Chapter 156: Thirteen

For a breath nothing happened. Then the grey under the pill began to move.

It turned slowly under the Treasurer’s palms, round and round the little dark bead. A number came up beside it in thin pale letters.

"Forty."

The letters faded. The grey kept turning.

"Thirty-five."

Lucan’s clerk wrote both down in the writing case. Lucan stood in front of the glass with his hand still half open, waiting for his change.

"Thirty."

Every Drum ever sold in Aurem would have stopped before the next number. The glass went on turning.

Coin leaned toward the hood without taking his eyes off the front of the hall. "It leans until it finds the dirt, my friend. A cheap pill gives in at once. The Veils’ best held him three breaths." He folded his hands on his clean apron. "And he can’t lift his hands until it’s done, or the glass cracks, and it’s older than the palace. Ten crowns says yours holds him twenty."

"Twenty-five." The old man’s voice had gone thinner.

Aren watched the ink-stained fingers on the black iron. The knuckles were white now. With every number the Treasurer breathed out longer, and his shoulders sank lower over the frame.

"Twenty-two."

Two seats down, Tarquin was holding his pencil in both fists.

"Twenty."

The pencil broke.

’It stops at thirteen, near the clean end of seven. Whatever Tarquin brought for lot two, it sells cheap after this.’

"Eighteen."

The whole hall was counting with the old man now, under its breath.

"Sixteen."

That one came slowly. A sound went down the hall, half a cheer and half a groan. Lucan turned his head and smiled over his shoulder at the bench: at the bride, and at the cousin who had stopped at four hundred thousand.

Aren had kept Iron Sense open since the white stairs. A room full of steel made him itch. It ran along both walls, as it had all afternoon, and found what it always found. Forty swords at forty hips, one every five paces. The captain’s long blade at the Treasurer’s elbow.

Then it found the hands.

At thirty, nobody had been touching a sword. Now every grip had a hand on it. Iron Sense felt forty hands close on forty sword grips while the hall watched the glass. The captain’s hand had closed on his.

Beside Aren, Coin untied his clean apron and folded it in four.

"Get under the table, my friend." He said it kindly, in the voice he used for a man whose debt he was about to forgive. "You’re worth a great deal more alive."

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

"Fifteen."

Coin laid the folded apron on the alchemists’ table, in the empty place where Hush’s box had stood.

The cloth touched the wood.

Forty swords came out at once, down both walls, in one long ringing sound from the windows to the door.

The captain was fastest. His blade was at his hip, and then it was in Lucan. In through the back, out under the ribs, right in front of the Treasurer’s glass.

Lucan looked down at it.

His hand was still open toward the glass. His mouth opened too, as if he meant to argue the price. The captain pulled the blade out. The prince of House Sarkhane folded down onto the white floor in front of the Treasurer’s desk. His blood spread out across the Sarkhane colors.

The Treasurer didn’t move. His hands stayed flat on the iron frame. He bent over the glass with the prince’s blood around his feet, and read the next number for the Emperor’s book.

"Fourteen."

Lucan’s clerk dropped the writing case. The nearest of Coin’s guards cut him down before he could turn. The bank note with the large careful figures slid across the floor into the blood.

’How high does this Drum go?’ Coin had asked that over his soup, the night he offered to pay the Bureau’s ten thousand. Lot one, because the House always sells first. A reading after the hammer, with the Treasurer’s hands stuck on the frame and the richest grandson standing in front of him.

’He bought the time it takes to read it, and I pressed it as low as it would go. That part is mine.’

A long, sick heat went through him. He let it go.

The alchemists’ table went over.

Six alchemists dived under it. Boxes went everywhere. Tarquin went under last, with his lot two clutched to his chest in both arms.

"It’s lot two," he said to nobody, in a high voice. "Lot two hasn’t been sold!"

Coin’s guards were already moving. They moved like men who had walked this hall in their heads a hundred times.

Two of them ran the length of the floor to the great door. They swung it shut behind the rack of swords. The door clerk with the Emperor’s seal round his neck lay dead under the rack.

Eight more ran up the hall toward the Treasurer, who still had his hands on the glass. Iron Sense found shackles swinging on their belts.

Inside the shut door, on the clerks’ bench, a bald man in a porter’s brown coat sat peeling an orange with his thumbnail. He had sat there all afternoon, and nobody had looked at him twice. Nobody ran at him now. Nobody ran past him. White frost was spreading across the floor from his boots. It had already reached the rack of swords.

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

The cold touched the back of Aren’s neck from a hundred paces away. He had felt it once before, on the Undervault gallery, while he walked last.

’He carries no iron at all. Iron Sense walked straight past him all afternoon.’

"Thirteen."

Varek came up off the bench, huge and fast.

"My sword!" He roared it down the hall, and the painted ceiling threw it back. His sword was in the rack at the far end of the hall, behind a shut door and two of Coin’s guards.

Three more guards came at him from the wall behind the bench. He caught the first by the helm and crushed it, lifted him off the floor and threw him into the other two. All three went down in a heap of grey plate. Varek stepped over them and started for the door with his bare hands.

Coin walked out onto the floor in front of him, rolling up his sleeves.

"Sit down, Highness." He sounded pleased. "You owe me money."

Varek stopped and looked down at him, at the bare forearms and the soup stains. "The cook? Is this your doing, cook?"

"Mine and the Emperor’s, Highness. Only one of us is collecting today."

At the end of the bench, Theo was on his feet, empty-handed. His mother’s knife was in the rack behind the shut door. Two guards came at him. He grabbed the end of the bench and swung it badly, but they had to go round it.

Cardinal Sallow had not moved from the wall behind the bench. He stood in his white and gold with his brass lantern on its chain. He put one hand on the shutter, and waited.

Vivienne had been moving since the first sword cleared its sheath.

She came off the bench with a crescent of white light in each hand. She threw the first before her feet touched the floor. It hit the nearest guard at the elbow, and his arm and his sword fell away together. The second crescent went through the next man’s helm, at the eye slit. He stood for a moment. Then his knees buckled.

Luna sprang up off the princes’ boots and took a third guard by the throat. Her teeth glowed with moonlight. Where they closed, the grey plate smoked.

Behind the bench, where the bride’s maid had stood all afternoon, there was nobody at all.

Vivienne did not stay by the bench. She walked forward onto the open floor, away from the wall and the wood, with fresh light already rising off both palms.

Aren lay flat behind the fallen table with the alchemists, among the spilled boxes.

His hands were empty. His blade lay in the Deep Purse, with Nil’s plate folded under it. Iron Sense counted thirty-odd of Coin’s guards still on their feet. Every one of them had been told who to kill.

’If she dies on this floor, the wheel goes with her. The key goes to whoever holds this floor when it’s over, and Mira’s jar stays on a shelf across the sea, with my name in it, for good.’

At the front of the hall, blood still dripped from the captain’s blade.

He looked down the hall once. The giant and the cook. The boy with the bench. The Cardinal with his hand on his lantern. Then he stepped over Lucan, past the eight guards running up to the Treasurer, and came down the white floor at a walk.

He did not hurry. The gold band on his shoulder caught the light from the tall windows. His long blade hung low in his right hand, the tip a finger above the floor.

Luna let go of the dead man’s throat and turned to face him, lips back from her teeth.

Vivienne stood in the middle of the long hall with two dead men at her feet and a crescent in each hand, and watched him come.