Chapter 169 Thirteen Hands Wide

The tape tightened around his ribs and began to glow, a column of pale numbers climbing up its yellow length. The Collector walked along it with a stub of tailor's chalk, murmuring each figure as if reading a love letter.

"Chest, thirty-eight, shoulder, seventeen, all perfectly ordinary," the Collector said, chalking a mark across the plate.

"There are tailors in the Lower Town who charge less and ask fewer questions."

"None of them could measure what I am measuring now, dear boy, I mean the Seat beneath the ribs."

The numbers climbed the tape through ten, eleven and twelve, until the cloth began to smoke. Jingles stopped breathing on the bandolier, his gold crack flickering like a candle in a draft.

"Thirteen hands, the widest Seat anyone has ever carried, I thought Kell Rowan's seven were a marvel," the Collector breathed.

'Thirteen. Tink said my seat was the thirteenth, so this is not a coincidence.'

"That is a lot of hands for one boy, that is nearly all the hands," Jingles whispered.

Nilo drove his shoulders against the tape until the plate shrieked, Clangor's strength pouring into every strained muscle. The yellow cloth simply stretched, humming with patient arithmetic, another ten feet unrolling from the Collector's tidy sleeve.

"Do not strain, Mister Nilo, a strained Seat measures wider, I do hate to guess."

"Then I will stop pulling and start thinking," he said through his teeth.

The Collector lifted the hook from his apron, holding it beside the tape, where it looked suddenly very small. A thumb of brass against a tape that smoked at thirteen, a cup held up against the whole sea.

"The hook was cut for seven hands, so I must hem the world to fit the rest," the Collector said cheerfully.

Nilo pulled against the tape, "You cannot hem a world, you can barely hem a sleeve."

"Mister Lathe said as much about strings, look how well we are doing."

The thread above his left eye pulled tight, dragging his eyelid half shut as a colorless room flickered into view. In it stood a door and a voice that was not a mask, humming a note that fit no scale.

'That room again. The voice is humming along with the tape.'

[ WARDROBE ]

[Tab: THE THIRTEENTH]

[Status: stirring]

The Collector's stitched smile widened until the seams creaked, delighted as a child who found the last toy. He wrote the number on the plate, underlining it twice, then kissed the chalk like a gambler's die.

"Twenty years I cut small Seats for a very large garment, tonight it walked into my shop on its own two feet."

The tape ground against his ribs as his voice went low and level, "Take the tape off now, I will let you leave this building in one piece."

"Oh, I could never, Mister Nilo, a fitting ends only when the customer has finished—"

"I finished the fitting about a minute ago, you simply failed to notice."

Cold Read settled over him like a hand over a lantern flame, snuffing every joke he owned. He stopped swapping, because every swap made the numbers on the tape climb faster than the last.

Almost without moving his lips, he murmured to the rack, "Nobody change, every swap widens the Seat for him."

The rack went quiet in a row, Cadenza dropping to a whisper, Jingles swallowing his pun, Clangor holding his tongue.

The violet thread under his skin crept across his brow, tugging his head toward the hook like a leash. Tears kept falling from his chin, each drop hissing where it touched the tape, burning holes in the cloth.

Sorrow's voice came soft as rain on a window, "Be gentle with your rain, child, it is the one cloth in this room he cannot hem."

"If that tape touches the hook I am going to bite it, I have teeth, probably," Jingles whispered.

Zilch's voice cut in from the rack, flat as a dropped coin, "Numbers are bait, nothing more."

"A fitting is a duel of patience, young man, I have never yet lost one, I intend to keep my record intact."

The Pins gathered around the table in tidy rows, thimble heads tilted like an audience waiting for the overture. Somewhere beyond the hooks Bruno's hammering on the door rang out in time, a drumbeat for the Collector's lecture.

"Do sit, my darlings, the best part of a fitting is the arithmetic," the Collector told them.

"Those are the creepiest ushers in the history of ushers," Jingles squeaked.

A lectern rose from the floor beside the table, carrying a ledger as thick as a church door. Its pages flipped to a fresh line, the chalk writing NO NAME across it in tidy black letters.

"Kell Rowan, seven hands, Dessa Crane, four, you, dear boy, are the only entry I cannot close with a total," the Collector said.

"My name has four letters, you left out two, same as the clerk who wrote it first."

The ledger's pages riffled by themselves, showing hundreds of names, each followed by a number and a small brown stain. The oldest entries were dated the year the sky tore open, written in a hand that shook with real joy.

"Twenty years of names, every one of them begged you to stop."

"Oh, they begged beautifully, I keep the best of it sewn into my cuffs, dear boy," the Collector said fondly.

Along the hem of the apron the six cut masks stirred, their eyes tilting toward Nilo like flowers toward rain. A whisper rose from the golden wings, thin as paper, the voice of a champion who could not remember flying.

"Is someone there... please, I can feel someone standing in the light," the wings whispered.

"I'm here," he whispered back, "I am taking every one of you home."

"How touching, they always talk when a customer is near, it is the only bother of a fresh cut," the Collector said.

The Collector set the chalk down on the lectern, folding his gloved hands the way a priest folds them. He seemed, for one moment, almost sad, a craftsman admitting that the great work was never really his own.

"The Court does not want masks, dear boy, it wants room, you are the last empty room in the world."

"Tell your Court it can buy a house like everybody else," he answered.

A thunderclap of gold light burst from the corridor, throwing long reflections across every hook in the hall. Zinnia was still on her feet, the sight of it steadying his breathing by exactly a single beat.

"He has not looked at the apron since the tea, I counted that too," Calla breathed from the rafters.

'She is holding her end. So I hold mine, then I find the gap before he finishes the sum.'

The Collector untied his apron strings, laying the hundred brass hooks across his forearm like a waiter's towel. Six masks swung near the hem, each tagged with a name, one of them spread with golden wings.

"Six masks for one Seat, dear boy... I will even throw in Miss Crane's wings," the Collector said.

'Six masks hanging a lazy arm's length from a man who thinks I cannot move. Magpie, wake up.'