Chapter 149: Three of Me

Master Corvel didn’t even jump when the ghost climbed in through his furnace-room window.

He was an old man in a shirt with burned cuffs, alone behind the Veil great house. He looked at the grey rag over Aren’s face, then at the white jar Aren set on his bench. His eyes stayed on the Church’s lantern, stamped in the lead of its cap.

[Unknown. Rank C. Hostility: 30%.]

Aren put a note beside the jar, printed with his left hand.

MASTER CORVEL. YOUR PRICE. IN SPRING, WHEN YOU ARE ASKED, YOU WILL SAY WHO PAID FOR THE RITE PILL, AND WHO KNEW. OR THE PAGE WITH YOUR NAME ON IT GOES TO THE BUREAU.

"I only bow to sand," the old man said.

He put two fingers into the jar. "Thirty years I’ve bowed for a pinch of this. It’s short a pinch."

Aren shrugged. The missing pinch was six rings down, in a twist of paper on Seren’s bench.

Corvel poured the sand into a clay salt crock, to the last grain. Then he dropped the cap into his furnace, watched the lantern run off the lead, and hummed.

[Corvel. Hostility: 30% → 14%.]

"Spring, then," he said, and went back to his recipe.

The squire, his second copy, was already waiting at the Undervault gate when Nil came down the stairs at the second bell.

It stood by the wall in a closed helm off a dead man’s rack, with a hired man’s bronze band on its left shoulder. Coin had sold both without asking who they were for, because asking cost extra.

Inside Coin’s plate, Aren had only a third of everything he had. The other two thirds were simply gone, and he hated it.

’One of me at Seren’s bench as the goose. One here, in a dead man’s helm, with my old eel blade. And me, at a third.’ He flexed his hands. ’Three of me, and together we make one tired man. I can’t miss once tonight.’

Corran looked at the two grey shapes and sighed. "Tin brought his own squire? Wonderful!"

The warden in white checked the squire’s band against his book and opened the gate. Wade came through last, limping and grinning about it.

"Stitched," he told Nil. "Still carries. Want me to carry you?"

At the first junction, somebody had chalked a new line on the Bureau board since noon. South Two, B.

Corran didn’t even slow down. "West Nine again. It’s a C, it’s warm, and it’s never killed anybody I liked. Nobody on my crew goes into a B on a stitched leg."

Nil reached past him and tapped South Two with one steel finger.

’Something down here left a cold hand on my back. I want to be a lot stronger before it comes back. A B core can turn my ring. If it’s bad, I come back up.’

Corran stared at the finger. "Then go without us, tin. A B pays ten times what a C pays, because it eats crews. Be at the gate by the fourth bell, or I tell Coin to stop paying you." He turned away. "West Nine! Lamps up!"

The crew went left. Nil and the squire went right, alone, with one lamp between them.

’Nobody to carry this time.’

South Two was a crack in the gallery floor and a cave of black glass below it, full of glass crabs with cores the size of peas. With nobody to guard and nobody to wait for, it went quickly. In an hour they had two full sacks, the squire had crab spit on one gauntlet, and Aren was starting to enjoy himself.

They climbed back out into the white gallery, and the lamp began to die.

The flame shrank to a blue bead. Grey dust was falling through its light, and where it landed on the squire’s wrist, between glove and plate, the skin blistered.

Above them, in the dark of the vault, a light came on.

It was a dull orange glow, the color of coals. It came down the gallery wall on grey wings that filled the passage from side to side. Between the wings hung a fat body of hard plates, glowing from inside.

[Ash Moth. Rank B.]

It went straight past both of them to the lamp.

’It hunts heat.’ Aren pressed himself flat against the wall. ’Coin’s plate lets nothing out of me. The squire’s iron leaks a little, but next to a lamp, we’re two more rocks.’

The moth folded its wings round the lamp, and the light went out inside them. Then it hung there in the dark, glowing, and turned slowly, looking for something else to eat.

Nullstep needed a place he could see, and the only thing he could see was the moth.

’Fault Line.’

The plates lit up faintly. One line was bright, where the right wing joined the body, and it only showed when the wing was fully open.

’So it has to open its wings. Then I’ll give it something worth opening them for.’

He pulled the oil flask off his belt, emptied it over the second sack and struck a spark into it. ’Shells burn. Cores don’t, I hope.’

The fire went up, and the moth dropped onto it with its wings spread wide.

[Nullstep.]

The squire stepped first. It landed on the moth’s back, between the wings, and wrapped both arms round the root of the right wing, pulling it open. The dust under the wing was burning hot, and smoke came off the squire’s gloves.

The moth couldn’t feel anything warm holding it, and that confused it. It rolled hard against the gallery wall to scrape the weight off, and the squire went between plate and stone. Something in the squire’s side broke with a small dry sound. The squire held on.

The wing stayed open, and the line under it blazed.

[Nullstep.]

Nil was under the wing, in the heat. He put everything his third had into the Well iron, and the blade grew heavy and stayed dark. He cut once along the line.

[New Moon.]

For one heartbeat the joint had nothing in it that could stop steel. The wing came away in the squire’s arms, and the moth fell sideways off the wall with one wing beating, spilling orange light across the floor.

Then it ran.

It went down the gallery on its legs, dragging the stump, toward the cold. Nil went after it and left the squire sitting by the burning shells, holding its side.

