Chapter 10 - Last Night at the Nail

The lane behind the Crooked Nail was full of people, and none of them would go near the grate.

I rode in from the river road at noon with Felix ahead of me on his steaming horse, and Bertha so tired she was walking sideways, and I could see the crowd from the end of the street: carters, two women from the laundry, the boy who swept for the baker, half the Nail’s regulars standing in the snow in their shirtsleeves with their arms folded and their breath going up white. They made room when they saw me and watched me go by with their mouths shut. Two men from the city Watch stood at the mouth of the lane with their halberds, looking at the ground, and one of them had been sick in the snow by the wall and kicked fresh snow over it.

Maple stood at her own kitchen door in her apron with her furred hands knotted together in front of her. Her face had gone gray under the fur.

“It’s the carter,” she said, when I came up to her. “From your floor. The room next to yours.”

I knew the room. I didn’t know his name. I had never asked it. He drove a wagon for the brewers and came in late and left early, and he banged on our shared wall with his fist whenever Kaniz and I got loud, and once, a month ago, he had banged so long that I had banged back, and he had shouted some of us work, Thornwood through the plaster, and I had laughed about it for a week.

“He went out to the privy,” Maple said. “Middle of the night. He always goes out to the privy, he won’t use the pot, he says it’s not decent. And this morning the privy door was open.” She looked down the lane. “And there’s that.”

The privy stood at the far end of the lane against the back wall of the Nail. Its door hung open on one hinge. In front of it, the snow had been trampled flat by a lot of feet, and across it, from the privy to the iron grate of the old drain in the middle of the lane, ran a long smear of red. It was wide, about the width of a man’s shoulders, and I knew they were the carter’s. It had soaked down into the snow and frozen there, pink at the edges and black in the middle, and at the grate it stopped, and the iron bars of the grate had been pulled up and dropped back crooked.

My stomach turned over and kept turning.

Kaniz came out of the kitchen behind Maple. She came straight to me without a word and put her hand flat on my chest, under my coat, over my heart, and left it there. Her face was dead calm, but I could feel her hand shaking.

“They came from below,” she said. “Six or seven. I heard them. I was awake.” She looked at the grate. “I heard him, too. Not for long.”

“Where’s the Tome?”

“Upstairs. It has not spoken since last night.” Kaniz’s fingers pressed into my chest. “It was awake, too.”

The two Watchmen at the mouth of the lane had been joined by a sergeant, a big man with a gray moustache and a lantern, and the three of them were standing over the grate, looking down through the bars into the dark, and not one of them, halberds and all, had moved to lift it.

“We’ve sent to the Guild,” the sergeant said, to nobody in particular. “The Guild’s sending someone. The Guild handles the cellars.”

“When?” I said.

He looked at me. “When the Guild gets here.”

I took my coat off. I gave it to Kaniz. I checked my dagger on my hip, and the second one in my boot, and walked down the lane to the grate.

Felix had been leaning on the wall by the kitchen door the whole time with his arms folded, watching me. He didn’t move off it.

“Are you coming?” I said.

“Into a drain?” Felix looked at the smear in the snow, and the crooked grate, and me. “Hold your coat,” he said, and nodded at Kaniz, who was already holding it. “Ah. Then I’ll hold the wall.”

I lifted the grate. It was heavier than it looked, and it came up with a shriek of iron that made every person in the lane flinch, and under it there was a square shaft going straight down with an iron ladder bolted to one side. The smell came up out of it, and the sergeant took two steps back.

I climbed down.

The ladder went down about twenty feet into the old drain, a round brick tunnel just high enough to stand in if you kept your head down, with a shallow black stream running along the bottom of it. The smear went on along the bricks, darker now, out of the light from the shaft and into the dark, and I didn’t want to follow it.

I let the Shadow Dance take me, though I hadn’t planned to. I stood at the bottom of the ladder up to my ankles in freezing water and my head went quiet and my breathing slowed and the dark stopped bothering me, and I followed the blood with my feet. It was easy to follow. They had dragged him the whole way. Twice the smear went up the wall where they had stopped and rested him against it, and once, at a junction, I found one of his boots lying on its side in the water, and I didn’t pick it up.

The tunnel turned left. The blood cult has a natural preference for left turns. I had said that to Felix in the catacombs to sound clever. It turned left again, and I stopped, because I knew where I was.

