The first thing the hatch gave us was the smell.
It came up as Kaelen and the two Row men heaved the iron lid aside, a cold, flat breath of stale air with something sweet and rotten underneath. Wren, standing at the rope with her heels dug into the dirt, wrinkled her nose and took a half step back.
"Smells like a cellar that died," she said.
"Stay where you are," Marrow told her.
"I am."
"Stay further."
I knelt at the rim and lowered the lamp on a cord. It was a good lamp, borrowed from the Hospice, with a brass shield and a glass chimney, and Sister Vell had pressed it into my hands the night before without being asked. I let it drop ten feet, twenty, thirty, until the cord went slack. Then I watched the flame.
It leaned. Then it shrank to a blue bead, stubborn and small, barely clinging to the wick.
"That's not good," Kaelen said.
"No." I hauled the lamp back up and held it to my face. The flame fattened and steadied as it rose into open air. "There's something wrong with the air down there. It can't feed a fire properly."
"Can it feed a man?"
"For a while. Not for long." I set the lamp on the ground and sat back on my heels. "Old mines have a name for it. Blackdamp. Air that's been used up. You don't feel it. You get tired, you get stupid, you decide to sit down for a minute. Then you don't get up."
Marrow's scarred face went very still. "The people who went down."
"Maybe."
"Dessik never said."
"Dessik wouldn't have known. He sealed it and told people it wasn't safe, and he was more right than he realized." I looked at Tobb, who had come to stand behind her with his arms folded and his ear-less head tilted. "How long can a man hold his breath?"
"Not long enough to cut coal," Tobb said.
"I'm not asking about cutting coal. I'm asking about a bellows."
Tobb's eyes narrowed. Then, slowly, something that was almost respect crossed his flat face.
"You want to blow air down the hole," he said.
"I want to push the bad air out and pull fresh air in. Two openings, one in and one out. If the bunker has a second vent, we can set a bellows at the hatch and let the draft do the rest." I nodded at the yard behind us, where a pair of heavy forge bellows lay half buried under a collapsed shed. "How long to get those working?"
"An hour. Maybe two."
"Then we do that first. Nobody goes down until the lamp burns bright at the bottom."
Marrow looked at me for a moment, the way she had looked at me on the road into Cinder Row, when I had stood with my hands open and waited for her to speak.
"That's slow," she said.
"I know."
"We have two days."
"We have two days to make iron," I said. "We have no days to lose a man in the dark."
She nodded once, short and decisive, and went to find the bellows.
◆
It took closer to three hours, and when the lamp finally went down on its cord and the flame stayed tall all the way to the bottom, even Tobb let out a breath he had clearly been holding since dawn.
The bellows stood at the hatch like a pair of great leather lungs, worked by two men at a time in a rhythm Tobb called out in a low monotone. Every time they pressed, the air above the hole shivered and rushed down into the dark. Every time they drew back, a thin cold stream came sighing up from somewhere I couldn't see.
"There's a second opening," I said. "Somewhere down there. It's drawing."
"Can you find it?" Marrow asked.
"I can try."
"Then we go," said Kaelen.
He had tied a rope around his own waist and one around mine, and he had checked both knots twice, with the grim thoroughness of a man who had taught himself that fear was just a kind of carefulness. His empty sword belt was gone, replaced by a hand axe borrowed from one of the Row men, and he held it in his left hand as if he didn't quite trust it.
"You don't have to come," I said.
"I know."
"You could stay up top. Hold the rope."
"Wren is holding the rope," Kaelen said. "And I've decided I'd rather be somewhere I can see you."
It was, I realized, about as close to saying I trusted him as Kaelen was going to get.
"Fair enough," I said.
We went down a rusted iron ladder bolted to the shaft wall, a hundred rungs of cold, flaking metal that left orange dust on my palms. The lamp swung from my belt. The air thickened as we descended, cool and damp, with that sweet undertone growing stronger. Above us, the circle of daylight shrank to a coin, then a button, then a pinprick.
My feet struck stone. I let go of the ladder and held up the lamp.
For a moment I couldn't understand what I was seeing.
The bunker was enormous. It was a long, vaulted hall of black brick, forty feet wide and twice as long, its roof held up by iron ribs gone brown with age. The floor was carpeted in a thick layer of coal dust, soft and silent underfoot, and in the lamplight the walls glittered, as if the whole room had been dusted with tiny black stars.
And it was full.
Coal lay in great sloping mounds down the length of the hall, heaped to the ceiling at the far end, the dull, oily black of the good stuff, the hard kind that burned hot and clean. There were tons of it. More than tons. A winter's worth, maybe a year's.
"By the Gods," Kaelen breathed.
"Wren's father was right," I said.
"This is more than the Row could burn in a year."
"A lot more." I took a step forward and stopped. "And it doesn't make sense."
"What doesn't?"
I held the lamp lower. In the loose coal dust at my feet, running in a long straight line toward the far wall, were tracks.
Wheel tracks. Narrow and deep, laid down by something heavy and regular, and not old. The edges of the ruts were still sharp. No dust had settled in them. Beside them ran a second set, the prints of boots, many boots, going in both directions.
"Someone's been hauling it out," Kaelen said slowly.
"A lot of someones." I followed the tracks with the light. They ran down the length of the hall, past the mounds, to the far wall, where the lamplight failed. "Recently. Days, not weeks. And not a little."
"Then why is there still so much?"
"Because it's a lot," I said. "Or because they ran out of time."
We walked. Our footsteps made no sound in the dust. The cold pressed in around us. Behind us, faint and far, the bellows sighed in the dark.
