Tallow Street
The street door of No.
14 opened onto Tallow Street, and Tallow Street opened onto the whole roaring, smoking, stinking, shining world.
Corin stopped on the front step.
He always stopped on the front step.
He did not know that.
But his body did.
It stood still for a moment on the worn stone, with the door swinging shut behind him, and let the city hit him all at once, like a wave hitting a man who has just walked out into the sea.
The noise came first.
Carts.
Hundreds of them.
Iron wheels grinding on cobbles, and horses’ hooves clattering, and drivers shouting at each other, and somewhere close by, a steam engine thumping and hissing like a giant with a bad chest.
A bell ringing.
Two bells, three, from different towers, not quite together.
A gull screaming overhead.
A woman selling hot chestnuts from a brazier on the corner, calling out in a high sing-song voice: Chest-nuts!
Hot chest-nuts!
Two a copper!
Chest-nuts!
A man arguing with another man about money.
Children shrieking somewhere, playing a game.
Then the smell.
Coal smoke, first and thickest, the bitter yellow smell of it that got into your throat and made you want to cough.
Then fish, from the docks at the bottom of the street.
Then horse dung, and wet stone, and roasting chestnuts, and the sour smell of the river, and something else underneath all of it.
Something faint and sharp and chemical, like the air after lightning.
The same smell as his coat.
Then the light.
The sun was not up yet.
Not properly.
The sky over the rooftops was a dull, low, dirty gray, like a ceiling of wet wool, and the smoke from ten thousand chimneys rose up into it and spread out and made it darker still.
But Tallow Street was not dark.
It was blue.
The lamps were still burning.
They stood all along both sides of the street, every twenty paces, tall iron posts painted black, curving over at the top like the necks of herons.
And at the end of each one, in a glass cage, there was a stone.
A gemstone, about the size of a hen’s egg, rough-cut and clear and burning with a cold, steady, pale blue light.
Hundreds of them.
Thousands, across the city.
They lit the wet cobbles of Tallow Street like moonlight on a river.
They threw everyone’s shadows out long and blue and sharp across the stones.
They made the faces of the people hurrying past look pale and tired and a little bit dead.
Corin looked up at the nearest one.
It was humming.
Very faintly.
A thin high sound, right at the edge of hearing, like a mosquito in another room.
If he looked at it long enough, he could see things moving inside it.
Very small.
Very faint.
Shapes.
Like the shapes you see in clouds.
A face, perhaps.
A hand.
A window with a red curtain.
They turned slowly inside the stone, and faded, and burned.
Because they burn memories, said a voice in his head.
A young man’s voice, soft and tired.
There’s a stone in each one, and it’s full of things people have forgotten.
Corin blinked.
He did not know whose voice that was.
He did not know where it had come from.
It was gone as quickly as it had come, like a fish turning under dark water.
He shook his head and stepped down off the front step into the street.
The Lower Docks
Tallow Street ran downhill, as nearly every street in the Lower Docks did, toward the river.
Corin walked down it with the long wooden case under his arm and his collar turned up against the damp.
He did not need to think about where he was going.
His feet knew.
They took him past the chestnut seller, who called out “Morning, Mister V!” and threw him a hot chestnut without being asked, which he caught without looking.
They took him around a cart full of cabbages that had lost a wheel and tipped over, and around the two men shouting about it, and around a pile of horse dung, and across the street between two carriages, and down a short flight of steps into an alley that cut the corner.
The Lower Docks were old.
Older than the rest of Veridia, people said.
The houses were tall and thin and crooked, four and five and six stories high, built of black brick and gray stone and old dark timber, and they leaned.
All of them.
They leaned toward each other across the narrow streets, so far that in some places the top floors almost touched, and the people who lived in them could pass a cup of sugar across the gap from one window to another.
Washing hung on lines strung between them, high up, gray shirts and patched sheets and children’s stockings, dripping onto the people below.
And on every wall, at the height of a man’s eyes, there was paper.
Notices.
Hundreds of them.
Pasted on top of each other, layer on layer, so thick in some places that the wall underneath had disappeared completely and the paper was as deep as the bark of a tree.
Most of them were printed in heavy black letters, and most of them had the same sign at the top.
An open book, and above it, a single closed eye.
The sign of the Ministry of Records.
NOTICE OF MEMORY TAX DUE.
