Tull came through the falling paper like a bull through a hedge.
He did not try to dodge it.
He did not brush it aside.
He simply walked, and the white sheets broke against his chest and his huge shoulders and slid off him and fell, and he kept coming, head down, arms out, his shovel-sized hands opening and closing.
Lyra turned to meet him.
Corin saw her sword come up.
He saw her left hand, the one that had just forgotten how to hold a needle, close around the hilt beside her right, for a two-handed grip.
He saw the hilt slip.
Just a little.
Just a fraction.
The fingers of her left hand, closing on the black leather grip, did not close quite right.
They hesitated.
As if they were not sure, any longer, how tight to hold a thin thing.
As if the part of them that had known, the part that had held ten thousand needles, had gone, and taken something else with it.
It was only a moment.
But a moment was all Tull needed.
His right hand came round in a great swinging slap, open-palmed, the way a man swats a fly.
It hit the flat of Lyra’s blade and knocked it sideways, out of her hands, spinning, and it flew away into the white falling paper and hit something iron with a clang.
And his left hand closed around her throat.
He lifted her off her feet.
She hung there, kicking, in her mended silk, with both her hands clawing at his thick wrist, and her face going dark.
He held her at arm’s length, easily, the way you hold a cat you do not want to scratch you.
And he smiled his small wet smile.
“There,” he said.
“There now.”
Corin took the jar out of his pocket.
Volatile
Not like that, said Malakor, very fast.
Not like that, you fool, not all at once, not a volatile, not without the rod, you’ll—
Corin unscrewed the lid.
He did not use the rod.
There was no time for the rod.
He put the open mouth of the jar against his own mouth, the way you would drink from a bottle, and tipped his head back, and breathed in.
And Jory Kestle came into him like a punch in the face.
It was nothing like Pell.
Pell had come in slowly, like cold water seeping into a boot.
Pell had been a quiet room, a desk, a scratching pen, a humming.
This was not quiet.
This was not a room.
This was a fist.
Noise, first.
A roar.
Hundreds of voices, shouting, screaming, stamping.
A ring of faces in the dark, red and sweating and twisted, mouths open, howling, lit by smoking torches.
Coins flying through the air, glinting.
The smell of sweat and blood and beer and sawdust and fear.
The feel of sawdust under bare feet.
Rope at his back, rough and hard, the ropes of a ring.
And in front of him, another man.
Huge.
Bloody.
Coming.
And under the noise, under the smell, under the sawdust, something else.
Something that came up from the bottom of the jar and filled Corin from the soles of his feet to the top of his skull like water filling a jug.
Rage.
Not a hot rage.
Not a shouting rage.
A cold one.
Old, and deep, and patient, and absolutely certain, like iron.
The rage of a man who had been hit every day of his life since he was five years old, by his father, by his brothers, by the men on the docks, by the men in the ring, and had learned, very early, that the only thing in the world that ever made the hitting stop was to hit back harder.
He will make you angry, said Corin’s own handwriting, on a label, a long way away.
Let him.
Corin let him.
Thirty-One Fights
The world went slow.
That was the first thing.
Not slow the way it had gone slow for Lyra, when she burned, everything stopping.
Slow the way it goes slow for a man who has been fighting for so long that his body knows, before he does, where every blow will land.
The paper was still falling.
But Corin could see every sheet.
Turning.
Drifting.
The lanterns swung, but slowly, like pendulums in syrup.
Tull, holding Lyra up by her throat, was turning his round bald head toward him, and Corin could see every fold of fat in the back of his neck, and the little vein ticking at his temple, and the exact moment when the small wet pig’s eyes saw what was in Corin’s face and went, for the first time, wide.
Corin’s body moved.
It was not his body anymore.
Not quite.
It was heavier.
Lower.
It stood differently.
The weight had gone down into the hips, into the knees, the feet set wide and turned out a little, the left one forward.
The shoulders had come up and in, and the chin had gone down, tucked, so that the face was behind the shoulders and the fists.
The fists.
His hands had closed into fists without his telling them, and they had come up in front of his face, the left a little forward, the right back by his jaw.
He had never held his hands like that in his life.
They knew exactly how.
He crossed the space between them in two steps.
Short ones.
Quick.
Light, on the balls of his feet, the way a big man moves when he has learned to move like a small one.
Tull dropped Lyra.
He did it without thinking, the way you drop a parcel when you see a cart coming.
She fell to the floor in a heap of silk and paper, coughing, clutching her throat.
And Tull turned, all of him, to face what was coming, and his huge right fist came round in a hook that would have taken Corin’s head off his shoulders.
