“You know what will happen,” Ignatius said, “when you do this.”
He was sitting in the old armchair by the window of the back room with his long ebony cane across his knees and his blind face turned toward the glass, as though he were looking out at the rooftops.
He wasn’t looking.
He was listening.
Lucan had learned, in the four days since Ignatius had arrived, that he was always listening.
“Coyle will hear,” Lucan said.
“Coyle will hear.
Lady Fennick will hear.” Ignatius turned his milky eyes toward the sound of Lucan’s voice.
“The Fennick Mining Concern owns those three bonds.
When a young apothecary named Thorne walks into the Registry and pays to redeem three Pit Nine bondsmen by name, under Section Seven, the Concern’s clerks will be informed by the end of the day.
And Coyle reads every report the Concern’s clerks write.” He smiled faintly.
“Coyle already has a file on you, my boy.
I can hear him paying for it.
He’s been paying a clerk at the Registry two silver a week since the Holloway auction to tell him every time your name crosses a counter.”
“I know.”
“He’ll put it together.
Thorne buys Nell Harlow’s bond through Ottilie Brask.
Thorne buys three Pit Nine bonds.
The sister of a dead Pit Nine man and three living ones.
And a petition at the Registry, in eight days’ time, claiming that Thorne is a dead Pit Nine man named Marr.” Ignatius spread his long, thin hands.
“Even a very stupid man could draw a line between those dots.
And Coyle is not stupid.”
“I know,” said Lucan again.
“And you’re going to do it anyway.”
“Orsen Tull gave Nell Harlow a barley sugar every Sunday for four years, out of his own wages,” Lucan said.
“Because her brother told him she liked them.
Wim Carrow taught me how to splice a rope.
Haddin didn’t have a surname because he was found as a baby in a coal sack under the Grise bridge, and he used to sing hymns while he worked because he said the dark was less dark if you sang at it.” He looked at Ignatius.
“They’ve been in the Throat for nearly two months.
Men don’t last a year down there.”
Ignatius was silent for a long moment.
The clocks ticked.
“Kesset had a saying,” he said at last.
“A man who will spend everything on his friends has no money, but a great deal of wealth.” He sighed.
“It was mostly said by bankrupts.” He turned his blind face back to the window.
“Go on, then.
Go and be wealthy.
I’ll start thinking about how to keep Coyle busy.”
Wren redeemed the bonds that afternoon.
Eighteen hundred and sixty silver for the three of them, in coin from Mr.
Crowe’s furnace-vault.
The clerk with the cold in his head stamped the forms with a great deal of sniffing and said that the bondsmen in question were currently on shift at the Deep Works and could be collected at the Shaft Thirty pithead when their shift came up.
“When is that?” asked Wren.
The clerk checked a ledger.
“Six days.”
“Six days?”
“The Deep Works runs on a nine-day shift, madam.
Nine days down, two up.
Saves on winching costs.” He sniffed.
“It was in the amendment.”
Shaft Thirty was eleven miles east of the city, out past the last of the spoil-heaps, in a dead valley where nothing grew.
They went the next morning, in a hired coach.
Lucan, Rook and the newest member of the household, who sat bolt upright on the seat opposite them with her hands folded in her lap, staring out of the window at the grey dead land rolling past, and moving her lips in silent prayer.
Sister Ilse Varn had been in Grisholt for exactly one day.
Lucan had bought her the night before, from the Roster, with the last of the clean coin he had left after the bonds.
Five hundred and twenty silver.
Grade II.
Battle Cleric.
He’d bought her for one reason, and he’d told her so the moment she arrived: three men were dying of mana-sickness at the bottom of a shaft eleven miles away, and nothing in the Market at his Rank could cure it.
She’d arrived in a roar of fire.
The tear in the air had opened onto a vast burning temple, its columns crumbling, its great golden dome cracking open, and something huge and dark moving through the smoke behind it.
Something with too many arms that was eating the stars.
She’d stepped through backward, holding a sword in one hand and a book in the other, still facing the thing in the temple, still shouting a prayer at it.
