkerboard Each step was onto a tile that shifted the music and set clangs of machinery through the walls. He was beginning to understand why it had taken Spinny days to disarm the traps she had. Brinn winced as another step set gears in the walls grinding. Dust rained down from the ceiling.

  “It’s funny, ye know,” said a voice. Spinny. His blood felt…carbonated. It pulsed and surged in him. “The boss ‘n’ I didn’t meet as allies.”

  He’d never really thought of Alexander as their boss, but even in his current state Spinny had piqued Brinn’s curiosity.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I was brought on to a crew meant to nick some tithes from the church. They turned out to be a crate of weapons, but that was when I met the boss.”

  Brinn squinted. “Must have been a while back.”

  “Aye,” said Spinny. “Before you were born, I’d wager. Before the church had gone to shite.”

  “I’m older than I look,” Brinn muttered. It was a reflexive response. He did, in fact, remember the beginning of the church’s reign over the city—vaguely—but Spinny was right. It had started before he was born.

  “I know ye are, lad,” she said. “But what I meant to say is Alexander looked nigh a day over what you look now, so it must be, eh, forty years back?”

  Brinn blinked. It had never occurred to him that Alexander was in his mid fifties, the man had been strong as an ox—but yes. Alexander’s sons were Brinn’s own age, and—“Not there, pay attention, lad.”

  Brinn jumped, nearly losing his balance as he overcompensated in the other direction, is arms wheeling to the side of him as he tried to keep himself from tumbling first left, then right onto the floor. They were nearly there. The small stone steps leading up to the door were only a few steps from him, and Brinn fought the sudden urge to race across them—but he resisted it. He eyed the distance to the first step. Maybe he could jump the whole thing? No, no he’d need a running start.

  “You haven’t finished your story,” he said as he took another step. Three left. The gnome had made a perfectly reasonable path, at least if you were about half Brinn’s height—but to him it was a series of tight, precise steps, and she watched him closely for any more absent-minded mistakes.

  “You never finished your story,” Brinn said. Two steps left.

  “What I was getting at is, I’ve seen it before, lad. The look in someone’s eyes when they’ve been in the game and it all goes foul.”

  “They’re all dead, Spinny.”

  “Aye,” she said. “But yer not, are ye?” Even more of the rural inflection had leaked into her voice. There was a wild look in her eye, that he hadn’t expected from the normally calm, stern woman. “They’re all dead, and we’re not, and it ain’t doing a lick of good to sit on our arses. You’ve got a piece of ‘im with you—quite an important one, I might add—“ At this she jerked her chin towards the gauntlet that now hung from Brinn’s belt.

  “About that,” he said. “What do you know about it?”

  “Right,” she said. “The story. I’ll tell ye as we walk. No more traps this way, I promise, though ye might want to prepare yourself fer what yer gonna see.” Just what was this “library” Spinny was guiding him towards? “One more tile. Third from the left of ye there—no, your other left—foot down, okay, up ye go.”

  Brinn barely even realized that Spinny had already been standing on solid ground.

  “Hold—” she said. “One more thing—there.” She stomped down on a tile one to the right of where Brinn’s foot had just been, and Brinn threw his arms up in front of his face as what must have been a thousand traps activated all at once. Clicks, whirrs, hisses, the rumble of stone. Blades launched themselves across the room, darts shot from underneath the tapestries as they billowed in the wind of all the combined force. No more than three feet from his face an axe swung. It would’ve decapitated him had he been standing on the tile Spinny had just depressed.

  “What in the hells did you do that for?!” Brinn shouted. It was done. His heart hammered in his chest, threatening to break through his ribs and clatter out into the chaos.

  “The door won’t open unless you set them off. I had to wait for you to get clear.”

  Brinn was starting to get nauseous.

  “And why’d you have to stomp it?!”

  “I’m not heavy enough to set off the tiles on me own, lad.”

  “You mean you could have just walked across the entire room without me and been fine?”

