The chute was steeper than it had felt on the way down.
Lucan got about fifteen feet up the slope before his boots lost their grip on the loose spoil and he slid all the way back to the bottom, landing on his hip on the pile of bodies with a crunch that he very much hoped had come from someone else’s bones.
He lay there for a moment, breathing.
“Fine,” he said to the darkness.
“Fine.
We’ll do this properly.”
The golden panel hung in the air above him, patient as a clerk at a counter.
He had already learned that it would follow his eyes wherever he looked, and that it went dim when he wasn’t thinking about it and bright when he was.
Now he thought about it very hard.
“Market.
Show me everything I can buy at my rank.”
The panel unfolded.
It didn’t scroll so much as open, layer after layer, like the pages of an enormous book being riffled by an invisible thumb.
Categories ran down the left side in neat gold lettering.
[ MARKET — Tier I (Common) ACCESSIBLE ]
▸ Consumables (Draughts, tinctures, salves, food) ▸ Equipment (Tools, weapons, clothing, armour) ▸ Techniques (Breathing methods, combat forms, foundational arts) ▸ Spells (LOCKED — Requires Rank 1) ▸ Curiosities (Miscellaneous)
[ Tier II (Uncommon) — LOCKED.
Requires Rank 1 AND Clean Currency.
] [ Tier III and above — LOCKED.
]
Lucan frowned.
“Clean currency.
Explain.”
The panel considered him for a moment, if a panel could be said to consider.
[ Currency produced by the MINT is classified as RAW.
]
[ RAW currency is accepted for Tier I purchases only.
]
[ CLEAN currency is coin that carries a valid thread-sigil of a recognised sovereign authority, acquired through exchange in the world.
]
[ Tier II and higher purchases, and all ROSTER contracts, require CLEAN currency.
]
[ The Exchequer does not create value.
It records it.
]
He read that last line three times.
It records it.
So that was the catch.
He could pour gold out of the air until he was buried in it, but the gold was worth nothing to the system beyond the cheapest shelf.
To buy anything that really mattered, he had to push his raw coin through the real world, into goods, into trade, into something that came back to him stamped with the king’s mana.
He had to launder it.
The system itself demanded it.
It was, he thought, the most elegant piece of financial control he had ever seen.
Whoever had designed this thing understood money better than the Chamber of Commerce did.
“And rank,” he said.
“How do I rank up?”
[ RANK 1 — Requirement: Settle one (1) entry in the LEDGER.
]
[ “Settle” means: a debt owed TO you is collected, OR a debt owed BY you or on behalf of one under your protection is paid.
]
[ Current LEDGER entries: 1 (Varga, Edmund — UNCOLLECTED) ]
So he could collect Varga, or he could pay something off.
Varga was four hundred feet up and surrounded by Debt Marshals.
That would have to wait.
He put it aside.
First, he had to survive the night.
He went through the Tier I list slowly and carefully, the way he would once have gone through a company’s petty cash.
It was a habit from his old life: when you were looking for something important, you started with the boring entries, because that was where people hid things.
Most of it was useless to him right now.
Cooking pots.
Wool blankets.
Lamp oil.
A hundred kinds of rope.
But a few entries caught his eye.
[ Gutter-Cat Tincture (Common) — Three drops in each eye grants clear sight in near-total darkness for six hours.
Side effect: Light sensitivity.
— 2 Silver ]
[ Climber’s Iron (Common) — A set of four hand-and-boot spikes, hardened steel.
Rated for vertical rock and brick.
— 1 Silver, 30 Copper ]
[ Ironmarrow Breathing — Foundation Form (Common Technique) — A basic breathing method that draws ambient mana into the bones, gradually increasing strength, endurance and resistance to injury.
Mastery: Slow.
Effects: Permanent.
— 15 Silver ]
[ Plain Work Knife (Common) — Seven-inch single edge.
— 8 Copper ]
He hesitated over the breathing technique.
Fifteen silver for a thing that would make him stronger slowly.
In Grisholt, men trained in the foundation arts from childhood if their families could afford tutors.
Lucan’s family hadn’t been able to afford shoes.
