Chapter 72: THE FATHER
He had not slept.
On the rotation, he had gone two nights without it. The body had taken them back on the third. This was different. He had lain on the floor with his back to the bench leg, thinking about a closed desk, until the window went grey.
Miasma had not moved off his leg all night. Nyx had not moved off its corner.
He got up. He took the herbalist’s empty jar off the bench on his way out.
There were no route papers. The desk was closed. The papers were on it. A lamplighter without papers drew no oil. He walked no route. He collected no three copper at the end of it. That would hold for three weeks, or four, or however long the audit took.
He had forty-five silver and twenty copper under the floorboard. Renn had paid it out over two sales of sewer moonsage, three-twenty a sprig, rounded in his favor both times to keep him quiet about where it grew.
Aiden had not spent any of it. Four years at three copper a day did not teach a man to break silver. He would have to break silver now.
He took ten with him and left the rest hidden.
Miasma had eaten out of the sewer since the night he pulled her out of the grate.
Nyx had never taken food from his hand. It sat in the darkest corner of the room, stared at the crack where the wall met the ceiling, and was heavier this week than last.
Either something in that wall is dying very slowly, or my beast eats the dark.
So he had the morning, with nothing in it.
He went down and walked his own streets at first bell.
The herb-lane lamp was still burning on the rendered fat he had put in it twelve days ago. Six bells left in the wick. Maybe seven. Nobody would fill it after that.
The herb shop’s shutter was down.
That shutter went up at first bell every day of the year. It stayed up until ninth. He stood in front of it long enough to be sure of what he was seeing.
He went to Renn first.
He knocked three times on the door frame, not the door. She opened it before his hand came down.
Renn never poured. That was not the signal. The signal was that she had not touched the shelf or the scale since he came in. She sold while she talked, always. This morning her hands stayed folded on the wood.
He sat at the bench.
"The audit," he said.
"Vane’s people filed on the depot desk two mornings ago. Harken signed the petition himself. Twelve weeks of the desk’s paper, read line by line."
"Twelve weeks. Marsh has only been at it since the wax went on my slip."
"That is the trap." She did not soften it. "The petition reaches back twelve weeks so the last three stand out. Eleven clean weeks, then a run of holes. Marsh never crossed anything out, Aiden. He put the papers in his coat. The desk has a receiving line for each of them with nothing on the other side. A clerk does not need to be clever to see where that starts."
"It starts at me."
"It starts the week your name went on a Vane paper. That is the column they want written."
Aiden sat with it.
"And Marsh."
"Marsh is off this lane. The papers are in his coat. Those are the same fact. He stays gone as long as he is carrying them."
"The paper with my name on it."
"Vane filed a fresh one the same morning. It is on a closed desk. Nobody left there has the authority to lose it. In five days the desk empties upward. It goes to the chamber with everything else on the filed side."
"Who reads it to me."
"Nobody. There is no panel this time. A clerk writes a column. Your standing goes back to flagged."
The scale’s brass pans hung level behind her. She had not put a weight in them all morning.
"There’s more," he said.
"There is."
She told him.
"Three nights ago a man came to the herb shop. Small clean press, same as the lieutenant’s. He told the herbalist the shop’s books could be audited the same as the depot’s if the lane went on covering for you. Then he said the daughter’s name out loud."
Aiden froze.
"The herbalist told him to get off the step. The man put him on the floor of his own back room. Broke two ribs doing it. The daughter has run the front and the back since. She has told nobody. The lane will know by ninth bell anyway."
"Three nights ago I was at a burn line reading prints."
"You were."
Aiden stood up.
"I am not going to tell you what to do," Renn said. "I never have." She looked at him. "But the lane paid for you this week. Go and see what it cost."
"Understood."
Miasma came off his shoulder onto the counter before he reached the door.
She went along the shelf with her head up, sniffing the air over the jars. She had never once looked at Renn’s stock. She fed herself off the pipe growth under the Row and had done since the night he pulled her out of a grate.
