Chapter 23: Lantern Street

The door opened by itself.

It was a shop, a long narrow room with a low ceiling, lit by small lamps that burned with a pale blue flame and gave off no heat at all. Shelves covered both walls from floor to ceiling, and every one of them was full. Some of the stones on them rose and fell slowly, as if they were breathing. Glass jars of something black and liquid slid against the glass as he walked past, like they were watching him. There were bones too big for any animal he knew, little carved boxes that hummed, and a mirror under a cloth that he had absolutely no intention of looking under. The air smelled of cold metal and deep ocean, the same smell that had come out of the Rift in the dye house.

At the far end, behind a long counter of dark wood, stood the merchant.

He was very tall and very thin, in a grey robe that fell to the floor, and his long pale hands lay perfectly still on the counter. Where his face should have been there was nothing. Not a mask, not a shadow, just smooth pale skin like porcelain before the painter had touched it, no eyes or nose or mouth, only a gentle curve like a statue someone had left unfinished.

"Welcome." The voice came from somewhere in the room, soft and polite and very far away. "Please. Look as long as you like."

Aren stayed warily in the doorway. He had stood in front of a lot of dangerous men across two lives, and none of them had made the skin on his arms go cold like this.

’Rule one of negotiating: never let them see you’re terrified. Rule two: I’m terrified!’

"You sell Abyss Salt."

"I sell many things." The smooth face tilted toward him. "Abyss Salt, yes. It comes from very deep places, and I find it easy to get there. Two gold crowns for one month."

Two. Mag charged twelve.

"And that?"

On the counter, under a small glass dome, stood a single black flower. Its petals were thin as paper and dark as the inside of a closed eye, and they stirred very slightly, as if a wind he couldn’t feel was blowing across them.

"An Abyss Lily. Rare. Very rare. I have only this one."

"How much?"

"It is not sold for gold." The pale hands didn’t move. "It is sold for a memory. One memory. I take it, and you keep everything else. You will not know which one is gone. Perhaps the taste of your mother’s bread. Perhaps the first time you saw the sea. Perhaps the face of someone you love." The smooth face tilted the other way. "Most people never notice. A few do."

Aren looked at the black flower. One Lily, the Headmaster had said, given at the right time, could push a mark back for years.

You will not know which one is gone.

In his old life he had read ten thousand contracts, and he had never once signed one where the other side got to choose what he was paying.

"No." He said it firmly.

"Of course." The merchant didn’t sound disappointed. He didn’t sound anything. "Then perhaps something else."

Aren took out the bundle wrapped in his spare shirt, unwrapped it slowly and deliberately, and laid the black stake on the counter between them.

In this room it hummed louder, and some of the things on the shelves seemed to answer it, a faint murmur of breathing stones and whispering jars. The merchant stopped moving entirely. It wasn’t the stillness he had shown before. It was a cat’s stillness when something moves in the grass, and along the walls the blue lamps dimmed a little, as if the whole room had drawn a breath.

That was when Aren knew he was holding something valuable. The merchant hadn’t said a word, and it was easily the most expensive silence he had ever heard.

"Where did you find this?" The merchant’s voice was very soft.

"In a Rift. Under a guardian."

"Ah." Long fingers lifted and hovered over the stake without touching it. "And you pulled it out."

"Yes."

"Brave. Or very foolish. They are often the same." The smooth face rose toward him. "What do you want for it?"

He had thought about this all the way down Lantern Street. "Abyss Salt. Enough for a year, delivered every month."

"Done."

"And the Lily."

"No." The voice didn’t change, but something in the room did. "The Lily is paid in memories and only memories. I do not break my own prices, not even for this."

Aren had expected that and asked anyway, because you always ask for more than you want. It makes the other side feel generous when they give you the rest.

"Then the salt, and information. What this is, who made it, and why."

The merchant laughed, a soft strange sound like wind through a broken window.

