The next morning, Rhoa rose early. Her headache hadn't improved. The idea that the Vanguard had somehow influenced the hum of the tower had only added dull irritation to a sleepless night. Her conversation with the man – what sort of a name was Kryphan, anyway? – had gone racing about in her brain like a frightened bat trapped in a round room. She wasn't looking forward to talking to him again, not if he and that blasted rumbling in the ground were somehow connected.

"Are you waiting for it to move?"

Her mother's voice dragged her abruptly from sleep-deprived stupor, and Rhoa blinked, her eyes focusing on the poached egg in the bowl in front of her. She didn't know how long she had been staring at it. With a sigh, she stabbed the egg with her spoon and began mopping up the gooey orange yolk with a chunk of toast.

The toast didn't make it to her mouth. She fiddled absently with it instead while she studied her mother askance across the table. That question was still there, flitting along the edges of her thoughts. She should ignore it. She really should. But if she didn't ask, it would only keep bothering her.

After a moment, she cleared her throat. "I um... I was just wondering... You've never heard anything about our monster getting loose, have you?"

Her mother glanced up from her supply ledger. "No," she said, lifting her half-spectacles from her nose and tucking them in the top pocket of her apron. "Why?"

Rhoa pressed her lips into a grim line and looked down.

"Ah. I see. He's already started on you. I suppose that's to be expected..." She sat back and closed the ledger, then gave the question more serious thought. "I've never heard of any of the monsters escaping, but that doesn't mean they haven't. Still, I would think there would be some record of it, somewhere. Letters to the other towers, reports from the Council... I haven't come across anything in the archives here or in the Keeper's Vault in Lubelin."

Then she peered closely at Rhoa. "Questions are important. You shouldn't accept what you're told without weighing it first, even if you trust the person telling you." She paused and smiled a little. "Just... Keep in mind, the Vanguard have been around since the Keepers began, and they have been at war with us for centuries. You've never had to worry about them since they were driven out before you were born, but they were still strong in the Seventh District when I was a child. I remember the sieges, the raids... The graves... My father's brother and sister, and his first wife and their infant son, were killed in one of the attacks on Greycliff."

"So," she continued, smiling again as she got to her feet. "This is good. Question your beliefs, by all means. But at the same time, don't get pulled in. The Vanguard hold to creeds that go against everything we value. While our ancestors sought a way to contain the monsters, they sought ways to harness the dark power of the Warmoon for themselves. They claim to be able to wield magic. We must rely on science and reason. Right now, we need to keep our priorities straight and start churning the clay for the tower. Questions can wait."

Rhoa bit her lower lip as her mother bent and placed a kiss on the crown of her head before leaving the kitchen. 

She was right. They needed to start making the saltpeter clay or they wouldn't have enough.

She shot a worried look at the rain pattering against the diamond panes of the kitchen windows. Having enough clay to mud the tower wouldn't do much good if it all washed away while they were working. They would have to put up the shroud if the storm didn't end soon.

°°°°°ººººº°°°°°

After breakfast, Rhoa went down and tended to the prisoner, holding her breath at the smell of him as she fed him gruel, then unlocking the shackle bar and stepping out into the hallway while he relieved himself in the privy bucket. He was clearly in pain from sitting so long, but didn't protest, and didn't try anything. And thankfully, he didn't talk, simply returning to let her shackle him to the wall again, those dark eyes following her every move as she locked him up and left him there.

Then she joined her mother and Tettony in the Churning Room, where they had already started mixing the clay. Tettony stood at the auger, pouring three buckets of dried, powdered river clay into the hopper, followed by one bucket of saltpeter, while her mother cranked the auger handle and sifted the clay and salt together into a barrow.

The clay had to be added, one barrow-full at a time, to the water in the clay pit, while Tettony's eldest daughter led a team of oxen around the churning floor, turning the heavy stirring apparatus inside the pit. Rhoa slipped easily into the rhythm of things, taking the heavy loads of clay up the ramp to the top of the clay pit. It was hard, dusty work that parched the lips and dried the skin, and she was glad when Orla rang the bell for the mid-day meal.

Rhoa had just hung her work smock in the Sifting Room and started washing up when Orla came flying down the steps from the kitchen, a huge smile on her face, her giddy, high-pitched squeal the only clue Rhoa needed. Drying her hands on a clean rag, she went to stand in the lean-to doorway, watching as Radier jumped out of the back of the still-moving wagon and held his arms wide, catching Orla as she slammed into him and began peppering his face with kisses.

"Oy! Be off with you! Bad as cats!" Phane hooted from the driver's seat as he and Lathen kept going, guiding their team of draft horses into the loading bay – horses that were pulling a load riding heavy on its axle and covered in a high-mounded tarp.

They had brought in a catch.

Rhoa let out a short, surprised laugh, a full smile breaking free for the first time in weeks. Maybe things were going to start turning around after all.

°°°°°ººººº°°°°°

The rest of the day passed in a blur of activity.

Phane, Radier, and Lathen unpacked their kit bags, then repacked for the hunt, ate a quick lunch, and set off again, following the route their father had taken, hoping to catch up with the others before nightfall.

The catch turned out to be three immature spraks, each of them about the size of a pony. Small, by sprak standards, but better than nothing.

