Chapter 6 - Original Fixtures

The tower stood on a bare knuckle of rock two hours east of the city, and the Tome fell in love with it from the road.

“THERE,” it shouted, from the saddlebag on Bertha’s near side. “Boy. Boy! Look at it! Battlements! A proper crenellated parapet, the first honest piece of architecture you have shown me since that cesspit of an inn! Turn the mule! Turn it now, before some merchant with a wife buys it out from under us!”

“We’re going there,” I said. “We’re on the road to it. That’s what the road is for.”

“Then go FASTER.”

Bertha stopped in the middle of the road, turned her head, and looked at the saddlebag.

“Do not look at me, you ambulatory hearthrug. I have ridden in the war-howdah of an empress whose name three courts have begged me never to repeat. I will not be judged by a MULE.”

Bertha started walking again, slower than before, and the Tome screamed into the leather.

I didn’t want the tower. I want that known before anything else that happened. I hadn’t wanted the farm, either, and the farm had had ghouls, and I had come home from it with a bitten lip, a clawed calf, and no house. I didn’t trust this tower. It looked wonderful from the road, squat and square on its rock with a stone wall around the base and a gatehouse with an actual portcullis rusted halfway up, and anything that looked that good from the road was going to have something terrible in its basement. That was all I wanted from it. I wanted to find the terrible thing and go home.

Kaniz wanted the basement.

She rode behind me on Bertha with her arms around my waist and her chain looped twice round my belt, and she had not stopped touching the tower woodcut since Fenwick lent it to her at breakfast. She had it now, flat across my thigh under one hand, and her thumb kept moving over the little drawing of the lower chamber, over the rings in the walls and the frame in the middle of the floor, over and over. Her tits were pressed against my back through her shift and my coat. Every time Bertha stepped down off a rut, Kaniz’s whole body pushed into me and her thumb pressed down on the drawing of the frame, and I rode the whole two hours east with my cock hard against the front of the saddle and nowhere to put it.

“You’re wearing out the picture,” I told her.

“It is a good picture.”

“It’s a dungeon.”

“Yes,” said Kaniz, with enormous satisfaction, and her hand slid off the woodcut onto the inside of my thigh and stayed there for the last mile.

Fenwick rode ahead of us on a pony that was exactly the right size for him and exactly the wrong temperament for anyone. It had tried to bite Bertha twice. Bertha had let it know, the second time, that she was considering her options. Lily hadn’t come. Lily had a shop, and she had said at breakfast, with her boot on my ankle, that she had read the listing for this one and would rather sell funeral wreaths to a dead man than walk around in a dungeon on a Tuesday. She had kissed me goodbye at the Nail’s door, slow, with her hand on the back of my neck, and whispered that she expected a full report. I had been hard since then, too, more or less.

We came through the gatehouse under the rusted portcullis. The yard inside was bare rock with snow drifted in the corners. The tower door was oak bound in iron, and Fenwick unlocked it with a key the length of his forearm and pushed it open on a ground floor that was one big stone room with a hearth and two stairs, one going up round the wall and one going down. I knew which one Kaniz was going to want. I left Bertha tied in the yard and carried the saddlebag in over my shoulder.

“The upper floors,” Fenwick said, “offer three bedchambers, a solar, and the parapet. The lower floors offer the original fixtures, and the feature.”

“What feature?”

“A dramatic original water feature,” said Fenwick, “of considerable depth.”

The Tome went silent in the saddlebag for a full breath, the first time it had shut up all day.

“Oh,” it said, in a completely different voice. “Oh, you beautiful little gnome. Is it a PIT?”

It was a pit.

It took up most of the second cellar, at the bottom of the stair, below the dungeon. Fenwick walked us straight past the dungeon door to show it to us first because, he said, he believed in leading with a property’s distinctions. It was round, about twelve feet across, ringed in a low stone kerb somebody had built a long time ago and somebody else had tried to cover over with a wooden grate that had since rotted through in two places. The air coming up out of it was warm. It smelled of wet stone with a sweet, rotten stink underneath, and I leaned over the kerb with Fenwick’s lantern and looked down, and the light went down the smooth wet wall about forty feet and stopped, and below that there was nothing at all, and my balls tried to climb back up inside me.

