"Here."
That morning, down on the shop floor, Grun tossed something over to him.
It was a small round shield. An old one: nothing but wooden boards with a thin iron rim nailed around the edge.
"Your last one broke, didn't it? This was on the leftovers shelf. Better than nothing."
"Thank you."
Luca slid it onto his left arm. It was a little heavier than his old shield, but it settled against his arm as if it belonged there.
"So. What about that thing?"
Grun jerked his chin toward the attic.
He meant the blue stone that had been mixed in with the Stone-Eating Lizard's scales.
"It didn't sell."
Yesterday, Luca had carried the scales he'd hauled home over to the materials shop. The iron ore scales, the white quartz scales: every one of them got a price. But when it came to the blue stone, about the size of a fist, the old woman at the materials shop had only shaken her head. Never seen a stone like it, she'd said. No way to put a price on a thing like that.
"A stone even that old woman doesn't know, huh. ...Don't throw it out."
"I won't. I picked it up."
* * *
The Guild hall was strangely quiet that morning.
Everyone was looking toward the entrance and talking in low voices.
"I wonder what's happened."
Just as Celes tilted her head, the door creaked open.
Five huge men walked in.
Their necks and arms were as thick as logs. You could tell from the way they walked that they were used to wearing heavy armor.
Only, none of them was wearing any.
What they had on was the thick, cotton-stuffed jacket that goes under armor. Padded underclothes, people called them. The five men walked down the middle of the hall in nothing but their padded underclothes, filthy with sweat and mud.
"...Luca. What is that?"
"Padded underclothes. The things you wear under armor."
"I can see that."
Someone couldn't hold it in and snorted.
The man in the lead, the one with the thick beard, turned around slowly. Luca thought he was about to lose his temper.
"Gahahahaha!"
The bearded man clutched his belly and roared with laughter.
"Go on, laugh! Laugh it up! The Steel Bulls, Rank Six, got every last scrap of armor stripped off them and came home in their underclothes! What else is it but a joke?"
"Ganz..."
At the front desk, Nora had a hand pressed to her forehead.
"We came back alive. That's profit enough. ...Nora, I've got a report for you. We lost. To the Gatekeeper on the twentieth floor."
* * *
"It's a new Gatekeeper. It spawned half a month ago. People are calling it the Armor-Eater."
Once the five Steel Bulls had been shown into a back room, Nora went and peeled a sheet of paper off the notice board.
"Do you know what a hermit crab is? A kind of crab that lives in a snail shell it carries around on its back."
"I've seen them in baskets at the market. The little ones they catch in the lakes in the Labyrinth."
"It's one of those. As big as a house."
The paper had a drawing on it, probably done by a delver. Out of a huge spiral shell stuck a thick claw and two eyes on stalks, like a pair of sticks. The outside of the shell was plastered with a jumble of square shapes.
"What are these square things?"
"Armor. It strips the armor off delvers and sticks it onto its own shell. It seems to love iron. It goes after people in armor first, grabs them, tosses out whoever's inside, and keeps only the armor."
"...So that's why Ganz and his party are in their underclothes."
"They're the third party it's done that to. That makes eleven suits of armor so far."
At the very bottom of the paper, it said: Bounty: twenty gold coins.
"As long as the door on the twentieth floor stays shut, nobody can get down to the twenty-first floor or below. All the higher-ranked parties are at their wits' end."
"What about the Branch Master?" Celes asked.
She was probably thinking that Branch Master Valeria and that greatsword of hers could deal with it.
"She left yesterday for the Branch Masters' council in the capital. She won't be back for half a month. And the Rank Ones and Twos are all off on month-long expeditions to the deep floors. Even with a Gatekeeper sitting there, they can still come back up by the return path beside the door, but they won't be back for a good while."
Nora shrugged.
"It's strange, though. It's only been ten months since the last Gatekeeper was killed. Normally it takes years before the next one spawns."
* * *
Celes stared at the drawing without a word.
Her eyes glinted. Luca knew exactly what that glint meant.
"Nora. Rank Eight is when you're allowed to challenge the Gatekeeper on the twentieth floor, isn't it?"
"...Yes. If a Rank Eight party beats it, they make Rank Seven. Same rule as the tenth floor."
"Celes."
"I know, I know. I'm not saying we should go right now."
Celes turned to Luca.
"But it's something to aim for, isn't it? We build up our strength on the eleventh through nineteenth floors, and then we beat the Gatekeeper on the twentieth."