QUARTER DAY.
ALL HOUSEHOLDS.
CITIZENS IN ARREARS WILL REPORT TO THE INTAKE HALL, CANAL STREET, FOR ASSESSMENT.
A CLEAR MIND IS A CALM MIND.
A CALM MIND IS A FREE MIND.
— THE OBLIVION BANK.
REMEMBER: GRIEF IS A DEBT.
LET US CARRY IT FOR YOU.
That last one had a picture with it.
A woman, crying, holding a small painted portrait.
And then the same woman, smiling, holding nothing, with a gentle blue light shining around her head.
Someone had drawn a mustache on the smiling woman in charcoal.
Someone else had written, underneath, in small, angry, careful letters: WHO ASKED YOU?
Corin walked past.
At the bottom of the alley, the street opened out onto the riverfront, and there was the river.
The Mother Ash was wide here.
Very wide.
So wide that the far bank was only a dim gray line in the smoky morning, with the shapes of warehouses and cranes and church towers standing along it like the teeth of a comb.
The water was brown and slow and thick, and it smelled.
It had a skin on it in some places, a gray, oily skin that shone faintly in the blue lamplight, like the skin on a bowl of cooling stew.
Boats moved on it.
Barges loaded with coal, low in the water.
Fishing boats with patched brown sails.
Long flat ferries crammed with people going to work on the other side, their lamps glowing blue at bow and stern.
And among them, very small, darting, a little rowing boat with a boy in it fishing for something with a net on a long pole.
Along the riverbank, the docks stretched away to the left and right as far as Corin could see.
Wooden wharves on great black pilings.
Stone quays.
Warehouses with their doors open and men inside them, shouting, rolling barrels.
Cranes, huge ones, iron and wood, swinging their long arms out over the water with bales and crates hanging from their hooks.
And people.
Thousands of them.
Dockers and fishwives and sailors and clerks and carters and beggars and children, all moving, all shouting, all in a hurry.
Except some of them.
Some of them were not in a hurry at all.
Corin saw them the way he always saw them.
Without wanting to.
They stood out in the crowd like still stones in a fast stream.
A big man in a canvas apron, standing at the end of a wharf, looking out at the water with his hands hanging at his sides.
A woman sitting on an upturned crate by a warehouse door, with a basket of fish in her lap that she was not selling, smiling gently at the gulls.
Two men carrying a heavy sack between them, slowly, carefully, very carefully, with calm, empty, pleasant faces, while a foreman in a bowler hat walked beside them shouting orders that they followed without a word.
Slates.
People who had sold so much of themselves that there was nothing left to sell.
They worked on the docks because the docks were where the work was simple.
Lift this.
Carry that.
Put it down here.
They did not complain.
They did not get tired, or angry, or sad.
They did not ask for more money.
They did not, as far as anyone could tell, want anything at all.
At the end of the day, someone would lead them back to wherever they slept, and in the morning someone would lead them out again.
The foreman in the bowler hat saw Corin watching.
He tipped his hat and grinned, showing a gold tooth.
“Best workers in the city, Inspector,” he called.
“Never late.
Never drunk.
Never ask for a holiday.”
Corin did not answer.
He walked on.
Lantern Bridge
His feet took him along the riverfront for a quarter of a mile, and then up a set of stone steps, worn into deep hollows in the middle by a hundred years of boots, onto a bridge.
It was an old bridge.
Stone, gray-green with age and damp, with seven great arches marching out across the brown water to the far bank.
It was wide enough for two carts to pass.
And along both sides, on top of the low stone walls, every few paces, there was a lamp.
Not one of the tall heron-necked iron posts of the streets.
Old lamps.
Short and squat, made of black iron, shaped like little houses with peaked roofs and small glass windows.
They had once burned oil, Corin thought.
You could still see the old blackened brass burners inside them.
But the burners had been taken out and gemstones put in their place, and now they glowed the same cold pale blue as everything else.
A plaque on the first lamppost said: LANTERN BRIDGE.
BUILT IN THE REIGN OF—and then there was a space, where the stone had been chiseled smooth, as if a word had been cut out of it—.
RESTORED BY THE GRACE OF THE MINISTRY.
Corin looked at the smooth empty space on the plaque.
He always looked at it.
He did not know why.
Halfway across the bridge, there was music.
