Penitent Page 6

  ‘Gone in?’ I asked. I glanced at the barred gate that the burdener had locked. ‘I thought it was a wager-bout, for spectators?’

  ‘No, it is travail,’ the boy replied. ‘They go in by number, and come out under Limehall. And them as come out first are the winners on which wagers are paid out.’

  ‘And them as come out at all are lucky,’ chuckled the old veteran.

  ‘Close up your mouths,’ the burdener said, his voice bearing the hard accent of the Herrat. ‘She’s no wagerer. Look at her.’ He stared at me. ‘What is your true game?’ he asked.

  ‘Is there one called Renner?’ I asked, changing my approach quickly. I described Lightburn to them in simple terms.

  ‘Him, aye,’ the veteran said. ‘Renner-boy. Him’s a good lad. Done it three time, so he has, and won the purse each go.’

  ‘That’s why he took number three,’ said the old woman with the pail. I saw that it contained many tokens cut from plastek wafers, each one inscribed with a number.

  ‘Our champion, is Renner,’ the other woman agreed.

  ‘So he has gone in?’ I asked. I already knew the answer. The boy had not yet sponged away all the words written on the boards, and I saw Renner’s name chalk-written alongside other names, each with a number and odds marked against them.

  ‘And you should go off,’ the burdener hissed. ‘Be away, or we will fetch you away.’

  It was not the worst threat I have ever been issued, but the menace was more in his bearing than his words. He took a step forward, his hidden hand preparing to draw. I read the hunch in his shoulder as he braced to engage. He had fought before, and knew how it was done.

  I turned my limiter cuff off before he could demonstrate. The cold empti­ness of my blankness washed into them hard, magnified in the small chamber. It was as though all warmth had imploded. They all recoiled in distaste at the un-ness of my presence. Even to those not psychically sensitive, the pariah state can come as an unsettling shock, especially when delivered suddenly. The two men who had been stacking weapons fled at once, but the rest could not, or dared not, pass close to me to reach the exit. They were reluctant to touch what was untouchable, and flinched back. The veteran slipped off his stool, the old woman gasped and drew her shawl up to her lips, and the boy started backwards into the chalkboard.

  The burdener was wrong-footed. In his hesitation, I grabbed his face and shoved, sweeping out his legs at the same moment. He fell on his back. I relieved him of his hook-knife, and put my foot upon his chest.

  ‘Where do they go?’ I asked.

  None of them wanted to answer me, for they were all too disarmed by an uncanny lack they could not explain.

  ‘Where?’ I insisted.

  ‘Through the underworld,’ the veteran stammered. ‘Down in the below, in the old catacombs.’

  The lowest and oldest part of the bonehall.

  ‘It’s a race?’ I asked.

  ‘There are no rules,’ the veteran said. ‘It’s travail. You find your way, or you get lost. It’s a maze down there.’

  ‘But the first to find their way to Limehall wins?’

  He nodded anxiously.

  ‘Are there hazards?’ I asked. ‘You arm them.’

  ‘No rules say you cannot afflict your competitors in the dark,’ said the woman with the apron. ‘It’s catch as catch can. And there are holes, mind. Sinkholes. Pits.’ Apprehension of me wavered in her voice.

  ‘So, it’s first one to Limehall by whatever means necessary?’ I asked. ‘What else lies below?’

  ‘Who knows?’ mumbled the boy. ‘But so many go in and so few come out, as I can’t explain by pit-holes or a knife in the ribs.’

  ‘They come out in Limehall?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re going there now,’ the militiaman said, holding the lightpole with a shivering hand. ‘It never takes less than three hour for them to come out. The wagerers will be gathering, to see who first emerges.’

  I considered going to Limehall. It was, perhaps, a mile away. If Renner came through, I could greet him there. It would be a risk, if the gamblers were assembling at the finish line. The kind of men who wagered on such human blood sports would not be hale company. They would be armed, or accompanied by lifewards, and they would not take well to an interloper in their midst.

  My choice was then decided for me. A man’s cry of pain, distant but clear, rang up from the depths through the cage gate.