"Yes. ...Also, I don't wear armor, so it can't strip me."
Nora slapped the counter. "That is not the point!"
* * *
"Anyway, first things first. A shield-bearer."
From the eleventh floor on down, it would be rough with just the two of them. Get a shield-bearer, someone up front to take the hits. That was what Valeria had told them.
But the party board was covered in notices from people looking for shield-bearers. Shield-bearer wanted. Shield-bearer wanted. Shield-bearer, urgent.
"Every party is fighting over shield-bearers. It's the job where you get hurt, so not many people want it."
Nora looked away, as if this part was hard to say.
"There's only one Rank Eight shield who isn't in a party right now. A boy named Miro. He used to be with a party called the Silver Scales, but since he left them two months ago, nobody will take him."
"Why is that?"
"There's a rumor. ...That when they were attacked by a monster on the thirteenth floor, he threw away his shield and ran."
Celes's eyebrow twitched.
A shield-bearer who threw away his shield and ran. To anyone in a party, there was nobody they'd less want to team up with.
"Is it true?"
"I don't know. That's how the Silver Scales' leader reported it. Miro himself didn't say a thing."
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
* * *
"A shield who threw away his shield, huh. ...Well, go get some lunch. The Full Belly, down in the lower town. Cheap, and the portions are big. Your kind of place."
That was what Grun said when Luca got back to the shop and told him.
The name alone was enough to make Luca's stomach growl.
The Full Belly sat on a back street behind the market, under a big signboard painted with a steaming pot. At lunchtime, the place was packed with porters, craftsmen and young delvers.
"Welcome, welcome! What'll it be?"
At the back of the room, a stout woman was stirring a huge pot and calling out over the noise. Her arms were about as thick as Luca's legs.
"The biggest portion you have, please."
"Oh, listen to him! One big bowl of stew, coming up!"
Out came a heaping bowl of meat-and-bean stew.
Luca ate without a word. One bowl. Two. Three. Somewhere around the time he ordered his fourth, Celes set down her own bowl and simply sat there watching him.
The one carrying the bowls out was a big young man.
He was a head and a half taller than Luca, broad in the shoulders, with reddish-brown hair cropped short and skin tanned by the sun. He set down the seventh bowl with a thud and glared at Luca.
"...Where do you put all that?"
"My stomach."
"That's not what I meant."
"Now that's what I call eating! Miro, you could learn a thing or two!"
"Ma, shut up!"
Celes's head snapped up.
"...Miro?"
"Are you Mr. Miro? The Rank Eight shield?"
All expression drained from the young man's face. From Miro's face.
He looked at the tag around Luca's neck and narrowed his eyes, as if something had just clicked.
"A Rank Eight tag, and an appetite like that. ...You're the ex-scavenger who took down the Stone-Eater. What do you want? Come to laugh at the shield who threw away his shield and ran?"
"I'm looking for a shield-bearer. Would you come down with us, from the eleventh floor on?"
For a while, Miro just looked down at him.
Then he snorted.
"Be a scavenger's shield? Don't make me laugh. ...Scavengers live off picking up what other people throw away, right? So what, you'll go pick up the shield I threw away, too?"
There was no laughter in his voice at all.
A ladle came down on top of his head.
Bonk.
"Ow!"
"Is that any way to talk to a customer?!"
Miro's mother stood planted behind him, ladle in hand.
"Sorry about that, dear. My idiot son."
"Ma, that's the ladle that goes back in the pot!"
"A head like yours won't dirty it!"
Miro retreated to the kitchen, clutching his head.
Celes let out a small sigh.
"...Just like the rumors say, it seems."
"Do you think so?"
Luca was looking at Miro's left arm.
When Miro set the bowl down, his sleeve had ridden up. A scar ran all the way around his left forearm like a band. A fresh one. It looked as if something had been cinched tight around the arm and then torn off, taking the skin and flesh with it.
Luca had seen a mark that shape before, back in his scavenger days.
A single gauntlet he'd picked up on the fifth floor. The leather strap on the inside had torn in exactly that shape. A monster grabbed him by the arm and yanked, and the strap ripped right off, Boss had told him.
A shield strap.
You wrapped a leather strap around the arm that held the shield.
Someone who threw his shield away himself wouldn't be left with the mark of a strap torn off his arm.
"Luca? Are you ordering an eighth?"
"...Yes. Please."
A rumor wasn't a dropped thing. You couldn't pick it up, hold it, and recall it.
But a shield, he could.
