Chapter 83

Chapter 83: Chapter 83

Nia ate her fried herring roll cold while sitting on the floor by the cast-iron radiator, using her left hand to pick flecks of pickled onion off her linen sling.

"You actually carried a dead fish around in your coat pocket for three hours while tying up dockers," she said, licking salt off her thumb. "That might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me, Elvit."

"Luckas bought them," I said, sitting cross-legged on the floorboards across from her with my tunic unbuttoned down to the sternum. "I just kept from sitting on it when we climbed the stairs."

It was nine o’clock on Sunday night. Outside our frosted window, snow was sliding off the steep slate roofs of the dormitory wing in heavy, soft thuds.

Between our knees sat two of the small lead-glass bottles from the War Ministry’s mahogany prize chest, alongside two red crystal vials of refined ember-quartz.

I pulled the glass stopper out of my bottle of marrow oil.

It didn’t smell like oil at all. It smelled like wet quarry slate and turpentine, and when I tipped two drops onto the fingers of my left hand, the silvery liquid was so heavy and cold it felt like rubbing liquid lead across my skin.

"Luckas said go slow over the breastbone," Nia murmured, setting her empty paper wrapper aside and loosening the top two buttons of her flannel nightshirt with her left hand so she could reach her collarbones. "If you rub it too low over your stomach, it makes you throw up."

I smeared three fingers’ worth of the cold silver grease straight down the center of my chest, right over the flat bone where my internal furnace sat.

For five seconds, it just sat there on my skin like cold lard. Then the turpentine smell vanished, and the silver liquid sank straight through my pores into the cartilage of my ribs without leaving a single greasy smudge on my fingers.

A deep, weird numbness spread across my chest—as if someone had packed clean snow between my ribs and my lungs, loosening the tight, hot knot of muscle that usually sat behind my breastbone whenever I pulled my Ember hard.

"Feels like peppermint," Nia whispered, her eyes half-closed as she rubbed a dab into her own chest. "My stitches stopped itching."

I picked up the red crystal vial of crown quartz, pulled the wax plug with my teeth, and tipped the coarse red sand dry onto the back of my tongue, swallowing it down in one gulp without water.

The first time I had taken a vial after beating Mercer two weeks ago, the heat had rolled through my veins like a heavy mug of mulled wine, warming my hands and feet for twelve hours.

This time was different.

Because my core was already packed full from a month of heavy sparring and the first November vial, the new mineral didn’t spread out into my legs. It hit the bottom of my throat, turned into a solid ball of white-hot iron behind my sternum, and shoved outward against my ribs like a fist trying to punch its way out of a closed barrel.

My breath locked in my windpipe. Despite the marrow oil keeping my ribs from cramping, sweat popped out across my forehead in two seconds flat.

Deep inside my chest, for the very first time, I felt the wall.

Commander Erula had told me about it once while we were sitting by a grease-fire in the caves north of Shepfold: Between the Swelled Bud and the Bud Burst, there’s a skin of dead iron around your heart. You can’t go around it, and you can’t melt it a little at a time. You have to pack so much heat behind your ribs that the skin splits open all at once—or else it cooks you inside your own shirt.

As the red quartz slammed against that internal iron band, my right forearm suddenly jerked across my knee on its own.

Under the linen splint Madam Sorrel had taped around my wrist, the Rune of Antiquity woke up without me calling it.

The pale, freezing starlight didn’t go up into my right eye the way it did in a fight. Instead, the four-inch ash brand on my skin turned cold as river ice and sucked a third of the burning mineral heat straight out of my chest down my right shoulder, swallowing the raw crown quartz before it could build up enough pressure to crack the wall around my heart.

When the pull stopped ten seconds later, my chest cooled down to a dull, heavy throb.

I opened my eyes and looked down at my right arm. I pulled back the edge of my sleeve above Madam Sorrel’s wrist tape.

The rough grey scar of the rune looked darker than it had yesterday, and around the outer edges of the old brand, two tiny new hair-thin lines—no longer than an eyelash, shining like threads of wet mercury—had crept a quarter-inch further up toward my elbow.

Across the radiator, Nia let out a long, shivering sigh and opened her eyes, her cheeks flushed bright pink and a healthy film of grey sweat shining on her throat.

