It was the binding that gave it away.
Pell found it the next night.
Thursday.
He had come back again, after the others had gone, after Grane had locked his high desk and put on his coat and his hat and walked out past the long rows of scribes without looking at any of them.
Pell had stayed bent over his copying until the footsteps faded down the corridor.
Then he had waited ten minutes more, counting under his breath.
Then he had got up, very quietly, and taken the old green ledger from the shelf at the end of the room where it was kept at night, and brought it back to his desk under the last burning lamp.
He did not know what he was looking for.
He only knew he could not leave it alone.
He read the last page again.
Oakhaven.
Account closed.
S.F.R.
By order of the Inquisitor-General.
He traced the words with his fingertip.
Then he closed the book.
And as he closed it, he felt it.
The back cover was wrong.
It was a small thing.
Hardly anything.
A book like this, a big Treasury ledger, was bound between two boards, front and back, each one covered in the same faded green cloth.
And the boards should be the same thickness.
They always were.
That was how bookbinders made them.
Pell had copied a hundred ledgers.
He had held a thousand.
His hands knew how a book should feel.
The back board of this one was thicker than the front.
Not by much.
By the thickness of a finger, perhaps.
But when he closed the book and laid his palm flat on top of it, he could feel that it did not sit quite level.
It leaned.
Very slightly.
Toward the front.
He sat very still under the humming blue lamp.
Then he opened the book again, at the very back, and looked at the inside of the back cover.
It was covered with paper, the way the inside of every book’s cover is.
A sheet of heavy marbled endpaper, swirled in faded blue and brown, pasted down flat over the board.
It looked perfectly ordinary.
But when he pressed it with his thumb, in the middle, it gave a little.
It was soft.
There was something under it that was not wood.
Pell looked over his shoulder at the dark, empty Copying Hall.
At Grane’s locked desk.
At the door.
Then he took the little knife he used to sharpen his nibs out of his pocket.
The Knife
Corin felt it all.
Every second.
The weight of the little knife in a thin hand.
The tremble in the fingers, so faint you could not see it but you could feel it, like a plucked string.
The dryness of a mouth.
The thump of a heart going much too fast.
The smell of the old paper, and the cold blue lamp, and the faint sour sweat of fear.
And the thoughts.
Not words.
Feelings, quick and sharp as sparks.
This is wrong.
I shouldn’t.
This is Ministry property.
They’ll write me up.
They’ll do worse than write me up.
Stop.
Stop it, Pell, you donkey, close the book and put it back and go home and eat your bread and dripping and forget it.
Oakhaven.
Gran, by the fire, with the old people, whispering.
Struck from the register.
Pell slid the point of the little knife under the edge of the marbled endpaper, at the very bottom, where the paper folded around the edge of the board.
Gently.
Gently.
The old glue was dry and brittle.
It gave with a tiny crackling sound, like frost breaking on a puddle.
He worked the knife along.
A finger’s width.
Two.
Three.
He lifted the paper.
Underneath, the board had been cut away.
Someone, long ago, had carved out a hollow in the thick wood, a neat square hollow, as deep as a finger.
And in the hollow, lying flat, fitting as exactly as a hand fits a glove, there was a book.
The Book
It was small.
About the size of a man’s hand, and thin, no thicker than a slice of bread.
It was bound in leather, very fine, very soft, the kind of leather that costs more for one book than a scribe earns in a month.
And it was red.
A deep, dark, rich red, like old wine, or a ripe cherry.
On its front cover, pressed into the leather, there was a picture.
A small one.
A rose.
A single, open rose, with every petal sharp and clear.
And wrapped around the rose, coiling up its stem and over its petals and around and around, so that the flower seemed to be inside a cage, there was a stem of thorns.
Long, sharp, curving thorns.
And in the center of the rose, very small, one letter.
T.
Pell had seen that picture before.
Everyone in Veridia had seen it.
On carriage doors.
On the gates of a great house in the High Quarter.
On the silver buttons of servants’ coats.
On wax seals at the bottom of important letters that came down to the Copying Hall to be copied and filed.
The rose in thorns.
The crest of House Thorne.
He did not breathe for a long moment.
Then he took the red book out of its hollow, very carefully, with two fingers, as if it might bite him.
Under it, in the bottom of the hollow, there were three small things wrapped in a twist of black silk.
He unwrapped them.
They spilled into his palm.
Stones.
Three of them.
Small, about the size of the end of his little finger, smooth and oval like river pebbles.
