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CHAPTER 128: Twenty Names
The pen scratched in the cold. Cassian had copied seventeen entries, and he did it the way he had read the ledger in the loft, without letting himself think about the people behind them. Name, row, classifier, and the narrow upright H. V. in the margin like a thumbprint on every page. His fingers had gone stiff by the tenth. His breath came out white over the paper and smeared the wet ink, and twice he had to start a line again.Seraphine stood at his shoulder reading each one as he finished it. She didn't speak. When he reached a name she recognized, a Pell, a Thorne, families from the resettlement contracts, her breath hitched, and he felt it through his sleeve where her arm pressed against his."Eighteen," the Keeper said from the doorway. She had gone back to stand beside Voss, her cane planted and her good hand on the black iron of the door. "Two more, and then we go up. The hour I gave Aldric is nearly spent.""Nineteen." Cassian's voice came out thin. "Nearly there.""The cold
CHAPTER 127: H.V.
The white lamp hummed. Somewhere above them, through two floors of stone, a clerk dropped something heavy, and the sound arrived as a dull thud, like a fist on a mattress.Cassian bent over the lectern. The margin ink was darker than the rest, nearly black, and when he put his thumb beside one line of it the paper was warm. He snatched the thumb back. The seal under his ribs gave a single heavy knock, and the initials began to glow, a faint amber seeping up through the fibers, the same shade as the eye on his chest."It's answering," he said."Don't touch it again." The Keeper had come up beside him, her cane scraping the stone, and she leaned over the book without laying a finger on it. Her breath fogged in the cold. "Marrin filled the first ledger with honest ink. Somebody has been keeping this one. Above Calder, above Ames, above Voss. A supervisor's hand, in a room only the commission's seal opens.""I carry the only key," Voss said from the doorway. His voice cracked on it."You
CHAPTER 126: The Strongroom
The steps were slick with last night's damp, and Cassian counted them without meaning to. Thirty-one. The Keeper took each one with her cane and her good hand locked on his sleeve, and by the twentieth her breath was sawing in and out, but she wouldn't let him slow. Behind them Aldric's boots scraped, heavy and uneven. Seraphine climbed a half step back with one arm pressed to her bound ribs, and every time the crowd murmured she shifted closer to his shoulder.At the top Voss stood with his burned hand held carefully against his coat. "Madam. Mr. Cassian." He bowed to each as though it were a dinner. "Before we go in, the commission's rules. Anyone entering the Office registers at the table and surrenders weapons. A formality, but I'd rather it were observed in front of witnesses."The man in the blue sash had risen. He was thin and pale, with ink on his lip where he'd been chewing the pen. "Recorder Hale," he said, not looking at anyone's face. "Name, and any blade or club on your p
CHAPTER 125: The Front Door
He woke to the smell of frying onions and the sound of somebody arguing in whispers. Gray light came through the shutter slats in flat bars and lay across the blanket. His mouth tasted of old pennies, and a cough sat in his chest that he hadn't started. It belonged to a woman in a tent, and it took him several breaths to understand it was gone. The sheet on the table a few feet from his cot hadn't moved. Somebody had set a saucer of salt at its head, and nobody had said why. Seraphine's place on the floor was empty, the blanket she'd used folded in a neat square against the cot frame.The seal's remembering, he thought, and put it away to ask the Keeper about later.Through the doorway, in the front room, Lira stood over the stove ladling thin soup into mismatched bowls. Tam sat at the table with his face scrubbed pink and his hair still wet, shoveling it in as if someone might take it. Aldric had one boot up on a chair and was flexing the fingers of his bound arm, one at a time, with
CHAPTER 124: The Bonesetter's Hands
Lira's back room smelled of tallow and wet wool, with the mineral damp of the canal coming up through the floorboards. Somebody had cleared the ribbon bundles off the table and laid Holt there under a clean sheet. Everyone gave it a wide berth, moving around the edges of the room like people steering clear of a stain.The bonesetter came with the first real light. Hesta Pike, Gaff's cousin, was short and square, with forearms like bread dough and a leather roll under one arm that clinked when she set it down. She looked at Aldric's shoulder for about three seconds, grunted, and told him to sit on the floor and bite something."I'll manage," Aldric said."You'll bite this." She shoved a folded leather strap into his good hand. "I'm not paid enough to listen to you manage."It took two tries to seat the joint. Cassian, wedged into a chair by the stove with a blanket around his shoulders, heard the first as a wet, grinding clunk, with Aldric's breath whistling out around the leather. The
CHAPTER 123: What Tam Heard
Davan came up the cellar stair with a filthy bundle in his arms, and it took Cassian a second to understand the bundle was Tam. Coal dust was ground into the boy's face and hands, with a long black smear down one cheek where tears had cut through it. The blanket was gone. His lips were still moving around numbers that made no sound."He's been going since Voss's men came up," Davan said. His own voice wasn't steady. "I told him it was over. He didn't believe me till I lifted him out.""Four thousand and something," Tam said, very quietly. "Then I lost it and started over."Nobody laughed. Lira got up from beside Holt and crossed the floor in three strides. She took Tam's black hands in both of hers, turned them palm up as if checking for damage, and pulled him against her coat. He stood stiff for a second. Then his shoulders went, and he cried into her collar with his whole body, loud and ugly, the way a child cries once he's allowed to.Cassian looked away and found the board where i
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