That summer, as I began to look time and again toward the gate to see if Federo would return, the Dancing Mistress made another change in my training. Instead of running the roofs, she brought me two blocks from the Factor’s house and into a narrow court crowded with garbage and glint-eyed rats. Only a sliver of sky showed above. The odor was foul, and the refuse rustled strangely.
“We travel a different route tonight,” she announced. “Can you tell me where?”
“Not above, and not within.” I looked around, then at the metal grate beneath our feet. “Is there a below?”
“Below is the life of a city.” Her smile flexed toward the feral. “Now you will learn the truth that lies beneath.” She took up my hand. “Never stray away from me down there. Not for a step or a corner. You can always climb down off a roof if you become lost, and find the pavement and from there your way back. Below, there are no landmarks as you know them. Exits are rare and tend to be located in odd places.”
Going from a rooftop block to another rooftop block involved much climbing up and down, which in turn required a great deal of waiting for a quiet moment and good shadow. I could immediately see the value of traveling Below, if there was a place in which we could make the run. “How far does it go?”
“Not everywhere,” she admitted, “but more places than you might think. There are layers beneath this city.”
“The water flows deeper?”
“The sewers are channeled to the harbor, for the most part. But mine galleries run beneath them, and warrens from some other age of history when people here felt a need to build below the surface.”
I was fascinated.
We pried open the grate and looked down a mossy hole that smelled of mold. Rungs were set in the wall, just as slimed over as the bricks around them. “I will always go first,” she told me. “Unless I instruct you different in the moment.”
She slipped down the rungs. I followed. Having no way to pull the grate after me, I left it standing open.
At the bottom of the climb, there was a drop of eight or nine feet. The Dancing Mistress helped me land. I looked back up to see a circle of stars, as if the new moon had inverted itself to cover the entire night sky and left only a single disc of stars behind.
Water trickled. The mold smell had given way to damp stone and old rot. I could see nothing at all when I looked around me.
“You can step into a pit and never know it.” Her voice was not where I had expected it to be, and I jumped in startlement.
“There are things that live down here. Most of them are nasty.” The Dancing Mistress had moved again, again without my knowing. She walked in absolute silence. Her unpleasant little game made me realize how much I depended on my eyes.
“There is no light except that which you bring.” This time I thought I heard her feet pad on stone.
“Close your eyes and spin round.” Her hands touched my shoulders and moved me. I spun. Strangely, closing my eyes made it worse, as if my balance were partly anchored in what I saw even within the impenetrable dark.
She spun me around time and again, then eventually slipped me to a halt. “Take a step.”
I tried, and collapsed. I bit back a cry of surprise and pain. The stone was slimed beneath my touch, and my knee felt as if I had wrenched it.
Something writhed beneath my hand. The squeak that left me was no more in my control than was my heartbeat.
“Do you want to be here?” the Dancing Mistress asked from close above me. Her breath was hot, and I thought I could see the faintest spots of gleam where her eyes were.
“Y-yes.” I held on to my fear, clutching it close as I clutched my anger and sadness when I stood inside the Pomegranate Court. This was freedom, too-free as the starry skies over the roofs, and more so, for I could find direction and distance here. Mistress Tirelle would cut me and cast me out, if she did not kill me in the moment, for being down in this place.
Going underground was the greatest rebellion I knew. I needed the Dancing Mistress’ hand in mine to pursue this. There were no walls Below except the bounds of tunnels. A cage the size of the city lay beneath the feet of my captors.
“Yes,” I repeated. “I want to be here.”
“Good,” she said. “Never forget the fear, though. It will keep you alive down Below.”
Fear doesn’t keep me alive, I thought. The account that I must repay keeps me alive.
“Take this.” The Dancing Mistress handed me a length of dark cloth.
We were out in the courtyard on a chilly night nine days after she’d taken me down beneath the grating. I was eager to run in the underworld again.
“What is this for?”
“Draw it over your eyes.”
That was an old game. I had done the same with Mistress Tirelle often enough, when we worked on my seeing. I triple-folded the blind, then tied it around my head so that my eyes were fully obscured. Though I did not realize it, one of my most valuable lessons was about to begin.
“Now slowly walk from here to the horse box.” Her grip tightened on my arm, until the claws caught at my skin. “Slowly.”
She turned me toward the far wall of the courtyard and released me. I took a confident step and slammed my shin into the low wall around the pomegranate tree. I stumbled at that, and fell hands-first into the bark. Pain erupted in my forearms to match the throbbing ache in my shin. I swallowed back a shout, then stammered, “Y-you t-turned me!”
I could not keep the sense of betrayal from my voice.
“No,” she said. “You turned yourself. All I did was point you wrong.”
“That’s not fair.”
Her voice hissed close to my ear, just as it had down Below. “Is the world fair?”
“N-no.”
“Then why should I be fair? You’ve lived here more than three years. You know every cobble of this court. How is it that you need my help here?”
I shook her off and stood still.
Her breathing dropped to near silence, just the faint passage of air. I extended my arms without moving, and looked with my ears.
It was silent, as always in the Factor’s house. But the silence of a city is not an absence of noise, any more than there is silence wherever people live.
At home, when I was very small, the fire had crackled, even well after it died to coals and the eye-watering odor of ash. Endurance whuffled in his pen, his gut rumbling all night long. Animals yipped in the stands of trees. Night-hunting birds sang their prey songs.
Aboard Fortune’s Flight, the sea had constantly slapped the hull. The boiler’s kettle burbled below the deck, while someone always must run to orders or coil a line or call out a log reading, even in the deepest hours of the night.
Here the silence was eased by the faint snap of a fire within the house. The streets away from our walls echoed their noises. The wind eddied differently around the high, blank inner wall than it did rattling through the pomegranate branches or sliding along the copper-clad roof.
Now, concentrating, even the Dancing Mistress’ breathing seemed loud.
I listened to the tree a moment, let its damp bark smell tell me where it was. I turned from there toward the faint echo of the breeze worrying at the inner wall. One slow step, to find the slight slope of the cobbles away from the pomegranate tree’s little circle of stone-bounded soil. Another slow step to the flattening out. Vague echo of street noise behind me. Wall before me. I began to walk with deliberation, keeping my hands loose and ready for a fall should there be an unstable cobble or some trap left by my Mistress to teach me further wariness.
After twenty-two of my paces, I reached up to touch the inner wall. I’d known it was there. The horse box should be a few steps to my left. I listened for a while. The box made no noises, for it was fairly compact and had sat there through many seasons. It was too small to trap the slight breeze that blew. Memory would be my guide.