Chapter 2 The Sigil-Scribe

Skellick worked in a room off the tanner's row that smelled of vinegar and iron filings and the particular burnt-nail smell of a badly set ward. He was thirty, thin as a hinge, with ink-blackened fingers and the red burn-marks of his trade climbing the insides of both forearms like ivy. When Ophira came in he did not look up. He was holding a silver plate with tongs and examining the sigil cut into it under a lens, and the sigil was slowly coming apart into faint blue lines, like a spiderweb deciding not to be a web anymore. "Whatever you're selling, I'm not buying," he said. "I'm selling a door." That made him look up. She had prepared the phrase in advance. Ward-breakers were a small, paranoid guild, and the fastest way to their attention was to describe a lock instead of oneself. She held up her hands, empty, and then turned them over, so he could see she had no ink on them. He relaxed one degree, which was a lot for a man like him. "Which door," he said. "The one at the top of the Aureole." He set the plate down with great care and took off his lens. "Get out." "Skellick—" "I know who you are. I write sigils for a living, which means I hear things two days before anyone else, and I heard about the woman who walked the Aureole and came down without her partner. You're poison. Whatever you're planning, Kalfax will have a warden standing behind every door in that spire, and the first thing they'll ask when they catch you is who cut your wards, and the answer will be me." He picked the plate up again. "Get out." Ophira stayed where she was. "You're already in trouble with the Cognate. That's why you're burning your own forgery in an unlit room instead of selling it on Lantern Row." His jaw worked. "How much do you owe them?" she asked. "Nothing." "Everyone in this city owes them something. That's the arrangement." She pulled a stool out of the corner and sat, slowly, like a person sitting down at the end of a long walk. "Three years ago the ward on a magistrate's strongbox came apart while he was opening it and the door fell on him. The Cognate calls it manslaughter. The ward-scribe who signed that panel calls it a badly copied master. I call it a man being paid to make a lock look weaker than it was." "That's a very specific guess." "It's not a guess. Harlo tailed you for a week the month before we went into the Aureole. He said you were the best hand in the city and that you were too honest to stay alive, and then he said the same thing about me." Ophira smiled, and it was not a warm smile. "You didn't kill that magistrate. The person who paid you to weaken his lock did. But you signed the panel, and you've been burning evidence ever since." Skellick stood very still. Out in the tanner's row someone was beating a hide against a post, patiently, over and over, and the sound filled the silence like rain. "What do you want from me?" "The Ward-Lattice on the Reliquary," Ophira said. "I've read two descriptions of it and both of them were written by people who'd only seen the outside. I need someone who can look at it and tell me where it breathes." "Nobody can do that in nine days." "Then we'll find out in nine days." He turned the plate over in his hands. "You understand what you're asking. That lattice re-keys every Lumenfast. Every decade, the whole thing is torn down and rewritten from a master sigil that only Kalfax carries. There is no book of it. There is no copy. The only place the pattern exists is inside one old man's head. "And the man who cuts it is the one man in Vessant who can afford to forget it. Every other scribe who ever held a piece of that pattern is dead, or burned, or working in the mines below the First Terrace and wishing he were dead. The Cognate makes sure of that. They call it security. A scribe I trained with tried to keep a rubbing of one section, one section out of a hundred, so he could practice at home, and by the end of the week he was gone and his room had been scrubbed with lye. I know because I was the one they asked whether he had made any other copies. I told them no. I lied. I've been carrying that lie for eleven years and I have never found a use for it until tonight." Ophira looked at him. "You have a rubbing." "I have a memory," Skellick said, which was not the same thing and was better. "I copied it out at sixteen, in my own hand, on the flyleaf of a book of psalms, because I thought I would need it one day. It's the only piece of Cognate sigilwork I've ever kept. I've kept it because it's beautiful. I've kept it because it's the reason I'm any good at all." He wiped his hands on his coat. "You're asking me to take the one thing I'm proud of and put it up against the thing it belongs to, in front of all the wardens in Vessant." "Yes." "And if it doesn't hold?" "Then the practice door eats itself, and the real door eats us," Ophira said. "That's the whole arithmetic. I'm not going to dress it up." Skellick laughed, a thin sound without much in it, and looked at his workshop, at the vinegar buckets and the salvaged chains and the coils of burnt plate along the shelf, the whole small failing kingdom of a man who had spent eleven years being careful. "The psalms book is under the third floorboard from the window," he said. "I'll bring it. And don't make me regret telling you where I keep the only thing I've ever been proud of." "I won't," Ophira said, and meant it the way thieves mean things, which is conditionally. "Then we don't break it," Ophira said. "We borrow it." Skellick looked at her for a long moment. Then he set the plate down and wiped his hands on his coat, and his hands were shaking slightly, and he pretended they were not. "I want payment in Cognate silver," he said. "New-minted, so I can spend it without anyone asking where it came from. And I want one other thing." "Name it." "When this is over, you tell me who paid me to sign that panel. Harlo knew. You said so." Ophira had not said so. She had said Harlo tailed him, which was true, and she had hoped he would draw the rest of the line himself. The lie sat between them on the table, small and smooth. "If we both live through the Lumenfast," she said, "I'll tell you everything Harlo knew." "That's a lot of conditions." "It's a lot of door." Skellick picked up the tongs and laid the ruined plate in a bucket of vinegar, where it hissed and went dark. "Fine," he said. "Nine days. But I'll need a better room than this one, and I'll need it in a place the wardens don't sweep." "I know a place," Ophira said. She was already thinking about the Undercroft's deepest hall, the one Grissa kept for storing things that could not be stored anywhere else. She was thinking about the crew she did not have and the time she did not have and the promise she had just made with a stranger's name. And underneath all of it, thin and cold and not quite a plan, she was thinking about a book in a cabinet on the fourth tier of the Aureole. ---