Corin was not there.
He had gone under it.
Not far.
Just enough.
His head and shoulders dipped and swayed, like a willow branch in the wind, and the great fist went over him so close that he felt the wind of it in his hair.
And as it went over, his own left hand came up, short and straight and hard, into the soft place under Tull’s ribs.
It was not a big punch.
It did not look like anything.
It traveled perhaps a hand’s length.
But it came from the floor.
From the back foot, through the knee, through the hip, through the shoulder, all at once, all of it, in one short twisting snap, the way you crack a whip.
And when it landed, Corin felt something give inside the big man, like a door being kicked in.
Tull’s breath went out of him in a great whooshing grunt.
He did not fall.
He was too big to fall from one punch.
He staggered back one step, two, his little eyes gone huge and watering, his wet pink mouth opening and closing like a fish’s.
Corin followed him.
Left.
Right.
Left.
Not to the head.
Never to the head first.
Jory Kestle had learned that in his fourth fight, and lost a tooth learning it.
To the body.
To the ribs.
To the belly.
To the soft places under the arms, where the big muscles could not protect.
Short, hard, fast, one after another, like a man driving nails, thud, thud, thud, each one coming from the floor, each one snapping like a whip.
Tull swung at him.
A wild, clumsy, roundhouse swing, all shoulder, no legs.
Corin rolled under it.
He felt Jory Kestle’s lips, which were his own lips, peel back from his teeth in a grin.
And then the big man made a mistake.
He dropped his hands.
To protect his ribs.
Both of them.
The great shovel hands came down, crossed, over his belly.
And his face was open.
Corin’s right fist had been waiting, back by his jaw, the whole time.
Waiting, the way Jory Kestle had waited in thirty-one fights, for that one moment.
It came up, and over, and down.
Not a hook.
Not a jab.
A straight, short, crushing right hand, with everything behind it, everything, from the floor, from the feet, from the hips, from thirty years of being hit and hitting back.
It landed on the point of Tull’s chin.
The big man’s head snapped back.
His eyes rolled up.
And he went over backward like a felled tree, slowly, all at once, rigid, and hit the stone floor of the Inkwell with a crash that shook the presses, and lay still in a great drift of white paper, with more paper settling softly down on top of him, on his face, on his chest, on his huge open hands.
The Inkwell was suddenly very quiet.
The Rest
Not all of them had seen.
The paper was still falling, and the lanterns were mostly out, and it was dark and white and confused.
But some of them had.
The man with the long knife, who no longer had a long knife, was standing by the end of the nearest press with his mouth open, staring at Tull on the floor.
The man with no chain was behind him.
The cat-man was crawling backward on his hands across the floor, away from Corin, with his broken knife-handle still clutched in one fist.
Corin turned to look at them.
He did not mean to look at them the way he looked at them.
He did not know what his face was doing.
Jory Kestle knew.
Jory Kestle had looked at men like that across the sawdust for thirty-one fights, and twenty-nine times they had looked away first.
They looked away first.
“Go,” said Corin.
It was not his voice.
It was deeper.
Rougher.
It had a Lower Docks accent so thick you could have stood a spoon in it.
It came out of his chest like a growl.
They went.
They went fast, stumbling and slipping through the drifts of fallen paper, between the presses, toward the broken front doors and the street beyond, leaving their lanterns, leaving their clubs, leaving the young man with the shaved head still lying unconscious under his blanket of paper, and the man with the broken shin still pinned by his sleeve to Old Joss’s press.
Corin heard them go.
Boots on stone.
A crash, as someone ran into a press in the dark.
A curse.
The groan of the broken doors.
Then the patter of the rain, and the street, and nothing.
He stood in the middle of the clear space in front of the type cabinet, with his fists still up and his feet still set and his chin still tucked, breathing hard, in the dark, in the falling white.
And Jory Kestle, inside him, was still angry.
That was the trouble.
That was always the trouble, with a volatile.
The fight was over.
The men were gone.
The big man was lying on the floor with paper on his face.
But the rage did not know that.
The rage had been waiting in a jar under a bed in Room 9 for months, maybe years, with nothing to hit.
And now it had a body again.
And arms.
And fists.
And it wanted to keep going.
Corin looked down at Tull, lying on his back on the floor.
He took a step toward him.
Scavenger, said Malakor.
Another step.
His right fist was drawing back.
His lips were peeled back from his teeth.
He could feel the place, on the side of the big man’s head, just above the ear, where one more punch, one short hard one from the floor, would—
Scavenger.
