Chapter 8 Measurement

The young woman with the ink on her fingers held her handkerchief to her nose for about a minute without saying anything, and looked at me over it the whole time.

It was a bit unsettling. She had grey eyes, very clear, the kind that look at a thing like they're adding it up, and she didn't blink much. Everybody else at the table had gone back to their porridge. Widow Ostry hadn't. She was standing at the end of the table with her arms folded, watching the handkerchief like it was going to drip on her cloth.

"Head back," I said. "Pinch the bridge. Grandad used to say cold water on the back of the neck, but I don't know if that's true."

The young woman lowered the handkerchief. The bleeding had stopped.

"Mister Marsh," she said. "My name is Hesper Quill. I'm the Senior Auditor at the Adventurers' Guild."

"Oh," I said. "Morning."

"I've been asked to review your registration. There are some irregularities in the readings. I'd like you to come to the Guild at the eighth bell for a re-measurement."

My stomach dropped a bit. "Is it about the sewer? Was that the wrong ear?"

"It was not the wrong ear."

"Do I owe something? For the stone?"

Something went across her face, too quick to catch. "No. It's routine."

"No business at my table, Miss Quill," said Widow Ostry. "You know the rules."

"Yes, Mrs Ostry. Sorry, Mrs Ostry." Miss Quill picked up her book and stood. At the door she turned round. "Eighth bell, Mister Marsh. North stair, bottom floor. Please don't be late."

"I won't," I said.

She went out. The two clerks looked at each other. The old lady with the horn said, "What? What did she say?" and nobody told her.

* * *

The bottom floor of the Guild was under the ground, down a long stone stair that went round and round. It was cool and dry down there, and quiet, with lamps in iron brackets and a smell of oil and old paper. Miss Quill was waiting outside a heavy door with a slate in one hand and three pens behind her ear. Next to her stood the grey-haired woman from the stone, the one with the chamois.

"Maud Kestrel is attending as witness," said Miss Quill. "For the record."

"Morning, Maud," I said.

Maud looked surprised, then pleased, then went back to looking like a gravel path.

The room behind the door was long and low, and full of equipment I'd never seen the like of. There was a bench along one wall with three small green stones sitting on it in wooden cradles, each about the size of a loaf. There was a chain coming up out of an iron ring set into the floor, with a big brass dial on the end of it. There was a measuring rod, and a set of scales for small things, and at the far end, a big wooden platform with a post at one side and another brass dial on top, the kind of scale you'd weigh a bullock on.

"Tally glasses," said Miss Quill, pointing at the green stones. "Portable Ledger Stones. Smaller than the hall stone, but they read the same Tally. Hand flat on the first one, please."

I put my hand on it. It was cold, the same creek-water cold as the big one.

The glass lit up. The same words came up as before, smaller. Tobin Marsh. Level 1. Farmhand. Then the ant writing underneath, crawling.

Then the light went white.

It went white from the middle out, the way milk spreads in tea, and there was a high thin sound like a wet finger going round the rim of a glass. Then the stone burst. Not loud. It just stopped being a stone and started being a heap of green dust in the cradle, still faintly glowing, with a little puff of it going up into the air.

I took my hand away. There was dust on my palm. I wiped it on my trousers.

"Sorry," I said.

Miss Quill was writing. "Second one, please."

"Are you sure?"

"Please."

I put my hand on the second one. It went white faster this time, and burst before the words had even finished coming up. Maud stepped back and said, "Bloody hell," under her breath, then looked guilty about it.

I didn't move towards the third one. I was looking at the heaps of dust.

"They're the cheap ones, are they?" I said. "The travelling ones. Not as strong as the big stone."

"They cost forty gold each," said Miss Quill.

My knees went a bit weak.

Forty gold. Eighty gold, now, in two heaps of dust. Eighty gold was the farm. Eighty gold was the best part of half of everything I had to find by first frost, and I'd turned it into sand in less time than it takes to boil an egg.