A man was sitting on the low wall with his back to the river, between two of the little house-shaped lamps.
He was thin and ragged, with a beard like a bird’s nest and a hat with no crown, and he was playing a fiddle.
An old one, scratched and patched, with a crack down its belly that had been mended with glue and string.
In front of him on the paving stones there was an upturned cap with three coppers in it.
He was playing a slow tune.
A sad one, but not too sad.
The kind of tune that people hum without knowing they are humming it.
It went up, and up, and hung there for a moment, high and thin and sweet, like someone asking a question.
And then came gently down again.
Corin stopped walking.
He stood in the middle of Lantern Bridge with the carts and the people flowing around him on both sides, and he listened.
He did not know the tune.
He was sure of that.
He had never heard it in his life.
But something in his chest went tight and hot and painful, like a fist closing, and he could not move.
The high part came again.
The part that went up and hung there, asking.
His eyes stung.
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.
The fiddler finished the tune.
He looked up and saw Corin standing there, and grinned through his bird’s-nest beard.
“You again,” he said.
“Same as yesterday, eh?
Same tune?”
Corin swallowed.
“What is it called?”
“Don’t know, friend.
Nobody does.” The fiddler shrugged.
“Old country tune.
My gran used to sing it.
Something about a fisherman and the moon.” He looked at Corin’s face, and his grin went a little softer.
“You want it again?”
Corin found a copper in his coat pocket.
He did not know how it had got there.
He dropped it in the cap.
“No,” he said.
“Thank you.
No.”
He walked on across the bridge, fast, without looking back.
But he could hear the fiddle start again behind him, the slow sad tune going up and hanging there and coming gently down, all the way to the far end of the bridge and down the steps on the other side.
And when he reached the bottom of the steps, he found that his hand was pressed flat against the Ledger in his coat, over his heart, so hard that he could feel its corners through the cloth.
He did not take it out.
He did not write anything down.
He did not know what he would have written.
Quill Row
On the north bank of the river, at the foot of Lantern Bridge, there was a street called Quill Row, and on Quill Row there was a shop.
Corin’s feet had not meant to go there.
He was sure of that.
He had read the note on the board.
DO NOT BUY MORE INK.
YOU HAVE INK.
He had four bottles of it sitting on his table at home.
He did not need anything.
He was going to walk straight past.
He was standing in front of the shop window before he knew it.
It was a narrow shop, squeezed between a pawnbroker’s and a pie shop, so that the whole front of it smelled of hot pastry and old metal.
It had one window, a big bow window of small square panes, some of them so old that the glass had gone thick and wavy at the bottom, like honey that has run down and set.
Behind the glass, on a slope of faded green velvet, were the things for sale.
Pens.
Dozens of them.
Steel nibs and brass nibs and old-fashioned goose quills, sharpened and laid out in a fan.
Bottles of ink, black and blue and green and a deep dark red, with handwritten labels.
Pencils tied in bundles with string.
Sealing wax, in sticks.
Little brass pots of sand for drying wet writing.
And books.
Blank books, every size, bound in leather and cloth and board.
Some as small as a playing card.
Some as big as a paving stone.
Above the window, a wooden sign, its paint flaking, said in tall gold letters: B.
HOLT.
STATIONER & BOOKBINDER.
EST.
And then a date, which had been painted over, very neatly, in black.
Corin looked at the painted-over date for a moment.
Then he looked down at the Ledger’s cover, in his hand.
He had taken it out without noticing.
GROUNDING LEDGER.
B.
HOLT, STATIONER.
LOWER DOCKS.
The shop bell jangled.
The door had opened.
“Are you coming in,” said a voice, “or are you going to stand there all morning steaming up my window?”
Bram
The man in the doorway was old, and large, and looked as though he had been carved out of a tree stump by someone who did not like him very much.
He was broad in the shoulders and broad in the belly and very broad in the face, with a big red nose that had been broken at least twice, and bushy gray eyebrows that grew together in the middle like two caterpillars meeting.
His head was bald and shiny on top, with a fringe of white hair around the sides that stuck out in tufts.
He wore a leather apron, very old, stained all over with ink and glue and something dark that might have been blood.
There was a pencil behind each of his ears.
There was a pair of half-moon spectacles hanging from a string around his neck.
And his hands were the biggest hands Corin had ever seen.
