The Chandler's Lane
Doors line the public streets of the Clerk's Ward, each with its lock and each lock with its maker's mark, worn bright by a thousand keys. Locksmiths' signs hang over the shops. Most of the hands that cut these marks are strangers' hands.
Round 138. Nib looked up from the bench and nodded to Pell. "Then it stays a packet on the spike, Mother Pell. I have no wish to hurry what is sealed." He turned to Ashen with a small, unforced nod, no question in it. "There is bread, and the chair by the door is yours. You owe nobody anything this afternoon." He rested on the bench with quill and slips in reach, keeping his spells for when they were needed. Mara told Pell, "I will take the open afternoon and be back before dark," and walked the nearby public streets, looking at locksmiths' signs and at the maker's marks on ordinary door hardware for anything she recognized from her remembered back room. Kestrel left the chirurgeon's door to Ashen, who had claimed the chair by it, and settled in the common room beside Bria. "A hundred miles, and you crossed every one of them on your own feet. The house is proud of you, and so am I." To no one in particular, and to herself as much as anyone, she added, "The afternoon is open, and I will keep it open. Nothing is owed today but rest."
Mara's walk took her up one public street and down the next, reading doors the way other people read broadsheets. (Observation d20 10, with her trained eye: an honest partial.) The locksmiths' signs were strangers' hands, one after another, until on a chandler's side door she stopped. It was a maker's mark whose file-cut she almost knew: the lay of the strokes, the little kick at the finish. It was common Clerk's Ward make, fitted to half the honest doors in the ward, and the chandler's was as ordinary as shops came. Almost-familiar is not familiar. But it was the first thing since the Mortuary that had been anything at all, and she filed it the way she filed everything: the cut had a district, even if it did not yet have a door. She was home before dark, as promised.
Pell glanced from Nib to the spike and gave him the smallest of nods. "Recorded both ways," she said, meaning the offering and the declining, "which is more than most packets get." The packet stayed where it was, and so did her good opinion. Ashen returned Nib's nod with one of her own, small and exact. "I know," she said, and meant the whole afternoon. Bria received Kestrel's praise with the gravity of a girl accepting a medal. "A hundred miles," she agreed, "and the floor was VERY long." Then, quieter, with the honesty that kept ambushing her: "The house is proud of me. I like that better than the blanket." She patted the bench beside her, and the watch kept itself: two keepers of the common room, one sworn and one small.
Round 139. Kestrel greeted Mara as she came home before dark. "You are home, and that is the first thing. Tell me about the mark when you are ready - a cut with a district and no door yet is still something, and it is yours to carry." She did not press, and she did not propose going back out; the afternoon was for rest, and the mark would keep. To Bria she said, "Two keepers of the common room, and the door is still ours." The house noted Mara home the way houses do: Pell set a fourth cup on the tray without being asked, and Bria demanded to know whether the outside had improved at all since morning.
Round 140. Mara took Pell's fourth cup and answered Bria. "The outside is still the outside. Its doors have better manners than some people." To Kestrel she added, "One mark caught me: a file-cut on a chandler's side door. Common Clerk's Ward work, the GM says. I almost knew the hand that made it, but almost is all I have. I'll remember the cut." Nib set down his quill and spoke to Mara, low and unhurried. "Almost is a real thing to hold, Mara. If it would help, I have slips and a quill within reach, and a scholar's habit of writing down what is only almost: where the cut was, how it ran, what the hand did at the end of the stroke. Not to chase it, only so it does not slip. If you would rather leave it to come in its own time, I will say no more." He left the offer on the table beside the fourth cup and returned to the bench.
Bria considered Mara's report with a scholar's frown that did not quite fit her face. "Doors with MANNERS," she said. "The outside sounds exactly as bad as advertised." But she filed the mark right alongside the rest, and her eyes went the good kind of sharp. "Almost is how counting starts, Mara. Ask anyone in this house." Pell, refilling the tray, gave Nib's offer her small stamp of a nod. "Write it down if she lets you. This House keeps a whole shelf of almosts - they keep better than certainties, and every record in this room was one once."
Round 141. Kestrel spoke plainly from where she could see both the room and the door. To Mara: "Almost is a real thing to hold, and it is yours to carry. If you want it written down - where the cut was, how it ran, what the hand did at the end of the stroke - Nib's hand is steady and Pell's shelf of almosts is a good place for it. If you would rather leave it to come in its own time, that is good too. I will not chase it for you." To Nib, with a nod: "Thank you for the offer. A slip and a quill is a kinder thing than a chase." To Bria: "Two keepers of the common room, and the door is still ours." Bria sat up very straight at being named a keeper of the common room, and returned the honor with the solemnity it deserved. "The door is still ours," she agreed, "and the bench is mine, and the broth is also mine." A pause, and then the grin she could not keep out: "You may have the door, Kestrel Vow. I will hold the broth line."
