The Grandmaster's Gambit

16. Prayer Day

[Day-9 (10:20)]

(Weaver's Lane, Sector 9, Alexandria)

On Sundial the Row stopped.

Every stall was shuttered, and the canvas hung slack on its poles. Nobody sold and nobody haggled. The only thing that moved was the Basilica bell, one flat note every few breaths, rolling down the lane from two streets away. Neighbours walked under it in their good coats with their children by the wrist. A carter had left his cart across a doorway and stood beside it with his hat in his hands.

Kai walked with a headache behind his left eye. It had come with him out of the night and settled in like a lodger.

The Almonry gate was shut. A sister in grey stood behind the bars with a ledger under her arm and a small gold lamp inside a ring pinned at her left shoulder.

"Light keep you."

"Fair weight," Kai said. It came out smoothly. Oren would have been proud.

"Your friend with the pockets was here at first bell. He asked if the boy had eaten." Her voice was polite and tired. "The boy has eaten. The ward takes visitors when the bell stops, and the Almonry takes blood or a contract. Go and be quiet somewhere. Most people do."

Most of them were turning in at a doorway beside a shuttered tinsmith's stall, where a stair went down. Kai had passed it four times without seeing it. He went in behind a woman with a child on her hip.

The stair was longer than it looked. The steps had worn into dips, and the wall under his hand was cold and slightly wet.

At the bottom lay a cellar with a low vaulted roof. Lamps burned in tin saucers along the walls. Sixty people stood or knelt on the floor, and nobody spoke. There was no priest and no book. Nobody kept the door.

The floor was the thing. A pattern had been cut into the stone in grooves as wide as a thumb: a ring inside a ring, with spokes running out from the middle to the walls. Knees and feet had worn each groove into a shallow trough. The Registry cut everything square, and this was not square. Kai did not know how he knew, but it was older than the Registry.

The grooves were full of tin tokens. Thousands of them lay edge to edge like fish scales. Most had been handled so long that their faces were gone.

Along the walls the contractors had come to pay what they owed. A carter knelt with his sleeve rolled and his forearm pressed flat to the stone. A thread of brass showed under his skin, jumping like a bad wick. As Kai watched, it steadied. The man opened his eyes and rolled his sleeve down without looking at anyone. *Sundial. Before midday, or the rune goes bad.* Oren had said so once, in the voice he used for rent.

At the front a stout woman in a grey shawl knelt at the edge of the inner ring. She had been coughing since the top of the stair. It was a tearing cough, and the crowd had stepped aside for it. A small girl held a fistful of her skirt.

The woman laid a token in the groove. She said a few words, low and quick, the way you say your own address. The cough caught on the last one.

It let go.

The air at the front went mild. Kai felt it on his face from twenty feet away, like a stove door opened in the next room. The woman put a hand flat on her chest and breathed in. It went all the way down. The girl let go of the skirt.

"Coughs and cracked bones," said a man at Kai's shoulder, without turning his head. "The Stair is good for those. Fevers it ignores. Don't ask it for fevers." He glanced at Kai's face. "And don't stare. It isn't a show."

Kai studied the floor.

*Did she believe it would help? Does belief ease a cough here? I've seen it ease a tremor. That's one possibility.*

*Coughs come in fits. Hers might have been ending anyway.*

*Sixty people in a cellar, all wanting the same thing. One woman who needed it to work.*

*Three explanations. None accounted for the timing. The cough had held all the way down the stair. It stopped on the last word.*

He ran them again in a different order. They did not get better.

*I have to be careful. When the evidence stops fitting the theory you do not shout at the board. You change the theory. All right. There are things here that answer. And if they answer, they can take. What took me was not weather.*

A hot, fast thing started under his ribs. He put it away before it had a shape.

Nobody had answered in the hospital. He had been eleven, in a corridor that smelled of floor cleaner, asking a ceiling. He had asked once, and nobody answered, and he had decided the ceiling was empty. Here a woman asked once and got her breath back.

His hand was in his pocket. It came out with a tin in it, from the day's wages and not one of Doss's. He checked that it was not one of Doss's, and then he was annoyed that he had checked. He walked to the edge of the grooves and laid the tin in the nearest one, between two worn blanks.

*It is a bet at long odds against a house I do not believe in.* He did not say who the bet was on. There were two people it could have been, and he had never learned either name.

Overhead the bell gave its last note and was done. He climbed the stair with his face hot.

The ward ran the whole length of a long, low hall. Two rows of cots faced each other across a path of scrubbed boards. It smelled of boiled linen, wax and wet stone. At the far end one tall window gave the only daylight, and the dust turned in it.

A small brass board hung over every bed. Each had a name punched into the top and a column of numbers chalked below. Nobody read them. Everybody knew exactly what theirs said.

