Chapter 137: The Auditor

A man on the fish docks was selling prints of Seren Veil with a pill in her hand, two coppers each, and her name was in every mouth in Port Myrrh.

Aren bought one, because it was terrible. The engraver had given her long golden curls and a smile.

"Burn that," Seren said, without looking up from her furnace, when he pinned it to the cellar wall.

He left it there. She didn’t burn it.

That evening he chalked a small ring on the lids of the lily jars he had filled, so that later nobody could say whose lily it was.

Seren saw the rings, and used the jars, and said nothing.

The first of the month had come and gone the day before the Assay. He had gone to the Kettle with two hundred crowns, stood in the line with the merchants and the ship’s mates, and drunk Auntie’s little brown cup with a grateful face, for a poison he had killed the day he met her. It was the cheapest cover in Port Myrrh.

Up the hill, the Veils had closed the counting house and posted guards on every door. Tarquin had not been seen since the Assay. The judges had sent the Blue Mortar’s pill to Ambar under the Bureau’s seal, and Osric Danner, who never guessed at a number if he could help it, had guessed that it would sell for more than forty thousand.

"Auntie is so pleased she’s knitting a second scarf," the Tally told Aren, on his floor above the silk warehouse. "And I have a new problem."

He pointed at the wall behind his table.

It was a blackboard as wide as a door, and on it, in chalk, in Danner’s fine hand, were written the House’s jobs for the month. A cargo of salt for Reyna. A bank vault on the Ninefold Quay for the Twins. A debt in Calderre for Teeth. A warehouse in the Sarkhane yards for Glass. Next to each job was a space for the name of the man who would do it, and the House’s price for him.

Next to the vault, the Twins had written Hush.

Next to the salt, Reyna had written Hush.

Next to the warehouse, Glass had written Hush and underlined it twice.

"Three Hands, three jobs, one man." Danner tapped the board. "And the price for you has gone up every day since the Veil box. The Twins have offered me a third of the vault. Reyna’s offered half the salt." He dusted chalk from his fingers. "Teeth hasn’t offered anything. He came up here last night and looked at that board for an hour, and went away without a word. I didn’t like it."

"What does Teeth want?"

"The Cellar." Danner folded his hands. "It was a little room that made False Glass, and he never cared about it. This morning it’s a room that can make a pill like that one, and Teeth would dearly like to be the one who decides who works in it. He told Auntie that Seren will bring the Veils down on all of us, and the Cellar needs a firm hand." He paused. "His."

"And Auntie?"

"Auntie said no. Teeth doesn’t hear that word often." The Tally turned back to his ledger. "Oh, and this came for you, from the Bureau."

It was a printed card with a blank filled in by hand.

The Bureau of Bands requests the attendance of the Servant who came on the northern boats, at the third bell today. S. Lorne.

The Bureau was a tall pale building on the square behind the Measure, as quiet inside as a library. A clerk in iron led him up three flights of stairs to a small room with one window, one table, two chairs and a measuring glass the size of a fist on a brass stand.

Sefa Lorne was already sitting behind the table.

"Sit down, please," she said. "You’re not under arrest." She opened her ledger. "I count things. That’s all I do. Put your hand on the glass, would you?"

He put his hand on the glass. It glowed, faint and bronze.

Small letters came up in it: Servant. Rank C.

She wrote it down, and didn’t look surprised.

"Thank you." She set the pen down and folded her hands. Up close she was plainer than she had looked in the hall, with a long, patient face and brown eyes that hardly ever blinked. "Three weeks ago you came through the Measure on the northern boats, as a Servant class at Rank C, and the scribe wrote you down as purchased. So I went looking for the purchase. Every licensed pill house in Solvane sends its ledgers to the Bureau at the end of the season. There are thirty-one houses in Solvane licensed to make Rank C pills, and in the last five years they sold to four hundred and twelve buyers. I checked every one." She looked up. "None of them was a Servant. None of them was from the north."

