Chapter 3 The Gate-Warden

Boden collected debts for Grevane, and he was not good at it, which was why he was still alive. A man who was good at collecting debts in the Undercroft did not last. He got promoted to the kind of collecting that involved knives, and then he got buried. Boden was big and slow to anger and had a face that made people want to pay him before he asked, so Grevane used him on the ones who only needed to be reminded. He had been at it for six years. Before that he had stood the Fourth Gate of Vessant for eleven years, which was a real job with a uniform and a pension, and he had thrown it away in one afternoon by letting a cart through without papers because the carter's daughter was crying. Ophira found him in the yard behind Grevane's counting-house, sitting on an upturned crate with his elbows on his knees, looking at nothing. "You look like a man doing arithmetic," she said. "I'm doing arithmetic." He did not look up. "I owe Grevane four hundred silver and I have one hundred and ten, and tomorrow it's four hundred and twelve, and I have one hundred and ten." "There's work." "I have work." "You have a debt." She sat down on the next crate. "What if I told you there was a job that would pay four hundred silver in ten days, and you could hand it to Grevane in a bag and walk out from under him, and never take another collection?" Boden looked at her then, and she watched him decide not to ask the obvious question, which was why she would give him such a job. "You're the Aureole woman," he said. "I'm the Aureole woman." "Everyone says you got Harlo killed." "Everyone's wrong," she said, and was surprised by how flat and easy the lie was, because she had told it so many times. "Harlo got Harlo killed. I was two tiers above him when it happened and I couldn't get back down." Boden grunted. It was not agreement and it was not disbelief. It was the sound a man makes when he has decided to keep talking. "What's the job?" "I need a gate-warden." "I'm not a warden anymore." "You're the only person in this city who has stood the Fourth Gate and knows the rotation for every other gate up the terraces, because the Cognate trains all of them off one book." She waited, letting him do the arithmetic that mattered. "I need to know which gate opens the night of the Lumenfast and which one doesn't, and I need to know it from the inside. That's worth four hundred silver." He was quiet for a while. Behind them, the counting-house door opened and a clerk came out with a slate and looked at them and went back in. "You understand that if I do this," Boden said, "I'm not just stealing. I'm telling the Cognate how I'd do it. I spent eleven years learning to be the person who stops people like you. If it comes apart, I'm the one they'll hang as the example." "Yes." "And if it comes apart, you'll run." "Yes," Ophira said. "Probably." He laughed. It was a short, ugly sound, made of air and no joy, and it was the first honest thing either of them had said. "You're straight with me," he said. "That's rare." "I'm not straight with you. I'm just tired of pretending the whole plan is perfect. It isn't. Nine days is nothing, and I've got one sigil-scribe who won't stop shaking and one fence who wants crates I haven't seen, and now I'm trying to talk a debt-collector into treason. If you join, we'll be four, and three of us have never done anything this large." He told her the rest of it without being asked, which was the thing about Boden that had made him a bad debt-collector and would, she thought, make him a good thief. He told her how the gates of Vessant opened and closed, and how the warden corps trained every man on one book, and how that book was the same book it had been for sixty years, so that a man who had stood the Fourth Gate for a decade could walk any other gate in the city blindfolded and know which way the hinges swung. He told her about the rotation in festival week, when every warden in Vessant was pulled up to the Aureole and the lower terraces were left to the watch and the watch was left to itself. He told her that on the tenth night of the Lumenfast the Fourth Gate was not locked at all, because the Cognate liked to leave the city open for the crowds coming down from the upper terraces, and that the man standing it would be a boy of nineteen who had never once had to stop anybody. "How do you know it's a boy of nineteen?" Ophira asked. "Because I stood it," Boden said. "Eleven years ago, the last Lumenfast. I was the boy of nineteen. Nobody came through the Fourth Gate that night who wasn't supposed to, and I was so proud of it I nearly wept, and the man who trained me stood behind me the whole night saying nothing." He looked at his hands. "I let a cart through for a crying child six years later and they took the uniform off me in an afternoon. The book doesn't care what you were like at nineteen. The book cares that you're predictable." "And you're going to walk me through your own predictability." "I'm going to walk you through the archive of it." Boden stood. He was taller than she had thought, and his coat was gone at both shoulders, and there was an old gate-warden's stripe still faintly visible under the dirt at his collar, where a tailor had unpicked the uniform and left the thread. "Four hundred and twelve," he said. "Ask again when it's four hundred and fifty." "You'll get four hundred and twelve," she said. "And I'll want something else." "What." "Names." She looked up at him. "You've been collecting in the Undercroft for six years. You know who owes what to Grevane and Grevane knows who owes what to everyone. I need to know who else is already planning to move on the Reliquary during the Lumenfast, because I am not the only thief in this city who can read a calendar." Boden's face changed, just slightly, the way a door changes when it comes ajar. "There's a man called Braccus," he said. "He's run four crews in the Undercroft and lost three of them, and the fourth lost him two fingers. He's had the Lumenfast circled on his wall for a year. Grevane won't touch him, and neither will anyone else, because he pays his debts on time and he's never once informed on anybody, which is a strange kind of honor for a man who'll rob you while you're talking to him." "And he's going to be in the Aureole on the tenth night whether we like it or not." "He's going to be in the Aureole on the tenth night," Boden agreed. "He's been buying festival coats for a month. I've seen the receipts, because Grevane lends him money and I collect it." He stood, and then said the other thing, the one that had been sitting behind his eyes the whole conversation. "There's one more name you should have, and I don't have it. Somebody in the Undercroft has been selling the Cognate information for eleven years, and I've been collecting from four hundred people who owe Grevane money, and in all that time I have never once been able to work out who it is. So if you're building a crew, understand that you'll be building it under a roof that already has a hole in it." "I've lived here three years," Ophira said. "Everyone's roof has a hole in it." "Then everyone's floor is wet," Boden said, "and you'll find out whose, and it won't be the person you expect." ---