The bell rang with the same tired certainty.
Eryk woke before the second strike, eyes open in the dark, waiting for the sound to finish what it started. Around him, straw whispered as boys rose. No one spoke. No one lingered. If you were slow, you were noticed, and being noticed was a kind of debt.
He sat up and flexed his hands.
The rope loops were gone now, cut away yesterday and replaced by work, but the grooves remained. Raw lines across the wrists, scabbed and split. When he rolled his sleeves down, the cloth caught on the rough edges and tugged.
He did not wince out loud.
Outside, morning pressed damp and gray against the yard walls. Smoke from the kitchen slid along the stone like low fog. Hala was already there. She looked as if she had never slept, as if sleep was something boys did and women endured.
She pointed at Eryk with her ladle.
"You. With Bran. Upper yard."
Bran appeared from the shed doorway, arms folded, expression unreadable. He jerked his head once. Eryk followed.
They climbed.
The steps were worn smooth from use, the center dipped where feet had repeated the same path for years. The air changed as they rose, colder and cleaner, with a sharp stone smell that reminded Eryk of riverbeds and grave markers.
At the top, the quarry's mouth waited.
It was not a hole in the ground. It was a bite taken out of the hill. A wide cut, stepped down into shadow, with chains and hooks and pulley arms that creaked softly even when they were still. The sound of hammers did not stop. It never fully started either. It was simply there, like breathing.
Bran kept Eryk to the side, away from the edge.
"You keep your feet," Bran said without looking at him. "If you slip, no one reaches."
Eryk swallowed. "Why am I here?"
Bran's mouth tightened. "Because the pit needs hands."
They passed a shed with doors banded in iron. Men moved around it, carrying sacks of lime. The lime dust clung to their boots and hems in pale ghosts.
The pit was below.
Not the quarry. Something separate.
Eryk felt it before he saw it. A smell that did not belong to stone or smoke or grease. A wet rot, sweet and thick, like meat left too long in sun.
He fought the urge to breathe through his mouth. The taste still found him.
Bran stopped beside a low wall.
Beyond it was a narrow trench that ran along the yard's far side, deeper than a ditch, lined with rough boards. It was half covered by planks, the kind laid down quickly and never fixed properly. Flies were not active in the cold, but the place still felt alive with them.
A man stood by the trench with a list in his hand.
He was not the steward. He was not a guard, either. No spear, no uniform. Just a thick coat and ink-stained fingers, like he had been borrowed from the desk and sent to do something dirty.
He glanced at Bran. "Yard boy?"
Bran nodded. "Bran."
The man's eyes moved to Eryk. "Name."
"Eryk."
"From where?"
Eryk hesitated.
Bran answered for him. "Hollowford."
The man wrote it down as if villages were just another kind of number.
He tapped the list with the end of his quill. "You carry slop down. You don't stop. You don't look under the planks. You don't talk to the ones down there unless spoken to first."
Eryk's stomach tightened. "The ones down there?"
The man's gaze sharpened slightly, not with cruelty, but with the mild irritation of someone being asked the wrong kind of question.
"The pit," he said, as if that explained everything. Then, softer, like advice given to a dull tool, "If you want to last, boy, you do your job and you forget what you smelled."
Bran took a bucket from the stack beside the trench. It was heavy before anything went in it. The iron handle cut into Eryk's palm as soon as he gripped the other side.
"Walk," Bran said.
They went down a narrow side path that led into the lower yard again, and then deeper, into a lane that hugged the base of the wall. It felt like walking along the spine of something large and sleeping.
Two men pushed open a half door at the end.
The pit opened below it.
Not a wide space, not a room. A narrow, steep stair cut into stone, wet underfoot, leading to a shadowed hollow. The air down there was warmer, stale, heavy with damp and rot.
Eryk's eyes adjusted slowly.
Shapes moved in the darkness.
Men, boys, maybe. It was hard to tell in the low light. Everyone looked the same down there: hunched, dirty, moving with the careful slowness of people who had learned that sudden motion drew attention.
A chain hung from the ceiling, thick links slick with moisture. At its end was a hook. The hook swayed gently, even though no one touched it, as if the pit was breathing.
A voice called up from the dark. "Slop."
Bran lowered the bucket down to a man waiting at the bottom step. The man took it without looking up.
His face was gray. Not pale. Gray, like ash ground into skin.
He turned away with the bucket and vanished into the deeper dark.
Eryk stared after him before he could stop himself.
Bran's hand landed on his shoulder.
Not rough. Not kind. Just precise.
"You don't stare," Bran said quietly.
"I didn't mean to."
"You meant to," Bran replied. "You just didn't know it."
The bucket returned empty.
Bran handed it to Eryk.
"Your turn."
Eryk lowered it down, arms shaking. The weight pulled at his shoulders, and the handle bit hard into the tender skin of his palm.
A smaller figure reached for it.
A boy.
Thin as wire. Hair cut too close. Cheeks hollow. One eye bruised dark enough to look like rot.
