He had to do the jar before they left.
He knew that.
Yes, said Malakor.
You do.
Now.
Before he gets comfortable.
Corin stood up from beside Tull.
His knees ached.
He took the jar out of his pocket.
The empty one.
The one he had drunk Jory Kestle out of, with no rod, with no care, all at once.
It was cold in his hand.
The label was still on it, in his own untidy hand.
He will make you angry.
Let him.
He had let him.
Now he had to let him go.
He held the jar to his mouth.
He closed his eyes.
He breathed out, slowly, from the bottom of himself, the way he had done in Gutter Lane.
And he thought of the end.
And the end came.
It came all at once, the way the beginning had.
A roar.
A ring of red faces in the torchlight.
Sawdust.
A man in front of him, huge, bloody, one eye swollen shut.
Swinging.
And Jory Kestle, thirty-two years old, in his thirty-first fight, tired, so tired, his arms like lead, the sweat running into his eyes, ducking, too slow, just a little too slow, the way you are always a little too slow in the end—
A fist, coming in from the side.
Big and hard.
Just above the ear.
A white flash.
A great, high, ringing sound, like a bell struck inside the skull.
And then the sawdust, coming up to meet him.
Rough and dry and warm against his cheek.
Smelling of beer and blood and pine.
And far away, very far, the roar of the crowd, going on and on, and somebody’s voice, a woman’s, high and thin, screaming his name.
Jory.
Jory.
Jory.
And under it all, at the very end, faint and small, a single thought, not angry at all.
Almost surprised.
Oh.
So that’s how it stops.
Corin opened his eyes.
He was on his knees in the paper.
He did not remember falling.
Lyra was crouched in front of him, holding his shoulders, saying his name.
Old Joss was standing over them with his candle relit, peering down.
And the jar in his hands was not empty.
A thick blue-white mist was curling at the bottom of it.
Not swirling, now.
Not angry.
Turning slowly, round and round, like a cat settling to sleep.
Corin screwed the lid on with fingers that shook so hard that he could barely turn it.
Then he took the stub of pencil from his Ledger and, under the old label, wrote:
Used.
Inkwell.
Saved a life.
And under that, after a moment:
He was surprised, at the end.
He wasn’t angry anymore.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he put the jar away.
“Can you stand?” said Lyra.
“I don’t know.”
She looked at him.
Then, without a word, she put his arm over her shoulders and stood up, and he came with her.
She was stronger than she looked.
Much stronger.
And she did not let go.
“Coal hatch,” said Old Joss, holding up his candle.
“Behind the cabinet.
Mind the step.
It’s steep.”
Someone Who Can Read It
The coal hatch was a square iron door in the floor behind the far end of the type cabinet, so black with old coal dust that it was almost invisible.
Under it, a ladder.
Under the ladder, a cellar that smelled of damp and mice and a hundred years of coal.
And at the far end of the cellar, behind a stack of rotten barrels, a low brick arch, so low that Corin had to bend nearly double, leading into a tunnel.
They went through it in the dark, with Lyra in front and her hand on the wall, and Corin behind her with his hand on her shoulder, and neither of them saying anything.
The tunnel was long and narrow and wet, and the floor was slick with mud, and somewhere water was dripping.
It smelled of rope.
Old hemp rope, tarred and rotting.
And then, at the end, a smell of the river, cold and green.
They came up through a trapdoor into the long, low, empty shed of a rope-walk, where the great coils of ship’s rope lay in the dark like sleeping snakes.
The Watch
They had only taken a few steps into the dark when they heard the whistles.
High, shrill, long blasts, two and three at a time, from somewhere close outside.
The whistles of the City Watch.
And voices.
And boots on cobbles, running.
And the swing of lantern light past the dirty windows high up in the rope-walk wall, yellow, moving, sweeping.
Lyra stopped dead.
Corin, with his arm still across her shoulders, stopped with her.
“In here,” she breathed.
She pulled him sideways, between two of the great coils of rope.
They were as tall as a man and as wide as a cart, and they had been wound so tightly and so long ago that they had become almost solid, like barrels made of tarred hemp.
Between them there was a narrow gap, black and close, that smelled so strongly of tar that it made Corin’s eyes water.
They squeezed into it.
Lyra pressed her back against one coil and Corin pressed his against the other, and they stood there face to face in the dark, so close that he could feel her breath, shallow and fast.
