Down the Chute

The thing about mopping is that it requires exactly enough concentration to prevent you from doing anything useful, but not enough to prevent you from thinking. And when I think, I think about books.

I'd been halfway through a rather good one before the Ironarm Incident — a human treatise on natural philosophy that I'd traded for with a surface merchant. It was called On the Motion of Bodies Celestial and Otherwise, and it had chapters on gravity, optics, and something called "thermodynamics" which I was fairly sure was just a fancy word for "things get hot." I'd left it under my bunk with the spine cracked open to page two hundred and fourteen, and the thought of it sitting there — unfinished, patient, waiting — was slowly driving me mad.

I leaned on my mop and stared at the ceiling murals. Ancient dwarves carved in stone, doing ancient things. One of them appeared to be wrestling a serpent. Another was holding what looked like a very large sandwich. Hard to tell with centuries of soot.

If I squinted, I could almost pretend the mop was a book. A very wet, very smelly book with no pages and terrible prose.

I was contemplating this — and I want to be clear, I was standing perfectly still, not doing anything reckless, because the reckless part happened entirely without my consent — when I shifted my weight against what I believed to be a wall.

It was not a wall.

It was a hatch.

Specifically, it was the rusted iron cover of an old refuse chute, set into the stone at the far edge of the Crossing where the lantern light didn't quite reach. The kind of thing you'd walk past a thousand times without noticing, because it looked like every other patch of dark iron in a fortress made entirely of dark iron. The rust had welded it nearly shut. The word "REFUSE" was stamped into it in old Dwarvish script, barely legible under decades of grime.

Nearly shut, it turned out, is not the same as shut.

The hatch groaned. I felt it give beneath my shoulder. I had approximately half a second to think that's not a wall before the entire panel swung inward and I was falling.

The mop came with me. I don't know why I held onto it. Instinct, maybe. Or the vague hope that it might function as a brake, or a weapon, or at the very least a conversational excuse when someone found my body. He died as he lived — holding a mop and making poor decisions.

The chute was steep. Steep in the way that "vertical" is steep. I slid, bounced, and ricocheted off ancient stonework that had clearly not seen maintenance since the Third Age. Dust exploded around me. Something that might have been a cobweb — or might have been a very old piece of someone's lunch — slapped me across the face. I made a noise that I am not going to describe, because this is my story and I have editorial authority.

Down.

Down.

Down.

The chute twisted. It narrowed. It widened again. At one point I was fairly sure I went briefly upward, which shouldn't be possible in a garbage chute but the architects of the Rumbling Deeps have always had a flexible relationship with geometry.

Then, with the abruptness of a sentence that ends mid

I stopped.

Or rather, I didn't stop so much as I was stopped — by something that shattered beneath me with a tremendous crash of wood, glass, and what sounded like a thousand tiny bells. I lay in a heap of debris, covered in dust, one hand still gripping the mop, the other gripping what appeared to be a piece of a very old table.

I coughed. Dust billowed. Somewhere in the darkness, something was still tinkling — little bell-like sounds, fading slowly, as if the room itself was recovering from the shock of my arrival.

I sat up, spat out something that tasted like ancient parchment, and looked around.

And what I saw made no sense at all.