When the tear closed, she’d turned around, looked at Lucan, looked at the room, and finished the prayer anyway, all the way to the end.
Then she’d put the book down on his bed and said, in a flat, deep, foreign voice, “My god ate my world.
I am told that you are now responsible for me.
Where is the nearest altar?”
She was tall, nearly as tall as Rook, and broad-shouldered, with a square, heavy, plain face, short-cropped iron-grey hair and pale blue eyes like chips of winter sky.
She wore a long white surcoat over chainmail, both scorched and torn, and a heavy silver chain around her neck from which hung a symbol Lucan didn’t recognise: an open hand with an eye in the palm.
She had a broadsword on her back that most men couldn’t have lifted.
She hadn’t smiled once.
Rook was fascinated by her.
“So your god,” he said, leaning forward in the swaying coach.
“It actually ate your world.”
“Yes.”
“What, all of it?”
“All of it.”
“Even the oceans?”
“Even the oceans.” Ilse didn’t look away from the window.
“It began with the oceans.”
“Huh.” Rook sat back.
“Mine was the moon.
It fell in the sea.
Drowned everything.” He thought about it.
“I think yours is worse.”
“It is not a contest.”
“Everything’s a contest,” said Rook cheerfully, “if you’re doing it right.”
Ilse turned her head, very slowly, and looked at him with her pale winter eyes.
It was a long look.
Lucan had seen men wither under shorter.
Rook grinned at her with his gold tooth.
“You,” said Ilse at last, “are going to be a trial to me.”
“Everyone says that,” said Rook.
“Then they get to like me.”
Ilse went back to looking out of the window.
But Lucan, watching her face in the grey light, thought he saw the very corner of her mouth move.
Just slightly.
The pithead at Shaft Thirty was a cluster of black iron sheds around a winding tower, standing alone in the middle of the dead valley like a gallows in an empty field.
There was a high fence around it, topped with spikes.
A Concern guard-post at the gate.
A barracks.
A great steam winch, roaring and pounding.
And a long, low, windowless shed beside the tower with a sign over the door: INFIRMARY.
Lucan had been here once before, in his memories.
He’d never got further than the gate.
The line of bondsmen being marched in, the line of carts coming out.
He’d thought about this part very carefully.
In the eyes of the law, he was a free man who had legally redeemed three bonds.
The men belonged to him now.
The Concern couldn’t keep them.
But the Concern could make him wait six days, and in six days, Haddin might be dead.
So he’d brought money.
Not clean coin.
Raw.
A heavy leather bag of it.
Out here, eleven miles from the city, among men who’d never seen an Assay Warden’s brass lens in their lives, a gold coin was a gold coin.
The shift foreman was a hard, red-faced man named Tolley.
Above his head: Owes: 210 silver (cards).
Is owed: 14 lives.
Lucan put five gold coins on his desk.
It was more money than the man would see in a year.
“I’d like to go down,” he said.
“Now.
And bring three men up.”
Tolley looked at the gold for a long time.
He picked one coin up and bit it.
Then he looked at Lucan with something in his face that was almost pity.
“You’ve never been down the Throat, have you, sir?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know what you’re asking.” Tolley pocketed the gold.
“I’ll take you to the cage.
But I’m not going down with you.
Nobody goes down there who doesn’t have to.” He stood up.
“And if you meet anything at the bottom, sir, that isn’t a man, don’t you look at it.
Just don’t you look at it at all.”
The cage dropped for a very long time.
Lucan had been down Pit Nine’s lift a thousand times.
It had taken two minutes.
This took twenty.
They stood in the swaying iron box in the dark, the three of them, and listened to the chain pay out over their heads, clank by clank, and felt the air change around them as they fell.
It got hot.
Then it got hotter.
Then it got thick.
It was like breathing soup.
The mana in the air was so dense that Lucan could taste it, a metallic, electric tang on his tongue like licking a battery in his old life.
His Ironmarrow training tried to pull it into his bones, the way he’d taught it to, and his bones hummed, a deep, painful vibration, as though someone had struck him with a tuning fork.
It was too much.
It would cook him from the inside.