"Miss Quill," I said. "I can't pay for those. Not now. I can pay you back, but it'll take..."

"Guild property damaged during Guild testing is a Guild expense," she said, without looking up. "It's in the regulations. Section nine."

The chapter's published home belongs to its author, while this display was taken from that page without permission.

I let my breath out slow. "You're sure?"

"I wrote section nine," said Miss Quill.

I believed her. She looked like a woman who wrote sections.

She looked at the third stone for a long moment. Then she picked it up, cradle and all, and put it on a high shelf on the other side of the room, well away from me.

* * *

The chain was next.

"It measures pulling strength," said Miss Quill. "Take hold of the handle and pull straight up, as hard as you can."

I took hold of it. It was a good chain, thick links, and the ring it came out of was set in the floor with lead. I pulled about the way I'd pull a fence post that was nearly out already, and the needle on the brass dial went round to a number and stopped.

"Four hundred and ten," Miss Quill read out. "That's within the range for a strong adult man." She looked at me. "Mister Marsh, are you trying?"

"Not hard."

"Why not?"

"I didn't want to break it," I said. "You've had a bad morning with the stones already."

She was quiet for a bit. Maud made a small noise that might have been a laugh.

"It's rated for a bull," said Miss Quill. "Please pull properly."

I pulled a bit harder. Not properly. I'd seen what had happened to the stones and I wasn't going to wreck the floor of the Guild hall on top of it. The needle went right round past the numbers and pressed against the little peg there, quivering, and the chain made a creaking noise I didn't like, so I let go.

Miss Quill wrote something. She wrote it for quite a long time.

* * *

"The cleaver," she said, after the measuring rod, which went fine, I was six foot two, the height I'd been since I was seventeen. "I'd like to weigh it."

"Fair enough."

"The weapons clerk says it can't be lifted. Lark Hollis says it can't be lifted. The bandit at the Gallow's Cut waystation put his back out on it, according to the sergeant's report." She'd done her reading, I'll give her that. "And yet you carry it everywhere."

"It's heavy," I said. "You get used to it. I've had it since I was a kid."

"Then let's see how heavy."

I unslung it, unwrapped the sacking, and laid it on the big platform at the end of the room.

The needle on the dial went round once.

Then it went round again, faster, and again, and then it was spinning so fast you couldn't see it, just a brass blur with a whirring noise coming off it like a hive. The post holding the dial began to shake. Something inside it went ping, then ping again, then there was a crack, and the spring came out of the top of the dial like a jack-in-the-box and hit the ceiling, and the needle came off and flew across the room and stuck in a beam above Maud's head, quivering.

The platform hadn't moved. Not a hair. The cleaver lay on it as quiet as anything.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Maud looked up at the needle above her head. Then she took one step to the left.

"That scale's old," I said, after a bit. "I reckon the spring was gone."

"It was serviced last month," said Miss Quill. Her voice was very calm. "It is rated to a ton."

"Well," I said. "It's not a ton." I picked the cleaver up off the platform. "It's heavier than a kitchen knife and lighter than an axe. I'd have said about that."

Miss Quill put her pen down on the bench. She walked over and stood in front of me and held out both hands.

"May I?" she said.

"Better not. The bloke at the waystation did his back."

"I'm not a bandit. I'll be careful."

I put it on the bench next to her instead, handle towards her, which seemed safer. She took hold of the handle with both hands and lifted, properly, from the knees, the way I'd have told her to.

Nothing. She might as well have tried to lift the bench, and the room, and the hill the Guild was built on.

She let go. She put her fingertips on the blade, very lightly, and closed her eyes. Some sort of skill, I guessed, the way the stone reads you.

She opened her eyes again quite quickly. She looked a bit sick.

"What is it?" she said.

"It's my grandad's cleaver."

"Mister Marsh."

