I sit again, trying to remember something, but there is nothing except a slight whimper in my ring, an instinct to cringe.
I do not cringe. I cast about, waiting for Tom to suck me down into his well of darkness so we can “talk,” but the throne is solid now, a solid echo of power. I feel its throb pushing into my ring. The throne is solid, too. This time I own the throne. It’s my throne.
“Teacup?” Lucinda asks.
“This is important.”
The puzzle unravels easily.
The armrest is a skeletal hand carved upon a black-oak armrest of its own. Its fingers are splayed, but the ring finger is slightly elevated, not connected to the wood beneath. There is a groove beneath it, as if it should be nestled into the wood itself, as if it should be wearing . . .
I remove Tom’s ring and put it on the skeletal finger, but nothing happens until I push the finger down. The bony thing articulates at the knuckle and my ring clicks into place as if a part of the throne.
Almost. My ring is a hair too small.
The massive oaken throne sinks. Then the entire room shifts. I feel the clicking of mechanisms and see moss falling from the one long, circular ceiling seam, torn free as the room turns. Everything except the throne rotates, trees and basin moving, revolving upon some giant millstone.
When it stops, the door has moved five long paces to the left.
“Pan’s beard,” Lucinda swears. She puts her hand back on the white, stone basin, lips moving.
I stare at this new passageway, calculating. “It’s broken,” I say.
“What’s broken?” Lucinda asks. “You found a secret door!”
“Look with your eyes, Lucinda. It’s not flush. See how the black, tunnel stone extends on the left side of the frame and disappears on the right? This place is falling apart.”
“Yes, but you found—”
“And the grinding sound at the end. Nobody’s been maintaining the mechanisms. Only Tom would have known about this place, and he’s dead, so it hasn’t been greased and managed.”
“I see,” she says. “Can we discuss how interesting this place is above ground? Maybe this is a way out.”
“Oops.” I know she’s trying to hold it together. This room is a lot less peaceful-feeling since I barfed. I grab Tom’s ring and scamper to the door that has moved. This secret so big and intricate? This giant, swiveling room below the city? My heart breaks at the beauty of it. My old self would have been happy here. Content to hide, love, and explore. “Sorry.”
Lucinda smiles softly. “Don’t apologize,” she says as I help her squeeze through the new door. “It’s so good to see you smile again.”
Tom’s true home is full of surprises, and not the nasty sort I’ve grown accustomed to. The brown walls come alive with light as the new air blows in from the throne room, going from full dark to “bright, moonlit night” in just a few minutes time. We find a room with a bed and a writing desk, littered with old letters, repeat tax summons, and a dry inkwell. I leave the summons and grab the stack of letters. They stuff nicely into my satchel, which I’ve somehow managed to keep all this time. One letter appears to have been charred, torn apart, and glued back together several times. I would read it now but Lucinda has reminded me my smile has a shelf life and it’s running out. Any minute a riot could start, and the Nightshades could decide that keeping Carmen alive is more trouble than it’s worth.
We also find a larder with mostly spoiled food, except some cheese and a bottle of wine, which Lucinda and I share because it’s perfectly corked and perfectly safe.
“I thought Paladins didn’t drink alcohol?”
“You got something better to drink, sewer-rat?” Lucinda says, glaring. “I’m just a cadet, anyways.”
“Technically, we’re below the sewer.”
She glares again, takes the bottle from me, and coughs when she overtips, spraying red wine across the larder.
She slaps my helping hand away. “Bastard.”
I laugh.
Next, there’s a room full of vials, clay pots, odors, and powders. I prevent Lucinda from entering. “Don’t go in there. We’re in enough trouble as it is.”
She doesn’t argue. Tom’s poisonery is no place for amateurs. The antidotes are just as bad as the poisons unless you know your stuff, and I don’t. The sheer volume of ingredients here boggles my mind.
Down a short bending hallway we find a door jammed shut. I double check for traps, but there are none. Just an old-fashioned stuck door.
