Place · Book 3, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

The Iron Tangle

The fourth floor: a knot of subway and rail lines through which the dungeon's mobs commute, with ten days on the clock and 9,375 stairwells. Colored lines are subways that run one way from station 11 to 435 and never come back; named lines loop; transfer stations are prime numbers; every fifth station is a drug den; stairwells are at 12, 24, 36, 48 and 72. Seen from above it is the Syndicate's logo; seen whole, by Katia, it is a mirrored, upside-down noodle with a hidden chamber between the two tracks. A political cartoon, Mordecai says, about the Plenty and the Apothecary.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 1 — I'm on a train
• Chapter 2 — Transfer station 83
• Chapter 3 — Messages from deceased Crawlers
• Chapter 4 — Limp Richard's books
• Chapter 5 — Vernon the conductor
• Chapter 6 — Banshee Station
• Chapter 7 — The Prize Carousel
• Chapter 10 — Landmines on the ochre line
• Chapter 11 — Gore-Gore
• Chapter 12 — The Dismemberment Limited
• Chapter 13 — The Ugly-Ass Backpack
• Chapter 14 — Stealing the Nightmare Express
• Chapter 15 — The Abyss
• Chapter 16 — Babababoons
• Chapter 17 — Station and Repair Hub E
• Chapter 18 — The PVP coupon
• Chapter 19 — Frank Q at the bar
• Chapter 21 — Brynhild's Daughters
• Chapter 26 — Growler Gary
• Chapter 27 — Physical
• Chapter 28 — Plan C
• Chapter 29 — The Bolt of Ophiotaurus
• Chapter 30 — The Syndicate logo
• Chapter 31 — The Iron Tangle, signing off
• Chapter 32 — Prepotente

Arc

What it is

Carl reads it as a subway system in the first minute (ch. 1) and the sign at 83 gives the rules (ch. 2); Vernon gives the loop and the missing memory (ch. 5); Elle gives the primes (ch. 9); Gore-Gore gives the abyss gate and the depot (ch. 11); the abyss gives the truth about the trains (ch. 15); Widget gives the Escape Velocity (ch. 17); the stairwell rooms give the circle (ch. 18). Katia's map, filled in from every contact the party has, goes from a whiteboard to a roll of paper to a folded, torn sheet held up to the light (ch. 3, ch. 7, ch. 30).

What it means

A floor that breaks the moment anyone stops a train (ch. 12) and is designed to: the mobs are addicts, the trains are thrown away, the employees are wiped between shifts, the ghouls are conveyed back to the yards, and some mobs die three times (ch. 31). Mordecai reads the named lines as the Syndicate's logo and the whole as a racist cartoon about the Plenty and the Apothecary, broadcast by Borant on the Plenty's own tunnels (ch. 30). Katia reads it as a mirrored noodle with a chamber between, and is right (ch. 30, ch. 31). The system signs off 'betrayed by the Krakaren' (ch. 31). 'If I never see another train again, it'll be too soon' (ch. 34).