Idris
One day before the audit. Evening.
They put me in irons at eight and brought me up at nine. In the interval I graded the irons. Bank iron, cast, not forged, a little pitted at the hinge where somebody's sweat had dried on it. Twelve links to the chain, each heavier than it needed to be. Everything the Bank makes for its prisoners is. A man in a cell will grade whatever he is given. It is the only shelf left to him.
The captain of the guard walked in front of me and two of his men behind, up the officers' stair and along the tellers' gallery. The doors stood open. The noise came through them like heat through a wall. At the top of the last flight the captain stopped and straightened his coat. He spoke without turning his head. "You'll stand where I put you, Assessor. You'll say nothing unless the Auditor asks."
"And if the Auditor asks?"
"The Governor was clear that she will not."
"The Governor has never met her," I said. "Nor have you."
He put me where he liked.
The great hall of the Reliquary was built to make a man feel what he owed. It runs a hundred feet. The ceiling goes up into a dark the lamps do not reach, and the dead governors hang round it in their frames, each with his hand on a ledger. Tonight the tables had been pushed back to the walls and hung with green. Every lamp the Bank owned was lit, and the floor shone like polished slate. The great doors at the far end were shut. At the near end was the dais, three steps high: a chair for the Governor, a chair for the Auditor, and between them, a little forward, a space on the boards where a man in irons might stand.
Behind the dais, against the north wall, stood a door that had no business in a hall.
It was bronze. Seven feet high, freshly cast, propped in a frame of green baize with a ribbon across it. The Reserve's new vault, the Governor had told the Bank's council in the spring: a gift of the Bank to its own future. At midnight he would cut the ribbon before the Auditor, and the Sealed Reserve would go through it under new wax, to a place where no Assessor had a key. Beside the door stood a stool with a grey gown and hood folded on it; the sealer would come at midnight. The Bank gives its sealers a number and a hood, so that whoever tastes their work never meets their hands.
I could name the sealer. I did not look at the stool twice, because the Governor was watching where I looked.
He came across the boards to me, silver and smiling, with my spoon in his waistcoat pocket. It was not hidden. He had left the bowl of it showing above the seam, the way a man leaves a watch-chain. Above it, in his breast pocket, sat the corner of my letter to the Guild, still sealed; the constable had picked it up off my floor. When he stopped in front of me he touched the spoon with two fingers, as if to check that it was still there.
"Assessor. You look tired."
"It's a poor cell, Governor. I'd recommend the Bank see to it."
"The Bank will see to a great deal." He stepped back, so that the hall could see us both. "Auditor! May I present my Assessor."
She was coming up the hall from the side door, with a clerk at her elbow and six wardens in undyed wool behind her. Every head in the room turned. I had read her reports for six years and never seen her face. It was long and plain, with grey hair cut like a boy's. She looked at the room as a woman looks at a ledger she has been told is in order.
She came to me last.
"I regret the circumstances," the Governor said. "The charter requires an officer's offences to be read before the Auditor on audit eve. Assessor Carrow, in company with his wife, a woman calling herself Bess Tolley, entered the Sealed Reserve by night on the fifth and took from it a lot, or lots, unknown. The seals at the pre-count burned yellow. The drawing is fixed for tomorrow."
"The Assessor," said Cassia Lorn, "robbed his own vault?"
"So the evidence says."
She considered me. Her eyes were grey and entirely unhurried. I have been looked at by tasters before. It is a professional discourtesy, and one gets used to it. I had never been tasted by anyone who did it with her whole face.
"Mr Carrow?"
I had been six days in a game of true sentences. I had the rules of it better than she did, and the first of them is that you must not say a thing you cannot afford to have tasted. I had time to choose. I had, I believe, about a breath.
"The Assessor," I said, "was robbed, by the vault."
There was a silence in which I could hear the lamps.
She did not say that it tasted of nothing. She did not need to. Her mouth moved very slightly at one corner. Then she looked at the Governor, who was frowning. Then, for one long half-second, she looked at the great doors, and back at me.
"I was given sentences like that this morning," said the Auditor, in an undertone meant for me alone. "Each one cut for a single lock. I recommend that you do not ask me by whom."
She went up to her chair. I stood in my irons on the boards, in front of the whole of the Bank, and for the first time in two days I could feel my hands.
The Governor settled beside her and began, in the low voice of a host, to explain the door.
"A gift to the Reserve's future, Auditor. A single vault, with a single seal, and no Assessor's key to it, so that no officer of the Bank need ever again be tempted by what he guards."
"Tempted by whom?" said Lorn.
"By himself, one supposes." The Governor smiled at the door. "The sealer is my best. Ring Number Seven; she attends at midnight. You will forgive her hood."
"I forgive everything in a hood," Lorn said. "It is the face I object to."
He laughed, a beat late. To the left of the dais stood a side table with a square of green baize on it, bare, as a table is laid before the dish comes. I did not need to ask what dish. I had counted the needles the night before, aloud, until I reached forty-one.
The hall filled.
The Bank's people came first, as they always do, in order of rank: the council in green velvet, the tellers in their good gowns, the wives, the harbour magistrates with the faces of men who have been asked to dine by someone who owns them. The band began something in the gallery over the doors. Servants went round with trays. Nobody stared at me for long. Everyone stole a glance. I have seen the same expression on a crowd round a horse that has broken its leg.
Then the public gallery began to fill, and the Governor's smile developed a hair.
It runs along the west wall above the tables, a narrow balcony with a rail. By the Bank's charter it is open to depositors on Audit Eve, and has been for two hundred years, because a Bank in those days liked to be seen by the people whose days it kept. Nobody had used it in living memory. The Bank had let it be known that the gallery was very cold, the stair very steep, and the view poor.
They came up the stair in twos and threes, and then by the dozen, in coats.