They were thick and red and scarred, with fingers like sausages, and every one of them was stained to the knuckle with ink.
He glared at Corin from under his caterpillar eyebrows.
“Well?” he said.
“I don’t need anything,” said Corin.
“I know you don’t.
You never need anything.
You come in anyway.” The big man stood aside and jerked his head at the dark inside of the shop.
“In.
Before you let all the warm out.”
Corin went in.
The shop was dark and warm and crowded, and it smelled wonderful.
Paper.
That was the main smell.
Thousands of sheets of it, stacked on shelves and tables and in tall piles on the floor, old paper and new paper, white and cream and yellow and gray.
Then leather, rich and dark and oily.
Then glue, a sharp, sweet, slightly rotten smell that came from a black iron pot bubbling on a little stove at the back.
Then ink.
Then wood shavings and beeswax and dust, and under it all, very faint, pipe smoke.
There was a long counter of dark wood running down one side of the shop, scarred and stained by a hundred years of use.
Behind it, from floor to ceiling, there were shelves of little square wooden drawers, each with a brass handle and a handwritten paper label.
NIBS, STEEL, FINE.
NIBS, STEEL, BROAD.
WAX, RED.
WAX, BLACK.
THREAD, LINEN.
THREAD, SILK.
BRASS CORNERS.
CLASPS.
And on the wall at the end of the counter, beside the door to the back room, there was a chalkboard.
It was a big one, as big as a door, in a heavy wooden frame.
It was covered in writing.
Chalk writing, white and yellow, in the same big, square, heavy letters as the labels on the drawers.
It was a list of names.
Customers, Corin guessed.
Each name had a column of marks and numbers beside it.
Most of the names had only a few marks.
One of them had a great many.
VANE.
And underneath, in a long column:
Ink, black.
1 bottle.
Ink, black.
1 bottle.
Ink, black.
1 bottle.
Ink, black.
1 bottle.
Ink, black.
1 bottle.
Ink, black—
It went on and on, down almost to the bottom of the board.
And beside every single line, someone had drawn a small, neat chalk circle with a line through it.
At the very bottom, in letters twice as big as the rest, and underlined three times:
YOU HAVE INK.
— B.
Corin looked at the chalkboard.
Then at the big old man, who had gone behind the counter and was leaning on it with his enormous hands folded, watching him.
“I have ink,” said Corin.
“You have ink,” agreed the old man.
“How much ink do I have?”
The old man unfolded one hand and counted on the fingers.
“Four bottles at home.
Two in your desk at the Ministry.
One in the pocket of that coat you left here on Saturday, which I’ve still got, by the way, it’s hanging on the back of the door.
And one I gave you for free last week because you looked so miserable I couldn’t stand it.” He folded the hand again.
“So.
Eight.”
“I left a coat here?”
“Your good one.
The black one.
You came in wearing it, bought a bottle of ink you didn’t need, took the coat off because it was hot by the stove, and walked out without it in your shirtsleeves.
In the rain.” The old man shook his head slowly.
“I ran after you.
You’d gone.
You walk fast for a man who doesn’t know where he’s going.”
Corin looked at the coat hanging on the back of the shop door.
It was black wool, long, much better than the one he was wearing.
He had no memory of it at all.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Mister—” He looked at the Ledger.
At the cover.
B.
HOLT.
“Mister Holt.”
The old man’s face did something.
His caterpillar eyebrows went up, and then down, and then he let out a long breath through his broken nose, like a horse.
“Bram,” he said.
“You call me Bram.
You’ve called me Bram for six years.
It’s on the second page.”
Corin opened the Ledger.
Turned to the second page.
THINGS THAT ARE TRUE TODAY.
He ran his finger down the list.
Toby.
Mrs.
Marta.
The rod.
The jars.
No Bram.
He frowned and looked again.
Then he turned the page over.
On the back of it, very small, squeezed into the bottom corner, in pencil so faint he could barely see it:
Bram, the stationer.
Quill Row.
He made this book.
Trust him.
“Bram,” said Corin.
“That’s it.” Bram sounded a little less cross.
“Now.
Since you’re here.
Let me see it.”
“See what?”
“The book.” He held out one huge hand.
“Your Ledger.
Let me see how many pages you’ve got left.”
Volume Seven
Corin hesitated.
He did not know why.