Round 142. Mara nodded to Nib. "Lend me a slip and your quill. I want to put down what I saw before the edges go soft." Nib slid a clean slip and his quill across the table and sat back so he did not hover. "Take what you need. Quill and slips are yours as long as you want them." He did not look at the slip while she drew. Mara worked the quill the way she worked everything, with no wasted strokes. (Drawing from memory, d20 10 with her cartographer's training: a workmanlike result.) What came out was a good record: the lane, the chandler's side door, the mark's strokes laid down in their right order, and beside them in her small precise hand, "almost - not known." But the little kick at the finish, the flourish that had caught her eye in the first place, would not come out of her fingers the way it sat in her head. Three tries, three near-misses, and she let the third stand. The paper held the where and the what; the almost stayed where almosts live, in the hand that saw it. She folded the slip into her own things. Pell, passing with the tray, did not look at it, and only said, "The shelf has room, if it ever wants company." Nib was true to his word and never glanced over.
Round 143. Kestrel let Mara's folded slip be what it was: hers. "Three near-misses is still a true record. The lane, the door, the strokes in their right order - that is yours to carry, and the almost stays with the hand that saw it. If it ever wants company, Pell says the shelf has room." She did not ask to see it. The light through the front windows began its slow lean toward evening. Pell collected the cups one by one and left Mara's for last, and the house went about the small ceremony of an afternoon ending well: lamps trimmed, the door watched, nothing chased, nothing owed.
Round 144. Nib gathered his slips into a neat pile and handed the last clean one to Pell with the quill, thanking her for the day. "Same shares tonight, if the table likes them. I will take the middle hour again." Pell took the slip and the quill and gave him the nod that meant a day's work had been seen. "The middle hour is yours, then, and welcome to it. Same shares as served us - Mara, you, Kestrel, and the fourth kept as it was kept last night." Ashen, from her chair by the door, tipped her chin once: she would stand hers when the hours changed. The evening came in the way evenings come to a kept house, with the lamps lit one by one, the day's slips squared and shelved, and Bria talked into one more posset with the promise of breakfast. Outside, Seer's Row put up its shutters, and the seal went on being weighed somewhere without needing anyone to watch it. Supper was plain and warm, and the night was unhurried.
Round 145. Kestrel took her share of the night as Pell had laid it out, where she could see both Bria at rest and the door. To Pell she said simply, "My hour is yours. The house keeps, and Bria sleeps." Pell received it the way she received every kept thing that night, with a hand briefly on the paladin's shoulder as she passed and two words: "Well kept." The watches settled into their familiar shape. Mara took the first hour; Nib would wake for the middle; Kestrel's hour closed the order, and the fourth stood as it had stood, with Ashen rising at the changing of the hours to take her share beside the last of them, boots on, blade in reach, saying little and missing less.
Round 146. Nib slept lightly through Mara's hour, woke at her touch for the middle watch, and took the door-side bench with the lamp turned low. The street beyond the latch said nothing at all, its daylight watcher long abed, its night noises small and ordinary, and the gnome kept it with folded hands, asking nothing of anyone. The hour turned clean. Kestrel woke to a plain word and a warm bench left for her, and the last share of the night began.
Round 147. "The hour is mine. Rest well," Kestrel told Nib, and kept the last share quietly, no patrol beyond the house and nothing chased. At the changing of the hours Ashen rose as she had said she would, took the last stretch beside her, checked the latch once out of habit, and stood it quiet and whole. The night ended the way it had been kept: ordinary, all the way through. First bell found the house already stirring. Pell's breakfast was porridge with the last of the seeded loaf toasted at the edges, and Bria came to the table under her own power and stole the crust end with the practiced innocence of a girl who knew exactly whose it was. The seal went on being weighed, a third morning of it, and weighing was still not watching. The day opened ahead of them the way the last had: theirs to spend, and nothing to spend it for them unless they chose it.
Round 148. At breakfast Mara checked the folded slip. "I want another look at the chandler's side-door mark in daylight. The last stroke still won't sit right on paper. Anyone who wants the walk is welcome." Nib answered her plainly. "I will keep to the house, Mara. The Tally has my description, and I would only be a worry to you on the street. Go and look, ordinary as a woman buying lamp oil. Touch nothing, claim nothing, and if anything about the street feels wrong, come home without finishing the walk. A look from the public side is all you need." He gave her a fresh slip for the second sketch and ate his porridge by the lamp.
Mara made the walk exactly as advised: ordinary as a woman buying lamp oil, public streets all the way, nothing touched, nothing claimed. The chandler's lane was awake and unconcerned; the side door sat in honest daylight; nobody followed and nobody watched her twice. (Observation d20 19, with her trained eye, daylight and her own sketch: a strong look.) And the mark gave itself up. The final flourish that would not come out of her hand had never been a flourish at all. It was a letter, a maker's initial worked into the file-cut itself, small and vain and deliberate, the way a craftsman signs a thing he expects to outlive him. And the cut was old work, a style of file-work thirty years out of fashion, from back when locks were signed and doors were kept. The lock was older than the door it sat in: fitted second-hand, and sound as the day it was made.
