Chapter 135: Marrow. Mine.

"Tarquin Veil," Osric Danner said, when Aren came up the silk warehouse stairs that afternoon, "is a Veil pillmaster at twenty-nine, Rank C by pills, and the most promising man the Veils have produced in a generation. He came in on a Veil ship two days ago, with a judge’s seal for the Assay and orders to find out who robbed his family’s strongroom." The Tally turned a page of his ledger. "He’s staying at the Veil counting house on the east quay. Top floor."

"Front or back?"

"Back. He asked for the rooms with the best view of the fish docks."

"Of the fish docks," Aren said.

"Of the Smoke Cellar, yes. He knows where she is. He’s always known." Danner dipped his pen. "Four years ago she went into the Veil rite for Rank B, took the breakthrough pill from the patriarch’s own hand, and came out still a C. A month later the Veils cast her out, and his family still calls her the thief who tried to sell the Veil Gold. Every year before the Assay he sends a presser down here with a card. Come and see what your recipe can do in proper hands. She burns it, and the next morning the whole Veil quay has a good laugh. This year he came himself."

"And the Assay?"

"Five days from now, in the hall of the counting house. Every pill house in Port Myrrh brings its best Marrow, and a glass from the Bureau reads them in front of everyone. The cleanest three go to the auction at Ambar." Danner looked up from the page. "The Veil house has won it four years running. His pressers, her recipe."

Seren came back from the Kettle before dusk.

She came down the stairs fast, with her face set, and went straight to the middle bench and began to clear it with both arms. Jars, mortars, a week of False Glass, all of it went onto the shelves or the floor.

"Auntie owns an apothecary on the Ninefold Quay," she said, without looking at him. "The Blue Mortar. It’s licensed. It can enter the Assay, and it can send whoever it likes to make its pill." She slammed the last mortar down. "I’m going to make it, under a hood. Teeth told Auntie it would bring the Veils down on the whole House. Auntie said a pill at Ambar was worth more than Teeth’s opinion."

"What will you make?"

She turned and looked at him as if he were stupid.

"Veil Gold," she said. "It’s mine."

That night, Aren slept for an hour, and then he went up onto the roofs.

He wasn’t going to let her walk into that hall blind. A man who sent her a seat in the gallery every year wouldn’t come to the Assay with only a good pill. Aren wanted to know what else he was bringing.

The Veil counting house stood at the end of the east quay, a square house of green stone four floors high, with a walled courtyard in front and a strongroom in the cellar. Aren lay on the roof of a rope store across the lane and let Iron Sense open.

It was a busy house. Eight guards in the courtyard, with bronze bands and crossbows. Two more on each landing. The strongroom had three locks and a bar. On the top floor, at the back, there was a sword on a stand beside a bed, a gold ring that hadn’t moved in an hour, and a small iron-bound case on the desk by the window.

’Tarquin. And that’s where he keeps what matters, close to him.’

The courtyard was twenty paces across, with lamps at each corner and the guards walking it in pairs. He couldn’t cross it unseen. He could see the top floor windows from the roof, and the dark rooms behind them, but they were twenty-five paces away, and Nullstep went ten.

He lay on the cold tiles and looked at the gap.

It was like the gap on the ship. The air between him and the window was one empty place, and he could see all of it, its whole length, in the dark. Since the ship, he had only ever stepped into the near end of a gap. He had never tried to see the far end.

He looked at it until he could.

[Nullstep (Lv. 1 → Lv. 2). Range: 10 → 30 paces. The Host may carry one person.]

He stepped, and he was standing inside a dark room on the top floor of the Veil counting house, among sheeted chairs, with the courtyard lamps far below the window.

His knees went. He caught himself on a chair before it could scrape, and something warm ran over his lip. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and waited until the room stopped tilting.

’Thirty paces for the price of a nosebleed. I’ve paid worse rates.’

He tied the grey rag over his face.

The bedroom was two doors down. He left his boots under the sheeted chairs and went along the corridor in his stockings, past the head of the stairs, where two guards sat playing cards on the landing below, their backs to him, and stopped at the door. Iron Sense felt the lock: Veil steel, new springs. Fault Line showed him the weak point in the latch. It opened without a sound.

Tarquin Veil was asleep on his back with his mouth open. He was handsome, even asleep, with fair hair and a soft, well-fed face, and he snored a little.

Aren went to the desk.

The iron-bound case had a lock of Veil make, small and good. Fault Line found the one bright line in it, where the spring had been set a hair too tight, and the eel blade went in and turned. Inside lay a fat ledger bound in green leather, and beside it, folded small, a purse.