His hand had tightened on the leather cover, the way a child’s hand tightens on a toy when another child reaches for it.
Bram saw it.
He did not say anything.
He just kept his hand out, steady, and waited.
After a moment, Corin gave him the book.
The old man held it the way you would hold a bird that had flown into a window.
Carefully.
Gently.
He opened it with one thick finger and turned to the back, past all the crowded pages, to the few blank ones left at the end.
He counted them, moving his lips.
He looked at the spine, and bent it very slightly, and listened to it creak.
He ran his thumb along the edge of the pages, where they had gone soft and gray and furry from being turned so many times.
“Nineteen pages,” he said.
“Three weeks, if you’re careful.
Two if you’re not.” He looked up at Corin over the top of his half-moon spectacles.
“You’re never careful.”
“What happens when it’s full?”
“What always happens.” Bram reached under the counter.
There was a sound of drawers opening and shutting.
Then he brought out a book and laid it on the dark wood between them.
It was the same as the Ledger.
Exactly the same.
The same size and thickness.
The same dark brown leather, but new, smooth and shining and stiff, without a single crack.
The same small rectangle pressed into the cover, low down.
Corin bent closer to read it.
The letters were sharp and clean.
GROUNDING LEDGER.
B.
HOLT, STATIONER.
LOWER DOCKS.
And under it, smaller, a number.
VII.
“Seven,” said Corin slowly.
“Seven.” Bram put one big hand flat on the new book.
“When that one’s full, you’ll bring it here, and I’ll put it with the others.
And you’ll take this one.
And you’ll sit at the end of my counter with a pot of tea and copy out the front pages into it, all of them, the things you need.
And you’ll grumble the whole time about your handwriting.”
“Put it with the others,” said Corin.
“There are others?”
“Six of them.” Bram jerked his chin at the door to the back room, beside the chalkboard.
“In the strongbox.
Under the floor.
Six years of you.” He paused.
“You asked me to keep them, the first time.
You said if anyone ever came asking for them, I was to say I’d never heard of you.”
“Why would anyone come asking for them?”
Bram looked at him for a long time over his spectacles.
It was a strange look.
Not cross.
Not kind, exactly.
The look of a man who knows the answer to a question and has decided, carefully, not to give it.
“Couldn’t say,” he said at last.
“You never told me.
But you were very serious about it.
You made me promise.
Twice.”
He handed the old Ledger back across the counter.
Corin took it and put it back inside his coat, over his heart, and felt a little better at once, though he did not know why.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t thank me.
Pay me.” Bram picked up a stub of chalk from the counter, turned to the board, and under the long column of crossed-out ink bottles he wrote, in his big square letters: LEDGER VII.
ON ACCOUNT.
“And take your coat.
And don’t buy any ink.”
Corin took the black coat down from the back of the door.
It was heavy and smelled of the stove.
He folded it over his arm, on top of the long wooden case.
At the door, he stopped.
Something had caught his eye on the chalkboard.
Not his name.
Something in the bottom corner of the board, below all the names, very small.
It was not writing.
It was a drawing.
A tiny chalk drawing, no bigger than his thumbnail, drawn very neatly.
An open book.
And above it, an eye.
Not the Ministry’s sign.
The Ministry’s eye was always closed.
This one was open.
“What’s that?” said Corin.
Bram did not turn around.
He was wiping chalk dust off his fingers onto his apron, slowly, one finger at a time.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Just a mark.
Customer drew it.
Months ago.
Keep meaning to rub it out.”
He did not rub it out.
Corin looked at the tiny open eye for a moment longer.
Then the shop bell jangled over his head, and he was out in Quill Row again, in the smoke and the noise and the cold blue light of the lamps, with the smell of hot pies from next door filling his nose.
Behind him, through the thick wavy glass of the bow window, he saw the big old man standing at the end of his counter, watching him go.
He was not wiping his fingers anymore.
He stood very still, with his huge ink-stained hands at his sides, and he watched until Corin had turned the corner.
Corin did not see what Bram did then.
He was already gone.
But if he had looked back, he would have seen the old man take a small key from around his neck, on a leather cord, and unlock one of the little square wooden drawers behind the counter, the one with no label at all.
And take out a sheet of paper.
And look at it for a long time.
And put it back, and lock the drawer, and stand there with his hand on the brass handle, frowning, as the glue pot bubbled softly on the stove.