I dropped a pebble. I listened. I didn’t hear it land.

“Bottomless,” Fenwick said, “is a legal term in this county. It means that no one has found the bottom and returned to file the paperwork.”

“What’s down there?”

“The previous owner’s journals describe seasonal visitors.”

“What season?”

“Spring.” Fenwick turned a page. “Generally. The journals note eleven days a year, fourteen in a late year. We are, I am pleased to say, comfortably out of season.”

I didn’t like how he said comfortably. I didn’t like any of it, and I liked it a lot, because a man can’t be made to buy a house with a hole to the underworld in the cellar, and Fenwick’s folio was starting to look as good to me as a bakery in Willowbrook that never locked its back door.

“SET ME ON THE KERB,” the Tome bellowed.

“No.”

“I am petitioning! I wish to be formally petitioning! Set me on the lip, boy, and leave me here for the season, I will be NO TROUBLE, I have not spoken with a creature of the lower regions in two hundred years, and the last one I met was a perfectly charming gentleman with eleven tongues who taught a margrave’s entire court a hymn they were never able to stop singing! They sang it at his FUNERAL! They sang it at their OWN funerals! I miss him every DAY!”

“You’re staying in the bag.”

“You are a PEASANT. You are a LICE-RIDDEN, MULE-KISSING VILLAGE PEASANT with the soul of a turnip and the ambition of a damp sock, and when the lower regions hear that you denied them my company, they will come up through your FLOORBOARDS—”

I buckled the saddlebag flap over its eye and set the bag down on the stair. It kept shouting about turnips through the leather, muffled, but not by much.

Kaniz had not looked at the pit once. She stood at the bottom of the stair with her back to it, looking up at the dungeon door, and her chain hung still from her wrists, and she was breathing through her mouth.

The dungeon matched the woodcut ring for ring, and it was bigger than the picture made it look.

It was a long, low room under the ground floor with a vaulted ceiling and a floor of worn flagstones that sloped a little toward a drain in the middle. Iron rings were set into the walls at every height a man could want: at the floor, at the waist, at the shoulder, high over the head. I couldn’t look at the waist-high ones without seeing Kaniz bent over under them with her shift up round her hips. Chains hung from some of them still, black with age, and a heavy wooden frame stood in the middle of the room on four squat legs, with straps and rings bolted to its corners, the leather gone stiff and gray. Somebody had owned this room and used it for years. The stone round the rings at shoulder height was worn smooth in two pale patches where hands had pressed against it.

Kaniz walked into the middle of it and turned in a slow circle.

I had seen her look at food when she was starving and at Malkor’s knife when she thought she was going to die. I had seen her look at me the first night in the inn, after she had put herself on her knees on my floor and told me what she was. I had never seen her look at anything the way she looked at that room. Her lips parted. Her dark eyes went round the walls from ring to ring, slowly, and her hands came up in front of her and turned over, wrists up, as if somebody had already asked her for them.

My cock had been hard for two hours. It got harder. I hadn’t known that was possible. “Kaniz,” I said.

“Yes, Master.”

“This is a viewing.”

“I know.” She walked to the wall at the far end and stood under the highest pair of rings, the ones set a hand above where her fingertips would reach on her toes. She looked up at them, and her throat moved. “The spacing is correct,” she said. “Whoever set these knew what they were doing. You see how they are wider than the shoulders? That is so the chest opens. Malkor set his too close, and the girls’ arms went numb, and he had to keep stopping.” She looked back at me over her shoulder with her chin up. “You would not have to stop.”

Fenwick had gone back upstairs. I could hear his boots on the ground floor over our heads, going from wall to wall at the even pace of a gnome measuring a room. The Tome was still shouting about turnips somewhere on the stair. I was nineteen and standing in a dungeon in a tower I wasn’t going to buy. The whole plan was find the terrible thing and go home. Well, I’d found it. It was a pit. I should have been halfway up the stairs already.