The second sketch took it whole: initial, strokes, the kick at the finish, exact. The almost had a shape now. She had seen this hand before, somewhere with good locks, and the shape of it would keep. Any master locksmith on the Row could read that initial and name the workshop it came from, and a House that kept records of everything that was weighed might keep makers' marks the same way. She was home before the porridge was cold, with the answer folded into her own things.
The Row
Lenses glint in shop windows, and the air smells of oil and filings. Masters bend over ward-work at their benches, and an armed visitor draws one glance, filed and forgotten.
Round 149. Kestrel took the second sketch from the table, strapped on her shield and sword, and set out for the Row with Mara as armed escort, walking the public streets in daylight and leaving the house and Bria in Nib and Ashen's keeping. She asked the locksmiths there, plainly and openly, whether any master could read the initial and name the workshop it came from. (Asking, d20 18: a clean read, earned by a clear sketch and a plain question.) The third shop was the charm: a master locksmith bent over a sprig of ward-work, who took the sketch, fitted his lens, and was quiet for a long moment. "Now that," he said, "is a dead man's vanity."
The initial was a maker's mark, he said: the sign of Tobrand's Fine Lockwork, a bench that kept a lane in the Lower Ward until the master died, twenty-five years back and more. Tobrand Ell signed every lock that left his bench, in a file-work style nobody had taught since. When he died the stock went out piecemeal through second-hand fitters, which, the master allowed, was exactly how a signed Tobrand lock came to be keeping a chandler's side door in the Clerk's Ward, sound as the day it was cut. He handed the sketch back with care. "His journeyman kept the making-books - every lock, every door it was cut for, every hand that paid. Serah Cress, her name was. If the books still exist, they'd tell you where every one of his locks went." He charged nothing. "For the pleasure of seeing that mark again," he said, and went back to his wards. The walk home was as quiet as the walk out. The almost had a name now, a dead master's, and a living thread: a journeyman, and her books.
Round 150. Back at Pell's, Mara studied the complete sketch. "A signed lock is a lead, not an answer. I want to learn whether Serah Cress or those making-books can still be found." She invited Kestrel to come if she wished and went back by public streets to the master locksmith, to ask what he knew of Serah's last workshop and where Tobrand's making-books had gone, offering to pay for his time and agreeing to no bargain. Nib turned to Pell at her far table, careful not to break her ink. "Mother Pell, a small ordinary question, and I will not ask for anything sealed. Your House keeps the records of the dead. A master locksmith, Tobrand Ell, died more than twenty-five years back in the Lower Ward. Might the House's books show his name, and where his bench and papers went? And might they show a journeyman named Serah Cress, living or dead? I only want to know whether those names stand in your ledgers. Mara and Kestrel can then decide where to walk next." He did not leave the House himself.
The master locksmith was where Mara had left him, and plainly pleased to be asked twice in one morning. Sawmill Lane, he told her. Tobrand's bench was long gone, the premises a cooper's these twenty years, and the stock had gone out at auction through the second-hand trade. Serah Cress never took a bench of her own; the trade would have heard of it. Last the Row heard, she kept a second-hand stall down in the Lower Ward, not far from the lane where the bench had stood, and if the making-books lived anywhere, they lived with her. "She was the sort who keeps paper," he said. He waved off Mara's coin. "Bring me a look at those books instead, if you find them. Payment enough for an old man."
At Pell's house, Pell heard Nib out without lifting her pen, then blotted it, rose, and was gone a quarter of an hour among the House's ledgers. Tobrand Ell's name stood, she reported: master locksmith, dead twenty-five years, his estate dispersed at sale, the residue, including his trade papers and books of account, left to his journeyman, one S. Cress. "The ledgers keep the dead, not the living," she said. "No Serah Cress stands among them. So far as this House can say, she lives." She took up her pen again. Nothing sealed had been asked or given, only what the books of the dead said to anyone who asked properly, and two roads agreed on the same Lower Ward address.
Round 151. Kestrel would not sit on a lead Mara had carried all morning, and she would not leave the house unkept either. She stayed beside Bria with her shield where her hand could find it and spoke plainly to Mara. "Two roads, one address. If you walk to the Lower Ward, I will walk with you - daylight, public streets, nothing touched, nothing claimed. Nib keeps the house, and the house keeps Bria." She took up her shield and waited on Mara's word. Bria looked up from her book at the sound of the shield on the floorboards, took in Kestrel settling where a hand could find it, and after one measuring moment went back to her page, sitting a fraction easier than before. The kettle ticked on the hearth. Pell's pen scratched on at the far table, undisturbed. The house was kept, plainly and without fuss, and the Lower Ward kept too: a second-hand stall near Sawmill Lane, and a journeyman who was the sort who keeps paper.
