They buried Hale at dusk, behind the west hall, in soft ground beside Dessik's people.
There was no ceremony. Corvin had asked for none. Four of the Row's men lowered the plank on ropes, and Tobb said the only words he knew, which were a smith's blessing for a cooling blade. May it ring true. Then Corvin knelt and pressed the brass key from her brother's sleeve into the dirt above his chest, and stood, and brushed her knees.
"That's all," she said.
"Sergeant," I said.
"Not yet." She drew the leather notebook from her coat and held it out to me. "Keep it."
"It's yours."
"It's evidence. I can't keep evidence. I'm a Warden." Her mouth thinned. "Or I was this morning. I haven't decided what I am tonight."
"You're allowed to be both."
"That's a very generous reading." She pressed the notebook into my hand anyway. "If I hold it, I'll go to the Captain's door and ask him to read it aloud. And that would be the end of the Row."
I put it inside my coat, beside the copied pages, the grey cloth, and the black card with the silver runes. My coat was getting heavy. I had begun to wonder what I would do on the day I ran out of pockets.
"Corvin," I said. "I won't use it until I'm sure."
"I know."
"How?"
"Because you asked me politely what the flashes meant," she said, "when you could have just taken the lantern." She nodded once. "I'll be on the east wall."
◆
Iron does not care about grief, and that is the only mercy it has.
By midnight the furnace was drawing cleanly, Odda's folding crew had found their rhythm, and I was at the anvil with my sleeves rolled and a hammer that finally felt like part of my arm. Heat, strike, fold. Strike, fold, heat. The old woman watched over my shoulder and said nothing, which I had learned meant I was not doing it wrong.
"Thirty-six," Marrow said, walking the cooling beds with her chalk.
"Seventeen to go."
"Plus the order for the Forges to accept them."
"Don't make me think about that."
"I'm only counting." She stopped beside me. She had a way of standing very still when she wanted to say something, and I had learned to put down the hammer. "Aren. About the Captain."
"Yes."
"I've known Drum nine years. He didn't pack a furnace with witch-fire. He doesn't do things with his hands." She paused. "He gives orders. Quiet ones. Then people do the rest."
"That's what worries me."
"It's what worries me too." She rubbed her blind eye with a thumb. "But I'll tell you what I told the Broker once, when she asked me the same thing. A man who gives orders is only as guilty as the person who dresses up as him."
"Someone could be using his name."
"Someone is using everyone's name," said Marrow. "The Broker's. The Wardens'. Now maybe his." She looked at the furnace. "I'd start asking who benefits when all of us are looking at each other."
I thought about that for a long time, with the hammer cooling in my hand.
◆
The boy came an hour before dawn.
I almost did not recognize him. He stood at the gate in a coat two sizes too large, ink-stained to the wrists, with his eyeshade pushed up into hair that stuck out in three directions, and his face the grey of old paper. A pair of Wardens stopped him at the post. I walked over before they could decide anything.
"Ferrow."
"Master Aren." He held his hands out at his sides, palms open, as if to prove he carried nothing. "I'm sorry. I didn't know where else."
"Does the Tallyman know you're here?"
"He sent me." His voice cracked. "That is, he sent me with a message, and I came by the back, and I didn't go to the Row, and I took a wrong turn twice." He gave a short, ragged laugh. "I've never been outside the mint at night."
"Come inside."
I brought him to the kitchen of the east hall, where Vell was boiling water for the evening's bandages. She took one look at him, put a bowl of barley soup in his hands, and went back to her pot. He held the bowl as though it might disappear.
"Master Greaves wants it known," he said, when he could speak, "that he did not send the grey coat."
"He told me that himself."
"He wants it known twice. In writing." He drew a folded paper from his coat. "And he asked me to bring you this. He says it's not a favor. It's a courtesy. He keeps track."
I opened it. It was a single sheet in a small, precise hand, and for a moment I did not understand what I was reading.
It was a list. Names, dates, sums. At the top, in a heading underlined twice: PURCHASES, WOOL, GREY, WARDEN PATTERN.
"A tailor in the Velvet Quarter," said Ferrow, very low. "Territory Three. Madame Ossel's district. Over the last four months, someone has ordered twenty-two grey Warden coats, without badges, in sizes from small to large. Paid in advance, in silver, through a Council account."