  She seemed to ponder that for a moment. “Aye,”

  That must have been it. The reason so many gnomes found themselves foot deep in gears disarming traps when they joined the adventurer’s guild.

  And so they walked, and Spinny spoke of the job where she’d met Alexander. The crew had been a rag-tag team thrown together by one of the richer family’s in the city. Spinny had no stake in it—she’d only been there for the cache, so when they’d started to pry the crates open and found not gold, but weapons, she made the only intelligent decision.

  “We all knew what the church was up to by then, lad. But the schism was still a few years off, I think, and that’s where the boss came in.”

  “They sent paladins to recover the cache?”

  “Aye. There was only a few of us. We couldn’t keep every witness from running off, and it turned out one of the ones that did happened to have a haste charm.” Brinn winced as he thought of Favel, of the wizard flickering this way and that as his unstable heat mana flickered. Brinn twitched, wondering if his own mana was that unstable. Would he have to vent it again? Was all of that unstable vortex Favel’s, or was some of it Brinn’s own?

  “That one ‘at got away alerted the church, and ‘fore we knew it there was ten of them Paladins bearing down on us from all sides. I always wondered about how fast they got there. Whether maybe the entire thing had been a set-up from the start—but I was just a Padfoot, then. That sort of information was above my pay-grade.”

  They turned a corner. Spinny’s words made sense to Brinn, even if this had happened before his time. The Thieves Guild—officially the “disarmament, mechanisms, and guerrilla tactics” department of the adventurer’s guild, but their reputation gave them the title—was an almost wholly separate structure from that of the Adventurer’s guild he knew well. Rather than a decentralized group of volunteer monster hunters, knick knackers were all paying off a debt. To what, Brinn didn’t know—and it was taboo to ask. From what little he’d been able to work out, they all seemed to be in debt to each other, which really seemed like it made the whole process pointless—but actually tell a knacker that, and they’d leave you out to dry.

  They rounded another bend. Brinn noticed this hall was yet again different from the last—rather than the smooth, tiled stone he associated with the halls near the entrance and the main portions of the labyrinth, this seemed to be opening up into a cavern not unlike that where the Garden had been stored—another bend, in the distance. He could see a piece of Spinny’s golden thread held taught in the distance.

  “So Alexander was one of the Paladins, I take it?”

  “Smart lad.” She was messing with him. They both knew it didn’t take a genius to figure that out.

  “How’d ye get away?”

  “Ha!” Spinny scoffed. “I’m three feet tall and elbows deep in a carriage full of crates of weapons, lad, I didn’t get away. Alexander ‘imself dragged me to the stocks.”

  “I—what?” It was hard to imagine the man dragging anyone to the stocks. Alexander had never been anything but calm, and kind with Brinn—but he was a Paladin. The order of Undying Light had once been enforcers for the church.

  “Was ‘is job lad! But it would’ve been the gallows if it weren’t for ‘im. Stealing? From the church, then of all times? Still surprised I kept me head on my shoulders.”

  “How did he swing that? Church can’t have been happy.” Brinn asked. Alexander had always been a charismatic leader—but never an out of the box thinker. It was what surprised Brinn about his devotion to the Undying Light. Alexander, Brinn thought, should have been a cleric.

  “I got into the game late, and we threw that crew together slapshod, lad. Who do you think we ‘ad working the locks?”

  “Surely not who I think. You could have done that yourself!”

  Spinny was, among many things, a grandmother. And in the time she and Brinn had known each other, he’d even met one of her grandsons—they were considerably older than him. Not just older than the way Brinn looked, either—the man he’d met had been approaching his fifth decade—but to the Gnomes, Brinn supposed that must still be a child. Borin. That had been his name.

  “It was time to get ‘im out into the field! For the first time, mind ye. At the time he was younger ‘n you look now.”

  “Still, just…Borin? Really?”

