Chapter 6: The Man Who Knew

The Company order had been nailed to the pit gate post in the night. It was one sheet, printed, with the Board's badge at the head and a wax seal at the foot that someone had thumbed crooked. Kael read it through twice from the back of the crowd. The service gap was sealed to all but Company inspectors. The East Cut crews were stood down without pay until the finding was settled. Statements would be called for. Tool invoices stood.

Hask read it out anyway, from the gatehouse step, then called the roll plain, name by name. Each man said "Here" and nothing else. Pell, J. Rill, T. Ketter, D. A space where Tarn, N., would have been. Hask did not stop on the space.

Kael waited until the crowd had thinned. Then he went to the step.

"My token."

Hask looked at his roster. "Under advisement, Veyran."

"It's brass. It's mine."

"The Company has it." The foreman turned a page. "Under advisement."

He went down the step and across the yard. Kael stood with his bound hands at his sides. Then a shoulder came against his, a grey stoop and a gap where a tooth had been, and a twist of cloth was pressed into his coat pocket without anyone seeming to move.

"Don't open it here," Joren Pell said.

Kael opened it. It was a square of sacking tied with string, and it had weight. Through the cloth he could feel coins, copper and brass, a few of each, and a flat one that might be silver. "A mark," he said. His fingers were no use, and he was guessing.

"The old-seam crews. Passed it round the cage." Joren was looking at the gate, not at him. "Not a mark. A mark and eight bits."

Kael did not know where to put it. It was the first money anyone had given him that was not wages. He put his hand over the pocket.

"Take it," Joren said. "It's owed."

"It's not owed."

"It's owed to the crews, then. Don't pay it back to me." He rubbed his jaw with a hand like a root. "The old man at the cart. The one who turned the brace."

Kael waited.

"The forge man. Mends wards for scrap, up past the Cut road. He went to the hauler himself and undercut the scrap yard to get the weighing. Nobody does that." Joren's eyes came round at last. "He asked me who it was that came out last."

"What did you say?"

"I said it was dark." The old man looked at Kael's palms in their grey wrap. "I saw your hands on that brace, Veyran."

Kael said, "Where?"

"The dead forge. On the Ash side of the Cut road, with the chimney split." Joren turned away and then did not. "Three years cold, they say. It isn't."

Mira was at the door when he came up the Low Stair. She stood in the frame with the last loaf in the crook of her arm and a folded sheet in the other hand, and she held up the sheet before he reached the step.

"The permit roll. Posted at the Arcade this morning, with ours on it." She did not unfold it. "If the invoices go unpaid past the fifteenth, the permit is struck. We eat the plain measure now. After that we eat what the neighbours leave." She glanced down the stair. "An usher's been past twice since the hearing. Slow, both times."

He put the twist of sacking in her hand, because it was easier than explaining it. She weighed it, and undid the string, and counted onto the loaf board by the door. "A mark and eight." Her lips moved. "Nine bits in the tin, after the week's bread. Thirty-seven. The bond wants sixty, and the invoices want twelve marks on top." She tied the string again. "Twenty-three short, Kael, before anyone eats."

"I'll deal with it."

"With what?" She lifted the loaf slightly. "Where are you going?"

She asked it in the voice for clerks.

"To see a man who mends wards." It was what Joren had given him. "Joren says he might have work. Sorting scrap."

"With your hands wrapped to the elbow."

"It's sitting work."

"Right," said Mira.

She put the loaf down on the step and straightened, and her palm lay against the doorframe, for the shake in it.

"Tell me, Kael. Who is he?"

"A man who mends wards."

"That's a trade. It isn't a name." She waited. He said nothing. "The one at the cart. The one who looked at you in the yard like he'd found his own coat on a stranger."

"I don't know his name."

"Then you'll find it out. Bring me his name before you go back." She shifted the sacking in her fist. "And the invoices are mine. I'll dispute the sum in writing, at the desk, before the fifteenth. My name's in their book already. It can do some work."

He turned to go, and the doorframe was under his knuckles before he had decided on it. Two raps. He heard her take her hand away.

The knock came back a beat late, as if she had stood a moment first.

The forge was cold, and it looked empty.

The chimney had split from the cap to the shoulder, and the door stood on one hinge. Inside, there was a bellows with a hole in its leather, an anvil under a drift of old ash, and a long bar of iron laid across two stands. A rime of dust lay over everything, and over the dust no print of any boot but his.

"Hello?"

