GRIMDARK MONSTER HUNTER AND CAPTIVE GODDESS

The ladder down into The Maw had forty rungs and Chamberlain counted every one of them because the counting kept his mind off the air. The air came up warm from the bottom and it carried grease and sulfur and the wet iron smell of a boiler house that had not been cleaned in a decade. He took a rung at a time with the greatsword strapped across his back and the strap pulling at his left shoulder and the pistol hanging under his coat where the wool kept the worst of the steam off the lock. Somewhere below him a pipe vented and the sound came up the shaft like a man clearing his throat. He stopped on the thirty-first rung and coughed. The cough came out of the lower right lung and it took its time. He held the rung with his left hand and put his right forearm against the ladder and let it run its course. The sputum came up grey and thick and he spat it onto the wet stone below and watched it slide down into the dark. He pulled the rag out of his coat pocket and wiped his mouth and put the rag back. There was a fleck of silver in the grey that time. Small. No bigger than a grain of salt off a pretzel. He did not look at it twice. The last nine rungs went fast. The corridor at the bottom ran east with a low bone ceiling and pipes bolted along both walls at the height of a man's chest. The rust on the joints had flaked off and drifted down onto the floor in a red powder that mixed with the grease and made a paste. A gauge on the left wall glowed a dull red and the light came off the wet floor and turned the whole corridor the color of an old bruise. He walked with his boots placed flat and his weight back on the heels because the floor was slick and a fall onto the pipes would break a rib and he had two ribs that had been broken before and did not enjoy the memory. Three men passed him on the way down. Two pipe fitters with their sleeves rolled and their arms black to the elbow. A woman carrying a wire basket of turnips against her hip. None of them looked at him. That was the courtesy of The Maw. A man with a greatsword on his back was either working or dying and either way it was not your business. Jorik Tarth kept a stall behind the second boiler house. The stall was a counter of nailed planks with a canvas roof over it and a lamp hung from a hook and a strongbox bolted to the floor. Behind the counter stood Jorik himself with one eye and a scar that ran through the empty socket and a plug of bitter root turning in his cheek. He was sixty or close to it and his hands were steady and his back was bent in the shape of a man who had spent forty years leaning over a counter. He looked up and he did not smile. "You are late." "I am alive." Chamberlain put his hands flat on the counter. "Those are different." Jorik spat into a tin cup and set the cup down and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. He reached under the counter and brought out a folded page with a wax seal on it and set the page down between them. "The Sunken Cathedral. The east supply line has been cut three times this month. Cult raiders. They take the carts and they take the drivers and they take the boots." He tapped the page with one thick finger. "The guild wants it stopped. They have put up coin." "How much." "Two hundred silver." Chamberlain did not answer. He stood at the counter with his hands flat and his eyes on the wax seal and he let the silence run. The boiler house behind him put out a slow hiss. Somewhere down the corridor a lift cage rattled in its shaft. Jorik chewed his root and watched him with the one eye and the eye did not blink. "Three hundred," Jorik said. "The medicine." Jorik reached under the counter again and brought out a tin the size of a snuff box and set it on the wood. The tin was dull and the lid was stamped with a maker's mark that had worn down to a smudge. Chamberlain picked it up and weighed it in his palm. It was full. He set it back down. "Four hundred," he said. "And a second tin." Jorik stopped chewing. "You are a hard man to do business with." "I am a hard man to do business with because the last three men you sent into that cathedral came back in pieces and you did not mention it." Chamberlain's voice did not rise. "I heard it from a pipe fitter. One of them came back with his jaw missing and lived four days. That is worth a hundred silver by itself." Jorik spat into the cup again and looked at the wall for a while. "Four hundred. Two tins. And you take the contract as written with no renegotiation after the fact." He slid the page across the counter. "Sign at the bottom and I will weigh the coin before you go and not after." Chamberlain broke the seal and read the page twice. He read it the way he read everything, for the terms and not the words. Payment on completion. No advance. The guild held the coin and Jorik held the guild's note and Jorik would pay out when the raiders were dead and the line was open. There was a clause at the bottom about salvage rights that gave the guild first claim on anything of value recovered from the cathedral. He took a pen off the counter and drew a line through the clause and wrote his initials beside the line. Jorik looked at the initials and chewed his root and did not argue. He pulled the strongbox out from under the counter and counted the coin onto the wood in stacks of twenty and Chamberlain counted the stacks with him. Four hundred silver. Two tins of medicine. Eleven cartridges of salted silver shot, which he had not asked for and which Jorik put on the counter anyway because a dead hunter did not pay his debts and Jorik was a practical man. Chamberlain put the coin in the inner pocket of his coat and put the tins in the outer pocket and loaded the cartridges into his belt one at a time and counted them out loud under his breath as he did it. Eleven. He wrote the whole transaction in the ledger with a stub of charcoal and the writing was a blocky scrawl that a clerk would have called a disgrace. He was at the mouth of the corridor when Jorik spoke again. "Rodriguez." Chamberlain stopped. "There is something in the deep end of that cathedral." Jorik's voice had changed. The root was out of his cheek and his tone had gone flat. "The raiders are not just taking carts. They are dragging things down there. Wire. Glass. Iron chain. One of my men saw a cage on a sledge and the cage was big enough to hold a horse." "Cult business." "That is what I told myself." Jorik picked up the tin cup and did not drink from it. "I have been telling myself that for six weeks. Then I stopped." Chamberlain stood in the corridor mouth with the gauge light red on his shoulder and did not turn around. "Four hundred silver," he said. "Two tins. No renegotiation." He walked east into the pipe run. The floor sloped down after the second junction and the water started at his ankles and rose to his knees and then to his thighs. It was warm. Warm was worse than cold because warm meant the boiler veins were bleeding into the sewer again and the fluid in the water was titan ichor and titan ichor on bare skin would raise a rash that itched for a week. He pulled his coat tight at the collar and kept walking. At the fourth junction he took a tallow candle out of his pocket and lit it off the gauge light and held it low. The chalk mark on the bone was his own mark from a job three years back. That was how he knew he was still on the right route. The cathedral had been mapped by hunters before him and the map was wrong in six places and the chalk was right in all of them. The fifth junction was where the whispers started. They came through the pipes and not through the air. A low murmur with no words in it, like a crowd in another room with a door between them. He stopped and put a hand on the wall and felt the vibration in the bone. The vibration came from below and it came in a rhythm. Not a machine rhythm. A human one. A chant. The candle guttered. Ahead of him the corridor opened and the water fell away over a lip of stone and he stood at the top of a stair with eleven steps going down and the bottom of the stair was dark and the dark moved. He held the candle out over the first step and the light did not reach the bottom. The chant came up the stairwell and the words were still not words and the rhythm was still a human rhythm and there was a second sound under it, a thin high sound like a wire drawn tight, and the wire sound was coming from something that was breathing. Chamberlain put the candle out with his thumb and set his back against the wall and drew the greatsword.