They took the steam tram.
It ran along the ridge of the hill from the Ministry steps, down through the Civic Ring and the Market Ring and into the Ink Quarter, on two iron rails set into the cobbles.
Corin and Toby caught it at the stop at the bottom of the great stairs.
It came grinding and hissing round the corner like a dragon, a long green car with brass rails and big round windows, pulled by a squat black engine that coughed clouds of white steam and sparks out of a tall chimney.
A man in a green uniform hung off the back step, shouting the names of the stops.
They climbed on and paid two coppers each and found a place to stand near the back, holding on to a leather strap that hung from the ceiling.
The tram was crowded.
Clerks going to work.
Market women with baskets of eggs and onions.
A priest in black robes.
A soldier with his arm in a sling.
A very fat man in a fur collar reading a newspaper, the front page of which said in big black letters: QUARTER DAY TAX DUE: “NO EXTENSIONS,” SAYS BANK.
And under it, smaller: Archon Valerius to Address Council on “New Era of Calm.”
Corin looked at the name.
Valerius.
He did not know it.
Or he did.
He was not sure.
It sat in his head like a pebble in a shoe, small and hard and annoying, and he could not shake it out.
Toby was not looking at anything.
He was holding the leather strap with both hands and staring at his own boots, and his lips were moving very slightly, without any sound.
“What are you saying?” said Corin.
Toby jumped.
“Nothing.” Then, after a moment: “The things I know about him.
Pell.
In case—in case I need to tell you.
In case you ask.” He swallowed.
“He’s twenty-six.
He’s from somewhere in the south, up in the hills, he never said where.
Just the hills.
He’s got a sister.
Younger.
She sends him letters, and he reads them out at lunch and does all the voices.
He’s saving up to bring her to the city.
He keeps the money in a sock.
He told me that.
A red sock.” Toby’s voice was very steady and very flat, the way a voice goes when it is holding something heavy.
“He was copying the old Treasury ledgers this month.
Twenty years old, some of them.
Boring work.
He said it was the most boring work he’d ever done.
And then last week he stopped saying that.
He stopped saying anything about it at all.
He was quiet.” Toby frowned.
“Pell’s never quiet.”
Corin took out his own Ledger and the pencil from its spine, and wrote, while the tram swayed and lurched: Pell Dorran.
26.
From the hills, south.
Sister.
Red sock.
Copying old Treasury ledgers, twenty years old.
Went quiet last week.
He underlined went quiet.
The tram went down the hill.
Through the Civic Ring, where the buildings were pale stone and tall and clean, with brass plates by their doors and gemstone lamps above their porches.
Through the Market Ring, where the street widened out into a great square full of stalls under striped awnings, and the noise came in through the round windows like a wave: people shouting prices, chickens squawking, a man ringing a handbell, a hundred voices arguing about the price of turnips.
Past a great white building with a dome, with a long line of people standing outside it, all the way down the steps and along the street and around the corner.
Silent people.
Gray, tired, shabby people, holding papers in their hands.
Waiting.
“Intake Hall,” said Toby quietly, following his look.
“Quarter Day.
They come to pay what they owe.”
On the steps of the white building, a guard in a brown uniform was walking slowly up and down the line.
He was a big man, middle-aged, heavy in the shoulders, with a tired, flat, patient face, like a man who has done the same job for so long he no longer sees it.
As the tram passed, he looked up for a moment, straight at the window where Corin stood.
Their eyes met.
Then the tram rolled on, and the white building slid away behind, and the long silent line of people with it.
Corin did not know why he turned to watch it go.
And then the street tipped downward, and the buildings got older and darker and closer together, and the air got thicker, and the smell came in through the windows.
A smell like nothing else in the city.
Sharp.
Bitter.
Metallic.
Like vinegar, and blood, and burned sugar, all at once.
Ink.
“Ink Quarter!” bawled the man on the back step.
“Needle Street!
Ink Quarter, Needle Street, mind the step!”
The Ink Quarter
If the Lower Docks were Veridia’s belly, the Ink Quarter was its skin, and the skin was covered in writing.
Corin stepped down off the tram onto Needle Street and stood still, as he had stood still on his own front step that morning, and let it all come at him.
The street was narrow and steep and paved with cobbles that had gone black and shining and slippery with years of spilled ink.