* * *
The Gatekeeper's chamber on the tenth floor stood empty.
Great chunks had been gouged out of the walls here and there, and a fine dusting of white stone powder still lay across the floor. Three days ago, they had fought the Stone-Eating Lizard right here.
The stone door at the back of the chamber was still open. Once its Gatekeeper was gone, a door didn't close again until the next one spawned.
"...It feels strange, somehow."
"Yes. It's quiet."
The two of them passed through the door.
When they reached the bottom of the long staircase beyond it, Luca stopped.
It was a lake.
Glowmoss covered the whole ceiling, so high above that he had to crane his neck to see it. Its pale blue light shone back off the water, which stretched away from his feet into the distance, and the entire cavern glowed a soft blue.
The far shore was lost in haze. A cool breeze carried the smell of water.
"The eleventh floor. The underground lake..."
Celes murmured it like a sigh.
Luca's stomach growled.
"...And why did it growl this time?"
"I smelled fish."
* * *
A long wooden pier jutted out from the shore.
At the foot of the pier stood a small hut. There was one ferry, flat and wide, and two peddlers' stalls laid out with jerky and lamp oil. Several groups of delvers sat around waiting for the boat.
The sign in front of the hut read:
Fare: five copper coins, one way. Drop something? Pick it up yourself.
"If you walk around to the far shore, it's a whole day on a narrow path along the cliffs. By boat, it's about half an hour. Everyone takes the ferry here."
"It says 'Drop something? Pick it up yourself.'"
"...That's the part you care about, isn't it."
"Don't know your faces."
An old man sitting on an upturned bucket in front of the hut said it without looking up from the net he was mending.
He had to be past sixty. His head was bald and shiny, and his arms were thicker than Luca's legs.
"Name's Bodge. I'm the ferryman. You'd be the kid and the missy who just made Rank Eight. Next crossing goes when I've got enough passengers."
"I'm Luca. Um, about the sign. 'Drop something? Pick it up yourself.'"
"Ah. That."
Bodge laid the half-mended net across his knees.
"Every day, some fool drops something off the boat. Swords, purses, even boots, if you'll believe it. And every time, they come crying to me to haul it up. So salvage costs extra."
"Salvage?"
"Feel around with a pole, snag it with a hook, haul it up. Thirty years I've done that alongside the ferry. ...But last month's lake storm took my sounding pole. Thirty years I'd had that pole. This one's a stopgap. Too short. Can't reach the deep spots."
Luca's eyes lit up.
"Should I go pick it up for you?"
"Huh?"
"The pole. Whereabouts did you drop it?"
Bodge looked him up and down.
"Kid. Can you swim?"
"No, I can't."
For a moment, nobody said anything.
"...Hold on."
Celes grabbed Luca by the shoulder.
"I asked you before whether you could swim. And you told me you had [Hold Breath]."
"Yes. I can hold my breath. I just can't swim."
"That's what can't swim means!"
* * *
According to Bodge, the pole had jumped out of his hands off the end of the pier, been swallowed by an eddy, and vanished under the pier.
Luca left his jacket and dagger on the boards. He put on the goggles he'd picked up on the ninth floor, tied a rope around his waist and handed the other end to Celes. Then he picked up a big rock from the shore and hugged it to his chest.
"Are you serious?"
"I can't swim, so I'll sink and walk."
"You an idiot?"
That was Bodge. But his hands had stopped working on the net.
Luca breathed in. Slowly, all the way down to the bottom of his belly. Then he let a little out, and breathed in again.
Still hugging the rock, he stepped off the pier.
The water was cold.
The weight of the rock carried him straight down. His feet touched soft mud. Through the goggles, blue light wavered.
...Amazing.
The bottom of the lake was covered in dropped things.
A rusted sword. A helmet half buried in the mud. Someone's water flask. Boots. He walked through the mud among the pier's pilings, and there, wedged at a slant between two of them, was a long bamboo pole. Notches were cut along it, one every hand's width.
Luca started to reach for it, then stopped.
Thirty years, Bodge had said. The more an item had been used, the more likely it was to pull you into a recall the instant you touched it. Back in his scavenger days, the old butchering knife he'd tried had done exactly that. If a recall started at the bottom of the lake, he wouldn't be able to breathe until it was over.
He untied the rope from his waist, looped it around the pole and knotted it again. Then he gave the rope two hard tugs.
* * *
"—Pwah!"
"You took too long! I counted to a hundred and twenty!"
Celes hauled him up, and Luca rolled onto the pier.
