Perpetua
Nine days before the audit. Afternoon.
There's one rule in the Penny Cellar, and Master Esk has never needed to chalk it over the door: you don't watch the buyer drink. You take your fourteen marks, you hold the cotton to the back of your head, and you stare at the wall as if it owes you money.
I had my eye to the gap in the curtain of booth three, and it was my day going into her mouth.
Ten minutes earlier Esk had slid his silver needle in behind my left ear and drawn it out of me. That's all drawing is. A needle behind the ear, a cold pull like a thread going through a hem, and a day you had becomes a day you haven't. He'd run it off into a thumb-length of glass, sealed it with Cellar green, and the woman in booth three had paid for it before the wax was hard.
I'd gone over the day once more in the chair while he warmed the needle, slowly, like coins you count before you hand them across. It was a Tuesday in March, the March before my father died, and it was raining. He stood at the stove laughing with his whole back, the pan on fire, and my brother Tobin, fourteen and all elbows, floured the table and the floor and the cat, and swore the cat had wanted to help. The pancakes came out black. Nobody minded. There was nowhere any of us had to be.
Then the needle, and the pull, and my father's laugh was a fact somebody had told me once.
The buyer was broad as a door, in a shawl worn thin at the elbows, her fingers dyed to the second knuckle the blue of a winter bruise. A dyer, then, on her half-day. She broke the wax with a fingernail and tipped the glass back like a sailor with his rum.
That's the other half of the trade. You drink somebody's day and it becomes yours. She got the kitchen. She got the rain on the window and the smoke and the cat. Her eyes shut, and her whole face came unfastened, and then it ran.
"Oh, love," she said, to the curtain, or to me behind it. "It was so warm."
I should have looked away. I stood there with my eye to the gap while a stranger wept over my kitchen. I still had the facts of it. Rain, pancakes, the cat: I could have chalked them on a slate. But the warmth had gone out of them with the needle, and now it was in her, running down her face, and all I had left was the list.
I put my hand flat under my ribs, where the hollow is.
Everyone who sells has one, and mine's the size of one summer, gone out of me years back, a thing I know was there the way you know you've visited a country: by the stamp, not the pictures. Most days it sits in me like a pebble, smooth and blank, and the pebble had a receipt, folded in my stays, that I'd never unfolded, because reading it had never put anything back.
The curtain rattled along its rings. The dyer came out wiping her face with the heel of a blue hand, and she looked me up and down the way a dyer looks at a bad batch.
"There's a torn edge in it," she said. "Years back. Right at the end of the day, where it runs into the ones after."
"Esk's clean," I said. "Cleanest needle on Tallow Lane."
From behind his counter, Esk made a small, grateful noise.
"It's not the needle's mark." She set the empty glass on the ledge between us, carefully, as if it might still be hot. "Whoever it was you sold before, girl, they got a bargain. And you got robbed."
I've been called worse than girl, by people who charged for the privilege. I gave her the smile I keep for landlords and held my hand out to Esk.
He counted fourteen marks into my palm. I counted them again, once with my fingers and once in my head, which is how you count when the room is twelve a week and the interest on your brother's note falls due at the quarter. Two marks over. Bread, if I walked everywhere till Friday. I could smell the bakery at the top of the Cellar steps. I'd been smelling it for an hour.
Then the whistles went.
Three short and a long, from the top of the lane and then from the bottom, which meant both ends were stopped. Bank whistles. The constables wear blue and say they serve the port, but their whistles come from the Bank's foundry and so do their wages, and when they shout, they shout in the Bank's voice.
"Papers," Esk said faintly, to nobody, and lifted his licence off its nail and held it to his chest like a hymn book.
The sellers on the bench did what sellers do. Nobody ran. Running is for people with something in their pockets besides fourteen marks, and I had fourteen marks, a lockpick roll sewn into my hem, and a name the Bank would pay a great deal to hear. So I went boring.
It's a knack. You let your shoulders round. You let your mouth hang a little, like someone waiting for soup. You think about nothing more interesting than the damp on the wall until you're so dull that eyes slide off you like rain off slate. My father taught me at nine, for the days the lock inspectors came round to poke at his work.
The dyer sat down on the bench beside me, square as a wardrobe, so that most of the room had her and not me, and fixed her eyes on the floor like the rest of us.
Boots on the steps. Four constables in blue, bored and wet at the shoulders. Then the Assessor.
