Chapter 141: The Toll Post

The Oros lieutenant slit open the third bolt of cloth with his knife, and the dye came off on his fingers. Sarkhane red, said the order. To Aren it was only grey.

"Smuggling." He wiped the blade on the next bolt. "Undeclared dye. Undeclared cloth." He looked down the long line of House wagons. "All of it stays here."

The toll post stood where the Pale Road crossed a dry river: a stone hut, a striped pole across the road, a well, and a tall post covered in nailed notices. Twenty soldiers in Oros coats stood around it, bored. On the hills to the north a brown cloud of dust hung over the road, where Varek’s army was coming home from the Oros camps, an hour behind them.

Hobb, the House wagon master, already had his purse out. He was a heavy, patient man who had driven this road for twenty years. The House ran wagons on every road in Solvane, he liked to say, and paid every post on every one of them.

"Lieutenant, the House has paid this post for years..."

"Then the House has been smuggling for years."

The lieutenant wore a bronze band on his left shoulder, polished until it shone, and he kept that shoulder turned toward the drivers so that they would see it.

Aren sat on the tailboard of the fifth wagon and kept his hands perfectly still. The front wagons carried Sarkhane’s order and nothing else. In the back half, inside every bolt, rolled tightly into the middle and wrapped in oilcloth, were pills from the Cellar. The lieutenant had cut three bolts on the sixth wagon, at the edge. A hand deeper, and smuggling would stop being just a word.

’He hasn’t found anything yet. He wants the purse, and he wants it fat, and if he gets bored waiting he’ll cut deeper.’

An old sergeant with a grey moustache and an iron band stood by the pole with a slate. He never looked at it. Every time a wheel rolled up to the line, a new chalk mark appeared on the slate by itself, because his class did the counting for him and the army had given him a slate to put it on.

"Lieutenant Haske," he called. "The captain wants the road clear before the column comes down."

"Then they’d better pay quickly."

[Haske. Rank D. Hostility: 40%.]

On the wagon behind, under her hood, Seren hadn’t moved at all. Her crates were in that wagon. She had packed them herself and sworn at every single one.

Aren got down and walked to the post.

By Aurem’s law, every toll post kept its book in the open, so that travelers could see what they paid. This one hung on a chain from a nail under a little roof of boards, and the pages had gone soft with rain. He turned them. Dates, wagons and tolls in a neat hand, and the lieutenant’s seal at the foot of every page.

"Hobb. The House receipts for this post."

Hobb frowned, but he went to his wagon and came back with a tin box. "The Tally wants a receipt for every copper. He’d want one for a sneeze if he could get it."

Aren went through the slips, and then back through the book, page by page.

Three weeks ago, a House convoy of nine wagons had paid here, and the receipt was stamped with Haske’s seal. The book said four wagons that day. He went back five months, and every House convoy was in the book at about half.

’He takes the full toll, writes down half, sends that half to the army and keeps the rest. The House never complains, because the House has its receipt. Nobody ever puts the two side by side.’

He lifted the book, chain and all, off its nail and carried it over, and stood beside the lieutenant, close enough for the sergeant to hear every word.

"You’re busy, Lieutenant. Let me help you count."

Haske looked at him sharply, and Aren held up a receipt beside the open book. "Nine wagons, your seal, three weeks ago." He turned the page. "Your book says four." He looked past Haske. "Sergeant, how many wagons have you got on your slate today?"

The sergeant didn’t answer. He looked at the receipt, and then at the book, and then at the lieutenant, and his face didn’t change at all.

Haske’s hand went to his sword.

’He could cut me down here and call it resisting. Then Brother Coin asks why an Oros toll officer killed a House man on House wagons, and the answer to that costs him far more than any purse.’

Aren didn’t step back. He simply waited.

The lieutenant’s hand came off the sword.

"My clerk can’t add." Haske’s voice was perfectly flat. "Sergeant! The wagons are cleared. The cloth is in order."

The sergeant wiped his slate clean with his sleeve, and went back to the pole without a word.

The pole went up. Hobb climbed onto his wagon, breathing out hard, and the first team leaned into the traces.

Haske caught up with Aren at the fifth wagon. He kept his back to the post and his voice low, and he pressed a small purse into Aren’s hand as if he were shaking it.

"For your trouble. Forty crowns."

"Fifty. You said it yourself; your clerk can’t add."

The lieutenant stared at him, then took out more coin and dropped it into the purse, and walked away with his ears burning.

Hobb had seen it from his seat. "That goes in the House book."

"The House didn’t pay a toll today." Aren put the purse away in his shirt. "That was my fee for counting. It goes in mine."