"Okay," Nia breathed, flexing her left hand and watching a crisp, four-inch ribbon of bright yellow fire dance cleanly across her knuckles from finger to finger without a single stray spark. "That marrow oil is worth every copper. I think I just jumped twenty ranks sitting on the floor. How did yours go?"

I pulled my sleeve back down over my forearm and buttoned my wool tunic back up to the neck.

"Fine," I lied, rubbing my right thumb over the stiff linen tape on my wrist. "Cleared out the stiffness in my shoulders. Go wash your face before the water in the pitcher freezes—tomorrow morning we start mapping the third floor."

On Monday at noon, the winter recess officially began, and half the citadel packed their trunks and left on the afternoon ferries.

Most of the provincial kids couldn’t afford the coach fare all the way home to the borders for a two-week break, so they stayed in the lower dorms to use the warm bathhouses and eat free roast mutton, while almost all the capital nobles—whose family estates sat five miles away on the upper tiers of the Crown Jewel—went home for their mothers’ solstice balls.

Luckas didn’t go home.

When his father’s head coachman drove a four-horse sleigh up to the south bridge on Monday afternoon to pick up his luggage, Luckas walked down to the gatehouse in his uniform coat, handed the driver a sealed note saying he was doing mandatory remedial history work with Professor Sterling over the holidays, and walked right back up the hill to us.

"My mother is hosting forty aunts from the southern wine counties until New Year’s," Luckas said when Kaelen asked him why he didn’t want a feather bed for two weeks. "If I go home with a purple eye and burned cuffs, she’ll lock me in the drawing room playing the harpsichord until January. I’d much rather freeze in a cellar with you three."

By Wednesday afternoon, we knew the layout of the Administrative Spire better than the janitors did.

The third-floor Bursar’s Annex sat at the end of the east corridor, behind a heavy oak counter where three junior clerks stamped supply vouchers all day under the watchful eye of Deputy Auditor Ross—a thin, balding man in his late forties who wore spotless linen sleeve-protectors tied at his elbows with black ribbon and carried the brass master-key to the stationery vault on a chain attached to his waistcoat button.

Behind the main office was a narrow, windowless service hallway used by the house stewards. Built into the thick exterior limestone wall at the end of that hallway was a two-foot-square vertical shaft lined with greased zinc sheets: the laundry chute.

Every Friday at four o’clock, the floor stewards dumped the week’s soiled tablecloths, ink-stained towels, and dormitory sheets down that zinc shaft. The bags fell forty feet straight down through the core of the building into the Basement Wash-House, where the kitchen girls sorted the Academy linen into boiling lye vats, while the heavy canvas bags marked for the off-island commercial bleacheries were loaded directly onto horse-sleds waiting at the back cellar door.

"Ross never leaves his desk between one and four on Fridays," Kaelen reported on Thursday night as we sat around the corner table in the half-empty dining hall, speaking low over mugs of hot barley soup. "And nobody else on the third floor has a key to the purple-stamped owl paper except Head Bursar Vane, who went to his country house in the hills on Monday morning."

"Why hasn’t Ross panicked yet?" Nia asked, resting her chin on her left hand. "The barge at Wharf Four left without the boat-hook on Sunday. By Monday night, the Viganator people down river must have realized the drop didn’t arrive."

"Because the canal froze solid at the second lock on Monday night," Kaelen said. "I walked down by the gatehouse this morning and listened to the coal carters complaining. None of the river barges have moved past the lower basin since Sunday afternoon because of the ice jam. Neither Ross nor Lord Lorenzo’s clerk knows we took the buckle off the teamster—they probably think the teamster got drunk in a dock tavern when his boat got iced in."

"Except Marta Vane-Sule isn’t an idiot," I said, stirring my soup with my spoon. "If the river is frozen, Viganator can’t use barges for the Friday drop tomorrow. Which means when Ross drops the next arsenal manifest down the laundry chute tomorrow at four, it isn’t going down to Wharf Four on a sleigh. Somebody on this island is going to pick it up straight out of the basement sorting bin before it ever leaves the cellar."

Luckas leaned forward across the oak table. "Marta."