Gemstones.
They were clear and pale blue, the same blue as the lamps.
But they were not burning.
They were dark inside.
Cold.
Asleep.
And each one had been dipped in a thin coat of black wax, like a seal, and on each little black seal, someone had pressed two letters with the point of a pin.
U.W.
Pell did not know what that meant either.
He looked at the three cold stones in his palm for a long time.
Then he wrapped them up again in their twist of black silk, and put them in his waistcoat pocket, and opened the red book.
Accounts
It was a book of household accounts.
That was all.
That was what it looked like.
Pell turned the soft thin pages one after another, faster and faster, and every page was the same.
Neat handwriting, in black ink, small and elegant and sloping, with long tails on the gs and ys.
The handwriting of a man who had been taught to write by an expensive tutor.
Columns of items and prices.
Candles, beeswax, two dozen.
3 silver.
Flour, fine white, one sack.
2 silver, 4 copper.
Wine for the Councillor’s dinner.
1 gold.
Mending of the blue carriage wheel.
6 copper.
Page after page.
Ordinary.
Boring.
The kind of thing every great house kept.
The kind of thing nobody would ever bother to read.
Pell frowned.
He bent closer to the page, under the cold blue light.
And saw that the ink was strange.
It was black.
But it was not quite black.
When he tilted the page toward the lamp, there was a sheen on it.
A faint, shifting, oily shine, like the shine on a puddle in the street where a cart has dripped oil.
Green, and violet, and gold, sliding over the black letters and away again as the page moved.
And under the black letters, in the spaces between the lines, where the paper should have been blank, there was something else.
So faint it was almost not there at all.
Not ink.
More like the marks a pen leaves when you press too hard on the sheet above, and they come through onto the sheet below.
Little grooves in the paper.
Shapes.
Letters, perhaps.
Words.
He could not read them.
They were too faint.
But they were there.
On every page.
Between every line of candles and flour and wine.
Two books.
One written on top of the other.
Pell sat back in his chair.
The hum of the lamp seemed very loud.
He turned to the very last page of the little red book.
It was not accounts.
It was blank, except for a few words written in the bottom corner, in the same elegant sloping hand.
But not neatly, this time.
Fast.
Hard.
As if the man writing them had been in a great hurry, or very frightened, or both.
Witness.
K.
For my children, if I forget.
A.T.
The Torn Page
Tucked inside the back cover of the red book, folded small, there was one more thing.
A single sheet of paper.
Not the fine thin paper of the red book.
Coarse, gray, cheap paper, the kind schoolchildren use.
It had been torn out of a bigger book, roughly, along one edge.
Pell unfolded it with shaking fingers and smoothed it flat on the desk under the lamp.
It was a list.
A list of names, written in the same elegant sloping hand as the red book’s last page.
But younger.
Steadier.
Each name had an age beside it, and a word.
And at the top of the page, a heading, underlined:
Oakhaven.
Registration.
Children under fourteen.
And under it, the names.
Pell ran his finger down the list.
He did not mean to.
His finger simply moved, by itself, the way a finger moves down a list of names in a newspaper after a shipwreck, looking for the one you are afraid to find.
Abbot, Mara.
9.
Clear.
Abbot, Wil.
5.
Clear.
Cooper, Jonah.
11.
Clear.
Cooper, Sal.
3.
Clear.
Cooper.
He knew that name.
The Coopers lived two doors down from Gran.
Old Abe Cooper, with his bad leg.
And Jonah Cooper, who was a grown man now, with a red beard, and a forge, and three children.
Who had been eleven, once, twenty years ago, and stood in a line in a schoolhouse and put his hand on something, and been called Clear.
Pell’s finger went on down the list.
It was shaking now.
Dorran, Pell.
6.
Clear.
He stopped.
He looked at his own name for a long, long time.
He did not remember.
He had been six.
He did not remember any schoolhouse, or any line, or any soldiers.
He did not remember anything from before he was seven or eight, except a few small bright scraps: his gran’s apple pies, and a red kite, and a big tree in the middle of the village with carved wooden birds hanging from its branches.
He had always thought that was normal.
He had always thought nobody remembered being six.
Now, sitting under the cold blue lamp with his own name in front of him in a stranger’s elegant hand, he was not so sure.
His eyes went on down the page.
There were more names.
Many more.
Most of them Clear.
A few of them Trace, with a small cross beside them.
And near the bottom, two lines that were different from all the others.
