Chapter 32: The Seventh Point

On Wednesday, the Headmaster summoned every servant in the Academy to the kitchen courtyard.

There were forty of them, cooks and laundresses and gardeners and stable boys, the old man who mended the roofs, and the night porters, Aren among them, standing in a ragged line in the cold while a clerk read loudly from a sheet of paper.

"By order of the Headmaster, during the days of the Festival, no servant will enter the Great Hall without an escort from the Royal Knights. No servant will enter the arena below the hill without written permission. Any servant found in either place without it will be dismissed at once and severely punished." He folded the paper. "That is all."

The servants grumbled openly and went back to work, but Aren stayed in the courtyard a little longer. He had wanted to be in the Great Hall when the Archdeacon woke the Measure, and in the arena on the last night, and now he could not get near either one without being thrown straight out.

’Good! That means she actually read the note. She’s closing doors on everyone, and she has no idea that one of the people she’s locking out is the one who warned her.’

It didn’t feel good at all.

"They need a new nail."

Rook was sitting up stiffly in his narrow bed in the back room of the warehouse with fresh linen around his chest and more color in his face. Old Mag sat on a crate by the door, smoking, and Tiller leaned lazily against the wall cracking nuts. It was, Aren thought, the strangest council of war in the history of Highcrest.

"Seven nails in a ring," he went on. "That’s what the merchant on Lantern Street told me. When the ring is complete and the song is sung, the small wounds open into one big one in the center. I pulled one out, so the ring’s broken. But they’re painting the same marks under the Measure, so they haven’t given up. They’re going to fix the ring."

"With what?" Mag asked.

"A new nail, in the same place. The old dye house on the east bank. It has to be exactly the same place, because a ring only works if it’s a ring."

Rook looked at Tiller. "Well?"

Tiller cracked another nut. "I’ve been on your clerk for a week. Two nights ago he didn’t go to the wool merchant’s. He went to a smithy by the canal, an old place run by a man called Gorrick who does horseshoes mostly." He chewed slowly. "Except the forge was going at midnight, and the smoke was black."

"Black iron," Aren said.

"Could be. I didn’t go in. But last night two men went to the old dye house. Big ones, with a sack. They walked slowly around the ruins for an hour with a lantern, poking at the cellar, then left." Tiller looked at him. "The cellar’s still flooded and the Guild’s rope is still up. Nobody’s been down there since the Rift closed."

"They were measuring. Making absolutely sure the spot was still clear."

"So they’ll come back with their new nail and drive it into that cellar floor." Rook folded his long hands on the blanket. "When?"

"Before the last night of the Festival, when Vivienne fights in the arena. Everything they’ve done points at that night: the bet, the Measure, the cathedral fixed in time." Aren swallowed. "If the ring’s complete by then, they sing, and whatever opens, opens in the middle of ten thousand people."

The little room went quiet.

"The east bank is mine," Rook said at last, very softly. "That cellar is on my streets."

"You can’t fight for three more weeks."

"I don’t intend to. Neither do you, I think." Rook’s dark eyes settled on him. "You’re going to tell me how to stop them without fighting. That’s what you do."

Aren had been turning it over for two days, and he had come back every time to the same thing: the strongest weapon in any city was a piece of paper with the right seal on it.

"Who owns the dye house?"

Mag took the pipe out of her mouth. "Nobody, now. It burned last spring and the owner died in the fire. No family. The land went back to the city."

"Then buy it," Aren said.

Rook’s eyes narrowed slightly.

"Buy the land from the city, today if you can. It’s a burned ruin with a dead Rift under it. Nobody wants it, and the city will happily sell it for nothing just to get it off the books." He leaned forward. "Then it’s yours, legally. Put a fence around it and your own men on the gate in your colors, with a paper from the city clerk saying they’re guarding private property. If anyone comes over that fence at night with a sack and a hammer, they’re not fighting a gang anymore, they’re breaking the law. Your men call the guard, and the guard arrives with a Rank D sergeant and arrests whoever’s standing in the cellar."

Mag started laughing quietly around her pipe.

"And if the Choir sends someone the guard can’t handle?" Rook asked.