Tobin lay in the second cot from the window, propped on a bolster. Both arms lay out on the blanket like two white loaves, bandaged from the fingertips to the shoulder. His stubble had grown into a grey beard. He seemed smaller and crosser than he had in the yard, which Kai took for a good sign.

"Cross."

"Tobin."

"You look worse than I do."

"I didn't sleep."

"Nobody does, after. Sit on the stool. Don't touch the bolster." Tobin studied him for a while. His mouth worked like a man forcing on a boot that did not fit. "I owe you a thing. Nine days I've been working out how to say it, and it comes out like a bill. You did the sum right. I was looking."

"It cost you your hands."

"It cost me a lamp I'd have put down in a year or two anyway." He moved one white arm an inch and stopped. "I was acknowledged. I'll thank you not to spoil it."

"I'm sorry about your hands."

"Don't be. I felt nothing." He said it to the ceiling. "Held them in that fire and felt nothing. That's the part that frightens me. Forty years the fire told me when to stop, and somewhere along the way it quit telling."

Kai said nothing. There was nothing to say that would be both kind and true, and Tobin had no use for the first kind.

*Come at it sideways.* "Since the head, words come loose," he said. "The clerk at the pit said one, and I couldn't have told him what it was. Essence."

"Twice, I hear. The Row is very fond of it." Tobin let his head sink back on the bolster. "Essence. Everything runs on it, and nobody makes it. The lamps burn it. A Contract spends it. A token holds a thimble of it, if you could bite one hard enough to find out. You spend it or you hold it. That's all of it."

"If nobody makes it, where does it come from?"

"It's lent." He said it flatly, as if reading a price. "That's what a Contract is, boy. A loan, against you. The rune is the pipe it comes down."

*Lent. Then mine was lent too. I never signed for anything.* Kai kept his face still. *So someone has an entry in a book with my name over it, and I have no idea what it says.*

"While we're at it," Tobin said, "I owe you the half I left out. In the yard I said they hunt the smoke and not people."

"The Hunter walked past me at arm's length."

"It did. It was true, and it let nine people sleep. This is the other half. Defaults eat our sort first. When there's none of us left, they eat whoever is standing there. That's why everybody runs."

"You gave them half."

"I gave them the half that let them sleep." The grey eyes came round. "You'd have given them the odds. I know. You gave me the odds."

"How does anyone become one?" Kai asked. "A contractor."

"The Tithe." A passing novice set a cup of water on the blanket. Tobin eyed it like an insult. "You pay your dues and you go in. A god looks at you. Some come out with a rune. Some don't come out."

"What was yours like?"

"Mine was at twenty." He did not look at the cup. "Ask me when I can lift my own."

"There's a boy in the yard," Tobin said. "Window's at the end. I've watched him nine days, and the sisters think I'm asleep."

Kai stood. The sill was at the height of his waist. He put one hand on the cold frame and looked down.

The Almonry courtyard was a small square of beaten earth with a well-head and one tree in a tub. On a bench against the far wall sat a thin boy with his hair cut short by someone who had not known him. A wooden ladle lay across his knees. He held it in both hands, as you hold a thing you have been told to put down. Beside him a sister in grey was talking, patient and low. The boy was looking at the wall.

*I put him on Oren's shoulders. I let a crowd take him. I can hold ten lines of a position in my head and I cannot open a gate.* He found that he was counting the dead on the glass with one fingertip.

The boy raised his head.

His eyes went across the ward window and slid off it. Kai was a shape behind a glare. The boy went back to the wall.

Kai laid his palm flat on the glass. It was cold. He held it there for the length of a breath. Then he took it away before anyone in the ward could see.

Boots scraped at the door behind him.

Kestrel Dunn stood in the doorway with a cap crushed in one bandaged fist. In the other he held a twist of paper between the heels of both hands, like a man carrying a bird. His goggles were gone, and without them his face was bare. He saw Kai at the window and found something to study on the ceiling.

Kai kept his back turned. He could not have said which of them was the more ashamed.

"Dunn," said Tobin.

"Tobin." The boots came down the path and stopped. "That's figs."

"I can smell them."

"Wife's." A pause. "She says I'm to say it properly. So. The sum was wrong."

"The sum was right," Tobin said. "That's what was wrong with it."

Nobody spoke. Down in the yard the sister's voice went on. The boy had bent his head over the ladle.

"Put them there," Tobin said at last. "I can't hold a fig, and I won't be fed one. Put them where I can see them. Then sit down. You're standing in my light, and there's precious little of it."

Paper rustled on the blanket. A stool scraped. Kai watched the boy and did not turn round. He heard two men settle beside each other without looking at each other, and he knew exactly how that sounded.

"You asked me what it was like," Tobin said.

He was not speaking to Kestrel. Kai kept his eyes on the glass.

"Best and worst day of my life, boy."