Lucinda puts her foot to the wall and pulls. The door groans and creaks. She resets and yanks, ripping the door away from the frame. She stumbles back as it rebounds against the stone. One of its hinges falls free and hits the floor in a shower of rust.
The entire room sighs and rustles with the sudden movement. Parchment and paper shunt into the tunnel. I wade in, once again fascinated by this secret world that Tom built for himself, here below the city of Lower Ector.
The room is piled high with papers and paintings and sketches. The parchment laps against the walls and furniture. Parchment torn to bits. Parchment in full sheets. A small library, a fortune of it.
None of the pages carry long-forgotten histories or priceless wisdom. No legends written in ancient script, or ancient ledgers and ciphers. Nor any script at all, in fact. Sketches only. Charcoal. Ink. Paint.
The paper flutters in bits as Lucinda wades in, stirring the once-quiet air and commenting on how it feels dryer in this room.
“Who would waste a fortune on sketching paper?” she asks. She picks one from the pile and shows it to me. It’s a pen-and-ink drawing of a woman. She has a haunted cheek and an earthy smile, a healthy smile, and a braid that wraps twice around the widest part of her head and tucks neatly behind the ears. She stands in the center of a familiar street in Upper Ector. A fine street. A clean street. She wears a well-tailored dress and boots both functional, clean, and well-crafted.
I pick up another sketch. Same woman, different street.
And another charcoal sketch.
And another.
And another.
The study is entirely filled with sketches of the same woman, with hair like the wisteria vine. Something about her face is unshakeable. It is the summer wind and late spring breeze rolled into one, mercurial but still . . . dependable. Both devious and unselfishly kind. A face I’ve never seen, but somehow familiar.
The style also looks familiar, but not like something Tom would do. I look around. There are a few charcoal drawings of far-away cities on the wall. Pen drawings of Ector’s docks and gallows. My favorite sewer grate. Sanjuste’s cobble shop. The dark grey-and-black stone of Byzantus. The faces of people from the bar. Gap-tooth. Markel.
“Teacup, look.” Lucinda hands me a sketch of Carmen and me playing darts together. I feel the ache in my chest and fiercely wish I’d spent less time being embarrassed and watching her from my perch, and more time laughing and telling her things. I fold it and put it in my vest pocket as Lucinda hands me another.
“Did I really look like this?” Turning another sketch toward me so I can see it properly. Its a sketch of her this time, flouncing from the kitchen with food and drinks. Her bodice isn’t properly laced, but back then it rarely was.
“Yes.”
There is canvas as well. I pull a scrap of it from the chaos. Painted, red cords as thick as my thumb stretch across a piece the size of my hand. Fishing in the mess, I find another piece with the same red coils and spirals. I see the gold-gilded portrait frame on the wall but it is mostly empty, painting torn from it completely. Only scraps remain between the ornately-carved bevel, though the frame’s carved title placard is undamaged.
“Wisteria,” it reads.
I approach the wall, trying to orient my scrap of canvas in the mostly empty frame. I lean forward, bracing a hand on the desk beneath it. My hand brushes a small, wooden box centered directly beneath the frame. Something in the box crackles and hisses.
Lucinda d
oesn’t see me open the box. She doesn’t feel me wondering, marking my crooked path through to the bloody end. She doesn’t see me examining Tom’s stone knife and wondering if it has room for another soul. She doesn’t see me slip the stone knife and its harness into one of my pockets.
“We need to go,” I say. “This room holds nothing for us.”
Lucinda nods sadly, letting a sketch fall quietly to the already-papered floor.
Down the hallway we find another door, and behind it a room full of models. Wooden models of trapped chests. Metallic locks, cut in half. Models of machines. Stiffened parchment models of famous castles and abbeys, including a shining, white, knee-high model of Fortrus Abbey. Working models. Models you could study for hours and still find new details.
The chef-d’oeuvre, though, is an enormous city model. Ector, in its entirety, is suspended in the center of the room. It’s a genius thing, with tiny buildings and bridges, working castle gates, and miniscule vegetable carts and stands that can be repositioned to whichever quarter is having market day.