But money was no longer the problem.
Time was.
“Mint,” he said.
“Twenty silver.”
The coins arrived in his palm with a cold, satisfying weight.
He bought all four items.
The coins vanished, and in their place appeared a small brown bottle, a canvas roll that clanked, a knife in a cracked leather sheath, and nothing at all for the technique.
Instead, there was a sudden pressure behind his eyes, like the beginning of a headache, and then knowledge simply unfolded inside his skull: how to breathe, where to send the breath, how to feel the faint warmth of mana in the air and pull it in and down into the long bones of his legs and arms.
He sat still and tried it.
The air in the cavern was thick with mana.
Of course it was.
He was sitting in the bottom of a bone pit.
The old dead power in the seams leaked out of the walls like damp, and when he breathed the way the technique showed him, he felt it come in.
It was cold at first, then warm, sliding down his throat and spreading out through his chest and into his arms in slow, heavy rivers.
It ached.
It ached in a good way, the way a muscle aches after work.
He breathed for perhaps twenty minutes.
When he stopped, his hands were tingling.
[ Ironmarrow Breathing: Foundation Form — Progress 0.4% ]
“Slow,” he muttered.
“Right.”
He uncorked the tincture and put three drops in each eye.
It burned like pepper.
He swore, blinked, swore again, and when his eyes stopped streaming, the cavern was full of light.
Not real light.
It was a soft grey luminescence, like the world just before dawn, with no shadows anywhere.
He could see every crack in the walls.
He could see the chute rising above him, a raw slanting throat of broken rock.
He could see the bodies around him in perfect, terrible detail.
He made himself look at them.
There were more than he had thought.
Thirty, forty.
Most were bone and rag.
A few still had faces.
The young man he had shared soup with lay on his back with his mouth open, a black crust of dried blood along his jaw, flies crawling in and out of his nostrils.
There was a woman.
Lucan hadn’t known women worked in Pit Nine.
Her skull had been staved in on one side, a neat shallow dent the shape of a baton end.
Near the bottom of the pile, half-buried, he found a boy.
Maybe twelve.
Maybe younger.
His shirt was too big for him and his boots had been taken.
Lucan stood over him for a long moment.
Then he opened the Ledger.
“Can I add entries?” he asked quietly.
[ The LEDGER records debts as they are recognised by the Account Holder.
]
[ Recognise a debt?
]
He looked at the boy.
At the woman with the dented skull.
At the young man with flies in his face.
“The Fennick Mining Concern,” he said.
“Owes.
For every one of these.”
The panel was still for a moment.
Then a new entry wrote itself under Varga’s, letter by letter, as if a pen were moving across the page.
▸ Debt owed TO Account Holder (on behalf of the dead): Fennick Mining Concern.
Amount: Forty-three lives.
(Count verified.)
Status: UNCOLLECTED.
[ Note: Debts recognised on behalf of others carry great weight.
Collection of such debts will be rewarded accordingly.
]
Forty-three.
He hadn’t counted.
The system had.
Lucan closed the panel, strapped the climbing iron to his hands and boots, and started up the chute.
It took him three hours.
The spikes bit into the rock well enough, but the spoil shifted under him constantly, and twice he lost his footing and hung by his hands with loose rubble pouring past him into the dark.
The new bones the Draught had built him held.
The muscle on top of them was the same tired, half-starved muscle it had always been.
By the halfway point his forearms were shaking so badly he had to stop and wedge himself into a crack to rest, and he used the time to breathe the way the technique had taught him, pulling the mana down into his arms.
It helped a little.
Not enough.
He thought about Dez the whole way up.
He thought about the way Dez had laughed at the soup line, last week, when Big Orsen had fished a rat’s tail out of his bowl and eaten it anyway.
He thought about the way Dez had kept a stub of pencil behind his ear and written terrible poems on the backs of ration cards and left them in other men’s boots.
He thought about the way Dez had smiled with blood running down his face.
Add it to the tab.
He thought about Dez’s sister.
He didn’t know her name.
That bothered him more than he could say.
