Grim Solace (The Chasing Graves Trilogy Book 2) Page 3

  I tilted my head. ‘Lost the key, have you?’

  Busk sneered. ‘Something like that. I think there is a better chance of it opening for you.’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  ‘Do we have an understanding, Mr Basalt?’ The tor had the cheek to pretend this was a job I had a choice in accepting. I decided to challenge that, play along.

  ‘Show me the chest first and we’ll see.’

  With a nod from Busk, I was hauled from the chair and out of the room. The guards’ gloves sizzled against my skin, turning my glow white. I couldn’t help but wriggle. Busk trailed behind, tutting at my struggles and examining my tools as he walked. I heard the clicks as he tried to figure them out, but only I knew the combinations of how they fit together.

  I was right about one thing: the tor was not nearly as high-ranking as Horix. The narrow corridors, the low ceilings, the coil of stairs half as tall as I was used to; they all presented their evidence. The gaudiness also continued in the form of metallic drapes and more animal-furniture hybrids.

  Once I had been dragged down to the lowest floor, a door was kicked open into some sort of storeroom. Crates, barrels, and cloth-bound objects hugged the walls. Tables stood guard here and there, strewn with assorted trinkets. It was a scene I knew well from visiting more than my fair share of fences’ dens. Seeing it here was as if all the gold and pomp had been ripped away from Busk, showing the scrawny dock-rat that hid beneath.

  ‘Here we have it.’ The tor whisked a dust sheet from something large and square, and I found myself staring at my opponent.

  The thing was a fortress, not a chest. Skol-made by the looks of it, an ugly mess of black iron and traces of silver. Spikes adorned its edges. Six locks ringed with mossy malachite stared out from the side that faced me. Two great iron straps bound the tented lid shut, each with a bolt and another lock. If I wasn’t mistaken, this was the work of Feksi Drood. She was one of the finest and most cunning doorsmiths Skol had ever produced. Even after a hundred years her locks were still puzzling delinquent entrepreneurs like myself.

  I made to suck my lip, but my vapours escaped me. ‘Must have been heavy to steal.’

  ‘Left to me by my grandfather, actually. A man of great secrecy and wealth. This is his challenge to me from beyond the afterlife.’

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t bind him.’

  Busk looked insulted. ‘Though I own my fair share of shades, I am no soultrader, Basalt. I am an esteemed collector and—’

  I finished that thought for him. ‘Fence.’

  A club came at my ribs, making me stagger.

  Busk pushed me towards the chest. He had gathered up my tools and now he held them in his gloved hands. ‘It’s a Drood design. I assume you know who and what that is? I’ve waited decades to find a locksmith who could tackle it.’ Here his face cracked into a grin. ‘And now I have you.’

  With a curled lip, I took the tools from him, along with some spares. ‘Aside from the threat of violence and intense boredom, why should I help you? You’re not my master.’

  ‘Well, it depends how much of those you can take.’

  I decided to measure him against what Horix had offered, partly in cheek, partly in hope. ‘I want my freedom.’

  Busk laughed heartily. ‘And why ever would I give you that? I have the best locksmith in the Reaches in my possession. Besides, I don’t have your half-coin, do I? Let’s hope Horix is a charitable whore and doesn’t have your coin melted too quickly. Now, if you’re saying you want to taste the clubs some more before you begin, we can continue.’

  I muttered curses under my breath as I settled down before the beast of a chest, and began to poke and prod at the insides of its locks. My eyes were closed; all my concentration poured down my arms and into the metal in my hands. I was grateful I’d chosen steel instead of copper for my tools. The stand-ins Busk had gifted me were crude, but they would do.

  Floating cylinder locks to stop me finding the notches.

  Two deeplocks, reaching far into the chest’s lid to test my picks.

  Cast steel bar-bolts that would need a forge to cut through.

  And a clever drop-pin cylinder, needing a tube-key to crack it.

  Nice try, Feksi Drood.

  ‘It’s not going to be a quick job,’ I told him.

  Busk folded his arms and leaned on a nearby crate. ‘Well, why don’t you pretend it’s one of your usual jobs and imagine you’ve got until dawn to crack it.’