"Then it gets very loud very fast in the middle of the east bank, in front of the city guard, a week before the Festival. That’s the last thing they want." Aren sat back. "They’ve spent two months making sure nobody notices them. They opened a Rift in their own cathedral to hide. They pay in old gold through a wool merchant. They don’t want a fight, they want quiet. So we take the quiet away."

Rook stared at him silently, as if he were trying to see through his skull.

"You want me," he said slowly, "to stop a cult that can open Rifts in the capital with a deed of sale and a fence."

"Yes."

"Eleven years I’ve fought for every street on this river with my hands, and a boy with ink on his fingers tells me to buy it." He closed his eyes. "Tiller. Find the city clerk who handles land. Wake him up if you have to, and bring a lot of silver."

Tiller pushed off the wall and went.

[Rook. Hostility: 85% → 86%.]

’He hates being told what to do. He is also going to do it anyway. That’s what I like about him.’

Mira was alone in the training yard behind the Class D dormitory that evening, holding her orange dome against a bag of sand that swung at her on a rope.

Aren watched from the fence for a while before she noticed him. She had gotten better, much better. The dome was smaller and tighter now, wrapped closely around her like a coat of light, and when the sandbag slammed into it she didn’t stagger. She leaned in and pushed, exactly as he’d told her, and the bag flew back on its rope and spun.

"She keeps her left hand low," Mira said without turning around. "After every strike. I watched her train today. You were right."

"I usually am."

"You’re usually annoying." She let the dome fade and turned to face him, flushed and breathing hard. "Day two. Morning. You promised."

"I did."

She came and leaned on the fence beside him. The sun was going down over the city and the river had turned gold, and somewhere down there a man called Tiller was waking a city clerk with a bag of silver.

"Have you heard about Lady Ashgrave?" Mira asked.

He kept his face carefully still. "Heard what?"

"The Headmaster offered her an escort for the Festival, two Royal Knights to walk with her everywhere, and she said no. In front of everybody. Said she’d fight alone, the way an Ashgrave always fights." Mira shook her head. "Isn’t that stupid? Turning down knights!"

Aren thought about the words he’d read in the dark. Before the eyes of ten thousand, stand alone against the one who would end you. If anyone stood beside her, her Trial would fail, and she knew it.

"Yes," he said quietly. "Very stupid."

Rook bought the old dye house on Friday morning for eleven silver and a cup of wine with the city clerk, and by Friday evening there was a tall new fence of good timber around it. Two of Rook’s men in black coats stood proudly at the gate beside a paper nailed to the post, bearing the seal of the city of Highcrest: PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE GIVEN TO THE GUARD.

On Saturday night, Tiller watched from a rooftop across the street as two big men with a sack walked up the dead-end lane toward the dye house. They stopped when they saw the fence, stood looking at the men in black coats and the paper on the post for a long, uncomfortable minute, and then turned around and walked away. Tiller followed them. They did not go to the smithy or the wool merchant’s. They went straight to the High Cathedral, in through the small side door of the treasury, and didn’t come out again.

The Festival began at dawn on Monday.

Every bell in Highcrest rang at once, but not the deep, frantic bells of the Night of Bells. These were the bright, high bells of celebration, ringing from every tower in the city from the cathedral to the docks, and people poured happily out of their houses and filled the streets with flowers and music.

Aren stood at the back of the crowd in the main courtyard, where servants were grudgingly allowed, and watched the great doors of the hall swing open. Through them he could see the Measure at the front of the hall, black and silent in its silver frame, with six Royal Knights around it and a thousand candles burning along the walls.

Archdeacon Morvane walked slowly up the aisle, leaning on his staff, his white and gold shining in the candlelight. He climbed the platform steps and turned to face the hall, the nobles in their best clothes and the instructors in their robes and the students crowded at the back, and smiled his kind, tired smile. Behind him, at the side of the platform, Brother Ansel stood holding the silver alms box against his chest.

The Archdeacon raised his hands.

"Let the Light bless the three hundredth Festival of Highcrest," he said in his warm, honeyed voice. "And let the Measure show us, as it always has, what we truly are."

The black glass began to glow.