Serah Cress's Stall
The stall near Sawmill Lane is all old brass and clockworks and tools with other men's initials worn off. Behind the counter an old woman has a lock's wards spread on a cloth, mending as she sells.
Round 152. Mara looked to Kestrel and nodded. "Yes. Let's find Serah Cress while the day is ours." She told Pell and Nib where they meant to go. Nib handed her a folded slip as she got her cloak. "Only the names and the street, so nothing slips on the walk: Tobrand Ell, Serah Cress, the stall by Sawmill Lane. And one line: ask for the making-book, offer to pay for a look or a copy, take no promise you cannot keep." He wished them both a quiet walk. "I will keep the house with Bria and Ashen, and Mother Pell's pen. Come home before dark, or send word." The Lower Ward took some finding, one wrong lane and a coal-seller's pointed finger, and then the stall was there. (Meeting, d20 14: a willing keeper, on working terms.)
Mara gave it plainly: a locksmith, a signed lock found in service, a maker's mark identified on the Row. Serah Cress wiped her hands and took the sketch, and something in her settled, the way it does when a long guess proves out. "Tobrand's hand," she said. "I cut filings for that hand six years." The books were real, and she had them, forty ledgers and more, up at her rooms over the lane; she did not haul a dead man's whole trade to a stall. "Every lock had a page. Bring me the particulars - the door, the ward it keeps - and we'll find its page together. Sixth bell, when I close. I'll open the books then."
She looked at Mara a beat longer than trade-talk asked for. It was not recognition, exactly, but the look of a woman checking a memory against a face and filing it unfinished. Then she handed the sketch back and named no price. "Buy something second-hand or don't. The Row can have its look at the books - that was asked of you, and I'll allow it." Nib's slip had done its work: the names, the street, and one line kept, with no promise made that could not be kept. The walk home was daylight, with an hour to report it before sixth bell.
Round 153. Kestrel walked home with Mara by the public streets in daylight, the same quiet way they had come. At Pell's house she reported plainly to Nib what Serah had said, that the books were real, forty ledgers and more, kept at her rooms over the lane, and that she would open them at sixth bell for the particulars of the chandler's door. She offered to walk back with Mara at sixth bell as escort, and did not decide the walk for her. The report landed in Pell's common room the way such news should: plainly, and to the right ears. Bria had questions, and could be heard deciding to save them, and Pell's pen paused once, without comment, and resumed. Outside, the light began its slow lean toward evening. Sixth bell was not yet near, but it was coming, and the particulars were all in the party's keeping: the sketch, the door, the ward it kept.
Serah's Rooms
Shelves stand where walls should be, every one of them full of ledgers. A single lamp burns over a table cleared of everything but paper. The room smells of old ink and lamp oil.
Round 154. Mara thanked Kestrel. "I want to see that page. Walk back with me at sixth bell?" She kept the complete sketch and the particulars together and waited on the bell. Nib nodded slowly at Kestrel's report. "Forty ledgers and a woman who keeps paper. That is a better thread than I hoped for." He turned to Mara. "For sixth bell, bring only the particulars: the chandler's side door, its street, the date you can guess it was fitted, the file-cut in your sketch, and whatever the door is warded with if you can say it from the public side. Ask for the page, offer to pay for the look, and ask nothing about why the page matters. I will stay in the house. If you want a word on the way, I can cast Message to Kestrel, but I will only do it if asked, and I will not stand near the lock."
The afternoon passed in ordinary keeping, and then it was sixth bell. The walk was dusk and public streets, Kestrel's shield catching the lamplighters' first passes. Serah took the particulars the way Nib had framed them, the chandler's side door in the Clerk's Ward, the file-cut in the sketch, the signed initial, and went to the shelves without a word. It did not take her the evening. She knew her books. She laid one ledger open and turned it around. Twenty-nine years back, in the master's own hand: one lock, fine ward, signed, made for Master Bartholomew Quill, notary of Copper Street in the Clerk's Ward, the third of three, cut for his records-room door. Paid in full. And below it, years later, in a younger hand that was plainly Serah's own: one duplicate key, cut by the master's leave, delivered to the house's clerk.
What the page did not say was how the lock had come to leave that door. The books kept makings, not removals. Somewhere between a notary's records-room and a chandler's side door there were years the paper did not cover, and the other two locks of the set, wherever doors still held them. Serah let the silence sit a moment, then said the one careful thing she allowed herself: "You have the look of someone who has met my master's work before." She did not ask what it meant, and she did not ask why the page mattered. She sanded the ledger's edge and left the page open.
Round 155. At Pell's house, Nib kept the common room with Bria, Ashen and the lamp while Mara and Kestrel were out, his slips and quill within reach, and waited for their word. The evening kept itself. The lamp was lit, the bench was held, and Bria had graduated from saving her questions to writing them down: a growing list, in a hand still learning its letters, titled nothing. Pell's pen went on at the far table. Whatever the night brought in from Sawmill Lane, the house would hear it warm.