The boys had backed the wagon into the loading bay, and Rhoa scrabbled up the wooden side of the wagon bed, climbing carefully over the thorny white sprak carapaces until she found the head of the top carcass. Then she shoved the wickedly sharp end of a massive hook through the tough, leathery under-hide where one of the front pincer arms joined the thorax. She did the same on the other side, then reached up above her and grabbed the winch chains, dragging them down till she could attach them to the hooks.

"Alright, heave-to!" she called as she hopped down to the ground again, well clear of the carcass when Tettony released the counter-weights and the dead sprak began rising out of the wagon, its jointed legs and long, barbed tail trailing.

She repeated the process for the second and third bug, and then they teamed up to pull the carcasses down the pulley track and into the Soaking Room. One after the other, the sprak were lowered into the gigantic wooden soaking barrels.

Rhoa opened the spigots above the barrels, and then it was a matter of waiting for them to fill with lye water from the collection tank. The sprak would have to soak for almost a day before the tough outer shells would desolve enough to cut open.

There was more clay to be made after that, and Rhoa took another shift trundling loads of dry mix up the ramp to the top of the pit while Orla led the oxen and her mother ran the auger.

Then there was a quick dinner of cold meat pies and soft Ardusk cheese before Rhoa and her mother lit the great, mirrored lanterns in the Cutting Room, pulled on their full-length oiled leather coats and thick gloves, and hauled the sprak carcasses out of the lye vats and over to the draining screens to begin the arduous task of dissecting them.

The reek of lye stung Rhoa's nose even through the folded linen scarf covering her face, and her eyes watered behind her blown-glass goggles as she found the edge of a tail segment and stabbed her filleting blade through the rubbery joint tissue just beneath it. She ran the blade downward, opening the seam all along the side of the tail from root to tip, grimacing and hissing out a breath through clenched teeth when the spongy white inner muscles began protruding from the sprak's tough outer shell.

"You alright?" her mother asked, her goggled face appearing over the top of the next sprak over.

"Sorry," Rhoa grunted. "That first cut always makes my stomach turn."

Her mother chuckled. There was a juicy crunch as she inserted the spreaders and began cracking the shell of her sprak all the way apart.

Rhoa did the same to hers, and the two of them fell silent in concentration as they carved away the muscle layer, cutting to the thick coppery blue veins and arteries that ran down the center of the tail.

Their target was a long, thick, wax-yellow structure nestled beneath the blood supply. Rhoa deftly cut the veins and lifted them away, dropping them into the offal trough beneath the draining screen.

The yellow venom gland was much trickier. Careful not to nick anything, she severed the duct that ran up into the barbed sting at the end of the tail. Then, ever so gently, working from bottom to top, she began pulling the grape-like venom sacks free of the muscles around them, until the entire gland was free.

Her sprak had stung something. Not all the venom sacks were full, and she sighed when she finally lowered the stringy yellowish mass into the collection jar waiting on the workbench. It was still better than nothing.

An hour later, her mother placed the third collection jar on the workbench and began raising the top plate of the screw-driven extraction press. "Go on with you. I can do the alchemy alone."

Rhoa eased her back for a moment. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. Go on," she said, smiling behind her scarf. "Get some rest."

"I'll send Tettony to help you when I get back in from the wall."

Her mother nodded, and Rhoa trudged across the Cutting Room floor, up the stone steps to the Lye Room, then on through into the Sifting Room, where she traded her long coat and gloves for her father's spare leather armor and helmet and kept going out through the lean-to and into the bailey.

After walking the scheduled patrol along the ramparts and lighting the fires in the watchtowers, Rhoa ducked back inside through the wall access to the south tower stairwell, and went thumping down the stairs to the Great Hall, soggy boots leaving wet prints behind her, armored boot covers clanking against the marble floor as she made her way through the Hall and into the warmth of the empty kitchen.

The only thing left to do was see to the prisoner.

She came to a stop in the kitchen doorway. The basket of cold meat pies she had saved for him was sitting on the table where she had left it, proof that no one had miraculously done her job for her. She stuck her tongue out at it and began unbuckling her father's chestplate and shoulder guards. Then she narrowed her eyes, considering the basket, an idea forming.

It would be an unapproved change in her orders, but her father wasn't the one dealing with the over-ripe, unwashed man-stench rolling off the mudman. Going all the way down to the dungeon just to let him relieve himself was also turning out to be a logistical problem. Besides. How did that saying go? A man can die by the pillow as well as the sword? Or maybe it was the one about wasps coming to honey more often than vinegar. Whichever. She might get more information out of him with kindness.

She chewed her lower lip. It would make him more mobile, using just the ankle chains, but she could make sure the they didn't reach to the door. They would, however, let him stretch his limbs, reach a privy bucket, and bathe himself. That last thought had her shrugging quickly out of the armor and moving about the kitchen, gathering the supplies she would need.

Then she went up to Tettony and Isander's quarters, quietly passing along the message that Tettony was needed in the Cutting Room and asking if she could borrow a smock shirt and underlinens from Isander's clothes chest. Her next stop was the armory, where she got her crossbow, armed it, and headed back down to the kitchen.

One way or the other, that man was going to stop stinking.

Then maybe she could get him to start talking. 

°°°°°ººººº°°°°°