Chapter 8: Second Night Bell

Wick turned his brass stamp over on the sill before Mira had finished asking, which told Kael how it would go.

"The order for my dose," she said. She stood at Window Four with her shawl over her plait and her chin tipped up, and she used the voice for clerks. "In the name of Veyran, M., with the Dispensary's seal on it. It's the paper that says I was promised."

"That is not this window." The registrar did not meet her eye. He met the stamp. "I looked two days back and again this morning. The book says allocated, Miss Veyran. There is no order behind the word. I can only..." He stopped on the edge of the thing he could not do, as he stopped at the end of most sentences. "The Lamp keeps its list at the side counter."

Orin had paid Kael at dawn, a mark for a morning of sorting ward scrap into two crates, and had not let him within arm's reach of anything cracked. The coin was in Mira's shawl now. It would stay there. Kael followed her to the side counter and kept his mouth shut.

The counter was a plank on trestles under the stair. Women sat on a bench along the wall with their hands in their laps, and a child coughed into a sleeve. A long sheet hung on a board in three inks, most of its lines struck through. Nobody on it was a miner. The Lamp's clerk wore grey with a lamp badge over his heart, and he read from a card in a drone, like a cart on a plank road. "The Lamp's list is open to the petitioner for her name today, on the following condition. The petitioner waives sight of findings and diagnosis."

"What does that mean?" said Mira.

He read it again, louder.

A name on that list was a vial, and a clerk who would hand it over. Twelve days ago, outside this same door, Kael had watched her refuse fifteen marks of green glass. He wanted this one. The wanting had a weight, and he knew what it weighed, and he said it anyway.

"What does she sign away?"

The clerk read the card a third time, louder yet. A woman behind them shifted her feet.

"That's mine to decide," Mira said. She said it to the clerk, in her ordinary voice, with the shawl gone from her head. "I don't sign."

"It is, Miss, you understand, only that the list has been called twice this year, and there are not..." He put the card down, took up a slip and struck her name off the pending with a stroke that went through the paper. "There."

Kael looked at the struck line. A man who had wanted that list had no business asking her what she signed. He kept his hands in his coat.

Behind the high rail of Window Four, a woman in a grey cap had stopped counting a tray of vials. She stood with a finger on the third one and her lips still. A slip hung from her other hand. She looked at the slip, then at Mira, the way a clerk checks a name against a list, and nodded once.

Mira looked back for exactly one breath. Then she turned and walked toward the door, and Kael went after her without knowing what had been agreed.

The Dispensary yard at the second night bell was black except for one lamp over the gate.

It was the same square of packed dirt. An iron grating covered the drain in the middle. The post stood by the gate with its pot of ink on a chain, a skin of dust across the ink. Beyond the dirt, a stone door stood in the wall to the left of the stock rooms. A wooden door stood to the right. The air smelled of wet slate and old medicine.

"You stand over there," Mira said, very low. "At the drain. Face the gate. You hear it. You don't look at her, and you write nothing."

"I wasn't going to write."

"You were going to count her." She had the shawl pulled up over her hair again. "She said not him. This is as close to not him as she'll take."

He went to the drain and stood on the grating with his back to the yard. The last stroke of the second night bell died over the roofs. After it there was only the lamp's thin buzz and Mira's breathing, six paces off. Then a woman's shoes sounded on the dirt, quick and uneven, and stopped.

A door scraped open behind him, the wooden one. Kael kept his eyes on the gate, his hands in his coat and his shoulders square. He knew the grey cap from the Dispensary window and nothing else of her. The shoes stopped dead: she had seen the second shape by the drain. He could hear her weight go back onto her heels. For a moment he thought she would go in again and bar the door.

"He's here."

"He's there." Mira's voice had changed, thin and sweet. "He has his back to you. He can't see your face and he'll say nothing. I'd be so grateful if you'd say it slowly."

"I'm not saying that." The nurse's voice was breathless. It came in pieces, with a counting under it, one, two, measuring out her words as she measured vials. "I said I'd come, not that I'd say. They'll know it was me. It's my name on the seal."

