Chapter 157 The Cost of Sorrow

The Collector lifted his shears toward the faceless reflection, delight slowly pulling his stitched smile wider and wider still. Nilo let the Diva coat fall away, the Weeper’s shawl rising around him like a wave off the floor.

A hook on the Collector’s apron glowed brighter, tugging at something behind Nilo’s ribs like a bell rope.

His knees buckled for half a heartbeat before the rain steadied him.

"Hold on to me, child, the thread is only looking for the end of itself," Sorrow murmured.

Tears sliding off his chin in the lantern light, "Then it can look somewhere else."

"Mourning Rain," Sorrow breathed, the words falling as softly as a hand on a sleeping child’s hair.

[ SKILL USED ]

[Mourning Rain: every drop shows the one it touches what they lost]

Every drop falling across the vault opened into a silver ring, wide as a pupil, hanging like a window. Inside each ring lay a sleeping face folded in tissue paper, the six sleepers repeated a hundred times over.

The first drop to reach his brow melted the violet thread above his left eye.

"Stop that this instant, I did not order weather," the Collector snapped, slashing at the nearest ring.

The shears passed straight through the drop without cutting anything, leaving the whole blade streaked with thin silver tears. A single drop touched his stitched cheek, loosening the thread there until a small gap showed the skin beneath.

"How very strange," he said, pressing two gloved fingers to the gap, "I do not recall that sensation."

"He feels it," Zinnia whispered, lowering her rapier an inch.

Pipa crouched behind the toppled mirror with her slate held over her mouth, "Chat, the villain is having a feeling, I am sorry for what you are about to witness."

"Every face you folded is crying in there, can you hear them?"

"I hear good tailoring, Mister Nilo, grief is only the sound of cloth being altered."

"Who are you mourning, tailor?" Sorrow asked him gently.

The Collector hesitated for exactly one breath, his gloved fingers tightening around the shears.

"A customer who never came back to pay, a very long time ago," he said.

Zilch murmured from the rack like a ghost in a coat pocket, "Sad tailor, sharp shears."

Zinnia’s doubles stepped out of the mist one by one, each copper head tilted at the same sympathetic angle. Bruno’s grip loosened on his ruined pauldron, his eyes shining with something he plainly refused to ever call tears.

"Nobody move, he is listening to them, so please let him finish," she murmured, her rapier finally lowered.

"I am not sure whether to arrest him or buy him a handkerchief," Bruno muttered.

The rain thickened into a silver curtain, every ring turning toward the Collector until a hundred faces stared out. He stepped backward into his own shadow, shears trembling, the brass hooks chiming against his apron like frightened bells.

’An S rank Visage is shaking. I am not even touching him.’

"You have one warning, so listen carefully," Nilo said, "go home before you forget where it is."

The Collector stood very still, rain sliding down his stitches as if the seams were learning to cry. Then the stitched smile returned, tidy as a hem pulled tight again, the shaking stopping all at once.

"A deposit, then, I never leave a fitting without one," he said, bowing from the waist.

"Do give my regards to your Director, Miss Fox, she knows exactly what a fitting costs," he added.

He snapped his fingers, sending the narrow drawer sliding across the floor with six faces breathing in tissue. Bruno dived to catch it before it struck the wall, cradling it against his pauldron like an infant.

"Keep the faces, they are only pinned, the masks remain with me until the final fitting."

"Pinned means we can unpin them," Zinnia said, her rapier rising again.

"Do try, Miss Fox... I adore a good unpicking."

"Chat, he said final fitting, does anyone else really feel like we should be taking notes?"

He stepped backward into the last tall frame, where Nilo’s blank reflection waited with its egg-shaped face turned upward. The glass swallowed him the way a pond swallows a stone, leaving ripples and a faint ringing of brass.

Silence settled over the vault, broken by the soft patter of rain on shattered glass.

Nilo took one step toward the frame before his knees folded, the staff slipping from his fist.

She caught his elbow before he reached the floor, "Easy, I have you."

"I’m fine," he said, though his voice cracked down the middle like dry clay.