I counted it. Ashara had taught me to count paces in the dark till I hated her for it, and I had been counting since the ladder without thinking about it, and I went over it again now, the lane and the grate and the two left turns. I was standing under the Nail.

The tunnel opened into a cellar.

It was much older than any of Maple’s cellars, older than the inn, a low square room with a vaulted brick ceiling and the stumps of old pillars, left over from some building that stood here before the Nail, and got buried under it, and nobody remembered. Somebody had found it and cleaned it out and set black candles all round the edge of the floor, dozens of them, burned down to stubs, and the stubs were still warm and smoking, which meant they hadn’t been gone long. The vaulted ceiling was painted all over in black and red with a great open mouth, the same mouth from the catacombs, wide as the room, with stars inside it. It hung over the middle of the room with its lips peeled back.

Under it lay the carter.

They had laid him on his back on four brass bowls, one under each shoulder and one under each hip, so that his body was lifted off the floor and his back was arched. His arms were raised straight up above his chest, stiff, tied at the wrists with red cord and the cord run up to an iron hook in the ceiling, so that both his hands pointed at the painted mouth. They had cut him open, from his throat right down to the bottom of his stomach, and pulled him apart, and the bowls under him were full and running over and the stones round him were black and slick with it in the candlelight. His eyes were open. His mouth was packed full of black candles, like the dead man’s in the catacombs, so many that his jaw had come out of its joint, and the wicks were still smoking.

He was looking up. They had set him up so he was staring at the mouth on the ceiling, and past it, at whatever was up there.

I worked out what was above it. I stood there in the doorway of the cellar with the Shadow Dance gone and my breath coming fast again, and counted it again, the lane and the grate and the two turns and the ceiling, and it came out the same both times. Straight up, past the brick and the dirt and the old stones and Maple’s storeroom and the back stair, was the second floor of the Crooked Nail. His hands were pointing at my room. The stars in that mouth were right under the corner where my table stood under the window, and the Tome was sitting on that table.

I threw up. I bent over in the doorway of the cellar and threw up into the black stream, everything, Kaniz’s bread from the night before and the beer I’d had with Felix on the road, until there was nothing left, and I went on heaving after that with my hands on my knees and my eyes streaming.

Somebody was crying.

It was a small, wet, hiccuping sound, and it came from behind one of the old pillars at the back of the cellar. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. I took my dagger out, and walked round the edge of the room, away from the bowls, keeping my boots out of the blood, and found him.

He was a fat man in a crimson robe with little black mouths embroidered round the cuffs, sitting on the floor with his back against the pillar and his knees drawn up, crying into them. His hood had fallen back. He had a neat gray beard and a bald head and clean pink hands with no calluses on them, and there was blood all down the front of his robe, and he looked up at me when I came round the pillar and didn’t try to get up.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t, I didn’t do that. I only held the candles.”

I put my dagger to his throat. My hand was shaking so badly that the point jumped on his skin, and he squeaked and pressed himself back against the pillar.

“Who did it?”

“The others. The Deacon. I don’t know their names, we don’t use our names, it isn’t done.” He was crying harder. “I make candles. I’m a chandler. I have a shop. I make very good candles. I only came because of the dreams.”

“What dreams?”

He glanced up past me, at the ceiling, at the painted mouth.

“It talks,” he said. His wet eyes went dull and stupid, staring up. “Every night, since the spring. In your sleep. Not words, exactly. It’s like hearing someone reading in the next room, and you can’t quite make it out, and you want to so badly. It’s up there. All of us hear it. It’s always up. We only wanted to be closer. We only wanted to hear it better. The Deacon said it wanted to be shown we were serious.” He looked at the carter on the bowls, and his face crumpled. “I didn’t know he meant that. I swear on the Mouth I didn’t know.”

I got him up by the front of his robe. He was heavy, and he kept trying to sit back down, and I dragged him back along the tunnel by the collar, through the freezing water, past the carter’s boot on its side, while he cried and said he had a bad hip, and his physician had forbidden him stairs. At the bottom of the ladder I put his hands on the rungs and told him to climb, and when he said his hip, I put my dagger against the back of his thigh, and he climbed.

The sergeant pulled him up out of the shaft by his arms. Felix was still leaning on the wall. He looked at the chandler on his knees in the snow and at me coming up out of the grate behind him wet to the knees and covered in brick dirt with vomit on my sleeve, and kept his arms folded.

“Well?” he said.

“He’s under the Nail,” I said. My voice cracked. “They put him under my room. They pointed his hands at it.”

