The Grandmaster's Gambit

10. No Such Square

[Day-2 (06:10)]

(The Foundry Yard, Sector 8, Alexandria)

Kai woke on a tarp with a stranger's boot print across it.

The sky over the yard was the pale grey of the hour before the Curtain's lamps turn white. His mouth tasted of copper. When he touched his lip, the blood had dried to a crust. He held up his right hand and looked at it against the sky.

It did not shake. In London it had. He looked at it for longer than the morning deserved.

The yard had filled up while he slept. Registry clerks in charcoal grey ringed the pit with their ledgers open. Beyond them, along the wall, a line of men in slate-blue coats waited with every button done up and every boot clean. Rampart pickets. They looked like they had been issued that morning.

"Held at the Outer Line since nine," a sergeant was telling a clerk, in the flat voice of a man who has said it twice already. "Your sheet had Foundry Lane down as cleared."

"It was cleared."

The sergeant looked at the pit, and at the grey stone hand on its rim. "Was it," he said.

Kai sat up. His ribs told him there was a new crack in them, low on the left side, and that it would be with him for some time. He found the sabre hilt in his pocket and the hook-knife on his belt. The six tokens were still there. He did not know why he checked.

A white-painted cart stood by the gate, with two Basilica novices in grey at its shafts. Tobin laid on it with both arms bound in clean cloth to the shoulder. The orange had gone from his skin. He turned his head as Kai came past.

"Cross." His voice was a thread. "I was looked at."

"You were."

"Good." He shut his eyes. "Don't tell me the odds next time. I'd sooner not know."

Beside the cart Kestrel sat on an upturned bucket with his bandaged hands in his lap. He lifted his chin at Kai once. Kai nodded back. It was all either of them had.

The Registry had set up a testimony table in the mouth of the lane. It was a folding table with an ink stand, a ledger, and a brass lamp still burning in the daylight. The man behind it was tall and thin, with the sleeves of his charcoal coat rolled to the elbow. His hair was cut close and grey at one temple. A faint scar ran along his jaw. On his collar bar was the name VOSS.

Under the skin of his left wrist lay a small rune, pale gold. It looked like a stone hanging from a string.

"Name," said Voss. He did not look up.

"Aeron Cross."

"Block?"

"Seven."

"You are the scavenger the others say gave the orders." He dipped the pen. "Tell me what happened at the east wall."

*I should say only true things. Keep each answer small and exact. If I say too much, I leave a hole the size of what I'm hiding.*

"The Hunter was after Tobin's glow," Kai said. "It came in through the gate. The roof over the cistern gave way under its foot, and it fell in. We opened the steam main into the pit."

The rune warmed a shade. Voss's pen did not stop. "Who chose where the old man stood?"

"I did."

"You told him to move two paces. Eleven people heard you shout it, and then the ground broke. How did you know where it would break?"

"I didn't know. Something about the sound the slab made bothered me."

That was true. The sideways boom had bothered him all night, once he thought about it. The rune brightened and settled. Voss raised his eyes for the first time. They were tired and very steady.

"Where did you learn to read ground?"

"I scavenge."

"Hm." The pen moved. "Do you remember how it began? Yesterday?"

*Too clean to say no. Too clean to say yes.*

"I don't remember how it started, I saw people evacuating and I joined them." said Kai.

It was the truest thing he had said all morning. The rune held still for several seconds. Voss set the pen down.

"Did you lose someone yesterday, Mr. Cross?"

"Yes."

The rune flared. Voss did not flinch, and he did not move his eyes from Kai's face. Kai felt the answer leave him like a stone dropped down a well. It was true. It was the heaviest thing he owned. He could not have said who, or how many.

"Yes," Voss said at last. "That is heavy. It is as heavy as any I've weighed this week." He turned the pen over once. "It just doesn't sit where it should. It sits like a man grieving at someone else's funeral."

