SIX DAYS BEFORE THE AUCTION: 20 SEPTEMBER 3113 · DAY 282 OF THE SEVENTH EPOCH
Bakr had been listening to the same conversation for two hours and had stopped pretending to wipe the counter.
"Say it again," Adam said. "The part about the tokens."
"Totems," Bakr said. "Not tokens. Silver, family-struck, one for each house. The crown sent them out three months ago by hand, not by post, and every one of them is written down in a book somewhere with a name beside it. You don't buy a seat at that auction. You are born into one, or you're not going."
"And if a house doesn't want its seat?"
"Then the house sells the seat with the totem inside it, for more money than you'll see in your life, to another house." Bakr shrugged. "It still ends up on a noble's palm."
"We need a totem," Adam said. "That's one. What's two?"
"Two. Every house was given a phrase. Their own, nobody else's. You say it at the door or you don't come in."
"So, we're not going," Zeren said.
"We're going."
"Adam…"
"There are cursed objects in that building. Plural." He set the cup down. "And in six days they get sold to people from all across the world and scattered across a continent, and I will never see them in one place again."
Nobody said anything to that.
"And they have mine," Zaid said.
"Two hundred years my family kept a treasure in a room nobody was allowed into, and nine and a half months ago it woke up, and happened to be very compatible with the power granted by my curse." He tore the bread. "So, they're selling it."
"Why would they sell it if it fits you?" Zeren asked.
"That is exactly why they are doing so."
Zeren opened his mouth and then closed it.
"There's something else," Bakr said. "The largest pile of valuables ever assembled on this continent, in one building, on one week. Who else would you expect to be there?"
Adam went quiet for a moment, then said a single word: "Thaumiel."
"I see. Front door, then. Totem, and a phrase," Zeren said. "We have no access to that, right?"
"If we get rejected at the entrance, then we find another way in," Adam said. "That building has twenty floors and one entrance and the people who built it were in a hurry. There's another way in."
"No need for that." Zaid pushed the bowl away and stood up and stretched until something in his back popped. "I'll go get the totem."
Adam looked at him.
"From where?"
Zaid was already pulling his coat on, and for the first time all evening the lightness stepped aside.
"From my father."
Zeren was off the stool before the coat was on.
"Two seats," Adam said.
The stool went over.
"TWO?"
"Two."
"There are three of us!"
"There are three of us," Adam said, "and one of us is thirteen, who was just drinking milk."
"THAT IS NOT AN ARGUMENT."
"It's most of one."
FIVE DAYS BEFORE THE AUCTION: 21 SEPTEMBER 3113 · DAY 283
The Zyriam had taken a house in the upper terraces, four streets from the palace, with a garden.
They had been in the city for two days and the garden had already been changed. Southern trees in southern soil, carried up out of the harbor in crates, planted in rows by men who had crossed an ocean to plant them. Nothing in it belonged here. All of it was thriving.
Zaid stood in the street and looked at it for a while.
Five days. Get the seats and get out. That's all this is.
The retainers at the gate saw him coming from thirty paces and did not move, nor did they call out, and when he reached them the eldest of the three bowed at exactly the depth he had bowed at in Nauz.
"Young master."
"Is he in."
"He is expecting you."
Zaid stopped.
"Since when."
"Since yesterday evening," the eldest retainer said, and stepped aside, and opened the gate.
His father was at a writing desk.
Lord Zyriam did not look up when the door opened, and did not look up when it closed, and finished the line he was writing, and set the pen down in its groove.
"You want the auction," he said.
"I want two seats at it."
"Two?"
"Myself and one other."
His father nodded once, and drew a sheet toward him and began to write on it.
Zaid stood in the middle of the floor with his hands at his sides.
He had built this on the walk up. All of it, every turn of it. He had a speech for the shrine and a speech for the choosing and a speech for the crossing, and he had an answer ready for the word duty and a better one for the word House, and he had been prepared to shout, and he had been more prepared to be shouted at, and none of it was happening.