That’s not you.
He did not stop.
And a hand caught his wrist.
It was a thin hand.
Cold.
It closed around his drawn-back fist with fingers that did not grip quite right, that were not quite sure how tight to hold a thin thing.
But they held.
“Corin Vane,” said Lyra Thorne, in a hoarse, scraped, ruined voice, right beside him in the dark.
“Ministry of Records.
You told me your name.
That’s your name.” She coughed.
Her hand tightened on his wrist.
“Not his.
Yours.”
Corin stood very still.
The rage went on roaring, somewhere inside him.
But it was further away now.
Smaller.
As if he were standing outside a room with the door half shut, and the roaring was on the other side of it.
He looked down at her hand on his wrist.
At the soft gray leather of his own glove.
At his fist.
He opened it.
It took a very long time.
Among the Presses
The last of the paper came down.
It came slowly, a few sheets at a time, drifting out of the dark above the presses and settling on the drifts below with soft dry whispers, like the last flakes at the end of a snowfall.
And then there was no more.
The air was still.
The great iron presses stood in the gloom up to their knees in white, like cattle in a winter field.
The two lanterns that were still burning lay on their sides on the floor where the men had dropped them, throwing long, low, yellow light across the drifts, so that every crumpled sheet threw a tiny shadow.
It was beautiful, in a strange, wrecked way.
Like a room after a party that went very wrong.
Corin stood in the middle of it with his hands open at his sides.
They were his hands again.
Mostly.
The knuckles were split, both of them, the gray leather of the gloves torn across them and dark with blood.
He had not felt it happen.
He felt it now.
A deep, hot, throbbing ache, all the way up to his elbows.
And under the ache, something else.
A heaviness in his shoulders.
A stiffness in his hips.
The weight still down low, in his knees, the feet still set wide.
His body was still standing the way Jory Kestle had stood, and it did not seem to want to stop.
He made it stop.
He straightened up.
He put his feet together.
He let his shoulders down.
It felt wrong.
Like taking off a coat on a cold day.
“Are you back?” said Lyra.
She was standing beside him, very close.
Her hand had let go of his wrist, but it was still there, hovering, an inch away, as if she was ready to grab it again.
Her voice was a ruin.
A hoarse, scraped whisper, as if she had swallowed a handful of gravel.
There were dark marks on her white throat, five of them, the size and shape of the ends of very large fingers.
“Mostly,” said Corin.
It came out in his own voice.
Nearly.
There was still a little of the Lower Docks in it.
A little gravel.
“Your throat.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.”
“It’s fine,” she said again, and turned away from him, and went to look for her sword.
Old Joss’s Shop
Old Joss was sitting on his heap of blankets beside the cold stove with his composing stick across his knees, staring at the wreck of his printing house.
He did not look frightened anymore.
He did not look angry.
He looked tired.
He looked like a very old man who has just watched sixty years of his life fall out of the sky in the middle of the night.
“Three days’ printing,” he said, too loud, to nobody.
“That was.
On the lines.
Pamphlets for the Cooper’s Guild.
Song-sheets for the Lantern Bridge fair.
Bills for the theater on Gilt Street.” He looked at a sheet of paper that had landed in his lap and picked it up and held it close to his eyes, in the yellow lantern light.
“The Fisherman’s Daughter.
A Comedy in Three Acts.” He let it fall.
“Three days.”
Corin crouched down in front of him, so the old man could see his lips.
“I’m sorry, Joss.”
Old Joss looked at him.
His small black eyes went to Corin’s split knuckles.
To his face.
To his eyes.
He looked at Corin’s eyes for a long time.
“Blue,” he said.
“Round the edges.
More than before.” He shook his speckled head slowly.
“Whatever you’ve got in you, boy, I’d get it out quick.”
“I will.”
“You won’t.
Not quick enough.” The old man sighed.
“Go on.
Get out.
Both of you.
Before the Watch comes.
They’ll have heard those doors in the next Quarter.” He thumped his composing stick on the floor.
“I’ll tell them burglars.
Drunk burglars.
Came for the brass, knocked the lines down, fell over each other in the dark.” A thin smile cracked his face.
“I’m deaf, see.
Didn’t hear a thing.
Didn’t see a thing.
Slept through it all.”
“What about him?” Lyra had come back.
Her sword was in her hand again, back in its sheath, and she was holding her left hand pressed flat against her side, as if she did not quite trust it.
She nodded at the huge shape lying on its back in the drift of white paper a few steps away.
“When he wakes up.”
They looked at Tull.
He was breathing.
