Four Hundred and Eleven Steps

They give you a quarter of an hour, when they collect you, to say your goodbyes and gather your portables. It is not mercy. It is in the regulations, because a collected person who has been allowed to weep and pack a bag walks up the stair quietly, and a collected person who has been dragged screaming attracts a crowd, and crowds in the Sink have, on three historic occasions, become something the Exchequer had to put down with more than paperwork. So they give you a quarter of an hour. They time it.

Halloran timed it from the doorstep, turned half away, giving me the privacy of her scarred profile, which I marked down as the second small mercy of a woman who could not afford to be merciful and kept being it anyway.

I used four of my fifteen minutes on Tatch and the rest on robbery.

"Listen to me," I told my brother, kneeling, holding his thin shoulders, and I pitched it under the fog so the grey men would not hear, in the fast flat Sink-cant they did not bother to learn because they thought it was just poverty making noise. "You're not to drink from any well but the rain butt behind the green-door apothecary. Not the saint one. The green one. The boy there draws from rain, not river, and you'll pay him a clipped half-crown a week to keep doing it where you can watch, and if he draws from the river you tell him the Magpie is counting, and you watch his face go white, and you find another."

"Who's the Magpie," Tatch said, because of course he did. Nine years old. No survival instinct, all curiosity, exactly the child I had failed once and was now going to keep alive if I had to bend the whole city around him like a windbreak.

"A bird that takes shiny things," I said. "Like you. Now the next part, and this is the part with the custard in it, so attend."

I told him where to find the loose board under our mother's pallet and the seven crowns I had hidden there in the last four of my fifteen minutes, which were seven crowns I had not put there, because the girl I used to be had owned nothing but a tin saint and a comb. The seven crowns had a more recent provenance. While Halloran had been writing the amended Notice, I had read the grey men, the way I read everyone now, and the youngest of them had a purse heavy on the left and a debt to a dice-house on Cribbage Row that glowed on him like a fresh bruise, the debt of a man who would not notice seven crowns gone for a day, and could not report them gone for a year, because to report them gone he would have to explain where the rest had come from.

I had picked an Exchequer Collector's pocket on my own doorstep while being collected by the Exchequer. It was the first genuinely good day's work of my second life, and a woman should be allowed to take pride in her craft.

"Where did you get seven crowns," Tatch breathed, scandalized and delighted.

"From a man who can spare them. The custard, Tatch, is the seven crowns. The seven crowns are the custard. Do you understand."

"No."

"Good. Keep not understanding it in front of anyone in grey." I pulled him in, fast, hard, the way you hold a thing you have already buried once. He smelled of marsh and bread and boy. I memorised it, the way I memorise everything now, because I had learned the cost of letting a face go soft in the memory until you cannot find it when you need it most. "I'm going up for a while. It isn't forever. I'm coming back down for you, and when I do I'll be wearing a better coat, and you're not to be impressed by it."

"Will there be"

"There will be custard," I said, "when I come back. That's an oath. You heard it. The Tally heard it." And I felt it land as I said it, the small cold click of a true thing sworn out loud, an entry opening on my own ledger, an oath to a nine-year-old about a pudding, the most binding contract I had signed all morning and the only one I had signed gladly.

Behind the curtain, my mother slept the thick sweet sleep of the poppy, and did not wake, and I did not wake her.

I had spent the night deciding what I would say to her. I had a great deal to say. I had eleven years and a pauper's field and forty crowns drunk in two and a blood-indenture I could not read, all of it racked up and ready, the whole bitter account of a daughter sold to keep a household one more winter. I had meant to wake her and lay it all on the chipped good plate between us and make her look at it.

But she had not sold me. That was the thing I kept tripping on, all morning, like a loose board. In this life she had not yet done the thing I could not forgive, because the Collectors had come before the broker and the broker's purse had gone unpassed, and so the woman behind the curtain was, technically, by the only accounting that the Tally recognises, innocent. You cannot collect on a debt that has not been incurred. Even I cannot. Especially I cannot.

So I looked at my sleeping mother with the Eye, one last time, the way I had been afraid to look at my brother, and I read on her the small grey ordinary ledger of a frightened woman who loved badly and was about to be spared the chance to prove how badly, and at the bottom of her page, where everyone's great unpayable principal sits, I saw the world-debt weighing on her the same as it weighs on us all, no heavier, no lighter, and I found, to my enormous inconvenience, that I could not hate a balance sheet. I could only grieve it.

"Tell her I went up to make us rich," I said to Tatch. "She'll like that. She always did like a story with money at the end."

"Is it true?"

"It's the best kind of lie," I said. "It's one I'm going to make true."

The quarter-hour ended. Halloran turned back from her scarred profile and her flat official voice and said, "Time, Quill," and it was time, and I stood, and I did not look at the curtain again because there are economies even in grief and I could not afford the second look.

We went up.

The Exchequer stair out of the Sink is four hundred and eleven steps, cut into the old sea-wall, and I counted every one of them the first time I climbed it eleven years ago, gratefully, and I counted them again now, and they came out four hundred and eleven both times, which steadied me, because the dead do not lie about the number of steps and only the living round up.

Halloran climbed beside me, not behind, which a careful jailer does not do, and I marked that too. At the two-hundredth step, where the fog thins and the Sink falls away below into its own grey breath and you can see, for the first time, the whole drowned glittering wound of Caul spread out under the seam in the sky, she spoke without looking at me.

"The Mendicant who came before us," she said. "What did he take from you."

"Nothing," I said. "He left me something."

"That's worse." She said it flatly, climbing, her clean ledger clean and her buried coast showing. "They never take. They lend. And the Mendicants of the Last Coin only ever lend at one rate, and the rate is everything, and they only call it due on the last day. If a Mendicant has opened an account in your name, Quill, then somewhere a clock you can't see has started running, and it runs toward the seam." She nodded up, once, at the cold closed scar across the morning sky, and for the first time I saw her afraid, the disciplined unbuyable fear of a woman who pays every debt the day it falls and has just met someone the debt-world had marked. "Whatever you did to earn their interest," Wren Halloran said, "undo it."

"I can't," I said, honestly, which surprised us both.

And above us, at the head of the four hundred and eleven steps, the great bronze doors of the Exchequer stood open on a hall I had walked out of in chains and into a yard of salt, and waiting in the doorway, grey on grey, with her hands folded and her face arranged into the precise expression of a woman watching a difficult sum begin, eleven years before she should ever have known my name, stood Comptroller-General Iselle Crane.