Halfway down the hall, I stopped again.
There was something on the floor.
It lay half buried in coal dust against the wall, at the foot of one of the great iron ribs. It was long and pale and curved, and for a second my mind refused to name it. Then I saw the other shapes beside it, and the cloth, and the small things that had once been boots, and understood.
"Kaelen," I said.
"I see them."
There were eleven.
They lay in a loose cluster at the foot of the wall, as if they had sat down together to rest. Some had slumped sideways. One lay with an arm flung over its face. Their clothes had rotted to thin gray rags, and their bones were bare and clean and strangely peaceful, and beside them lay a scatter of tools, picks and shovels and a dented lantern with its glass cracked.
"They didn't fight," Kaelen said quietly. He knelt, and I could hear the careful control in his voice. "There are no marks on the bones. No broken skulls, no cuts."
"Blackdamp."
"They went down to get coal."
"And the air killed them. Slowly, and without pain." I swallowed. "They sat down for a minute. They were tired. And they never stood up again."
"How long ago?"
I looked at the bones, at the clean, dry white of them, and tried to think like someone who understood these things. "A year. More. Dessik sealed the hatch after they died. That's why he wouldn't say anything."
"Because he was ashamed."
"Because he knew the Row would have gone down after them," I said. "And died too."
Kaelen was silent for a long moment. Then he took off his cloak and laid it gently over the nearest of the bones, and did not say another word about it.
I let the lamp drop, just a little, and looked away.
◆
We found the second opening at the far end of the hall, behind the last great mound of coal.
It was a tunnel mouth, low and square, cut into the brick at about shoulder height. The draft was coming from there. I could feel it on my face, cold and steady, carrying a faint, familiar smell that made my stomach tighten.
Not rot. Not dust. Something else.
"Smoke," Kaelen said.
"Tobacco smoke." I crouched at the mouth of the tunnel and held the lamp to the wall. The brick was black with old soot, but there were fresh marks in the soot, a smeared handprint, a drag of cloth, and on the floor a scatter of coal chips leading into the dark. "Someone's been through here. And they've been smoking."
"Where does it go?"
"I don't know." I leaned in and let the light fall down the tunnel. It ran straight, perhaps forty feet, and then turned. "But it's heading east."
"Toward the Forges."
"Or toward Territory Five."
Kaelen said nothing. I could feel him looking at me.
I took a step into the tunnel. The ceiling was low, and I had to stoop. The air was warm here, warmer than the bunker, and the draft was stronger.
Ten feet in, my foot struck something. I stopped, and lowered the lamp.
It was a crate.
Not a large one. A plain wooden box about the size of a bread tin, half buried in the coal dust, its lid pried open and its contents gone. But along one side, burned into the pine with a branding iron, was a small neat mark. A scale, balanced on a pillar. Beneath it, in tiny letters:
T. GREAVES & CO.
For a long moment I just looked at it.
"That's Greaves's mark," Kaelen said.
"Yes."
"He's been hauling coal out of the Row's own bunker."
"Looks like it." I turned the crate over with the toe of my boot. Underneath, the dust was disturbed in a long, shallow furrow. "Which means the Tallyman has known about this place for a while. Maybe since before the fire."
"Then why leave this much behind?"
I stood slowly, with the lamp held low.
"Because he can't carry it all," I said. "Or because he wants someone to find it."
"Why?"
"If the Row burns a ton of Greaves's coal to meet the Forges' order," I said, "that's a ton he can write into the ledger. Interest on a stolen stockpile. A debt we didn't know we had."
Kaelen was quiet for a very long moment.
"That's a very cruel kind of cleverness," he said at last.
"It's the only kind he has."
"Can we use it?"
"We have to." I looked back down the long hall, at the black mounds glittering in the lamplight. "There's no other coal. If we take it, we owe him. If we don't, we lose the seat, and Wren's father's furnace stays cold."
"Then what do we do?"
The ache behind my left eye pulsed once, slow and heavy.
"Think," I said. "And fast."
◆
We climbed out at dusk, black to the elbows and silent.
Marrow met us at the top of the ladder with a hand under each of our arms, and when she saw our faces she did not ask. She just looked from me to Kaelen and back, and her good eye hardened.
"It's there," I said. "All of it."
"How much?"
"Enough for a year."
She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, I could see the effort it cost her to let herself hope.
"Then we're saved," she said.
"Not yet." I wiped my hands on my cloak, which only made them dirtier. "It's Greaves's coal. Or it will be, the moment we use it. He's been drawing it down for months, and the rest is bait."
"Then we don't use it."
"Then we lose the seat."
She stared at me. "You want to take it anyway."
"I want to take it on our terms," I said. "Not his. But to do that, I need to know exactly how much he thinks he's already taken, and I need to know before dawn."
"How?"
I looked across the yard to the furnace, where Wren sat on the steps with her bucket in her lap, watching us with a look of anxious, hopeful curiosity.
"I need to talk to your twelve-year-old," I said. "And then I need to go see an old man about a ledger."
Marrow's eyes narrowed.
"You're going back to Greaves."
"Not to him." I allowed myself a thin, tired smile. "To his clerks."
Behind me, at the bottom of the shaft, the bellows sighed in the dark. Somewhere below, in a long black hall full of coal and quiet bones, a man's cloak lay folded over the remains of eleven people who had only ever wanted to keep a fire lit.
I would have to remember that. I would have to remember it every time I was tempted to be clever.
Dawn was thirty-six hours away.