She narrowed her eyes at him, "That was nearly number nineteen, so I am choosing to hear nothing."

"Chat, I tapped the mirror and it is only a mirror again, I am sorry for tapping it," Pipa whispered.

’Everyone keeps writing me down. Notebooks, threads, hooks.’

[ LEDGER ]

[Sorrow: tears unbroken for one hour]

[Also owed: the grief of six sleepers, felt in full]

Tears kept pouring down his face in warm lines, each one landing on his sleeve with a tiny silver ring. Beneath them came a second feeling that was not his own, six sorrows pressing all at once against his ribs.

"The one on the end is afraid of the dark," he whispered, "the second one misses a dog."

"You can feel them?" Bruno asked, rubbing the drawer’s brass handle with his thumb.

"Sorrow doesn’t let me hear them, it lets me carry them... for an hour."

The six smooth faces stirred inside the drawer, each one shaping a word with a mouth that was not there. Nilo felt every one of them reach for him, like swimmers in the dark reaching for any rope at all.

"To mourn a thing, child, you must first hold it," Sorrow said inside his head.

"Nobody warned me it came with luggage."

"Darling, grief is the heaviest costume in the wardrobe, you wear it beautifully," Cadenza sighed.

"Wear it later," Zilch said.

"I would have warned you, but you were crying too hard to listen."

The vault grew quieter as the rain thinned, each silver ring closing like an eyelid until only ordinary drops fell. Somewhere above them a pump coughed, the canal slowly returning its water to the broken stair in thin gray ribbons.

Jingles whimpered from the rack, "I would like to offer a pun, but my heart is not in it, it is on the floor."

"Save it for later," he said, a ghost of a smile breaking through the tears.

Zinnia knelt in the wet glass, wiping his cheek with her thumb until the glove came away silver. For once she did not scold him, her ears pink as she kept her eyes on his collar.

"You will ruin the glove," he muttered.

"It is a very bad glove, I have been meaning to retire it."

"What did you see in that frame, before he stepped into it?" she asked, keeping her voice low.

"Nothing... and I think that is exactly why he wants it."

"A mirror cannot hold what a notebook can," she said, tapping her satchel, "I wrote your face down in ink, every line of it."

"You are going to make me cry harder."

"Then do it quietly, Steelhorn is trying to be dignified over there."

"That thing in the glass scared me more than he did," he admitted.

"Then be scared with company, it is cheaper than being scared alone."

"Chat, I am pretending my camera died, this is a private moment," Pipa announced, turning her lens toward the ceiling.

Bruno cleared his throat with enormous dignity, "I will carry the faces to the surface, a Steelhorn does not weep at funerals, he merely rains a little."

"A Steelhorn does not drop what he promised to hold," he added gruffly.

He set off toward the stair with the drawer in both arms, his broad shoulders shaking just slightly. A faint scent of lavender drifted down from the dark above, there for a moment and then gone.

"That smells exactly like trouble," Zinnia said, her nose wrinkling.

Zinnia helped him up, one arm tucked under his shoulder as a cold breath of air brushed his wrist. Something silver glittered against his cuff, a thread so fine that he took it for a drop of rain.

"Hold still," she said, lifting his hand toward the light.

A silver thread circled his wrist eight times, tied off in a neat tailor’s knot beneath the bone. Nothing about it was violet, the knot was nothing like Violet’s, but the patience in it felt familiar.

"Eight turns," she said, her voice gone very quiet, "he tied it while we were watching you cry—"

"Do not touch it... a knot like that might pull both of us," he whispered.

"It’s warm, that thread, warm like something knitted by somebody’s grandmother," Jingles whispered.

"He tied what he could not cut, child... a thread is a promise made in a hurry," Sorrow said.

’Whoever made this promise, I need to find them before the thread finds me.’

Far above them a church bell began to toll the hour, muffled and slow through the water.

He stared at the thread until it seemed to stare back, patient as a promise kept for later. Far below the canal, a pair of shears closed once, just loud enough for the rain to carry.