Twenty years later.
Corin Vane woke up the way he always woke up: with a book on his chest and no idea whose it was.
It was heavy.
That was the first thing he knew.
A square weight sitting on his breastbone, rising and falling when he breathed.
Then he knew it was leather, because his hand was resting on it, and the leather was old and soft and a little greasy, like a saddle that has been ridden for years.
Then he knew it was a book, because his thumb was lying in the gap between its pages, holding a place.
He did not know where he was.
That was normal.
He did not know that it was normal yet, but it was.
He lay very still on his back, the way an animal lies still when it hears something in the grass, and he let his eyes move without moving his head.
A ceiling.
Low and gray, with a long brown water stain across it shaped a little like a fish.
A crack running from the fish’s tail to the corner.
A cobweb in the corner, with a dead fly in it.
A window, to his left.
Small and square, with four panes of glass, one of them cracked and patched with a strip of brown paper.
Gray light coming through it.
Not morning light, exactly.
The kind of light that comes before morning, thin and cold and the color of dishwater.
A lamp, on a wooden crate beside the bed.
A small brass oil lamp, still burning, its flame turned down so low that it was only a tiny blue bead at the bottom of the glass chimney.
It had been burning all night.
He could smell the hot oil.
He did not know why he had left it burning.
He did not know his own name.
He lay there for a long moment with that fact sitting in the middle of his head like a stone in an empty bowl.
He waited for the name to come.
It did not come.
There was nothing behind his eyes but a soft gray quiet, like fog over water, and the faint smell of lamp oil, and the weight of the book on his chest.
Then his hands moved.
He did not tell them to.
They simply did it, the way your hands find the light switch in a room you have lived in for years.
His thumb pushed the book open at the place it had been holding.
No.
Not that place.
His other hand closed the book again, turned it over, and opened it at the very beginning.
At the inside of the front cover.
There was writing there.
Big letters.
Black ink, pressed deep into the thick cream-colored paper, so deep that some of the strokes had cut through the surface.
The handwriting was untidy and sloping, the kind of handwriting that belongs to someone who writes a great deal, very fast, and does not care whether anyone else can read it.
But he could read it.
He could read it easily.
Because he knew, before he had finished the first line, that it was his own.
READ THIS FIRST.
Your name is Corin.
You were born in Oakhaven.
You had a younger sister named Elara.
You used to fear the dark.
He read it twice.
Then a third time, slowly, moving his lips.
Your name is Corin.
“Corin,” he said out loud.
His voice was rough with sleep.
It sounded strange in the small gray room.
But the name fit.
It fit the way a key fits a lock.
He felt it turn somewhere inside him, and a door opened, and a little light came through.
Not much.
Not memories.
Just a sense of rightness.
Yes.
That one.
That’s mine.
You were born in Oakhaven.
He did not know where Oakhaven was.
The word meant nothing.
It was just a sound, like a word in a language he had studied once and forgotten.
You had a younger sister named Elara.
Nothing.
No face.
No voice.
Only a small, strange ache under his ribs, as if someone had pressed a thumb there, gently, and then taken it away.
You used to fear the dark.
He turned his head and looked at the little brass lamp on the crate, with its tiny blue bead of flame.
Burning all night.
Used to, he thought.
Hm.
Below the five lines, in smaller writing, squeezed in at the bottom of the cover:
Turn the page.
Then get up.
Then eat something.
In that order.
He turned the page.
The Rules
The second page was a list.
It was headed, in the same untidy black letters, THINGS THAT ARE TRUE TODAY, and someone, he, had ruled lines under it in pencil, very straight and very even, with what must have been a ruler.
You live at No.
14 Tallow Street, the Lower Docks, Veridia.
Top floor.
Room 9.
You are a Senior Investigator at the Ministry of Records.
Third Basement.
Harvesting Section.
You go to work at the seventh bell.
It is a forty-minute walk.
Leave by the sixth bell and a half.
Your landlady is Mrs.
Marta.
She is old and rude and kind.
Be polite.
Pay your rent.
Eat the stew.
Your clerk is Toby.
He is young and nervous.
He is on your side.
Do not lend Toby money.
He will not pay it back and he will feel terrible about it.
You harvest Ash.
That means you breathe in what is left of dead mages, so you can use their memories instead of your own.
It is illegal for everyone except you.
Do not forget that it is illegal for everyone except you.
You do not burn your own memories.
Ever.
If you have to burn something, burn Ash.
If there is no Ash, run.
The rod in the long case is yours.
