“I’ll do it,” Locke said.
“Good. That means you can stay for dinner. Let’s get down off this roof.”
2
BEHIND THE curtained door at the rear of the sanctuary there was a grimy hall leading to several grimy rooms; moisture and mold and poverty were on abundant display. There were cells with sleeping pallets, lit by oiled-paper lamps that gave off a light the color of cheap ale. Scrolls and bound books were scattered on the pallets; robes in questionable states of cleanliness hung from wall hooks.
“This is a necessary nonsense.” Chains gestured to and fro as he led Locke into the room closest to the curtained door, as though showing off a palace. “Occasionally, we play host to a tutor or a traveling priest of Perelandro’s order, and they have to see what they expect.”
Chains’ own sleeping pallet (for Locke saw that the wall-manacles in the other room could surely reach none of the other sleeping chambers back here) was set atop a block of solid stone, a sort of heavy shelf jutting from the wall. Chains reached under the stale blankets, turned something that made a metallic clacking noise, and lifted his bed up as though it were a coffin lid; the blankets turned out to be on some sort of wooden panel with hinges set into the stone. An inviting golden light spilled from within the stone block, along with the spicy smells of high-class Camorri cooking. Locke knew that aroma only from the way it drifted out of the Alcegrante district or down from certain inns and houses.
“In you go!” Chains gestured once again, and Locke peeked over the lip of the stone block. A sturdy wooden ladder led down a square shaft just slightly wider than Chains’ shoulders; it ended about twenty feet below, on a polished wood floor. “Don’t gawk, climb!”
Locke obeyed. The rungs of the ladder were wide and rough and very narrowly spaced; he had no trouble moving down it, and when he stepped off he was in a tall passage that might have been torn out of the duke’s own tower. The floor was indeed polished wood, long straight golden-brown boards that creaked pleasantly beneath his feet. The arched ceiling and the walls were entirely covered with a thick milky golden glass that shone faintly, like a rainy-season sun peeking out from behind heavy clouds. The illumination came from everywhere and nowhere; the wall scintillated. With a series of thumps and grunts and jingles (for Locke saw that he now carried the day’s donated coins in a small burlap sack) Chains came down and hopped to the floor beside him. He gave a quick tug to a rope tied to the ladder, and the false bed-pallet fell back down and locked itself above.
“There. Isn’t this much nicer?”
“Yeah.” Locke ran one hand down the flawless surface of one of the walls. The glass was noticeably cooler than the air. “It’s Elderglass, isn’t it?”
“Sure as hell isn’t plaster.” Chains shooed Locke along the passage to the left, where it turned a corner. “The whole temple cellar is surrounded by the stuff. Sealed in it. The temple above was actually built to settle into it, hundreds of years ago. There’s not a break in it, as far as I can tell, except for one or two little tunnels that lead out to other interesting places. It’s flood-tight, and never lets in a drop from below even when the water’s waist-deep in the streets. And it keeps out rats and roaches and suckle-spiders and all that crap, so long as we mind our comings and goings.”
The clatter of metal pans and the low giggle of the Sanza brothers reached them from around the corner just before they turned it, entering into a comfortably appointed kitchen with tall wooden cabinets and a long witchwood table, surrounded by high-backed chairs. Locke actually rubbed his eyes when he saw their black velvet cushions, and the varnished gold leaf that gilded their every surface.
Calo and Galdo were working at a brick cooking shelf, shuffling pans and banging knives over a huge white alchemical hearthslab. Locke had seen smaller blocks of this stone, which gave off a smokeless heat when water was splashed atop it, but this one must have weighed as much as Father Chains. As Locke watched, Calo (Galdo?) held a pan in the air and poured water from a glass pitcher onto the sizzling slab; the great uprush of steam carried a deep bouquet of sweet cooking smells, and Locke felt saliva spilling down the back of his mouth.
In the air over the witchwood table, a striking chandelier blazed; Locke would, in later years, come to recognize it as an armillary sphere, fashioned from glass with an axis of solid gold. At its heart shone an alchemical globe with the white-bronze light of the sun; surrounding this were the concentric glass rings that marked the orbits and processions of the world and all her celestial cousins, including the three moons; at the outermost edges were a hundred dangling stars that looked like spatters of molten glass somehow frozen at the very instant of their outward explosions. The light ran and glimmered and burned along every facet of the chandelier, yet there was something wrong about it. It was as if the Elderglass ceilings and walls were somehow drawing the light out of the alchemical sun; leavening it, weakening it, redistributing it along the full length and breadth of all the Elderglass in this uncanny cellar.
“Welcome to our real home, our little temple to the Benefactor.” Chains tossed his bag of coins down on the table. “Our patron has always sort of danced upon the notion that austerity and piety go hand in hand; down here, we show our appreciation for things by appreciating, if you get me. Boys! Look who survived his interview!”
“We never doubted,” said one twin.
“For even a second,” said the other.
“But now can we hear what he did to get himself kicked out of Shades’ Hill?” The question, spoken in near-perfect unison, had the ring of repeated ritual.
“When you’re older.” Chains raised his eyebrows at Locke and shook his head, ensuring the boy could see the gesture clearly. “Much older. Locke, I don’t expect that you know how to set a table?”
When Locke shook his head, Chains led him over to a tall cabinet just to the left of the cooking hearth. Inside were stacks of white porcelain plates; Chains held one up so Locke could see the hand-painted heraldic design (a mailed fist clutching an arrow and a grapevine) and the bright gold gilding on the rim.
“Borrowed,” said Chains, “on a rather permanent basis from Doña Isabella Manechezzo, the old dowager aunt of our own Duke Nicovante. She died childless and rarely gave parties, so it wasn’t as though she was using them all. You see how some of our acts that might seem purely cruel and larcenous to outsiders are actually sort of convenient, if you look at them in the right way? That’s the hand of the Benefactor at work, or so we like to think. It’s not as though we could tell the difference if he didn’t want us to.”
Chains handed the plate to Locke (who clutched at it with greatly exaggerated care and peered very closely at the gold rim) and ran his right hand lovingly over the surface of the witchwood table. “Now this, this used to be the property of Marius Cordo, a master merchant of Tal Verrar. He had it in the great cabin of a triple-decker galley. Huge! Eighty-six oars. I was a bit upset with him, so I lifted it, his chairs, his carpets and tapestries, and all of his clothes. Right off the ship. I left his money; I was making a point. I dumped everything but the table into the Sea of Brass.
“And that!” Chains lifted a finger in the direction of the celestial chandelier. “That was being shipped overland from Ashmere in a guarded wagon convoy for the old Don Leviana. Somehow, in transit, it transformed itself into a box of straw.” Chains took three more plates out of the cabinet and set them in Locke’s arms. “Damn, I was fairly good back when I actually worked for a living.”
“Urk,” said Locke, under the weight of the fine dinnerware.