Chapter 143: The Kitchen

Brother Coin was stirring a pot the size of a bathtub when Aren came down the steps, and he did not stop.

The Kitchen lay under the Ninth Ring, in an old cistern with a vaulted roof held up by sixty white pillars. At the long tables between the pillars sat two hundred people eating soup: porters with iron bands and shoulders like doors, clerks with ink on their fingers, a captain of the watch with his bronze band unbuckled from his shoulder and laid on the table beside his bowl. None of them talked much, and all of them owed the man with the spoon.

He stood a head taller than anyone in the room and twice as wide, bald, in a white apron, with old burns up both arms.

"The one-crown man!" Coin waved the spoon without looking round. "Sit, sit. A fed man pays and a hungry man runs. That’s the whole of banking, and nobody believes me."

[Brother Coin. Rank A. Hostility: 4%.]

Aren sat down and ate. It was good soup, thick with barley and beef. Seren had gone upstairs, refusing a moneylender’s soup.

Coin dropped onto the bench across the table, and the bench complained. He laid a letter beside Aren’s bowl. It carried four wax seals in a neat row: a kettle, a ship, a hammer and a pair of scales.

"Auntie wrote to the heads of the House about you, and about what the House took for your one crown. Port Myrrh, Ambar, Ferrant and the Free Cities have all read it." He tapped the seals. "Four cities. I usually only get two, and only when somebody has died."

"I would like it back."

Coin laughed, and three tables turned round. "Everybody would like it back, my friend. That is why I own this city."

"The debt was one crown. The House took a whole pill for it, and the contract said it could, in any coin the House chose." Aren put the spoon down. "I’m not asking you to break your contract. The ledger says paid in full, so you have no string on me. If I borrow from the House again, I write the clause. Crowns only, written down, or nothing."

"And if I say no?"

"Then nothing. I never borrow from you again, and you have a man in your own cellar you can never collect from." Aren shrugged. "And a man you can’t collect from is a man you can’t keep."

’Any coin means my memories, my skills, whatever he likes best that day. Crowns I can earn.’

Coin looked at him while the debtors went on eating.

"Crowns only," he said finally, like a man who had lost a good hand to a better player. "Nobody asks for the coin. They ask for less interest, or more time." He rubbed his chin. "The money stays. The House never gives money back. It sets a terrible example. But the House lends. Your pill went in the book at twelve thousand. That, less your crown, at the House rate, in crowns, written down, since you insist. Due on the first day of spring."

’The Choosing. He even picked the day I’ll be busiest.’ Aren did the sum anyway. ’Danner guessed forty thousand in Ambar for one of Seren’s grade five Marrows. Every one needs clean lily, and I’m the only man in the House with any. Twelve thousand is cheap money.’

Coin held out his hand, and Aren shook it.

[Debt recorded: 11,999 crowns.]

"Anything else?" Coin licked his spoon. "You have the look of a man with a list."

"What do you sell that a moon-hound can’t smell?"

Coin’s eyebrows went up. "Now why would a pill-fed Servant want that?"

"My girl in the Glass Wing. She’s a maid up there." Aren looked down at his soup, the picture of a young man with no shame left. "They say the bride brought a hound from the north that bites strangers. I’d rather be a stranger it can’t smell."

For a breath Coin said nothing. Then his smile spread across his whole face.

"The Glass Wing has pretty maids. I know one or two of them myself." He winked. "But nobody gets in by a window up there, my friend. The inner door belongs to the Lamp Guard, Church knights with silver bands and shuttered lanterns that read every man who walks past them. Outside that door, the courts are mine." He dropped a fat book on the table, and the bowls jumped. "Hired swords. Half the swords in the palace eat my soup and owe me for their boots."

’He thinks he knows which maid I mean.’ Aren kept his eyes on the book. ’No window, a Church knight on the inner door, and Coin’s men on every court outside it. The roster is the only way in.’

Coin fetched a long wooden box from a shelf and opened it between the bowls.

It was a suit of grey plate, dull and plain, with a closed helm that had no face at all, only a fine black mesh where the eyes should be.

"It doesn’t smell," Coin said. "It doesn’t let out your breath or your heartbeat, and hounds walk straight past it. Lanterns and glass read the man inside, and they will read you colorless, Rank C, like half the pill-fed boys on my roster. I don’t rent it. It costs what I just lent you."

’My own money, lent to me and spent on his armor. The crowns never leave his apron.’ He kept his face pleasant. ’And he gets his own man inside the palace, on his roster, to send anywhere or strike off with one line. That’s what he’s selling. It’s still the only door.’

"Done."

"Wise!" Coin took the pencil from behind his ear and opened the roster. "Name?"

"No name."

"Nil, then." He wrote it in large cheerful letters: Nil. Hired sword. Rank C. Colorless. "You came down my stairs a debtor, and you will go up them a Hand. Debtors eat my soup. Hands carry it."