The handwriting was different there.
Pressed harder into the paper.
And the words beside them were not Clear or Trace.
Corin, kneeling at the edge of the cold dark pool of a dead man’s memory, tried to see them.
He could not.
The Ash was thin there.
Torn.
Like a page that has been left out in the rain, where the ink has run.
He could see that there were two names.
He could see the first letters of the words beside them.
A B.
And a word much longer, that started with the same letter.
And then the memory slid, and went gray, and was gone.
Leave it, said Malakor quietly.
That part burned.
He burned it himself, at the end.
There’s nothing left there to read.
Corin knelt in the gray for a moment, with his hand still in the cold water, feeling for the torn edge of the page.
Then he let it go.
The Note
The gray came.
And went.
And this time, when the memory opened, it opened slowly, like a door being pushed by a draft.
It was Friday.
Afternoon.
Pell knew it was afternoon because the thin slice of daylight from the barred window at the end of the Copying Hall had moved off the floor and crawled halfway up the wall, the way it always did by the third bell after noon.
He knew it was Friday because the Hall smelled of fish.
On Fridays, the Ministry kitchen made fish soup for the clerks’ lunch, and the smell crept down every stair and along every corridor and soaked into every page.
He was copying.
Or pretending to.
He had not slept.
He could feel that in the body Corin was wearing: a gritty, aching heaviness behind the eyes, a dull headache at the back of the skull, a slowness in the fingers.
He had sat up all night in his little rented room over the rope-maker’s shop on Wick Street, with the red book open on his knees and a candle burning down beside him, turning the pages, tilting them to the light, trying to read the faint grooved letters between the lines.
He had not been able to read a single word.
Now the red book was inside his shirt.
Pressed flat against his belly, under his waistcoat, held in place by his belt.
He could feel its corners every time he breathed.
The three cold stones in their twist of black silk were in his waistcoat pocket.
The torn gray page with his own name on it was folded inside the red book.
He had not put the green ledger back on the shelf.
He had glued the marbled endpaper down again, very carefully, with a dab of paste from the pot on Grane’s desk, and pressed it flat under a stack of other books all night, and in the morning it had looked exactly as it always had.
He had put it back on the shelf at the end of the room before anyone came in.
Nobody had noticed.
He was almost sure nobody had noticed.
He dipped his pen.
He copied a line.
Pike’s Ford.
Quarter tax.
Paid in part.
His hand was shaking.
The letters came out crooked.
He scraped them off the page with the edge of his little knife, and blew away the dust, and wrote them again.
Above him, in the brass pipe that ran along the ceiling over his row of desks, something went whoosh.
And thump.
And the little brass hatch above his desk swung open, and a cylinder dropped out of it and landed on the page in front of him with a clatter, and rolled, and stopped against his inkwell.
Pell stared at it.
Scribes in the First Basement did not get cylinders.
Not of their own.
Work came down in the morning, in great bundles, on a trolley pushed by a porter.
Instructions came from Grane.
Nobody sent a Grade Three copying scribe a message by pneumatic post.
In two years, it had never happened to him once.
He looked up.
Down the long room.
The other scribes were bent over their desks, scratching.
Nobody had looked up.
At the end of the room, on his high platform, Supervisor Grane was reading something, frowning, with his spectacles pushed up onto his forehead.
Pell picked up the cylinder.
It was heavier than an ordinary one.
Better made.
Not dull brass, dented and scratched from years of banging through the pipes, like the ones he saw on other people’s desks.
This one was bright.
Polished.
And on its cap, instead of the usual twist of plain wax, there was a seal.
Dark red wax.
Pressed with a signet.
A rose, open.
Wrapped in a stem of thorns.
The Message
He did not open it at his desk.
He was not that stupid.
He put it in his coat pocket and waited, with his heart thudding so hard he thought the scribes on either side of him must hear it, until the bell for the end of the afternoon.
Then he walked out of the Copying Hall with all the others, not too fast, not too slow, and went down the short flight of steps to the boiler room, where nobody went but the boilerman and the rats.
Toby was not there.
Toby had gone home early with a cold.
Pell was glad.
He did not want Toby to see.
He sat on the warm step with his back against the warm brick, and broke the red seal with his thumbnail, and unscrewed the cap, and tipped out the roll of paper inside.
It was good paper.
Heavy and creamy and smooth, the kind of paper that is sold one sheet at a time in shops in the High Quarter.
The handwriting on it was elegant.