"You aren't going to ask where I've been."
"No."
"You had three men in a bar in Nauz threatening a man who fed me."
"They reported it." His father turned the sheet and wrote on the other side. "You told me to choke on the House. They gave it to me word for word."
"I did."
"It was well phrased."
He signed it. He pressed the seal into the wax without hurrying, and set it aside to cool, and only then looked up.
Zaid had not seen his father's face in nine weeks. It had not changed at all.
"The seats are yours. The totem is one totem and it goes in and out with the bearer, so you will present it and return it that evening to the man at the gate, and if you lose it the House will not replace it." He folded his hands. "Is there anything else."
"...That's it?"
"You asked for two seats."
"I ran," Zaid said. "Twice."
"I know."
"You put me in a room with the heart and locked the door."
"I did."
"And now I walk in here after nine weeks and ask you for the only thing in this city anyone wants and you write it out and hand it to me and ask if there's anything else, instead of trying to capture me again and force me to devour the Sandy Heart."
"Yes."
Zaid stared at him.
"Who has it," he said.
His father's hands did not move on the desk.
"That is no longer your concern."
"It was my concern for three years."
"It was the House's concern for three years." Lord Zyriam picked the pen back up. "You made yourself very clear at the naming, in front of a hundred people, and the House heard you, and the House has proceeded. You are not required for anything. There is nothing further you can refuse us." He drew a fresh sheet toward him. "That is what you asked for. I would have thought you'd take it more gladly."
The wax had gone hard. He pushed the sealed paper across the desk with two fingers and went back to his writing.
Zaid picked it up.
He had come here to be fought, and he had been filed.
He got to the door before he stopped, and he did not turn around, and he stood there long enough that his father's pen paused.
"If I find out you risked Faiz's life and had him devour the heart after I ran away, I will make it my life's mission to kill you," Zaid said.
The pen started again.
"Good evening, Zaid."
FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE AUCTION: 22 SEPTEMBER 3113 · DAY 284
Malthane's house.
The training floor was bare boards and one lamp, and Master Kurogane had been standing in the same place for forty minutes without saying anything at all.
Evelyn came out of the last form and held it, and her arms burned, she held it anyway.
"Again."
She did it again.
"Again."
She did it again, and on the fourth one he lifted a hand and she stopped, and the wooden sword came down, and she stood there breathing.
"How many corrections," she said.
"None."
She looked up.
"Then…"
"You are four days away from the auction." Kurogane set his own wooden sword on the rack.
"Your sword is finished. It is not finished well, but it is finished, and there is nothing further I can put into it in four days that your body will keep." He came across the boards and stopped in front of her. "So, I am correcting the other thing. For nine days you will be close enough to touch him."
She looked at the lamp for a while.
the day you can stand in front of me as an equal, come to me, and I will clear the room.
"Don't throw your life away, that would be such a waste of talent."
THREE DAYS BEFORE THE AUCTION: 23 SEPTEMBER 3113 · DAY 285
Alphonse Graves read the roster three times, and then set it down and looked at the one line on it that mattered.
Malthane's daughter. To stand at his shoulder for nine days and go where he went and hear what he heard.
There was a decanter and he did not touch it. On the desk in front of him, under the roster, was a letter he had not looked at since the spring, from a man who had been the Supreme Judge of this kingdom for thirty-one years and had taught him everything he had ever been proud of knowing, and who had been found dead in his own chambers.
Alphonse had gone through it in his head so many times that it had stopped being a memory and become a piece of furniture in a room he lived in.
He put the roster on top of the letter.
Everything worth stealing on this continent, in one building, for nine days, and the crown has advertised it on every wall in the city.
He'll come. He can't not come.
He is the only man alive who thinks he's owed it.
And I will be standing in the room when he does.