  I felt sure that it was Renner Lightburn.

  ‘Give me the keys,’ I said to the burdener.

  Prone, with my foot on his sternum, he grudgingly held the key-bunch up.

  ‘And give me that,’ I said to the militiaman, reaching for the lightpole.

  ‘We need the light to find our way back up,’ he said, with some concern.

  ‘Find another,’ I snapped. ‘Light a lamp.’

  I stepped off the ruffian’s chest, and unlocked the cage gate. It was heavy on its hinges, and opened with a squeal that sounded like another distant cry of pain. Lightpole in my hand, I peered in.

  ‘You can’t go down there,’ said the old woman.

  ‘Watch me,’ I replied.

  CHAPTER 8

  Which is of the Below

  I entered the underworld, and did so with unease.

  I had read books, perhaps too many, and could easily recount the many myths of travellers who ventured into underworld realms. It was said even Orphaeus himself, whose name ran through the very fabric of the world, had made a pilgrimage into darkness. Such journeys were fraught. In not one single myth did the traveller undertake a crossing without paying a toll or making some sacrifice. There was always a price for admission, and another price for exit.

  But that was myths. This was merely underground, the subcore of Queen Mab. But the ’romatik veteran’s choice of word had bothered me. Queen Mab was a place where myths seemed more real, hiding just beneath the skin, and I well knew that, however hard it was to find access, the City of Dust overlapped the City of Mab. I felt as though I was descending into a real underworld of myth, not some benighted catacomb. I shivered to think I was embarking on some soul-quest into the otherworld, a safe return from which would require some existential penalty. I felt I should have brought a lyre, or coins to pay the boatman.

  I tried to dispel such whimsical fears.

  I had the lightpole, and the field of waxy, yellow light it cast around me. I had my sidearm, and I still had the burdener’s ugly hook-knife. I turned my limiter back on, for I did not wish to rile up the lemures and spirits of the dead with my null state.

  That which they had called the Below was a dire place. The steps down were ragged, and worn slick by run-off. The walls were dripping wet, like the black cliffs of thawing glaciers. Shadows bobbed and weaved, and everywhere, in side chambers and pits, bones were piled like matchsticks. There were heaps of femurs, and bundles of ribs, and pyramids of skulls. It felt like the True Hell of the infernally damned, except that the tormenting fires had gone out. It also resembled some vault of spare parts, where raw components had been sorted and stored according to type, like screws and washers, from which an artisan god could reassemble men and send them back into the light to live additional lives.

  The darkness beyond the compass of my lamplight was heavy. It seemed to throb like a living thing. It was like pitch midnight, distilled down to a concentrated syrup. I could hear the constant drip of water, but I felt I could hear the darkness too, hear what an old poet had called the weird sound of its own stillness.

  Down here were the bones of men, the bones of lives, the bones of dreams, the skeletal remains of things forgotten and neglected. They had all fallen here, but I had chosen to come, and I quickly began to regret that choice.

  I walked with tentative steps. My boots were good, but still they slipped and skidded on the wet calcite. My light sparked back to me
off glinting rock crystal in the shadows, mere reflections, but they seemed like the tapetum flash of observing eyes. The stacks of old bones were endless, heaped by the unreliable path, or piled in pits, or crammed into stone alcoves of ancient manufacture so that they spilled out underfoot. As before, they were compulsively sorted by type. This, I knew, was the habit of bonehouses like St Belpheg’s Ossuary, and of long barrows and kiln graves too. The bodies of the dead were left on the stone shelves of the upper galleries until age had taken the flesh and tissue all to dust. Then the attendants of the ossuary would gather the loose and now anonymous bones, and remove them to the catacombs below, sorting them type by type so they might be packed and stored with more economy. Thus the upper vaults were kept clear for new arrivals, and the irreducible bones were archived in smaller and yet smaller spaces. Thus skulls were stacked in niches, and longbones piled end to end in alcoves, and spines were entwined in stone basins until the last gristle had decayed, whereupon the loose vertebrae could be tipped like seashells into ouslite urns or marble coffers.

