Chapter 133: Nothing To Give

Theo stood in a flattened yard at two in the morning with a woman twenty feet away who had just used his name.

He thought about it for a while.

’She walked four miles on the east road at night with a throat that colour, and sat on a stump for four hours... and she didn’t bring anybody.’

Then he left the mask exactly where it was.

Yura waited.

She had spent six years waiting on men to do things, and she stood there with her hands at her sides and let the silence run until it had answered for him. Then she made a small sound with no amusement in it at all.

"...Right."

The mask did not move.

Her voice was going badly, and she kept going anyway:

"You offered us a core on a field. A C-tier Warden Core, out of the Coffer, in your hand, to three women you had known for three days. Do you know how many people in this Tower have ever done that to me? It’s not a long list. It’s not a list."

Nothing.

Yura took a step toward him and stopped herself.

"You said the word alive to Sivvy in a pen. One word, through a mask, because you wouldn’t give her a whole sentence. And you walked out of that Hall this afternoon while I was standing up."

Theo held still and let her lay all of it on the table.

’None of it came out of my mouth... that’s all that matters.’

Then she stopped and looked at the beak, and her shoulders came down, and she went quiet and practical, which was much worse.

"You’re not going to say it."

"No."

Yura absorbed that.

"Why."

’Because if a man puts his hand round your throat again, you need to have nothing in you to give him.’

He didn’t say that either. It took him a moment to turn it into the version that would actually land, and then the mask told her:

"Because you’ve been asked things with a hand on your neck once already today, and you gave him nothing, and it cost you your voice for a fortnight. If you’d had something to give, you’d have given it."

Yura’s chin came up.

"..."

"So I’m not going to put anything in you. That’s all it is."

She sat back down on the stump, which he took for progress.

"Then what do you want."

"You. Working."

"For a man in a bird mask."

Theo didn’t hurry the next part:

"For the Sky’s Husband. Out loud, in that Hall, in front of the counter. You’re the Sky’s Husband’s woman on the ledgers and everybody in that building’s going to know it by Thursday, and that’s not me being generous, that’s the whole point. The standing sits on the name. Yours has been nothing for six years. Borrow mine."

Yura sat very still.

’She’s doing the arithmetic... good.’

"And what am I reading."

Theo turned round and looked at the flat quarter acre and the ring of grey stone standing in the middle of it.

"Whose land this is. There’s a gate on this ground the Hall hasn’t got on its register, and somebody pays a ground rent on four miles of the east road, and that goes in a book."

"...The book’s in the Keep."

"Yes."

"I can’t walk into the Keep."

The mask came back round.

"No. But the Hall keeps copies of anything it’s ever insured, and you’ve read nineteen months of that building with a man standing behind you. This time nobody’s standing behind you."

He told her the rest of it. She couldn’t read for a thing she didn’t know to look for.

The cart ruts. The crates and the tally board, received four thousand four hundred and eleven and dispatched nothing. The cores grown into the bodies of things in the water. Twenty-five feet of unfinished stone on its knees in a flooded vault, with iron cables holding it up and four thousand lights turning in its chest.

He gave her the number last.

"Twenty-six days."

Yura didn’t interrupt once, and at the end of it she asked the question he hadn’t thought of at all.

"Does it have to be that gate?"

’...What?’

She was looking at the ring, not at him:

"You said the Hall doesn’t have this one. How many other gates isn’t it on?"

Theo stood in a stockyard at two in the morning and had absolutely nothing to say to that.

He reached into the Coffer and came out with four smoky stones, slow lights turning inside them, and held them out on his palm.

Yura looked at them the way she had looked at the core on the field.

Before she could start, the mask offered:

"These came out of the bodies of things in that Dungeon, and the people who own them aren’t going to file a complaint, and there’s two hundred and ten more in the box. It’s a wage, and it’s the first week of it. Take it or read the ledgers hungry, and I’d rather you didn’t, because hungry people make mistakes in books."

"...That’s the least kind way anybody has ever given me anything."

"I know. I worked at it."

She took them.

She put them in her belt pouch, stood up and squared herself off, and for one second Theo could see what she must have looked like six years ago, before anybody had got hold of her.

"Where do I find you."

He had worked this out on the ride over, and it was the only part he had ready:

"You don’t. Third pillar inside the Hall doors, the one with the old guild nails in it. Anything you want me to know, you put it behind the nail on the left at the bottom. I’ll come past."

"That’s it?"

"That’s it, and don’t wait around to see who takes it."

He got nine paces.

"I’m not going to say it."

Theo stopped with his back to her.

Yura’s voice came across the flat ground with the gravel still in it:

"To Sivvy, or Bethe, or a clerk, or a man with his hand on my neck. Not because you told me to. Because I want the thing you’re doing to keep working."

’...’

He didn’t turn round:

"Thank you."

"I haven’t finished."

A pause, and then the rest of it, flatter:

"But I’m not going to forget it either. So when you finally want something off me that costs, ask properly. Don’t hand me stones and be rude about it."

Then she went up the east road on her own with four Warden cores in her pouch, and Theo stood in the flattened yard and watched her the whole way until the dark took her, which was about as long as it took him to feel completely outmanoeuvred.

He rode home at three, with the mask on until the last mile.

Alfred was on the gravel.

That was the part he would remember out of the whole night. Three o’clock, four miles of woods behind him, and a man in a coat at the bottom of the steps with a lamp, who had very obviously been standing there for some hours.

"My Lord."

"Alfred. Go to bed."

Alfred took the horse’s head without being asked.

"Presently, my Lord. A man came from the Castle at six and again at nine. He would not leave it with me the first time."

’Here we go.’

"And the second time?"

"The second time he left it with me."

It was waiting on a tray in the hall, set square to the edge, and Theo read it standing in his own doorway with cistern water still coming out of his boots.

Four lines and a seal.

The King’s household requested the attendance of the Champion at the Keep on the morning of the sixteenth. Aufrey of the Dungeon Management Hall would be present. Captain Hessa Dunn would be present.

The word in the third line was expedition.

’The sixteenth. That’s nine days, and it’s the same nine days... of course it is.’

He went up the stairs with the letter in one hand and the crow mask in the other, and stopped on the landing and looked at the two of them.

Then he put the mask in the bottom of the wardrobe under a dead duke’s coats, gone hard at the shoulders, and put the letter on the table by the bed where he would see it the second he woke.

’Twenty-six days for the thing in the water, nine to the Keep.’

He sat on the edge of the bed and got one boot off.

Somewhere on the other side of an aperture there was a basement with a machine in it, and the only thing in this Tower that could fix what lay in that basement grew on a tree nobody had found yet.

’So I’d better go to the expedition.’

He got the other boot off, went to sleep in his clothes, and slept eleven hours.