Master Hale gave it to you.
Do not lose it.
The jars on the shelf are empty.
The jars in the box under the bed are NOT.
Do not open the box under the bed unless you mean it.
And at the very bottom, underlined twice:
You wake up like this every morning.
It is not an emergency.
It is just Tuesday.
Corin looked at the last line for a long time.
Then, for no reason he could have explained, he laughed.
A short, rusty, surprised sound, like a door that has not been opened in a while.
The laugh went up into the low gray room and bumped against the fish-shaped stain on the ceiling and came back down again.
“Is it Tuesday?” he asked the room.
The room did not know.
He sat up.
Room 9
The room was very small.
He could see all of it from the bed without turning his head very far.
The bed itself was narrow and hard, an iron frame with a thin mattress stuffed with something that crackled when he moved.
Straw, probably.
Or old newspaper.
There was one wool blanket, gray, with a hole worn through it near the foot.
He had slept in his clothes.
A gray shirt, wrinkled.
Gray trousers.
Gray wool socks, one of them with a hole in the heel.
His boots stood side by side on the bare wooden floor beside the bed, very neatly, their laces tucked inside, as if someone had placed them there with great care.
On the wall above the boots, at the height where a man sitting on the edge of the bed would see it first thing, someone had nailed a piece of board.
And on the board, held with small iron tacks, were papers.
Dozens of them.
Small squares of paper, all different colors and sizes, some new and white, some old and yellow and curling at the corners.
Each one had a few words on it, in the same untidy black hand as the book.
BOOTS FIRST, THEN COAT.
KEYS ARE IN THE LEFT COAT POCKET.
ALWAYS LEFT.
THE WATER IN THE JUG IS FROM YESTERDAY.
IT IS FINE.
THE MAN ON THE SECOND-FLOOR LANDING IS CALLED OLD TERRENCE.
HE IS A SLATE.
HE IS NOT DANGEROUS.
SAY GOOD MORNING.
DO NOT BUY MORE INK.
YOU HAVE INK.
That last one had been underlined so hard that the pen had torn the paper.
There was a table under the window.
A small wooden table, with one leg shorter than the others and a folded wad of paper jammed under it to keep it level.
On the table: a tin cup.
A water jug with a chipped spout.
A stub of candle in a saucer.
A pen.
Three bottles of ink, all of them full.
And a fourth bottle of ink, also full, still wrapped in the brown paper and string from the shop.
Corin looked at the four bottles of ink.
Then at the note on the board.
DO NOT BUY MORE INK.
YOU HAVE INK.
“Ah,” he said.
Against the opposite wall there was a shelf.
A long, sagging plank held up by two iron brackets.
On the shelf there were jars.
They were glass jars, all the same size, about as tall as his hand, with brass screw-top lids.
There were perhaps twenty of them, standing in a neat row.
They were all empty.
He could see straight through them to the cracked plaster of the wall behind.
Each one had a small paper label pasted on its side, but the labels were blank.
At the end of the shelf, lying on its side, there was a long, thin case made of dark polished wood.
The kind of case a musician carries a flute in.
Its brass clasps were worn pale from being opened and closed.
And under the bed, he knew without looking, there was a box.
He did not look.
Do not open the box under the bed unless you mean it.
He did not mean it.
Not yet.
He got up.
The floorboards were cold under his socks.
He went to the table and poured water from the chipped jug into the tin cup and drank it.
It tasted flat and a little dusty.
The water in the jug is from yesterday.
It is fine.
He drank another cup.
Then he picked up the book from the bed, and held it for a moment, and felt the weight of it in his hand.
It was thick.
As thick as two fingers laid side by side.
The leather cover was dark brown, almost black, cracked and worn pale along the spine and at the corners.
There was no title on the front.
Only a small rectangle, low on the cover, where someone had pressed letters into the leather with a hot tool, long ago.
The letters had worn almost smooth, but if he tilted the book toward the gray window, he could just read them.
GROUNDING LEDGER.
B.
HOLT, STATIONER.
LOWER DOCKS.
He opened it in the middle.
The pages were crowded.
Every one of them, from edge to edge, covered in his untidy black writing.
Some in pencil.
Some in ink.
Some pages had little drawings on them, maps of streets, the shape of a key, a man’s face drawn badly with a big nose.
There were dates at the tops of some pages, and names, and lists, and notes written sideways up the margins.
Some of the notes had been crossed out and written again.
Some had been crossed out and written again three or four times, as if he had kept getting them wrong.
He turned to the last page that had writing on it.
