The Grandmaster's Gambit

24. Rookless

[Day-26 (19:00)]

(The Copper Kettle, Ashen Quarter, Sector 7, Alexandria)

"Count the heads," said the big man. He did not look up from his cup.

Kai had not sat down yet. He did it, because it cost nothing. Marcus, Cass, himself. And a fourth chair, pushed in square to the table, with a grey scarf folded on the seat. Somebody might have stepped away a minute ago. His eyes rested on it for the length of a breath and moved on.

"Sit," said Marcus.

The Copper Kettle was a long low room with a counter down one side. Copper pots stood along it, each as big as a bucket, breathing steam into rafters the colour of old tea. The steam gathered and came down on the tables in single fat drops. Two wardens in grey coats drank at the counter on their feet, amber clasps at their collars, and the room kept a polite yard of space round them.

Their table was at the back, against the wall. Even there, with a whole table between them, Kai felt the lean. It was faint, like a draught under a door, and it came from the two people across from him.

Marcus was a broad man of about forty-five, grey at the temples, in a slate-blue coat done up to the neck. The thumb of his left hand rubbed the scarred ridge across the knuckles of his right, over and over, at something that would not come off. Cass was lean, with dark hair cropped close and faint white lines under the skin at both wrists, thin as chalk. She looked at Kai's hands before she looked at his face.

Marcus's thumb went on rubbing. *Four at the table. He counted the chair. Aeron never counted the chair. Aeron would have sat in it.* His thumb stopped for a moment, and then went on.

"Aeron," said Cass.

"Cass. Marcus." Kai sat. The bench was wet. "Dace said you had a place for me."

"Dace charges a lot." Marcus turned his cup a quarter turn. "He's earned it this once."

A small spirit burner sat under the tea pot. Cass touched one finger to the wick, and a white spark jumped from her fingertip, hard-edged and brief. The wick took it and burned a plain yellow. She did not chant, and there was no heat in the room that Kai could feel, but the air above her hand had been somewhere else for a breath.

*White, not yellow. And no words, no nothing, just a finger. How's she do that? What does she have to pay? No. Don't ask. I'm not too certain of the relationship Aeron had with these two. Have to be cautious.*

"You don't flinch like you used to," Cass said.

"At what?"

"That." She nodded at the burner. "You went grey every time. I stopped lighting it near you."

*Didn't like fire. Add it to the plums. Why would anyone here not like fire? Everything runs on it.*

"Ummm...I hit my head," said Kai.

"We heard," said Marcus. "The whole Quarter's heard."

Cass poured. Then she asked it, in the same flat voice she had used about the flame. "Do you remember what Rook did before an anchor?"

*Who's Rook. Ohh the scarf. Whoever Rook is. And anchor, another word nobody's explained. If I say yes I'm making it up, and it's a test, she's laid it out like a plate. There's only one answer I can give that's true.*

"No," said Kai. "I don't. If I said I did, I'd be guessing."

Cass held the pot longer than she needed to. "Good," she said. "I never told you." She set the pot down and pushed a cup across. Kai drank. The tea was black and bitter enough to take the skin off his tongue.

*Naomi's. She'd leave the bag in until the water gave up, and then hand it over like a prize. I drank every one.*

He drank this one too.

"You'll want to know why we sent through Dace," Marcus said, "and didn't just knock."

"Yes."

"Because I owe you. And I didn't want to be the one asking in the street." He stopped rubbing the knuckle. "Fourteen months ago the Nine had an Exalted breach. There were five of us on the team. When it was over there were two. Rook, Sera and Jin didn't come out. The Registry sealed the ruin and wouldn't let us back."

Cass looked at the scarf.

"You went in alone," Marcus said. "The night after. Nobody asked you to. You came out with Rook's ring in your fist and put it in my hand on the steps. You never said a word, and you wouldn't take a token for it."

"He wouldn't take a token," Cass said.

"I've got the ring. It's iron, with a dent where he caught it on a rail." Marcus's hand went to his breast pocket and stayed there. "We keep a book, the two of us. It isn't the Registry's. It says what's owed, and to who. You're in it. That's not a favour. It's a debt. And in this world you don't want to owe anyone anything."

*I don't remember it. I wasn't there. I wasn't even here.* Kai opened his mouth to say so.

"I know," Marcus said, before he could. "Cass told me. It doesn't change what was done."

Kai shut his mouth.

He looked at the two of them across the steam. A man was rubbing his knuckle raw and a woman had gone quiet. The first word in his head was *useful*.

*Useful.* That's what it was, and not *sorry*. Two Watchmen Order contractors who owe a dead man, a way into somewhere, a share of whatever Dace is dangling.

He let it sit there, and then he put his cup down and got on with it. Underneath it was something small and warm that he had not expected. Marcus had said *you're in it* as if Kai were a person who could say no. He couldn't remember when anyone here had talked to him like that.

"What's the job?" he said.

"Dace has a cache in the old consolidation waterworks, under Sector 7. The Registry condemned it years back and never cleared it. Dace knows where it is and won't go." Marcus shrugged. "Three of us, four days from now. Sundial, after devotions. Four hundred and ten each, if all three come up."

"Dace said the same."

"He would. He takes his f*e in what we see down there, so don't get clever with whatever we find."

"Why a third? I assume you two have done worse than this."

"Because there are things in that water that come for a rune," said Cass. "They go past a commons as if he were a pipe."

Kai put his cup down. *I'm to be a pipe.* He asked the one that mattered. "What happens to the commons when it goes wrong?"

"The commons is the one who comes up last," Marcus said. "That's the point of him."

*Last up. Left behind, or the last one out? It can't be both. Unless it can.*

"Last out because he's slow," said Kai, "or last out because he's staying?"

"Last out because he's counting." Marcus tapped the table beside the scarf. "A contractor's too busy keeping the thing off your back to keep track. First rule is the one you did when you came in. Heads on the way in, heads on the way out. If the number's wrong, no one leaves and no one argues. You stop and you find who's missing."

"And the second rule?"

"I'll teach you on the day. You'd forget it by tonight." He looked at Kai properly for the first time. His eyes were grey and red-rimmed and very steady. "Say no if you want to. It's allowed. It's a bad place. You're not a contractor - there's risk as great as the reward."

*Fifty questions. How the lean works, what an anchor is, why her finger does that. If I ask them now I'll look like a man with something to find out.*

*Four hundred and ten. Add what I have and I'm past six hundred. And they'll teach me, and no one else here will.*

"I'll come," said Kai.

Marcus nodded once. "The yard behind the Kettle. We go at the second bell after noon, so be there before it."

"Eat first," said Cass. "Something that stays."

"Right."

Marcus finished his tea and stood. Cass took the scarf off the chair, folded it once more and put it in her coat. The chair stayed where it was, pushed in square.

Kai stayed a moment longer. There was a little tea left in the cup, black and bitter and gone cold. He drank it, and then he went out through the steam to find the long road back to Sector 9.