Chapter 169: A Roof Returned

Dane Rook had a voice four words long, and he had just spent all four on Senn Parr, the keeper of Rainhouse: "I killed your brother." They were still in the wet stone of her doorstep. He was a blind mimic chest, a wagon in shape tonight. Four words always set his cracked side shaking, and they killed the lure, the click he could throw, for sixty breaths. Over her roof stood the House, a walking street of swallowed inns, with her stolen west room hanging under it by her own split rafters and the rest of her roof going after it.

He wanted her to have all of it, Dane thought, the truth first and then her brother's brass. After that, if she let him stay on her step, he wanted to earn this roof.

Senn did not scream. He had braced for her bar across his lid, and the bar never left the stone by her dragging boot. The hunger, wide awake for hours now, handed him her heartbeat unasked: an arm's length from his teeth, going fast and going nowhere.

Behind those teeth her brother Nate's brass charm rang its two notes against Nate's belt knife, one bright and one flat. She had been hearing that all night. Now she knew what it was ringing in.

She did not ask how. She had watched this mouth haul two women up to its teeth that night.

"Was he alone?" Senn said.

He knocked once, a wheel on stone. Yes. Nobody had been with Nate Parr but a chest he took for a piece of luck.

"Did he know what you were?" she said.

He knocked twice. No. The rain ran in her gutter for a while.

The foot of her bar ground a small circle into the step. "What came after his name?"

Dane had it. If someone finds. Three words, and Nate had not lived to hang a fourth on them. No knock could carry them. His voice came in fours or not at all, and it was spent besides, so he knocked three times. Ask it another way.

"There's no other way to ask it," Senn said. "You owed me that at dusk, chest. You owe it still."

He knocked once. Yes. Vera, Ash Company's mage, had laid her hand flat on his lid before he spoke. It was still there, smelling of chalk, and he could not tell whether she had left it or forgotten it.

"Clerk," Senn said. "You stopped writing at my name, and the reason's in that box. Read it."

A bone clicked in the doorway. "As written, keeper," said Kett, the dungeon's skeleton clerk. "I add nothing." The wax cracked, and he read the page out at one speed.

[ REGISTRY: Kill Record, Corrected ]

Nate Parr. Seven silver due.

Kill credit claimed late by the quartermaster. Unsupported.

The chest refused to convert his knife and charm.

Dane had dreaded that page all night. It gave the kill to nobody but him, and then it said the one thing he had no knock for. A chest converts a dead man's goods, renders them down for its own gain, and when the System offered he had said no and carried both up here. It did not say he had refused the man, Dane thought. By then a knife and a charm were all that was left to refuse.

"The chest refused to convert his knife and charm," Senn said, trying each word like a floorboard. Then, "Seven. He walked out of this door to fill the medicine cupboard in my west room. Seven silver."

That cupboard was hanging over their heads, and the House chose then to lean. Its twelve legs shifted and a rafter groaned, and her door swung in on its twisted frame. The six-legged coffer that had propped it open since dusk went skidding backward with it, and Dane stopped them both with his good corner.

Senn rapped her bar on the doorframe. "Scout. I want a climber on my roof."

A blade scraped over the threshold: Kril, the company's scout.

"Where the House has my room joined on, there's one dry patch, low on the hinge side, and iron goes in it," Senn said. "There's a spare hinge pin on the nail inside my door. I'll be on the cistern chain. Water makes a join let go, but only till it takes hold again, and that tank empties once. So no water till the iron's in. Then the chest drives my door outward."

Kril went up the wall with the pin, on the one blade Tess the fixer had left him, and Senn's boot dragged off toward her cistern. Overhead the air went sharp, the way it does after lightning, as Vera put a light up.

"It's healed over, Senn," Vera said. "No door on it, no posts, one skin right round."

"All wet," Kril said from the roof.

Dane reached for the lure and got nothing, like squeezing the trigger of a drill with a flat battery. He had run it flat telling the truth. It was the first time honesty had cost him a tool, he thought.