The moth stopped at the mouth of the deep gallery, where the walls went white with frost. It stood at the frost line, trembling, and didn’t cross it. Then it turned back toward the fire, and the stump came round to him.

He cut along what was left of the line. It came apart like the Bell-Eater had, and the glow went out of the plates.

Nil stood in the dark with the frost a pace in front of his boots and waited.

The fire behind him flared, and its light went past the dead moth into the deep gallery. One pace past the frost line, on the white stone, there was a hand.

It was a print of frost, narrow, with long thin fingers, pressed flat. The lines of the palm were sharp, and the frost around it was soft and old. Somebody had pressed it there tonight, from the deep side.

Iron Sense went a hundred paces down the deep gallery. No iron, no blood bound to iron. Whatever had made that hand carried nothing at all. They were the same long fingers that had pressed into his back plate. His mouth went dry. He walked back without turning round, and he didn’t hurry, because hurrying was what prey did.

’That moth was big enough to have hunted this side a long time, and it never went in there.’ He looked down at it. ’So what made that hand? Something that eats the things that eat crews.’

He opened the moth himself and came out with a core the size of a child’s fist, white-gold and warm.

’Fence’s Eye.’

The number came up: ninety thousand crowns. More than twenty crab nights, in one lump.

’Sell it, and I buy cores for a month. Eat it, and the month is tonight. Or give it away, and let the wheel do the eating.’

Nil and the squire were sitting by the gate with two sacks, one of them scorched black, when Corran’s crew came up the last stairs. The squire sat crooked, holding its side. Corran looked at the burns on its gloves, then at the weight in Nil’s belt pouch, and didn’t ask.

"Came up first from a B section," Wade said. "Tin, you’re mad."

Nil nodded.

The copies would end when he slept. He lay down on the workshop roof and gave Sleepless Watch its one hour, with the squire sitting against a chimney, its arms wrapped round its side.

He woke with three nights in his head.

The goose’s night came first: every press at Seren’s bench, in his own hands. Seren’s notebook open at the Marrow, and on the next page a recipe headed LEASH that she had crossed out twice. The pinch of Well sand going into the pot, cold. The flare, clean and pale.

[Marrow Pill. Result: Refined. Impurities: 19%.]

Grade six. Lucan’s steward had just ordered a Marrow from Seren for the bride, and Aren meant her to swallow this one instead.

’If she grows on his pill, the wheel spins for nobody. If she grows on mine, it spins for me.’

Then two blisters on his right palm, where the goose had grabbed a hot pot bare-handed, like a man who’d watched Seren do it all night.

’Next time, use a cloth, idiot.’

Then the squire’s night came home all at once, and he rolled onto his side on the tiles and could barely breathe. The cracked rib had been the squire’s. Now it was his, on the left, with the memory of holding a wing open with his face in a fire. The burns came home too, down both forearms, and closed while he lay there. The rib didn’t.

[Nullstep (Lv. 2). Mastery: 47% → 50%.]

’What they learn and what they break, both come home.’ He breathed short and shallow until the tiles stopped moving. ’Nobody said which one hits first.’

He went stiffly down into the workshop. Seren was asleep in her boots. On the bench lay the clean Marrow, folded in white paper. In his coat was the warden’s paper for the crab cores: four thousand one hundred crowns.

He set the cracked furnace going and pressed a Wheel Pill around the B core. Plain salt, the lily, and at the end the last grains of sand dust from the goose’s twist of paper. Not enough to matter, but a B core wants every grain. Then he pressed with nothing, and kept pressing, because the core was heavy and wanted to stay what it was.

[Wheel Pill. Result: Refined. Impurities: 22%.]

’If I swallow it, I move one turn, and twenty-two percent of it stays in my ring as impurities, for life. If Rook swallows it, he moves, the wheel spins, and what comes back to me is clean.’

He carried it back up onto the roof and sat with his hand on his ribs. Rook came over the ridge at first light, bottle first.

"Your brothers are gone, stone-seller."

"They went home."

"Good." Rook sat down and pulled the cork. "They drank my bottle."

Aren held out the pill.

Rook looked at it, then at Aren’s hand pressed flat to his ribs. "The last one of these cost you a night. This one cost you a rib." He sniffed it. "That’s a B core. You could have sold it and bought a house."

"I’d rather have the interest."

Rook swallowed it dry, the same as last time, and lay back on the tiles with his book on his chest.

[Investment recorded.]

[Type: Risk taken on behalf of Anchor.]

For an hour nothing happened. Then the old fence went grey around the mouth and gripped the edge of the roof, and Aren watched an old man’s ring pull a B core down into itself, one hard turn at a time.

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

[Mirror Return triggered.]

The little wheel spun once round, slowed, and settled in the wide band of x10.

[Result: x10.]

[Return: the Anchor’s progress, x10.]

[Rank C: Core Formed → Core Turning.]

It hit his own ring like a hammer on a bell. The void in his chest stopped grinding and started turning by itself, slow and smooth, and he lay flat with his teeth shut and counted chimneys until it stopped hurting.

’Turning.’ He felt it go round. ’His ring has a color, so a core that heavy can shut it. Mine has none, so I want a Seal Pill with zero impurities. Nobody has ever pressed one.’

’And I just gave a family’s whole season of Well sand to an old man in a salt crock.’ He winced. ’A witness for spring is worth more than sand I can’t sell. Probably.’

Rook sat up, looked at his hands for a while, and opened his book again.

"Next time," he said, "bring two."