Chapter 144: The Undervault

The forge had no sign. It stood at the bottom of a steep lane on the Seventh Ring, and inside it a man with one ear was beating a hinge flat without looking up.

"Garrow? Coin says you make blades for men who don’t want to be remembered."

"Coin says a lot of things. Most of them cost." Garrow dropped the hinge in the water, and the steam went up. "What do you want?"

[Garrow. Rank D. Hostility: 9%.]

"Straight. As long as my arm. No shine on it, and nothing on the hilt that a man could describe afterward."

Garrow looked him up and down, then laid a bar of black steel on the anvil and patted it.

"Ambar black! The best steel in Solvane."

’Fence’s Eye.’ The number that came up in Aren’s head would have bought a good kitchen knife.

"It’s Ninth Ring iron with soot on it."

Garrow barked a short laugh and put the bar back. "I keep it for rich boys. What did you look at it with?"

"My grandfather was a smith."

"Your grandfather was an assassin as well, then." He came back from the back room with something in an oiled rag, and unwrapped it far more carefully.

It was a finished blade, straight and plain, grey and pitted, the color of the dust on the Fourth Ring roofs.

"Well iron, from the Pale Well side, where nothing grows. Your essence stays inside the edge, without a glow or a spark." He shrugged. "A pill-fed lord ordered it to hide how little he had, and never came up from the Undervault."

’Inside this edge, New Moon is a straight cut, no longer than the blade. I lose the reach. But I keep my head.’

Fence’s Eye put the blade a little above the green silk purse from Leoric Dane’s coat. He laid the whole purse on the anvil. On the paper band round the gold, in a round and pleased hand, someone had written: For the night’s work. T.

"Nobody else wants an ugly blade from a dead man’s order," Aren said.

Garrow stared at him. "Your grandfather, right?"

"Nope, this time it’s my grandmother."

Garrow weighed the purse and nodded.

’Tarquin paid twenty-four men to drag Seren out of her own cellar in her sleep and burn it behind her.’ Aren folded the paper band away in the Deep Purse. ’He can pay for one knife.’

The stair to the Undervault went down from the Ninth Ring to the galleries that circle the Well, behind an iron gate with a Church lantern painted on it. A warden in white sat by it with a book on his knee.

Nil came down at the second bell after dark, and the six men waiting by the gate looked at him as if Coin had sent them a bill.

’One good core before the week is out, or Rook’s head goes on a wall.’

Their chief was a broad, weathered man in an old Sarkhane sea coat with the badges cut off, and his silver band was scratched from years of rope and stone. He handed the warden a folded paper. The seal was white wax, stamped with a lantern. The warden read it aloud, "Corran, crew of six, and one more extra," wrote down Nil, and opened the gate.

"Coin’s seal," Corran said when it shut behind them. "Church wax, House money. If they ever check it, we all hang."

[Corran. Rank B. Hostility: 41%.]

"Coin sends me a colorless nobody in a tin suit." Corran lit his lamp. "Last week he sent me two like you. One came up in a sack, and the other didn’t come up." He looked at the black mesh of the helm. "Can you talk, tin?"

Nil nodded.

"Good. Don’t." Corran started down. "Stay at the back. If you run, run up."

The stairs ended in a gallery of white stone that curved away round the Well. A Bureau board hung on a chain at the first junction, with the Rifts chalked on it by grade, and somebody had rubbed two out since morning. Wade, a thin cheerful boy with a carrying class, had all the sacks and both lamps on his back.

"They open and shut," he told Nil.

West Nine, C, was a crack in the gallery wall as tall as a door, with edges that shook like air over a fire. Cold air came out of it, with a smell of wet copper.

Corran sniffed. "Bell-Eaters. A nest. We kill the little ones at the neck and take their marrow. Nobody touches the mother. When she comes down, we leave." He looked at each of his men. "That’s how we lost two last week. Somebody wanted her core."

They went through.

On the other side was a wet cave lit by glowing jellies on the roof. The young Bell-Eaters were feeding on them, long pale things with too many legs, walking upside down and tasting the air with the feelers round their mouths.

[Bell-Eater. Rank D: Marrow.]

The crew went to work. Two men held lamps high to draw the young ones down, and Corran and the others killed them at the soft joint behind the head, one stroke each. Wade sacked the marrow. Nil stood at the back and watched the roof.

The feelers of every Bell-Eater in the cave turned toward the lamps, and the warm men holding them. None of them turned toward him.

’They taste the air. This armor doesn’t give them anything to taste.’

Iron Sense found nothing in the stone but the crew’s buckles. So he used his eyes, and found the dark hole in the roof above the deepest cluster of jellies, wider than the others, where nothing was feeding.