Felix stopped leaning on the wall.

The Tome was on the table under the window, where it always was. Its eye was open. It was looking at the floor.

I stayed in the doorway with brick dirt drying on my trousers and glared at it. I had climbed the back stair three steps at a time, and my heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth, and I had meant to shout at it. I had shouted at it in my head the whole way up the stairs.

“Did you know?” I said.

“They put the candles in his mouth wick-first,” said the Tome.

It said it in a low, furious voice, much quieter than I had ever heard it.

“Wick-FIRST,” it said again, and its voice climbed. “Into the MOUTH. Do you understand what that means? It means they have no idea what they are doing. None! It means that a congregation of chandlers and wine merchants and lawyers’ wives has been lying in their beds dreaming of me, of ME, and the best they can do with it is to stuff a carter full of tallow and hang his arms from a HOOK!” It was shouting now. “Eight hundred years! I have watched the great rites of the Crimson Empire! I have watched a high priestess open a king on a black altar under a red moon with forty thousand people singing on the steps, and it was ART, boy, it was terrible and holy and it meant something, and these… these… CANDLEMAKERS…”

“Did you know they were down there?”

The Tome stopped.

“I heard them,” it said. It had gone quiet again. “Last night. I heard them all night. The chanting comes up through the floor.” Its eye moved up from the floorboards, slowly, and found me. “I have heard them for some time.”

“How long?”

“Some time.”

I sat down on the bed. I put my face in my hands, and the ring on its hook over the bed swung in the draft from the window, and I could smell the cellar on my own skin.

“A week till the Guild comes for you,” I said, into my hands.

“Seven and a half days,” the Tome corrected. “If you count from the hour Blackthorn gave the order. The carter banged on the wall when you and the slave were at it. Every night.”

“I know.”

“I used to count the bangs,” said the Tome. “It was the best part of my evening.”

Kaniz went downstairs after supper and didn’t come back up.

I didn’t go down. I heard them all down there, Maple and Kaniz and Lily, who had come as soon as she heard and stayed, and later another voice I couldn’t place, and I lay on my bed in the dark with my boots on and the ring hanging over my face and listened to them stay down there. The Watch had gone. The Guild had come at last, two mages in gray, and gone down the grate with lanterns, come up an hour later, been sick in the lane like everybody else, and gone back to the Guild to write it down. The room next to mine was empty. I kept listening for his fist on the wall.

I’d had a year in this room. When I showed up in Ashbourne with nothing, Maple gave me this room and the stew and a key, and I’d made a year of bad decisions since and dragged every one of them back up here: Ashara’s bruises, Felix’s bites, Lily’s flowers in a jar, Kaniz and her chain, the egg in its crate, the book on the table. I knew which boards creaked. I knew how to get the fire going when the wind was in the east. I had figured I’d live here till somebody threw me out.

And under the floor, under the storeroom and the old stones, some bastards had painted a mouth.

The shutter opened.

It opened from outside, without a sound, the way it always did when he used it, and cold and snow blew in, and then Felix, over the sill in one smooth move, and shut the shutter behind him.

“You didn’t come down to supper,” he said.

“Go away, Felix.”

“I won a wager this morning.” He took his coat off, and laid it over the end of my bed, and sat down beside my feet. “You owe me a night. My choice. I choose this one.”

“Felix. A man died under my bed.”

“I know.” He took hold of my boot, pulled it off, and threw it at the door. “And in a week, the Guild will come for the book, and you will leave this room for good, one way or another. So this is the last night you’ll ever spend in it.” He pulled off my other boot and tossed it under the table. “I want it.”

“That’s sick.”

“Is it?” He looked at me with his violet eyes. “You’ve been lying here for four hours listening to the empty room next door. You’ve been thinking about the carter, and the stairs, and the cellar, and the bowls, and the ceiling, round and round, and you’ll do it all night if nobody stops you.” He put his hand on my ankle. “I’m not going to help you. You know I never help you. I’m going to take what I’m owed, in this bed, in this room, and while I do it you won’t think about the cellar at all. That’s all. Call it a side effect.”

I didn’t answer him. He didn’t wait for me to. He took off my shirt and my trousers and dropped them on the floor, and I lifted my hips so he could get them off, which I’m not proud of. He stood up on the bed over me, and reached up to the ring on its hook, Kaniz’s ring, and looked at it.

“She hung this here,” he said.

“She stole it from a dungeon.”

