Dain went up to the third floor because it was the only one of the three he could use with one arm, and because a man who has lost his unit does not want to be on a ground floor near a door.
Rurik gave him five minutes and then came up with another glass of water, and found him standing in the middle of the aisle not touching anything.
“They are all different,” Dain said.
“Yeah.”
“No.
You are not hearing it.” He gestured at the shelf with the glass hand, the good one, and Rurik saw that his fingers were not steady.
“Harth has a library.
I have seen it, from the outside, through a gate, on a saint’s day.
It is four rooms.
The books in it are chained to the tables and there are seventy-one of them and every man in the Company knows that number because it is on the coin they minted for it.”
He turned around.
“This is one room of yours.”
“Third floor’s about sixteen hundred,” Rurik said.
“The rest are downstairs.”
Dain looked at him for a while.
“You are not a merchant,” he said.
“A merchant would have started with the number.”
He picked one off the shelf eventually, and he picked it the way everybody picks their first one, which is to say he picked it because of the cover.
Black spine, red lettering, a man in a ragged coat standing at the bottom of a stairway that went up out of frame.
NINE GATES OF THE ASHEN FIST, VOL.
1.
“This is a picture book.”
“Kind of.”
“For children.”
“Read four pages,” Rurik said, “and then tell me that again.”
Dain took it to the reading chair by the window, the good chair, the one Rurik had been planning to eat his last breakfast in.
He sat down with it one-handed and propped it on his knee.
Rurik went back downstairs.
He wiped the bar.
He got out the tablet with the inventory spreadsheet and it had no signal and no connection to anything, which he had expected, and the spreadsheet opened anyway.
At some point Mira came and stood on the other side of the counter.
She had the rule sheet folded in one hand and she had brought it with her, which Rurik noticed and did not comment on.
“He has not turned a page in four minutes,” she said.
“He’s reading.”
“He is not moving his eyes.”
“Then he’s on a good bit.” Rurik set the cloth down.
“Mira, are you watching him?”
“I am watching the room.
He is in the room.”
She said it in exactly the same tone she said everything, and Rurik was starting to learn that this meant nothing at all about what she was doing, and he was going to have to find some other way to read her.
“Can I ask you something,” he said.
[ Query logged.
] [ -1 credit.
]
“Not you.”
[ … ]
“The Silvered Company,” Mira said.
Rurik stopped.
“What?”
“That is what he is.
The surcoat is Silvered Company.
They broke at the fifth bell and they should have broken at the third.” She was looking at the stairs.
“Somebody taught them to hold a bad line in a way that they were not taught by the Company, because the Company does not teach that, and I want to know who.”
“Why?”
Mira did not answer immediately.
“It was the only interesting thing that happened this morning,” she said.
Upstairs, a chair scraped.
Dain Verrow came down the stairs faster than a man with one working arm ought to, and he came across the ground floor to the counter, and he put the book down on it open to the last page, and his face had colour in it that had not been there an hour ago.
“Yeah.”
“It stops here.
He goes through the second gate and the old man says the thing about his father and it stops.”
“That’s volume one.”
Dain stared at him.
“There’s a volume two,” Rurik said.
The silence went on long enough that Rurik became aware of the hum of the lights.
“How much,” Dain said.
“For a member?
Six a day for the library, or fifteen for the—”
“I gave you my last coin.”
“You did.”
“I have no coin.
I have a sword I cannot lift and a surcoat with a dead company’s badge on it.” Dain put both hands on the counter, the bad one too, and he did not seem to notice that he had used it.
“What else takes value.
You said value.
The woman said value.
What else.”
Rurik opened his mouth to say something reasonable.
[ Posted rates available on request.
] [ Query fee applies.
]
“Post them,” Dain said.
“Hang on, you don’t have to—”
“Post them.”
[ -1 credit.
]
And that was how Rurik Vance, out of a small county in southeast Kentucky, thirty years old, sixteen hours from a foreclosure that no longer existed in any jurisdiction that could reach him, made his first sale in six days to a sergeant with no money, at a loss of one unit of a currency he could not define, on the strength of a cliffhanger.