The side door of the rope-walk banged open.
Lantern light swept down the long shed.
It touched the coils of rope one after another, throwing their huge round shadows up the walls.
It touched the floor.
It touched the mouth of the gap between the two coils where they stood, and went past, and came back.
“Nothing in here, Sergeant,” said a young voice.
Nervous.
Corin knew it.
The young constable with the thin blond mustache, from the rope across Gutter Lane.
“Just rope.”
“Look properly.”
That voice Corin knew too.
Short.
Gruff.
Tired.
It smelled, he was sure, of pipe smoke.
Sergeant Moll.
Footsteps came down the shed.
Heavy ones.
Slow.
The lantern light came with them, swinging, growing brighter.
It filled the gap between the coils with yellow.
Corin saw Lyra’s face in it, white, set, her gray eyes very wide, her hand on the hilt of her sword.
The footsteps stopped.
Corin turned his head, very slowly, and looked out of the gap.
Sergeant Moll was standing at the mouth of it, three paces away, with a lantern held up in one hand and his truncheon in the other and his round black hat pushed back on his head.
His boiled-ham face was red from running.
He was looking straight into the gap.
Straight at Corin.
Their eyes met.
For a long moment, the sergeant did not move.
His small, tired, shrewd eyes went from Corin’s face, with its blue-rimmed eyes and its streaks of coal dust, to his split and bloody knuckles, to the young woman in mended silk pressed against the coil beside him with a hand on her sword and dark finger-marks on her throat.
And back.
Then Sergeant Moll turned round.
“Nothing in here, lad,” he said loudly, over his shoulder.
“Just rope.
You were right.” He lowered the lantern.
“Back to the printing house.
The old deaf one’ll have something to tell us.
Or he won’t.
Either way.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
The footsteps went away down the shed.
The lantern light went with them, swinging, shrinking.
The side door banged.
The whistles went on outside for a while, further off, and then stopped.
In the dark between the coils, Lyra let out her breath.
“He saw us,” she whispered.
“He looked right at you.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t he—”
“I don’t know,” said Corin.
He thought of a square red face, looking very carefully at a blank brick wall at the end of an alley, as if it were the most interesting wall in the world.
“I think he decided, yesterday, not to see things that would only end up in a drawer.”
They waited until there was no sound outside at all.
Then they went out through the side door, and down a flight of slippery wooden steps, and there was the river.
The Mother Ash, wide and brown and slow, sliding past in the gray light before dawn.
The rain had stopped.
The sky over the far bank had gone from black to the color of a bruise, and at its very bottom edge, low over the rooftops and the cranes and the church towers, there was a thin pale line, like a crack under a door.
There were stone steps going down to the water.
Old ones, green with weed, worn into hollows.
Lyra sat down on the third one from the top, very suddenly, as if her legs had decided for her.
Corin sat down beside her.
For a long time, neither of them said anything at all.
The Step
The river slid past.
A barge went by, very slow, low in the water with coal, its lamp glowing blue at the stern and a man standing at the long tiller, smoking, who did not look at them.
Gulls began to wake on the mud below the steps, and squabble, and fly off in twos and threes across the water, crying.
The pale line under the sky grew wider.
Lyra sat with her hands in her lap.
She was looking at them.
At her left hand, mostly.
Turning it over.
Palm up.
Palm down.
She touched the tip of each finger to the tip of her thumb, one after another, slowly, the way a child counts.
Then again.
Then again.
“It’s not gone,” she said at last.
Her voice was still a ruined whisper.
“The hand.
I can still hold the sword.
I can still fight.
It’s only the—” She stopped.
“It’s only the fine things.
The small things.
Threading a needle.
Tying a thread.
I tried, back there, in my head, while we were in the tunnel.
To remember how.
To think it through.
And there’s nothing.
It’s like trying to remember a word in a language you never learned.”
Corin did not say anything.
He thought of a little brass lamp, burning a tiny blue bead of flame beside his bed all night.
He thought of a book on his chest, every morning, and a stranger’s handwriting that turned out to be his.
“That’s not the worst part,” said Lyra.
“What’s the worst part?”
She was quiet for a long time.
“My mother taught me,” she said.
“When I was six.
In a room at the top of our house, with a window over the rose garden.
I remember that I remember that.
I know she did.
I know there was a room, and a window, and roses.
