Chapter 56: Lantern Street

They slept through the day in the loft of the old rope shed behind the dye house.

It was where Pip used to sleep, before Aren sent him to Old Mag. There was still a pile of sacking in one corner and a cracked bowl with the dried end of an apple in it. The roof leaked and the walls let in the wind off the river, and after ninety-eight days in the Abyss, it felt like a palace.

Roderick lay in the darkest corner with his cloak of petals pulled over his head like a tent and slept as Aren had seen him sleep only once before, in the barred storeroom at the top of the hanging tower. Flat on his back, completely limp, as if the world had finally agreed to leave him alone for a few hours.

Aren barely slept. He lay on the sacking and listened to the lower city wake up around them. There were carts on the cobbles, gulls over the river, a woman shouting at a child to come in for bread, a man singing badly on his way to the docks. He had forgotten how loud the world was, and how much of it there was.

He lay there and listened to all of it, and didn’t want it to stop.

When the sun went down, he wrapped a long grey scarf around his face and pulled up the hood of a coat he had borrowed from a washing line on the way back from the healer house.

’I’ll return it. Probably. Eventually!’

[False Face: Concealment active.]

Lantern Street hadn’t changed. It was narrow and quiet, most of the houses empty with boarded windows, and halfway down stood the tall dark building that had been empty for twenty years.

There was light under its door.

It had not been there when he walked past two nights before he fell. He had checked. It was there now, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that it was there because he was.

He knocked once. Before his hand had left the wood, a small bell rang somewhere inside, and the soft, faraway voice spoke through the door.

"Please. Come in."

The shop was just as he remembered: the narrow room, the blue lamps that gave no heat, the shelves of breathing stones and whispering jars, and the mirror under its cloth. The air still smelled of cold metal and the deep sea. He knew that smell much better now than he had the first time.

The Faceless Merchant stood behind his long counter, very tall and very thin in his grey robe, his long pale hands resting motionless on the dark wood. His smooth face turned toward the door as Aren came in.

Then, slowly, it tilted to one side. It was the same gesture as before, but it lasted longer.

"You have been somewhere very deep."

Aren didn’t answer.

"I can smell it on you. The bottom. The places where things go when they are finished." The smooth face tilted the other way. "And you have brought something back with you. Something that sleeps along your ribs." A pause. "How interesting."

The cold in Aren’s side went watchful.

"I didn’t come to talk about that."

"No. Naturally not." The merchant’s hands stayed where they were. "What did you come to talk about?"

"A man. Grey eyes. He worked in the cathedral treasury and carried a silver box." Aren kept his voice level. "His name is Brother Ansel. He disappeared nine nights ago. I want to know where he went."

"Ah." The smooth face turned slightly, as if looking at something on a distant shelf. "That is a small question. Small questions are cheap." It turned back. "But they are not free."

Aren had thought about this all day on the sacking in the rope shed.

He had twenty Abyss Lilies, one of them short a petal. He had seen with his own eyes what this creature asked for one of them: a memory, and you didn’t get to know which. He knew what a lily was worth here, and he had no intention of trading one for a single answer.

He reached into the small leather pouch he had sewn inside his coat that afternoon and took out a single black petal, thin as paper and dark as the inside of a closed eye. He laid it on the counter.

The merchant went motionless.

It was different from the last time, when Aren had laid the black iron nail on this same counter. Quieter.

The long pale fingers lifted from the wood and moved toward the petal, slowly, and stopped just above it. Then, very carefully, they picked it up.

The merchant held the petal between two fingers in the blue light of his lamps and looked at it with his blank face.

"Do you know," he asked at last, very softly, "how many of these I have held, in all the years I have kept this shop?"

Aren waited.

"Many. Thousands, perhaps. People bring them to me from very deep places, and I sell them again for memories, and the memories are always worth more than the flowers." The fingers turned the petal slowly. "But this is the first one anyone has ever simply given me. Without being asked. Without knowing what it is worth to me." The smooth face lifted toward him. "You could have asked for much more."

"I only asked one question."

"Yes. You did."

He set the petal down in front of him, very gently, as if it might break.

"The man with grey eyes went out through the North Gate of this city seven nights ago, before dawn. He did not go alone. There were three with him, in grey, with heavy packs. They took the old road toward the iron mountains." A pause. "That is all you asked."

Aren stood there a moment.

The iron mountains. North, and the border, and beyond the border the Iron Empire, which would very much like to own Aldermere, as Crane had said in the basement on the morning after the Night of Bells.

’Of all the directions. It had to be the one with an army in it.’

"Thank you."

"Thank you," the merchant replied, and Aren had the strangest feeling that he meant it.

He had reached the door when the soft voice came again.

"Investor."

He stopped dead. He had never told the merchant that word. He had told it to exactly one creature in his life, at the bottom of a stair beneath the Academy.

He didn’t turn around.

"The thing along your ribs." The merchant’s voice was gentle. "Feed it well, in the cold places. It will be hungrier there than you expect."

Aren went out into the street. When he turned to look, there was only a wall.

Roderick was awake when he got back to the rope shed, sitting by the small round window in the loft with his cloak pulled around him, watching the street below.

"Well?"

"North. The iron mountains. He’s gone to the Empire."

Roderick took that in quietly. He didn’t ask what it meant, and Aren didn’t know yet either.

Aren sat down on the sacking across from him. Down in the lane a cat was going through the rubbish heaped against the dye house fence. Across the river, the bells of the east bank rang the hour.

"Did you go?" Aren asked. "Last night. While I was at the healer house."

Roderick didn’t pretend not to understand. He kept looking out of the window.

"Yes. She lives on Copper Street, by the old well. Same house. I climbed onto the roof across the lane." He paused. "She was sewing by the window. Same chair she always had. She looked old."

Aren waited.

"She was sewing a coat. A boy’s coat. Blue. I think it was mine, the one I left at home when I went to the Academy." His voice stayed perfectly flat. "She was mending the elbow. I tore it climbing the fence the summer before. She had been meaning to fix it for a year." He paused. "She was mending it for nobody, ghost."

"Did you go down?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Roderick turned his head, and his eyes were very tired.

"She already buried me once. There’s a stone. She goes every week. There were fresh flowers in a jar by her door, the kind you take to a grave." He looked back out of the window. "If I go down there looking like this, and then I go north with you, and something happens to me up there..." He shrugged. "I’m not making her do it twice."

Aren said nothing.

He thought about a girl with brown hair on the low wall of a training yard, a bruise coming up on her cheekbone, saying you’re always sorry. He thought about a letter he hadn’t written yet, and a promise to Nell he had already decided to break.

He had made exactly the same choice, for exactly the same reason. He had just been telling himself it was a different one.

’You hypocrite. You absolute hypocrite!’

"When we come back," he said at last, "you’ll go down."

The corner of Roderick’s mouth moved slightly. "So will you."

They sat by the little round window after that, two dead men in a loft over a lane, watching the lights of the city that had buried them.