Chapter 15: SEVEN DAYS
He folded the inspection authority into quarters and put it in his coat pocket beside the route forms.
He kept it on him. The paper was leverage of a kind he did not yet know how to use, and the leverage was that someone had put a dead handler’s name on a Division seal this morning. Any moment he could put that document in front of someone who knew the handler had been dead would be a moment he could use.
He looked at the workbench.
The relic sat in the lamp reservoir at the center. The ledger sat beside it. The extraction kit was packed and re-packed in the order he would need it. The bread the boy had given him yesterday was wrapped in wax paper at the edge of the bench.
He had not eaten it. He had not been able to eat the bread yet.
The seven days started at first bell tonight.
It was first bell.
He had until then to decide what the seven days were for.
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He sat down on the floor with his back against the workbench leg.
Miasma came down off the bench and sat on his thigh.
He looked at her.
All right. Let’s lay this out.
He spoke it inside his head and she held his gaze and he had the strange clear sense, the way he had had it at the basin and at the back wall, that she understood him.
The buyer arrives in five days. The thin man’s crew goes for the Ashwood grave on the new moon, which is in two nights. The cache is empty of the relic. They don’t know that yet. They will figure it out when they come back. That gives me three nights of grace.
The Witness wants me in the tunnels. The Witness forged a legal cover to be there. I don’t know what for.
The Live Combat Assessment is in a month. I need her at Tier 2 by then. The cultivation manual says she needs a catalyst and an environment. The environment is a sealed tomb. The catalyst is Corpse Lotus. The Vanes hold the Ashwood mid-belt license. The next official harvest is in three weeks. The grove is unattended.
The thin man’s crew is going to the Ashwood grave. Not the grove. A grave. A specific grave. Renn’s records had been clear on that.
He stopped.
He looked at the bread.
He looked at Miasma.
Marsh.
He needed advice.
He stood up.
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Marsh’s rooms were two streets over and one flight up, in a building that had been a maintenance worker’s tenement before the Outer Ring reorganization had moved the maintenance offices. He climbed the stairs at the pace of a man who had something specific to deliver and did not want to deliver it in a hurry.
He knocked twice.
The door opened on the second tap.
Marsh was in the doorway, dressed, with his coat already on. He had been about to go out.
He looked at Aiden. He looked at the lamp reservoir in Aiden’s hand.
Aiden had brought it because the relic had to stay close, and he had not yet found anywhere safer than the reservoir on his shoulder.
Marsh looked at the reservoir for a beat.
He looked at Aiden’s face.
"You moved it," Marsh said.
Aiden had come here hoping Marsh knew something. Marsh knew everything. The old man had taken one look at a lamp reservoir and seen what was inside it.
"I moved it."
Marsh stepped back from the door.
"Come in. Sit. I have ten minutes before the depot opens."
Aiden came in.
The room was the way Marsh’s rooms had always been, which was that Marsh kept them the way a depot supervisor of thirty years kept rooms.
The kettle was on the stove. The route maps from year sixteen were folded on the table. The chair Marsh sat in faced the door.
The kettle had a new handle. The old one had cracked across the rivet two winters back. Aiden had been in the room the night it went, had watched Marsh look at the crack the way he looked at a route change, and had assumed that was the end of the kettle. It was not the end of the kettle.
The new handle was depot brass, filed to fit, wrapped in cord where a hand landed.
Thirty years of a man’s rooms told you what the man threw away. Marsh’s rooms said: nothing that could still be made to do its work.
Aiden stood in the doorway half a beat longer than the doorway needed and understood that this applied to retired lamplighters’ opinions of certain visitors as well.
Aiden sat in the second chair.
He set the reservoir on the table between them.
Marsh did not look at it. Marsh was watching Aiden’s face.
"You all right," Marsh said.
It was the first time Marsh had asked him that in fifteen years.
Aiden gave the question the silence it had paid for, and then he answered it straight.
"I’m all right," he said. "I’m — I don’t know what I am yet. I’m walking. My hands work. My chest works. I have a Vesperian relic in a lamp reservoir on your table that I carried out of a sealed cache under the Academy and the relic has not killed me yet. I think I am going to ask you to help me decide what to do with the next seven days before something else does."
Marsh nodded once.
"All right," he said.
He poured tea for both of them without standing up. The kettle had been at temperature when Aiden walked in. Marsh had been expecting him.
Aiden took the cup.
He did not drink yet.
"The Witness forged me an inspection authority," he said. "Signed by Halbern."
Marsh’s hand on his own cup stopped.
He set the cup down.
He looked at the table for a beat.
"Halbern died in year 13." Marsh said. "I went to the collector visit. The collector did not ask whether anyone wanted to come. I went anyway. Halbern was the third of three handlers I had worked under in this city. He was the kindest of them. He was also the one who told me, the year before he died, that the network we both worked for was a small piece of a larger thing he did not understand and could not protect me from, and that if I wanted to live long enough to retire, I should pick a lane and not deviate. I picked the lane. I retired."
"You worked under Halbern."
"I worked under Halbern for seven years. Halbern signed off on every site I logged in the Outer Ring between year 5 and year 13. He died in month 4. The collector came and went. The signature plate at the Division was retired in month 5. The signature plate at the Inner Trades depot was not retired. Different office. Different ledger."
"They kept his signature plate."
"They kept his signature plate, and they have used it three times in eleven years that I know of."
"Who used it."
"The Witness."
"You’re certain."
"I am as certain as a retired lamp depot supervisor can be about a thing he is not supposed to know."
Aiden waited.
Marsh looked at him.
"The Witness has used Halbern’s plate three times in eleven years," he said. "Each time, the use was for the same purpose: to put a handler in the tunnels with legal cover for seven days. Each handler the Witness placed under the plate worked a specific extraction. Each handler died inside the window."
"Of what."
"The first one, in a fall. The second one, in the tunnels. The third one, of an injury that should not have killed him. I do not know what the Witness wanted them to extract. I know that the Witness places handlers, the handlers die, and the next plate is signed."
He paused.
"You are the fourth name on the plate."
The room held still for a beat.
Aiden looked at his tea.
He did not drink it.
He looked at Marsh.
"Why me."
"I do not know. I have a guess."
"Guess."
"The Witness does not have hands. The Witness moves through borrowed bodies. The borrowed bodies cannot lift a relic, cannot break a seal, cannot move a chain. The Witness has been watching this city for at least eleven years, and in eleven years, the Witness has not, to my knowledge, taken a single relic out of a single site. The Witness watches. The Witness reports. The Witness does not extract."
"So the Witness needs handlers."
"Yes."
"And the handlers die."
"Yes."
Aiden looked at the reservoir on the table.
He looked at his hands.
The stain on his palms had darkened by another half-shade since he had left the room.
"Why do they die."
"I do not know. I have considered three possibilities and I have never been able to choose between them. The first is that the Witness uses them and discards them. The second is that whatever the Witness sends them after is more than they can survive. The third is that the Witness and the handlers are working at cross-purposes. The handlers do not understand. They die because the Witness’s purpose is not the handler’s purpose."
"You don’t know which one is right."
"I do not."