It ran down the hill in a long crooked curve, and on both sides of it, shoulder to shoulder, there were shops.
Hundreds of them.
All small.
All crowded.
All with their doors open and their windows steamed up and painted signs hanging out over the street on iron brackets, so many signs that they made a kind of ceiling, creaking and swinging in the smoky wind.
TATTOOS.
PRICES FAIR.
That one had a painted heart with a dagger through it.
MEMORY-MARKS.
NAMES, DATES, FACES.
WHILE U WAIT.
MADAME OOLA’S.
THE INK THAT REMEMBERS.
PRINTING.
PAMPHLETS, POSTERS, BILLS.
CHEAPEST IN THE QUARTER.
INK MILL.
BLACK, BLUE, RED, GOLD.
BY THE BARREL OR THE BOTTLE.
And on the walls between the signs, everywhere, writing.
Not printed notices, like the Lower Docks.
Painted.
Scratched.
Chalked.
Names and dates and messages, in a hundred different hands, layer over layer.
MARIA LOVES TOMAS.
REMEMBER ME, JEM.
I WAS HERE AND I WAS HAPPY.
THEY TOOK MY MOTHER’S VOICE.
And the people.
Corin had never seen people like the people of the Ink Quarter.
Or he had, every time he came here, and forgotten.
Their skin was covered in writing too.
Arms.
Hands.
Necks.
Faces.
Black and blue and red letters, curling around their wrists and up their throats and across their cheekbones.
A big man pushing a barrow of coal had a list of names tattooed down the whole length of his forearm, from wrist to elbow, in tiny neat letters.
A girl selling hot buns from a tray had a single word written across the back of each hand.
MINE on the left.
KEEP on the right.
An old woman sitting in a doorway, smoking a clay pipe, had a map tattooed on her bald head.
Streets.
Rivers.
A little cross marking one spot.
“Memory-marks,” said Toby quietly beside him.
He had his hands pushed deep into his pockets and his shoulders hunched up around his big ears.
“People come here when they’re afraid they’ll forget something.
Or when they’ve already started to.
They get it written on.
Their children’s names.
Their own name.
Where they live.
The ink-shops say it helps.” He paused.
“Some of them say the ink remembers for you.
That there’s crystal dust in it.
That it glows in the dark.”
“Does it?”
“The cheap stuff doesn’t.” Toby looked at the old woman with the map on her head.
“The good stuff, maybe.
I don’t know.
I’ve never been able to afford to find out.”
Corin pushed up his own coat sleeve, without quite meaning to, and looked at his left wrist.
There was writing on it.
He had not known.
Small black letters, very neat, much neater than his own handwriting, running in a line around the inside of his wrist like a bracelet.
He turned his arm to read them.
LEDGER, INSIDE LEFT POCKET.
ROD, INSIDE RIGHT.
READ THE FIRST PAGE.
And below that, very small, in a different ink, a faint silvery gray that caught the light strangely:
V.
made this.
Go to V.
if you are lost.
Corin stared at it.
“Vespera,” said Toby, glancing at it.
“The Ink-Binder.
On Hook Lane.
Down by the water.
You go there sometimes.
After a bad one.” He hunched his shoulders further.
“She doesn’t like me.
She says I fidget.”
Corin pulled his sleeve down again.
He did not know what he felt.
Something warm and strange and a little frightening, like finding a letter in your own coat pocket that you do not remember writing, addressed to you.
“Come on,” he said.
“Gutter Lane.”
Gutter Lane
They did not need to ask the way.
They only needed to follow the crowd.
It was gathered at the bottom of Needle Street, where a big ugly building of soot-black brick squatted on the corner like a toad.
Its windows were tall and dirty, and through them Corin could see the dark shapes of machines, great iron printing presses, standing still.
A painted sign ran along the whole front of the building, faded almost to nothing: THE INKWELL.
PRINTERS TO THE MINISTRY.
Smoke rose from a tall chimney at the back.
Beside it, between the printing house and the next building, there was a gap.
A slot.
A dark, narrow alley, no wider than a man’s outstretched arms, running back into shadow.
A rope had been tied across the mouth of it, from a drainpipe on one side to an iron ring on the other.
A Watch constable stood in front of the rope with his arms folded, in the dark blue coat and round black hat of the City Watch, a long wooden truncheon hanging from his belt.
