The Thread — hints

The tool store first (through the office, west of the yard), then the cart road east and south to the shaft head. You want the lamp, the coil, the chalk, the rule, the crowbar and the wedges — all six, and the game will tell you later exactly which one you left behind.

Read it before you sign it. Two hundred and six people have gone down this shaft in four years and two hundred and five have signed out again, and the game is not going to mention that twice.

Talk to him. Then notice how long he takes to answer the obvious question, because that pause is the plot.

It is a wall, not a rock face — sheet 94 in the office says so. Walls have bad courses. sound wall with the iron, which is the thing you do for a living.

You need the crowbar. Sounding is done with an iron, and the irons are in the tool store three miles north and eighty feet up.

You are not, and that is the point: follow thread walks you one gallery back down your own cord, and it works in the dark. It is the only thing down here that does.

Correct, and deliberately so. The door is seven hundred and sixty feet out. Read the next hint only if you want the answer rather than the nudge.

You letter galleries for a living. chalk the gallery you are standing in — measure it, name it, and take the cord off it, because a gallery with a name on it does not need a rope. Then the line starts from there. Do the crossing, the south gallery and the hall of pillars, and six hundred feet reaches seven hundred and sixty.

Lettering only works one gallery out from ground that already has a name on it. A name in the middle of nowhere is still a place you cannot find. Work outward from the wall.

Then it is a long walk and not a disaster. Go back north through the gap to the lettered gallery and up to the tool store. It costs you an hour and the cord stays exactly where you left it.

That is the lamp doing its job — it is open on purpose so that it leans before your lungs notice. Heavy air lies in the low place. Get out of the crawl, in either direction, and it relights on its own.

You have a cord in your hand and it is tied to the world. follow thread.

Because it was never meant to be opened again. It comes out the way stone has always come out: dry oak in the joint, water on the oak, and three hours somewhere else.

Dry oak in a dry joint sits there. There are four inches of standing water in the dip, two hundred feet north, and a burnt-out lamp in your satchel that holds a pint.

That is the method. It wants about three hours. Go and do something else — there is a gallery or two worth lettering while you wait.

Look at the lead joint properly, and then at the four square holes in it that you did not cut. There is something snapped off in the bottom one, and you are qualified to date it.

sound roof first. It is what the Inspection pays you for and the game will not let you down there until you have.

You were paid four hundred livres to bring it up unopened and offered four hundred more. That is the whole question and the game is not going to answer it for you.

Yes. Exactly as Guillemin's was, four years ago, by the same knife and quite possibly the same hand. The reason it is an inconvenience and not an obituary is the chalk you put on the walls in Act II.

From the far side, in mortar four hours old, by somebody reaching through as he closed it. An eighteen-inch bar against two feet of coursed limestone is not a plan. There is another way and the draught in the west gallery is pointing at it.

Sound it before you cut anything — you do not cut a rope to a depth you have not measured. It is ninety feet, dry at the bottom, and the draught goes down it and does not come back.

Not on the foot-holes. They are four hundred and seventy-five years old and cut in limestone, and the game gives you one free attempt to find that out. There is a wrought iron ring in the roof that would take a bull.

The only cord under Paris, which is the one on your shoulder. cut cord, then tie rope to the ring, then down. It is irreversible and it is meant to be.

West, with the fall, and with the draught. Air that moves is going somewhere that is open to the sky.

Two things, and both change what the ending means: the chamber south of the lower gallery, and the settling tank south of the long run. One of them tells you what the roll actually is. The other tells you who cut the conduit, and it was not the Order.

sound staples before you climb. Forty feet of iron in a wet shaft since the Hundred Years War, and three of them will come away in your hand. Four minutes with a bar finds out which three.

Carry it up. Burn it — the lamp is in your hand and the game will ask you once whether that is really what this was. Put it back with the rest of the archive, in the chests, where it came from. Or climb out and leave it lying, which is also an answer and is scored as one.

None. Carrying it up ruins a family that deserves ruining and destroys the roll anyway in 1871. Burning it is what you were paid for and you will be turning it over at four in the morning for thirty years. Putting it back makes you the last person who will ever read it. That is the game.