It was near the back.
There were not many empty pages left.
Monday, it said at the top.
And under it:
Quiet day.
Filed four reports.
Toby brought a pie.
It had pigeon in it.
Do not eat Toby’s pies again.
Mrs.
Marta says rent is due Friday.
Saw a busker on Lantern Bridge.
He played a tune you didn’t know.
You stood and listened to it for a long time and you don’t know why.
It made your chest hurt.
Ask Vespera if that means anything.
Go to bed.
Leave the lamp on.
Corin looked at the last line.
Then at the little brass lamp, still burning its tiny blue bead on the crate.
He turned the lamp down until the flame went out.
The smell of hot oil rose up in a thin gray thread and curled away into the room.
The room did not get darker.
The dishwater light from the window was enough now.
He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on his boots.
Then his coat.
The Door Frame
The keys were in the left coat pocket.
Always left.
The coat was long and heavy, dark gray wool gone shiny at the elbows, with a high collar and deep pockets and a lining that had been torn and mended so many times that it was more thread than cloth.
It smelled of smoke and rain and something else, something faint and sharp and chemical that Corin could not name.
Like the air after lightning.
He would learn later in the day what it was.
He always did.
He put the Ledger in the inside pocket, over his heart, where it fit as if the pocket had been sewn for it.
It probably had.
He took the long wooden case from the end of the shelf and tucked it under his arm.
He looked around the little room one last time.
At the board of notes.
At the four bottles of ink.
At the box he could not see, under the bed.
Then he opened the door.
The door frame was covered in paper.
Not the small neat squares of his own notes, inside the room.
These were bigger.
Pieces of brown wrapping paper and the backs of old handbills, torn into rough strips and pinned to the wooden frame around his door with long, sharp hatpins, the kind with little glass beads on the ends.
There were six or seven of them.
The handwriting was different from his.
It was small and spiky and leaned hard to the right, like a row of thorns in a high wind, and it had been written in purple ink.
MARTA.
LANDLADY.
GROUND FLOOR, BACK.
IF YOU FORGET ME AGAIN I WILL NOT BE PLEASED.
RENT: 4 SILVER A WEEK.
YOU OWE 4 SILVER.
DUE FRIDAY.
THIS IS YOUR DOOR.
ROOM 9.
THE ONE WITH THE PAPERS.
IF YOU ARE STANDING HERE AT NIGHT TRYING YOUR KEY IN NUMBER 8 AGAIN, STOP IT.
MR.
ODDING HAS A BAD HEART.
STEW IS ON THE FLOOR.
EAT IT HOT.
IF YOU LEAVE IT FOR THE RATS AGAIN I WILL KNOW.
Corin looked down.
On the bare boards in front of his door there was a bowl.
A thick brown clay bowl, with a plate turned upside down on top of it to keep the heat in, and a spoon lying across the plate.
A thin curl of steam was coming out from under the edge of the plate.
He could smell it now.
Onions.
Potatoes.
Something meaty and salty and brown.
His stomach woke up all at once and made a noise like a dog growling.
Then eat something.
In that order.
He crouched down in the doorway and lifted the plate.
The stew underneath was thick and dark and shining, with lumps of potato and carrot and gristly gray meat, and a skin had just begun to form on top.
It was still hot.
Very hot.
Someone had put it there only minutes ago.
He ate it crouching in the doorway, with the long wooden case balanced across his knees, blowing on every spoonful.
It was salty and greasy and slightly burned on the bottom, and it was the best thing he had ever tasted.
He was fairly sure of that.
Though, he thought, scraping the bottom of the bowl, he would probably think that every morning.
When it was gone, he stood up and put the bowl and the plate and the spoon carefully together, and carried them down the stairs.
The Stairs
The tenement at No.
14 Tallow Street had five floors and one staircase, and the staircase had been built by someone who hated people.
It was narrow.
So narrow that Corin had to turn sideways to pass the iron rail where it bulged out at the landings.
It was steep.
Every step was a different height, some tall and some short, so that you could never find a rhythm going up or down, and you had to watch your feet the whole time like a man walking on a rocky beach.
And it was dark.
There were no windows on the stairs.
There was one lamp on each landing, a small blue gemstone lamp in a cage of rusty wire, screwed to the wall at head height.
Their light was cold and thin, the color of skimmed milk, and it did not reach very far.
Between the landings, the stairs went down into a kind of gray dimness where you felt for each step with your toe.
The walls were brown.
They had been painted once, long ago, a sort of mustard yellow.