He had to duck under the lintel, and once he'd straightened he was the tallest man in the room: a slate-grey coat cut well and worn badly, dark hair that wanted a barber, and a small silver spoon pinned to his lapel like a medal nobody had got round to giving him. I didn't need the spoon. Every thief in the port knows the Assessor by sight. He's the Bank's taster, the man who puts a drop of your day on his tongue and says what it's worth, and a lie spoken near him tastes of tin. He looked along the booths like a jeweller sorting paste from stones.
Idris Carrow. Three years of stealing from the Bank's shelves, two of them with him hunting me, and I had never once let him close enough to learn the colour of my eyes.
His were dark, and bruised underneath, as if he hadn't slept since the last audit.
"Master Esk." His voice was low, and quite polite. "Your licence is in order. I'm not here for it. Sit down before you fall down."
Esk sat.
The Assessor went along the bench. He asked each seller a name, and each seller gave one, and he said, "Head to the side, if you would," and put two fingers behind their ear and read their scars like a clerk running a finger down a ledger. The constables studied the ceiling. It isn't a thing you watch, a man counting how much of a person has been sold.
The dyer held up her empty glass, which is a buyer's whole defence, and said nothing to him at all. He moved on.
Then he was in front of me, and the light from the stairwell was behind him, and I was looking at a grey waistcoat button with a loose thread.
"Name?"
"Bess Tolley." It's the name in Esk's ledger. In the Penny Cellar, that makes it true.
"Head to the side, Miss Tolley, if you'd be so kind."
I tipped my head and gave him the left side, where the row is.
I'd expected cold. Everything the Bank owns is cold: the steps, the counters, the spoon. His fingers were warm and dry. They found the first scar without hunting for it, then the next, and the next, one pin at a time down a lock, while I kept my eyes on the damp and thought hard about soup. He smelled of cloves, and cold air, and ink.
"Do you charge for this," I said to the wall, "or does it come free with the raid?"
"The Bank pays me." A pause, and his thumb moved to the next scar. "You'd be surprised how little. Twenty-two. Nine of them since the spring. One of them today; it's still warm."
"You can count."
"What did you sell?"
"A Tuesday."
"And what's a Tuesday worth?"
"Today?" I said. "A Tuesday's rent."
"You're selling faster than you're eating, Miss Tolley. You're too thin for the rate."
"Are you the Bank's Assessor or my aunt?"
"That's only observation," said Idris Carrow.
His fingers stayed where they were. Not moving. Just resting on the row, as if he'd forgotten them there. Then he took them away, and the back of my neck was cold where they'd been, and I was furious with it. Three years, and the first man from the Bank to lay a hand on me had done it with a warrant, and the back of my neck wanted to know when he'd do it again.
"There's a thief," he said, in the same polite voice, "who takes bottles off the Bank's shelves. Never the gold-wax lots. Never anything that fetches a price at auction. Only bottles somebody loved, and afterwards they turn up back in the people who sold them, in cellars very like this one. The Bank calls her the Linnet."
"Pretty name," I said.
"It's a small brown bird nobody looks at twice." He looked at me twice. "I'm looking for a woman with a list."
The trick with an Assessor isn't lying. My father told me that too. It's choosing the true thing that does the most work.
"I've never taken anything from this Bank," I said, "that belonged to it."
I watched him taste it: a pause somewhere behind his eyes, a wine merchant's pause. No tin. There wouldn't be. Every bottle I'd ever lifted belonged to whoever had been bled for it, and I'd only carried them home.
"That," the Assessor said, "is a very particular sentence."
"I'm a very particular woman."
He looked at my face then, properly, as though it were a label he'd half read somewhere and couldn't place.
"Have we met?" he said.
"I'd remember."
Something went over his face and was gone before I could put a price on it.
"Yes," said Idris Carrow. "So would I."
He straightened to his full height, up into the lamp smoke under the ceiling. "Go home, Miss Tolley. Eat something with butter." He turned to the constables. "There's nothing here for us. Open the lane." And over his shoulder, to me or to the room, he said, "I'm a patient man."
That was all. He went up the steps with the blue coats after him, ducking the lintel, and the whistles blew the lane open, and Esk hung his licence back on its nail with both hands.
He'd let me go. Assessors don't let people go. The Bank doesn't pay them for it, however little it pays.
I walked up the Cellar steps as if I had nowhere to be. At the top, in the drizzle, I ran.
Tallow Lane runs downhill to the harbour, and I took it at a pace that would have fetched a whistle on any other afternoon. I didn't know what I was running from. That was the trouble. You can outrun a man who's chasing you. You can't outrun one who's decided to wait.