Dez had talked about her constantly, and Lucan had never asked her name, because he had never imagined he would need to know it.
He kept climbing.
Near the top, the chute narrowed and the angle got steeper, and he could see a square of grey above him.
The grate.
Of course there was a grate.
They didn’t want things climbing out.
He stopped a few feet below it and listened.
Footsteps.
Slow, heavy, bored.
Someone was walking a circuit on the gallery floor above.
And with the footsteps, a second sound: a soft clicking, like claws on stone, and a low, wet snuffling.
A mana-hound.
Lucan’s stomach went cold.
He had seen the Concern’s hounds before.
They were bred in the company kennels on the surface from something that wasn’t quite a dog, hairless and grey, with too many teeth and a ridge of glowing blue nodes along the spine where the breeders had grafted bone-coal into their bodies to sharpen their senses.
They could smell mana.
They could smell fear.
They were used on the night shift to catch bondsmen trying to run.
The snuffling stopped right above the grate.
Lucan held his breath.
He could see it now through the bars, with his strange grey eyesight: a long, low shape, a head the size of a bucket, the blue nodes along its back pulsing faintly.
It pushed its snout against the iron, and its nostrils flared, and it made a sound low in its throat.
“What’s that, girl?” The footsteps came closer.
A man’s face appeared above the hound’s, peering down through the grate.
He was young and stubble-chinned, with a Concern night-watch badge on his collar and a lantern in one hand.
“Something down there?
Another rat?”
He lifted the lantern.
The light hit Lucan full in the face.
His tincture-soaked eyes exploded with pain.
It was like having boiling water poured into them.
He made a sound, he couldn’t stop himself, a choked hiss, and threw an arm across his face.
“Holy Saint,” the guard breathed.
“There’s a man down there.
Someone’s alive down there!” He fumbled at his belt.
“Hold on.
Hold on, I’ll get the key—”
Lucan blinked through the white blaze of tears.
The guard was kneeling by the grate, trying to unlock it with shaking hands.
He was going to let him out.
For one strange, dizzy second Lucan thought: he’s going to help me.
Then the guard stopped.
He held the lantern closer, and his eyes went wide.
“Wait.
You’re Marr.
You’re the one Varga wrote off this afternoon.” He stood up fast and backed away, his hand going to the brass whistle on his belt.
“Saint’s bones, you’re supposed to be dead.
I’ve got to report this.
Varga’ll want to—”
He put the whistle to his lips.
Lucan didn’t think.
Later, he would wish that he had; he would turn the next ten seconds over in his mind many times, looking for the place where he could have done something different.
But in the moment there was no thinking at all.
There was only the whistle, and the word Varga, and the absolute certainty that if that whistle blew, every Debt Marshal on the night shift would come running, and he would go back down the chute, and this time there would be no Draught.
The grate was already unlocked.
The guard had turned the key.
Lucan threw it open with one hand and came up through it like something crawling out of a grave.
The hound lunged first.
It was very fast.
Its jaws closed on his left forearm, and he felt its teeth go in, all of them, through the sleeve and the skin and the meat right down to the bone, and the pain was white and total.
It shook its head the way dogs shake rats, and something in his arm tore.
He drove the climbing spike on his right hand into its eye.
The spike was four inches of hardened steel, and it went into the eye socket with a wet pop and kept going.
The hound’s whole body convulsed.
Its jaws went slack.
The blue nodes along its spine flared once, brilliantly, and went dark, and it dropped.
The guard was staring at him with the whistle halfway to his mouth.
Lucan hit him.
He didn’t hit him well.
He had never been taught how.
He simply threw his whole body forward, and they went down together onto the gallery floor in a tangle of limbs, and the lantern rolled away spinning, throwing wild light across the walls.
The guard was bigger and better fed.
He got his hands around Lucan’s throat.
He was shouting something.
His knee came up into Lucan’s stomach.
Lucan raised the spike on his right hand and brought it down.
It went into the side of the guard’s neck, just under the jaw.
The guard’s eyes went very wide.
He let go of Lucan’s throat and grabbed at the spike instead, and blood came out around his fingers, a lot of it, dark and fast and hot, pulsing in time with his heart.