  These I saw along the way: boxes of bones, stone jars brimful of knucklebones, urns of phalanges and tarsals. I saw old push-barrows too, and handcarts and brooms and rakes, the tools of the attendants’ trade. I wondered what such a trade, a constant nocturnal administration of bone, did to a person’s mind. Did they lose all disquiet of death, or did they become more prey to superstition than most?

  Beyond the next rambling gallery, filled with baskets of loose ribs bound into bundles like corn sheaves, or quivers of bent arrows, I found an answer of sorts. Before me stood a gateway made of human ivories, its frame of thigh bones braced with wooden collars, its arch of shoulder blades crowned with jawless skulls. The mind, it seemed, became deranged, or so inured to the material of the deceased that it was prompted to disrespectful sport. More bone sculptures loomed into my light as I went on: grotesque constructions of impossible anatomies. Some were huge, towering ten metres tall or more, and many of the bones they had been wrought from had evidently been selected for their unusual qualities. There were fragile wands of osteoporotic wastage, bones knurled with old and long-healed fractures, and others distended by the overgrowth of acromegaly. The sculptures were made more awful by the fact they had no meaning, none I could discern, and served no purpose. They were not even gates or arches, just ivory confections raised like the altars of the mad. More awful still was the vacant stare of the empty sockets: bare skulls whose constant grins betrayed no mirth, and whose deep orbits seemed to plead for dignity. A ribcage with four heads, upon a platform of ulnae; a rostrum of pelvic halves, surmounted by ten skulls bound into one; a death-knight mounted upon a whole horse, both fashioned from human fragments, both armoured with scale mantles of overlapping scapulae and sacrums, and strung with necklaces of teeth.

  I fancied I should not like to meet the ossuary workers, above or below ground, and wondered if they were one of the hazards that the wager-sport participants were obliged to evade.

  Ghost sounds came from the breathing dark, not just the patter of seeped water. I heard, more than once, dry bones scatter and ­rattle, as if settling, and thought they might have been disturbed by intrepid rats, except I saw no rats, for there was no meat or marrow to draw them down. I heard, twice, a distant cry, but I could not judge the direction, and once I distinctly heard the sound of running, of hasty footsteps that approached and resolved to nothing.

  At the base of more steps, which could not have been riskier to descend if they had been hewn from ice, I found a yellow disc. It was a plastek token, like those the old woman had held in her pail. Near it, on the gleaming floor, I saw spots of fresh blood. I picked up the token, and saw it bore the number ‘7’. Not Renner, but seven had been an unlucky number for someone.

  Just then, my luck seemed to end too. I almost pitched into a sheer pit, the bottom of which my light could not reach. The wet stone floor was almost black, and the mouth of the pit black too, and only at the very last moment did I notice the black was no longer reflecting the gleam of my glow-globe.

  I started back, then stooped, feeling the ground until my fingers found the invisible lip, the line where black rock became black air. One more step, and I would have plunged. I looked for a way around, for none was clear even by lamplight. I used the base of the lightpole to prod and test what was stone and what was not. I found, at length, a narrow path, little more than a ledge, that skirted the pit beneath the gable of a stone colonnade where each recess was packed with jumbled skulls, like market wareboxes piled with dry-husk fruit.

  Again, I heard a far-off cry that made me tense, and I drew back against the alcove arch. I waited for a moment, and as I did, I noticed that some of the skulls there had been turned so they faced – out of the haphazard heap – in the same direction. This was true in the adjacent alcove, and the next along, suggesting it was not random. Someone had turned the skulls, perhaps to mark the route, and indicate the safe way forward with their vacant stares.

  In the crypt beyond, several femurs had been extracted from their stacks and laid out along the same plane. More markers, deliberately set, though not obvious in this desert of bones. Once I had noticed them, I began to find more, little moments of linear precision in the scattered litter. Who had set them so, and where did they lead? It was reasonable to suspect they marked the way to some trap or misfortune, yet there was nothing else I could trust, because I could not see far into the darkness, and my sense of direction was scrambled by the catacomb’s twists, descents and turns.