  Surely if the man had waited a few decades, he could wait another day. Drood was a tricksy locksmith, fond of traps that sealed chests and vaults permanently. I needed to go about this cleverly. No doubt these locks had an order to them, and penalties for deviating. I’d tackled several Droods before, and each of them had kicked my ample arse throughout my efforts to break them. I had won, of course. I almost always do in the end. I’ve only walked away from one vault, and that was because of its deadlock. I had no desire to spend eternity trapped in a door. Some rewards in life are not worth the risk to claim them. Fortunately for me, deadlocks were rarer than rare, and far beyond Feksi fucking Drood.

  ‘This is not your average chest, Busk, you know that. If you want it open, I need to take my time. Otherwise you’ll be staring at a hunk of metal for the rest of your life,’ I told him.

  Tor Busk shook his head, and I heard the scuff of boots coming closer, accompanied by the impatient thwack of clubs against palms. ‘Sunrise,’ he said, and I shrugged.

  ‘You’re the boss.’

  In scores of taverns and inns across the Reaches, I’d heard warriors both young and old yapping over their beers, telling stories of bloodlust and battle-rage: the moment when a fighter was consumed by a singular task, blocking out all else. Fear, exhaustion, even pain can vanish, or so I’d been told. I tended to believe it. There are many kinds of battle, and though mine was with tumblers and cogs and clever machines, I knew my own bloodlust. Despite my dulled senses, it had survived the grave with me.

  The scuffing of the guards, the impatient humming of Busk, a repetitive dripping in a distant corner… they all fell away to a low murmur. Anything outside my direct line of sight blurred and faded. My tools felt like swords in my hand as I lifted them. All I knew was the chest.

  The duel began. I bent closer to the first lock, tapping the metal for signs of mechanisms behind it. My pick explored the first few cylinders, twisting them around to find their pin-holes and notches. I had the measure of it within an hour, and by extension, the measure of half the others. I moved from one to the next, tracing their clicks and whirs to find the order they ran in. Several played bastard, making me work hard to break them, like meeting an equal on the battlefield. In life I would have been streaming with sweat. I always was a sweater. It was not nerves, but more accurately the thrill of treading that thin line between success and failure. The narrower the line, the greater the thrill.

  When the fifth lock was done, I moved on to the sixth. It needed a tube-like key with holes cut for the tumblers to fall through when the key was turned. I’d faced only three of these locks before, and they’d taken a night to crack. Breaking from my trance for a moment told me half the guards were nodding off, slumped against barrels and crates. Even Busk watched on with one eye closed, the very definition of half asleep. It must have been early morning already, almost sunrise.

  The trick with a drop-pin cylinder was to coax the tumblers out as you turned, testing each one while holding back the others. The rest was repetition until you saw a pattern. Drood must have been having an off-day building this chest, getting predictable in her old age. It took an hour, no more, to smite the lock. It was with a beaming smile that I went on to the final tests.

  ‘How much longer, shade?’ Busk grunted, lurching as if he’d shaken himself awake.

  ‘We agreed sunrise, didn’t we?’

  Busk looked to a nearby hourglass a guard had fetched. He pulled a face. ‘Hmph.’

  The deeplocks put up a brief fight; on
e last vain tactic by withdrawing troops. I cracked my file apart and snapped it into a longer position. The same with my pincers, bending the metal out to serve my purposes. Into the keyholes they went, grazing the ridges of the tumblers.

  By the time I began to hear the thumps of a household waking up, I had just about broken the final lock. The last tumbler was being stubborn. I had to reset the cylinder several times before I managed to jimmy it into position.

  There came an almighty thud as the steel bolts sprang back. The malachite keyholes turned with all the magic of clockwork. With a resounding, mechanical clunking, the lid inched open. The noise wrenched Busk from his dozing. He came staggering over to the chest, blinking like a pig on its way to the chopping block.

  ‘Out of the way!’ he snapped. A few guards did my work for me and threw me back a few paces. I buried my tools in the sleeves of my smock, crossed my arms and watched.