Nothing answered. The iron on the stands gave a faint ring when he stepped past it, and something at the back of his hands, very small, said it was sound, and the burn gave a hot little pulse for the knowing. He stood on the threshold of the second room and put his bound palm on the jamb.

"You may stop there," said a voice behind him. "You are standing, I should say, on the one board in the building that tells me when somebody has done so."

Kael turned. The old man from the cart stood in the doorway he had just come through, narrow and upright, with white hair cut short as though by his own hand, and his hands clasped behind his back. The scorched cuffs had slipped back from forearms laced with old burns.

"Where," said the old man, "did you put your hands?"

"On the brace."

"That is a place on the brace and not an answer." He crossed to the anvil and cleared the ash with the side of one shoe. "A brace that is spent is a rare thing on a Company cart. Rarer, in the same week as a man dug out of that gap with his palms burned."

"I was pinned."

"And who else knows that you were pinned?"

"Nobody. The wardens think it came down on me."

"That is not the same as knowing." He took something from his coat and laid it on the anvil: a sliver of iron, bright and grey, no longer than a thumb. A second went beside it, the same width, from the same make of strip. He waited.

It was a test. Kael knew that much from the waiting. He put his hand out over them, not touching, and the prickle in his palms came up like a small cold wind. He shut his eyes and weighed them in the dark of his own head.

"What's it weigh?" he said, to no one.

The left one was a bit of ordinary iron, with the heft of iron. The right one was not. It was lighter than it should have been, so light that his hand wanted to lift it too far, a flake of ash dressed up as metal. He picked it up between two bandaged fingers and held it out with his eyes still shut.

"That one."

There was a pause. "Open your eyes."

He did. The linen across his right palm had gone dark from the heel to the root of the thumb. The wedge was back behind his eyes, and for a breath the old man's face stood in two places before it settled. His eyes had gone from the sliver to Kael's hands, and stayed.

"The white one came off the Company's brace. It fell loose in the sling." He did not say that it had been the right guess. "I have a further thing to show you."

He went to the shelf and came back with a lantern ward the size of two fists, a practice ward with the glass of it whole and a green rim. He set it on the anvil beside the slivers. Then a leather purse, which clinked once when it landed.

"Six marks. The fee for the ward, and an advance against lessons if you take it." The old man looked at the ward, not at Kael. "That ward is whole. If you put your hands to it, it will give you a burst of strength. Enough for the tournament, I should think, if you mean to enter."

Six marks was the bond twice over. His hands knew what grabbing had cost him. He knew what Mira had done on the table with a cloth she could not hold.

He walked the one pace to the anvil. He lowered his right hand over the ward, and it came down to a finger's width of the glass and stopped.

It was whole. His palms read it through the air as a prop reads a roof: sound, seated, bearing. Nothing was broken in it and nothing was empty. You did not pull a prop that was holding.

"It's holding," Kael said. "I won't pull it."

The old man made no sound. Kael took his hand back, and the linen on his left palm began to darken like the right.

"The six marks were the fee for the ward." The old man picked up the purse and put it in his coat. "You have not taken the ward." He lifted it off the anvil in both hands, as if it had been put down in the wrong place, and set it on the shelf behind him.

"Then I'll work for what I get," Kael said. "Sorting scrap, if there's scrap."

"A mark a day, beginning in two days. It will not be offered twice."

"The Ring." Kael's voice came out rougher than he meant. "The notice says unranked entrants can enter on the fee. Does the book hold it?"

The old man went to the shelf again and came back with a printed rule book, thick and much thumbed, and opened it on the anvil with one finger. Kael bent over the page. Open candidates. An unranked entrant who pays the bond is entered with the field. He read it twice, lips moving, as Mira did.

"It holds," said the old man. "There is a signature on the white sliver, young man. It is an old art, and it is outlawed, and the Board has hung people for it within living memory."

"What did it do to me?"

"That is a different question."

Two days at a mark was forty bits. It put the bond in hand, with seventeen over. It did not touch the invoices. The Ring had to be the answer to those.

"My sister wants your name," Kael said.

"Your sister may want a great many things."

"Give me your hands."

Kael held them out. The old man looked at the grey linen without touching it. "How long ago?"

"Five days."

"They are still cold. I can see that from here. What is in your pocket?"

"A paper."

"Show me."

He pinned the pocket flap against his ribs with the heel of one hand and worked the folded slip out with the other, and held it open between two fingers, the charcoal black on the back of a ration slip. It was all he had.