Rook was sweating.
Ilse wasn’t.
She was praying, under her breath, steadily, and around her, faintly, there was a glow.
Pale gold.
Like the light of a candle seen through a closed eyelid.
Then the walls of the shaft began to glow.
They were bone.
Like Pit Nine.
But here the bone was different.
It wasn’t white.
It was blue.
A deep, rich, luminous blue, glowing from within, every rib and vertebra and knuckle-joint of it lit up like a stained-glass window.
The mana in it was so thick it shone.
Lucan could see the whole structure of the bones in the walls as they fell past: vast curving shapes, bigger than houses, bigger than churches, some of them arching overhead like the roofs of cathedrals.
It was beautiful.
It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
It was also, he realised slowly, moving.
Very slightly.
Very slowly.
The great blue shapes in the walls were rising and falling.
A long, slow, enormous rhythm.
In.
And out.
In.
And out.
Like breathing.
“Lucan,” Rook said quietly.
“I see it.”
“It’s alive.”
“I know.”
“Don’t look at it,” said Ilse, without opening her eyes.
“The foreman told you.
Do not look at it.”
The cage hit the bottom with a bang.
The Throat was a cave.
A vast natural cavern, glowing blue from every wall, so big that its far side was lost in a shimmering haze of mana.
And across its floor, in every direction, men were digging.
There were perhaps two hundred of them.
They swung picks and pushed carts in the blue light, slow and mechanical, like figures in a nightmare.
They were all thin.
They were all filthy.
And every one of them had veins that glowed.
Lucan saw it on the first man they passed.
His arms were bare to the shoulder, and under the grey skin, every vein had turned blue.
Not the blue of ordinary veins.
The blue of the walls.
Glowing.
As though the mana in the bone had got into his blood and lit it up from inside.
His eyes were blue too, faintly, and when he opened his mouth to cough, his gums were black with blood.
He didn’t look up as they passed.
None of them did.
And among them, smaller, much smaller, moving in and out of narrow cracks in the walls, there were children.
Lucan stopped walking.
He watched a boy of perhaps nine crawl out of a gap in the rock no wider than a drainpipe, dragging a sack of glowing blue bone behind him.
The boy’s arms were blue to the elbow.
He stood up, swaying, and handed the sack to a man with a ledger, who weighed it and made a mark and pushed the boy back toward the crack.
The boy went back in without a word.
Above the man with the ledger, Lucan’s eyes read: Owes: 4 silver (gin).
Is owed: 40 lives.
Above the boy: True name: Kip.
Bond: 70 silver (Fennick Mining Concern).
Owes: 1 life (to the Deep).
Status: being collected.
Being collected.
The same words he had seen over Rook.
He looked across the cavern, at all of them, the men and the children with their glowing veins, and saw the same words over every single head.
Owes: 1 life (to the Deep).
Being collected.
“Lucan.” Ilse’s hand closed on his arm.
Her grip was like iron.
“Your friends.
Find them.
We cannot stay here long.”
They found Orsen first.
He was singing.
They heard him before they saw him: a big, deep, cracked, tuneless voice, roaring out a drinking song from the pit taverns in the middle of the blue haze.
Oh, the bosun’s wife had a wooden leg, and the bosun’s wife had a— Lucan followed it through the haze and found a man the size of a door sitting on a heap of rubble in a side-gallery with his back against the wall and his eyes closed, singing at the top of his lungs.
Big Orsen Tull had been the strongest man in Pit Nine.
He’d been able to lift a full ore cart off its rails on his own.
He’d had a belly like a barrel and a laugh like a rockfall, and a beard like a hedge, and he’d drunk the meat out of the soup every single day for six years, and nobody had ever dared to say a word about it.
Now his beard was falling out in patches.
His great belly was gone, and the skin hung off his huge frame in loose grey folds.
Every vein in his body glowed blue.
His lips were black.
He stopped singing when Lucan said his name.
His eyes opened.
They were blue.
Faintly.
Glowing.
He looked at Lucan for a long time.
“Huh,” he said.
“Marr.
You’re dead.”
“I got better.”