Jory.
Eryk froze.
Jory looked up at him, and for a breath the pit stopped being a smell and a shadow. It became a face he knew.
Jory's mouth moved, but no sound came out. His lips were cracked. His tongue flashed briefly, dry.
Eryk's hands tightened on the handle. "Jory."
Bran's fingers squeezed Eryk's shoulder once, warning pressed into bone.
Jory took the bucket and turned away.
His ankle caught on the edge of the step. He stumbled.
The bucket tipped.
A wave of thin stew and scraps splashed over the stone, running down into the cracks.
A sound came from deeper in the pit, sharp and angry.
"Careless," someone snapped. "Careless and stupid."
Jory flinched like he had been struck.
He dropped to his knees at once and began scraping the spill back with his hands, scooping soup and grit together into a miserable paste. He worked fast, desperate.
Eryk watched, throat tight.
Bran held him in place by the shoulder.
"It's not your job," Bran murmured.
Eryk's voice came out hoarse. "He'll get beaten."
Bran's eyes stayed forward. "He'll get beaten anyway."
Jory scraped faster. His fingers were red and raw. He pushed the dirty slop into the bucket, tears cutting clean tracks down his cheeks.
A man stepped into the dim light.
Broad shoulders. Scarred hands. A belt with a short club hanging from it.
Not a guard. Not quite. Something between.
He looked at the spill and then at Jory.
Jory froze, hands hovering over the mess.
The man's gaze flicked up the stairs, stopped on Bran, and then settled on Eryk like a weight.
"New one?" the man asked.
Bran nodded once. "Just carrying."
The man grunted and looked back at Jory.
"Faster," he said.
Jory moved again, frantic.
The man's boot hovered above Jory's hand for a moment, then came down beside it instead, hard enough to make the stone jump.
Jory jerked back and made a small, broken sound in his throat.
The man leaned in. "You spill again, rat, and you eat it off the stone."
He straightened and walked away into the deeper shadow.
Eryk stood frozen, heart pounding.
Bran did not release his shoulder until Jory had turned away with the bucket, limping slightly now.
When the bucket came back empty, Eryk took it with hands that felt too stiff, too slow.
They did three more runs.
Each time, the smell dug deeper into his throat.
Each time, the shapes below moved like they were trying not to be people.
On the fourth run, the hook above swayed again, and Eryk's attention snagged on it without his consent. The iron looked different down here. Darker. Heavier. Alive with damp.
Heat stirred under his ribs, faint and unpleasant, like an itch beneath bone.
The stone-deep thrum.
It came softly, not enough to shake the world. Just enough to make his teeth feel too tight in his mouth.
The hook twitched.
Barely.
Eryk's breath caught.
He had not moved.
Bran's hand tightened on his shoulder again, immediate.
"You feel it too?" Bran asked, so low it was almost nothing.
Eryk looked at him sharply.
Bran's face was still blank, but his eyes were not. They were focused, narrowed in the way they got when a door didn't sit right on its hinges.
"Don't," Bran said.
Eryk swallowed. "What is it?"
Bran's jaw worked once. "Trouble. That's all you need to know."
The hook stilled.
The faint heat under Eryk's ribs faded, leaving a hollow ache behind.
They finished the runs and climbed back into daylight.
The cold air hit Eryk like a slap. He drew it in greedily even though it burned his lungs. Up here, the sky looked pale and far away, and the walls felt a little less close.
Bran led him along the upper yard wall toward the sheds again.
They passed the board.
Eryk tried not to look.
He looked anyway.
Jory's name was still there.
Jory, pit.
Beside it, in smaller writing, a new mark had been added. Not a word Eryk understood. Just a short notation, like a scratch in the margin.
He turned away quickly.
Bran did not slow. "You learn fast," he said.
Eryk's voice came out flat. "I learned I should not care."
Bran's eyes flicked toward him. For a breath, something like anger lived there, sharp and embarrassed.
"You can care," Bran said. "Just don't do it where people can use it."
In the lower yard, Hala was waiting.
"You smell like death," she said the moment she saw him. "Wash before you touch my bowls."
Eryk went to the trough and scrubbed his hands until his skin burned, until the smell became faint enough to pretend it was gone.
It stayed anyway.
At supper, the stew was thinner than yesterday. The line moved quietly. Boys ate fast, eyes down, shoulders hunched.
Jory did not appear.
Eryk waited, watching the steps, telling himself not to.
He counted bowls. He counted breaths. He counted the places where Jory should have been.
Bran ate beside him and did not speak.
When the yard finally emptied toward sleep, Eryk lay on his pallet and stared up into the dark rafters.
The smell of the pit lingered in his nose no matter how he breathed.
The hook's twitch replayed in his mind with ugly clarity, the small obedient movement of iron.
He pressed a hand to his ribs and felt only bone, only breath.
But under that, deep and quiet, something waited.
Not a gift.
Not a blessing.
A lever.
And Blackstone was built from things that moved when pulled.