"It is," I said. "He was the butcher in Thornfell. He used it on pigs."

* * *

She sat me down on a stool after that and asked me questions for an hour. Where I was from. How big the farm was. How long I'd lived there, and who with, and what we grew. Then she asked what I'd killed, and I told her.

"Mostly pests," I said. "Out of the barn. There's an old mine shaft under it."

"What sort of pests?"

"Big rats, mainly. Then there's the screamy ones, that come up in winter. The fence-chewers. One time a sort of walking haystack, but only the once."

She wrote all of it down, word for word. "Is that everything?"

I thought about that one time. The winter I was nineteen, and Dad's hands, and the barn roof.

"There was one other," I said. "Once. I don't talk about that one."

She looked up. Whatever she saw in my face, she didn't push. She just nodded and drew a little line on the slate, and moved on, and I was grateful to her for that.

"Describe a big rat," she said.

So I did. The plates and the length and the backwards teeth, and the ring of yellow eyes, and the drool that eats through boards. The soft seam under the jaw.

Her pen stopped moving about halfway through. She didn't look up from the slate, but she'd gone very still, like a hare when the dog walks past.

"How many," she said, "have you killed?"

"Of the big rats? One a month or so. Since I was nine. So." I worked it out. "Couple of hundred, give or take."

Miss Quill put the slate down on her knee.

"Excuse me," she said, and got up and went out into the corridor and shut the door behind her.

Maud and I sat there. After a bit there was a soft thump from outside, like someone putting their forehead against a wall, and then nothing for a while.

"She all right?" I asked Maud.

"Couldn't say," said Maud. "Never seen her like this. Usually she makes other people go out in the corridor."

* * *

When Miss Quill came back in her face was perfectly calm and her hair was perfectly neat and there was a small pink mark in the middle of her forehead.

"The re-measurement is complete," she said. "Your recorded level stands. Level one."

"Right," I said. It was a relief, honestly. "Thanks for checking."

"The Guild pays a testing fee for a day's attendance." She counted three silver into my hand. "Copper rate."

I hadn't expected that. Three silver for sitting on a stool and breaking things. I put it in my purse. Twenty-one gold, near enough, if I didn't count too hard.

"Mister Marsh," she said, as I was going. "The pretty rock. The one you sold in the Weir for three copper."

I stopped. "How'd you know about that?"

"It's my job to know things." She held my eye. "Don't sell any more. Not to anyone. If you find one, bring it to me."

"Why?"

She seemed to think about how to answer that.

"Because I asked you to," she said.

That was fair enough, and it was more honest than most answers I'd had in this city. So I said all right.

Lark Hollis was coming down the stair as I went up. He had a bandage round one wrist and he stopped dead when he saw me, two steps above, so we were eye to eye.

"Farmer," he said. "You been in the measuring room?"

"Just now."

"What'd they do to you?"

"Nothing much. I broke two of the little stones and the big scale."

Lark stared.

"Fuck off," he said.

"Sorry."

"You broke the bullock scale."

"The spring went," I said. "It's an old scale."

"That scale weighed a dead troll last spring. A whole troll." He put a hand on the wall, like he needed it. "What'd the stones say?"

"Level one, same as before."

Lark closed his eyes and stood there for a moment, breathing through his nose. Then he opened them, turned round, and went back up the stairs ahead of me without a word. I don't know what he'd come down for. He didn't seem to remember either.

I went up the rest of the long stair into the daylight and stood for a minute on the Guild steps. Two heaps of dust and a scale with its spring out. That was a lot for one morning. But they were small stones, travelling ones, and the scale was meant for bullocks, not tools. And she'd been very thorough. You'd want an auditor to be thorough.

I thought about her face when the needle stuck in the beam. She hadn't jumped. Maud had jumped, and I'd jumped a bit, but Miss Quill had just stood there and watched it go, and then written something down.

I liked that about her. I wasn't sure why.