Orsen thought about that.
Then he started to laugh.
It was a dreadful laugh, cracked and wet and ending in a fit of coughing that brought up black blood.
But it was a laugh.
“Course you did,” he wheezed.
“Course you did.
You always were a stubborn little bastard.” He wiped his mouth.
“Where’s Dez?
He with you?”
Lucan didn’t answer.
Orsen looked at his face, and stopped laughing.
“Ah,” he said quietly.
“Ah, no.”
“Varga,” Lucan said.
Orsen closed his eyes.
“Where are Wim and Haddin?” Lucan asked.
Orsen didn’t open his eyes.
He lifted one huge blue-veined hand and pointed along the side-gallery, deeper in.
Wim Carrow was dead.
He’d been dead for some time.
He was lying at the end of the gallery against the glowing wall with his knees drawn up, and the blue had got all the way into him.
His skin was translucent.
You could see the bones of his face through it, glowing.
Someone had folded his hands on his chest and closed his eyes.
Haddin was beside him.
He was still alive.
Just.
He was lying on his side on the rubble, curled up very small.
He was so thin that Lucan could have put both hands around his waist.
The blue in his veins was so bright it lit up the rock around him.
His lips were moving.
He was singing, very softly, under his breath.
A hymn.
Lucan didn’t know the words.
Lucan knelt beside him.
“Haddin.”
The young man’s eyes opened.
They were entirely blue.
No white left at all.
They found Lucan’s face, and something in them flickered.
“The quiet one,” Haddin whispered.
“The one who reads.”
“Yes.”
“Are you an angel?”
“No.”
“Shame.” Haddin smiled.
His teeth were black.
“Would’ve been nice.
An angel.” He coughed, very weakly.
“It’s in me now. Find the original chapter at g.com.
The Deep.
Can you hear it?
It’s singing back.”
“Ilse,” said Lucan.
She was already there, kneeling on Haddin’s other side.
She set her book on the rubble and laid both her broad hands flat on the young man’s chest.
She closed her eyes.
And she began to pray.
It wasn’t like the Draughts.
It wasn’t like the Sunwell.
It was slow and quiet and steady.
Her voice, deep and flat and foreign, rose and fell in words Lucan didn’t know.
And the gold light that had hung around her in the cage grew.
It spread out from her hands into Haddin’s chest, soft and warm, and where it touched the blue in his veins the blue faded.
Dimmed.
Pulled back.
Haddin gasped.
“Oh,” he said.
“Oh, that’s warm.”
Ilse kept praying.
Sweat stood out on her forehead.
The light flickered.
Brightened.
Flickered.
Then the walls moved.
The whole cavern shifted around them.
A long, deep, grinding groan came up through the floor and the walls and the glowing bones, so deep that Lucan felt it more than heard it, in his teeth, in his bones, in the roots of his hair.
Rubble rattled.
Dust fell from the roof in glowing blue streams.
Out in the great cavern, men cried out.
And the blue in Haddin’s veins flared.
It came back all at once, brighter than before, pouring back into his chest like water into a hole in the sand, pushing Ilse’s gold light out of him.
Ilse grunted as though she’d been struck.
Her hands jerked back.
[ WARNING: Hostile claim detected.
]
[ A debt is being collected in your presence.
]
[ Creditor: UNKNOWN.
]
[ Registry: ——— (ancient) ——— ]
[ Debt: “Every bone that was ever burned.” ]
Lucan looked up.
He didn’t mean to.
The foreman had told him.
Ilse had told him.
But the walls were moving, and the floor was moving, and the panel was screaming red in front of his eyes, and he looked up at the great curving blue shapes that arched over the cavern like the roof of a cathedral.
They weren’t the ribs of a roof.
They were the ribs of something lying on its back.
And high above, at the very top of the cavern, where the haze was thickest, half-buried in the rock, there was a shape.
Round.
Vast.
Bigger than the Hanged Bishop.
Bigger than the Registry.
Smooth and pale and gleaming blue.
An eye socket.
And at the very bottom of it, very far away, something glowed.
Something like a light at the bottom of a well.