My feet walked me across the dungeon floor to her. “Just to see,” I said. “Just to see if they’re sound.”

“Yes, Master,” said Kaniz, and lifted her arms.

The rings were sound. The old chains were rusted through, but her own were perfectly good, and I unhooked the loop from my belt and threaded her wrist chain through the right ring and the left and drew it tight, and Kaniz went up on her toes with her arms spread wide and her back against the cold wall and let out a long, shaking breath I felt on my face. Her shift had ridden up to the tops of her thighs, and her collar had pulled up under her jaw. Her chest rose and fell, open, exactly as she had said it would, and the cold of the dungeon had made her nipples hard enough to poke through the linen.

I put my hand flat on her stomach. She pushed into it.

“This is how it would be,” she said, low, looking straight at me. “Every night that you wanted. You would come down the stairs and I would already be here. You would not have to ask. You would not have to tell me to kneel or to open my mouth or to be quiet. You would only have to come down the stairs.”

My hand slid down. She was bare under the shift, as she always was, and hot, and wet enough that my fingers went into her without any effort at all, and she made a sound against the wall that went straight up my arm and into my teeth.

“Kaniz.”

“Yes, Master.”

“I’m not buying this tower.”

“I know.” Her hips rolled against my hand, slow and deliberate, and the chain rang in the rings over her head. “I want you to see it anyway.”

I was going to stop. I had it all planned. I would take my hand back and unhook her chain and go up the stairs and find Fenwick and say pass, and I would do it in a firm voice. My other hand opened my belt. I don’t remember telling it to. My cock came out into the cold dungeon air and Kaniz looked down at it and back up at my face with her eyes gone huge and black, and she lifted one bare leg off the floor and hooked it round my hip, as far as the chain would let her, and pulled.

I went into her standing up, against the wall of a stranger’s dungeon, with her hung from his rings.

She was so hot after the cold of the room that I swore out loud. Kaniz gasped and threw her head back against the stone and wrapped her other leg round me too, so all her weight hung from the chain and from my cock, and the rings creaked in the wall. I took her by the hips. I held her up and drove into her, hard, and every thrust slammed her back against the stone and rang the chain in the rings over her head, and she was saying yes, yes, Master, yes in that low, steady, delighted voice, and I wasn’t thinking about the tower or Fenwick or anything at all except the heat of her and the sound of the iron.

Under my feet, the floor breathed.

I felt it before I heard it. A long warm draft came up between the flagstones round my boots with the same sweet, rotten smell as the pit, only much stronger, and under it there was a sound like a thousand fingernails tapping on stone. It was coming from the stair. It was coming up from the second cellar.

Kaniz opened her eyes.

“Master,” she said, perfectly calm, with her legs still locked on me and her heels in my back. “I think it is the season.”

Upstairs, Fenwick’s boots stopped. From the stair, the Tome let out a scream of pure joy.

“THEY’RE COMING UP! Boy! BOY! Open the bag! Open the bag so I can SEE THEM!”

I pulled out of her and nearly fell over my own trousers, which had gone down round my knees again, because apparently that was going to be the story of my life now. I got them up with one hand. I got the other hand on Kaniz’s chain and pulled it back through the rings, and it was stuck. She had wanted it tight, so I had pulled it hard, and now the links had jammed against the old iron and wouldn’t come.

The tapping got louder. Something came up the stair.

It was pale and about the size of a hound, wet all over, with no eyes and a great many legs with too many knees on each, and I hated it on sight. It came up the stair to the dungeon door, stopped in the doorway, lifted the front of its body off the floor, and moved its head from side to side, tasting the air with a mouth that opened in four directions. Another one came up behind it. Another came behind that.

“Samuel,” Kaniz said. “The chain.”

“I know!”

“You pulled it too tight.”

“You told me to!”

“I did.” She looked pleased about it, even then. “Pull the other way.”