  The thought took me by surprise. For a moment, I had to work to control rising anxiety. I had been focused on the way ahead, and finding poor Renner. Now, I realised, I wasn’t certain I could easily retrace my steps if the need arose. I imagined Medea chiding me for my rashness, and Harlon beginning a blunt lecture on tracking practices and proper field preparation.

  This, in every myth, was how visitors to the underworld came astray. The underworld swallowed them and, despite their confidence or determination upon setting out, they lost their way. The myths always ended in the same manner, no matter their cultural derivation: the visitors only ever emerged from the underworld if they had a guide, or if there was divine intercession, or if they paid the boatman’s price to be shown the way. They never, ever found their own way out, and some part of them, at bitter cost, was always left behind. I thought of coins upon dead eyelids, the ferry-fee.

  I was lost. The furtive signposts of bone were my only aid. I hoped they were, perhaps, my divine intercession. I placed my trust in them, and followed their morbid lead.

  ‘Give me your light,’ a voice called out.

  It startled me a little. So many odd sounds had occurred since I began my descent, I had begun to dismiss them all as imagination, but this was abruptly real.

  ‘I will not,’ I replied, turning and raising my lightpole to squint at the shadows.

  ‘Give it me.’

  A man’s voice. Out of breath and, from the tone, scared. I smelled rank sweat.

  He edged into the lamplight. He was a street vagabond, clad in poor and dirty clothing. He was short but heavyset, his face blotched with an old las-burn. In his hand, he clutched a rusty cutro, the tip towards me. My lamp was meagre, but his eyes creased at the glare of it.

  ‘Give me it,’ he said. ‘I need it.’

  ‘Are you of the game?’ I asked, keeping an eye on his small sword.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The game? Do you play it?’

  He nodded, and patted at his chest. There, a green token was pinned like a medal, and on it, the numeral ‘9’.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Never mind my name, girl. Give me the lamp.’

  ‘I will not,’ I replied, ‘for I need it to find my way. But if you give me your name, I will share my light. You look lost too.’

  His expression was pained, from nothing but fear.

&n
bsp; ‘Eyling,’ he said.

  ‘We both need a way out, Eyling,’ I said. ‘We do not belong here, nor should we have entered.’

  Eyling nodded. ‘Play the game for a few pennies,’ he replied ruefully. ‘I thought it would be easy. But there’s something down here in this damn pit.’

  ‘The other players?’

  ‘No, not them. The anatomists. Forsaken freaks. You’ve seen their work, you must have done.’

  Eyling, a Militarum veteran of the war, had been living in poverty on the city streets, his circumstances miserably reduced when his pension was denied. He had joined the game in a desperate bid to make coin. The anatomists, he told me, were the workers of the ossuary, who dwelt in the deepest parts of the catacomb, and shunned the surface. They had become a tribe to themselves, living in a world of human bone that had long since demented them and driven them feral.

  These, and many other things, he told me as we made our way by the light of my lamp. He acted bold, as though he had taken me prisoner and was now in charge, but I could tell he was simply glad of my company. He talked without my prompting, chattering eagerly now he had light again and a person to talk to. He’d only been in the Below for two hours, but the solitude and heavy darkness had already punished him badly.

  ‘Do you know Renner?’ I asked him.

  ‘Renner?’

  ‘Number three?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Lightburn. Yes. Him, I know. He’s played before. He told me not to join the game, but I need the pay. It’s hard, he said, hard on the mind, and I said to him, I said, I was at Caston Field with the Sixty-First, I know hard.

  ‘I was wrong,’ he added, after a pause. ‘It is hard on the mind. To be alone, and in such weight of darkness. I believe this is how it feels to be dead.’

  ‘I do not think being dead feels like anything,’ I replied.

  He shrugged. Eyling was a poor wretch, but I was strengthened by his presence. He was the lost soul now, and I had become his light and his divine intercession, and that suggested my myth might play out in a quite different fashion.