My native disguise didn’t fool the proprietor, a genial woman named Delia, for longer than an eyeblink.
“Eh, Miss Kit, is that you under all that bronze? So it is.” She chuckled as she handed me a cowled cloak. “Mind you keep your head down in there. Don’t want the ladies thinking I’ve sold them out to the savages.”
She led me back through the communal baths to the private rooms used by ladies who enjoyed a rub before or after their wash. The young men who attended them worked stripped to the waist and had been trained to use their hands to deliver various degrees of pleasure. Rina always claimed the bathboys were doing a great deal more than that behind the locked doors, but I thought not. If a woman wished to be penetrated and run the risk of catching a babe, she went to her husband, or a lover who resembled her husband. If she wished to be stroked and petted and made to feel beautiful in her skin, she came here for a rub.
Delia let me into her tube room and the stairs leading down to the small sorting station beneath it. “Tell Clancy while you’re down there that I don’t want no holdup on the linens in those tubes today. Missus Trevors and her ducklings are coming in at three.”
“All nine of them?” I pulled on my gloves and gogs. “Better let the boys have an early supper, Del.”
I climbed down through the darkness on the rusty, rickety staircase and stepped off into a damp, murky room filled with tubes from the bathhouse and several other businesses. Four of Delia’s brothers worked in the station, and they rarely had a moment’s rest from dawn until dusk, when all the tubes finally closed. Clancy, her eldest sibling, paused long enough to laugh soon as he saw me.
“What’s all this, then?” He rerouted a load of damp, soiled towels from the bathhouse to the launderer’s tube. “You giving up the civilized life, Miss Kit?”
I sighed. “Why do I never fool you people?”
He chuckled. “You may dress the part of a savage well enough, but you smell of roses and lavender. That lot, they smell of horses or trees, or naught ’tall.”
“Next time I’ll have to remember to dab some pine resin behind my ears.” I passed along his sister’s message, and then asked, “Have you seen Hedger today?”
“Aye, he came up with his bucket at noon.” Clancy waved his hand toward the tubes that curved out of sight beside a hatch. “Said to me he were off to scram under the exchange today. Here.” He tossed me a watershed. “Keep your heathen skin from washing off.”
“Thanks, Clance.” I pulled on the rubber cloak and followed the tubes.
Descending into Rumsen’s bowels required I bring my own light, so I borrowed a flystick from Clancy and gently shook it until the bugs inside the glass rod gave off a blue-green glow. That lit my path down into the sublevels and tunnels where old Hedger dwelled and worked.
Chapter Seven
As usual, the stink from the sewer tubes hit me first and took my breath away. Every time I came belowground I wondered how the old man could tolerate living in it. He claimed one became accustomed to it and even grew to like it, although I doubted I’d ever accomplish the feat.
Toriana’s first citizens had used pit privies and rubbish dumps for their waste, but when the blues sent over their architects to begin building a more permanent settlement, the builders had been instructed to attend first to the works needed belowground. For every building erected, three sublevels had been dug out and reinforced around what had been sewer lines and root bunkers.
As tubeworks and iceboxes had come along into common use, the sewer lines had been converted over, and the bunkers emptied. Now and then I spotted a cluster of carrot or potato plants that had grown from what had been left to rot in the old storage bins, their stunted, whitish-green leaves looking ghostly and unnatural.
The darkness and the smell didn’t unnerve me, nor had the rats I’d helped the old tunneler clear out. (Crate traps baited with raw bacon and nut butter had done the trick, along with some judicious reinforcement of the dump tubes.) The inherent dampness of the tunnels made trodding through them a wet business, but my bucks and Clancy’s watershed kept me dry enough. I even liked the echoing clatter, plings, and bongs of the mechworks overhead, and the constant rush of air sucked along by the tubes.
Something else crawled along my skin, however. Something I didn’t feel aboveground, a kind of awareness I’d never understood. A sense of presence just out of view, of watching eyes and waiting fists.
“Ere ye, hold on.” Hedger popped out of a hatch some three feet to the side of me, his gnarled hands pulling up his fogged gogs to expose bulging, tunnel-dilated eyes. “Miss Kit? Is that ye in all that getup?”
“It is.” I smiled. “Afternoon, Mr. Hedgeworth.”
“I’ll be blind.” The old man hoisted himself out of the drop and stood, shaking some of the water from the old-fashioned waders he wore over his clothes. “Never tell them hotel people sent ye back. I’ve not seen hide nor hair down here since we emptied the last of them crates uptoppers.”
“No, I’m here to collect on the favor owed for that, if you’ve some time now.”
“Right with ye.” He hoisted his catchall and a dripping kipbag. “Just let me empty these in the blower.”
I followed him to one of his stations, the one where he dried out whatever he found while inspecting the tubes. Every tube in the city suffered occasional blockages, and snakelike unjammers were sent through those that conveyed goods that could not be lost. Every station had the ability to valve off their tubes and blow out blockages through release doors, however, and did so with goods unworthy of the time and expense of unjamming. Once blown out of the tubes, whatever had been discarded fell into the gutters that ran under the tubes, where they were carried off to be redeposited in the main rubbish tube. Anything thus dumped in the gutter was referred to as scram.
Hedger’s main occupation was to keep the underground tubes in good repair, but he did a nice side business in reselling whatever he retrieved from the scram before it reached the rubbish tube. Today he emptied two voluminous skirts, a gent’s velvet bacco jacket, and several pairs of homespun stockings into an elbow tube that had a mesh plate on either end to prevent the contents from being sucked into the feed tube. The air still passed through the mesh, which blew the contents into a constant, billowing tumble that eventually dried them.
“Keeping the jacket?” I guessed. Hedger disdained most of the creature comforts most citizens took for granted, but he did have a soft spot for embroidered velvet.
“Aye. Cold season’s just round the corner.” He secured the blower and turned to me. “So what can I do ye for, Miss Kit? Ye’re wanting a thing or a service?”
“Service,” I said. “I need to get into the vault under the City Archives.”
He grimaced. “That’ll be a trick and a half. They keep it under close watch round the clock.”
“If anyone can smuggle me in and out of there,” I assured him, “it’ll be you, Mr. Hedgeworth.”
He nodded toward my bucks. “Ye’ll need to change out of that getup and put on me spare waders.” He went to a rack of dried garments and selected a small workman’s shirt, trousers, and skullcap. “These first. I’ll collect the waders. Use the basin to wash that muck from yer face; they’ll never believe I’ve taken on a native ’prentice.”
He left me there to change and returned just as I was scrubbing the bronzen off my face. After helping me step in and fasten the waders, he smeared his dirty hands over my cheeks, chin, and brow, and handed me a heavy tool pouch. He then shouldered two air tanks onto his bent back.