For a moment I hear the city, as clearly as if it is all around me, see the ghostly picket lines throwing water on the buildings laid out before me I feel a pull in my chest, line to the oaken throne. And then, just as suddenly, it is gone.
“Teacup, are you okay?”
“I could hear the entire city.”
She stares at me hard in mosslight. “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
I trace the roads and streets with my index finger, marveling. Finding The Black Cat is a cinch. I’ve been going there since the day I was born, it seems.
The model for it is a cut above the buildings around it. The roof shifts slightly when I touch it, and I realize it is actually a stacked model of four smaller sections.
I lift the roof to reveal attic space and a few of its cheapest rooms. These lift away as well to reveal Barkus’s office and the “nice” rooms clustered around the open space above the common room. From here rises my center pillar. There’s even a miniature of myself perched upon the crossbeam, a tiny, paper version of myself in ragged, brown trousers and a brown vest. It’s holding a dagger and wearing a miniscule black ring.
Things haven’t changed much.
Lucinda glances at me. “Why are you the only paper character in the entire model?”
I answer with a question. “Why do you think?”
Because he’s using me.
Lucinda doesn’t answer, doesn’t understand that Tom set me on this dangerous course. Instead she follows my lead, removing another section of the model. She pulls away The Black Cat’s second story, exposing the common room, kitchens, and basement stairwell. I pull up the floor, revealing a basement half full of ale casks and a secret chamber behind them I hadn’t known about.
“Well, well, well,” Lucinda says, looming over my shoulder. “What other secrets are you keeping, Master Barkus?”
The city model is saying something important about the city itself, but I keep getting lost in the craftsmanship. Craftsmanship. Why does that seem so important?
Carmen’s old shop is especially well-rendered. Why would that be important to Tom? The detailed barracks? What is Tom’s purpose here?
The better I understand Tom, the better I’ll be at navigating rescuing Carmen. This world, the Nightshade world, was his.
Lucinda points to a lever on the wall. “What’s that for?”
“Probably to raise and lower it,” I say. “Hang on.” I reassemble The Black Cat and step back. “Pull that down. Slowly.”
The entire city model shifts upward as Lucinda works the lever, rising on thin wires strung through loops on the ceiling. The motion exposes a near-complete model of the sewers, cut away to show each lateral line in moderate detail. By the time she has the lever fully down and locked into place, the sewer has risen toward the ceiling as well, exposing Tom’s tunnels beneath them. The tunnels are incomplete, with discarded wood and paper scraps lying across the model, a thin knife, and a small, apothecary bowl of dried horse-glue. Half-finished segments of the tunnel layer have been pulled out of alignment, pulled to one side of a long, wide worktable for better access.
I try to orient myself in Tom’s lair, but this area of the model is even less complete than the encircling tunnels. The sanctuary has been framed in with rough wooden pillars and two tiny trees, but the larder is just a sketched piece of paper laid flat, while the poisonery, sketchroom, and bedroom are absent, dark holes of oblivion on the black-velvet tablecloth.
I hop up onto the single workbench in the room to get an the aerial perspective. The lowest layer looks like an archery target. Tunnels circle the entire city of Ector.
There are smaller tunnels, like the spokes of a wheel that connect the inner rings to the outermost rings. They travel deep beneath the city, well below the river, but from above the model the intent is obvious.
Not an archery target, I realize. This is an oversized dart board, with the oaken throne as the bull’s eye.
“You sneaky bastard,” I whisper.
“Beats the snot out of the sewer,” Lucinda says, missing my intent. “I think we could leave the city this way.” She traces a tunnel against the seven wedges. “We could be halfway back to Fortrus with Carmen before they even suspect we’re gone. And what about that?” She points to a large empty swath of table. “Do you think the tunnel’s unfinished, or the just the model?”
I shrug. I’m already miles ahead of her, just like Tom was miles ahead of the rest of us. With this, a shadowcloak, and a cloudy night, I could go unnoticed anywhere in the city. Or in little Kiri’s words, I could steal the pants off a Dreadlord’s bum. “Let’s see the city again.”