Small.
Sloping.
With long tails on the gs and the ys.
The same handwriting as the red book.
Or very nearly.
Corin, looking through the dead man’s eyes, felt something tug at the back of his attention, like a thread caught on a nail.
Very nearly.
The slope was the same.
The tails were the same.
But the letters were a little too careful.
A little too even.
As if someone had been copying them.
Slowly.
From another page.
Pell did not notice.
Pell was too frightened to notice anything.
Scribe Dorran,
You have found something that belongs to my family.
I know that you have it.
I know what you have read.
I do not blame you.
You could not have known.
I will pay you for its return.
Generously.
I will pay you also for your silence, which I will need.
And I will tell you what it means.
All of it.
You have a right to know.
Your name is in it.
Gutter Lane, behind the Inkwell printing house, off Needle Street.
The fourth bell before dawn, on Tuesday.
Come alone.
Bring everything.
Tell no one, not even your friend with the spectacles.
Burn this.
T.
Pell read it four times.
Then he sat on the warm boiler-room step with the paper in his hands for a long time, while the great iron boiler growled behind its door like a dragon in its sleep.
He knows about Toby, he thought.
He knows Toby wears spectacles.
He’s been watching.
Your name is in it.
I will tell you what it means.
He should go to Grane.
He knew that.
He should go upstairs right now, to Grane’s office, and put the red book on Grane’s desk, and the stones, and the note, and say, I found these in a Treasury ledger, sir, and I don’t know what they are, and I’m very sorry I cut the binding.
And Grane would write him up.
And take them away.
And give them to someone.
And Pell would never see them again.
And he would never know.
Oakhaven.
Account closed.
S.F.R.
Dorran, Pell.
6.
Clear.
He could not do it.
He struck a match against the brick, and held the cream-colored paper over it, and watched the elegant sloping letters curl and blacken and go up in a small bright flame.
He dropped the last corner of it on the step and ground the ash under his boot.
But he did not burn it all.
Not quite.
A small piece of the red wax seal had fallen off when he broke it, and rolled into the crack between two steps, and he did not see it.
Corin saw it.
Through the dead man’s eyes, at the very edge of sight.
A tiny chip of dark red wax, lying in the dust in the crack between two stone steps, with half of a thorn pressed into it.
Remember that, said Malakor softly.
Corin remembered it.
The Inkwell
The gray came, and went, and it was the same night.
Late.
Very late.
The streets of the Ink Quarter were dark and empty and wet, and the gemstone lamps on their tall black heron-necks made pools of cold blue light on the shining black cobbles, with long stretches of darkness in between.
Pell was walking fast through the darkness, with his collar turned up and his hands in his pockets and the red book pressed flat against his belly under his shirt.
He knew where he was going.
He had decided on the boiler-room step, with the smell of burned paper still in his nose.
He was not going to take the red book to Gutter Lane on Monday.
Not the book, and not the stones, and not the page.
He would go, yes.
He had to go.
He had to know.
But he would go empty-handed.
And when the man who wrote the note had told him what it all meant, and paid him, and shown that he was who he said he was, then Pell would take him to it.
Not before.
He was not a fool.
Whatever Toby thought.
Whatever Grane thought.
The Inkwell printing house stood on the corner of Needle Street, black and squat in the dark, like a toad asleep.
All its windows were dark except one, low down at the back, where a dim yellow light was burning.
Pell went round to the back, past the mouth of Gutter Lane, without looking into it, and knocked on a small door with a brass knocker shaped like a printer’s ink ball.
He knocked a pattern.
Two quick.
One slow.
Two quick.
After a long time, the door opened, and an old man looked out.
Old Joss
He was very old and very small and very bent, so bent that his face was at the height of Pell’s chest, and he had to tip his head back to look up.
He had no hair at all, and no eyebrows, and his skin was the color of old newspaper, and it was covered all over, his face and his scalp and his hands and his thin neck, in tiny black specks.
Ink.
Sixty years of it, spattered from the presses, sunk so deep into the skin that it had become part of him.
He looked like a speckled egg.
He wore a printer’s leather apron over a nightshirt, and held a candle in a tin holder, and he was deaf.
As deaf as a stone.
Pell knew that.
Everyone in the Ink Quarter knew that.
Sixty years beside the great iron presses, with their thunderous clack-thump, clack-thump all day and all night, had taken his hearing away long ago.
But he could read lips.
And he could read faces.
