The Grandmaster's Gambit

18. Behind The Brick

[Day-12 (17:40)]

(Aeron's room, Chandler Court, Sector 9, Alexandria)

Late light came across the room low and yellow and lay across the plaster behind the bed. It found the crack first. The crack ran down the plaster from the window sill like a dark hair, and where it reached the iron headboard it bent around one brick.

Kai had been looking at that brick for two days.

The foreman had paid off the gang at the half bell because the stone ran out. Oren had stayed on Foundry Lane to bargain for a second shift from a man who paid in bread. The room was empty, and the pipes in the wall ticked as they cooled.

*It is only a brick.* It was not. The mortar around it was a shade lighter than the mortar around its neighbours, the way a patch is lighter than the old plaster. Something in him wanted that brick. He was careful with the word. It was not a hand on his arm and it was not an order. It was the low, plain want of a man looking at his own front door.

Kai tested it the way he tested anything he could not explain, with the want set to one side.

*A guy who sleeps in a chair keeps a bed made up and under dust. Why keep a bed nobody uses? Maybe because a thief looks at the bed first and the pillow second. This pillow had a skin of dust on it when I first came. Nobody had touched it in years.*

He knelt, which he had never done at that bed, and looked along the floor. At the foot of the bed four short pale arcs curved out from the iron feet, where it had been dragged from the wall and pushed back, many times. The feet were rubbed with candle wax, so that it would move without a sound.

*The hinges are oiled. The feet are waxed. He went to a lot of trouble not to be heard in his own room. The dust on the pillow was the point. It told anyone who came in that nobody sleeps here, and anyone who believes it never moves the bed.*

The headboard was cold iron under his hands. He pulled, and the bed slid away from the wall in perfect silence. The brick stood a thumb's width proud of its neighbours. Fingers round the edges, a twist, and it came out with a gritty scrape. It was lighter than a brick should be, because it was only the front half of one.

Behind it was a hole the size of a loaf and a flat tin box, the kind tea comes in.

Inside lay ten paper rolls of twenty tokens, and twelve loose tokens, and on top of them a note folded once. He counted the tokens twice. That was Oren's habit and not his own, and he noticed it. Two hundred and twelve. Doss's six were in the jar on the table. Together they made two hundred and eighteen.

Relief went through him so warmly that he was ashamed of it. It was a dead man's savings, and the first thing he felt was that he could stop counting bread.

The paper was cheap and grey, and the ink had been dragged. The writer had moved his hand through the wet line, so that the last word of every line had smeared into a tail. Aeron wrote left-handed. Kai had known it for a week. It was another matter to see it, small and cramped and slanting backwards, a hand that had spent its life being told it was wrong.

There was no name at the top and none at the bottom.

*Quarter Day. The Writ. Dues 1,500. If you read this I'm dead. Burn the map before the Registry reads it.*

Under it, smaller, pressed harder:

*Do not pay D. the last 400.*

Three readings. Each time it was angry, and sad, and brave, and cruel, and all of it at once. *Burn the map.* It was an order, with no please in it. *If you read this I'm dead.* There was no goodbye in that either. Fifteen years in this room, and he had not found one person to address it to.

It was the first thing the man had ever said to him. Kai found he was holding the paper by its edges, as one holds something that might wake.

*I can't make assumptions - I have to understand the facts first.*

*Quarter Day is the date on the rent receipt. Mrs. Wray said on the stairs this morning that it is forty days off and the chalk men will be round for the rent. That makes it fifty-two days later, by my count. The Writ is a permit. Dues must be what Tobin meant: you pay your dues and you go in. Fifteen hundred. He was saving for the Tithe to become a contractor.*

*He wrote "if I'm dead" before he did it. He knew the odds, or he knew what the other side of it looked like. Either he was going in, or he was going after whatever he hunted. Quarter Day says going in.*

*Fifteen hundred, less two hundred and eighteen, is one thousand two hundred and eighty-two. Forty days. A man on the rubble gang makes four a day if the foreman likes him and two if he doesn't. Say I ate nothing and paid Senna nothing and got the top rate every day. That is a hundred and sixty. It leaves one thousand one hundred and twenty-two. I would need seven times the best I can do.*

It was not a gap. It was a cliff.

His eyes went to the map. It hung where it had hung since the second day, with red thread running between the pins and little paper flags in the margin marked with dates. *Burn it before the Registry reads it.* Warden-Clerk Orme had stood in this room four days ago and written the map into her ruled book in one long, even line. Aeron's order had come too late. The people he feared had already read it.

*If I burn it now, it is a map that existed and does not. That is worse. A missing map is something to come back and ask about. And it is the only thing in this room that can tell me what he was doing.*

They were good reasons. He noticed that he had them ready. The pull toward the brick had been longing, and this was the same pull turned round. He could no more have put a match to that map than to a face.

*D.* The ledgers under the floor were marked with a letter, and the note had one. *Do not pay D. the last 400.* Someone called D. was owed money, and Aeron had stopped trusting him or her. Both things had been true for a while. The ledgers lay under the third board from the window, a few steps from his knee. He did not go to them.

*The ledgers might tell me who D. is. They will not tell me where to find one thousand two hundred and eighty-two tokens.*

He got up, because the floor had begun to hurt his knee. He took the pawn from the sill and stood turning it in his fingers. It was cut from black wood, and the top had gone smooth where a thumb had rested on it for years.

*One thousand five hundred. In forty days. Even if I worked every hour I wouldn't make it. So the problem is not how to earn it. The problem is what shape a solution has when it does not look like earning.*

*Every wall has a seam. Chess teaches that much. When the front door is shut, look at which side of the board your opponent forgot.*

A sour thought came in under it, uninvited. *Aeron looked for the seam for fifteen years. It ate him.*

He sat down on the boards with his back to the wall and did what he did before a hard game. He listed the moves and put them in two columns: the ones he would play and the ones he would not.

*Work.* He would play it. It could not reach.

*Borrow.* He would play it, from nobody he had met yet.

*Sell.* The rack held five hook-knives and a licence for six. The map was worth something to someone. So was whatever Aeron had known, and Kai did not know what that was.

*Steal.* He would not take from anyone it could hurt. That left the Registry and the Exchange, and nothing he knew how to reach.

*Lie.*

He had put it in the first column without a pause. He read the columns again, in case the word had moved. It had not. In twelve days he had told a Registry clerk that he had held this room for six years. He had told Oren that a nosebleed was dust. He had told Mrs. Wray that his head hurt, which was true, and let her believe the rest. Lying was the one tool he owned that cost nothing, and it came out of him as easily as breath.

*All right. That is a thing I know about myself now.*

He pushed the brick home with the heel of his hand and set the bed back against the wall. He scuffed the four pale arcs out of the boards with his boot. The box stayed in its hole. The light had gone off the plaster, and the crack was a hair again.

Fifteen hundred was a posted price. He knew what that was worth on this street. A posted price was only the first bid, the number somebody wanted him to see before the real one came. Dues were fifteen hundred on a slate. He did not yet know what the Tithe cost in the other things: how many went in, how many came out, and what the god took on the way.

He meant to find out. He would not guess, and he would not ask Tobin to live it again. He would have to find the people who had paid.