Twenty-Seven #2
My rooms are, if anything, more luxurious than Ky’s—in her suite the furniture had the scuffs and wear of daily use, while here everything is as pristine as if it had been made yesterday.
She breezes past the gilded ewers of fresh-cut flowers to demonstrate the bath, a massive marble thing with taps for hot and cold water on demand.
I probably could have figured it out on my own, but Ky grins at me like a child demonstrating a favorite toy.
Once she departs for her own rooms, I have to chase a couple of servants away to actually get some privacy.
Then, cautiously, I run the water as hot as I can stand it and shed my worn Heaper garb.
Slipping in is a little-by-little process of exquisite agony.
I sink down, water closing over my face, and feel the heat of it on every centimeter of my skin.
This I could get used to.
Eventually I have to empty the tub and fill it again, watching my accumulated filth whirl down the drain.
The hot tap catches my eye—it’s a simple sigwork construct, a few sigils built into the pipe so subtly it’s hard to notice them.
They’re orange, orange sigils just to heat water for a bath a little faster, and there are at least three taps in this room alone.
Now that I’m paying attention, there’s sigwork everywhere, even in the toilet. (Maybe to keep it from clogging?)
There’s a knock at the door. “Taj?” Ky says. “Have you drowned?”
“Not yet, but I’m working on it.”
“Shall I come rescue you? We’ve got work to do.”
If I say yes, she might actually do it. “I can rescue myself, thanks.”
Amid all this splendor, the last thing I want is to put my filthy clothes back on.
Fortunately there’s a fluffy gray bathrobe hanging nearby for exactly this purpose.
When I emerge I find Ky, freshly bathed herself, fussing over several outfits laid on the table with a couple of maids.
She’s wearing a well-fitted shirt, jacket, and trousers; with her hair done up and her slim figure, it gives her an almost androgynous look I find ridiculously attractive.
I make sure the bathrobe is loose enough to hide any importunate stiffenings.
“These should be close enough,” Ky says. “We’ll take proper measurements later, but Saree’s a wizard at doing things by eye. Here, try this one for now.”
I’d been worried since she first mentioned clothes that I was going to be expected to wear something hideously awkward and end up looking like an idiot.
Or more of an idiot, anyway. Thankfully none of these outfits are as bad as I feared, and the one she indicates looks almost practical—thick, loose pants; a sleeveless vest; and a light jacket, all of fine but sturdy material.
I gather it up and head back to the bathroom.
“Nice” is Ky’s judgment when I emerge. “You need a shave and a proper haircut, but we’re getting somewhere. You look like a real runic master.”
“Is that what I’m dressed as?”
She nods. “An official from the Ascent is coming over to register Star. We’ll meet him in the workshop. Everything fit all right?”
I tap one foot. “Shoes are a little tight.”
Ky glances at one of the maids, who scurries away. New shoes appear, as though from some bottomless stockpile of footwear, and I pronounce them acceptable. Ky, still grinning, takes me by the arm and leads me on a convoluted path through this maze of a house.
“You’ll like this,” she says. “We don’t keep a staff sigworker anymore, but we have all the tools you could possibly want. My grandfather was a big sponsor of fighting runics, and my father kept it all up even though he wasn’t much interested.”
“Can I ask a question?”
Ky looks back at me, slowing a little. “Hmm?”
“Where does all this come from?”
She frowns, following my vague gesture. “The lamps?”
“All of it. The sigwork, the clothes, everything.” I look down at myself. “Maybe some of this is made here on Hod, but…”
It’s been bothering me since I noticed the construct in the bath.
I just can’t imagine someone up here carefully hammering out gold-filigree hot water taps, complete with orange sigils.
More importantly, I know the fighting runics here are made from parts with sigils already integrated, but who makes the parts?
Ky slows to a halt, looking thoughtful.
“Some of it is made on Hod,” she says. “The clothes especially. But mostly it comes from Above.”
“From Above? You get your fabric and pretty vases and… and toilets from Above?”
She nods. “A lot more than that. Food, too, except for a few fruits and vegetables we grow here. All the mash you eat in the undercity ultimately comes down from Above.”
“I thought nobody from Above ever came down except for the tournament judges.”
“They don’t. It’s all automatic.” She waves a hand. “On the other side of Hod there’s a processing facility. Big… things, like runic wagons three stories high. They come down loaded with stuff for us.”
I shake my head, trying to process this revelation. “Why?”
“What do you mean, why? Because we need it. Without food we’d all starve.”
“But why does Above do it? Charity?” There’s a terrifying thought. What if they wake up one day and feel suddenly less generous?
“Oh!” Ky raises her eyebrows. “Sorry, I forget that you don’t know anything. We send them stuff back. Sigils and scrap. It’s a sort of trade.”
“You send them sigils?”
“From the workhouses.” She pauses, uncomfortable, perhaps recalling our previous conversation on the subject.
“Each of the Hod families owns some of the sigil production and scrap processing operations on Yesod and Malkuth. All the product goes Above, and we get a corresponding share of what comes down. We sell that on and use the proceeds to buy the scrap and pay the sigworkers. Round and round, right?”
It has the air of something she learned in childhood, something she’s never questioned. “Your family does this, too?”
“Of course. The twelve families with the largest holdings make up the Council.” Ky looks at me closer. “Taj? What’s wrong?”
“I just…” I swallow. “I never thought about how the whole thing worked. Down in the Heap looking up, it’s not so easy to see.”
She gives a sympathetic nod. “I know it’s a lot to take in.”
“What does Above even want with our sigils and scrap?” It’s hard to imagine the authors of all this luxury around us having any use for the pathetic red sigils scratched into clay by Heapers burning their lives out, or the piles of tangled steel and wire assembled by the scavengers.
Ky gives another shrug. “Nobody knows, unless the Council members get told when they go up to the surface. You can try asking the judge when he arrives, but I doubt he’ll say anything.” She takes my arm again. “Now come on, the Ascent people will be here any minute.”
I allow myself to be dragged onward.
The workshop is everything Ky promised and more, enough to make my mouth water at the sight of it.
There are four stalls big enough for a large runic, each with sigwork cranes for lowering heavy parts into place.
More tools, a few familiar to me but most utterly beyond my experience, are neatly laid out on racks nearby.
Bins of common parts line one wall, the kind of things I might have saved up for weeks to buy.
Star is picking through these as we enter, sorting a stack of disembodied joints with his fine manipulators. His head swivels round to watch us, big optics gleaming.
[Understatement: this is a treasure trove.]
No kidding. You should see the rest of the house.
[Conclusion: burgling Yesod was setting our sights too low.]
I doubt getting in here would have been quite so simple. If those harrowing climbs can be called simple.
[Suggestion: bonk Ky on the head, load up, and run for it?]
I smile to myself. I think we can do better than that.
[Query: what could be better than this much loot?]
Living here. Belonging here. With no Arbiters trying to catch us.
He clicks and whirs thoughtfully.
“Well?” Ky says. “Sufficient for your purposes?”
I laugh. “You know it is. If I’d had a place like this before, I’d…” I trail off, because there’s really no good conclusion other than not have to do this in the first place. “When do I get started?”
“After the Ascent official arrives.” She glances at Star. “We still want him looking incomplete.”
“Why?”
“He’s going to tell everybody all about us. These bureaucrats love to sell gossip, and we’re going to be the big unknown here. Every other runic in the Ascent has probably been on Hod for weeks getting ready, which gives the spies plenty of time to poke around.”
“So everyone else is going to know what they’re up against, and we won’t?”