"It is the only copy. The foreman tore the warning. This is what I took from the plate." He heard his voice. "I'd give it you for the lessons."

The old man did not take it. He stood with his hands behind him and looked at the row of figures, the last two doubtful, and went completely still. It lasted a few breaths. Kael could hear the dust settle.

"Put it away," the old man said. "I will not touch it. Show it to no one." And then, to the slip: "No one at all."

The old man took Kael by the elbow, not roughly, and set him on a stool in front of the bar, and laid both his bound palms on the iron. It was colder than the wrap, and through the linen it bit.

"Breathe out. All of it. Hold it empty." A hand came down on the stool's back, though not on Kael. "Again, and slower."

He breathed out. The breath came ragged. The iron bit his palms and the burn under the linen answered with a hot line, and his chest would not go still. He tried again and it went worse.

"Again," said the voice behind him. "Slower. Let it go before you want to."

Kael breathed. At the third try something in the cold at the heel of his hand eased, a small give, as when a frozen latch lets go. He did not stop there. He set his teeth and did it a fourth time, slower still, and the prickle went down in his palms like a lamp being turned low. It did not go out. It dimmed a shade, and the iron under his hands drank it. The linen under his right palm was wet.

"Good," said the old man, as if he had been prepared to be disappointed. "Men have been hanged for less than you did in that gap, and I would sooner teach you control than attend the hanging."

Kael looked up. The light from the split chimney had lain at the door when he sat down. Now it had crossed the floor and climbed the foot of the anvil. He looked for the hour between and found the stool, the iron's bite, the old man's voice, and nothing in the middle.

"That is the small kind," the old man said. "It comes back before the next day's bell. What did the gap take?"

"A song. I've still got the notes. I can't find her singing them."

"Then it will not come back." He said it flatly, and it was the only kindness in it. "Nothing is saved, in the Marches. It is only fixed where it stands."

He turned the stool square to the bar.

"The breath hides the trace after, young man. It does not hide the draw, and the Board will know the difference. Come the day after next."

The gate bell rang while he was still on the stool.

It was a clank, twice, from the yard. The old man's head came up. "Stay there," he said, and was gone from the room as if he had never been in it.

A man in a Company coat stood in the gateway, middle-aged and heavy, with a leather satchel and, on a strap round his neck, a rank plate the size of a dinner dish, white at the face and ringed in brass. A ledger lay open on his forearm. The old man was already crossing the yard with a look of vague courtesy.

"Routine plating," the inspector said. "Appraiser's forge, after a Company job. You weighed the brace the day after the collapse."

"Three days after," said the old man. "The cart was late."

"Whatever. Names of all present." The inspector's eyes found the second figure in the doorway. "You. Out here."

Kael went. Wrapped hands told anyone who looked what they had been in. The old man did not step between them. He stood at the gatepost with his face turned to the brickwork, as if it interested him, and Kael had his answer: he would be on his own.

The plate came up. It was held out at the length of an arm, and its face, white and blank, swung slowly across the yard and across the forge door. Kael put both palms out, open, as though to take a load. He did not hide them. Hiding would be read at once. He breathed out, all of it, then again, slower still, and he held it there with his teeth shut and his eyes on a point of rust on the gatepost.

The plate swept past his hands. A fine thread of pale light ran across its face from left to right. It flickered, once, near the edge, on his left side, and went dark.

The inspector stopped. He lowered the plate an inch and looked at it, and at Kael's hands. Then he tapped the plate against his palm and uncapped his pen. "Forges. Iron dust sets it off at the edges. Name."

"Kael Veyran."

The pen scratched. "Present at the forge after a Company job." He wrote it as he said it. "Yours." He turned his head. "Name."

"Master Thale," said the old man.

The pen scratched again, under the first. The inspector blew on the ink. "Address, Veyran."

"The Low Stair." He gave the number of the door.

The pen came down on the words and stopped. It stopped for as long as it takes to read a line one has read before this week. Then it went on.

On the road beyond the gate, Mira stood with one hand on the iron bar. She had not come in. She wore her shawl, and her face was pale, and she was looking at his hands, not at his face.

The inspector tucked the plate under his arm and turned the log to the light. "Strake reads the brace when his plate is back from re-licensing. Later this month." The pen scratched a final line. "He wants every name in this book on his table first. Yours, Master Thale. The young one's under it." Boots on the road, and then the road was empty.

"Master Thale," said Mira to no one, trying the name.

Kael's hands stood out in front of him in their wrap, and the Low Stair was in the book.