He made a sound like a man trying to gargle.
He kicked his heels against the stone.
Lucan held him down.
He held him down for what felt like a long time.
The guard’s hands clawed at his face, at his collar, at his wrists, getting weaker.
The pulse of the blood slowed.
The kicking slowed.
Lucan kept his weight on him, kept the spike in, and looked into his eyes the whole time, because it seemed to him that if he was going to do this, the least he owed the man was to watch.
Then it was over.
Lucan rolled off him and lay on his back on the stone, breathing hard.
The lantern had stopped rolling.
It lay on its side against the wall, throwing a long yellow fan of light across the gallery, across the dead hound with a spike-hole where its eye had been, across the dead guard with his throat opened and his chin painted red.
His arm was bleeding badly.
He could see the white of bone through the torn sleeve.
He opened the Ledger.
He wasn’t sure why.
Perhaps he wanted the system to tell him something: that it had been justified, or that it hadn’t.
The Ledger had nothing to say about the guard.
There was no new entry.
No debt.
[ No LEDGER entry recognised.
]
That was its own kind of answer.
“I didn’t know your name,” Lucan said to the body.
His voice was raw.
He reached over and turned the badge on the man’s collar toward the light.
T.
MARSH — NIGHT WATCH.
“Marsh.
All right.
I’ll remember.”
Then he got up, minted forty silver with his good hand, bought another Draught, and drank it standing over the body while the pain of his arm being sewn back together from the inside made him bite his own tongue bloody.
He left Pit Nine the way the bone-coal did.
The main lift was guarded.
But the slag rail, which carried waste up to the surface and dumped it on the great grey spoil-heaps east of the city, ran all night on a chain drive, automated, with only one bored brakeman at the top.
Lucan climbed into an empty ore cart in the dark of the loading bay and lay flat on the bottom of it, among the stink of old rock and old sweat, and let the chain haul him up.
The cart rattled and swayed.
It climbed through the tunnels for twenty minutes, past galleries he knew and galleries he didn’t.
He breathed the Ironmarrow technique the whole way, because it gave him something to do with his mind besides think about the guard’s hands on his wrists, getting weaker.
The air changed.
It got colder.
It got dirtier, in a different way, the clean dead dust of the pit replaced by the thick chemical sourness of the city.
Then the cart came out into the open.
Lucan sat up.
He had not seen Grisholt from above ground at night in six years.
He had forgotten.
The slag rail ran out along a high iron trestle over the eastern spoil-heaps, and from up here the whole city lay spread out to the west, under its permanent roof of smog.
The smog glowed.
That was the thing he had forgotten: how it glowed, underlit by the furnaces, a vast low ceiling of churning brown and orange and sulphur-yellow, like the inside of a wound.
Under it, the city burned.
Ten thousand chimneys stood up out of the dark like the bristles of a filthy brush, every one of them breathing fire.
Rail lines crossed and recrossed the districts on high iron trestles, and along them ran the night trains, long and black and studded with windows, trailing sparks and plumes of blue mana-steam.
Gas lamps traced the streets in long crooked chains of light.
Between them, the tenements of the lower wards were blocks of solid shadow, pressed shoulder to shoulder, lit here and there by a single window.
And above it all, in the centre of the city, rising out of the smog like a needle pushed up through dirty cloth, stood the Spire.
The Spire District didn’t burn.
The air-wardens kept a circle of clean sky around it, and in that circle, for the first time in six years, Lucan saw stars.
Just a few.
Faint and cold and very far away, shining down on the glass gardens and the white towers and the long galleries of the great houses, where the people who owned the mines lived above the smoke that the mines made.
Lucan looked at the stars for a long time.
Then he looked at the Ledger, glowing quietly in the corner of his vision.
▸ Varga, Edmund — UNCOLLECTED.
▸ Fennick Mining Concern — Forty-three lives — UNCOLLECTED.
“I’m coming,” he told the stars.
The cart lurched, tipped, and dumped him, along with half a ton of slag, down the side of the eastern spoil-heap.