  Keys came first; a whole ring of them, all differently-toothed. Busk tucked them into his belt before the thing could lock itself again. I was not needed any more. Next came scrolls, cloth bags with something rattling inside, and pieces of what looked like a shattered sundial, all solid gold.

  The more Busk plucked from the chest and the longer he rooted around, the more he smiled. I would have been doing the same; it was a fine haul for any thief. Although I highly doubted his grandfather had ever so much as farted near the chest, in any case the tor had just become considerably richer.

  ‘Fine work, Mr Basalt. The rumours about you are quite true,’ he congratulated me.

  I lifted my shoulders. ‘And what now?’

  ‘Now, Caltro, you’ll be going back to that wardrobe until I find something else for you to break into. I could use a half-life like yourself in my trade. Arctian locksmiths don’t seem to have your level of…’ The word escaped him, but not me.

  ‘Powerlessness? Don’t flatter me. You mean to say I’m at your disposal, Busk, let’s not fool around.’

  A club came down on the back of my neck, forcing me to the dust. Another clouted me in the ribs half a dozen times. The copper still hurt through my smock. I endured the beating until they’d had their fun or Busk put his hands up, I couldn’t tell. He stooped down to collect the tools that had fallen from my sleeve, and smiled simperingly.

  ‘Take him away.’

  That was the sum of my labour. Once again, somebody else got to grasp the prize, not I. It was getting pathetic. I felt not short of pathetic myself as my spectral feet bobbed on the stairs and copper-thread gloves sizzled in my armpits.

  It was then that I absently wished for a spear of that metal through my heart. The thought stunned me cold. I had never wished such a thing in thirty-four years of living, and yet a second death abruptly seemed like a good idea. I pushed that notion away from me like a plagued beggar. The cavern of screaming voices scared me more than my current state. Far, far more. Even this fresh hell of mine was preferable.

  Into the wardrobe they threw me, not bound but on the wrong side of any locks. By the sounds of it, the thing had four very solid bolts. I found myself once again in the blue wash of my own glow, staring at a wooden door. That was why indenturement irked me so. I had never liked being at the mercy of others’ whims. At least this time I didn’t have a sack over my head. I sighed.

  There was fuck all else to do except listen to the receding boots and the following slam of a door. Silence reigned, apart from the ticking of some strange timepiece I’d seen in the room earlier. It metered out my confinement with its cocky little ticks and taps. I promised to take it apart the quick way whenever I had a moment. Busk could punish me with his clubs all he wanted.

  I was just about to begin a thorough session of stewing over my problems and losses when I thought I heard a voice in the room. I stiffened as much as a vaporous form could, and put my face to the thin gap between the doors. The wardrobe might have been well-made and reinforced, but clothes and old things need to breathe.

  The guards hadn’t thought to snuff out the oil lamps. I scanned the room in slivers, like an invader peering through an arrow-slit. The tasteless room was empty, but I found myself once again distracted by the horrid things Busk had collected for himself. I would have burned all of it just so I wouldn’t have to look at it a moment further.

  ‘Hello!’

  That time I heard it distinctly. A man’s voice. Not beyond the door but inside the room. My palms pressed to the wood, I looked again. Unless the speaker was directly next to the wardrobe, which my ears told me he wasn’t, or in the corners behind me, I couldn’t see him.

  ‘Hello?’ I called.

  The voice became high-pitched with excitement. ‘Yes! Thank Frit!’

  Now there was a deity I’d never heard of. I groaned, forehead against the iron seam. The voice must have been another one of these so-called dead gods, here to chastise me some more. Why do they always come to me in moments of punishment? Where were they when I was being slaughtered?

  ‘What is it this time?’ I wondered what sort of dead thing they’d chosen for me now. Maybe one of the furry heads adorning the wall, an antelope or an ibis.

  ‘I tried to find these fanatics of yours, but as you can see, other people had different ideas. Unless you can get me out of here, leave me alone,’ I told the god.

  There was a long pause. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Then who are you?’

  A polite cough. ‘I’m a fellow captive. Same as you.’