Slow and deep and wet, through his mouth, with a bubbling whistle at the end of every breath.
A sheet of paper lay across his face, lifting a little each time he breathed out, and settling again each time he breathed in.
The Fisherman’s Daughter.
A Comedy in Three Acts.
“He’ll wake with a sore jaw,” said Corin.
“And a headache.
And no memory of the last few minutes before I hit him.” He did not know how he knew that.
Jory Kestle knew.
“He’ll wake up in an hour.
Maybe two.”
“And then he’ll come back,” said Lyra.
“With more.”
“Not here,” said Old Joss.
He had read her lips.
“Not for a while.
Not with the Watch crawling about.” He snorted.
“And not with the harvester who put him on the floor still walking about the city.
A man like that doesn’t come back to where he got knocked down.
Bad luck.”
Tull’s Pockets
Corin went and knelt beside Tull in the paper.
He did not want to.
His hands did not want to.
Jory Kestle, somewhere at the back of him, behind the half-shut door, wanted very much to do something else to the big man, something short and hard and final, from the floor.
Corin did not let him.
He took a breath.
He pushed the paper off Tull’s face, and he went through the big man’s pockets, quickly, the way his hands seemed to know how to go through a dead man’s pockets.
He was not dead.
He was close enough.
A clasp knife, heavy, with a horn handle.
A purse, leather, fat with coins: silver, mostly, and two gold.
Corin left it.
A plug of chewing tobacco, wrapped in paper.
A brass knuckle-duster, which Corin looked at for a moment and then threw away into the dark among the presses.
A stub of pencil.
A dirty handkerchief.
And in the inside pocket of the sheepskin jerkin, over the heart, a card.
It was small and stiff and heavy, the size of a playing card.
Black.
Thick black card, edged in gold, so fine and smooth under his fingers that it felt like silk.
And printed on it, in raised gold letters that caught the yellow lantern light:
THE MEMORY BOURSE.
ADMIT ONE.
And below that, smaller:
SERVICE.
And on the back, nothing.
Only a small shape stamped in the black card, without ink, so that you could only see it when the light slanted across it.
A mask.
A half-mask.
Smooth and curved, like the inside of a shell.
Lyra had come to stand over his shoulder.
She looked down at the card in his hand.
Corin felt her go very still.
“You know it?” he said.
She did not answer at once.
“I’ve been there,” she said at last.
Her ruined voice was very low.
“Once.
Years ago.
With my father.
When I was seventeen and he thought I should see how the world really worked.” She was quiet for a moment.
“It’s where the rich go to buy what the poor have sold.
Childhoods.
Talents.
Wedding days.
A whole life’s skill at the violin, in a vial, for the price of a carriage.” Her mouth twisted.
“It’s very beautiful.
There are chandeliers.”
Corin looked at the card.
At the gold letters.
At the small blind stamp of the mask on the back.
Then he put it in his own pocket, beside the jar that was not empty anymore.
The Boy Under the Paper
Something moved in the drift of paper by the type cabinet.
Lyra’s sword was out before Corin had even turned his head.
She took two quick steps and stood over the drift, with the point of the blade resting lightly on the white sheets, and waited.
The paper heaved.
Slid.
And a face came up out of it, blinking, white as the sheets themselves.
It was the young one with the shaved head.
The one who had found them first, with the iron bar.
The one Lyra had put down with the flat of her sword before anyone else had moved.
He lay on his back in the drift with paper stuck to his cheek and a great purple lump coming up on the side of his head, above the ear, and he looked up at the slim figure in mended silk standing over him with a sword at his chest, and his mouth fell open.
He was younger than Corin had thought.
Much younger.
Without the iron bar and the swagger, in the yellow light of the last lantern, he looked about seventeen.
His broken nose was the only hard thing about his face.
The rest of it was round and soft and frightened, with a few patches of pale fuzz on the chin that were trying very hard to be a beard.
“Don’t,” he said.
His voice cracked in the middle.
“Don’t, miss.
Please.”
“Name,” said Lyra.
“Dace.”
“Dace what?”
“Just Dace.” He swallowed.
His eyes went past her, to the huge shape lying on its back in the paper, and went wider.
“Is Tull—is he—”
“Asleep,” said Corin.
The boy’s eyes found him.
Found the long gray coat and the split knuckles and the blue frost round the edges of his eyes.
And went so wide that the whites showed all the way round.
“You,” he whispered.
“You’re the one.
The breather.
You put Tull down.” He tried to push himself back through the paper, away from Corin, and got nowhere, because Lyra’s sword followed him.