It was looking at him.
[ LEDGER SIGHT: True name: ——— .
]
[ Is owed: Every bone that was ever burned.
]
[ Owes: nothing.
]
[ Status: COLLECTING.
]
“Lucan.” Rook’s hand was on his shoulder.
Hard.
Shaking him.
“Lucan.
Don’t look.
Don’t look at it.”
Lucan tore his eyes away.
He looked down.
Haddin was dead.
He’d gone in the moment the walls moved.
His blue eyes were open and glowing and empty, and his black lips were still parted on the last note of his hymn.
They carried Orsen up between them, Rook on one side and Lucan on the other, with Ilse walking behind, her sword drawn and her lips moving and her pale blue eyes fixed on the ground.
Orsen sang the whole way up in the cage.
The same stupid song.
The bosun’s wife had a wooden leg.
Over and over.
He wouldn’t stop.
Lucan didn’t ask him to.
They left Wim and Haddin at the bottom.
There was nothing else they could do.
They didn’t have the strength to carry them, and Tolley the foreman had told them, white-faced, at the top, that the Concern didn’t bring the dead up from the Throat.
It cost too much in winching.
The Deep took care of them.
Every bone that was ever burned.
In the coach on the way back to the city, while Orsen slept, slumped against Ilse’s shoulder with his huge blue-veined hand resting in her lap, and Ilse sat bolt upright and prayed over him without stopping, Lucan opened the Ledger.
▸ Fennick Mining Concern — 45 lives — UNCOLLECTED.
Forty-five.
Wim and Haddin.
Below it, there was a new entry.
He hadn’t made it.
He hadn’t recognised anything.
It had written itself, sometime in the cage, sometime in the dark, in letters of the same ancient, flickering, unreadable kind that he had seen over the eye at the top of the cavern.
▸ NOTICE: An obligation exists between the Account Holder and ———.
Nature of obligation: UNKNOWN.
The Account Holder has burned bone-coal (as a citizen of Grisholt) for 19 years.
Status: OUTSTANDING.
Lucan looked at it for a long time.
Every bone that was ever burned.
Every furnace in Grisholt.
Every chimney.
Every mana-lamp, every carbine, every turbine, every train.
The whole city ran on the bones of something that wasn’t entirely dead.
And it was collecting.
They got home after dark.
Nell was waiting at the door of the shop.
When she saw Orsen, huge and grey and blue-veined, stumbling out of the coach between Rook and Brutus, she made a sound Lucan had never heard her make before and ran to him.
Orsen looked down at her, blinking his faint blue eyes.
“Little Harlow,” he rumbled.
His voice cracked.
“Look at you.
All grown.”
He reached into the pocket of his ragged shirt, and fumbled, and took something out, and held it out to her on his enormous trembling palm.
It was a barley sugar.
Old and grimy and half-melted.
He must have been carrying it for two months.
“Sunday,” he said.
“It’s Sunday, isn’t it?
Dez said you like these.”
Nell took it.
She stood in the dark street outside Greaves & Son, holding a dirty barley sugar in both hands, and cried.
There was a card on the counter when Lucan came in.
Thick, cream-coloured, expensive, with a gilt edge.
The Fennick crest embossed at the top: a pickaxe crossed with a key, under a coronet.
Underneath, in an elegant, sloping, feminine hand:
Lady Isolde Fennick requests the pleasure of the company of Mr.
Lucan Aurel Thorne at dinner, at the Fennick House, the Spire, on the evening of the 9th of Thaw, at the eighth bell.
And beneath that, in the same hand, smaller:
I understand it is your birthday.
How fortunate.
I do so love a celebration.
— I.F.
The 9th of Thaw.
The date Wren had written on his forged birth certificate.
Lucan stood at the counter and looked at the card for a long time.
Behind him, in the armchair by the window, Ignatius Vale lifted his blind face toward the sound of his breathing.
“The frightened coins,” the old man said softly, “have stopped being frightened, my boy.
They’ve started being curious.” He folded his thin hands on the head of his cane.
“I’d be very careful, if I were you, what you eat.”