Chapter 139: Tell Him

She woke a little before dawn. He heard her lift her head from the bench, and the small sound she made when her stiff neck moved. Then nothing, while she took in the dark lamp and the smell.

Then she was on her feet, and her boots came fast across the stone, and she was kneeling over him at the foot of the stairs with her hand on his throat.

"Goose." She shook him, hard. "Goose!"

He let her shake him twice more, and opened his eyes, and coughed. There was blood on his face from the fight. She would think it came from the step. She wiped it off with her thumb without seeming to notice she had done it.

"What..."

"Get up. Can you stand? Get up!"

He got up with a hand on the wall, stiff and slow. She had already lit a lamp. She went toward the back store with it held high, and then she stopped in the doorway, and didn’t move.

He came up behind her and looked over her shoulder at what he had done.

In the lamplight it was worse than it had been in the dark. The floor between the bodies was wet. Below the long crack in the far wall, six men lay in pieces, with their crossbows cut through beside them.

Seren didn’t scream. She didn’t turn away. She stood in the doorway with the lamp, and her face went cold and careful, the face she wore at the furnace.

Then she walked in among them.

She went from body to body, bending over each one with the lamp. She touched nothing. She looked at a cut throat, at a broken knee, at a hole under the captain’s arm. She looked longest at the rags tied over the dead men’s mouths.

"Night Smoke," she said. "They masked for it." She straightened. "One man did this. A thin blade, a boot, their own bolts. The same hand every time." She looked at the long crack in the brick, and the six men under it, and her voice changed. "And that."

She held the lamp up to the crack. It was clean, and curved like a crescent moon.

"They say the House has a ghost now." Seren spoke carefully. "They say he cut the Twins’ box open with his bare hand, and walked through the Veil strongroom. The crew says he robbed my cousin’s bedroom with my cousin asleep in it. And the same night, someone left my own pages on my bench." She turned around. "They call him Hush."

Aren said nothing.

"Your House ghost was in my cellar last night." She looked at him across the bodies, at his creased shirt and the dust from the stairs on his cheek. "He killed twenty-four men between my bench and that grate. And you slept through it."

She looked at the rags again.

"So did I."

She looked back down at the captain sitting against his barrel, and her mouth did something he had never seen it do. It shook.

[Seren Veil. Hostility: 93% → 81%.]

’For Hush, not for me. Or she’s guessed, and this is her way of not saying it.’ He kept his shoulders tired. ’She’ll never forgive the goose for sleeping.’

Kip came down with the morning water a little after that, took one look through the doorway and dropped both buckets. Seren sent him running for the House.

Teeth came first.

He came down the stairs two at a time, ahead of everyone, and looked at the dead men. Aren watched him see that none of them had reached the cellar, and that the woman he had sold was standing at her bench, alive, with her arms folded.

He covered it fast. He was good. He walked straight to the captain and knelt by him, as if to look at the wound, and his hand went into the inside of the coat.

It came out empty.

Teeth stayed on one knee a moment longer. Then he stood up and brushed off his trousers, and the others were on the stairs.

Auntie Kettle came down on Reyna’s arm with her knitting bag over her shoulder, and stood in the doorway of the back store for some time without saying anything. Osric Danner came behind her with his ledger and began, without being asked, to count. The Twins came, and knelt by the grate, and moved their fingers against each other’s palms, fast.

"This is what I told you, Auntie." Teeth’s voice was soft and reasonable. "I said she’d bring the Veils down on us, and here they are. A Veil captain and his whole company, dead in a House cellar. This is a war now." He turned. "And somebody let them in. That grate’s had a House lock on it for thirty years."

Ama tapped Osric’s sleeve and moved her fingers.

Osric glanced at her hands. "Ama says somebody had a key."

"Then find out who." Teeth spread his hands. "The alchemist hates the Veils enough to want this. She’s had a week down here to sell a key to anyone she liked." He glanced at Aren and smiled with all his iron. "And the purchased slept through a war. Every night this week on that step, and the one night it matters, he naps."

Every Hand in the cellar looked at Seren.

Aren didn’t argue. He walked across the back store toward the stairs, past the bodies, and as he passed Teeth, close enough to brush his sleeve, he turned his hand over at his side.

The iron key lay in his palm, with the filed notch near the bow.

It was there for one breath. Then his hand closed, and he went on to the stairs, and sat down on the bottom step with his elbows on his knees, a tired young man who had slept badly on stone.

Teeth didn’t move.

Nobody else seemed to have seen it. But Teeth’s face had gone still, and when he spoke again his voice was harder.

"Or a Veil lockpick did it and wants us at each other’s throats. Let the Twins take the lock apart."

Auntie Kettle turned her head and studied Teeth. Then she studied Aren on the step. Her face showed nothing at all.

[Teeth. Hostility: 96% → 99%.]

’He’s seen what happened to the men who came down here at night. If I hand Auntie this key here, in front of Seren, the goose was never asleep. If I hand it to her tonight, Teeth is dead by the end of the week.’ Aren rubbed his eyes. ’A dead Teeth tells me nothing. A Teeth on a string, afraid of the goose on the step, will.’

"Well," Auntie said at last, comfortably. "Nobody will report this, at least. The Veils can’t say they sent their house guards into a House cellar in the middle of the night to kill a woman. And we can’t say we killed them." She hitched up her knitting bag. "Osric, have them taken out through the drain before the tide comes in. Reyna, the boat."

"And the Cellar?" Teeth asked.

"Is Brother Coin’s, dear, not mine. And not yours." She turned to the stairs. "I’ll write to him today. He’ll want to know what’s happened to the most valuable woman in Port Myrrh."

When they had gone, and the dead had gone out through the drain on the tide, and the back store had been scrubbed with sand, Seren stood at the middle bench with her notebook and didn’t open it.

Aren swept.

’Twenty-four men, and I’m the one with the broom.’

"Goose," she said, without turning around.

"Yes?"

"If your ghost ever comes down those stairs again." She stopped. "Tell him I don’t owe him anything."

"I’ll tell him."

"I mean it." She opened the notebook, and looked at the page, and shut it again. "I’ve owed the Veils, and I owe the House, and I’m not going to owe a ghost. Tell him that."

Aren gave her the same answer. "I’ll tell him."

She lit the middle furnace and held her palm over the vent.

After a while, so quietly that he nearly missed it, she added, "Tell him thank you."