And in front of him, the crowd.
Fifty people.
More.
Shopkeepers in aprons.
Women with baskets.
Dockers.
Children squeezing between legs to see.
All pressing forward, all craning their necks, all talking at once in low, excited, frightened voices.
“—his head, they’re saying, all broke open like an egg—”
“—Ministry man, wasn’t he?
One of them clerks—”
“—they say his eyes are open.
Just staring.
Like the Slates—”
“—third one this year, I tell you, and nobody does a thing—”
Corin did not push.
He did not need to.
He just walked forward, steadily, with the long wooden case under one arm and Toby trailing behind him like a frightened dog, and the crowd saw his long gray Ministry coat and the case, and something changed in their faces, and they moved aside.
Not politely.
Not kindly.
The way people move aside for a hearse.
Their voices dropped as he passed.
He heard the word harvester, whispered, like a curse.
At the rope, the constable unfolded his arms.
“Ministry?” he said.
“Harvesting Section.
Senior Investigator Vane.”
The constable looked at him.
He was young, with a red face and a blond mustache that he was obviously very proud of and that was not quite thick enough to be proud of.
He looked at Corin’s long case.
Then at Corin’s face.
Then he lifted the rope, quickly, and stepped back from Corin as he passed under it, as if Corin had something catching.
“Sergeant’s down the end,” he said.
“With the—with him.”
Toby ducked under the rope after Corin.
The constable looked at him too.
Toby gave him a small, sick smile.
The alley closed around them.
It was dark.
Very dark, after the street.
The walls on either side were tall and close, black brick, wet and slimy, with moss growing in the cracks and long dark stains running down them where the drainpipes had leaked for years.
Above, far up, there was a thin gray strip of sky, crossed by washing lines with no washing on them.
The ground underfoot was not cobbles.
It was mud, and broken bricks, and rubbish.
Old cabbage leaves.
Broken bottles.
A dead rat, on its back, its feet in the air.
Torn paper, sodden and gray, printed with half-words.
—OTICE OF—.
—ALM MIND IS A FREE—.
And down the middle of it, in a shallow channel in the mud, ran a trickle of black liquid.
It came from a pipe in the wall of the printing house.
An iron pipe, rusted orange, sticking out at knee height, with the black liquid dripping steadily from its end.
It ran down the center of the alley in a thin, shining, oily line, and the smell of it was very strong.
Bitter.
Metallic.
Vinegar and blood and burned sugar.
Waste ink.
From the presses.
That was why it was called Gutter Lane.
They followed the black trickle down the alley.
It was longer than it looked from the street.
It bent to the left, around the back corner of the printing house, and then to the right, and the street noise faded behind them until it was only a dull murmur, like the sea heard from inside a house.
The light got dimmer.
The smell got stronger.
Around the second bend, there was a lantern.
Sergeant Moll
It was an ordinary lantern.
Oil, not gemstone.
It was sitting on top of an upturned barrel, and its warm yellow light filled the end of the alley like water fills a cup.
The alley ended here.
A blank wall of black brick, three stories high, with a single small barred window high up near the top, and a great heap of rubbish piled against its foot.
Broken crates.
Old sacks.
A rusted iron bedframe.
A cartwheel with no spokes.
Everything that the printing house and the buildings around it had wanted to throw away and had not wanted to pay to have taken away, thrown down here, at the end of Gutter Lane, where nobody would see it.
Two men were standing beside the lantern.
One of them was a Watch sergeant.
Corin knew it from the three silver stripes on the sleeve of his dark blue coat.
He was a short, square, solid man of about fifty, built like a barrel, with a face like a boiled ham and a gray beard cut so short it was almost stubble.
He had his round black hat pushed back on his head, and he was smoking a short black pipe, and he was staring down at the heap of rubbish with an expression that Corin could not quite read.
Not horror.
Not disgust.
Something more tired than either.
Something almost like grief.
The other was a doctor.
Corin knew that from the bag.
A black leather bag, open, on the ground at his feet, with brass instruments glinting inside it.
He was tall and thin and stooped, with a long gray face and long gray hands, in a black frock coat that was green with age at the seams.
He was crouched by the rubbish heap, peering at something, and he was humming very quietly to himself, tunelessly, through his nose.
The sergeant turned at the sound of their boots.
He looked at Corin’s coat.