"Then what can you say?"

Silence. A shoe scraped. Kael looked at the gate, where a moth beat itself against the lamp, and made his shoulders stay loose.

"Where did the vials go?" said Mira.

"I'm not saying that. What can you prove?" the nurse said. "You. Have you a paper? A signed one?"

"I have a docket slip," said Mira, "and a note in the Tribunal's record that I took a sheet off a pad. That's all I have."

"It's in a book."

"Yes."

"Already in a book." The woman's breath went. Kael heard her take two steps away and stop. "Then you've nothing. Then I tell you, and you go and say, and it's my name and yours. They'll have the pair of us. I'm the one with the seal."

"I'm not asking you to say it to anyone."

"You'd have to."

Mira did not answer at once. He heard paper: the docket slip, turned over in her fingers and turned back. She could take one frightened woman's word to the Tribunal with no paper behind it. She would be told it was a rumour, from a girl already fined for her zeal. Or she could keep the woman's name out of every mouth and have nothing to lay on a desk. Either way the batch stayed where it was. He did not turn his head.

"I'd have to, if I used it." Mira's hand came down on the post with a click. "Then I won't use it. No Tribunal, no notice. Not the Registrar, not an auditor with a sealed paper." The post creaked. "Not ever. I swear it."

The silence went on long enough that the moth had time to die against the lamp. The grating was cold under his boots. Somewhere under it water ran in the dark, steady, the loudest thing in the yard.

"Four things," the nurse said. She did not whisper now. She said them like stamps on a slip, one under another. "Your allocation was moved. The green-ring batch, yours, went from the Dispensary stock to the trials infirmary, under the Ring's allotment."

Her shoes scraped.

"It's drawn on provincial stock. Sealed six days before the first of the month." She breathed. "The window to give it is thirty days from the sealing. After that it's waste, and the trials store writes it off." She breathed out. "Thirty days. After that it isn't medicine. It's a number."

"Which day?" said Mira.

"I'm not putting a date in my mouth."

"Which day does it close?"

"Count it yourself."

A bell began somewhere beyond the Oldest Street, early and fast.

"Patrol," Kael said.

The nurse was gone before the second stroke. Mira had Kael's sleeve in her fist, and she was pulling him toward the stone door, which stood open the width of a hand. He pushed it and she slipped in under his arm, and the dark closed behind them like a lid.

It was colder than the street. The cold lay in the stone like wet cloth, and the dark smelled of rock and wet wool and glass. Shelves ran back into blackness, crated and stacked. He put his shoulder against a stack of boxes and drew her in after him.

Mira's hand went to her ear.

She did not make a sound. It reached him through his sleeve before it reached his eyes. Her fingers went to the side of her head. The breath caught in her chest. Through the crack of the door a lantern bobbed across the yard in a watchman's fist, its hood half shut. As it came, the slit of light thinned to a thread and swelled again. The watchman did not look up.

Two men. They went into the stock rooms next door, boots on slate, and began to count. "Eleven. Twelve. Mark that one." A box scraped. "Thirteen."

He could step out of the stack and draw the watch after him. They would follow a miner out of the Dispensary yard after the bell, hands bound, and Mira would be left in the dark with the cold and nobody's name to give. The Ring would go with it, and Orin, and the whole plan. Or he could stay, and hold still beside a dip with nothing to give her.

In the dark he put his bound hand flat between her shoulder blades, the way a brother holds a sister still in a crowd, and did not hum. A hand on a back was a hand and nothing more. The song that would have given it a use was one of the things he could not find. He kept the hand there.

Her teeth were chattering. The sound came through the stack against his shoulder, and she stopped it by pressing her lip between them. High on the back wall, beyond the crates, a ward was humming at the bottom of his hands. It was a thin, failing, off-true note, a cooling ward with a crack in its glass. It tugged at him. His hands could read it from here, a seam with load still in it and nowhere to put the load. It would take a moment, and it would stop the humming. He found he had lifted his hand toward the shelf.

Mira's fingers closed on his wrist, hard, above the bruise.

"Not here," she breathed.