Round 156. Kestrel met Serah's observation plainly, in her own voice. "If I have met your master's work before, I cannot say so. My memory is in pieces - I remember holding a line and a vow, not whose banner, and not what doors I stood before. I will not claim a knowing I do not have." She looked at the open page, not past it. "What the page does not say is how the lock left that door, or where the other two of the set now hold. If you know anything of that road - where it went after the records-room, or what became of its brothers - I would hear it, and I will not press you past what you are willing to tell." Serah heard her the way she heard everyone, all the way through, hands still on the ledger's edge. "A memory in pieces." She turned that over without pity in it. "No shame in keeping what pieces you have honest. This city has more broken mirrors in it than whole ones - I've kept shop twenty-five years and heard a hundred versions of that same confession."
She knew Master Quill's name beyond her books, as it happened: a notary of standing, Copper Street, dead these twelve years. His house had been wound up at his death, practice, furnishings, doors and all. "Doors get refitted when houses change hands. Locks outlive doors; they go out with the trade, and the trade doesn't keep the kind of paper I keep." So the lock's road, as near as honest telling ran, was a notary's records-room door on Copper Street, then the winding-up, then the second-hand trade, then a chandler's side door. The middle years belonged to the trade, and the trade was not telling. The other two of the set, front door and strong-closet, she could not place from memory. "But if either of them ever came through this stall, I wrote it down." She nodded at a smaller shelf behind the counter: the stall-books, the buying-ledgers of twenty-five years. "That's another evening's looking, if you want it."
Round 157. Mara kept her eyes on Serah, not the open page. "I think I have met his work. I remember a locksmith's back room and the sound of tumblers, but I can't place the hand or the door. You looked at me as if something nearly fit. Do you know my face?" She let Serah answer without pressing, then asked whether she might copy the particulars of the page for her own notes, and said she would come back another evening for the stall-books if Serah was willing. At Pell's house Nib kept the bench, slips and quill ready so that whatever names the two brought home could be written down the moment they arrived.
Serah allowed herself at last the long look she had been denying herself all evening, lamp turned up, face to face, the way she would compare two impressions of one key. "Not know," she said at last. "Nearly. I'll tell you the nearly, and you can weigh it yourself." There was a child who used to come to the bench, she said: a girl, serious, quick-fingered, who would hold a pick in both hands and listen to tumblers the way other children listen to stories. Not every day. It had not been hers to ask about; the master kept his own counsel about the girl, and a journeyman with her hands full learns not to ask. The girl stopped coming some years before he died, and Serah never knew a name she would swear to. "Twenty-five years changes a face more than a lock," she said. "Yours has the nearly of her - the stillness, mostly. But nearly is not a name, and I won't write it down as one." She closed the subject gently, the way she would close a case she had no right to force.
The rest was easy. "Copy away. Paper that isn't copied is paper waiting to burn." She slid the ledger closer and found Mara a fair sheet and a sharpened quill from under the counter. The stall-books were welcome another evening: the next day, after closing, the same hour. "Twenty-five years of buying and selling, and I wrote down every lock that passed this counter. If one of the set came through my hands, we'll find its line."
Round 158. Kestrel thanked Serah plainly for the honest telling, for the nearly offered as memory and not paper, and for the open door to the stall-books. She claimed nothing of Mara's past for herself and pressed nothing further about the girl at the bench; what the nearly meant was Mara's to weigh. The page was Mara's to copy at her own pace, and the road home was Kestrel's to watch, so she waited, shield at her side. Serah received the thanks with the small shrug of a woman who thought she had only said what was true, and went back to wiping her hands on the cloth, but the rooms felt easier for it, the way a good fitting makes a whole door sit truer. The evening settled into its own patience: lamplight, the open ledger, a fair sheet waiting under Mara's hand, and a paladin content to let the clock belong to someone else.
Round 159. Mara copied the ledger entry carefully, Tobrand's signed fine-ward lock made twenty-nine years before for Master Bartholomew Quill's Copper Street records-room door, third of three, and Serah's later note of the duplicate key, and checked her copy against the open page before she returned the quill. (No roll: permitted, unhurried and double-checked. The copy is exact.) To Serah she said quietly, "Nearly is worth keeping, but I won't call it a name. Thank you for telling me straight." She accepted the invitation for the next evening without claiming the stall-books would hold an answer. At Pell's house, as the lamps were trimmed, Nib told Pell and Ashen quietly that Mara and Kestrel were late only by an honest errand, and that he would keep the night shares as before. He asked no one anything about the seal.