Kai said nothing. There was nothing true that would help.

"Strange," Voss said. He wrote the word and underlined it. "You may go. I will keep your file open, Mr. Cross. I keep a good many open. It means nothing."

Kai got to his feet. A young clerk with ink on his cuff had come up on Voss's other side. He carried a brass box with a dial and a thin needle, and he had been pointing it at the pit.

"Sir," the clerk said, low. "The Hunter's essence. The count on it is off by one."

"By one what?"

"By one. It should balance, and it comes up one short. Like somebody took a coin."

Voss glanced once at the pit. Then, for a second, at Kai's back.

Kai kept walking.

The Registry let him out of the lane at seven. Ring Road was a mess of overturned carts and boots, and the stone trough lay black and still with its lip burst. A charcoal coat lay against one of the posts, empty, with its collar bar turned up. Nobody had touched it.

He got as far as the posts before something large hit him from the side.

Arms wrapped his ribs. Kai made a noise he had not planned to make. Coal smoke and wool and old sweat. A chin banged his shoulder. Then the arms let go, and two large hands turned him round to be looked at.

"Aeron."

Oren's straw hair had been slept on, if he had slept at all, and his eyes were red at the rims. He studied Kai from the crusted lip to the stained sleeve to the way he stood.

"You look terrible."

"Thanks."

"They said at the tables a scavenger from Block Seven went into the Foundry Yard and killed a Hunter. I said, no. That's not him. He hates levers." Oren's face did something complicated. "They're saying you told the old lamplighter where to stand. Before the floor went. Did you mysteriously become a contractor and get some cool powers I don't know about? "

"No, I got lucky. It's just basic deduction, I don't know why everyone is making a big deal out of it."

"You've never been lucky in your life."

"Then it was due."

Oren laughed. It cracked in the middle. He put a hand over his mouth, and then he put the other one on Kai's shoulder and left it there. The weight steadied Kai. He did not expect that.

He put his own hand over Oren's and left it there too. It was the first thing he had done in this world because he wanted to.

"I lost the boy," Oren said. "At the shutter. I had him on my shoulders, and the crowd took him off. I've asked at four tables. Nobody has a Hob." His jaw worked. "I'll keep asking."

"I'll help."

"You'll sleep." He did not say anything about the Rest. Neither of them did. "I went by the corner at first light. They had it roped. I didn't go close. If they tell me, they tell me."

Kai said nothing. He felt the tokens in his pocket like six small weights.

"Go home," Oren said. "Chandler Court is open again, the grille's up. Third floor, the door at the end. Your key's on the string round your neck, you idiot. You hit your head too hard - rest and heal up."

Kai put a hand to his collar. There was a string, and a key on it. It had been there all along.

"I'll come at noon," Oren said. "Have you eaten?"

"Yes."

"Liar." Oren dug in his coat and brought out something in a twist of paper. It was a bun, still hot from the baker's cart, with a split top and a shine of sugar. He put it in Kai's hand and folded his fingers round it. "Eat that. All of it. I'll check."

He went off up Ring Road at a half run, shouldering through the crowd, calling a name Kai could not hear.

Kai waited by the post with the bun in one hand. His other hand had gone to his collarbone. Two fingers pressed there. Nobody was looking. He let them stay a moment, and then he put his arm down.

He counted what he had. A hook-knife that was not his. Six tokens that had been Doss's. A broken sabre hilt that had been Penhallow's. A name that belonged to a man who had died yesterday.

And a thing in him that wrote in the air, with a quill only he could hear, and was now out of something, though he did not know what.

The bun was too hot to hold. He held it anyway.

*On the first night the wall held, a stranger came in from the dark. No one asked his name. The wall had no gate for strangers, yet he stood inside it. The old ones say a wall is not stone. A wall is those who agree to stand behind it. Count the stranger among them, if he stays. If he leaves, count the debt.*

- The Ashen Quarter Fragments