"You are a strange customer. Most people who come here want gold, or power, or the thing they want most." He folded his hands. "Very well. A year of salt and the truth. A fair trade."

He eyed the stake warily, as if it were a sleeping snake.

"It is called a Tide Nail. It is made by the Hollow Choir. You have heard that name, I think, because you do not look surprised." The smooth face tilted. "They forge seven at a time, somewhere very far below this city. Each one is driven into the floor of a Rift at its heart, under its guardian, and when the guardian dies and the Rift closes, the nail stays behind. Hidden, and waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"For the others." One long finger traced a slow circle in the air above the counter. "Seven nails in a ring. When the ring is complete and the right song is sung, the seven small wounds pull open together into one great one, in the center." The finger stopped. "That is how a Tide begins."

Aren thought about the map on the library wall, the ring of seven Rifts, and the hill in the middle with the Academy sitting on top of it. His mouth had gone completely dry.

"And this one?"

"This one is missing, which means the ring is broken, which means the Choir cannot sing. Not yet." The merchant paused. "They will know by now that one of their nails is gone, and they will be looking for whoever pulled it out."

"Will you sell it back to them?"

"I do not do business with the Choir." It was said very softly. "They do not pay well, and they are bad for my other customers." He finally laid one pale hand over the stake, and the humming stopped at once, like a hand closing over a bell. "It will be safe here. Safer than in your mattress."

Aren decided not to ask how he knew about the mattress.

"Your salt will come on the first day of each month, to the healer house on Salt Lane, I think, under your sister’s name." The smooth face tilted. "Good evening."

Out in Lantern Street the night was cold and very quiet. Aren turned around to look at the door, and it was gone. There was only a blank stone wall, cracked and furred with moss, as if no door had ever been there.

’Okay. That’s normal. That’s a perfectly normal thing for a shop to do!’

He stood there and added it up. He had just sold the only proof in the world that someone was trying to drown his city, and he hadn’t even gotten the Lily for it. He had traded it for a year of salt, enough to keep the mark on Nell’s arm from growing, enough to buy time and nothing more. He told himself it was a good trade, because the stake was dangerous to hold and the Choir would come looking for it, and now they wouldn’t find it under his bed.

All of that was true. It didn’t make him feel any better, and the whole way home he kept thinking about a black flower under a glass dome, moving in a wind he couldn’t feel.

Mira caught him in the corridor outside the Class D basement the next morning.

At first she didn’t say anything. She simply stood in front of him so he had to stop, and looked at him: at the dark circles under his eyes, at the way he held his left side when he thought nobody was watching, at the scabs on his knuckles that never quite healed before new ones arrived.

"I don’t see you anymore."

"I’m right here."

"No, you’re not." She wasn’t angry, and that was worse. "You’re never in the dormitory at night. You fall asleep in Crane’s class. You’ve got a new bruise every time I look at you, and there’s always some stupid story about stairs." She crossed her arms, not like she did before shouting, but like she did when she was cold. "You’re working too much, Aren. Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s eating you."

He smiled at her, the same smile he had given Vivienne in the east garden.

"It’s just the night porter job. Carrying crates. I’ll ask for fewer shifts, I promise."

She studied him silently, and then she nodded slowly, as if she believed him, though they both knew she didn’t.

"Okay. Okay." And she walked off down the corridor without looking back.

He watched her go, and then, without really knowing why, he opened the window at the edge of his vision.

[Investment Board.][Vivienne Ashgrave (Primary Anchor): 98%.][Rook (Anchor): 89%.][Celia Penrose: 41%.][Aldous Penrose: 33%.][Aldric Holt, Duke of Holt: 17%.][Fenwick Gale: 4%.][Gideon Crane: ??%.]

Mira’s name wasn’t on it. It never had been.

She didn’t hate him. She was the only person in his life who wanted nothing from him and gave him everything anyway, and he had just spent the morning lying to her face.