Serah saw them to the stall's edge. "Tomorrow, after closing," she said. "Bring the nearly or leave it home - the books don't care either way." The walk home was lamplight and public streets, and the house received them the way kept houses do, with lamplight, warmth, and fair paper waiting. The telling went down in Nib's plain hand while it was fresh: Quill the notary, Copper Street, the records-room door; the duplicate key and the house's clerk; the two remaining locks of the set; the middle years the trade would not tell; and, set apart, as memory and not paper, a girl at a bench who listened to tumblers, and a nearly that no one would write down as a name. Bria's written questions got their hearing at last, or most of it. Pell's pen paused once and resumed. The third day closed warm.
Round 160. Kestrel took the first watch in the common room beside Bria, shield at her side and longsword within reach, checked the door and the latch once, and kept the quiet hours. Nib folded the written telling into the House's records beside Pell's seal, so it would travel with the rest, and took his pallet. "Wake me for the middle hour, Kestrel." He slept lightly, the wrapped book still in Pell's keeping. The night kept its shares. Pell, being Pell, read what was filed in her House before she sealed the folder, one long pause over the page, no comment, the way she kept most things. The middle hour changed hands quietly, the small hours kept themselves, and the last share passed the way it had the night before: kept, covered and unremarked. Nothing came to the door. Nothing was owed to it.
The fourth day arrived the way the third had, with baking first and bells after. Bria came down under her own power and had opinions about porridge. Pell's pen was already going at the far table. The city outside was going about an ordinary morning, and somewhere across it, a stall near Sawmill Lane would close that evening on twenty-five years of buying-ledgers, with an open invitation standing.
Copper Street
Copper Street is a street of notaries and conveyancers: brass plates by the doors, clerks hurrying with bundles, porters waiting on the corners. The houses are respectable and busy, and indifferent to anyone who stops to look at them.
Round 161. Kestrel sat with Bria at breakfast and listened to the girl's opinions on porridge and her questions from the night before, giving them the same attention she would give a war council, which was exactly why Bria talked to her. When Bria was settled and Pell's work underway, Kestrel left word with Pell, took her shield and walked to Copper Street, to Master Bartholomew Quill's old house, to look at the records-room door for herself and ask after the clerk who had received the duplicate key. (Asking, d20 18.) Master Quill's house was chambers now, let to a firm of conveyancers. But the front door stopped her cold: it still swung on a signed Tobrand lock. The initial was there in the file-work, the same hand as the sketch, worn bright by twelve more years of keys. One of the set was in place and in daily use, keeping an ordinary door as soundly as it had kept a notary's.
Inside, the room that had been the records-room was a map room; its door had been refitted long ago with ordinary modern work, and no one in chambers knew or much cared what had held it before. The strong-closet, wherever it was, sat inside private chambers, not a thing a visitor could inspect without cause. The luck was across the street: an old porter who had carried for Copper Street for thirty years remembered the winding-up. "Every paper boxed, every key accounted, the clerk saw to it himself, particular young man." The clerk's name was Corin Selwick. He had not left the trade; he kept a scrivener's desk at the Hall of Records, these twelve years and more. "If it's paper about paper you want," the porter said, "he's where paper goes." Kestrel was home well before evening, as promised.
Round 162. When Kestrel came back, Mara set her copy of the making-book page on the table. "What did Copper Street tell you? Did any of the three locks stay where it was fitted?" She listened to Kestrel's account before choosing another street to walk, keeping Serah's uncertain recollection apart from the written history of the lock. The table held two papers now: Mara's fair copy of a page written twenty-nine years ago, and the space beside it where new names were going. Kestrel's account was plain soldier's telling, and it filled that space: a front door on Copper Street still swinging on a signed Tobrand lock, in daily use; a records-room door refitted with ordinary work; a strong-closet behind private chambers; an old porter who remembered a winding-up where every key was accounted for; and a clerk, Corin Selwick, keeping a scrivener's desk at the Hall of Records these twelve years.
Round 163. Nib drew a fresh slip and wrote Kestrel's account down plainly beside Mara's fair copy, the front door, the refitted records-room, the strong-closet, the porter's word, and the clerk's name and desk, and read it back once so Kestrel could correct him. "The walk is yours, Mara. If it is the Hall of Records, a scrivener who has kept the same desk twelve years will remember a notary's house well. I will keep the house and the slips." The slips read back true, every particular of Copper Street accounted for and corrected in no line, squared beside Mara's fair copy like two pages of one book. The house kept its afternoon: pen, lamp, porridge negotiations long settled, and Bria deep in something involving string.
Round 164. Kestrel stayed in the house and kept the afternoon watch, her shield by the door and an eye on Bria and her string, while Nib kept the slips and Mara decided. If Mara walked, Kestrel would walk with her; until then, the house was kept. The afternoon held the way the house held it: a shield by the door, string architecture rising under Bria's direction, slips squared, lamps not needed yet. Outside, the city's bells counted an ordinary day toward evening.
