She wanted all twelve.
“No,” Rurik said.
“I will pay conversion on the coat, the boots, both tablets, and the ring, and I will send a boy back with the contents of a cart, and you will tell me the number and I will not argue with the number.”
“I’m not selling you twelve boxes.”
“Why.”
And this was the thing about Hallis Vane that Rurik came to appreciate later and found completely unbearable at the time, which was that she asked why and then she waited.
She did not fill it.
She sat there with the empty air in front of her and let him walk into it.
“Because then there’s twelve boxes in one house,” he said.
“That is not a reason.”
“It is a reason, it’s just not one I can—” He put both hands flat on the counter.
“Okay.
Look.
In a year, right.
In a year I want four hundred people in this district who know how to play that game.
That’s what I want.
That’s the good outcome for me.
And if you’ve got all twelve boxes in a strongroom on the hill, how many people know how to play?”
“The number I decide.”
“Right.”
“Which would be a very good position,” said Vane, “for me.”
“It would be a great position for you.
It’s a terrible position for me, because I sell coffee.”
Vane looked at him.
Then she did something Rurik was not ready for, which was that she laughed — one, short, out the nose, gone immediately — and she wrote it down, the laugh, or something next to where the laugh went, and she said:
“You are not a fraud.”
“I’ve been saying.”
“You are worse.
You are an amateur with an unrepeatable asset.” She tapped the tablet.
“Two.”
“Two what?”
One I will keep.
One I will open in the Gorse house common room on a night when there are men there who cannot stop doing a thing once they have started it, and I will lose to a clerk in front of them on purpose.” She stood and started getting her coat on.
“In eight days you will have people in here whose fathers own ships.
What is your price.”
Rurik had no price.
The system priced conversion.
It had never priced a thing going the other way, and he had asked, and he had been charged for asking, and the answer had been a single line that he had thought about every day since.
[ RETAIL IS YOUR PROBLEM.
]
“Forty credits,” he said.
He had picked it because it was the number the account had started at, and he regretted it in the air.
“Forty,” said Vane.
“Each box.
Six half-crowns and four shills, in a coin you invented on a Tuesday.”
“Each.”
“I heard you.”
“They’re finite,” Rurik said, and did not look away, “and there’s never going to be any more of them, and you knew that before I did.
You did the sum on the stool.
I watched you do it.”
Vane finished with her coat.
“Eighty,” she said, “and you will not sell another box on this street for nine days.”
“Six days.”
“Nine.”
“Six, and I’ll teach you the game myself, tonight, for free, so you don’t lose to that clerk by accident.”
Hallis Vane stood in the middle of his shop and looked up at the ceiling of a room that was fifty feet across in a gap that was nineteen.
“Six,” she said.
They did it at the four-seater, because that was the table with the rule sheet on it, and Mira came down at some point and stood at the end of the table and watched the whole thing without being asked to and without saying anything.
Vane lost four hands.
On the fifth she stopped halfway through laying a card, took it back, put a different one down, and won, and then sat looking at the table for a while with her hand still out.
They played until ninth bell.
When she finally left she stopped in the doorway with the two boxes under her arm and turned around, and Rurik thought she was going to say something about the walls.
“The volume your employee was reading,” Vane said.
“Yeah?”
“Is there more of it.”
“Probably.
There’s usually more of it.”
“Put my name on the next one,” said Hallis Vane, and went out into Marrow Street.
Rurik locked the door behind her.
“That went alright,” he said.
Mira was collecting the cards off the four-seater into a stack, squaring the edges against the tabletop.
“You sold two,” she said.
“Eighty credits, Mira.
Eighty.
That’s — do you know what the whole first week was?”
“Two hundred and twelve.”
“That’s two days of everything in one—”
“There are ten boxes,” Mira said.
She set the squared stack down on the table.
“There were twelve.
Now there are ten.
That is what is on your shelf, and you have been speaking all morning as though it were what is in the world.” She straightened the stack by a fraction that did not need straightening.
“You should find out what is in the back room before you sell another one.”
Rurik stood there with the cloth in his hand.
“It’s a stockroom,” he said.
“It’s just a stockroom, I know what’s in my own stockroom, it’s—”
He stopped.
He had built the back room in Kentucky.
He had walked into it every day for fourteen months.
He could have drawn it from memory, every shelf, and he had not once gone into it since the morning the street changed.
He looked at the door behind the counter.
“Huh,” he said.