Chapter 5: Below Three

Joris looked at my party for a long time.

He was looking at an old porter, a girl with a slapped face and a boy with a bandaged head.

Then he looked at the healer with no cord.

"I'll come down," he said. "I'll watch. I won't fight your fights for you."

"Good," I said. "I don't want you to."

The fifth floor of the Deep smelled of wet stone and old blood.

Daan walked in front with his lance, because I had finally run out of reasons to stop him.

I walked beside him with the lamp in my right hand and my grey hand bare.

The girl walked behind me, talking under her breath about nothing at all, and the old porter walked behind her.

Joris came last.

A Gold walking at the back of an Iron party was something nobody in the guild had ever seen.

We found the floor-five healer in a crack in the wall, in the dark, two hours from the stair.

He had wedged himself in sideways.

His coat was in rags and he was covered in bites, half of them closed and pink, half of them still open.

He had been mending himself for two days.

"You're late," he croaked. "I ordered breakfast."

Then he laughed, and it sounded like a pan dropped on a kitchen floor.

"Can you walk?" I asked.

"If somebody pulls."

Daan and the porter pulled him out of the crack, and he screamed only once.

I put my right hand on the worst of the bites and closed it.

"Why only the one hand?" Joris asked from the dark.

"The grey one forgot how," I said.

He said nothing to that.

Then we heard them coming.

It was a pack, the kind that hunts the fifth floor, pale and low and quick, each one the size of a big dog.