Chapter 129: The Green Doors

The east road went out past the tanners and then stopped pretending to be a road.

Theo left the horse tied at the last house with a roof on it and walked the rest, and the smell came up to meet him a quarter mile out, old hides and lime and something under both of them that had been wet for a long time.

The stockyard sat in the elbow of a dry watercourse with a fence round three sides of it.

Pens. That was the first thing. Eleven of them in two rows, built for cattle a long time ago and not holding cattle now, and past the pens a long shed with the doors painted green about nine years ago.

Four men on the gate. Two more on the shed.

’Six. Hostile walked out of that Hall at half past four and it’s a two-mile walk on new hands, so either nobody’s told them yet or this is what being told looks like.’

He put the mask on.

They saw him at forty yards, which was further out than he had wanted and closer than they would have liked.

The one on the left gate said something. The one on the right went for a horn on a post and got it up to his mouth.

The dark came up out of the watercourse and went into the horn.

It made no noise at all. The man blew, and blew again, and took it away from his mouth and looked into it the way a man looks into a boot with a stone in it, and by then the crow mask was inside the fence.

Theo went through the six of them in about forty seconds and did not kill any of them, which cost him a great deal more effort than the alternative.

’Wrists and knees. They can still tell somebody about it afterwards if they’ve got a mouth.’

He put the last one down against the fence post with a broken arm, crouched, and asked his first question of the evening.

"Green doors."

The man told him. The man told him a great deal more than that, most of it about his own mother, and Theo left him there and walked up the row of pens.

He looked in every one on the way past.

Eleven pens. Four of them had people in them.

Not prisoners, exactly, and that was somehow worse. They were sitting down. They had blankets, and there was a water butt with a dipper on a chain, and somebody had been feeding them for long enough that they had a place they sat and a place they did not.

An old man in the second pen looked up at the mask and did not stand.

"You’re not one of them."

Theo said nothing.

"Fourth pen." The old man tipped his chin. "If you’re after the loud one. She’s been in the fourth pen since Tuesday and she’s been asking about a Yura every hour since."

Sivvy had her back to the rail and her knees up and both wrists tied in front of her with a carter’s knot.

She came off the rail when the shadow crossed her, and she got up with her shoulder into the post the way a person does who has been getting up fast for four days, and then she saw what was standing at the gate of the pen and went absolutely still.

The crow mask looked at her for a second.

Then it cut the rope.

Sivvy held her own hands up in front of her and did not rub them, and looked at the mask, and her mouth came open.

"...Are you — "

Theo pointed at the road.

She did not go.

That was the part he had not planned for, and it took him a moment to understand that she was not being brave, she was doing arithmetic, and the arithmetic had Yura in it.

"Yura," she got out. "There was a man, he came for Yura and Bethe, he said—"

"Alive."

Sivvy’s whole face folded.

"...Oh."

Then she wiped it with the back of her bound wrist and looked up at the mask again, and Theo could see her getting there, and he turned his head away from her the way he had turned it away from the woman at the counter.

’Don’t. Don’t say it. If you say it out loud in a yard with six men in it who can hear—’

Sivvy said it instead, with her bound wrists still up in front of her.

"Thank you."

And then she went, and she stopped at the end of the row and got the old man’s pen open and the two after it, and she went up the east road with eleven people and did not look back once, which Theo thought was the single most sensible thing anybody had done all week.

He let the Protector’s Domain up over them for the first two hundred yards.

It came out of the ground pale and thin and about as steady as a held breath, and it cost him something in the sternum, and it lasted until they were past the tanners.

[Protector’s Domain — A] 1.23% → 1.61%

’That went up. That’s the first time that number has moved since I got it.’

Then he went back and had a proper look at what he had just walked into.

The green doors were not locked.

Inside, the long shed was a warehouse, and it was nearly empty, and the emptiness was the interesting part.

Crates. Hundreds of them, stacked four high along the whole north wall, all of them open and all of them empty. Straw packing still in the bottom of most, and pressed into the straw, in every single crate, the same round hollow about the size of a fist.

Theo stood in the doorway and looked at four hundred feet of that.

’...Cores. That’s a core-shaped hole, and there’s one in every crate in this building.’

There was a board on the wall by the door with chalk on it, ruled into columns, and the columns had dates down one side and numbers down the other, and somebody had been keeping it up in a small careful hand for a very long time.

He let the eyes come open and read it, and then he did something he had not done since a ring of swept bone.

’Domestic Manager. Tell me what’s in this room and how much of it there is.’

[Domestic Manager — surveying]

[Crates: 1,180. Empty: 1,180]

[Straw: abundant]

[Cores in store: 0]

[Tally board — received: 4,411]

[Tally board — dispatched: 0]

’Four thousand four hundred and eleven in. None out.’

He read the second column again with his thumb under it.

’They tax every core taken on ten floors and they’ve never sold one.’

He came out of the shed into the yard with his heart going, and turned round, and looked at the place properly for the first time.

The path did it.

There was a path worn into the dirt from the green doors, four feet wide and beaten down to hardpan by years of men walking it with weight on their shoulders, and it did not go to the gate of the yard, and it did not go to the road.

It went the other way.

Theo followed it round the end of the shed, past a lean-to full of handcarts, out to the back of the lot where the fence stopped and the dry watercourse cut in.

And there it was.

A ring of grey stone, twelve feet high, standing on its own in the elbow of the ditch with nothing behind it but more ditch, and somebody had built a wooden ramp up to the lip of it, and the ramp was worn smooth in two tracks the width of a handcart’s wheels.

’There’s a Dungeon in the stockyard, and they’ve been wheeling four and a half thousand cores INTO it.’

He stood in the ditch and let the Genesis Eyes open all the way and gave the ring everything he had.

[Dungeon Gate]

[Registered Tier: C]

[Current classification: — ]

[You do not have access to this information]

’...That’s new.’

The line sat in the corner of his eye and did not go out.

’It’s told me I’m not allowed to know something twice in my life, and both times it was about a person.’

Theo went back up the yard and took his time about it.

He put the handcarts through the lean-to wall. He went down the north side of the shed with nine feet of shadow and took the roof props out one at a time, and eleven hundred and eighty crates came down into the middle of the building with a noise that started birds up out of the tanners’ yards half a mile away.

He took the tally board off the wall first and put it in the Coffer.

The pens went next, all eleven, gate posts and rails and the water butt with its dipper on a chain, and when he had finished with the pens he went back and did the fence.

By the end of it there was a quarter acre of flat ground in the elbow of a dry watercourse with a ring of grey stone standing in the middle of it and nothing else at all.

Theo stood in front of the ramp with the mask on and his sleeves pushed back and the chalk dust of a tally board still on the inside of his glove.

’Right. They’re feeding it, I’ve got no idea why, and the only thing in Alderkeep that can tell me is in there.’

He put his boot on the first board of the ramp.

’Also I’ve never done one of these on my own... let’s find out.’