She did not come in that night.
She stood out there until the light went off Marrow Street and she walked the frontage twice more, and then she went away up the hill toward the good end of the district, and Rurik watched her go and then locked up and slept badly.
She came back at second bell the next morning, which was before he had the coffee on.
He knew it was her before he turned around, because the door had that particular slow open, the one where somebody holds the handle the whole way instead of letting it swing.
“Good morning,” Rurik said.
“Your building is wrong.”
“Okay.”
She came three steps in and stopped and looked up, and kept looking up for long enough that Rurik had time to pour a cup and set it on the counter and decide not to offer it to her yet.
She was maybe forty.
Merchant’s coat, good stitching, the kind of boots that get resoled instead of replaced.
The wax tablet was out and there was a second one under her arm and both of them were full.
“The chandler’s wall and the rope-house wall,” she said.
“I have measured the gap between them from the street.
Twice, on two mornings, from two marks.
It is nineteen feet.”
“Sure.”
“This room is fifty.”
“Sounds about right.”
She wrote that down.
That was the part that got him, later, when he thought about it.
She wrote it down.
She did not back up, she did not make a sign at him, she did not go pale.
She got a fact she could not hold and she put it on the tablet with the other facts and moved on, because the tablet was where facts went until they could be dealt with.
“I am Hallis Vane,” she said.
“I appraise for the Gorse house.
“No.”
“It means when two parties disagree about what a thing is worth, they pay me and then they stop disagreeing.” She snapped the tablet shut.
“I am going to find out what you are selling.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m selling.”
“You will tell me what you say you are selling.”
“Right, but that’s also what I’m selling.”
Vane looked at him for the first time, properly, the way she had been looking at the ceiling.
“Coffee’s six credits,” Rurik said.
“Library’s one credit a day or three credits a week.
Screening’s one credit.
That’s everything.”
“Credits.”
“That’s what it calls them.
I didn’t pick it.”
Vane put the tablet on the counter and turned it around so he could see, which he appreciated and could not read.
“Your sign says one,” she said.
“One what, to a man off this street.
A man off this street has pins in his pocket.
Ten pins make a shill, six shills make a half-crown, and a half-crown is what a careful man eats on for a month.”
“Half-crown came in at six.”
“Then your credit is a shill,” Vane said.
She said it flatly and then stopped, and her hand stayed where it was on the tablet.
“To the pin.”
“Is that — good?”
“It is not good or bad, it is convenient, and things are not conveniently anything.” She wrote it down with more pressure than she had used on the walls.
“A man reads your board and does not have to think.
That is worth more than the sign cost you.”
“I didn’t do that on purpose.”
“I am aware.”
She picked the coffee up, remembered she had not been given it, and put it back down.
“So.
A shill a day.” Tablet up.
“A bed and a meal on this street is five pins.
A water carrier makes eight, nine pins from first bell to dark, and that is if the wall is hiring.
You are asking a man for a day of his life.”
“…Yeah.”
“And in exchange he may sit in a room of fifty feet and have—” she turned and looked up the stairwell “—how many volumes.”
“Four thousand and eleven.
I know because I put every one of them in a list myself, at night, in a building nobody came into.”
“Four thousand.”
“Yeah.”
“For a shill.”
“For a shill.”
Vane got the tablet back out.
“Then the volumes are worthless,” she said, “or you are not selling the volumes.”