  “Aye, lad. I know,”

  When Brinn and Borin had met, he’d found the man…agitating would be too kind a word. Foul mouthed and foul looking to boot, he’d barged into Brinn’s shop demanding a discount. Brinn had nearly tossed him into his ass—and he suspected he could throw a gnome quite far—before Spinny had come in and yanked her kin down by the ear. In the end he’d let her swindle him into giving the guy a discount, but only because she promised to make him the sash he still wore.

  “Fine, then,” as the memory passed. “What about Borin? I can’t imagine he’d have made things any easier for you.”

  “I never told ye? He used to want to be a Paladin. Ever since he was a wee boy. He even got ‘alfway through the process before he got kicked out for knicking pastries out of a footlocker.

  “No, he didn’t. I refuse to believe that.” Brinn couldn’t imagine the boisterous gnome in a clean tunic, let alone in shining armor.

  “I swear it, lad.” Brinn looked at her face, and there was a twinkle in her eye.

  “All I’ve got is your word. Still, how does that relate to you in the stocks?”

  “Borin came running out as soon as they found me. Was ‘iding in a crate of spears. Not the most comfortable place to rest, mind you—the lad threw himself to his knees in front of Alexander and begged to join the Paladins. They must have been pushing recruitment real hard, because he said yes—and turned around and told ‘is boss ‘e vouched for me, and would keep a ‘personal eye’ on my behavior from then out. They let me off with a slap on the wrist, I’d say.”

  “They let you off in the stocks,” Brinn reminded her.

  “Rather the stocks than the graveyard, eh? Camp should be just ahead, here.”

  Brinn blinked. As they rounded another corner, there was a glow in the distance—light, he realized, different from the torch-lit glow that somehow seems to permeate the labyrinth’s ambiance without a source. They made their way towards it, rough stone on each side of them tapering outwards into a cave—like opening—and Brinn gasped. Somehow, even after all of this, he could still be shocked.

  In front of him was an open space so large, he could barely make out the other end of it, or so he assumed—if Spinny had told him then it went on into the infinite blackness, she might have believed him. What laid in front of him was…light. Civilization. He could see creatures, perhaps even people milling about below in streets. From the way the buildings each rose into the air, Brinn realized to his utter disbelief he was looking at a city underground. In the middle of a labyrinth. Filled with monsters.

  His mind raced as he tried to think of anything that could explain this, other than the myths of his childhood. Was he really in that labyrinth? Where man and monster ha learned to coexist, and created a champion? Where writers had set a thousand stories? Or, Brinn realized, perhaps this is just another creation of the bard’s. Perhaps he was too much of a hack to come up with his own ideas.

  his time, Brinn kept the thought to himself. It wouldn’t do to draw the bard’s ire. Not now, when he was faced with this. He still didn’t know what the bard could and couldn’t hear, but he had a sneaking certainty the lich could hear him if he spoke aloud. Still, he watched in awe as tiny little shapes flitted between streets.

  It can’t be that place. This can’t be that labyrinth. It wasn’t just comfort. Brinn was certain. The city…too closely mirrored his own. The capital, the place from which he himself hailed, seat of the Church’s reach on the third continent.

  “That’s not a library,” he told Spinny. “It’s a city.”

  “I mean what’s on the inside, lad. Not one of those buildings ‘as anything but books and coffins. That’s it. An entire city of books and coffins—and the monsters, o’ course.”

  “Still,” he breathed. “You said you thought you knew a way out?”

  “Aye,” she said, and pointed to a particularly large building. With a start, he realized that he didn’t recognize it—it wasn’t a facsimile of something in the capitol. It was a single, rounded tower that extended…all the way into the earth above. Brinn didn’t realize just how far underground they’d been. The tower was directly in the center of the city. Filled with monsters. He imagined the bard’s seat of power would be in that tower as well, and that it wasn’t the last he’d seen of the portrait mimic. He shuddered, thinking of the feeling of warm paint covering his arms, seeping into his clothes.

  It seemed to Brinn that they had their work set out for them.