Lucinda raises the lever, and the sewer and city layers drop back into place.
Water drips onto my forehead. It’s not the sweet-smelling kind, but I wipe it away carelessly. These tunnels are dying. Without Tom here, they’re crumbling away, and they’re undermining the city sewer in the process. Every second we waste hurts us. We need to find Carmen and get out.
“Teacup?”
“Gimme a sec, Luce. Thinking.”
The ‘Shades came in numbers, and not just for me. They’ve come for the missing rings, the territory, and the power of the Dreadlord’s oaken throne. In our brief time above ground we even heard rumors of a turf war, “Pale-Monkey Nightshades arguing over city ownership, wagering on the souls of the damned.” For a group that large they’d need a headquarters, maybe two. Someplace to hold and interrogate the unlucky. Even in Fortrus they had a nest, and this operation is twice as big. Santé had said there might be one in Upper Ector.
Think!
I trace the model. The docks. My old house. The tax office. I think about the ‘Shades in every neighborhood, wriggling outward like a spiderweb. This isn’t like Fortrus. There’s too much directed action for them to be operating from outside the city. And that’s where Carmen would be, right at the center of the gauntlet. They’d make me wade through every inch of the city to find her. They’d expect me to fail.
I grin as the pieces snap together. Everything Tom cared about is rendered in detail. My house, the residence of an unwitting apprentice. Lantern Street. The Black Cat. The workmanship of these three models mark Tom’s strongest presence in the world of Ector. He would have had another, a building for hosting his kind, a larger building.
One black mansion sits like a dark cloud on the hill opposite Lord Bailey’s, ready to sweep down upon the rest of the town, down into these tunnels themselves and straight to me. By the standards of workmanship it screams for attention. Its walls are made of tiny, chiseled stones, slate roof-tiling, and carefully carved wooden beams. The model is authentic down to the wolf-carved, iron-studded, oak doors and vaulted red-glass vitrines.
She is there. I can feel it in my bones.
“That’s it,” I say pushing my finger toward it. “That’s where Carmen is.” My words come out as sure and solid as Magnus’s plate armor.
&nb
sp; “Lady Selwin’s? Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I say. “Lift the city again.”
My blood boils as I trace the tunnel we need to follow. A stone knife crackles in my vest. Selwin was Carmen’s patron, Carmen’s ticket to the uppercrust, but she’d been part of the setup. “Yes. I’m sure. We need to go this way.”
Lucinda chuffs at me like a stone bear as I stalk down the twisting hallway, pausing only for a moment to light her torch as we move into halls that aren’t lit and poorly maintained. “That’s it? No more food? No rest? Raw and battered and without allies?”
“This is my path.”
“Listen to reason, Teacup! Don’t try to do this alone. We can find someone to help.”
“The town watch?” I spit. “Lord Bailey’s ghost? Who is going to help us?” I stop for a heartbeat to rebuke her over my shoulder. “Between the ‘Shades and the Greys, this city is going up in flames. You think anyone is going to spare a dog’s puke for Carmen?”
“Yes.”
I turn back, her sharpness cutting through fatigue and stress. I expect to see her staring defiantly at me, but instead she seems to have forgotten our argument completely. Her cheek is pressed against the cold stone of a stairwell spiraling up and away from Tom’s lair. She’s staring across it, fingers tracing the wall as if trying to see something in the flickering torchlight.
With my ring on, I can see what she’s looking at better than she can. It looks like a street placard, though her probing fingers are obscuring most of it. It has a thin line carved in the stone, like the decoration on the painted street boards tacked to houses in Lower Ector. It even has divots carved to look like nail heads in the four corners. Lucinda inhales sharply, and when she moves her hand my heart stops. Where the street name would be is a carving of a cat sitting on its haunches, carefully textured to appear shifty and black in the torchlight. Lucinda bounds up the staircase, forgetting our argument.
“That’s the first place they’d wait for us!” I shout after her. Damn those long legs.
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