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39. Fair Weight
[Day-42 (06:40)](The ropewalk's back stairs, Market Row, Sector 9, Alexandria) Marrow sat down across from him with the spoon still in his hand. "So," he said. "What did Hollis's friend bring me?" Kai took the sock out of his coat and laid ten discs on the table in a row. Marrow shut the window slit and kicked the stove door closed. The landing darkened, and the discs lit the table, amber over gold, steady as a row of small lamps. Marrow's face did something fast and complicated in the light, and then it turned round and pink again. *He did the sum first and the surprise second. So he's seen something like it before. Or he's just seen what it's worth.* "Hm," said Marrow. He picked up the disc at the end, the first one Kai had made. The brown at its rim had crept in a finger's width since midnight, and the gold in the middle was the colour of a yolk. He bit it twice. "Soft under the fill. Unstruck. Cinder Road scrap, I'd say, by the grease on it. I don't ask where blanks come from
38. The Fence
*Nothing counterfeits faster than hope. A coin is only a promise struck in metal. A false coin is a promise struck in a hurry. The assayer weighs, bites and listens. The thief weighs nothing and listens to the crowd. Spend the false coin fast and far from the one who struck it. The one who struck it will know it, as a mother knows a cough in the next room.*From an Assay Office adage[Day-42 (06:10)](Hollis's yard, Cinder Road, Sector 9, Alexandria) "Five," said Kai. "For a name." Hollis counted the five tokens on the sorting table with one finger. Then he counted them again, because he counted everything twice, and then he looked up at Kai's face as if the rest of the sum might be written there. "A name," he said. "In all the time I've known you, you never wanted a name. You wanted a gate opened and a cart brought round. What sort of name?" "A man who takes small lots at night. He pays a fair price, he spends what he buys the same day, and he doesn't ask where it came from." "S
37. Blank Metal
[Day-41 (23:35)](Aeron's room, Chandler Court, Sector 9, Alexandria) The blanket off the chair covered the window, hooked on the two old curtain nails. The pawn came off the sill and stood on the table, out of the way. Then Kai pinched out the lamp and the room went black. He had meant that. If anything lit, he wanted it to be the only light there was, and not something he had talked himself into seeing. He stood at the table with a blank in his right hand. By feel it was a cold, slightly greasy disc, no bigger than a tin. Oren breathed at the far end of the room, long and even, with his back to the door and his coat pulled over his shoulders. Upstairs somebody walked to his window and back. In his left hand Kai held the bitten token. He had decided in the chair that it was the last warm thing he could think of, and a person ought to aim at something. The token was cold and ordinary, and it stayed that way. *Right. Push, then.* He pushed. He stood in the dark with his teeth tog
36. Eleven Days
[Day-41 (16:40)](Aeron's room, Chandler Court, Sector 9, Alexandria) The window had gone the colour of weak tea. The light lay across the table in one long stripe and stopped at the edge of the tea tin. Kai had the lid off and the rolls out, with the sock and the loose tokens beside them. Grey token, all of it, worn smooth by other people's pockets. He did the sum on the back of a bakery bill, in pencil, and then he shut his eyes and did it again. *Fifteen hundred. Nine-ten short.* Quarter Day was eleven days off, and the Writ ran fourteen after it. Oren's hundred and twenty was a different sum, and so was Dace's four hundred. He didn't do those. They hadn't shrunk since. *Two-fifty by honest wages, if nothing breaks. Something always breaks. So far it's been a rib, an arm and a bond.* On the wall the red thread ran between its paper flags. The one at Brewers' Cut sat low on the left, with a date under it in the same square hand as the date on Voss's paper. He had thought about
35. Unverified
[Day-39 (10:25)](Registry branch office, south of Market Row, Sector 9, Alexandria) *Six doors.* Kai watched the brass lamp, because it wasn't Voss. *A Collector walks down a street, stops at six doors, looks at them, and takes nobody. Do I believe that? I've seen one Collector. It took a man off a road I was standing on and looked straight through me like a window. Six doors and nobody was collected? I have no idea. No idea at all.* "I don't know," said Kai. The rune did not change. For a second he thought that was it, that it had gone through. "That is the answer of a man who has lost a memory," said Voss. He put his pen down. "I did not ask what you remember. Belief is not kept in the same place. A man who has forgotten a road still knows whether he thinks it's there." *Oh, that's good. That's really good.* It was a hot little flash of admiration, and he had no room for it. *He's shut it. "I don't know" was the door, and he's shut it.* The rune came up bright under the skin,
34. Voss
[Day-39 (10:00)](Registry branch office, south of Market Row, Sector 9, Alexandria) "Forty-seven," said the clerk behind the brass grille. A sergeant in a slate-blue coat got up from the third bench and went through the side door without looking at anyone. The board over the counter said thirty-eight, and the slip in Kai's hand said sixty-one. The machine by the street door had printed it. He had pushed Aeron's grey card into the slot, and it had clicked, hissed and stamped a number on a strip of grey paper. Under the number, in amber, it had added a line of its own: ATTEND. TESTIMONY OFFICER. The sergeant's slip had been yellow. *The Grey slips sit. Yellow slips go. They've just taken a forty-seven with thirty-eight on the board, so the numbers don't mean anything.* He looked along the bench. *And the sister in white came in with no slip at all and was through that door before I'd sat down.* The clerk had come round the end of the counter for her and bowed to the waist. To the
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