“Of course she did.” He took my belt off the floor, where my trousers had fallen, and looped it through the ring. My wrists went into one of his hands, both of them, and he lifted them over my head, and buckled my belt round them, tight, with the ring between, so that I lay on my back on my own bed with my arms stretched up over my head and fastened to Kaniz’s iron. He didn’t use a slipknot this time. He used the buckle. I watched him pull it to the last hole.

“Felix.”

“If you want out,” he said, “shout. Kaniz will be up the stairs in a breath, and she’ll take it off you, and I’ll leave.” He sat down on my thighs. “Do you want out?”

I didn’t shout.

He took his own shirt off. He was pale and lean, with the marks of my teeth from the tomb wall still yellow on his shoulder, and I liked seeing them there. He looked down at me and took my cock in his hand. I had been hard since he took my second boot off, a dead man under my bed and all, and when he touched me I jerked against the belt and the ring rang on its hook.

“Quiet,” said Felix. “Kaniz will hear.”

He stroked me. He did it slowly. He did it so slowly that I could feel every part of his hand, every finger, the heel of his palm, and he watched my face, and whenever my breath went short he stopped. He took his hand away and waited. Over on the table the Tome had its eye open on us, and for once in its life the nosy bastard didn’t say a word. Felix watched me pull at the belt with my hips coming up off the bed, looking for his hand, and he waited until my breath came back down, and then he started again.

“You’re going to leave this room,” he said, stroking. “Where are you going to sleep?”

“Felix…”

“Where?” He stopped. He waited. “A week. The book has to be out of the walls. The farm has ghouls. The tower has a hole. Blackrock has the thing you won’t talk about. Where are you going to sleep, Samuel?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.” He started again, slower. “You slept somewhere last night. With your arm round something warm. Till your arm went dead.” He leaned down over me, still stroking, until his mouth was close to my ear. “Where?”

I didn’t say it. He brought me right to the edge. He brought me there three times and stopped each time, and each time I pulled at the belt so hard the hook in the beam creaked, and he sat back on my thighs and watched me shake and waited for me to stop. I said his name. I said a lot of other things. I said I was going to kill him. He told me he knew.

The fourth time, he didn’t stop. He took his own cock out with his other hand.

He stroked us both. He knelt over me on the bed with his knees either side of my hips and a fist round each of us, and he worked himself fast and me slow, so slow I could have screamed, and I watched his face over me. I had made Felix come against a tomb wall with my face in his hair, but I had never watched it. His mouth fell open and his eyes went half shut, and he made one sound, low and rough, and came across my chest and stomach, hot, in long pulses, with his fist still moving on himself and his other hand gone completely still round my cock, holding me there at the edge without letting me go over.

He stayed like that for a while, getting his breath back.

“There,” he said. “That’s my night.”

He let go of me.

“Felix. Felix!” I pulled at the belt. My cock stood up against my stomach in his mess, so hard it hurt, twitching, with nothing touching it at all. “You can’t… You can’t leave it like…”

“Where are you going to sleep?” Felix asked.

“The River Bell.” It came out of me in a shout. “The River fucking Bell, Felix, all right? I want the River Bell. I want the inn, and I want the fire, and I want Kit, and I don’t want to want any of it, and I want it.”

Felix got off the bed.

He put his shirt on. He put his coat on. He went to the window and opened the shutter, and stood there in the cold with the snow coming in round him and one boot on the sill, and looked back at me tied to Kaniz’s ring on my bed with his come drying on my chest.

“Was that so hard?” he said.

“I’m going to kill you.”

“Fenwick came to supper,” said Felix. “He’s downstairs. He brought a deed, in case. Lily has been reading it to Kaniz for an hour, all the clauses, and Kaniz has been making her go back over the part about the cellar.” He looked down at the floor. “They’re waiting for you. All of them. They’ve been waiting all night.”

“Felix! The belt.”

“Shout for Kaniz,” said Felix, and went out the window, and was gone.

I lay there. I lay there a long time, tied to the ring, with the shutter banging in the wind and the snow blowing in across the floor, and I could hear them downstairs through the boards. I could hear Lily’s voice reading, slow and clear, and Fenwick’s voice correcting her, and the Tome, from the table under the window, shouting down at them about towers, and under all of it, steady and patient, the clink of Kaniz’s chain.

“Kaniz,” I said, at last, not loudly.

The voices downstairs stopped all at once. A chair scraped. Bare feet came up the stairs.