  I pulled a face in the darkness. ‘Where? I didn’t see anyone else in the room. Are you in a wardrobe like me? Are you able to get me out?’

  ‘I, er, haha. Not quite.’

  We had traded but a few sentences and I’d already decided I didn’t like this person. ‘Well…?’

  ‘I am, as they say, “gripp’d by grips of iron unseen”.’

  ‘You’re shackled, then?’

  Some nervous laughter now. ‘No, sir. That is to say I am indisposed to help you. It was I who rather fancied the helping.’

  I pressed my eye to the seam again. ‘Well, I’m locked up,’ I mumbled, staring to the fireplace, where it seemed the voice was coming from. Unless the man was sitting in the chair facing away from me, the voice was either that of an apparition, or in my own head.

  There was a dull thud as I fell back against the wood. That was it. I’d finally cracked. My inner turmoil had developed a voice and a character.

  ‘Perhaps we could talk? Tell tales. Trade stories.’

  I was trying to converse with myself.

  ‘Poetry, even? I actually write some of it myself, you know. Well, less of the writing… more of the thinking up.’

  That’s when I pushed myself forward again. I despised poetry in all its forms, primarily because I didn’t understand it. My unconscious, no matter how depraved and strange the depths of it may be, could never dream up something poetic. I couldn’t pen a sonnet if you dangled me over a well full of crocodiles.

  ‘Where are you?’ I challenged the voice. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘“An edge swung oft in battle, but also drawed in angst, I—”’

  ‘It’s “drawn”, and tell me where you are!’

  ‘I’m the sword, all right? The sword on the mantelpiece.’

  I swung left, looking up to the ghastly painted mirror and the terracotta vases with moulded grinning faces. Between them was a display rack, tilted to show its prize. It was a longsword with an obsidian blade mottled and veined with copper. It was silver in the hilt and forged in the shape of a tree, with a crossguard made of intertwining branches and its trunk the grip. Its roots clutched a black stone pommel, carved like the face of a man.

  ‘The sword?’

  ‘Yes, the sword.’

  I groaned. The clubs must have hit me harder than I thought. ‘Are you sure you’re not an ancient god?’

  ‘Well, I once played a few for the Theatre Guild of Gurra, and in The Black Scarab. My performance was reported to be a
stonis—’ He heard my growling. ‘But no. Alas. I am not. Just a humble deadbound.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Oh, you don’t know?’ The voice was eager, grateful for the chance to tell its story.

  My pause told him no, I hadn’t.

  ‘Deadbinding. It was a craze several… What year is it?’

  ‘One thousand and four, by Empire count.’

  ‘In that case, it was a craze several hundred years ago, when the Nyxites decided to experiment with the spell of binding in order to make trinkets for Arctian nobles. You might have heard of strangebinding? Of souls bound in the bodies of animals? They were the lucky ones. We weren’t allowed to live as shades or beasts, and instead we were bound to objects. Lifeless things, hence the name deadbound. You know: talking hourglasses, sentient doors, self-playing harps, that sort of thing. But no, I got put into a sword. A soulblade, they called it. Never brandished more than a stage-weapon in my life, now I know more about a blade than anybody else, ha… ha.’

  I had heard of talking trinkets before. Even stolen a few. Never once had I imagined they had been souls. I had assumed charms or some old magic.

  Once more, the back of my head struck the panel. So indenturement could be worse. There was a grim sort of solace in knowing there was somebody in a sorrier state than you, but it chipped away some of the weight that had rested on me since being snatched from the docks.

  At very least the sword was something to converse with that wasn’t my own thoughts. I was glad for the company. It even helped me ignore the wardrobe until Busk had need of me again. I closed my eyes, and let myself rest against the wardrobe’s back.

  ‘Go on.’

  Chapter 3

  Weighed & Measured

  A Weighing is as much a necessity as it is a great and wondrous massage of the egos. Let the other fellows enjoy their baths and visits to cathouses; my pleasure comes from seeing my half-coins counted and measured. They order once a month? I Weigh twice a week. A man knows what he wants for when he knows where he stands on society’s ladder.

  From a missive mistakenly delivered to Tal Tabath, who later married the sender