He read Pell’s face now, in the light of his candle, and his small black eyes went sharp.
“Trouble,” he said.
His voice was too loud, the way deaf people’s voices often are, and flat, and cracked like an old bell.
“You’ve got trouble on you, boy.
I can see it.”
Pell nodded.
He did not try to explain.
He said, slowly and clearly, so that the old man could see his lips:
“Can I come in, Joss?
I need to hide something.”
Old Joss looked at him for a long moment.
Then he looked past him, into the dark street, left and right.
Then he stood aside.
Inside, the printing house was enormous and black and silent, and it smelled so strongly of ink that it made Corin’s borrowed eyes water.
The great presses stood in long rows in the dark like sleeping beasts, iron and wood, taller than a man, with their great flat plates and their wheels and their levers.
Paper hung from lines strung across the ceiling, thousands of sheets, drying, pale in the candlelight, like ghosts.
And along one wall, from floor to ceiling, there were cabinets.
Tall wooden cabinets, with hundreds of shallow drawers.
Type cases.
Each drawer full of tiny metal letters, for setting the pages.
Each letter in its own small square compartment.
A drawer for every size and every style.
Thousands upon thousands of little backward letters, waiting in the dark.
Old Joss led him to the cabinets.
He held up his candle.
He looked at Pell and raised one hairless eyebrow-ridge.
Pell looked at the cabinets for a long moment.
Then he reached up, to a drawer near the top, in the corner, where the dust was thickest.
A drawer with a small brass label, very faded.
Q.
Gothic.
36 pt.
“Nobody uses it,” said Old Joss, too loud, watching his face.
“Big Q.
Old style.
Nobody’s set a page in that face in forty years.
Nobody’s opened that drawer since my master died.” He nodded slowly.
“Good choice, boy.”
Pell slid the drawer open.
It was full of heavy black metal letters, all the same.
Q.
Q.
Q.
Big, old-fashioned, curly ones, as long as his finger, gray with dust.
He scooped them out with both hands and laid them on the floor.
At the bottom of the drawer, there was just enough room.
He took the red book out from under his shirt.
He took the three cold stones in their black silk out of his waistcoat pocket.
He put the stones inside the red book, in the middle, between the pages of candles and flour and wine, and closed it, and laid it flat in the bottom of the drawer.
Then he put the heavy black letters back on top of it, one by one, until it was covered.
Until the drawer looked exactly as it had before.
Full of dusty, old-fashioned, useless Qs.
He slid it shut.
Old Joss was watching him with his small black eyes.
“I’ll not ask,” the old man said.
“Better I don’t know.
But I’ll tell you this.” He lifted his candle a little, so that its light fell on Pell’s face.
“Whatever that is.
Whoever wants it.
If they come here, they’ll not get it from me.
I’m deaf, see.” A thin smile cracked his speckled face.
“Very deaf.
Can’t understand a word anybody says.
Never could.”
Pell laughed.
A small, shaky, grateful laugh.
Not his big donkey bray.
Something quieter.
“Thank you, Joss.”
The old man shrugged.
Then he said something else.
Something that made Pell stop laughing.
“Your gran’s people,” said Old Joss.
“From the hills.
With the buttons.” He nodded at the old oak-leaf button on Pell’s right cuff.
“I knew some of them.
Long ago.
Before.
They used to come up to the city once a year with their carts, at the harvest, and sell their apples in the Market Ring.
Good apples.” He was quiet for a moment.
“Then they stopped coming.
All at once.
One year they were here, and the next year they weren’t.
And nobody ever said why.
And after a while, nobody even remembered they’d ever come at all.” The small black eyes held Pell’s.
“Except me.
I’m too old and too deaf to forget properly.
That’s the trick of it, see.
You have to be listening, to forget.”
He turned and shuffled away into the dark, between the sleeping presses, with his candle bobbing.
Pell stood alone in front of the tall cabinet of type for a long moment, with his hand resting on the drawer marked Q.
And Corin, inside him, kneeling at the edge of the cold dark pool, closed his own hand around that memory, very carefully, and held it tight.
The Inkwell.
Back door.
Two quick, one slow, two quick.
The cabinet on the left wall.
Top corner.
Q, Gothic, 36 point.
Good, said Malakor.
Now you know where it is.
That’s what you came for.
Now come out.
But Corin did not come out.
Because the gray was coming again.
And this time, under it, he could feel the cold.
The deep cold.
The bottom of the pool.
Coming up to meet him.
Fast.