The mother came out of it with no sound at all.

She was three times the length of her young, with thick milky plates, and she came across the roof in one fast rush. Her legs closed on Wade, who was bent over a sack, and she went back up the wall with him, toward the hole.

[Bell-Eater. Rank C: Core Formed.]

"Wade!" Corran threw his lamp. It burst on her plates and slid off, burning. Wade was screaming, twenty paces up.

’Just in reach.’

He looked hard at the empty air beside Wade’s shoulder.

[Nullstep.]

He was there, in the air, with nothing under his boots. He got one arm round Wade’s chest and chose the floor below before he looked at it.

[Nullstep.]

They landed heavily on the wet stone, and Nil let go of Wade and rolled. Wade’s leg was opened from knee to ankle, but it was still attached. Above them, the mother tasted the air for the thing that had taken her meal. She found Wade’s blood and the crew. She did not find Nil.

She came down at the men.

Corran met her first with his sword in both hands, and it bounced off her plates with a dull clang. The others backed toward the Rift crack. She was fast in a straight line and clumsy in the turns.

Nil went between her and the crew and made her turn.

He cut at a leg to tell her where he was, and she came at him. He stepped left and she followed, all her legs scraping, and he stepped right and she followed again, slower, and her glass teeth went through his arm plate, and he felt them open the skin under it.

’Fault Line.’

The plates lit up for him. One line ran bright down her back, where an old crack had healed badly.

She turned to come at him again, and showed it to him.

He put New Moon into the Well iron, all of it, and the blade did not glow. It simply got heavier in his hand. He went in under the feelers, close, inside the teeth, and cut once along the line.

[New Moon.]

For one heartbeat, along the line, there was nothing to stop it. The blade came out the far side, straight and short, no longer than itself.

The mother kept walking for three more steps. Then she came apart along the line, quite neatly, with her legs still moving.

The young ones went back into the roof.

Nobody said anything for a while. Wade sat against the wall with Corran’s belt tied tightly round his leg, white in the face. The others looked at the mother, and at the grey blade, and at the black mesh of the helm.

[Nullstep (Lv. 2). Mastery: 41% → 44%.]

Corran opened the mother with his knife where the plates met under the body. He came out with a core the size of a plum, grey-blue and lit from inside.

"House rule. The House buys crew cores at the House price." He put it into Nil’s hand. "A man who kills alone sells where he likes, and the House takes its cut. And a man who brings my boy back up with both legs gets no argument from anyone on my crew."

[Corran. Hostility: 41% → 12%.]

’Fence’s Eye.’

The number came up, plain and certain. Nine thousand six hundred crowns.

Nil closed his fist on it.

’Nine thousand six hundred, or a start on my own ring. I’d rather eat it.’ He didn’t. ’Rook’s neck first.’

Perfect Blood had already closed the cut under his sleeve. The split arm plate he would have to hide from Coin.

They went back round the white gallery, carrying Wade between two of them. Halfway round, a side passage went down to the left, and Corran, at the front, didn’t look at it, and neither did anyone behind him. The air that came out of it was colder than the Rift. The walls inside, as far as the lamplight reached, were white with frost.

"Don’t look down that one." Wade spoke through his teeth. "Nobody goes deep. Only A crews, and only for a lot of money."

"Shut up, Wade." Corran didn’t turn round.

Nil walked last. He looked down it briefly in passing, and nothing moved there.

Rook was on the workshop roof at dawn with his bottle and his book, and he had the core in his coat before the second bell.

"I won’t sell it with my face," he said, when Aren asked how. "Benedek has a price on my face this week, and you read colorless at the gate. A colorless boy with a C core gets asked where he got it." He drank. "There is a widow on the Fourth Ring who sells for the Sixth Ring crews. Nobody asks a widow anything."

He came back at noon and counted the gold out on the warm tiles, less the House’s cut and his own, which he said was his business.

"You were in the Undervault last night. You came back with the best core the widow has seen this year, and you can still walk. Coin has a new Hand, stone-seller. I hope he knows what he bought."

When Rook had gone, Aren took the armor out of the Deep Purse on the roof to clean the Bell-Eater’s blood off it, and laid it face down on the tiles.

On the grey plate of the back, between the shoulders, there was a print of frost.

A hand, narrow, with long thin fingers, pressed flat. It had been in the Deep Purse all night and all morning, and it had not melted. When he held his palm over it, the cold came up into his skin.

’The Scar’s cold stays inside the armor. This came from outside.’ He had walked last past the white gallery. Nobody had walked behind him, and he had felt nothing.

He put his fingers on it, and they came away white.