Now they were brown with smoke and damp and the grease of a thousand hands sliding down them in the dark.
Someone had scratched words into the paint here and there, with a nail or a knife.
Names, mostly.
DELLA.
TOMMY B.
KESTER WAS HERE.
And once, near the fourth-floor landing, very small and old, so faint that he almost did not see it: WE REMEMBER.
He did not know what that meant.
He went on down.
The stairs smelled of cabbage and coal smoke and wet laundry and cats.
Behind the doors on every landing, he could hear the building waking up.
A baby crying, thin and angry.
A man coughing, a deep wet cough that went on and on.
A woman’s voice singing something, off-key, over the clatter of pans.
Somewhere below, a door slammed, and boots went running down, thump-thump-thump, and the street door at the very bottom banged open and shut.
On the third-floor landing, a little girl was sitting on the top step in a nightdress, eating a heel of bread.
She had a cat in her lap, a big striped ginger cat with a torn ear, and it was eating bits of the bread too.
She looked up at Corin as he came down past her, sideways, with his bowl in one hand and the long case in the other.
“Morning, Mister Vane,” she said.
Corin stopped.
He did not know her.
Of course, he did not know her.
But she knew him.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Did you forget me again?”
He hesitated.
Then he decided to tell the truth.
“Yes.
I’m sorry.”
“S’all right.” She tore off a bit of bread and gave it to the cat.
“I’m Della.
From number six.
This is Admiral.
You gave him that ear.”
Corin looked at the cat’s torn ear in alarm.
“Not like that,” said Della, rolling her eyes.
“He got in a fight with the dog next door and you sewed it up.
With a needle.
In the kitchen.
You were very good at it.
You said you’d learned it from a dead man.” She looked at him with great interest.
“Did you?”
“Probably,” said Corin.
Della seemed satisfied with this.
She went back to her bread.
Corin went on down the stairs, and when he reached the bottom of the flight he took out the Ledger, and the stub of pencil that lived in its spine, and wrote very small at the bottom of Monday’s page: Della, No.
6, third floor.
Cat called Admiral.
You sewed his ear.
Then he put it away again.
Old Terrence
The man on the second-floor landing was exactly where the note said he would be.
He was sitting on a wooden chair beside the window at the end of the landing.
It was the only window on the whole staircase, a small round one like a ship’s porthole, very dirty, and the gray morning light came through it in a dim round patch and lay across the man’s knees.
He was old.
Perhaps seventy.
He was thin and clean and neatly dressed, in a brown suit that was much too big for him and a white shirt buttoned all the way up to the collar.
His white hair had been combed with water.
His hands lay folded in his lap, one on top of the other, very still.
And he was looking out of the dirty round window at the gray sky with a small, calm, gentle smile.
He did not turn his head when Corin came down onto the landing.
He did not move at all.
THE MAN ON THE SECOND-FLOOR LANDING IS CALLED OLD TERRENCE.
HE IS A SLATE.
HE IS NOT DANGEROUS.
SAY GOOD MORNING.
“Good morning, Terrence,” said Corin.
The old man’s smile did not change.
But after a moment, very slowly, he turned his head and looked at Corin.
His eyes were pale blue and clear and perfectly empty.
Not unkind.
Not unhappy.
Just empty, the way a clean glass is empty.
“Good morning,” said Old Terrence politely.
Then he turned back to the window.
Corin stood on the landing for a moment longer.
He did not know why.
The old man sat in his round patch of gray light, smiling at the sky, with his hands folded and his hair combed, and Corin had a strange, cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.
As if he were looking at something he had seen before, a long time ago, and could not remember where.
He shook it off and went down.
Mrs.
Marta
Mrs.
Marta’s door was at the back of the ground floor, past the foot of the stairs, down a short dark passage that smelled very strongly of onions.
It was painted purple.
The same purple as the ink on the notes around his door frame.
It had a brass knocker shaped like a small fist.
Before Corin could lift the knocker, the door opened.
“You’re late,” said Mrs.
Marta.
She was the smallest grown woman Corin had ever seen.
Or at least, the smallest he could remember seeing, which was not saying very much.
The top of her head came to the middle of his chest.
She was very old, with a face like a dried apple, all wrinkles and folds, and small sharp black eyes like two currants pushed into dough.
Her white hair was pulled back into a bun so tight that it seemed to be stretching her eyebrows up.
She wore a black dress, and a purple shawl, and a pair of round wire spectacles pushed up onto her forehead, and she was holding a wooden spoon in one hand like a weapon.