It was made of something like grey glass, soft as cloth, and a rich man had locked it up beside his accounts.

He slid the ledger into it. The ledger was as thick as his fist. The purse stayed flat, and weighed what it had weighed before, which was nothing.

’Well. If I’d owned one of these in my first life, I’d never have paid a customs man.’

He put the purse into his shirt.

Tarquin turned over in his sleep and said a woman’s name, and went on snoring.

Aren went back along the corridor, past the card players, and out over the courtyard.

On the roof of the rope store he tried the purse properly. He fed it loose tiles from the ridge until it would take no more, about a large chest’s worth, and it still weighed nothing in his hand. A beetle from the gutter would not go in at all. The mouth of the purse simply stayed shut for it. He took the tiles out again and put them back.

’Nothing living, then. A deep purse.’ He weighed it in his palm. ’The Deep Purse. It deserves a name.’

’I have no idea what a thing like this sells for. More than that counting house, if I had to guess.’

He read the ledger by the light of the harbor.

Most of it was Tarquin’s own work, recipes and costs and notes on his rivals, written in a neat, round, pleased hand. One name ran through all the cost pages: "Master Corvel, rite pills for the family, 400 a pill." The Veil Gold was there, copied out in full.

Pasted in behind it, on older and thinner paper, were the pages it had been copied from.

The writing was different: small and fast, leaning hard to the right, with notes crowding the margins and here and there a word crossed out so hard the pen had gone through. It was the writing from the notebook in the Smoke Cellar. At the top of the first page, in that hand, was a date six years old and a single line.

Marrow. Mine. S.V.

He turned the pages.

Near the back of the ledger, where Tarquin kept his private accounts, there was a short column of figures from four years ago. Wine. A new coat. A gift for someone called Lisette, forty crowns. And one line, in the same round, pleased hand.

Rite pill, S. To Master Corvel, 6,000.

’Fifteen times his price, out of Tarquin’s own pocket. Nobody pays fifteen times for a clean one.’

Aren sat still on the roof with that page under his thumb.

’Forty crowns for Lisette. Six thousand to the man who made her breakthrough pill.’

Four years ago, the dates in her notebook stopped. Four years ago, she failed to reach B. And there was a black thread of Rot in her core, thin as a hair, going into every pill she made.

’He paid Corvel to put it in her rite pill, and the patriarch handed it to her himself. Then Tarquin took her recipe, and called her the thief.’

’And he wrote it down. Men who’ve never been caught always do.’

He went through the rest of it once more. There was nothing about the Assay, no bribe for a judge, no name at the Bureau.

’So he plans to cheat with his hands, not his pen. Fine. A spare of everything.’

He tore out Seren’s pages carefully, along the paste, so that nothing of hers was left behind. Then he tore out the page with the Corvel line on it, folded it once, and put it into the Deep Purse by itself.

’Not yet. She’s not ready for that one. If I give it to her now, she’ll walk up to his house with a knife, and a Rank C with a stained core doesn’t win that fight.’

He put the rest of the ledger in the purse too. Recipes, costs, his notes on every rival house in Port Myrrh: a man’s whole shop in one book.

’Let him spend five days wondering who has it, and what they can read.’

He was in the Smoke Cellar before the fourth bell. He laid her pages on the middle bench, squared the edges, and went to the corner to grind.

Seren came down at the fifth bell with her white cloth.

She stopped at the foot of the stairs. Then she walked to the bench, and looked down at the pages without touching them, and Aren, grinding, watched her read the first line.

Marrow. Mine. S.V.

She put out one hand and touched the paper with her burned fingertips.

"Did anyone come down those stairs last night?" she asked. Her voice was perfectly flat.

"No."

"The door was locked."

"It’s always locked."

She looked at him then, at the key on the string round his neck. He went on grinding.

She held the pages against her chest with both arms and stood with her back to him. When she turned around, her face was as cold as ever, and her eyes were dry.

[Seren Veil. Hostility: 94% → 91%.]

"We have four days," she said.

The water boy came pounding down the stairs at noon, out of breath, his thin face shining.

"The Veils got robbed again! The counting house, last night, the top floor, and nobody saw anything!" He hung on the rail, panting. "Master Tarquin’s book is gone, his whole ledger, out of a locked case, and his guards were playing cards the whole time, and the crew’s all saying it was Hush!"

Seren looked up from her furnace.

"Who," she said, "is Hush?"

Kip opened his mouth, saw Aren behind her, and shut it again.

Aren went on grinding.

"No idea," he said.