I could have priced those coats. I was born under the harbour in the warren they call the Cellars. My mother had one. It was grey, kept for funerals and rent-hearings, and it smelled of camphor and boiled wool. Tonight the smell came down from the gallery like weather. There were three hundred of them at the rail before the band had finished its tune. More came behind. A cooper. A woman with a baby on her arm, holding a tin whistle. A very thin man in a coat too large for him who I believed was the fishmonger's, and had sold his Sundays. In the middle of them, a small nervous man with a needle-man's careful hands stood at the rail like a general at a window. His face lit when he looked down.
"Auditor," said the Governor, lightly, "I had hoped the gallery might be spared the Bank's business. It is very steep."
"It is the charter, Governor." Lorn did not look round. "You revived so many."
He managed a smile.
I graded the crowd. It is what I do when I have nothing else. One in four had a scarred ear. One in three had sold something in the last quarter. A boy of about eleven had his hair combed flat with water and a look I had worn myself, once, at a Bank hearing. They looked down at the floor, and the floor looked back, and the Bank, for one evening, was made to be seen by the people it kept.
No one had come to my cell. No one had sent word by the turnkey or the laundress. I had a spoon-shaped gap in my lapel, a chain, and Lorn's undertone, which might mean a great deal or nothing. And I had what I had said through the bars. Whatever you choose, I'll sign it. I had put every mark I owned on a woman doing what she chose. I could not now claim a right to be surprised at what she chose.
And still I watched the doors. Two hours to midnight. If she came, she would come in the light, where the Governor could not touch her. If she did not, she had taken me at my word and gone, with what was left of her summer in her pocket. I found I could be glad of that. That was the strange part. Very nearly glad, if only she was alive to be glad about it.
Sergeant Gannet was not at his post by the dais. Nobody remarked on it. Mrs Merrow's almond cakes went by on a tray, twelve dozen of them, in the hands of a footman. I looked for Merrow behind them. She was not there.
At a quarter to ten, by the great clock over the gallery, the herald struck the floor with his staff.
"The Chief Auditor's guests," he said.
He read from a card. He read it in the voice of someone handed a card a moment before who does not quite believe it. "Presented under the Guild's token, by leave of the Chief Auditor. The guest of the Auditor. Madam Carrow."
The great doors opened.
She walked in alone.
She wore the dress I had seen her married in, and it was not the same dress. She had let it out where a thief needs room and taken it in where she needed to breathe; she had taken the lace from the cuffs, and pinned her hair high off her neck with nothing blue in it, and she carried her hands quite empty at her sides. On her left wrist, on a loop of cord, hung a disc of white bone. She had never looked less like a bride. She looked like a creditor.
Not a soul spoke. It is a long way from the great doors to the dais. I counted without meaning to; I have counted everything in that hall since I was twenty-four. Sixty-one paces. She took them evenly. Not fast. She did not look at the Governor, or the gallery, or the guards, who had turned like a field of wheat and could not decide whether to move. The Bank's constables carry the Bank's warrants. They do not carry the Guild's. One man in blue took a half-step towards her. A warden in undyed wool put out an arm, without any expression whatsoever, and the half-step was withdrawn.
The Governor said, "Madam."
"Governor," she said, without stopping.
She came up the three steps to the boards where I stood. Close to, she was very pale. Her eyes were bright. There was a small hard line beside her mouth where she had bitten the inside of her cheek, and she smelled of lye soap and her own skin. I stood absolutely still with twelve links of iron between my hands.
She put her hands on my chest, on the place where the spoon had been.
She kissed me.
She tasted of lamp-smoke and salt and, faintly, of almonds, which meant she had come by way of the Bank's kitchens; I filed that, with everything else, and lost the file.
I will be exact, because I have been exact about every other thing. It was not the kiss on the Exchange steps, which was a lift. It was not the kiss in the cage, which was a discovery. It was a claim. She made it in front of the Bank and the Guild and three hundred people in funeral coats, with a warrant on her. It was hers from the first breath. My hands were in irons. For once I was glad of it: whatever this was, I could not have started it.
She drew back an inch.
From her sleeve she took something small and grey, and pinned it to my lapel, where my own had been, with two quick pulls of her fingers.
I looked down at it. A spoon, of pewter, badly finished, its bowl a little out of true. Her father's file marks were still on the handle. It would not have turned a lock in the Reliquary. It was mostly tin. I had spent my working life being paid to taste that in other people's mouths.
"I didn't drink it," she said, very low, into the small space between us.
Only that. She held my eye for a moment as if she were setting something down, and the whole of the last two days went out of me through the soles of my feet.
She turned to the hall.
She lifted her right hand, once, palm out, the way a lamplighter raises his pole.
And the gallery began to sing.
I do not know who started it. I believe it was the woman with the tin whistle. It was the first verse, the one the whole port knows. It came down from the rail in three hundred voices, out of tune and unhurried, so loud that the lamps trembled on their chains. The band tried to come in over it. It gave up. The council in their velvet looked at each other. The boy with the flat hair sang with his mouth wide open. The Auditor did not move. Her hands lay in her lap, and I thought I saw her lips move with the tune.
The Governor lifted his hand for silence. Nobody obeyed.
She did not run. She simply went. In the noise she passed along the side of the dais and behind the green baize, past the bronze door and its empty stool, and through a servants' door that I had not noticed in six years of noticing that hall, and it closed behind her with the small polite click of a well-oiled latch.
The song ended. The hall was very quiet. My lapel was heavy on one side.
The Governor did not look at me. He turned his back to the gallery so that only the captain of the guard could see his mouth, and spoke in the courteous voice that he uses to order a man's memory out of him.
"Find my Assessor's wife," he said, "outside the Auditor's sight. And bring the needles up. We'll do it here."