I know because I’ve told people, at parties, when they admired my handkerchiefs.” Her fingers closed slowly into a fist in her lap.
“But I can’t see it anymore.
I can’t see the room.
I can’t see her hands.
I can’t see her face, in that room, bending over mine.
It was the last clear memory I had of her face.” She swallowed.
“I burned it.
To cut a chain.”
The river slid past.
“She had a saying,” said Lyra.
“Fold it small.
I embroidered it on everything.
I still have one handkerchief with it on.
The last one I didn’t sell.” She reached into her silk coat and took out a small square of white linen, folded, and held it in her palm, and looked at it.
In one corner, in tiny stitches the color of roses, there were three words.
“I don’t know what it means.
She never told me.
I always meant to ask.”
She looked at the embroidery for a long time.
At the small, neat, perfect stitches she had made herself, years ago, with hands that knew how.
“I can’t even tell how I did that,” she said.
“Looking at it now.
It’s like looking at someone else’s work.”
Corin looked at the three small words in the corner of the handkerchief.
Fold it small.
Something moved in him.
Very faint.
Very deep.
Not Pell.
Not Kestle.
Not Malakor.
Something older.
Like a fish turning, once, in very dark water, at the bottom of a well.
Then it was gone.
“I’ll remember it for you,” he said.
She looked at him.
“The room,” said Corin.
“The window.
The roses.
Your mother’s hands.
In, through, pull.
I’ll write it down.
All of it.
Everything you just told me.” He took out the Ledger.
“I can’t give it back.
I don’t know how.
But I can keep it.
So it’s somewhere.”
Lyra stared at him.
“You won’t remember me tomorrow,” she said.
“Will you?”
“No,” said Corin.
“But the book will.”
And he wrote, on one of the last empty pages, in his big untidy hand, while she watched: Lyra Thorne.
Her mother taught her to embroider, at six, in a room at the top of the house, over the rose garden.
Gold light.
A blue dress.
“In, through, pull.
Every great thing is only patience.” “Fold it small: when something is too big to carry, fold it small and put it somewhere safe and carry it anyway.” Lyra burned it tonight in the Inkwell to save my life.
Remember it for her.
He showed her.
She read it.
She did not say anything.
But after a moment she put the handkerchief back inside her coat, very carefully, over her heart.
And she did not look away from the river for a long time.
Terms
The pale line under the sky had become a band of gray light, and the gray had begun, at the very bottom, to turn yellow.
Lyra took the red book out of her coat.
She held it in both hands in her lap, the way she had held it on the stool in the Inkwell, as if she were praying.
The rose in thorns was clear on the soft red leather now, in the growing light.
“I can’t read it,” she said.
“The other writing.
Under the lines.” She opened it, carefully, at a page in the middle, and tilted it toward the dawn.
Candles, beeswax, two dozen.
3 silver.
And between the lines, so faint that they were barely there at all, the tiny grooves in the paper.
The oily sheen on the ink, green and violet and gold, sliding.
“I tried, in the Inkwell, when you were—when you came in.
I tried in the light from the window.
I can see it’s there.
I can’t read a word of it.”
“Neither could Pell,” said Corin.
“He sat up all night with a candle.”
“Then nobody can.”
“Somebody can.”
She looked at him.
Corin pushed up his coat sleeve.
His left one.
He turned his wrist toward her, toward the dawn light, so that she could see the small black letters running round the inside of it like a bracelet.
LEDGER, INSIDE LEFT POCKET.
ROD, INSIDE RIGHT.
READ THE FIRST PAGE.
And below it, in the faint silvery gray ink that caught the light strangely, like the sheen on the red book’s pages:
V.
made this.
Go to V.
if you are lost.
Lyra bent close and looked at it for a long time.
At the strange silver-gray ink.
At the way it shifted, very faintly, in the light.
She looked at it, and then at the red book in her lap, and then back.
“It’s the same,” she said slowly.
“The ink.
The way it moves.
It’s the same kind of ink.”
“I think so.”
“Who is V.?”
“An Ink-Binder,” said Corin.
“Her name is Vespera.
She has a shop on Hook Lane, down by the water, about a mile from here.
I go there sometimes.
After a bad one.” He paused.
“My clerk says she doesn’t like him.
She says he fidgets.”
“You don’t remember her.”
“No.” He looked at the silver letters on his own wrist.