Halfway down, a black carriage stood across the mouth of Hook Street with its door open and its step let down, and a voice from inside said, "Get in."
I knew the voice. I'd taken work from it for three years, always through her boy and always on paper, and I'd never once been asked inside. Madam Corvane brokers what can't go through the Bank, which in this port is most of what matters.
I got in. You don't say no to Corvane in the street. You say it sitting down, where it's warmer.
She was small and silver-haired, in mourning black so old it had gone green at the seams, with a rug over her knees and two papers lying on the rug. She kept her eyes on my face, as she always did, pricing it.
"Nine days," she said, and handed me the first.
It was Collateral Office paper under the office's green seal, and I knew its shape before I read a word, because I pay the interest on that note every quarter. The notice said: Tobin Vane, aged nineteen. Forty-one memories held as collateral. Forfeit on the day of the quarterly audit, to be drawn and sold.
"Your brother's memories," Corvane said, "held against his debt. If it isn't settled by the audit, the Bank draws them out of him and sells them to whoever bids."
"I know what collateral is." My voice came out perfectly level, which is how I can tell I'm frightened. "I've paid on it every quarter for three years. It isn't due."
"It is now."
Tobin. Nineteen and still all elbows, who eats like a gull and makes jokes when he's scared and can't lie to me with a straight face. Forty-one pieces of him. I didn't know which forty-one. That was what turned my hands cold: nobody ever tells you which. It might be the fishing. It might be a kitchen in March, with rain on the window and a man laughing with his whole back, which was nobody's now but Tobin's, because an hour ago I'd sold my half of it for a Tuesday's rent.
"My client," said Corvane, "can see that paper paid in full."
"Who is your client?"
"My client keeps their word," Corvane said, "and so do I. That's all you'll have of either of us."
"For what, then?"
She laid the second paper over the first.
A marriage licence, on Bank vellum as thick as a slice of ham. The groom's line was signed already, in a hand that leaned forward like somebody walking into weather: Idris Carrow. The bride's line was blank.
I laughed. It came out wrong.
"The charter says the Assessor marries by the audit or gives up his spoon," Corvane said. "He has refused nineteen candidates in a year. My client wants the twentieth to be you."
"I've just met him."
"I know. I was across the lane."
"He was looking for the Linnet."
"Then his own house is the last place he'll look." She folded her gloved hands. "My client wants a single sealed bottle on the fourth level of the Reliquary. Nobody goes down to the fourth level but the Assessor and his household. You'll be his household."
"No," I said. "I lift bottles. I don't marry the men who guard them. Find a girl who likes them tall."
Corvane didn't answer that. She never wastes a word on a thing she means to win anyway.
She took a little bottle from her reticule and stood it on the licence between us. Its wax was violet, the colour of a vein at the wrist.
"A love, freshly drawn," she said, "with the face cut out."
"Whose face goes in?"
"Whoever's in front of him when he drinks. Put it in his cup at the wedding toast. A man in love takes his wife wherever she wants to go."
I didn't touch it. I've carried a great many bottles, and none of them ever made my skin creep like that one. "That's against the law twice over."
"It has been done before, twice, on lesser men."
"And you don't mind brokering it."
"Somebody has to keep the lamps lit, girl."
Outside, the lamplighters were coming down Hook Street with their poles, one flame at a time, and the harbour had gone the grey of a knife. I looked at the licence because it was easier than looking at the violet, and that was when I saw the date. He'd dated his signature, as the Bank teaches its officers to.
"This is eleven weeks old," I said.
Corvane waited.
"Eleven weeks ago nobody in this port had put my name and his in the same sentence. He turns down nineteen women, and then he signs a licence with the bride's line empty and hands it to a broker?" I tipped the vellum to the carriage lamp. "So who was he marrying eleven weeks ago?"
For the first time in three years, Madam Corvane looked at something other than my face.
"You may ask him," she said, to the window, "tomorrow, at noon." She uncapped a pen and held it out to me, nib first. "Sign the bride's line, Perpetua."
My name. My real one. She'd never once used it, and nobody but Tobin had said it aloud in three years, and it went into me the way the needle goes, cold, behind the ear.
Nine days. Forty-one of my brother's memories. One bottle on the fourth level, and at the bottom of the stairs, the man whose fingers had just been on the row behind my ear, waiting.
I took the pen and signed Bess Tolley, because that was the name he knew and the name the banns would carry, and I pressed so hard the nib went through the vellum. In the hollow, where the pebble of an unremembered summer lay smooth as glass, something had moved.