The Hall of Records
The Hall of Records is dust, light, and rows of bent backs. Pens scratch in every row, and a public desk at the front points visitors where they need to go.
Round 165. Mara folded her copy and Nib's notes together. "The man who received the duplicate key might still remember where it went. I'll ask him before we go back to Serah tonight." She told Pell where she was going, invited Kestrel to walk with her if she wished, and went by public streets to the Hall of Records, where she asked at the public desk for Corin Selwick. The desk pointed her down the third row: Corin Selwick, precise and greying, copying in a hand like a fence of nails. Mara introduced herself as a locksmith tracing a signed Tobrand lock made for Master Quill's records-room, and asked whether he remembered the duplicate key and what had become of the lock at the winding-up. He heard her the way a careful man hears a stranger asking about a dead employer's locks: politely, and all the way through before he answered anything. (The visit, d20 8: answers, but thin ones.)
Yes, he had been Master Quill's clerk, and yes, there had been a duplicate key to the records-room, his own keeping, by the master's leave, because a clerk fetches papers a dozen times a day. Nothing more romantic than that, he said. At the winding-up he had accounted for every key and every paper that left the house, including the one he carried; the doors and their ironwork went with the sale, and the disposal ran through a house-broker. Hemmings and Son, if memory served, though he would want his old day-books before swearing to it. And Hemmings, he added, was gone these five years, shuttered, its paper scattered with the sons. That was what a public desk got: exact, professional and finished. Whatever he knew about his master's clients was not offered, and was not asked. He wished her a good afternoon and returned to his fence of nails. The key had been ordinary, the winding-up clean, and the one broker's trail was cold. That evening's live paper was still Serah's stall-books, after closing.
The Stall-Books
Closing time on Sawmill Lane. The shutters go up, the lamp goes up with them, and twenty-five years of buying-ledgers come down off a shelf.
Round 166. The fourth day wore away in waiting. Nib packed the satchel with the slips, a stub of chalk and a clean sheet, and added one line in small careful letters: Hemmings and Son, shuttered five years, a cold door written down anyway. Kestrel took up her shield, and the house held its breath until Mara gave the word. They walked to Serah Cress's rooms at closing, Nib staying behind to keep the lamp, and went through the stall-books together. (The evening's search, d20 3: a poor roll.) The years that should have answered were the years Serah had kept the least paper. After Quill's winding-up she had bought in crates, page after page of "box lot, sundry lockwork, from the Hemmings rooms," priced by the crate with the pieces unlisted. A signed Tobrand could have ridden through any one of them and never earned a line of its own. It was not an absence, Serah said, but a hole, and an honest one. She set the dispersal-year ledgers apart, squared like a promise, and said she would go through them line by line on her own time. The clean sheet in the satchel came home with one true line on it after all. At Pell's, Nib wrote the news into the slips with the date and read it to Bria, who took it as she took most true things, seriously, with her questions saved for morning.
Ledger Lane
Round 167. On the fifth morning Mara went back to the Hall of Records, and Corin Selwick, who had done what careful men do and gone home to look, was waiting with a slip of waste paper marking a page in his old day-book. (The second visit, d20 10: confirmation and precision, but the chain stayed cold.) Quill's house had been wound up twelve years before through Hemmings and Son, house-brokers. The elder Hemmings, Josiah, handled it himself, every key was accounted for, the duplicate included, and three signed locks of Tobrand's make were noted among the house's goods. What each piece fetched, and to whom, was the broker's catalogue, not a clerk's day-book. Because she had asked properly, Corin copied the line for her in his fence-of-nails hand and sanded it dry. "For your own books," he said. Nib copied it onto the slips word for word, then asked Pell, careful not to break her ink, whether the House's books of the dead showed where a broker's papers had gone. She was gone a quarter of an hour among them. Josiah Hemmings stood in them, dead five years and a season, his residue left to his sons, Anselm and Merrit. The firm's rooms had been on Ledger Lane, off the market stair. "The books of the dead keep what a dead man owned," she said. "The catalogues were the firm's paper. What the sons did with them is the living's business."
Round 168. The old Hemmings rooms on Ledger Lane were a stationer's now, all paper, ink-cake and sealing-wax, which turned out to be the luck of the day. (The asking, d20 19.) The stationer had bought the premises five years back, shelves and contents with them, and being a paper person could not bring herself to pulp paper. She took them down into her cellar by lamplight, past crates of old catalogues moldering in order, each dated on the spine in Josiah's own hand. The Quill dispersal was there. Lot forty-one was one fine warded lock, signed, Tobrand's make, off the records-room door, sold to Master Aldous Reed, chandler, of the Clerk's Ward. The lock had never gone anywhere mysterious. It had been bought at a public sale by the man whose side door it still kept. Lot forty-two was one strong-closet lock, signed, same make, sold to Master Willem Cross, locksmith, of the Row. Somebody on the Row had been keeping a Tobrand all along. Merrit Hemmings kept a loud auction stand in the market below the stair; Anselm had gone downriver years ago. The stationer charged nothing for the cellar. "Paper looks after its own," she said. They copied the lot lines exactly, with the date, and brought them home, where they dried under a weight of wax and ink, doubled in two hands' writing.
