“Of course,” Malden said. “I’d like that.” He went to the door and called for Tyburn. The man who came at his call had once been Cutbill’s personal bodyguard. Malden had made him the castellan of the underground lair. “Let Loophole stay here as long as he wants. See to his needs.”
“Yes, milord,” Tyburn said. “Velmont’s been asking for you. Says it’s urgent. And ’Levenfingers came by this morn, said some of the thieves are getting restless.”
“What now?” Malden asked.
“They say they’ve looted just about the whole of the Golden Slope. All those abandoned houses, and no watchmen-well, the work went fast. They’re running out of things to steal.”
Malden had been afraid of that. Thieves would be thieves, and needed prodigious quantities of coin to pay for all the ale they quaffed while they weren’t actively working on a job. Meanwhile a delegation of honest citizens-the same honest citizens who had torn Pritchard Hood limb from limb-had petitioned him to offer them protection from robbers and cutpurses. He would have laughed them off if he didn’t already know that pickpocketing and footpaddery were running rampant in the city, right when the nonthief population was having trouble making ends meet. If this kept up, there wouldn’t be any coin left in Ness that hadn’t been stolen out of one pocket to be spent from another. He was probably the first guildmaster of thieves in history to actually have to find a way to reduce crime. It galled him, but he couldn’t just ignore it.
The Golden Slope had provided one outlet for the thieves. The houses there were boarded up and abandoned-but not empty. The rich folk of Ness had left plenty behind when they fled the city, so Malden had turned his men loose on the unguarded treasure. At first he’d thought they would resent this work as it was just too easy. He’d underestimated the base laziness in the heart of every thief. The whole point of being a thief was to get at the easy money. They had cheered him and offered to pay him a tenth of everything they stole, even before he thought to ask for it.
“When the Slope is wrung dry, when there are no more abandoned places to rob, talk to me of this again,” Malden said.
Tyburn nodded. He didn’t look happy, but since Malden became Lord Mayor he’d learned that politics was not the art of making everyone happy, it was making sure no one was so miserable they were willing to stab you in the back. “And Velmont? Will you hear what he has to say?”
“Yes. Let me just grab my cloak.”
Velmont had become Malden’s eyes and ears in the city, proving himself more valuable every day. The Helstrovian had no friends in Ness, but he brought a pair of fresh eyes that could see problems Malden might miss. To Malden, Ness had always been on the verge of collapse-he knew too well how shoddy and unstable the institutions of his home city could be. In the midst of the general chaos, no individual problem stood out in high relief. When Velmont saw a problem, however, Malden knew it had to be fixed immediately. This was one summons he had no choice but to accept.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
He already knew what his Helstrovian second-in-command wanted, but still he let Velmont explain it in the most dramatic terms. That, at least, meant spending some time on the rooftops. The two of them raced each other across the Stink and up into the no longer aptly named Smoke, that zone of manufactories and work yards that girdled the city and now lay mostly quiet, cold, and unproductive. Even the terrible smell of the place had dissipated. “There, brother, what do you see?” Velmont asked, pointing down into the courtyard of the city’s biggest grain mill.
“I see wheels that aren’t turning, and wheat rotting in sacks,” Malden said. The giant mills needed oxen to turn them, and the rich merchants had taken all the best livestock when they fled the city, long before Malden’s return. Now the mill wheels stood silent and unmoving. Some needed replacement, too, but none of the workers remaining in the Smoke-a bare handful of those who’d been there before the Burgrave enlisted all their fellows-knew how to lever a mill wheel off its axle.
“Slag says he has a solution,” Malden told Velmont. The dwarf had been working even longer hours than Malden on one project or another. “A way to use the current of the river Skrait to turn the wheels.”
“Won’t the grain get wet if you put ’em in yon river?” Velmont asked, looking confused.
“Don’t second-guess a dwarf when he says he’s invented something new,” Malden told the Helstrovian.
“Won’t matter, anyroad,” Velmont said, his shoulders slumping. “Come, keep up if you can, and follow me uphill. There’s more to see, and worse.”
The two of them hurried across the roofs of the Smoke and up the Golden Slope toward Castle Hill. It was not a place Malden truly wanted to see ever again. The burnt-out stones of the palace and the fallen public buildings were a mute accusation of guilt he would never be able to atone for. Yet when Velmont led him along the fire-besmirched wall to a place near the back of the courtyard, Malden saw why they’d come, and his stomach fell.
Six square towers stood along the back wall of the hill, each of them windowless and very tall, with a single thick door at the bottom. Each once possessed a steep conical lead-lined roof to keep snow and rain off, but the roofs had all melted in the fire.
“Not the granaries,” Malden moaned.
“Aye, yer lordship. Ever last one of ’em.” Velmont squatted on the battlements and then leapt over to the top of the nearest tower. Malden followed him down through the ruined top of the granary and they clambered down through scorched support beams to the level of the grain inside.
An entire harvest’s worth of wheat had gone into these towers before the barbarians came to Skrae. A winter’s worth of flour, once it was ground and sifted. Winter was always a lean time in Ness, a time of hunger when many of the poor died for lack of bread. The Burgrave kept these granaries full so that when the coldest months came, he would have something to distribute to his people, if only to keep them from rioting while he dined on succulent venison and rare sweetmeats in his palace.
This year there would be nothing to hand out. Malden knelt in the grain and picked up handfuls of it to study in the dim light. What wasn’t burnt outright was soaked through by exposure to the elements.
He dropped his hands and let the roasted grain fall from his fingers. It smelled wonderful, frankly. Its smell made his mouth water. In one way the fire had probably done them a favor. Malden had spoken with enough bakers and millers since his ascension to learn more than he ever cared to know about the proper storage and processing of wheat products. For instance, he knew that roasted grain was harder to mill into flour, but it didn’t spoil as quickly.
Which was one small saving grace on top of a very serious problem. Roasted grain might be better preserved, but only if it was kept dry. It had rained several times since the fire melted those leaden roofs, and Malden could feel the damp rising off the stored food. Mold was probably already spreading through the towers, and rats wouldn’t be far behind. He could repair the lead roofs of the granaries, but the damage was already done.
Malden had lived through enough famines in his brief life to understand that what he saw here, what Velmont had shown to him, could easily be the end of his career in politics.
He tried to think of what they could do. “We’ll need a small army up here to move the grain to better bins,” he said. “We’ll salvage what we can.”