It was too early for this. I was barely awake yet, and the woman they’d sent down to help me get dressed in my Vedish swathes was impatient. Even though my body still hurt from my beating, she tutted crossly and smacked my arms when they weren’t where she wanted them.

Belt and buckle-ring, they came first. Once fitted to my waist, she dropped the full sheet of hessian over my head. Pulling it back to form a hood, she aligned my head between two hooks, then tugged either side of the upper edge down over my chest so the stitches followed my arms. From behind my right shoulder, then, she brought a brass frog to fit the clasp that had to match it on the left; that made a collar. With another hook she guided the lower quarter over my right leg and secured it on the buckle-ring. The same was repeated on the left, but not before another hook was used to raise the flank off my left side. All of this done, the swathes covered my body from shoulders to knees, my shirt pockets reachable between the overlapping flaps that came together at the buckle – the ring of which protruded from the hessian like a wheel. Buttons, it seemed, had not occurred to Vedish tailors. I’d need practice.

She pinned a green ribbon to my collar; there was one just like it on her own.

‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

‘The greenstring. All servants of the Mooncircle Throne must wear the greenstring.’ So that’s what I was now. It made sense: if Rusper Symphin was now known as the “honorary” caliph, then I must be an honorary servant.

----------------------------------------

At first there wasn’t any time for me to study the Discs, and the vertical cabinet stayed locked.

‘Am I correct in assuming you have never had duties before?’

‘Duties?’

‘Mm.’

I gave it some thought. ‘Well, I used to collect the water from the river,’ I said.

First morning in the Deep, and still so early that it hadn’t even started to grumble, Rusper was sitting at his workbench. Forcing a smile.

‘And fed the chickens,’ I added. ‘Helped milk the cows too, sometimes.’

He bowed his head. ‘Anything else?’

‘No, nothing else.’

‘Well. Your duties here, under the Engineering Guild, will be quite different from all that. The work harder, you understand. Then again, by the look of you, a little stiff labour wouldn’t go amiss.’

I glared at him.

‘Your arms, boy. They’ve barely an ounce of muscle on them.’

I crossed them on my chest.

‘Oh come, we’ll build them up, you’ll see. At your age I was made of matchsticks too.’

Over the first few days, he placed me under Loquar’s supervision; the old man not yet having been dismissed from the Royal Guild. My first task: building rat-traps needed in the citadel above. ‘A Deep is not without its scourges,’ Rusper said before he left us to our work. ‘I get no end of complaints about the vermin these days.’ Adding, as he left, that Loquar stank of stale daskh.

His mysterious “piping” problem, as well as his business as Viceroy, would take him away from the Deep for hours at a time. But he always came back eventually, often with loud groups of engineers, massive piles of parchment and complex conversations about pipes that were hard to ignore. I tried my best to mind my business, while also trying to ignore just how badly Loquar did smell.

We stationed ourselves at the worktop farthest away from Rusper’s team and began with the trap assembly blocks. Wood had been sent down from the first-level joinery. Strong but springy, Loquar said it was yew.

‘Yew trees in the desert?’ I quizzed him.

‘From Elman.’ He winked knowingly at me.

‘I’m not Elmine,’ I said. ‘You know that.’

‘Chief says you are.’ There were five four-foot planks of yew wood, each one an inch or so thick, and three baskets full of thinner strips. With saws we cut the planks down into useable segments, having stacked almost forty on the worktop by midmorning. Then we sanded them down, using coarse grindstone slabs.

Meanwhile, behind us, the engineers discussed their piping riddles . . .

‘How many aqueducts affected?’

‘All of them.’

‘No, not all. The outer farming quarters remain at full supply.’

‘Stands to reason, they’re fed off fourth.’

‘Circuit Two. Fault must be there.’

Rusper: ‘No, that isn’t feasible. Look at the dribble through the Martial District and upper Mercantile. The troughs under that wheel have never stood so low.’

‘. . . Kid . . . kid!’ Loquar rasped in my ear. ‘I said sand ‘em, not wear ‘em to nowt but dust!’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

Two to a trap, the assembly blocks formed roof-and-floor of each container. We combined them with strips, cut to length and nailed with hammers. After I got my first purple thumb, Loquar found me a glove. By far the most awkward part of the job, this took the longest. And when I tried to cheat by spacing the bars just a little wider, the old man chided me for it. ‘You ever seen a rat, kid?’

I thought of saying something clever but stopped myself.

‘Reckon a critter couldn’t creep outta that? They squirm and squeeze, kid. Space ‘em close!’

I slammed mine down on the worktop. ‘Why don’t you just make boxes then, what’s the point of the bars?’

‘They gotta sniff the bait!’ he said in a shouted whisper. I blanched at the smell of his breath, then fished more strips from the basket. But his oily fingers snatched my effort away and cast it into a corner. ‘No good. Start over.’