“But I seem to trust her.
I wrote her into my skin.”
Lyra closed the red book.
She sat for a long moment with it in her lap, looking at the river.
Then she turned and looked at him.
Properly.
For the first time since she had dropped off a stool in the dark with a sword in her hand.
A long, cool, measuring look, from his hat to his boots and back.
At his split knuckles.
At the blue frost round the edges of his eyes.
At the long gray Ministry coat, with its brass buttons and their closed eyes.
“You work for them,” she said.
“The Ministry.
The people who closed my father’s accounts and sold his house and wrote natural madness on his file.
The people who might have killed your scribe.”
“Yes.”
“Why should I trust you?”
Corin thought about it.
He thought about lying, and decided not to, the way he had decided not to with Mrs.
Marta that morning.
It seemed like a very long time ago.
“You shouldn’t,” he said.
“I don’t know if I’m trustworthy.
I don’t know who I am, most mornings, until I read it.
I don’t know why the name of a village that isn’t on any map is written on the first page of my own book.
I don’t know why the ghost in my rod went quiet when I picked up those stones.” He took the three cold stones in their black silk out of his pocket and held them on his open palm between them, in the dawn light.
“But I know your father wrote that book for his children.
And I know Pell died so nobody else would have it.
And I know there’s a woman in a white mask who wants it badly enough to kill again.
And I know I can’t read it either.”
He held out the stones.
“So here’s a bargain,” he said.
“You keep the book.
I keep the stones.
Neither of us is any use without the other.
We take them both to Vespera.
Together.
Now.
And we find out what your father wrote.”
Lyra looked at the stones on his palm for a long time.
Then she looked at his face.
“And after?”
“I don’t know,” said Corin honestly.
“I’ll probably have forgotten your name by then.
You’ll have to tell me again.”
And for the first time since he had met her, Lyra Thorne almost smiled.
It was a small, tired, crooked thing, and it did not last.
But it was there.
“Lyra,” she said.
“Thorne.
Write it down.”
“I already did.”
She stood up.
She held out her hand to help him up.
It was her left hand, the one that could no longer thread a needle.
He took it.
It held.
Behind them, across the river, the sun came up over the rooftops of Veridia, red and huge through the smoke, and all along the riverbank, one after another, the cold blue gemstone lamps on their tall black heron-necks began to dim, and fade, and go out.
They walked down the riverfront together toward Hook Lane, where, at the bottom of a crooked street that ran down to the water, a single lamp was still burning in a small shop window.
Not blue.
Yellow.
An oil lamp, warm and low, as if someone inside had been up all night.
As if someone had been waiting.
Hook Lane
Hook Lane was so steep that it was almost a staircase.
It ran down from the riverfront road between two rows of crooked, leaning, tar-black houses to a little stone quay at the bottom, where a few small boats were tied up, bumping gently together in the brown water.
It smelled of fish and tar and wet rope and, very faintly, of something sharp and sweet and chemical that Corin knew.
The same smell as his coat.
The air after lightning.
The shop with the yellow lamp was the last one before the quay.
It was small and narrow, squeezed between a net-mender’s and a shuttered chandler’s.
It had a bow window like Bram’s, but smaller, of thick greenish glass, and behind the glass, instead of pens and ink, there were bottles.
Dozens of them.
Tiny ones, no bigger than a thumb, standing in rows on narrow glass shelves.
Each one held a few drops of ink, and each ink was a different color.
Black.
Blue.
Red.
Green.
Gold.
A deep, dark purple.
And some colors Corin did not have names for.
A gray that shimmered silver when the light moved.
A brown that was almost red.
A blue so dark it was nearly black, with tiny flecks of light in it, like a night sky.
The lamp in the window was set behind the bottles, so that its yellow light came through them, and every one of them glowed.
The whole window glowed.
Like stained glass in a chapel.
Like a jewel box opened in the dark.
There was no sign over the door.
Only a small symbol, painted in faded silver on the dark wood.
A needle.
And through its eye, a thread, curling away in a long loop that, if you looked at it from the right angle, was a letter.
V.
Corin stood in front of the door, with Lyra beside him, and the dawn light growing gray and gold behind them over the river, and did not knock.
He did not have to.
The door opened.
Vespera
The woman in the doorway was not tall.
She was round and solid and square, like a well-made chest of drawers, with broad shoulders and strong forearms and a plain, wide, weather-brown face.
