Chapter 146: The Gift Page

Tarquin Veil slept with six lamps burning, and Aren put them out one at a time.

He did it with two wet fingers, walking round the bed. The Veil great house on the Third Ring had a guard on every stair, but nobody guarded the inside of a room.

At the fourth, Tarquin stirred, and by the fifth he was sitting up against the headboard with the sheet pulled to his chin, staring at the grey rag where a face should have been.

[Tarquin Veil. Rank C. Hostility: 91%.]

Aren left the sixth lamp burning, on the table by the bed, so that Tarquin could read.

"You’re the one the crews call Hush. They were singing it in Port Myrrh the week my ledger went." Tarquin’s voice came out thin, and he was thinner too than he had been at the Assay. The handsome, well-fed face had gone loose and grey under the eyes. "There are men outside that door."

"Two. They’re still playing cards, like the night your ledger went." Aren kept his voice low and flat. "Pay them more. They’d play quieter."

He took a folded page out of the Deep Purse and laid it open on the blanket, over Tarquin’s knees. Beside it he laid a paper band, the kind a bank wraps round gold.

Rite pill, S. To Master Corvel, 6,000.

For the night’s work. T.

"Your hand, both times." Aren tapped the band. "Your captain was carrying the second one when he came up the drain. I spent what was inside it on a knife."

Tarquin looked down at the two papers, and his fingers closed on the sheet until the knuckles stood out white. Then he laughed. It was a high, shaky laugh, and he put a hand over his mouth to stop it.

"That’s what you came for? A page?" He took the hand away. "It’s a line in a ledger. Wine, a coat, a pill. Take it to the Bureau and I’ll say I owed Corvel for a year of rite pills." He leaned forward. "Or take it to my grandfather, if you like. He asked me what I paid Corvel, the week after her rite. When I told him, he said it was a lot to pay for a girl to fail."

Aren stood completely still beside the bed.

’The patriarch knew. He put that pill into her hand himself, in front of the whole family, and he knew what was in it.’

For one breath he thought about the eel blade, and about how little noise a dying man made in a soft bed. Then he let the thought go, because dead men did not testify, and more importantly, they did not pay.

"Then the Bureau gets the page and Master Corvel together."

"Corvel?" Tarquin almost laughed again. "Corvel wants one thing in this world, and only my grandfather can give it to him. He’ll never stand up for a ghost."

’Every pill master wants the same thing: Well sand, for the pills above grade five. Seren’s notebook says so on every page.’

Iron Sense went down through the floor, three locks down, into the strongroom. Coin chests, a rack of swords, and one small iron cap ringed in soft lead, sealed onto something that was not metal. Nothing else down there was sealed like it.

’No window, no light. Nullstep needs a place I can see. So that has to come up out of there.’

"The jar under your floor," Aren said. "With the lead cap."

Tarquin’s mouth opened. "No! That’s the family’s whole season of Well sand. The Church weighs it out once a year, under the Cardinal’s own seal. Do you want to have the Church on your back as well?"

"Then the Veils have a bad spring."

’One pinch stays with me. The rest buys Corvel’s mouth in spring, and Seren gets her name back.’

"Tomorrow, at the second bell after dark, the fountain on the Fifth Ring," Aren said. "Send the jar with anyone you like. If it isn’t there, this page goes to the Bureau in the morning, and the copy goes to the Emperor’s Treasurer, while a Veil prince is still in the Choosing."

"There’s a copy?"

"There’s always a copy."

There was not. But Tarquin had kept a ledger with his own crimes in it in a box by his bed, and a man like that believed in copies.

Aren picked up the page and the band and put them away again. Tarquin’s eyes followed them until they were gone.

"And after the jar, you give me the page."

"After the jar, I don’t give it to anyone else."

He pinched out the sixth lamp. In the dark, Tarquin made a small sound, as if he had been hit.

Aren went out by the window, and across the gap to the roof of the next house, and lay down on the cold tiles to think.

’A man who poisoned his cousin pays someone to catch a ghost.’ He looked across at the Veil roofs. ’So I didn’t ask him to bring it. I asked him to send it. A jar that’s sent has to change hands at least once, and it is never guarded worse than at the moment it does.’

He came back early the next evening, before dark, and lay on the same roof.

Iron Sense went down through the Veil great house, room by room. Swords, keys, hinges, a hundred pots in the kitchen. The lead-capped jar was still in the strongroom.

At the first bell after dark, an hour before the time he had named, it moved.

It came up the strongroom stairs, through the hall and out into the front court, held close against someone’s chest. Four swords came with it, the front gate opened, and Aren turned his head and looked down.

Tarquin himself was carrying it, with both arms wrapped round it, in a long green coat, with his guards around him. In the lamplight of the court the jar was white glass, as big as a man’s fist, with the iron cap on top.

Outside the gate, in the lane, a man in plain white was waiting. He was tall and quiet, with a silver band on his left shoulder and his hands folded, and he held a lantern with its shutter closed, so that only a thin line of light came out at the bottom. Six more men in white stood behind him in the shadow of the wall, with staffs in their hands and swords under their coats.

[Unknown. Rank B. Hostility: 0%.]

’Seven men in white, an hour early, at the gate instead of the fountain.’

Tarquin stopped in the gateway and held out the jar. The man in white unfolded his hands and reached for it. For a heartbeat both of them were holding it, and between their bodies, below their arms, there was an empty place no bigger than a child.

He had been watching for that space since the gate opened. He chose it.

[Nullstep.]

He was crouched between them, under their arms. He took the jar out of their hands with both of his, turned, and chose the dark on the roof of the stable across the lane, twenty-five paces away.

[Nullstep.]

He landed flat on the stable roof without a sound, holding the jar tight against his chest.

In the gateway, Tarquin was still holding out his empty hands. The man in white’s fingers closed on air a heartbeat late.

He did not shout, and he did not hurry. He opened the shutter of his lantern wide, and white light poured out across the lane, across the gate and up the walls, brighter than ten lamps. It went over the stable roof a hand’s width above Aren’s back. He lay still with his cheek on the tiles and let it pass.

"Where is it, Master Veil?" The man in white had a soft voice.

"He was here. He was right here, under my..." Tarquin’s voice cracked. "You saw him!"

"I saw a rag." The man in white closed his shutter. "His Grace will be disappointed."

[Nullstep (Lv. 2). Mastery: 44% → 47%.]

Aren went down off the back of the stable and away through the Third Ring gardens, and did not stop until he was two rings down, on a dark roof above a bakery, and lay there until its ovens warmed for the morning.

He set the jar between his knees.

’Fence’s Eye.’

No number came. He waited, and still nothing came, and then he understood it. Loose sand had a price. A jar under the Church’s own seal had none, because whoever tried to sell it would hang.

’Too hot to sell. In two lives I never stole anything like that.’

He looked at the iron cap. The lead around it carried a small stamped mark, a lantern. Below the cap, tied round the neck of the jar with white cord, was a letter, folded small and sealed in green wax with a mountain and a pill.

He broke the seal and read it by the light from the bakery chimney.

Your Grace. The sand is the bait. The thing that robbed me will come for it to the Fifth Ring fountain tonight. Whatever it is, it is yours. I ask only that it never speaks of my family. T. V.

He turned the letter over.

On the outside, in the same round, pleased hand: His Grace Cardinal Sallow.

’Two pages in his own hand now.’ Aren tucked it away beside the first. ’This man should never be allowed near paper.’