I pulled the other way. The chain came free of the rings so fast that I staggered back and Kaniz dropped off the wall onto her feet, and the first pale thing on the stair turned its head toward the sound of her chain and came across the flagstones at us in a long, quick, chittering run.

I cut it in half.

I didn’t mean to. I had the dagger out and I swung it where Ashara taught me to, at the place the head met the body, and it was soft in there, softer than anything that size had a right to be, and the blade went right through without catching on anything. The front half kept running. It ran into the wall beside Kaniz and fell over. The back half stood on its legs in the middle of the room for a moment, considering its options, and sat down.

The others stopped on the stair and tasted the air again.

“Up,” I said. “Up, up, up.”

We went up the stair past them. I had Kaniz by the chain and my trousers by the waistband and the dagger in my teeth, and the pale things pressed themselves flat to the wall to let us by, tasting at us as we passed, and none of them followed. I think they thought we were boring. Kaniz grabbed the saddlebag off the stair on the way past. The Tome was weeping with happiness inside it.

Fenwick met us at the top in the middle of the big ground-floor room with his folio open and his pencil out and his tall hat perfectly straight.

“Out of season,” he said, “appears to have been optimistic.”

“Pass,” I said, round the dagger.

“Noted.” He took the woodcut back from Kaniz and wrote it across the bottom in neat block capitals while we walked fast toward the door. “I will also note that the lower fixtures remain in excellent condition.”

“They do,” Kaniz said. “I tested them.”

I was so relieved that I sang the whole way home, which I never do, and Bertha flattened her ears at me for six miles.

Kaniz didn’t speak the whole way. She rode behind me with her cheek against my back, and every so often I felt her breathe in, long and slow, against my coat. I’d bet money she was still down in that dungeon in her head, counting rings, and I sang louder so I wouldn’t start thinking about it too.

The Tome sulked enough for both of them. It had stopped weeping somewhere around the gatehouse and started a long, detailed list of my ancestors and what was wrong with each of them, beginning with my great-great-grandfather, who it said had probably been a pig.

We got back to the Nail after dark. My room was the size it had always been, which was small, and it was full of everything I owned, which was too much. The egg was warm in its crate by the fire, and I had never been so glad to see four walls without a single ring in any of them.

I put the Tome on the table. I sat down on the edge of the bed to take my boots off.

Kaniz bolted the door.

She did it without hurrying. She shot the bolt home and turned round with her back against the door, and she reached into the front of her shift, between her tits, where my eyes went right along with her hand, and took something out of it, and held it up in the firelight.

It was an iron ring, one of the high ones from the dungeon wall, the size of my palm, black and heavy, smooth on the inside where hands had rubbed it for years, with three inches of its old bolt still sticking out of the back, bent where it had come loose from the stone. She had ridden two hours home with that down the front of her shift and pressed into my back, and I had thought that hard thing was her nipple. Some rogue I was.

“Kaniz.”

“It was loose,” she said. “When you pulled the chain free. It came out of the wall into my hand.”

“You stole a ring out of a dungeon.”

“It was the nicest one.” She looked at it in her palm with the same face she had worn in the dungeon, and then at me. “I will need a hook.”

My room had one hook. It was in the beam over the bed, a big iron one some previous tenant had put up for a lamp, and I had hung my sword belt on it for a year. I looked at it. Kaniz looked at it. She walked across the room, put one knee on the bed beside me, stood up on the mattress, and hung the ring on the hook by its bent bolt, and it swung there over my pillow and settled.

“No,” I said.

She stepped down off the bed in front of me and knelt between my knees. She put her wrists together in my lap, with the chain lying across them, and looked up at me.

“And yet,” she said.

I had told her no. I had told myself no for two hours on the road. I had sung songs to get away from what she wanted, and she had carried it home in her shift, and now it was hanging over my bed. My cock had been interested since the road, and since the dungeon, and since the moment she bolted the door, and it had no interest whatsoever in what I had told anybody. I stood up. I took her by the chain and stood her up on the mattress under the hook, and I threaded the chain through the ring over her head and pulled it tight, and she went up on her toes on my bed with her arms over her head and her whole body stretched long in the firelight, and the bed creaked, and the hook held.

