Six
I live in a giant hole in the ground.
There are some weird cults who’ll tell you that our enclosed cavern is the whole of the universe; they insist that stories of the outside—the sun, the moon, the stars, and so on—are merely heretical fictions.
This is obviously idiotic. If there’s no outside, where does the mash come from?
And where does the scrap we scavenge go?
Anyway. Giant hole in the ground. It’s a cylinder several kilometers across and a few hundred meters high.
At the very top is the Asshole, the giant orifice that dumps endless scrap atop the Heap.
Below that are the three tiers of the ring-city, each a circle around an empty void to give the tumbling concrete and metal plenty of space.
From the bottom up, the tiers are red-lit Malkuth, busy Yesod, and luxurious Hod.
At the top is a cul-de-sac, a plaza lined by razor-wire fences patrolled by watchful Arbiters.
Only those with appropriate passes are allowed to pass through the gates into Malkuth proper.
And if you want to get to Yesod, the pleasant second tier where the workhouse overseers and factory bosses reside, that means another ascent; the steps are less fearsome but the security is even stricter.
A Malkuth pass isn’t that hard to come by, stolen or sold by some workhouse inmate on leave, but a Yesod pass is rarer than a dancing pig.
So what’s a boy with robbery on his mind to do? If he happens to be completely insane, he might try this:
Find a hole in the grating that protects the underside of the Stair from debris.
There, among the shadowed tangle of rusting, groaning beams and girders, pull on a pair of gloves and kneepads enhanced with BIND sigils.
Work his way up a hundred meters to the underside of Malkuth, then climb upside down to its inner edge.
Ascend the armored inner wall another few dozen meters to reach the bottom of Yesod, all the while hoping that the spastic Asshole above doesn’t release a new torrent of junk that scrapes him off like a bug.
Crawl upside down again to reach a certain loose panel, which, when pressed upward in the right way, admits our enterprising thief into the sewer-and-maintenance layer that underlies the elegant houses and broad lawns above.
After all that I lie on the rusty metal and just breathe for a while, my leg a screaming mass of knotted pain. My faithful runic companion skitters around and helpfully berates me for the failures of my inadequate meat body.
Can’t spend too long relaxing in the sewage stink, though.
Unlike the Heap, the tiered city actually gets dark at night, courtesy of huge sunlamps set into the roof of the cavern.
That’s important because up here the Arbiters actually patrol; there’s no world in which my gray thieving outfit looks anything but suspicious, so it’ll go badly if they spot me.
Best to stick to the shadows and be gone before daybreak.
I move through the maintenance tunnels for a bit, then climb a ladder and ease open a hatch a few centimeters. Star flattens himself out and scrabbles through the gap.
[Observation: no observers], he tells me.
I slip out after him, press myself against a wall, and take a few moments to let my eyes adjust. Not just my eyes, either—everything here is so different I feel like I’m in another world.
Yesod has streets, not just haphazard alleys.
Yesod has houses, not just shacks leaning drunkenly against one another for support.
Most of all Yesod has plants, grassy lawns and neat rows of trees.
You might almost think you were in one of the surface towns from Somi’s storybooks, if not for the blackness of the sky and the stillness of the air.
I’ve been here a couple of times before, and it still takes my breath away.
[Query: what is the purpose of a “lawn”?]
You can… walk on it, I guess?
[Further query: the streets are insufficient?]
I don’t know. The lawns are nicer to look at.
[Speculation: “lawns” are decorative in nature?]
I think so. I know they’re involved in something called a “picnic,” but the nature of that activity remains unclear to me.
[Addendum: similar to “flowers.”]
Yeah. They look nice.
[Conclusion: it is a great deal of effort to go to, simply to look nice.]
I suppose they can afford it.
Which of course is why I’m here.
The smallest houses on Yesod, only twice the size of the bakery, belong to the lowest tiers of supervisory workers.
The largest would dwarf the entire market square down below and have permanent guards bearing the colors of Hod Council families.
What I’m looking for is something in between, a largish place without visible private security, which usually means an empty building.
A few minutes of skulking through alleys finds me a likely target.
It’s a big place, with a grass lawn in front and big windows all around.
The architect has provided all the trappings, like stone columns of no obvious purpose and extra little pointed bits like the roof needed its own, smaller roof.
Most importantly I see no guards out front and no lights inside. I circle it a few times, assessing.
I think this is it, I send to Star.
[Assessment: positive.] He’s up on the roof, a tiny black shape scuttling across the gray tile. [No inhabitants detected.]
Not a guarantee, of course. But nobody lives in a place like this alone; if there was an occupant, they’d have a flock of servants looking after them. No sign of anything like that. Let’s do it. Meet me in the back alley.
A few seconds later Star comes skittering down the wall.
The back door is locked, but the windows beside it are easily big enough to crawl through.
Star climbs across the glass with tiny click-clicks.
His blades are small but gruesomely sharp, and they cut through the glass with the faintest of high-pitched shrieks.
He expertly slices out a section big enough for me to step through, then grabs it with one sticky limb before it can fall and lowers it gently to the ground.
[Assessment: perfection. No possible room for improvement.]
Pity there’s no such thing as a HUMILITY sigil.
[Defense: there is no shame in stating a fact.]
Yeah, yeah. Get in there.
Star slips around to the other side of the window and drops gently to the floor. All I can see are thick blue drapes, which rustle slightly as he peeks out from underneath them.
[Observation: a parlor. Empty, door closed.]
Perfect. I step carefully through the sharp-edged hole, pushing the drapes aside.
The challenge in looting a Yesod house, assuming you’ve picked a good one, is less finding something valuable as it is finding something you can carry.
In the parlor alone I can see a half dozen objects that would sell—liquor bottles in the fancy sideboard, books on the recessed shelves, the oval carpet beneath the high-backed armchairs, and the clock on the wall all look tempting.
But I can carry only so much in my pack, so the point is to maximize value for weight.
I take a silver ashtray and pad to the door to keep looking.
It opens onto a darkened hall, lit only by the faint glow of streetlights from outside.
It’s hard to see much; I don’t dare show a light that someone outside might notice.
But Star’s thief body has sigils wired into his sensors that make him as comfortable in the dark as a rat, and he scuttles out ahead of me.
You take the first floor, I tell him. I’ll check the bedrooms upstairs. The main rooms are more likely to have useful sigwork constructs, but bedrooms usually have the best decoration. Star is better at finding sigils than he is at assessing artistic merit.
[Instruction: stairs are on your left.] He skitters off, tiny feet tick-ticking on polished stone.
I turn left and take a curving staircase up, snatching a few pretty knickknacks from the pointless little shelves.
The upper hall has a half dozen doors, with the largest at the far end.
I head for that and find it locked, which is a surprise.
But it’s a flimsy thing, intended for privacy rather than security.
I slam my hip against it, and it gives way with a crunch. My leg twinges.
Big room beyond. Big bed, sheets rumpled. There’s a painting on one wall, a nice one in a gilt frame. Some kind of ornamental vase, probably too heavy. A bathroom, with a cut-crystal soap dish—that might work—
I’m halfway across the room before the rest of my brain catches up. Rumpled sheets, like someone was sleeping there—
Someone kicks me very hard from behind.