Chapter 128: Collateral

The noise went on for a long time.

It came up off the benches and off the lounge and off the men still standing at the postings board with slips in their hands, and somebody near the doors was shouting the name over and over the way men shout at a race, and two of the guild tables had gone over entirely and nobody was picking them up.

Three men in the second row went down on one knee.

Theo saw that through the eyeholes of a mask he had been given free by a woman with twine round her wrist, and it very nearly finished him.

’Get up. Oh gods, please get up. Why are you kneeling, I haven’t done anything to you—’

His thumb was going on the grip and he made it stop.

’Don’t move. Don’t wave. Don’t say thank you. The Crow Mask does not say thank you.’

He stood in the middle of it with four feet of steel hanging off his fist and did not move a muscle, and four hundred people took that for something it was not.

The woman attendant had come out from behind the counter.

She stopped about eleven feet away with her hands wrapped in her apron and she was not cheering. She was looking at the mask, and at the shoulders under it, and at the way the man stood, and her mouth was doing something that had not arrived yet.

’She served me this morning. She told me to leave the Tower, and she looked me in the face for a minute and a half.’

Theo turned his head away from her, slowly, because turning away fast would have been an answer.

Hostile was laughing again by then, which took some doing for a man on his knees with no hands.

"Sky’s Husband."

’Here it comes.’

"The King’s man." He rocked back on his heels and looked up at the beak with his teeth red to the gums. "The old ones’ champion. The boy off the Floor One board that Alderkeep has been on about since the spring, and he walks into a Hall in a ten-gold market mask."

The threads at the end of his arms had thickened. There were knuckles forming.

"Do you know what you’ve just done to yourself?"

Theo said nothing.

"They’ll want you for it," Hostile went on, delighted, filling the silence because nobody else would. "My people. Not to kill, don’t flatter yourself, you’re a name now and names cost money to bury. They’ll want to know what you take. Everybody takes something."

’He’s talking because he’s frightened and he doesn’t know he’s doing it. Let him. He’s already told me two things he shouldn’t have.’

Then Theo crouched down in front of him, and put Raindrop’s point in the boards, and asked his second question of the evening.

"Where is she."

Hostile stopped.

"...What?"

"The small one."

Something went across the man’s face that was very close to relief, because a question is a handle, and a handle is a thing you can hold.

"Ah." He got his shoulders square. "Now we’re doing business."

He did not get to do business.

Theo stood up, walked four paces to the nearest bench that was still the right way up, sat down on it with his forearms on his knees, and waited.

The Hall did not understand. The Hall went quiet again because it did not understand.

Hostile’s right hand finished at about the count of ninety. It came up out of the stump pale and new and slightly too small, the fingers working through their first flex like something being born, and the man let out a breath that had actual pleasure in it.

The crow mask got up off the bench.

It took the hand off at the wrist.

Then it sat back down.

Somebody in the lounge was sick. Bethe put her hand over Yura’s eyes and Yura took it away again and went on watching, because Yura had decided some time ago that she was going to see all of this.

The second one came back faster, which Theo had expected, and which was why he was sitting down.

He took that one too.

By the third the noise coming out of Hostile was not words any more, and the whole Dungeon Management Hall stood in a silence with a completely different texture to it, and not one of the four hundred people in that building was cheering.

’I am going to think about this for the rest of my life. I know that, and I’m doing it anyway.’

Ninety seconds a hand, and he had all evening, and the man on the floor had two hundred and forty Stamina and nothing left to spend it on.

The fourth time, Hostile talked before the fingers had finished.

"The stockyard." It came out of him fast and flat and without any performance left in it at all. "East road, past the tanners, the long shed with the green doors. She’s alive. She’s been alive the whole time and she’ll go on being alive as long as I walk out of this building on my own two feet, and if I don’t, one of the nine cuts her throat before the bells and you will not find which one."

Theo sat on the bench and did not move.

’And there it is. That’s why he came in on his own, and why he came in shouting. He was never in any danger in this room, because the danger was somewhere else the whole time.’

’...He’s better at this than Donzo ever was.’

He got up, and put Raindrop back through his belt, and stood aside out of the lane.

The Hall made a noise at that. Somebody near the doors shouted something ugly, and a man at the guild tables said let him go in the flat voice of a person who had worked out the arithmetic four seconds after Theo had.

Hostile came up off his knees in stages.

He did it without hands and it took him a while, and nobody helped him, and when he was upright he stood there testing a wrist that was four minutes old and looking at the crow mask with his head on one side.

"You could have done that to me all night."

Theo said nothing.

"You were going to."

Nothing.

"...Hm." Hostile’s mouth moved into something that was not a smile and was not far off one. "You’re not a guild man. Guild men bargain. Association men arrest. You sat down."

He started for the doors, and the crowd came apart in front of him again, and he was halfway there when he stopped and turned round.

He was still doing arithmetic. Theo could see him doing it, and knew exactly which sum it was, and could not do one single thing about it.

He said it slowly, tasting where the pieces went.

"Sky’s Husband. Champion of Alderkeep. King Ordwin gave you Duke Harry’s old place, didn’t he. Out past the Alderkind."

’...’

"Eleven miles of road," Hostile went on pleasantly, "and a gate, and a staff off the Castle roster. That’s a fine house, Champion. You can put a mask on a face. You can’t put one on a house."

Then he went out into the square with his new hands hanging at his sides.

The Hall came back to life around Theo the way water comes back over a stone.

The bearded attendant was in front of him before he had moved, with a ledger open and a quill he had not inked, and he was bowing while he talked, which made the bowing look like a stutter.

"Champion. Champion, forgive me, the counter is yours whenever you want it, any Tier, any day, I’ll take the entry myself and I’ll take it now if you—"

’Any Tier. This morning that woman wouldn’t give me a wooden chit for an F.’

"—and the Hall would like it recorded that the Hall did not know, Champion. About Varrdia. About any of it. If you would only say that when you speak to His Majesty—"

’...There it is. That’s what all the kneeling is for.’

Theo looked past him.

Yura was on her feet by the wall with Bethe holding her up, and her throat had come out in four dark marks and one of her eyes had gone red all the way across. She was looking straight at the mask. She had been looking straight at it since the shadow came up off the boards.

She took one step toward him.

And the man in the crow mask turned round and walked out of the Dungeon Management Hall without a word to anybody, because the Crow Mask had never met her.

Outside, the square was ordinary.

Carts with their brakes set. A boy going past with a sack of something on his shoulder. The pigeon back on the Hall’s lintel where it had been at noon.

Theo got thirty yards up the shady side and into the mouth of an alley, and put his back against the wall, and breathed out for what felt like the first time in an hour.

Then he took the mask off and looked at it.

Cheap wood. Uneven black paint on the beak. Ten gold he had never paid, off a stall run by a woman who had wanted him gone four seconds before she wanted to give him things.

’A mask on a face.’

And nineteen people eleven miles up that road who would go to sleep in his house tonight, and a butler who stood on the gravel every morning and watched him all the way to the gate.

’Yes. Alright.’

He put it in his coat.

’Right. The stockyard first. Then Alfred.’