His name was Dain Verrow and he had been a sergeant in the Silvered Company for nineteen years, and he told Rurik this in the tone of a man laying out documents at a border crossing, because he had decided somewhere around the second glass of water that the building wanted something and he intended to find out what.
“I have nothing,” he said.
“I want that understood before we go further.
My unit is gone.
My pay chest was in the granary.
Whatever you are selling, I cannot buy it.”
“That’s fine.”
“It is not fine.
Nobody gives a man cold water in the fourth month for nothing.”
Rurik leaned on the counter.
He’d been up for thirty hours.
He had a woman on staff who had killed an unknown number of the people currently outside.
There was a bill coming in thirty days for an amount nobody would tell him.
And there was a man sitting at his table who had just accused him of being too generous, which had never happened to him in his entire life.
“First hour’s on the house if you’ve never been,” Rurik said.
Dain looked at him.
“That’s the deal.
It’s always been the deal.
It’s on a card by the register, you can read it, first hour’s free for anybody who’s never been in before.” He heard his own voice doing the thing it used to do, the pitch that came out automatically, and he did not stop it.
“Ground floor’s the tables and the counter.
Drinks, food, board games, there’s about ninety of those, you can play any of them here or in the booths.
Second floor’s the machines.
That one takes longer to explain.
Third floor is the library.”
“The what.”
“The library.
Up top.
Everything on those shelves, you can pull anything down and sit with it as long as you’re sitting.”
Dain was looking at the ceiling again.
“Every one of those,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Who owns them.”
“I do.”
“Why.”
And there it was.
The question, the actual question, the one he’d been asked by his accountant and his sister and the loan officer at the credit union back home, in that exact tone, in that exact key of what is wrong with you.
“Because somebody should,” Rurik said.
Dain Verrow sat with his ruined arm in his lap in a room colder than any room he had been in since childhood, and did not have an answer to that, and after a moment he reached into his surcoat and took something out and put it on the table.
It was a coin.
Thick, dull, stamped with a tower.
“That is a half-crown of Harth,” he said.
“It is worth a month of bread in a year that is not this one.
It is the last thing I have and I would rather owe nothing to a place I do not understand.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I am aware.”
Rurik crossed the floor and picked it up.
It was heavier than it looked.
He turned it over once, and the tower on the face was worn nearly smooth, and he was thinking about how old that made it when the coin stopped being in his hand.
[ Converting.
] [ Balance: 39 + 6.
] [ Balance: 45.
]
“Six credits,” Rurik said.
[ Yes.
]
“A month of bread is six cre—” He caught it.
He shut his mouth.
He stood very still and did not ask a question.
[ … ]
Over at the table, Mira made a short sound through her nose and turned the rule sheet over.
Rurik went back to the counter.
He opened the register drawer, which had thirty-two dollars in it that were no longer thirty-two dollars, and he stood looking into it.
Six.
He shut the drawer.
He opened it again.
“Is there a fault,” Mira said.
“No.”
“You have opened that twice.”
“I’m aware of that, Mira, thank you.”