TWO DAYS BEFORE THE AUCTION: 24 SEPTEMBER 3113 · DAY 286
Somewhere on the other side of the City of Gold.
"Two days left," Reed said.
"Two days," Wendy agreed, without looking at him.
"And I'm not in any of it."
"You're in it."
"I've had one sentence." Reed held up one finger, in case the number was in doubt. "One. Everybody else has had a week of it. Bane's been walking that tower since the rehearsal. Lilly spent all this time preparing at Thaumiel's side. You've been sitting on a roof for four days…"
"Five."
"…five days, looking at a building, and I've had one sentence."
Wendy was at the window with her arms folded and had been at the window for most of the evening. She did not turn.
"What was the sentence."
Reed didn't answer straight away, and when he did, some of the heat had gone out of it, and something else had come in.
"Go wild outside."
Wendy did turn around then. She looked at him for a moment.
"Then you'll have to go wild. Isn't that what you wanted anyway? The instruction seems clear enough to me," she said.
"That's it?"
"He doesn't say things twice."
Reed sat back and thought about it and found, to his own mild disgust, that it had worked. He was calm. He had been handed one sentence four days ago and he was calm.
"So, are you familiar with the range already? You've been standing here five days."
"One more day and I'll be able to shoot even a fly from here, I get one chance anyway, better make it perfect."
ONE DAY BEFORE THE AUCTION: 25 SEPTEMBER 3113 · DAY 287
The room at the end of the corridor had one lamp, and Lilly had been at the table since before it was lit.
Thaumiel came. He stood by the door with his hands folded and waited, and after a while she pushed the first sheet across the table with two fingers, the way you push something you would rather not be holding.
He picked it up.
A man's face in the corner of it, drawn small. Around it and under it and through it, the glyphs, not framing the face but reading it, taking it apart into properties. The set of the jaw as a value. The distance between the eyes. The particular heaviness of the lower lids.
"Good," Thaumiel said.
The second sheet had a girl on it. Nine, perhaps. A round face, a gap in the front teeth, and hair that had been braided carefully.
Down the corridor, through two doors, a man coughed. It went on too long. A second cough answered it, higher, further into the room, a child's, and then there was a sound like someone shushing someone else, and then nothing.
Nobody in that house said anything through a door.
Lilly's hand was still flat on the table where the paper had been.
"Her name is Rennie, she told me he papa’s name is Magath" she said.
Thaumiel folded the first sheet along a line that had not been creased before.
"They told you their names."
"She did." Lilly was looking at the wood grain. "You can't draw a face unless you look at it for a long time. I had to look at her for four hours. She kept trying to sit still because her father told her to sit still and she's not good at it, and she wanted to see what I was drawing, I said no, and then she asked me my name."
"And you gave her one."
"I gave her a wrong one."
She wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist, fast. Then she put her hand back on the table.
Thaumiel folded the second sheet.
"They will not be harmed," he said.
"You already…"
"I asked her father to give me the pass phrase, but it seems he himself doesn’t remember the last word." He put both papers inside his coat. "Even after investigating his memories, I found out the paper was damaged before he got it, so he didn’t keep it from me on purpose, I didn’t need to harm him anyway."
Lilly did not look up.
"Do you believe me."
"Yes," she said.
At the door he stopped.
"Tomorrow," he said. "You'll wear it once, for one day, and then you will never wear it again."
"I know."
"Lilly."
She looked up.
"You will be standing very close to many strong Eldritch holders. Cursed humans are sensitive to a strong aura; it might give you some nausea," Thaumiel said. "It will be extremely unpleasant and there will be no warning before it starts."
"I know that too."
"Then that is everything."
He left her the lamp.
Lilly sat where she was for a long while with her hands flat on the empty table. Down the corridor, through two doors, somebody was singing, very quietly, the way you sing to a child who cannot sleep in a room that is not hers.
Lilly listened to the whole of it.
Then she took a clean sheet out of the pile, and started drawing.