As they rolled past the post, he jumped down briefly to look at the notices.

Most of them were old: wolf heads, a fever warning, a deserter. In the middle, pasted over an older copy of itself, was his own poster: the cracked mask, the bell cap. REN, THE BLOOD THIEF. WANTED ALIVE BY THE IRON THRONE.

Under it, in fresh black ink, someone had printed a new line.

LAST SEEN: PORT MYRRH, A SHIP WITH NO NAME.

Rook came up beside him. He read the poster, tapped the new line once, and walked on to the wagons without a word.

’The Crown has Rook’s name for hiding the Blood Thief. Teeth knows which ship Rook came on, and who came with him. He sold the ship, and he’ll sell the face next.’ Aren looked at the grey smear where the drawing of a face had run in the damp. ’A week behind me, and he’s still working.’ He left the poster where it was. Tearing it down was the one thing a man from that ship would do.

At the well, Seren had pulled up a bucket and was drinking from the tin cup on its chain. She took one swallow, made a face, and threw the rest on the ground.

"Damn it! It came up cold, and now it’s warm."

"Your hands."

"Thank you, goose. I hadn’t noticed in ten years." She hung the cup back on its hook. "You talk well for one of Auntie’s people. She always sends the ones who talk well to watch the ones who don’t."

She climbed back onto her wagon before he could answer.

The convoy rolled on south, and by noon the army’s dust was only a brown line in the sky behind them.

Rook sat on the tailboard beside Aren with his book open on his knee, and didn’t read it. He was watching the road behind them. Two riders in plain brown coats had been half a mile back since the second day out of Port Myrrh. They had stopped at the toll post to water their horses, and now they were coming on again, never closer and never further.

"Those two are Benedek’s men," he said at last, without looking round. "He keeps a pair on Coin’s wagons. He has for years."

"Who’s Benedek?" Aren asked.

"Steward to House Sarkhane in Aurem. He counts their silver and keeps their secrets, and he does nicely out of both." Rook didn’t look up. "I told you a buyer in Aurem once tried to have me killed."

"You did."

"Years ago a man with no face, in a shop that was never in the same place twice, paid me to have a book made." Rook’s voice stayed dry. "He told me who to sell it to. The steward of House Sarkhane, at his price, and not a copper less."

"What was the book about?"

"A key. Some northern legend." Rook shrugged. "I never read what I sell. It’s bad for the price."

’The merchant was fishing for that key years before he ever met me. He wrote the bait himself and sent it to Aurem with Rook.’

"Benedek paid me at noon. That night two men came to my inn to take the money back, and the book’s name out of my head with it. I left with both their purses." Rook closed the book on his finger. "He’s had a price on me ever since, paid on proof."

"What proof?"

"My head, probably. He’s a steward, and he likes a receipt." Rook glanced back at the two riders. "So if I fall off this wagon in Aurem, stone-seller, look for a man in brown."

’Benedek bought a book about the key, then tried to bury the man who sold it.’ Aren watched the brown coats. ’He didn’t want his money back. He wanted nobody else alive to know what he’d bought.’

He kept that to himself. Rook, who noticed what people think, didn’t ask.

That evening the convoy stopped at a well station on a bare hill, and Hobb drew the wagons into a ring for the night. The two brown coats made their own fire half a mile down the road, and didn’t bother to hide it.

Aren waited until the drivers were snoring. Then he climbed onto the canvas roof of the first wagon and looked across the ring at the second, ten paces away, black against the stars.

[Nullstep.]

He was on the second roof, crouched, with the canvas giving under his boots. He looked at the fourth wagon across the ring, twenty paces off, and at the dark gap between them, on the side of the ring away from the brown coats’ fire.

He stepped into the dark air over the ring, and before he could drop he stepped again, onto the fourth roof. The canvas creaked loudly under him, and a driver grunted in his sleep.

’Too heavy. I’m looking at where I land and then deciding. I need to decide first.’

He picked the next spot before he looked at it, the far side of the sixth roof, and stepped. He arrived lighter, crouched, and the canvas didn’t make a sound. He did it again, and the third time his nose started bleeding.

[Nullstep (Lv. 2). Mastery: 41%.]

He wiped his lip, stepped back to the fifth wagon and sat down on its roof.

Below him, the tailboard creaked. Rook was sitting on it in the dark with his bottle and his book, wide awake.

"A lieutenant paid you today," Rook said, "for reading a book on a nail."

"Yes."

"I’ve read four hundred books, and nobody’s ever paid me for one."

"You read the wrong ones."