“Am I?” said Corin.
“You’re always late.
You stand on the third-floor landing talking to Della Pike and her horrible cat.
Then you stand on the second-floor landing staring at poor Terrence like he’s a ghost.
Then you come down here.” She held out her hand for the bowl.
“Did you eat all of it?”
“Yes.”
“Was it hot?”
“Very.”
“Good.” She took the bowl and the plate and the spoon, and looked at them closely, as if checking that he really had eaten it and not tipped it out of the window.
Then she nodded.
“What’s my name?”
Corin opened his mouth.
Closed it.
MARTA.
LANDLADY.
GROUND FLOOR, BACK.
“Mrs.
Marta,” he said.
“Did you remember that, or did you read it on the door?”
Corin thought about lying.
He had a feeling that it would not go well.
“I read it on the door.”
Mrs.
Marta snorted.
It was a small, sharp, dry sound, like a cat sneezing.
“Honest, at least,” she said.
“That’s something.
Most of them lie.
Most of them say oh, of course, Mrs.
Marta, how could I forget, and then try to pay me twice.” She tucked the bowl under her arm.
“You owe me four silver.
Friday.”
“Friday,” said Corin.
“Yes.”
“You’ll forget.”
“I’ll write it down.”
“You’ve written it down.
It’s on your door.
It’s been on your door for three weeks.
You still forget.” She sighed.
It was a long, heavy, theatrical sigh, the kind of sigh that is meant to be heard from the other end of a street.
“I don’t know why I keep you.
I could rent that room to a nice young couple.
A nice young couple who would remember my name, and pay their rent, and not come home at four in the morning smelling like a dead man’s breath and try to open Mr.
Odding’s door with the wrong key.”
“Did I do that?”
“Last Wednesday.” She pointed the wooden spoon at him.
“He thought you were a burglar.
He hit you with a warming pan.”
Corin touched the back of his head, cautiously.
There was a small tender lump there.
He had not noticed it before.
“Ah,” he said.
“Yes.
Ah.” Mrs.
Marta looked at him for a long moment with her small black currant eyes.
And something in her dried-apple face changed.
Softened.
Just a little, around the edges, the way butter softens near a stove.
“You look tired, boy,” she said, in a different voice.
“Are you sleeping?”
“I think so.”
“With the lamp on?”
Corin looked at her in surprise.
“How do you know that?”
“Because I can see the light under your door when I go up to check the roof tank.
Every night.
All night.” She shook her head.
“It’s oil, that lamp.
Oil costs money.
You could have a nice gemstone lamp like everyone else.
Cheaper.
Cleaner.
Doesn’t smell.”
“No,” said Corin.
He said it more quickly and more firmly than he meant to.
He did not know why.
He only knew that the thought of a cold blue gemstone lamp burning beside his bed all night, with a stranger’s memories inside it, made the skin on the back of his neck crawl.
Mrs.
Marta looked at him.
Then she nodded slowly, as if he had said something that made sense to her.
“No,” she agreed.
“I don’t have them either.
Not in my rooms.” She jerked her chin at the purple door behind her.
“My Juno thinks I’m a silly old woman.
She says everyone uses them, Gran, they’re only memories, the people who sold them don’t miss them.
I tell her, how do you know?
Did you ask them?”
“Juno?” said Corin.
“My granddaughter.
You’ve met her.
You won’t remember.
She runs about on the roofs with the other little hooligans and carries messages for people she shouldn’t, and one of these days she’ll fall off and break her neck, and then she’ll be sorry.” Mrs.
Marta sniffed.
“She likes you.
Says you’re the only grown-up in the building who listens when she talks.”
“I’ll try to remember her,” said Corin.
“You won’t.” But she said it without any sting.
She stepped back into her doorway, into a warm, dim, onion-smelling room full of dark furniture and lace and the ticking of a great many clocks, and began to close the door.
Then she stopped.
“Boy,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Whatever they’ve got you doing at that Ministry.
With the jars.” She looked at the long wooden case under his arm, and her mouth went thin.
“Be careful.
You come home some nights, and I look at you, and I think, that’s not all him in there.
That’s someone else as well.” She paused.
“I like you.
I’d like it to stay you.”
And she shut the purple door before he could answer.
Corin stood in the dark onion-smelling passage for a moment.
Then he took out the Ledger and wrote, very small, under the note about Della: Mrs.
Marta.
Purple door.
She says be careful.
She says she likes you.
He looked at that for a moment.
Then he wrote one more word, and underlined it.
Friday.