The ragmen pick their way over the course of many days, going back and forth, bearing engine parts like holy relics through a menagerie of absurd stone. They are not frightened by the awful maws of open charnel houses or the low piles nesting just inside. They are familiar with death and blend in, even here, where stacks of crumbling tombs fill the sky with colors like rust and urine streaking bone.
The ragmen drift north toward the crest of the cemetery, wading through patchy ugly weeds that flourish like pubic hair. The crypts around them fairly rocket skyward, visible above the walls of the Hold as enormous charred leg bones overspread with renegade tuberosities, held together purely by virtue of their weight.
The ragmen ignore them.
A low crouched tomb of blebby moldy-white, cracked and peeling and filthy in its mortarless crannies draws them like a magnet.
They come at odd hours, make counterfeit gestures of reverence or grief. A ludicrous display. No tomb so old has such devoted visitors let alone ones capable of remembering the deceased.
The ragmen place their flowers then shove bags into the open hole, ripped open by grave robbers long ago.
Deep inside the black corruption of the body niche, a shaft opens and drops straight down through the hillside. A rope and pulley installed in the middle of the night allows for bundles to be lowered through the shaft. The ragmen come and go from the tomb, passing engine parts to cohorts deep below.
Then, just as silently, they leave Barrow Hill, avoiding the trendy cafés and chocolate houses along King’s Road where people sing late into the night, bohemian music bubbling and tinkling from saxophones and plucked or hammered strings. The ragmen hear the gaiety and shrink from it, fading away from crowds of people whose hair glows obscene colors under paper lanterns and colorful bulbs: purple, orange and incandescent pink.
Back through North Fell, through South Fell, plotting a course through the tangled shadows of Hullmallow Cathedral into Maruchine, the ragmen return home. They dissolve like fog into the arched mélange of Ghoul Court.
By the twentieth of Lüme, the Cabal of Wights has rebuilt the engine and swapped new parts for the drive assembly the city watch laid to rest. They are ready.
There are good reasons for the elaborate plan. The sewers of Isca Castle are detached from the sewers of Isca City except for very slender culverts barely large enough to admit rats. One main line extends east out of the castle grounds, burrowing under Incense Street and the military yards of Ironside.
Countless grates and guard posts secure it, make the High King’s toilets virtually impregnable.
But when the foundations of the city were first laid, Isca Castle was planned on what is now Barrow Hill and a gigantic septic pit was dug and later covered over when the surveyors changed their minds.
The empty tank remains far below the graveyard. A drain field additionally helps to suck excessive water away—preventing the kinds of grisly landslides that occasionally plague Marbolia, the cemetery of the rich.
A lateral tunnel from the Barrow Hill septic tank runs north, pouring into what would have been the Barrow Hill castle’s main line to the sea. When the site was abandoned, this second vault was sealed off except to the east where water collects under the graves, sluiced down through narrow pipes into the labyrinthine channels under Temple Hill.
Thus there are two sewer systems sequestered and forsaken from the rest of Isca’s gurgling conduits. They are entangled and fight for space like two tarantulas below the hills but at no place do they ever intersect or intersect the rest of the city sewers.
A thieves guild once toyed with the idea of a base of operations in the Barrow Hill tunnels. But they are so inaccessible and so prone to sudden flooding that the guild reconsidered and settled Thief Town instead.
The powers in Ghoul Court rediscover them and fathom a use.
A tall gaunt man oversees operations in the dark. He has pink eyes like Mr. Naylor. On the morning of the twenty-fourth, long before the Byun-Ghala is set to leave Isca Castle for the spindle in Murkbell, the engine sparks to life.
A maul, head covered every inch with teeth, begins chewing methodically at the north end of the tunnel, pumping up and down. It rips chunks of rock away and kicks up heavy dust.
The gaunt man seems capable of ignoring the choking haze. His associates, who are crawlers—more like Fenwick Bengello—are forced to retreat up