’Four hundred and twelve buyers, to find one Servant.’ He kept his hands still on the table.

"Perhaps my master bought them abroad."

"Perhaps." She didn’t write that down. "So I wrote to the Free Cities. The crystals at every Awakening in the world are made there, and the Free Cities keep a copy of every reading. The answer came yesterday. It cost the Bureau eleven crowns." She turned a page. "In ten years, the north has Awakened one Servant. A boy at the Academy in Highcrest, called Aren, with no family name. The copy came with a note from Highcrest: reported dead before the year was out."

The room was quiet. Out in the square, a cart went by.

"You arrived with one pack," Sefa Lorne went on, in the same even voice. "You rent nothing. You bought a cracked furnace for three hundred crowns from a pawnshop on the Ninefold Quay, and E-rank cores from a woman who sells beans."

"It was a good furnace."

"It was cracked," Sefa Lorne said. "For yourself, you’ve bought one cheap print, and not even a shirt or a second pair of boots. And yesterday you stood behind the cleanest Marrow ever made, and when it was read, the band on your shoulder went cold enough to frost." She tilted her head.

He said nothing. There was nothing safe to say.

"I’m not going to tell anyone," she said. "Not yet. Dead boys from the north aren’t a crime, and I can’t prove that you’re anything but a Servant who’s lucky with pills." She closed the ledger. "But I don’t like numbers I can’t explain, Mister Aren. I’d like to know what you are before I decide what to do about it."

"And if you never find out?" he asked.

"I always find out." She stood and went to the window. "One more thing, since you’re careful. If you ever go to Aurem, they’ll measure you at the Dry Gate. That glass is nine hundred years old, and Aurem keeps every line it has ever read." She didn’t turn round. "I’d rather find out myself than read it in Aurem’s ledgers."

He went down three flights of stairs and out into the hot square, and kept walking until the Bureau was out of sight. Then he leaned against a wall in an alley that smelled of oranges, and breathed out.

He pressed the back of his head against the warm stone. ’People who hate me make mistakes. She doesn’t hate me at all.’

The Veils had been shamed in front of the whole city, and the Veils were not a family that forgot. Sooner or later they would come for the woman who had done it, and for the room where she did it. So every night from then on, before he went down to the Cellar, he lay on the roof of the rope store across from the counting house for two hours, and watched who came and went.

On the third night, a little after midnight, a big man in a dark cloak came down the lane behind the counting house, alone, and knocked at the kitchen gate. He kept his hood up and his head down. Aren didn’t need to see his face. Iron Sense felt the silver band, the knives at his belt, and the iron points of his teeth.

The gate opened, and he went in.

He came out an hour later, and walked off toward the fish docks with his hands in his pockets, whistling softly.

At the corner a lamp caught his grin, iron and filed.

[Teeth. Hostility: 96%.]

Aren lay still on the tiles.

’He’s sold them a door. The Veils get their recipe back, in a cage. Teeth gets rid of me, since I’m down there every night, and tells Auntie he warned her. After that, whoever works in the Cellar works for him.’

He could go to Auntie tonight. He had no proof, and Teeth had nineteen years of collecting.

’Nobody gets into a House cellar without a House key. If they come in with Teeth’s, I’ll have his mark in my pocket, and he’ll know who has it.’

’And if I warn him off, the Veils just come another night, a better one. Better they come on the night they’ve chosen, and find out what’s waiting for them.’

He got up and went down to the fish docks, and through the iron-banded door, and sat down in the dark at the bottom of the stairs, with his back against the wall and the eel blade across his knees.

Since the Assay, Seren hadn’t gone back to her rented room. The Veils knew where it was, and it had a window and a thin door. Down here there was one set of stairs and one old grate, and him between them. He hadn’t told her why. She would only have called him goose and stayed anyway. She worked until she dropped. Behind him, at the far end of the cellar, she had fallen asleep at her bench over her notebook, with her cheek on her arm and the lamp burning down.

He didn’t wake her, and he didn’t sleep.