Page 88 of The Only Way Out Is Up

She nods. “An official from the Ascent is coming over to register Star. We’ll meet him in the workshop. Everything fit all right?”

I tap one foot. “Shoes are a little tight.”

Ky glances at one of the maids, who scurries away. New shoes appear, as though from some bottomless stockpile of footwear, and I pronounce them acceptable. Ky, still grinning, takes me by the arm and leads me on a convoluted path through this maze of a house.

“You’ll like this,” she says. “We don’t keep a staff sigworker anymore, but we have all the tools you could possibly want. My grandfather was a big sponsor of fighting runics, and my father kept it all up even though he wasn’t much interested.”

“Can I ask a question?”

Ky looks back at me, slowing a little. “Hmm?”

“Where does all this come from?”

She frowns, following my vague gesture. “The lamps?”

“All of it. The sigwork, the clothes, everything.” I look down at myself. “Maybe some of this is made here on Hod, but…”

It’s been bothering me since I noticed the construct in the bath. I just can’t imagine someone up here carefully hammering out gold-filigree hot water taps, complete with orange sigils. More importantly, I know the fighting runics here are made from parts with sigils already integrated, but who makes the parts?

Ky slows to a halt, looking thoughtful.

“Some of it is made on Hod,” she says. “The clothes especially. But mostly it comes from Above.”

“From Above? You get your fabric and pretty vases and… and toilets from Above?”

She nods. “A lot more than that. Food, too, except for a few fruits and vegetables we grow here. All the mash you eat in the undercity ultimately comes down from Above.”

“I thought nobody from Above ever came down except for the tournament judges.”

“They don’t. It’s all automatic.” She waves a hand. “On the other side of Hod there’s a processing facility. Big… things, like runic wagons three stories high. They come down loaded with stuff for us.”

I shake my head, trying to process this revelation. “Why?”

“What do you mean, why? Because we need it. Without food we’d all starve.”

“But why does Above do it? Charity?” There’s a terrifying thought. What if they wake up one day and feel suddenly less generous?

“Oh!” Ky raises her eyebrows. “Sorry, I forget that you don’t know anything. We send them stuff back. Sigils and scrap. It’s a sort of trade.”

“You send them sigils?”

“From the workhouses.” She pauses, uncomfortable, perhaps recalling our previous conversation on the subject. “Each of the Hod families owns some of the sigil production and scrap processing operations on Yesod and Malkuth. All the product goes Above, and we get a corresponding share of what comes down. We sell that on and use the proceeds to buy the scrap and pay the sigworkers. Round and round, right?”

It has the air of something she learned in childhood, something she’s never questioned. “Your family does this, too?”

“Of course. The twelve families with the largest holdings make up the Council.” Ky looks at me closer. “Taj? What’s wrong?”

“I just…” I swallow. “I never thought about how the whole thing worked. Down in the Heap looking up, it’s not so easy to see.”

She gives a sympathetic nod. “I know it’s a lot to take in.”

“What does Above even want with our sigils and scrap?” It’s hard to imagine the authors of all this luxury around us having any use for the pathetic red sigils scratched into clay by Heapers burning their lives out, or the piles of tangled steel and wire assembled by the scavengers.

Ky gives another shrug. “Nobody knows, unless the Council members get told when they go up to the surface. You can try asking the judge when he arrives, but I doubt he’ll say anything.” She takes my arm again. “Now come on, the Ascent people will be here any minute.”

I allow myself to be dragged onward.

The workshop is everything Ky promised and more, enough to make my mouth water at the sight of it. There are four stalls big enough for a large runic, each with sigwork cranes for lowering heavy parts into place. More tools, a few familiar to me but most utterly beyond my experience, are neatly laid out on racks nearby. Bins of common parts line one wall, the kind of things I might have saved up for weeks to buy.