“Nobody puts Tull down.
Nobody.
He killed a man at the Cinder Lane pits with one hand.
I saw it.”
“Then you know what he’s like,” said Corin.
“Tell us who sent him.”
Dace shut his mouth.
His soft round face tried to go hard and stubborn.
It did not quite manage it.
Lyra moved the point of her sword.
Not much.
Just a little.
From his chest to the hollow of his throat, where it rested, very lightly, the way it had rested on Corin’s throat an hour before.
“I’ve lost a great deal tonight,” she said, in her ruined whisper.
“I’m tired.
My throat hurts.
I’d like to go home.
Tell him.”
The boy looked up at her face for a long moment.
Then it all came out at once, the way water comes out of a bucket when you tip it.
“The Lady,” he said.
“It’s the Lady.
The Lady at the Bourse.
We don’t say her name.
Nobody says her name.
Tull works for her.
We work for Tull.
That’s all I know, I swear it, miss.
I’ve never even seen her.
Tull goes to see her.
Down the service stairs.
We wait outside.” He was talking very fast.
“He came back this afternoon in a temper.
Said the clerk was a bust.
Said the clerk had burned what she wanted, right in front of her, and she was in a rage, and somebody was going to pay.
Said there’d been a harvester.
Said there’d be a broadsheet.
Said she’d want the harvester watched.”
“And tonight?”
“Tonight a boy came.
A runner.
With a note for Tull.
Tull read it and laughed and said the old deaf printer, of course, of course.
Said the clerk must have hidden it with him.
Said we’d go tonight, late, and break in, and get it.” Dace licked his lips.
“Little red book.
Little stones.
Bring them to the Lady.
That’s what he said.
And—” He stopped.
“And?” said Lyra.
The boy’s eyes went to Corin again.
“And if the harvester was there,” he said, “the Lady said to bring his book too.”
Corin went still.
“What book?” he said.
“The leather one.” Dace swallowed.
“That’s what Tull said.
A brown leather book.
He keeps it in his coat.
Over his heart.
Like a lover’s letter.
Tull laughed at that.
The Lady said it.” The boy’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“She said it was worth more than the red one.
She said if we only got one thing tonight, it had to be the harvester’s book.”
The Inkwell was very quiet.
Corin put his hand flat against the front of his coat.
He could feel the Ledger there, through the cloth.
The square weight of it.
The soft old leather.
The corners worn pale.
READ THIS FIRST.
Your name is Corin.
“Why?” he said.
“Why would she want that?”
“I don’t know.” Dace shook his head against the paper.
“I swear I don’t.
Tull didn’t know either.
He just said she wanted it.
He said she said a funny thing, about it.
He said she was standing at the window, looking out, and she said—” He screwed up his face, trying to get it right.
“She said, I’d like to read what he’s told himself.
I’d like to see if he got any of it right.”
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
Interesting, said Malakor, very softly, behind Corin’s eyes.
Very interesting.
Lyra looked at Corin.
Corin looked at the boy.
The boy looked at both of them, terrified, with the point of a sword resting at the hollow of his throat.
Then Lyra lifted the sword away.
“Go,” she said.
Dace stared at her.
“Go,” she said again.
“Out the front.
Run.
And if I ever see you with an iron bar in your hand again, I’ll take that hand off at the wrist.
I’ll do it tidily.
You won’t even feel it.” She paused.
“And find a different master.
One who doesn’t work for a woman who drinks children’s grandmothers out of a cup.”
The boy scrambled up out of the paper.
He nearly fell.
He looked once at Tull, lying on his back with the playbill on his face, breathing his bubbling breath.
Then he ran, slipping and stumbling between the presses, toward the broken front doors and the gray street beyond, and was gone.
Lyra put her sword away.
“That was stupid,” said Corin.
“He’ll tell them everything.”
“He’ll tell them nothing,” said Lyra.
“He’ll go home to whatever mother he has and be sick in a bucket and never go near Tull again.” She looked at the broken doors where the boy had gone.
“I know that face.
I’ve seen it in the mirror.” She turned back to him.
“Your book.
Why would she want your book?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d like to see if he got any of it right.” Lyra repeated the words slowly.
“That’s not what you say about a stranger, harvester.
That’s what you say about someone you knew.”
Corin did not answer.
He was thinking of a woman’s voice, in a black lane, low and rich and beautiful, like honey poured over a cold stone.
A voice he had heard through a dead man’s ears.
A voice he did not know.
He did not think he did.
He took his hand away from the front of his coat.
It was shaking again.