"Benedek’s paper," Aren said. "Do you hold it?"

"I hold everybody’s paper." Coin pointed his pencil at the shelf, where three ledgers stood apart from the rest, each with a prince’s seal on its spine. "Lucan. Varek. Theo’s is thin, but his mother’s is thick." He pulled the first one down. "A steward’s debts go in his master’s book, whether his master knows it or not. Benedek plays dice on the Fourth Ring and loses like a gentleman. And he raised his price on your fence this morning, did you know? Somebody will take it before the week is out."

"Sell me the note."

"With what?" Coin smiled. "A prince’s steward’s note isn’t cheap, and you just spent every crown I lent you on my armor."

"My Undervault crew lost two men last week," Coin went on. "There is a Rift in the galleries round the Well, rated C, and nobody left to carry the cores. A Hand who goes down gets his share of what comes up, and one good core would buy you Benedek’s note."

’A week, a Rift, and Rook’s head on a wall.’ Aren picked up his spoon again.

Coin tapped a line in the Lucan ledger.

"Your girl carried this one up herself."

Aren read it upside down. Heart Pill, grade 4. Veil make. White jade box. For His Highness Prince Lucan, by Steward Benedek. Delivered by hand to the Glass Wing.

Coin grinned. "There was a card in the box, and I read everything. It’s in the price." He cleared his throat and recited it in a deep, solemn voice. "For the step after next. When you want the step between, you know where I am. L."

"What step is she on?" Aren asked, eating.

"Blood. The Treasurer puts her on his glass every week and reads her stage and her purity, both columns, for the Emperor’s book." Coin closed the ledger. "And somebody has bought every Marrow sold in Aurem this season, every single one. I won’t say who. His steward buys his curtains."

’A Heart is for the last stage, and she’s at Blood, so it’s useless to her until she’s taken a Marrow. And Lucan owns every Marrow in the city.’ Aren drank the last of his soup. ’So the pill is a door, and she has to knock on it.’

"You and I would have sent flowers," Coin said.

Before he went up, Aren paid for a bird to Port Myrrh, asking the Twins for three key blanks in three sizes. He didn’t know the real size. Coin, who read everything, would see a boy learning locks.

A porter carried the box up behind him, and Aren took it at the dark top of the stairs, where nobody watched.

The workshop Coin had given Seren was two floors above the Kitchen, a long room with three furnaces and a window onto the Ninth Ring. Seren had chosen the middle furnace and sworn at all three. At midnight she was sound asleep on a bench in the back room with her boots on.

Aren set up his own cracked furnace in the corner, with her recipe in his head and herbs from the Ninth Ring market. A Wheel Pill, for a man at Core Formed who wanted his core to turn. He ground the abyss lily cold and fine, boiled and skimmed, and when the mixture went the color of dark honey, he spread his hands over it and pressed with nothing.

The furnace flared once, clean and pale, and died down.

[Wheel Pill. Result: Refined. Impurities: 23%.]

’Twenty-three again. My press leaves nothing, so the rest is the furnace, the cheap cores and the herbs.’

Seren’s notebook lay open on her bench at the page for the high grades, where one line stood alone at the bottom in her small angry writing. Above grade five, Well sand.

’And Well sand belongs to the Church and the crown.’ He closed the notebook. ’So does everything else worth having in this city.’

Rook was on the roof outside the window with his bottle and his book. Aren climbed out, sat down beside him and held out the pill.

Rook looked at it, and then at Aren, and did not take it.

"I sat at Core Condensation for eleven years until you came along," Rook said. "Then I moved, and somehow you did better out of it than I did. What does it cost me?"

"Nothing. A fence with a price on his head needs it more than I need the money." Aren kept his hand out. "And a fence who turns his core is much harder to collect."

’A grade five Wheel sold under the name Aren gets Sefa asking where it came from. And an anchor pays me in what crowns can’t buy.’

Rook took the pill and swallowed it dry.

[Investment recorded.]

Then he put his book face down on the tiles, sat up straight and closed his eyes.

It took most of an hour. Aren felt it happen through the roof tiles: a slow pull, and then a turn, like a heavy wheel that had stood still for years.

[Anchor progressed: Rook. Rank C: Core Formed → Core Turning.]

[Mirror Return triggered.]

The little wheel spun in the dark over the roofs. It spun, and settled on x10.

[Result: x10.]

[Return: the Anchor’s progress, x10.]

[Skill acquired: Fence’s Eye (Grade C).]

[The Host sees what a thing would sell for, today, in this city. Once per object.]

Rook opened his eyes and breathed out slowly. He picked up his book, and Aren looked at it.

’Fence’s Eye.’

A number came up in his head, plain and certain. Four coppers.

Rook saw his face. "Whatever you just did with your eyes, stone-seller, don’t do it to my book."

"Four coppers."

Rook opened the book to his page. "It’s a first edition."