She might have been fifty.
She might have been sixty.
Her hair was iron gray, thick and wiry, cut short and standing up from her head like the bristles of a brush.
She wore a long dark apron over a plain brown dress, with the sleeves rolled up past the elbow.
And her arms were covered in writing.
Every inch of them.
From the wrists to the elbows and up past the rolled sleeves, as far as Corin could see.
Small, neat, careful words, in a dozen different inks, running in lines and spirals and columns over the skin.
Names.
Dates.
Places.
Lists.
Some of them were black and sharp and new.
Some were faded to a soft gray-blue, so old that they had blurred at the edges.
And some of them, here and there, glowed.
Very faintly.
In the gray dawn light.
A soft silver shimmer, coming and going, like the light on water.
She looked at Corin.
She looked at him for a long time, without saying anything, with a pair of small, dark, very sharp eyes set deep in her plain wide face.
She looked at his coal-black coat.
At his torn gloves and his split and bloody knuckles.
At his face.
At his eyes.
Then she looked at Lyra.
At the mended silk.
At the dark marks on her throat.
At her left hand, pressed flat against her side.
Then back at Corin.
“You,” said Vespera, “have been drinking a volatile.”
Her voice was low and dry and flat, with a country burr in it, like gravel in honey.
“Without the rod,” she said.
“All at once.
Out of the jar.
Like a drunk with a bottle.” Her sharp dark eyes went to the blue frost round the edges of his.
“I can see it from here.
You’re full to the brim.
There’s somebody in there punching the walls.”
“Yes,” said Corin.
“And you’ve had a harvest before that.
A deep one.
Today.
You’ve got two dead men in you and a fight on top and you haven’t slept.” She folded her writing-covered arms across her chest.
“And now you’ve brought me a Thorne.”
Lyra went very still beside him.
Vespera looked at her.
Not unkindly.
Not kindly, either.
The way a doctor looks at a wound.
“I know the face,” she said.
“I did your father’s arm, once.
Twenty years back.
He came to me in the night with his sleeve rolled up and asked for one word, very small, on the inside of his wrist, where nobody would see.
Paid in gold.
Never told me why.” She was quiet for a moment.
“You have his eyes, girl.
And his chin.
He held it up like that, too, when he was frightened.”
“What word?” said Lyra.
Her ruined voice cracked.
“What word did you write?”
Vespera looked at her for a long moment.
“Come inside,” she said.
“Both of you.
Before somebody sees two fools standing on my step at dawn covered in coal dust and blood.”
She stood aside.
And behind her, in the warm yellow light of the lamp, the little shop was full of needles.
They hung from the low beams of the ceiling on threads, hundreds of them, every size, from needles as fine as a hair to needles as long as a finger, so that when the door swung shut behind them and the draft moved through the room, they turned and swayed and caught the lamplight and glittered, like a slow silver rain that never reached the floor.
There were needles in jars on the shelves, and needles stuck in fat red pincushions on the counter, and needles laid out on a square of black velvet on a little table by the stove, in a perfect row, from smallest to largest, beside a tray of tiny pots of ink.
There was a chair beside the table.
A big, worn, padded leather chair, tipped back a little, with a footrest.
The kind of chair a man might lie back in for a long time, while someone bent over his arm with a needle.
Corin looked at the chair.
He had never seen it before.
He was sure of that.
He would have remembered a chair like that.
But his body knew it.
His body knew exactly how far back it tipped, and how the leather was cracked on the left arm where a hand had gripped it, again and again, and how the stove ticked when it was cooling, and how the needles sounded when they turned on their threads in the draft, a faint, high, silvery chiming, like ice in a glass.
His body knew this room the way it knew the stairs at No.
14 Tallow Street.
It had been here many times.
It had sat in that chair in the dark, gripping that arm, while something was written into it that it would need.
Vespera saw him looking.
“Yes,” she said.
“That’s your chair.
You’ve worn the arm through.
Sit down in it before you fall down.” She turned to Lyra and held out one writing-covered hand.
“And you, Thorne girl.
Give me the book.
Let’s see what your father thought was worth folding small.”
Lyra’s hand went to the front of her silk coat.
And stopped there.
She looked at the Ink-Binder for a long, long moment, with her chin up, the way her father had held his.
“How did you know,” she whispered, “that he folded it?”