The trouble started when they began trying to pay him.
It started politely.
The young woman in grey came to the counter with a volume she had been carrying around for an hour and asked what she owed, and Rurik opened his mouth to say first hour’s free and then looked past her at nineteen people and understood, with a lurch, that the first-hour policy was about to end his business inside a week.
“Hang on,” he said.
[ …
]
“Not you.
What do I charge for that?”
[ That is not a conversion.
]
“I know it’s not a conversion.
What’s the price.”
[ Rates govern what comes in.
What you charge is a matter for the proprietor.
]
“You’re telling me you’ll price a dead man’s badge to the unit but you won’t tell me what a book costs.”
[ Yes.
]
“That wasn’t a question!”
[ -1 credit.
]
He went and got the chalkboard out of the back.
It had been leaning against the wall by the water heater since March with THIS WEEK’S EVENTS written on it in his own handwriting and nothing underneath, and he brought it out and set it on the counter and stood there with the chalk.
Nineteen people.
Three floors.
A currency he had learned the existence of five days ago.
He wrote LIBRARY — 1 CREDIT / DAY.
A half-crown of Harth, which Dain had called a month of bread, had converted at six.
So a day upstairs cost a sixth of a month of eating, and Rurik did not know yet what a man on this street made in a day, but he had watched Wick’s crew go up the road at first light and he could guess it was not much more than that.
He was asking for a day.
A whole day, for a day.
He did not want to drop the number, because the number was what he would charge a merchant who wandered in once and never came back.
He wanted a second one for the other kind.
The kind who would be here tomorrow.
He wiped it and wrote LIBRARY — 1 CREDIT / DAY · 3 / WEEK.
Three days bought seven.
Anybody who came twice would work that out on their own, and anybody who worked it out would come a third time.
Then he stood looking at the empty space under it, where the second line went.
That was the one that mattered.
Behind him somebody on the stairs said is it true it has forty-three, and somebody else said he said thirty-nine more, and a third voice said that cannot be right.
Rurik put the chalk to the board.
He thought about what the screen had cost him.
He thought about the second mortgage and the line where the carpet stopped.
He thought about nineteen people who did not know what a moving picture was and could not be told, only shown, and about how much any one of them would pay for it once they had seen it, which was, he understood with total clarity, anything.
They would pay anything.
He could put any number on that board and they would find it.
He wrote SCREENINGS — 1 CREDIT.
Behind him, Dain said, “That is not enough.”
“It’s fine.”
“You have not met these people.
I have been one of these people my entire life.” Dain came up to the counter and looked at the board.
“A carrier off that road would give you five pins and think he had cheated you.
The Hollow-side houses would give you a half-crown a head and send their sons back with more.”
“It’s one credit.”
“It is one.” Dain put a finger on the board, not quite touching it.
“Six times under the worst customer you will ever have.”
“Yeah, and the first one I ever showed I gave away free to a kid with a broken foot,” Rurik said, “so one credit is what it costs.
That’s the price.
That’s the price forever.”
Dain looked at him.
“You understand you will never be able to raise it.”
“I know.”
“They will hold you to it.”
“I know, Dain.”
He put the board up on the wall behind the counter, and it stayed there for a very long time, and years later there were people in three kingdoms who could recite it.
By the time the light went out of the front window the balance stood at 212 credits.
Rurik looked at the number for a while after everyone had gone.
Two hundred and twelve.
Up from forty-five.
In one day, from nineteen people, at a credit a screening and a credit a day for the library and six for a pot of coffee, which he had priced high on purpose because there were only nine pounds of it in the building and there was never going to be any more.
He had never made two hundred of anything in a day in his life.
He got out the paper ledger and wrote the date, and then stopped, because he did not know what the date was in any system that applied to him.
His own calendar had stopped meaning anything the morning the street changed, and he had never learned theirs.
So he had been doing the only thing left, which was counting from the morning it happened, the way you count from a thing that has no name yet.
He wrote DAY 6 instead, and under it, 212.
Then he sat down on the floor behind the counter, out of sight of the window, with his back against the cabinet, and put his hands over his face, and stayed there for a while.
Up on the mezzanine, Mira leaned over the rail and looked down at the top of his head, and did not say anything, and went away again.