Chapter 91: Those who live below the shambles
The Blue Moon sent an answer four days later.
Crescent gave it to him in the cellar without any preamble.
"There are sixty-three of them."
Encrid stopped with his hand on the back of the chair, wondering what she was talking about.
"Sixty-three what?"
"People."
She laid two sheets on the table.
"Thirty-six children under fourteen. Nineteen adults who cannot work-either old, crippled, or something worse. And eight women with infants."
Encrid was still not sure why Crescent was telling him any of this.
"All of them live under the Shambles. In the old works between the inner face and the backs of the buildings. There are three separate rooms, and all sixty-one of them are crowded into those three rooms."
Encrid sat down.
"None of them are on any roster," Crescent continued. "So the Wall provides them no rations. The law says every man is a resource. Anyone who is not yet one, or has stopped being one, is nothing at all."
She turned the second sheet around.
"Now here is the reason I am telling you this."
She tapped the page.
"Your man. He has been feeding them for six years. Since he was sixteen."
Encrid looked up.
"The group started with four, and now it is sixty-one."
She handed him the sheets.
"Because word gets around quickly among the bottom of the barrels. And your man has never turned anybody away."
Crescent paused.
"I would have you consider that a fact about his character."
Encrid said nothing.
He stared at the figures, trying to understand what they had to do with Rael refusing the commanders.
After a long moment, he finally looked up.
"How is that connected to his refusals? Wouldn’t getting paid and having a proper position make things easier for him?"
"That is the whole point."
She tapped the page again.
"A soldier on this Wall gets quarters, a ration, and eleven silver a month. That ration feeds one man. It does not feed one man and sixty-three people."
"Surely a commander’s position would pay him more."
"Not enough, apparently. And he would rather go into the Great Green, hunt Roamers, and sell their cores."
Crescent tapped the figures.
"A Level Two Roamer core is worth a hundred silver. A Level Three can buy nine months of bread for sixty-one people."
Encrid stared at the page.
"He makes more by risking his life."
"Yes."
"So he had no reason to accept the commander’s offer."
"Especially not when the offer came with strings."
Encrid’s eyes narrowed.
"What strings?"
Crescent leaned back.
"The moment Rael explained himself to anyone, those sixty-one people became real."
She let the words sit.
"And once they became real, the Wall would have to decide what to do about them. A group of sixty-one people living under the Shambles, being fed outside the roster, protected by a soldier who was selling Roamer cores to keep them alive..."
She shook her head.
"No matter how charitable the truth was, it would sound very different to people in power."
Encrid looked down at the sheets without really seeing them.
So that was what Rael had been protecting.
Not himself.
But them.
He remembered Rael standing half-turned in the doorway that first time. His eyes had lingered on the leftover bread and meat.
Encrid had told him to take the rest.
Rael had.
Encrid had thought the man was hungry.
He had been very wrong.
✧ ✧ ✧
The next day, Encrid took Gus with him, for a reason he did not explain.
They went down at dusk, through a broken arch behind the third bathhouse that Crescent’s man had marked for them.
The passage ran beneath the Shambles for two hundred paces before opening out.
The first thing Encrid noticed was that the old works were not ruins.
Someone had swept the floor.
A line of stones had been set along one wall where water seeped through, arranged so that it ran into a shallow channel and out again.
There were three braziers, spaced properly.
Above each one, someone had hung a scrap of tin to spread the heat.
That was not something a child worked out on their own.
The children were eating when they entered.
About thirty of them sat in a rough circle rather than a queue. The food passed from hand to hand under the direction of a girl of perhaps thirteen, a lamplighter’s striker hanging from a cord around her neck.
She saw Encrid’s coat before she saw his face.
The moment she did, the whole room changed.
They did not panic.
That was what struck Encrid most.
All thirty children simply stood.
They went quiet.
Then, without a word, they moved into a formation Encrid recognised at once as a drill.
The smallest went behind.
The older ones spread across the front.
The girl with the striker walked forward and stood between the coat and all of them.
They had practiced this a lot it seems.
And Encrid had a vague idea about who might have taught them.
"Who are you?" the girl asked.
Her voice was steady, though about half an octave too high.
Only after asking did she properly notice Encrid and the moment she did - her expression changed.
She looked at his clothing-the neat coat, the warm boots, everything about him that marked him as someone who belonged to the Wall’s inner side.
She made a quick decision to be courteous.
"There is nothing here that would be of your interest, my lord."
Encrid looked at her.
Then at the thirty children behind her.
Then at the swept floor.
The tin above the braziers.
The water channel running along the wall.
He said nothing.
He stood there for perhaps a minute.
Then he inclined his head to her properly.
The same way a man greeted somebody he had business with.
Then he turned and walked back through the arch.
Gus followed.
They went up through the Shambles in the dark, past the cookshops and the bathhouse and all the noise.
They were nearly at the granary before Gus spoke.
When he did, his voice was not quite right.
"Young Master."
"Yes."
"When I was locked up as a slave, there was a woman who came past on the road twice a week with a cart."
Encrid stopped and looked at Gus.
It was the first time Gus had ever spoken about the time he had been a slave.
For some reason, Encrid felt the need to hear him properly.
Gus kept his eyes ahead.
"She used to look at us."
He swallowed.
"Not at anything in particular. Just at us."
He paused.
"Then she went on past."
"Gus..."
"I used to hate her more than I hated the men who owned us."
His voice tightened.
"I never understood why."
Another pause.
"I think I understand it now."
They walked the rest of the way without speaking.
✦ ✦ ✦