"Or one of Lorenzo’s stable hands," I nodded. "So tomorrow at three-forty-five, you and Nia go up to the third-floor counter with our four tournament tax vouchers and ask Ross to calculate the twenty-percent mineral transfer assessment by hand."

"That takes twenty minutes of ledger checking," Nia said, a slow smile touching her lips. "Which keeps Ross stuck at the front counter until right before four, so he has to hurry when he ducks into the back hallway to make the drop."

"Kaelen, you’re in the broom loft above the third-floor hallway," I continued. "Don’t stop Ross when he puts the bag in the chute—I want to see what he drops, and I want to see who comes through the basement coal door to take it out of the bin. Once the bag slides down the zinc pipe, lock the upper hallway door behind Ross and bring him down the back spiral stairs to the cellar."

"Where you’ll be waiting," Luckas said, frowning slightly. "Elvit, if Marta Vane-Sule comes down to that basement himself, you shouldn’t be down there alone with one taped wrist. Let me stay in the wash-house with you, and Nia can handle the tax forms upstairs."

"If Lord Vance’s heir isn’t standing at the counter to sign his own family tax warrant, Ross won’t even open the ledger book," I pointed out. "And as soon as you sign the paper at four o’clock, it takes you ninety seconds to run down the main stairs to the basement. I can hold a door for ninety seconds."

The Basement Wash-House wasn’t cold like the rest of the citadel. It was an oven.

When I slipped down the narrow stone cellar steps at twenty minutes to four on Friday afternoon, the air was so thick with wet, soapy steam that I couldn’t see the vaulted brick ceiling ten feet above my head.

The front half of the cellar was full of six-foot copper cauldrons where two deaf old washerwomen were stirring boiling grey water with long wooden paddles, throwing in scoops of coarse brown lye soap that made the steam burn the inside of my nose. Along the middle wall stood four heavy cast-iron box mangles—massive wooden frames holding rollers made of solid iron and weighted down with two-hundred-pound granite blocks, used for pressing wet sheets flat.

At the very back of the cellar, cut off from the front cauldrons by rows of wet canvas drying curtains hung from ceiling wires, sat the zinc bottom of the third-floor laundry chute, emptying into a deep wooden slatted bin right beside the bolted oak coal-door that led out to the stable alley.

The usual Friday afternoon sorting boy was nowhere in sight—Kaelen had given him two silver marks at lunch to go down to the town apothecary for a jar of boot grease that didn’t exist.

I unbuckled my heavy wool cloak, hung it behind a stack of empty wicker laundry baskets where it wouldn’t soak up the steam, and stood in the shadow between the third iron mangle and the wet canvas curtains.

I didn’t bring my four-foot bastard sword down here; between the hanging wet sheets and the low brick arches, a long blade would get tangled in damp linen on the first swing. Instead, I had Master Bram’s nine-inch grey dwarven dagger in my right thigh sheath, and in my left hand I held a two-foot oak paddle-stick from one of the soap vats.

Up on the wall beside the chute, an old iron pendulum clock ticked loudly through the hiss of the steam kettles.

Three-fifty-eight.

Way up inside the square zinc pipe in the wall, forty feet above my head, I heard a muffled wooden hatch bang open, followed by the rapid, nervous clatter of someone shoving a heavy bundle into the metal mouth.

Shhhhh-thump.

A three-foot sack of coarse blue-striped ticking shot out the bottom of the zinc chute and landed in the wooden slatted bin five feet in front of me, smelling of ink rags and dusty office curtains.

I stepped out from behind the iron mangle, reached into the bin with my left hand, and felt along the bottom corner of the blue-striped sack.

Ross hadn’t even bothered putting the paper inside the bag where a washerwoman might find it if the tie-string came undone. Stitched neatly into the folded canvas cuff around the neck of the sack with three loops of red thread was a flat, stiff packet wrapped in waxed butcher’s paper, weighted down with a two-ounce lead plumb-bob so the bag would fall bottom-first down the chute.

I hooked the tip of my dwarven dagger under the red thread, sliced the packet out of the hem in two seconds, and slid it into my tunic breast pocket just as the iron latch on the outside of the heavy oak coal-door clicked twice.