"He'd find it by ear if he could," Vera said. "But the click dies when he talks, and he spent his talking on you."

The rafter above the door cracked like a board over a knee, and soot came down on his lid.

"He picked his minute," Senn said from the chain.

He had. A little later and a clerk's page would have told her for him, so he had taken the last minute there was, and her roof was paying for it over forty-odd heads. A second rafter went while he waited, and slates broke on the step.

Then something prickled under his torn tongue, and the lure was back.

In his first life he had found studs behind a finished wall with one knuckle: knock, move a hand, knock, and wait for the note to change. He put a click on the join where the nearest rafter met it, and it came back thick and wet. He walked the next one a hand along, and the next, out where nothing with weight would want to go, until a click came back dry and hollow. Dane had been an empty box long enough to know that sound.

He kept the click knocking on that spot and turned his lock up at it. That one.

Vera's hand came off his lid at last. "Kril, go to the knocking!"

A blade bit out along a rafter. Then iron rang on iron three times, and one flat strike after it, which was how Kril said yes.

The chain rattled. Senn's roof water came down in one sheet, and the join let go with a sound like wet wallpaper leaving a wall.

"Now, chest," Senn said.

The House hauled on what it had left. All this body could do was slow and straight, and for once the job wanted nothing else. Dane put his good corner into her door and drove, four wheels slipping and catching on wet stone, his cracked side shaking itself apart under the splint, straight out against the pull of the whole street. The door went over until its brass ring struck the wall.

The west room dropped. It came down onto its own walls with a boom he felt in every wheel, and every rafter that had complained since dusk shut up at once. Over the roof twelve legs shifted, and nothing of Senn's moved with them.

It was the biggest repair of either of his lives, and his tools had been a click and a door. Kril dropped off the eave and went in past him. Nobody said thank you, and Dane found he had been listening for it.

The rain gave out before the night did. Through the wall he heard the convoy's jars go onto shelves in the west room, filling the cupboard Nate had left home to fill. Then a blade chopped wood indoors: Tess, by the pepper, using Kril's borrowed steel on the bench the House had grown around the woman with the ladle. When it stopped, her ladle knocked her breastbone at walking pace.

The morning reached him as other people's noise, a pot lid and a cough. Senn's boot dragged back to her step and stopped in front of his lock.

That left the brass. He opened his lid. Her heart sped up and her boots stayed put, and he kept the lid still while the hunger measured her. His tongue, torn before tonight and ripped again on the cord, felt along the knife for the charm it had shaken off.

From Nate's knife, at the back of his mouth where only Dane could hear, Saint Rust said, "Brass only, cupboard. You promised."

This was the tongue that had fetched Nate in, on a day when nothing Dane told it counted. He told it to carry one small brass thing out past his teeth and set it on the stone. It went. The charm rang once on her step, the bright note alone, with no knife to drag the second one flat.

Senn did not reach for it. The foot of her bar came down beside the brass and drew it a boot's length from his mouth, and then she bent.

/==[ System: Item Returned ]==\\

| Brass Return Charm: given to Senn Parr

| Convert?: closed. Nothing left to ask

\\==[ Inventory: Lighter ]==/

Nothing left to ask, Dane thought. That question had sat open on a dead man's charm for months, like an invoice nobody would sign. Call Home went with the brass, too. The two notes that had rung forty people up a ramp had always belonged to the charm, and without them his mouth was very quiet.

"And the knife," Senn said.

The steel lay very still on his tongue.

He made himself knock twice. No. He had told her the worst thing he knew in four words, and he could not tell her the reason for this in any number, because it was a promise made to a knife. He was keeping her brother's knife from her on his own word, and it felt like what it was.

Senn did not ask twice. Overhead twelve legs began to walk, and this time the sound went away from her roof. Dane turned his lock to Vera.

"I can see the whole of it now," Vera said. "It's turning. Dane, it's going north. That's the Rookfall road. That's my town."

"Then that's where his knife is going," Senn said. "And so am I."