第16章 The Ledger and the Knife

Two nights later a hand came and took Sook out of her room in the Grey Stile and would not say where to. Ryam got Coll out through the coal hole and got him to a room over a chandler's shop in the Foldmarket that Halberd Jessop had paid for eleven weeks, and then he went down the stairs and sat on the bottom step for a long time with his hands hanging between his knees. Bilbe found him at four. "They have taken her," she said. "I know." "Ryam, I have looked. She is not in it." "No." He stood up. "She is at the Weighhouse Steps. She has been at the Weighhouse Steps since the sixteenth of the month, and I found out on the fourteenth, and I have been sitting on this step for two days deciding whether to tell you." "You have had two days." "Two days and a number. A number with four digits and a letter, 2147, and the thing it stands for is on a memorandum column in the fair copy and the memorandum column was instituted nine years ago and the sheet before that is the sheet I have been counting on for eleven years with my own hands, and I cannot tell you what any of it means because I do not know what the four digits mean, I only know they are the same on every south-ward chit I have ever seen." He said it in one go, because he had gone over it for two days and he had got it down to about as short as it would go. "And the second thing?" "The second thing is 2147 is the number of the warden's account. I know that because I have been in the counting floor inside the rail, and the account that all of it goes into is 2147, and on the north side that account is called the Standing of Halbeck, and on the south side it is called the fund, and the office gives it two names because there is no single word in Halbeck for what it does to a ward." "Then where is my mother." "Eleven days." Ryam held up his hand and showed her the blank strip of his own band. "The eleventh of next month. They take them out of the ward in order. Yours is third on the list of the ward and there are three hundred and ninety names in it. She is thirty-fifth on the list." Bilbe did not say anything for a while. "Thirty-five," she said. "Thirty-five." "Then you have made a mistake," she said, "or somebody has, because a hundred and ninety hours is not a mistake and it is not a mistake that happens once." She was looking at him the way she had looked at him on the wharf. "Ryam. The one hundred and twenty hours. What is the one hundred and twenty hours?" "The standing fee." "What is it for?" "I do not know." "Then you have nothing." She said it flatly. "You have a number and a word and a strip of bare skin, and any man with a lamp could tell me a number, and the word is a word. If you cannot say what the one hundred and twenty is for, then it is not a thing that was taken, it is a thing that was lost, and Halbeck has more lost things than anybody has ever stolen." "I know." "And you have told me the eleventh of the month and you have not told me what you intend to do about it." "I have not decided." "Right." Bilbe turned her coat up. "Then I am going to say a thing and I am going to say it once. You have a fair copy in a counting floor with no window and a man in it who has been there nineteen years and no reason to be loyal to anybody, and he is the only door in this city that was ever built for anything. You are going to go to him. And when you go, you are not going to take me with you, and you are not going to take Coll, and you are not going to take that woman on the Coalstairs with the milk jug, and whatever you do you will do it with a thing that is in your hands and not in your mouth. Do you understand me?" "I understand you." "I want it in words." "I will not put anybody in it." "Say it properly." "I will not use anybody's name," Ryam said. "Not hers, not yours, not his. It will be me and a book." Bilbe nodded and went up the stair. He sat on the bottom step for another hour and then he went and got the slab of an old fireback off the hearth in his own front room, because it was slate and it was flat and it was the right size, and he worked it down with a brick and a bowl of water until it was smooth, and he ruled it with the edge of the knife, and he wrote the number in on it, twice the size of his hand's width. The knife slipped on the second eight. It went in across the pad of his thumb and came out on the other side of the nail and he stood in his own front room and looked at his own hand and felt nothing at all about it, which frightened him worse than the pain did. He got the cloth from the wash house and the brown sugar out of the cupboard and made a poultice of the wrong thing entirely for the wrong thing entirely, and his mother came into the front room and stood over him and looked at the blood on the cloth. "You are going to be cold all winter," she said. "Aye." "You are not going to be able to do anything with that hand." "I know what I am going to do with that hand." "You are not listening to me. I am telling you that when you are fifty you will not remember any of this, and you will remember being cold." He said the things a man says. It took a long time, and she went to bed at the end of it with the blanket pulled up to her chin, and he sat with the fireback on the floor and the wet cloth on his hand and the house very quiet. He got up at one and cut a piece of paper the right size. Then he burned the paper over the fire until there was nothing left of it but the word Gallowfen, and he brushed the ash into the fire, and then he wrote the name out again in pencil on the flat of the fireback, because he had not understood what he was doing until he had done it, and he had understood afterwards that a thing done in that order is the only kind worth doing. *2147. Gallowfen. The eleventh. Thirty-five.* Then he turned the slate over and sat with his back against the cold hearth until the sky came grey over the ridge, and he had a plan, and it was not a good one, and it was the only one he had. ---