The swordsman came back the next morning, early.
He came back angry, which Rurik had expected, and he came back with money, which Rurik had also expected, and he came back having thought about it all night, which Rurik had not expected and which turned out to be the whole thing.
He did not look at the couch where Wick was sitting.
He did not look at the stairs.
He crossed the ground floor in a straight line, the way a man crosses a yard he has already decided to win, and held a half-crown up between two fingers, a hand’s width above the counter, where it could not touch anything that belonged to the shop.
“I want to buy the answer,” the swordsman said.
“Not the game.
The answer.
How the tutorial gate opens.
I will pay for it, and then I will do the rest myself.”
“Can’t sell you that,” Rurik said.
“I have the coin.”
“It’s not about the coin.”
Rurik could feel Mira not looking up from the four-seater.
He could feel Wick on the couch, very still, the way a kid goes still in a classroom when the teacher asks a question he knows the answer to and has been told not to say.
He had given this speech before.
Not out loud, mostly.
He’d given it in his head to a college kid in October who’d wanted him to just say which lever opened the water temple, and to a guy who wanted the last chapter of a mystery read to him over the counter because he was moving on Tuesday and wouldn’t finish it.
He had given it to himself at two in the morning on the couch upstairs, the night he looked up the ending of a series he loved and felt it go flat in his hands like a soda left open.
He had never given it to somebody who could cut him in half.
“If I tell you how the gate opens,” Rurik said, “you don’t learn how the gate opens.
You learn a sentence I said.
Those aren’t the same thing.
The game’s going to make you learn it in your hands, and it’s going to feel stupid, and then one day it won’t.
That day is the thing you’re actually paying for.”
The swordsman looked at him without blinking.
It went on a while.
Rurik had been stared at by bank officers, a landlord, and a man from the county who’d come about the sign, and none of them had done it like this, with the patience of somebody who had killed people for less and was deciding whether this counted.
“Both can be true,” Mira said, from the four-seater.
She turned a card over.
The swordsman looked at her, and his eyes went to her and then off her, the way everyone’s did, and came back to Rurik without seeming to notice they’d gone anywhere.
“The boy knows,” he said.
“The boy works here,” Rurik said.
“Staff doesn’t give answers.”
On the couch, Wick made a small noise and sat on both of his hands.
The swordsman put the half-crown back in his coat and went upstairs.
Rurik stood at the counter afterward with both hands flat on it, because they weren’t steady and he didn’t want anyone to see.
“He’s going to come back down those stairs,” he said, low, “and either thank me or cut my head off.”
“He will not cut your head off,” said Mira.
She moved a card.
“He has decided you are either wise or a fraud.
He will not kill a man until he knows which.
That is the Yard in him.”
“The what?”
“You will find out.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“It was not meant to be.” She laid the card down.
“It was meant to be accurate.”
The door opened and Brother Ansel came in the way he always did, already talking.
“—and I’ve been thinking about it all night, the tutorial, because Dain told me about it, the man with the sword who couldn’t get through the first gate, and I realized the trick is obviously that you have to be—”
Dain was behind him.
Dain put one hand over Ansel’s mouth, from behind, with no change of expression at all, and steered him bodily toward the stairs to the mezzanine.
“He is upstairs,” Dain said, over Ansel’s head.
“The swordsman.
Rurik has said that nobody tells him.”
Ansel made a muffled sound of betrayal through Dain’s fingers. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
“You may say it to me,” Dain told him, “later.
On the mezzanine.
Quietly.
I will not listen.” He guided Ansel up another step.
“I have already worked it out myself.”
“You have not,” said Ansel, getting a corner of his mouth free.
“I carry a sword.
I know what a man does when he stops being afraid to look foolish.” Dain didn’t slow down.
“He keeps moving.”
They went up.
Rurik watched them go and felt, for the first time that morning, something that wasn’t fear.
“I have a staff,” he said, to nobody.
“Sort of.
I have a staff that stops people from ruining things.”
“You have a sergeant who has decided your rules are orders,” said Mira.
“It is not the same as a staff.
It is better.”
Nothing came down the stairs for a long time.
Rurik listened anyway.
He wiped the counter and listened.
He restocked the cups and listened.
From the second floor there was only the faint electronic murmur of booth three, over and over, the same few bars of music the tutorial played while it waited for somebody to get it right.
“Stop listening,” said Mira.
“I’m not.”
“You have wiped that corner of the counter four times.” She turned a card over.
“He will not make a sound until he has earned one.
Men from the Yard do not.”