Chapter 1 #2
The upper levels of the Underground are the part that people mean when they say the Underground the way you'd say my neighborhood.
Lamp-lit corridors wide enough for two carts abreast, lined with black market vendors hawking everything from enchanted blades to counterfeit trade stamps to potions that will either cure your headache or give you a second one growing out of your shoulder, depending on how honest the alchemist is feeling.
Taverns and boarding houses and gambling dens sit shoulder to shoulder, and the air smells of fried food and forge smoke and the musk of a few thousand people living stacked on top of each other in a place where ventilation is an ideology.
It's not comfortable or safe, but it's lit, and it's navigable, and the people here follow something close to rules even if those rules are enforced by debt and reputation rather than law.
Below this, deeper, the corridors narrow and the lamps thin out and eventually you reach the Depths, which are uncarved cave systems full of ambient, unpredictable magic that changes people who stay too long.
Emery has been down there twice and come back both times with a headache and the nagging sense that something had tried to read his thoughts.
He doesn't go back unless he needs to. He must now, because that's where Bastian Kane hides out, but he's going to make sure he knows exactly where to go before he steps foot there.
The upper levels are his territory. He knows the rhythms, the faces, the unspoken hierarchies. He buys drinks and asks questions and lets people talk, because people in the Underground love to talk, especially about the things that frighten them.
The useful information is this: Bastian Kane frequents a place called the Velvet Hollow.
The noise is everything else, most of which is some variation of don't go near that man unless you want to find out what your own skeleton sounds like from the outside.
One bartender tells him that Bastian once killed a man by whispering into his ear.
Just a whisper. The man's skull came apart at the seams. Another source, a fence who deals in stolen goods and whose reliability Emery rates as questionable, tells him that Bastian controls the Underground's entire trade network and that anyone who tries to move product through his territory without permission ends up as a story that other smugglers tell each other over drinks to scare themselves sober.
None of which tells him anything he can actually use.
The Velvet Hollow is a brothel, but calling it that is reductive.
So is calling the Maw a city. It is, by all accounts, the most prestigious establishment in the Underground, the kind of place where the drinks are better than anything available above ground, the rooms are warm and draped in luxurious fabrics in the colors of deep gemstones, and the clientele pay accordingly.
It is run by a woman named Vella, and the consistent theme of every conversation Emery has about her is that she does not tolerate disrespect, she does not tolerate extortion, and she has never once in her considerable life answered to a man.
Emery likes the sound of her already.
He cleans himself up as much as his limited wardrobe allows, which means the shirt without the stain and the trousers without the patch, and makes his way down through the winding corridors of the Underground.
The descent from the guild house to the Hollow takes him through two of the lamp-lit upper corridors where black market vendors and boarding houses sit side by side, through a junction that smells of fried onions and mildew, and past a row of taverns where people who have never seen the sun drink things that would strip paint from the bridges above.
The Velvet Hollow announces itself gradually, first in the quality of the lamplight, which shifts from the guttering yellow of tallow candles to the steady amber of oil lamps in polished sconces, then in the smell, which loses the damp mineral edge of the tunnels and picks up something heavier, sweet and layered, incense and warm skin and the faint undercurrent of something floral he wouldn't be able to name if he tried.
The corridor widens and reveals a curtain of dark velvet hanging across an arched doorway.
Beyond it Emery can hear the murmur of voices, the clink of glasses, and the low throb of music that seems to come from everywhere at once.
He pushes through the curtain and into a room that makes him feel, immediately and acutely, that he does not belong.
The Hollow is gorgeous. There's no other word for it.
The ceiling is draped with fabric in deep blues and greens, and the light comes from dozens of lanterns suspended at varying heights so the whole room seems to glow from within, warm and pulsing and alive.
The furniture is dark wood and plush cushions, arranged in clusters that create pockets of intimacy without sacrificing sightlines.
A bar runs along the far wall, tended by a woman with four arms who pours drinks in a way that makes her part of the entertainment.
The air is thick with warmth and the faint charge of something Emery can't name, some ambient hum that sits just below the range of hearing and makes the skin prickle.
Dancers move through the room in various states of undress, all of them beautiful, all of them performing in ways Emery recognizes because he's been running his own version of the act his entire adult life.
He finds Vella.
She is exactly what he expected and nothing that he expected, both at once.
Tall, composed, with scales running up her forearms and the sides of her neck that catch the lamplight and scatter it in iridescent flashes of green and gold.
Her tongue is forked, and she speaks with a soft lisp that somehow makes every word sound more deliberate, threading each syllable into place with visible care.
Her eyes miss nothing. He knows this because they land on him the moment he's through the curtain and don't leave.
He does what he does best. He makes himself exactly what she needs and nothing more.
Over the course of a few careful conversations, spread across three visits, he constructs the version of himself that will get him through her door: a young man between circumstances, lean and pretty, with a face that will keep clients spending and a quiet competence that doesn't need to be loudly advertised.
He doesn't oversell. He doesn't grovel. He presents himself with the precise balance of confidence and need that tells Vella he will work hard, cause minimal trouble, and be grateful for the opportunity without being pathetic about it.
She studies him each time with those dark, slitted eyes. He feels, under the weight of that scrutiny, that she is seeing things he is not presenting, turning his pages and deciding whether the story is worth the shelf space.
On the third visit, she agrees to hire him.
She tells him her rule is that no one touches her dancers without their consent.
If they do, he tells her, and she handles it.
She takes a cut of his earnings and provides room and board in return.
The rooms upstairs are for the dancers and for business and he can use them for either.
She tells him this is a business, and he has the right to refuse service to anyone he wishes.
Emery almost asks her to repeat that last part because it's the first time in his life anyone has told him he's allowed to say no.
He doesn't ask. He nods, and he gets to work.
The first night is challenging.
The outfit is minimal, which he expected.
Low-slung trousers made of something thin and clinging that sit on his hips in a way designed to make people stare, bangles on his wrists that catch the light when he moves, and nothing else.
His chest is bare, his feet are bare, and the earrings he always wears are the only thing he brought from his old life into this one.
He dances.
He is good at this, which is not the same as enjoying it, but the distinction has never mattered to anyone paying.
He learned to move his body in ways that hold attention because holding attention is a form of power and power, when you have nothing else, is survival.
He rolls his hips for a table of merchants and watches their eyes glaze over with the hunger of men who see a body and forget there's a person attached to it.
He drops into the lap of a man who smells of pipe smoke and too much wine and lets the man's hands settle on his waist, his ribs, the bare skin of his stomach.
The man's fingers are clammy and possessive and Emery lets them wander within the parameters of what he's decided he'll tolerate for the evening.
Another patron, skin that looks and feels closer to polished bark, eyes that glow faintly amber, pulls Emery into his lap and whispers things in his ear with breath that smells of eggs while Emery pretends to be interested.
The man's breath is hot against his neck and his grip carries the entitlement that comes with believing money can buy anything.
Emery leans into the touch and makes soft sounds of encouragement that he doesn't mean and could probably make in his sleep.
He distracts himself. He thinks about rolling hills and a knight on a grand adventure.
He thinks about a portal to somewhere else, somewhere that smells of open air and fresh water instead of sweat and smoke and the desperation of people who must buy company, somewhere far from the shadow of the Underground.
He has done worse for less.