She stopped at the fourth jar and put a foot on the lid.
Renn looked at where the foot was. Then at Aiden.
"That is not food. That is poison, and I sell it to men who want a tamer’s beast dead without being seen doing it."
Miasma did not move her foot.
"Do you want it?" he asked, and she tapped her foot on the jar. Once.
He turned to Renn. "How much would she want."
"A pinch of that kills a grown beast." Renn had the jar down already. She was watching Miasma, not him. "She is not asking for a pinch."
"No."
Renn weighed it out, wrapped it, and did not make a joke while she did it.
"Ten silver. It’ll last her four days, maybe five for a beast her size."
Ten silver was a quarter of everything he owned, for five days of feed.
He emptied his pocket. It was money she earned, used for food she needed. He did not feel the sting. He ran his thumb along her back as he set two piles of five silver on the counter. He pocketed the wrapped poison.
Miasma went back up his arm and sat on his shoulder. She rubbed his cheek with her head.
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He knocked at the side door of the herb shop.
The daughter opened it. She had the working coat on, with a half-apron over it. There was flour down the front, because the stove at the back was going and somebody had to eat. Dried blood on the apron’s corner where she had wiped her hand.
Her eyes were red and dry. She had been past crying for two days. Her mouth went thin when she saw who it was, and she stepped back to let him in.
The herbalist lay on a low bed against the back wall, on his back, under a blanket. A strip of linen crossed his face above the cheekbones. The left eye had been swollen shut for three days. His hands rested on top of the blanket. They were a working man’s hands, stained at the fingers from forty years of the same shelf.
He breathed short and shallow. His daughter had strapped the ribs herself. She had done it for other people’s fathers.
Aiden stood at the foot of the bed.
"Was it about me," he said.
"He said your name twice." Her voice did not shake. She had spent whatever there was to spend on the first night. "He said mine once. That was the part my father stood up for."
"I know."
He set the empty jar on the small table where the herbalist kept his working stock, where the man would see it when he opened his eye.
"I’ll come back when he’s awake."
"He won’t want you to."
"I know that too."
She held the door open while he went down the step. She did not close it until he reached the lane.
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He walked back along the lane to the dead lamp on his own corner and put his hand on the housing. The iron was cold. Without papers, there was nothing on it he was allowed to touch.
This lane knew I took the baker’s chest. Every man on it worked out what I did, and none of them said a word to the depot or the enforcers.
Vane put a man in that shop because the shop is easier to reach than I am. He will do it again. He will do it to Renn, to the boy’s mother, to the clerk who counted my oil out ahead of my slips.
He does that while I am on this lane. He has no reason to once I am not.
He went up the stairs.
He pulled the floorboard up. He took the relic out. It went in the inside pocket of the kit bag, beside the wire and the token. The small blade went in his boot, the tin of rendered oil in his coat.
Nyx went into the dark inside the coat and stayed there.
He sat at the bench.
Miasma came up onto his leg. She settled with her head toward the window.
He looked at that for a while.
She had lain on his leg all night with her head that way. At the burn camp she had come onto his knee while he cleaned the blade and put herself under the hand holding it, facing up the trail the tracks went. He had thought she wanted the knee.
She pointed me at a tunnel with moonsage spriggs. She pointed at the back wall in the chamber. She pointed at an empty corner on my own street and I stood there half the night because she did.
She has been pointing since the burn line. I read it as a beast looking for somewhere warm.
He put two fingers on her side. She leaned into them. Her head did not move off the window.
The senior had told him at the gate that his proctor would send word by sixth bell. A proctor’s word came written, carried by a boy in livery.
I cannot take a paper off a closed desk. I cannot stand in front of a chamber that is not going to call me.
In five days a charter party writes that den into a column and a house sends men out to it.
She has been telling me east since the burn line. That one I can still reach.
He sat at the bench with the bag packed and waited for sixth bell.