“Oh,” said Kaniz.

The Tome’s eye opened on the table.

“I MUST PROTEST,” it said. “I must PROTEST, in the strongest terms, being made to WITNESS this in a room the size of a privy, with no proper fixtures, in a bed that could not support the moral weight of a CANDLE—”

I threw my coat over it. It went on protesting underneath, louder, something about a vizier who had once done this properly with a proper chain in a proper palace and had the decency to hire musicians.

I pulled Kaniz’s shift over her head and dropped it on the floor.

She was dark and full, bare under the iron, all of her, from the collar under her jaw to the cuffs at her ankles, and her arms were stretched up so her tits lifted high and round, and the firelight was all over her ribs and her hip and her thighs. I stood on the floor beside the bed, kicked my trousers off, and looked at her, and I took my time about it, because she had been showing me what she wanted all day and I wanted her to wait.

She watched me look. Her breath came short.

“You would come down the stairs,” she said, “and I would already be here.”

“There aren’t any stairs.”

“There is a bed. You would only have to come to the bed.”

I came to the bed.

I knelt on the mattress in front of her, which put my mouth level with her belly, and I put my hands on her hips and my mouth on her, low, and Kaniz cried out and pulled against the chain so hard the ring rang on its hook. I took her with my tongue until her thighs were shaking against my ears. She didn’t ask me to stop. She didn’t ask me for anything. She hung there from the iron and let me, and said Master over and over, in a voice that got higher and more broken each time, until she came with her whole weight on the chain and her knees gone out from under her and the bed jumping on its legs.

I didn’t let her rest. I stood up on the mattress behind her, which nearly put my head through the ceiling, and gripped her ass and pushed into her from behind while she was still shaking, and she was so wet and hot that I had to stop with my face in her hair and breathe.

“Use me,” Kaniz said. Her voice was wrecked. “Master. Please. Use me.”

I used her. I held her hips and fucked her hard, standing on my own bed with her hung from a stolen ring over my pillow, and the bed slammed against the wall with every stroke, and the hook in the beam creaked, and somewhere under my coat the Tome was shouting that it could FEEL the vibrations through the TABLE. The man in the next room started banging on the wall. I didn’t care. Kaniz didn’t care. She pushed back on me every time I drove forward and told me in a low, hoarse, perfectly practical voice exactly how deep she wanted it, and I gave it to her, and when I came it was with my teeth in the back of her shoulder and both arms across her waist and her weight hanging from me and the chain together.

We stood there a long time, breathing. The wall stopped banging. The coat on the table had gone quiet.

I unhooked her chain. Her arms came down slowly, and she sank onto the bed and pulled me down with her, and lay across my chest with her head under my chin and one thigh over mine, and the cuff on her ankle cold against my calf. “This is cuddling,” I said.

“This is where I am kept.” She didn’t move. “The ring stays.”

“The ring is going back in the morning.”

“The ring stays,” said Kaniz, and was asleep before I could argue.

I lay there under the hook with the ring swinging over us in the draft from the window, black against the beam, and I thought about that dungeon, all those rings, and the two smooth patches somebody’s hands had rubbed into the stone, and my cock twitched, which I didn’t appreciate.

My coat moved on the table. The Tome’s eye slid out from under the coat’s collar and found me in the dark.

“Tomorrow,” it said, “you will find ME something.”

“I’m not finding you anything.”

“The slave has her iron. The florist has her vegetables. Even the MULE has a stall.” Its voice rose in the dark, and the man next door started banging again. “I have been carried across this miserable county in a SADDLEBAG beside a MULE’S ARSE, and I have been denied a pit, and I will be denied NOTHING ELSE. Tomorrow you will find me a FORTRESS. Do you hear me, boy? Walls a man could die on! A gatehouse! Towers with BLOOD in the mortar!”

Kaniz stirred on my chest. She didn’t open her eyes.

“I know one,” she said, and went back to sleep.