第9章 The Decade Key

The Decade Key was not a key, which was the first thing Cadoc had to explain, and it took him the better part of a night. It was a sigil, cut into the palm of the Archmage's own hand and renewed each Lumenfast by the Archmage himself, and the tumbler on the vault door answered to it the way a lock answers to its own teeth. There was no separate object to steal. The key walked around Vessant inside Warden Uren, who had carried it for forty years and would carry it until he died, at which point the Cognate would cut the sigil into a successor's hand and burn the old man's, so that the pattern could not be lifted from a corpse. "Which means we can't take it," Boden said. "Which means we can't take it," Cadoc agreed. "We can only use it, for the length of one touch." "Where does Uren keep his hand on the tenth night?" Cadoc had the answer ready, because he had spent four days assembling it out of ledgers and duty rosters and one conversation with a kitchen girl who liked him, and he laid it out on Grissa's table with the careful precision of a man who had finally found a use for his life's only skill. The tenth night of the Lumenfast was the Sealing. The Archmage led a procession from the Aureole's base to its fourth tier, carrying the decennial tithe in a closed palanquin, and behind him came the Cognate in chambers, and behind them came Warden Uren with his bare right hand held out and open, because the custom was that the Key be visible to the city on the night it was used. The procession stopped at the door. Uren laid his palm on the tumbler. The Archmage spoke the closing words. The vault sealed for another decade. "Uren touches the door at the eleventh bell," Cadoc said. "Everyone in the Aureole is watching the palanquin. Nobody is watching his hand." "How long is his palm on the lock?" "Three heartbeats. He counts them, every year. It's in the ceremony notes." Ophira looked at Skellick. "Can you read a Key through a stone?" "No. But I can read a lock while it's open, if I'm close." "Then one of us has to be inside the portal frame, standing where the wardens won't see, and hold the pattern long enough for you to copy it." "You," Skellick said. She nodded. It was the only answer. She was the smallest and the stillest, and she was also the only one of them who had ever touched a Cognate door and lived. Ophira turned the plan over for a long time after Cadoc had finished, because the plan had a hole in it and she wanted to find the hole before the hole found her. The problem was the position. The Key walked into the Aureole inside a living man, and the only moment it could be read was the three heartbeats during which that man's palm rested on the tumbler, and the only place to read it from was the shallow alcove beside the portal, which meant one of them had to be standing inside the door's swing on the night of the Sealing with the entire Cognate of Vessant walking up the stair behind them. "Whoever stands there can't move for the whole procession," Skellick said. "If you flinch, the door covers you, and then the door opens and there you are in the middle of forty mages." "I know." "And the alcove is three feet deep and two feet wide, and the wardens know it's there, because the wardens built the door." "I know that too." "Then you know the last person who stood in it," Skellick said, "because there are four names carved beside that door and one of them is a woman called Hess." Ophira did know. Hess had been a friend of Harlo's, and she had gone into the Aureole on the night of a Sealing fourteen years ago and had not come out, and the Cognate had carved her name in the wall beside the door and had hung a votive lamp above it, because the Cognate liked to be seen being generous to the people it killed. "You're not asking me to stand there," Skellick said. "No." "Because I'd shake." "Yes." "Then who?" Ophira looked around Grissa's hall at the crew she had assembled out of half-lies and old debts: at Boden, who could hold a gate but could not hold still; at Bettany, whose whole gift was to be watched and forgotten; at Cadoc, who had the honesty and none of the nerve; at Braccus, who was standing against the wall doing arithmetic. "I'm going to stand there," she said. Nobody argued. That was the part that surprised her. Nobody in the hall said a word, not even Bettany, who argued about everything, and she understood, in the silence, that they had all known it from the first night and had simply been waiting for her to say it out loud. By the tenth night, Skellick said, the wardens on the fourth tier would not even notice the alcove, because they would be watching the palanquin, and the palanquin was the whole point of the ceremony, and a ceremony watched for a thousand years is a ceremony nobody watches, which was the only advantage a thief had ever gotten out of the Cognate of Vessant. That was when Braccus spoke up from the wall. "There's a problem with your plan," he said. "There usually is." "You're stealing a Key you can only use once, on a door that then seals for a decade, and you're doing it in front of the entire Cognate." He pushed off the wall and came to the table. "And if you fail, every thief in this city spends the next decade being watched, including me and mine. So I want insurance." "What kind?" "Your clerk." Braccus nodded at Cadoc, who went pale. "He's the one who knows the inventory and the ceremony and the duty roster. If you go down, he's the one the Cognate will want most. I want his name, written on a slip, in a sealed letter in my hand, so that if anything happens to me before the tenth night, the letter goes to the Archmage and your clerk hangs a week early." "That's not insurance," Ophira said. "That's a knife at our back." "It's a knife at your back if you cross me," Braccus said. "Otherwise it's a letter nobody reads." The crew looked at Ophira. Boden's hand had moved an inch toward his belt. Bettany was watching Braccus with the flat, interested expression of a man who had once done something similar and was trying to guess the price. Ophira did the arithmetic. Braccus holding a name was a cost. Braccus walking out of the room with a grudge and nine days to spend was a greater one. She took a blank slip, wrote Cadoc's name in her own hand, sealed it, and gave it to Braccus. "There," she said. "Now we're all in each other's pockets." Cadoc had not moved. He was looking at the seal in Braccus's hand the way a man looks at his own grave, and Ophira saw in his face that she had just spent a little of something she could not get back. She told herself, on the way back through the Undercroft, that Braccus would never use the letter, because a letter used is a letter spent, and Braccus was the kind of man who kept a weapon in his pocket for years and never took it out. It was true and it did not help. Cadoc walked behind her the whole way and did not say a word, and the silence had a new weight in it, and she understood that she had just taught her most honest crew member the first practical lesson of the job, which was that the person who holds the knife is very rarely the person you are afraid of. ---