So I did. Rolling my eyes.

The engineers argued on behind us . . .

‘Too much coming off the upper zone. Too many primary lines. The Deep can’t get much bigger than this on a mere two containment systems. The outer sluices—’

‘Gudge, it’s a closed circuit. Nothing to do with the sluices. And none of that explains why distribution to the North District—’

Loquar banged his hammer over the words.

‘—these diagrams,’ someone finished saying; I scowled at Loquar from my work.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

‘But they’ve never once given us cause to doubt the transcripts before. Scores of the original lines have been unearthed in the last decade, and with every one Meck’s proven right.’

‘We still cannot be sure whether or not the four arterials operate independently of one another.’

‘Pint’s right, Chief. The roots may yet be interlinked near the aquifer. How would we know?’

‘How could Meck himself have known? He never entered the Hub.’

‘Obviously.’

A thoughtful pause. In it, Loquar experimentally tapped his trap and I pretended to do the same.

Then I heard Rusper speak again: ‘I’m not convinced. Why would the Builders leave so extensive a network, only for it to be impervious to civic expansion? Antissa’s population has always fluctuated.’

‘Yet never reached these numbers.’

‘Not according to records anyway.’

‘Meck too will have faced this problem, Rusper.’

I heard the Chief Engineer deflate with a sigh, but missed his answer.

Next came the rods. The metal for these came from the junk-piles, Loquar told me. ‘We recycle,’ he explained. Each rod was cut down to two inches. Then we dragged out the big bulky machine he called the “lathe”—the screech it made as we pulled it over the bricks earning us dark looks from Rusper and the other engineers. Powered by pedals, we used the lathe to twist the rods into curves. I worked the pedals myself while Loquar attached the twisted lengths to brass-wrought girdles that had been sent down to us from the smelters. These had already been fashioned with holes for our bolts, so that the process of fitting each piece to a trap was made simpler: the rods hammered fast under the metal so that they pointed inward from the mouth of the cage.

It was a basic idea. A morsel of food would be left at the end of the box, to lure a rat. Rats having flexible bodies, as Loquar kept reminding me, they could easily wriggle between the inward-pointing rods at the entrance. Once inside, though, the rat would find the rods curved back towards its face, making it impossible to wriggle out.

By the end of the day, we’d made five traps.

‘Let him finish,’ murmured Rusper. Loquar left; the other engineers had gone already. The Chief Engineer sat by himself in another corner, hunched over the umpteenth page of parchment, making scruffy notes along its margins. Far too tired to disturb him, I ate my supper and turned in. And while I lay under my quilt of the red birds, eyes on the pipe above my bed, the lower reaches of the Deep gave up their final groans of the day. I wondered how long I’d be down here, and when next I’d see sun.

----------------------------------------

Cold water splashed me in the face.

I tumbled off my mattress, spluttering, and crawled away from the deluge coming down. Looking back, still half-asleep, I saw the pipe above my bed still belching splashes from the ceiling. When it stopped, the quilt and mattress were soaked through.

Confused and groggy, I wiped my face and shook it out of my hair. Then he arrived.

‘Wouldn’t do to have the Viceroy’s hand oversleepin’, now would it.’

‘You turned that on!’ I yelled up the stairs at Loquar.

‘Smart kid,’ he sniggered and held a bowl into the light of his lantern. ‘Here, get dressed and eat your tashi.’

‘What’s the time?’ I groaned.

‘Hour afore sun-up. Chief’s got you a new job, gotta be up extra early for this one. Shake a leg, kid!’ He sat and waited in Rusper’s chair until I was ready, then pulled on his green turban and led me out of the workshop at a scurry.

The Deep’s passages were black but for his lantern’s bars of light, and quiet too except for the deepest grumbles. A tunnel and a ladder going up from the workshop were the furnace rooms where yesterday’s embers were still glowing. Loquar shovelled some coals out of the bed of a forge to half-fill a small scuttle. He passed the scuttle to me. Then swept up a tool that looked more like some kind of weapon and squeezed a trigger: black tongs with nasty double claws. ‘From now on, kid, this’ll be your task,’ he said.

‘What task?’ I asked, to which he drove the tongs down into the coals like a sword. I recoiled from the sparks.

‘Lighting the Deep. Come on.’

Most industries were here between the red granite walls of the first and topmost level; joinery, foundry, metalworks and smelters, vellum-tanners, parchment-mills, rows upon rows of rooms for scraps and spares and storage. The walls bore their bones on this level: big pins of iron from which the box-lanterns hung. I could only just reach them to turn their latches back, open their windows and apply the hot pincers to the undercopper stems. I was mesmerised by the first, the second, the third; how the triglycerate element flashed on first contact with the heat, flickered, then basked the wall in its light. Loquar called it “hotting.”

