第15章 The Night Before

They spent the last night before the Lumenfast in Grissa's shallow hall, which was the farthest from the deep quarry and the least likely to be swept twice, and they did the thing that crews do on the last night, which is to lie to each other about what they will do after. Bettany went first, because Bettany always went first when the conversation turned toward feelings. "I'll go south," he said. "There's a city down the coast where nobody asks for papers as long as you can play cards, and I can play cards. I'll keep the tokens for a year and then sell them to a collector and buy a boat." "You hate boats," Skellick said. "I hate the sea. Boats are a job." Skellick had spent the day cutting his final plate, and he had it wrapped in oilcloth on his knee, and he was calmer than she had ever seen him, which was its own kind of frightening. "I'll go north," he said. "There's a scribe's college at the top of the valley that takes anyone who can read a ward. I'll tell them I'm a copyist. I'll spend ten years copying patterns I already know and they'll call me a master and I'll die in a warm room with ink on my hands." "And the man who paid you to weaken the magistrate's lock?" "I'll find him, or I won't. But I'll be alive to look." Skellick looked at Ophira. "You said we both live, you tell me what Harlo knew." "I remember," she said. Grissa came down at the second bell of the night, which he never did, and stood in the doorway of the shallow hall and looked at the four of them with the particular expression of an old man who has already buried more crews than he has fingers and is deciding whether to bother learning these names. "Boden," he said. "Alive. In the barracks cell below the Aureole." "Then you're three, and one of you is a clerk." Grissa came in and set a leather roll on the table and did not sit down. "Open it." It was a diagram of the Aureole, drawn by hand on good paper, and it was the first time anyone in the crew had seen the whole spire at once: the outer stair, the four tiers, the Reliquary cut into the cliff below the root, and a corridor that left the inner sanctum and climbed the cliff face to a ledge above the masons' old tool-store, which was the Archmage's private stair. "Where did you get this?" Skellick said. "Where I get everything," Grissa said. "From a man who needed money more than he needed a diagram." He put one finger on the inner sanctum and held it there. "I have wanted the First Crown for thirty years. I have known where it is for ten. I have never been able to reach it because the only route runs through a room that opens for one kind of person and closes on every other. Tomorrow night you'll cross that room, and you'll take my three crates, and you'll take whatever else your arms will hold, and you'll come down the Archmage's own stair and you'll bring it all to me." He looked at Ophira. "And you'll bring the book." "I told you I would." "You told me you'd bring me three crates and you brought me none, and you told me the door stayed open through the ceremony and it did not." Grissa's voice had not changed at all. That was the frightening part of him. "I am not angry. I am old. But I want you to understand that the reason I am still alive at seventy-one and every crew I've ever banked is dead is that I have never once trusted a thief to bring me what they said they would bring me, and I have never once been wrong, and if you cross me now I will still be alive when they carve your names on the wall beside that door." "I'm not crossing you," Ophira said. "No," Grissa said, and looked at her for a moment longer than the sentence needed. "You're crossing somebody. I can smell it on you. I just don't know yet whether it's me." He rolled up the diagram and left it on the table, which was Grissa's way of giving a gift, and went back up through the Undercroft, and the four of them listened to his steps fade and then sat with the diagram between them in the lamplight, and nobody said what everyone was thinking, which was that the old man had just told them exactly how the job would end and had not been wrong about a thing in forty years. Cadoc was last, and Cadoc had been quiet all night. "My sister's name is off the roll," he said. "I paid the twelve silver two days ago with money Grissa gave me. So there's nothing left for me here, and nothing I owe, and I've been trying to feel happy about that for two days and I can't." He looked around the hall at the three of them, and his voice was small. "If we do this, and if I walk into that vault, I'll have lied to the Cognate. I'll have stolen. I'll be the thing I spent my whole life not being, and it will be true forever, and there's no ledger to take it off again." "That's right," Ophira said. "It's true forever. That's the cost, and if you want out, Grissa will still pay you to stay home and keep your hands clean." Cadoc sat with it. Then he said, "I'm coming. But I'm not coming for the money. I'm coming because if the ledger burns, then no one else in this city will be written down the way my father was, and that includes me, and I want to see it happen even if I go to prison for it." Ophira looked at him for a long moment and felt the plan shift under her like a step that was not there. She had planned to use Cadoc to cross the Oath-Lock. She had planned to stand him in the frame and let him speak for his sister and let the door open and then reach past him for the book. It had been the cleanest roofline of the whole job. But Cadoc had just told her why he was coming, and it had nothing to do with her book, and the Oath-Lock would read that too. She did not say any of this. She lay back on the bedroll and stared at the shallow hall's low ceiling and listened to the other three breathing, and she made the only decision she was certain of. She lay and listened to the hall settle, and after a while she heard Skellick get up and put another stick on the fire, quietly, the way a man does when he cannot sleep and does not want to admit it, and then she heard Bettany shift on his bedroll and say, very low, "He'll be all right," and heard Skellick say, "You don't know that," and heard Bettany say, "No, but it's the last thing I can give him, so I'm giving it," and then the hall went quiet again, and Ophira lay in the dark and let the two of them be right and wrong at each other in the way that crews do on the last night. She would not stand Cadoc in front of the lock. Whatever the cost, whatever it did to the plan, she would not make him honest on her behalf. The rest of it, she would have to improvise. ---