The bamboo pole dangled from the end of the rope.
Bodge had gotten up off his bucket.
"...That's the one."
Luca closed his wet hands around the pole.
◆ ◆ ◆
—The lake is swelling.
A lake storm. A few times a year, the underground lake takes a great breath. Water wells up from somewhere deep, and the whole lake begins to heave.
Eight passengers in the boat. Halfway across. Too far to turn back.
Plunge the pole into the water. Read the depth by the notches. ...Getting shallower. The rocks are close.
Watch the surface. Lines of bubbles. Which way the eddies turn. Dark water runs deep; pale water runs shallow.
The current never lies. Thirty years, that's how he's taken them across.
Ride the line. Turn the oar. The boat slips neatly past the edge of the rocks.
"...Pops, I'm about to die of fright here."
"Shut up and sit still."
The last big wave slams into the side of the boat. The pole jumps out of his hands.
Damn—but by the time he thinks it, the pole has already been swallowed by an eddy and vanished under the pier.
◆ ◆ ◆
Echo inherited: [Water Reading].
When Luca opened his eyes, the world in front of him lurched.
It was heavy.
Nothing like his usual recalls. Thirty years' worth of an eye for water had poured into his head all at once.
His stomach growled. No, growled wasn't the word. It roared.
"Luca?!"
"...Sorry. I'm really, really hungry."
His knees gave out. Celes hurriedly stuffed a stick of jerky into his mouth, but one wasn't enough. Two. Three. Even then, the edges of his vision were still a little dark.
"Here. Eat these too."
Bodge brought over three skewers of grilled fish from the little hearth in front of the hut.
Luca ate all three without a word.
"...Thank you. Here's your pole back."
Bodge took it.
With knobbly fingers, he traced the notches one by one. Then he muttered:
"...Thirty years I used this pole."
That was all he said.
But when he leaned the pole against the wall of the hut, he did it with enormous care.
* * *
Luca stood at the end of the pier and looked out over the lake.
A little while ago, it had just been a sheet of blue water.
Now it looked different. Faint lines ran across the surface: rows of bubbles, the direction of tiny ripples, the slightest shifts in color, a little darker here, a little paler there.
The water only looked still. It was slowly circling. A current came in from the open lake toward the shore, bent along the pier's pilings, and about fifty paces out from the end of the pier, it swirled around and sank.
Things collect out there.
Anything dropped off the pier got caught among the pilings at first. But every time a lake storm came, it was torn loose and carried off into that eddy.
The dropped things he'd just seen on the bottom were the ones that hadn't been carried off yet.
"Bodge. About fifty paces out from the end of the pier, is there a deep hollow?"
Bodge's hands stopped.
"...How'd you know that?"
"The current sinks there. I think everything dropped off the pier probably ends up collecting there in the end."
Bodge was quiet for a while.
Then he looked at the pole leaning against the wall, and then at the lake.
"Things dropped off the pier hardly ever turn up under the pier. Thirty years, and I never could figure out where they got off to."
"Can you reach it with the pole?"
"Not a chance. Out there, even this pole won't touch bottom. ...So that's where. Out there."
Bodge laughed low in his throat. It sounded like something that had been tangled for thirty years had finally come loose.
* * *
"So what brings you two down to the eleventh floor, missy?"
Bodge asked while they waited for the next crossing.
Celes told him they were looking for a shield-bearer. About the rumor. About the Full Belly.
"...Miro, eh."
Bodge's expression changed, just slightly.
"That's the Silver Scales boy. Two months back, a little past noon, I brought the four of the Silver Scales over from the far shore. Said their shield boy threw away his shield and ran."
Bodge looked out across the lake.
"Two hours or so after that, the bell on the far shore rang. I went over, and there's the boy, soaked to the bone, standing there all by himself. Torn leather strap hanging off his left arm."
"Did he say anything?"
"Not a word. Didn't have the fare on him either, so I didn't take any. ...Tell me something. A fellow who throws away his shield and runs before anyone else, does he come back two hours behind the rest of his party?"
Celes caught her breath.
"Why didn't you tell the Guild?"
"A ferryman doesn't go spreading his passengers' business around. Besides, nobody came asking."
Bodge's hands went back to mending the net.
"So, kid. What are you going to do?"
Luca was looking at the spot out past the end of the pier where the eddy sank.
Then he said, "This afternoon, I'd like to dive out there."
"When you can't swim?"
"Yes. Even though I can't swim."
This time, Bodge really did laugh out loud.