At the long case.
He took the pipe out of his mouth.
“About time,” he said.
“You the harvester?”
“Vane.
Third Basement.”
“Moll.
Ink Quarter Station.” The sergeant did not offer to shake hands.
He jerked his chin at Toby.
“Who’s that?”
“My clerk.
He knew the dead man.”
Sergeant Moll looked at Toby for a long moment.
At his big ears and his thick spectacles and his white, frightened face.
Something softened in the boiled-ham face.
Just a little.
“Sorry, lad,” he said gruffly.
“Hard thing.
You don’t have to look.”
“I know,” whispered Toby.
“Thank you.”
He looked anyway.
Wick
Before Corin could look himself, a voice spoke from the shadows on the other side of the lantern.
“It was the light,” it said.
“I saw the light.”
Corin turned.
There was a third man at the end of the alley.
He had been sitting so still on an old crate in the darkest corner, beside the rubbish heap, that Corin had not seen him at all.
He was old.
Very old.
Small and bent and thin as a stick, wrapped in so many layers of rags and old coats and scarves and sacks that he looked like a bundle of laundry with a head on top.
His face was brown and wrinkled and dirty, with a white stubble of beard, and his eyes were small and bright and frightened.
He had a sack over his shoulder, half full of something lumpy, and a long stick with a nail in the end of it, for spearing rags and paper.
“That’s Wick,” said Sergeant Moll.
“Rag-picker.
He found him.
Fifth bell, before it was light.” He lowered his voice.
“He’s not right in the head.
Hasn’t been for years.
But he’s harmless.”
“I am right in the head,” said the old man with sudden dignity.
“I am perfectly right.
It’s everybody else that’s gone wrong.”
Corin crouched down in front of him, so that their eyes were level.
The old man smelled of damp and smoke and old rags and, very faintly, of gin.
“What light, Wick?” he said.
The rag-picker looked at him.
His small bright eyes went from Corin’s face to the long wooden case under his arm and back again, and he licked his lips.
“I come down here every morning,” he said.
“Fifth bell.
Before the others.
Before the boys from Cinder Lane come and take the good bits.
Printing house throws out paper.
Good paper, some of it.
Only spoiled a little.
I sell it to the fish men to wrap the fish.” He nodded several times, quickly, like a bird.
“So I come down the lane.
In the dark.
I know the way.
I don’t need a light.
And I come round the corner, there, the second corner.” He pointed with his nail-tipped stick.
“And there’s a light.
Down here.
At the end.
Where there’s never a light.”
“What color?” said Corin.
The old man stopped.
He looked at Corin with a strange, sharp expression, as if he were surprised that anyone had asked that question.
“Blue,” he said.
“Blue like the lamps.
But not like the lamps.
Brighter.
Moving.
Like—” He lifted his thin, filthy hands and moved them in the air, curling, drifting.
“Like smoke.
Blue smoke.
Coming up out of the heap.
Going up and up, out of the lane, toward the sky.
Lots of it.
More and more.
And there was somebody standing over it.
A shape.
Tall.
In a long coat.
Pale.
With something in their hand that was catching the smoke.
Like a jar.
Catching it all up.
All that blue.”
Toby made a small sound behind Corin.
“And then?” said Corin.
“And then they heard me.” Wick’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“I trod on a bottle.
Crack.
And they turned round.
And I couldn’t see their face.
It was too dark.
But I could smell them.” He shuddered.
“Flowers.
Sweet.
Like a funeral.
Like a whole room of funeral flowers.
And then they walked straight past me, back up the lane.
So close their coat brushed my arm.
And they didn’t say anything.
And they didn’t hurt me.
And I stood there for a long time.
And then I came and looked.”
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, very softly, looking down at his hands:
“The tide weighs it.
That’s what they said.
When they went past me.
Very quiet.
Like they were talking to themselves.
The tide weighs it.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” The old rag-picker shook his head slowly.
“I don’t know.
But I keep hearing it.”
Corin took out his Ledger and wrote: Wick, rag-picker.
Blue smoke rising, fifth bell.
Tall figure, long coat, pale, catching it in a jar.
Smelled of flowers.
Funeral flowers.
Said “the tide weighs it.”
Then he stood up, and turned, and looked at the heap of rubbish at the end of Gutter Lane.
At what was lying on top of it.