He knew why. If he emptied that ward the cold would go out of the room. Every vial on the shelves would start to sweat, and any plate in the yard would ring. He took the hand back and set it against the stone.

The count came nearer. The door scraped. Mira's mouth came near his ear, and what she whispered was not about the watchmen.

"It smells like the loft."

"What loft?"

"The tank loft. Over the wash-house." Her breath was ragged, but it was her voice. "Cold stone and wet wool. The winter Mam died." She swallowed. "The levy men came up the stair every morning. We lay on the planks over the tank with the iron warm on our backs, and I could see their boots through the gap."

He had it before she finished. The planks were soft with damp. The gap between two of them was a thumb wide. Through it came the grey light of the wash-house floor, and the boots. Her feet had been colder than anything he had ever held. The beam over his head was low enough to touch lying down. It was worn smooth in two places where they had knocked on it, to say we're here, to say nobody's here.

She tapped the edge of the shelf with a fingernail. Two. A pause. Three.

He took her wrist and tapped it back on the thin bone, two and three. She tapped again, and he answered. Her breath slowed to the pattern, two and three, two and three, and her shoulder stopped jumping against his arm. The lantern came into the room, its slit of light moving along the boxes. It stopped a foot from the stack. The watchman breathed through his nose and said the number to himself.

"Twenty. Twenty-one." The light slid over the shelf and on.

"Cold's failing again," said the second man from the door.

"It's been failing a month."

"Then write it."

The door scraped closed. Their boots went on down the stock rooms, counting. Kael and Mira stood in the dark a good while without tapping. She had gone grey to the lips. Her hand stayed locked on his wrist. In the end she let go as a child lets go of a rope, one finger at a time.

The yard was empty when they came out of it. The wooden door stood shut. No shoes crossed the dirt, and none would come back. Mira looked at the door a while, and then at the drain, and then she took the wall.

The Oldest Street lamps stood a hundred paces apart, and between them the road ran dark. Mira leaned her shoulder against the wall of every house from the Dispensary to the Low Stair.

She did it every fifty paces, one hand tucked into her shawl where he could not see it shake. A shutter banged somewhere above them. The tank on the corner ticked and ran. The lamp over it burned bright and ordinary, and she looked at it twice. Nothing dipped. He watched her check, and watched her not say that she had checked.

Then she pushed off and walked. He walked on her left and did not take her arm. Neither of them said the number. It rode between them, counted. At the third lamp she moved her lips over it, a thumb running along her knuckles, and stopped at one he could not see.

"It won't mend me," she said. "Wick told me that much, the first time I asked. A dose holds a few days and then it thins, and the next one's due. It buys days, Kael. It doesn't buy the rest." She ran the thumb along her knuckles again. "I want the days."

"Can we reach it first?" she said. "The batch."

He had an answer to that, and it was not the answer she wanted. He gave her the other one.

"I'll ask you." They stopped under the fifth lamp. "Before I spend a thing that's yours. The prize. The bond back. The appointment. I ask first."

"That's the half you wanted to give me. Say the rest."

"I don't decide anything about you in the dark and tell you at breakfast."

She looked at him. His hand had gone to her wrist, to the thin bone with the pulse knocking under it. He laid it there the way she pinned her own hand to a table to hold the shake in. She let it stay.

"Right," Mira said. "Now say it so I can hold you to it."

"I'll ask."

"Two words. You've said more to a rope."

"I'll ask, Mira."

Her face eased. Then her chin came up and the exact look came into it, the one she wore at a counter. He had been agreed with and put to work in the same breath.

"The batch is in the trials infirmary," she said. "Not the Dispensary. Somebody sat at a desk and decided who was worth a dose, and wrote it on a stock sheet." Her hand left his. "Somebody has to go into that building before the first bout."

They reached the foot of the Low Stair. The lamp at the corner hung over the landing, and she set one hand against the wall under it to hold herself up.

"What do entrants do before the first bout?"

"A medical," Kael said. "At the infirmary. It's in the book."

"Then you are going to look at a door for me," said Mira, "and I want to know who holds the key and what day it opens."