“Pull your socks up,” Maya said. “They don’t look quite right, but that’ll be closer.” They hadn’t found any footwear in the laundry, so they were stuck with their own boots. “I’ll change; give me a minute.”
Beq knelt to tug at her socks, inadvertently exposing quite a lot of well-toned leg in the process. Maya averted her eyes and went into the bathroom, hurriedly putting on her borrowed uniform. Her panoply belt fit snugly underneath, silver mesh pressed against the skin of her midsection, and a strap held her haken against the small of her back. The fit was a little tighter than she would have liked, but she didn’t think the weapon’s bulge was too obvious.
The most dangerous part was leaving their own rooms. Maya opened the door a crack and made sure the hallway was empty before she stepped outside.
“Try not to look like you’re sneaking around,” she told Beq. “Remember, as far as anyone knows, we belong here.”
“Right,” Beq said, swallowing hard. “I can do this.”
Maya led the way to the nearest corner at a brisk walk, turned at random, and hurried through another couple of hallways before slowing. She gave a casual nod to a pair of footmen as they passed, and as she’d hoped they paid her no attention whatsoever. After a few wrong turns, Maya found a staircase that led to the ground floor, and from there she and Beq could thread their way through the other servants to a door opening onto a gravel drive.
The Spike must have a grand entrance, Maya guessed, but this wasn’t it. Several doors opened onto a broad turnaround, liberally dotted with loadbird droppings, and teams of men were unloading wagons and hauling the crates and sacks inside. To Maya’s relief, there were a few smaller carriages labeled as cabs. She went up to one of these and found the driver resting with his hat tipped down over his eyes, his loadbird pecking irritably at the gravel.
“Excuse me,” Maya said. “How much for a ride into town?”
“Depends where you’re going,” the driver said, without raising his hat. “One thaler thirty to the West Central.”
“I don’t … exactly know where I’m going,” Maya said, improvising. “Truth be told, I’m new to the city. But my grandmother is ill, and now that I’ve got an evening off I wanted to see if I could find something that could help her. Do you … have any idea where I might—”
“Tunnel market,” the driver said, still not sitting up. “Two thalers ten.”
“Oh,” Maya said, deflating. The only kind of help a common servant could afford to buy would be dhak medicine, so she’d expected a little more reticence. Maybe he didn’t understand me. “Well, we’d like to go there, then.”
“All right.” The man pushed his hat up, revealing a craggy, weathered face, and smiled. “Get in.”
*
“So why the sick grandmother story?” Beq said quietly as the carriage rattled along.
“If anyone’s going to know anything about the Core Analytica, it’s going to be scavengers and dhak merchants,” Maya said, equally quietly. “I figured this would get us to the right neighborhood, and then we could ask about it.” She fingered a leather pouch in her pocket. “Baselanthus gave us plenty of travel money, so we can spread some coins around. That generally makes people friendly.”
“Good thinking,” Beq said. She shook her head. “I’m hopeless at this stuff. Is this how your master taught you to get information?”
“More or less,” Maya said. She didn’t add that Jaedia had mostly demonstrated the technique in small towns and villages, and that here Maya was largely making things up as she went along. Beq’s nervous enough as it is.
Beq, suddenly, was not paying attention. She peered out one window, motioning frantically to Maya. Curious, Maya slid over and looked out, but it took a moment before she understood what she was seeing.
She’d known the palace was called the Spike, but until now she hadn’t seen it from the outside. It rose into the air, a spire of dark unmetal, so thin and featureless it was hard to guess at its scale. Only by tracking upward from the base, where merely human architecture gathered around it, did it become obvious that the tip of the spire had to be hundreds of meters in the air. The more mundane palace had accreted around this Elder thing, like barnacles clinging to a wave-battered rock.
“One of the best-preserved and latest examples of Chosen architecture, obviously,” Beq said, rapidly dialing through the lenses on her spectacles. “Though the haste of its construction makes it less interesting artistically, it’s a fascinating study in Chosen methodology under pressure—”
“Why?” Maya asked.
“Why what?” Beq said.
“Why build something like that?” Maya said. “What’s it for?”
“It went up at the same time as the Gate here,” the arcanist said excitedly, “but obviously the spire isn’t necessary just to connect to the Gate network. There’s a theory that it’s tied somehow to the weapon that made the crater, or else that it’s some kind of sensor they used during the first purges of what was left of the ghouls. But—”
“We don’t know,” Maya translated.
The reference point of the Spike made it easy to trace their path around the city. The carriage swung south and west, clear of the sullen glow of the Pit—disappointing Beq, who’d hoped for a better look—and trundled through street after street of square, solid-looking brick buildings. To the north, long rows of smokestacks belched black columns into the pale blue sky.
As they continued west, the mountain above them loomed larger and larger, a slab-sided cliff dwarfing the human construction at its base. Just when it seemed they couldn’t go any farther without running into a wall of rock, the road took on a downward slope, passing under a broad stone archway and merging seamlessly into a wide, high-ceilinged tunnel. Maya caught sight of a line of Auxiliaries guarding the arch, but they seemed to be checking traffic only in one direction, from the tunnel into the city, and ignored the cab. The light took on the blue tinge of glowstones, alternating with the flicker of torches and bonfires, and the buildings grew more colorful and haphazard.
“These are real ghoul tunnels.” Beq was glued to the window again. “The whole mountain is riddled with them.”
“And people live down here?” Maya said. Having spent so much of her life in the open, she found it hard to imagine. “Why?”
“You have to be a Republic citizen to live on the surface, or else have a permit, I think,” Beq said. “Everything belowground is technically across the border.”
Maya felt something twist in her stomach. She’d never left the Republic before, and her first impression of the world outside it was not a happy one. Once her eyes had adjusted to the dimmer light of the underground, she’d started taking in the people, who milled on either side of the street in a steady stream. Most of them were as pale as mushrooms, even their hair white or gray, hunched over as though holding up their heads was too much effort. Men and women in workmen’s coveralls moved in large groups, some filthy from a shift just finished at a manufactory, others heading in to replace them.
In and among the workers were the beggars, who were so numerous they’d claimed the entire strip of ground in front of the buildings on either side. A few stood, hurrying up to likely prospects, but most simply sat in sullen silence, a bowl or a hat placed in front of them to catch a few centithalers. They were filthy, and some so horrifyingly thin that their bones stood out from their skin in sharp relief.