She paid for a week.
Rurik had expected a day, because a day is what you pay when you are testing a thing, and a week is what you pay when you have already decided to be here.
She put a half-crown on the counter without being asked for it, watched it convert, took the three credits for the week and left the other three sitting in the account, which nobody had done yet.
Then she went up the stairs and did not come back down for four hours.
Wick, going up with the cloth, reported that she was not reading.
“She’s just going along the shelves,” he said.
“She pulls one out and she opens it in the middle and she puts it back.”
“How many?”
“Lots.”
“She’s looking for the one that’s different,” Rurik said.
“Is one of them different?”
“No.”
Wick thought about that while he wrung out the cloth.
“Then she’s going to be up there a while,” he said.
She was.
She came down at seventh bell with her coat off over her arm and there was dust down one sleeve and a grey stripe across the front of her, and she sat down at the counter and put both tablets on it and said, “Give me the coffee.”
Rurik gave her the coffee.
“There is no catalogue,” she said.
“No.”
“There is no catalogue, there is no order, there is no index, the third floor is not sorted by anything I can find, and I can read every single one of them, which is the part I would like explained.
Not one is in a hand I know.
I open them and the words simply arrive.
And every few pages there is a word that is not a word — that I understand perfectly and cannot say aloud, and cannot write down afterward.
I have tried.
I have tried eleven times.” She drank some of the coffee and stopped and looked into the cup and then kept going.
“One of them is an account of a siege of a city I have never heard of, written by a man complaining about the food.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“That is not a thing a person forges.”
“No.”
“You forge a prophecy.
You forge a deed.” She put the cup down.
“You do not forge four hundred pages of a man complaining about the food.”
And then she stopped, because she had turned around on the stool.
Mira was at the four-seater with the cards pushed off to one side and a volume open flat on the table, propped on both elbows, and she had her face about nine inches off the page.
Her mouth was open.
Her mouth was open the way a child’s is, and she had a fistful of the tablecloth that Rurik had put down that morning, and she had not turned the page in the whole time Vane had been sitting there.
Rurik had seen it twice now and had not said anything either time.
Vane had been in the building for one day.
“What is that one,” Vane said.
Mira’s face came off the page.
It took about a quarter of a second, and afterward Rurik could not have said what left it, only that something had been there and then the standard-issue nothing was back, flat and level and pleasant, with the crooked name tag underneath it.
She closed the volume.
“Nothing,” Mira said.
“It is plainly not nothing, you have been—”
“It is nothing.”
She put the volume under her arm and picked up the cards in one stack and walked up the stairs at a completely normal speed, and the room was very quiet.
Vane turned back around.
“What is wrong with your employee,” she said.
“Nothing’s wrong with my employee.”
“She was—”
“She’s reading.”
Vane looked at him for a moment.
Then she wrote something down, which Rurik did not like at all, and moved on, which he liked better.
“The boxes,” she said.
“What?”
“On the shelf by the stair.
The flat boxes.
A dozen, sealed but for the one open on the table your employee has been sitting at for as long as I have been in this building.” Tablet up.
“What do they do.”
“Nothing.”
“What do they do.”
“They don’t do anything.
They’re a game.
You put the cards down and the cards beat the other cards, there’s a sheet in the box that tells you how.”
“And what does a man have after he wins.”
“He’s won.”
Vane stopped writing.
“Say that again.” Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“He’s — he’s won the game.
That’s what he has.
He’s won the game and the other guy hasn’t.”
“Nothing else.”
“No.”
“No strength.
No favour.
No mark.
No—” and she was going faster now, and she had the tablet up against her chest and was not writing on it, “—a thing is worth a crown because of what it leaves in the man who buys it.
That is my whole trade.
That is the only question I have ever been paid to answer.
I have been in this building since second bell waiting for you to say the part you have not said, and you keep not saying it, and I am beginning to think there is no part.
The boxes do nothing?”
“The boxes do nothing,” Rurik said.
Hallis Vane sat on the stool in the middle of his shop with the coffee going cold and did not speak for a long moment.
“Then anyone can win,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“A boy with a crushed foot could beat a sword saint.”
“If he plays better, sure.”
“How many are there.”
“Twelve.
On the shelf.”
“No.
In the world.” She was very still.
“How many boxes exist.”
Rurik opened his mouth and closed it, because it had honestly never come up, and the answer arrived in the same second he did the arithmetic and he did not like how it felt.
“Whatever’s on that shelf,” he said slowly, “and whatever’s in the back room.
And that’s it.
Forever.
The company that printed them is—”
He stopped.
“Is what,” said Vane.
“Gone,” Rurik said.