Our way scribbled under buttresses as the tunnels grew and shrank, zigzagging, backtracking, becoming rooms and passing them by. One wall was never far from sight. Different from the others, its stone was greenish and slick. But I didn’t ask about it. I wasn’t sure I trusted Loquar, or all that many of his answers.

When we came to the place where the rubble shaft opened in the floor, I inched in closer to look down but Loquar thumped me in the chest. So. I couldn’t quite trust him for facts, but at least he wasn’t going to let me jump into a hole.

All lights now lit on first level, we took the stairs back down to second. Two nights I’d now slept here in the Royal Guild headquarters. The level was bigger than that above and though its layout was similar, the sandstone passages made more sense. Here the lanterns were bolted fast in sconces. Just as before, the chasm of the rubble shaft cut its way through floor. And again, all ways and passages met at the central green-stone wall.

Rungs brought us down to the third level, the broadest level of the Deep, where the arrow-straight corridors divided sandstone, leading inward. The air was warm and full of powder, making me cough as we went. Many parts of this level were still being built, I soon realised.

We ghosted on, now only lighting the lanterns that were positioned at the ladders. Soon, more ghosts joined us. The diggers of the Deep—“sappers,” Loquar called them—overtook us in threes and fours with their own shallow lights. Grey faces, grey hands and grey clothes, as if painted. We followed them down to the fourth level, which was less than half built; barely more than a muddle of masonry and struts within rock pockets. A trembling started from somewhere, and sappers passed in larger groups. By the time we reached the last lantern, vibrations shook the floor we stood on.

Noise blasted up. Through a manhole, a ladder simply dropped away into nothing; a nothing in which human voices fought with thrashing metal echoes and mechanical moans. I hotted the lantern at the ladder and the triglycerate brightened, its glow waxing over bedrock and worming skins of buried pipes. I leaned forward and saw some lanterns blinking down there.

‘Someone’s already hotted those lights,’ I shouted to be heard above the noise, though secretly nervous of going any deeper.

‘Digging starts early, tight schedule,’ Loquar shouted back to me. ‘Gotta keep ‘em lit through the night down on fifth.’ He rattled his lantern at the manhole; then seeing my hesitation, put it down, took my scuttle and tongs, and went first. I watched and waited until he was something like ten rungs below me, thinking he’d not be too impressed if I squashed his turban, then gripped the poles. I started down.

Rock swallowed me. From all sides, pipes loomed like fat, sleeping reptiles in the earth. The noise got louder, became so loud that I couldn’t hear my hands or feet moving over the wood. Down, down and down . . . just don’t look down.

The earth and rock drew back around the ladder. Space opened up. I passed a dangling lantern, squinted in its light, and kept on going. Foot—hand, foot—hand. Deeper, deeper through the gloomy openness and noise, until my sandals met some surface and Loquar clapped me on the shoulder. I stepped off the ladder but, when I turned, so did my stomach.

Here gaped a cavern like some big, foul, rotted mouth. Lights on the scaffolds gave it half-form, rocks grinning out between the pipes that shot across the open. They weren’t a wall or a ceiling but a face of gritted teeth, gnarled-up brows, rearing lumps and jagged spines, mostly dark despite the lanterns.

My guide led on. Up, down the ladders, over, under scaffold platforms. Lantern to lantern. The dust was overwhelming here, thick in the air, a chalky sweetness that filled my throat. The scaffolds followed the curve of the green-stone wall, which now stood fully exposed some hundred feet or even more. Shadows lapped its edges and my stomach did another turn. Instead I looked at where I was putting my feet.

They were down there, the sappers, scores and scores of them now. Under the scaffolds’ iron legs and that messy cable webwork, the bottom of the Deep was a crawling, grey morass of digging. And there was Rusper! Impressively, he clambered about through the work, far too busy to see me. I heard the high rasp of his voice calling instructions, but all the hammering and smashing and screeching of machines drowned out his words.

Loquar and I made our way back up again, a final ladder and a manhole bringing us out of the cavern. ‘Think you’ve got it?’ he quizzed.

‘I think so, yes.’

‘You’ll needs be back here come dusk time to hot fifth level for the night.’ Not something I was looking forward to.

Back at the traps, I soon got faster, and by the early afternoon was keeping pace with Loquar. We didn’t say much to each other; from him there was barely ever more than ‘make a long arm for this’ or ‘make a long arm for that.’ Other engineers came and went; consulting, collecting, exchanging charts. Rusper didn’t come back that day.

Glancing at the tall cabinet in the corner, I thought again of the Discs. And then the Rath. The council had said that none had been sighted this side of the Empty River yet. But that had been two days ago; they could be closer by now. Was I really safe behind these walls, within this rock, inside this room? And were my people? Forget the Rath—were they still being fed and given water and enough blankets to keep warm?

And what did they think of me now, the boy who had left them for something better?

There were six more traps by evening.