It was something worse than torture, something that went beyond the desire to disfigure and cause pain. Crope was not good with notions, and he'd had to puzzle the evil for a long time before he realized its purpose: the creation of absolute dependency.
Baralis could not have lived without the aid of his persecutor. He had been stripped of the ability to fend for himself. Everything required for survival—food, water, warmth and clothing—had to be brought to him by another. Unable to draw a cool glass of water to his lips or move to ease the pain of the pressure sores, Baralis had been forced to wait in the darkness until his persecutor brought relief. Crope had lived in the sulfurous darkness of the tin mines. He'd been locked up in root cellars, back rooms and cages. He knew what it was to be frightened and alone. What he didn't know was what it felt like to be helpless. He was a giant man, and when chains needed breaking all he had to do was take them in his fists and pull.
His lord could not have pulled; that was the thought that undid Crope.
Feeling the bad pressure building behind his eyes, he took a step away from his lord to calm himself. The giant's blood in him pumped hard when he got angry and he had to be careful to keep his chest from getting tight. One of the last times he'd given in to the giant's blood he'd brought down a tavern in a fortified town north of Hound's Mire. Bringing down buildings wasn't good.
The smell of hot grease distracted him. The girls downstairs were preparing supper: hare fried in duck fat, if he wasn't mistaken. The girls had set up a little stove in the hallway and cooked whatever Quill or their customers brought to the house. Crope's mouth began to water at the thought of crispy hare skin, which was mostly a good thing. Feeling hungry was better than feeling mad.
As he washed his lord's wounds, Crope noticed the sunlight begin to fail. The strange, circular marks on Baralis' thighs and buttocks didn't bother him so much now. Crope had imagined his lord being branded with hot irons and that made him mad, but Quill had said no, that wasn't the case. According to him, Baralis had lain on his chains for so long that iron had leached through his skin and laid down pigment like a tattoo. Crope thought that Quill was about the smartest man he knew—excepting for his lord, of course.
A knock on the door made Crope freeze. What was he to do? Answer it? Ignore it? Hike out the window and escape? Quill had warned him many times of the need to keep a low profile. "Keep you head down, your door locked, and your mouth shut You're in the worst kind of trouble: you good as killed a king" Crope had no argument with that. "Worst kind of trouble" could have been his middle name. Frowning at the little circular window set at shoulder height in the west wall, Crope decided escape wasn't going to be quick. Grease would be needed. Bulk of this magnitude didn't go through openings of that… similitude without a considerable amount of help. "It's me. Grant me ingress."
Quill. Stupid, scuttle-brained fool. Should have known it was him all along. Crope nodded softly, relieved. The bad voice was usually right. "A moment," he called out. Bending deep at the waist, he attended his lord.
Baralis was in the half-world between sleep and waking. Blood of poppy pumped through his arteries, slowing the workings of his heart and liver, and clouding his brain. The terrors had been bad last night and Crope had been frightened that his lord might injure himself. Baralis had writhed on the bed, arching his spine and clawing at the shadows in front of his face. No, he had cried again and again. No.
The blood of poppy had stilled him, but now, half a day later, he was beginning to stir. Crope knew his lord. He could tell from a few tiny movements—the flick of an eyelid, the contraction of muscle below the jaw—that Baralis was becoming aware.
Swiftly, Crope tucked pillows beneath his lord's head and straightened the sheets. With the little whalebone comb he had carried with him all the way from the diamond pipe, he groomed Baralis' night-black hair. There was no time to banish the sour smell of urine so Crope scooped a packet of dried mint from the table and crushed it hard in his fist. On his way to the door he scattered the pieces randomly about the room. It didn't disguise the sourness exactly, he decided, reaching for the door bolt. Just made it smell as if someone had drunk a bucket of mint tea before pissing.
It would have to do. One quick glance back assured Crope that his lord was now in possession of his dignity, and he was free to pull back the bolts.
"Took your time," Quill said, stepping through the doorway, his gaze shooting into all the dark spaces. "Sleeping is he?" Crope nodded, thought, then shook his head. Quill appeared to understand this and jabbed his chin in response. Medium height and lean as back bacon, he shrank to almost nothing when viewed from the side. His hair was dark and greased close to his skull and his eyes were an uncertain color that Crope could only describe as "murky." As befitted a thief, Quill's clothes were unremarkable in fit and color, offering no information worth repeating to a bailiff. Brown. Gray. Worn. It was his custom however to wear "a spot of cream." Cream was gold that was nine-tenths pure, Crope had learned, and it advertised Quill's status to others like him. Today he wore a heavy-gauge chain circling his left wrist at the cuff mark. You could see it only when he extended his arm in a certain manner … which was exactly as he planned.
Sliding himself against the far wall, Quill said, "Close the door. There's business to discuss."
Crope did Quill's bidding, hoping Quill wouldn't study the room too carefully while his back was turned. The rough plank walls had sponged up years of damp, and holes of varying sizes told of longstanding infestations: woodworm, termites, mice. A rug woven from bulrushes had partially unraveled on the floor, and overhead in the roof beams fiddlehead spiders had crocheted a killing field for flies.
Crope tried to keep the room clean, but no matter how much he swept and scrubbed the shabbiness remained.
"Watch'll be coming door-to-door tonight," Quill said, flicking his gaze away from the figure on the bed as Crope turned to face him. "A carter hauling tallow up Lime Hill swears he saw a giant as tall as two men heading east towards Rat's Nest at dawn."
Crope felt his face grow hot. He had been out last night, walking in the chill air and watching the stars fade as the sun rose from behind the big mountain. He knew it was a risk, being out at dawn, but seventeen years interred in the darkness of tin mines and diamond pipes changed a man, and there was no one alive who could keep him away from the light.
Quill studied the color in Crope's face before nodding shrewdly with understanding. Perhaps he'd been locked up too. "Here's what we know. The watch has had their drawers in a dither ever since the night the tower fell. They don't look good. The Splinter comes crashing down, destroys half the fortress, wakes up every doomed and deluded soul in the city, and covers every rooftop, walltop and tabletop with a layer of dust as thick as me thumb. Eighteen days later and they're still pulling bodies from the wreckage. And to make matters worse they haven't found the Surlord." Quill paused to give Crope a speculative look. "All things considered it's a fuckup of historic proportions. Half the city's scared arseless and the other half's busy as bees trying to fleece them. We've got grangelords running wild with their hideclads, Rullion's whitenecks igniting one unholy fire under the faithful, and Mask Fortress under siege.
"Blunders left and right. Bollickings for all. The watch needs to be seen doing something. And that something, my friend, is finding you." Crope looked at his feet "Not as tall as two men," he said. Except for blinking a few times, Quill ignored this. "Rumors are running like cheap ale. The mountain moved, ancient evils awoken, the Surlord's in hiding, the Surlord's dead. Only one man alive knows the truth of what happened—and I'm looking straight at him and it ain't a reassuring sight."