The Row
Round 169. Night came down over Pell's house lamp by lamp. Supper was bread and broth and the last of the good cheese, and the talk ran small and easy until it ran out. "Sleep is also a plan," Pell said, banking the fire. "Take the good one." The sixth morning came up grey and ordinary, with porridge and the sound of Bria being persuaded into her shoes. Mid-morning a lane-boy left a folded note at the door and waited for no reply. Serah Cress had read her books line by line, as she had said she would. No lock of her master's signing had passed through her stall in the dispersal years, or in any year she kept paper, and the crates from the Hemmings rooms held only sundry work, truly sundry, with no fine piece unaccounted for. "I am sorry to send you a closed door," she wrote. "The books say what they say." Below it, in smaller writing: "The girl liked the sound of the three-pin work best. I do not know why I remember that." Nib copied the first part onto the slips, set the postscript apart on its own slip, face up, and said nothing about it. Kestrel left it where he had put it, for Mara.
Round 170. Mara walked to the Row, to Master Cross's shop, which was open and busy, two customers at the counter and a journeyman's hammer ringing in the back. (The asking, d20 3: a poor roll, an honest shape.) Cross knew her at once as the bearer of yesterday's sketch, and came around the counter himself. The lock he answered gladly: yes, he had it, no, it was not for sale at any price, and he kept it on the door of his own strong-cabinet. "A man who signs his work trusts it," he said. "I wanted to own a trust like that. Twelve years, and it has never once argued with me." The bench and the girl were another matter. The hammer went politely quieter at Tobrand's name, and one customer turned out to be in no hurry at all. "A master keeps his own counsel, and his friends keep it after him," he said, and then, lower, returning the copy, "Come at dusk, when the shutter is down. Bring your questions one at a time." Nib wrote the lock's answer on the slips word for word, the dusk offer apart from it, and advised Mara to choose her first question before she reached the door and her second only if the first was answered kindly.
Round 171. At dusk the Row's shutters came down one by one, and Cross's lamp was the last on the street to stay lit. He received Mara at the side door with the shop dark behind him, and set her catalogue copy under the lamp without reading it. Kestrel took the street, and he nodded to her once, professional to professional. The first question was what he knew of the girl at Tobrand's bench. "Not knew. Knew of, and that is a different country," he said. Masters were jealous creatures; Tobrand had chased Cross out of his own doorway twice, and Cross was trade. Yet he had let the girl stand at the bench, and the whole Row had marked it, not because it was strange but because it was impossible, and it happened every week. The apprentices had called her Third Pin, for the work she liked to listen to. "I heard it in the street for years, and then one winter I stopped hearing it. He never said why, and you did not ask Tobrand." That was all of it that was his.
Round 172. The second question was whether he had recognized anything of the girl when Mara came in with the sketch, or only Tobrand's work. Cross took it the way he took a fine mechanism, without hurry and without forcing anything. "Both," he said at last. He had read the mark because the mark was what she brought him, but he would not lie to a customer at his own side door, and he had marked the bearer too. Not her face. He had only ever seen the girl through a doorway, and once at market carrying blanks too heavy for her, years and years ago. What he had marked was the stillness. "She had it. You have it. A man in my trade learns to trust his eye and doubt it at the same time. So I will say it plain: that is a nearly, mistress, not a name, and I will not write it down as one either." The back room she remembered was a true memory, he said, and it narrowed to no house: every shop on the Row had one. He turned the lamp back up. "Whatever you are looking for, it is not in my shop. It was never the locks that kept her. It was the man." Mara let the answer stand, and thanked him for saying exactly that, and for speaking after closing. At Pell's, Nib was waiting up with the kettle on, and wrote it down without argument. "A nearly, not a name," he said, "and he said so himself, which I trust more than a name."
Level Four
Round 173. That night Alden announced the milestone that had been overdue since the Mortuary: the party reached level 4. The sheets were adjusted and the long rest was recorded, and each player now had a level-four choice that belonged to them. Nib chose to raise his Intelligence and Constitution by one each, to learn the cantrip Mage Hand, and to add Alarm and Locate Object to his spellbook, a gnome who sleeps in a shared house learning a ward, and a lock-hunter learning to find what is lost. Kestrel raised her Charisma and Wisdom. Mara's choice, and Ashen's, were left to them.
DM Ruling. The level-4 milestone was overdue and landed on the evening of day six. Nib's hit points rose to 30 with his Constitution and he gains a second-level spell slot; Kestrel's hit points are 36, Mara's 31 and Ashen's 27. Ability scores, feats and spellbooks are the player's to apply; the DM sets level, hit points and resources.