"Whose account?"
"The Recorder's."
I looked up. "The Recorder."
"Fenn. The Council's scribe. He keeps the minutes, the seals, the votes." Ferrow's voice dropped further, until I had to lean in. "Master Greaves checks every Council account. It's how he finds out who owes him. He noticed the coats three weeks ago and did nothing, because they were small sums, and the Recorder's clerks buy cloth for the Pit's banners." He swallowed. "Then yesterday he read the tailor's invoice."
"What did it say?"
"Twenty-two coats. Delivered to the back door of the Pit. Signed for by a man in gloves."
The cold crept up my spine.
"Describe him," I said.
"I never saw him. The tailor's boy did. He said tall, thin, soft-spoken. Very polite. Very clean." He hesitated. "He said the man smelled of ink."
For a moment I could not speak. In my mind a small room rose out of nothing, a corner of the Pit I had barely looked at. A narrow desk at the edge of the lowest terrace, half hidden in shadow, where a man in a plain dark coat had sat the whole of the Sitting, writing. I had not heard his name. I had not seen his face. He had written down every word I said.
"Fenn," I said.
"Yes."
"He was there. At the Sitting. He wrote down everything."
"Yes," said Ferrow. "That's his office."
"What does he look like?"
"I don't know. I've never met him." The boy shook his head. "He never comes to the mint. He sends his clerks. I only know he keeps a very clean desk."
◆
I sat for a long while with the paper on my knee.
Vell had gone to the other room. Ferrow sat across from me with his soup untouched, looking at his hands as if they belonged to somebody else.
"Why did Greaves send this?" I asked. "He could have used it himself."
"He said I should tell you something." Ferrow's mouth worked. "He said a man with a ledger can see more than a man with a sword, but he can't act on it. He said it takes someone who's willing to be wrong in public."
"That's a strange thing for the Tallyman to say."
"I thought so too." He looked up. "He seemed tired. I've never seen him tired."
"Did he say anything else?"
"He said to give you the paper and not to wait for an answer." Ferrow fumbled with the edge of his sleeve. "He said he'd rather not know what you decide."
It was, I thought, the most honest thing Greaves had said to me, and he had sent it by a boy.
"Ferrow," I said. "Thank you."
"I didn't do anything."
"You carried something across a city at night, past three patrols, when you could have gone to bed." I folded the paper. "I'm told that counts."
His eyes were bright. "My mother's debt is twenty-nine silver now," he said. "Master Greaves cut it by two this morning. He didn't say why."
"Maybe he didn't have to."
"Maybe." He gave a wavering smile. "I think I'd like to go home."
"I'll send someone with you."
"No. I know the way." He stood, and did not quite meet my eye. "If it helps. The Recorder's clerks said he's very kind. That he remembers everyone's name. They all like him."
"That helps," I said, and it was true, and it made me feel worse.
◆
I found Corvin on the east wall at first light, standing with her arms folded and her cap pushed back.
She listened to the whole story without interrupting. When I reached the part about the coats she said, "Twenty-two," in a low flat voice, and when I reached the part about the clean hands she said nothing at all.
"I'm not accusing him," I said.
"You said that about the Captain."
"I said it about everyone. That's the problem." I rubbed my temple. "Fenn bought coats. A man smelling of ink took delivery. A clerk's boy saw him. That's all I have."
"It's a start."
"It's a thread. If I pull it too hard it breaks."
"Then pull it gently." She looked out across the yard, where the first thin plume of furnace smoke rose into the haze. "What does a Recorder do, sir? Beyond write things down."
"He keeps the minutes. The votes. The seal." I thought about it. "He's the one person who sits at the Council table and belongs to no Territory. Everyone trusts him because he wants nothing."
"A man who wants nothing is very hard to catch," said Corvin.
"Yes."
"Or very easy, if you know what he's missing."
I turned to her. She was still looking at the yard, and her face was set in a hard, tired line I was beginning to know.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, nobody's stolen anything yet." She shrugged. "Not coal. Not iron. Not even the girl. They've killed a furnace, and a Warden, and a good many years of my life. But they haven't taken a single thing you could put a price on." Her eyes moved to me. "Whoever this is, they don't want what everyone else wants."
"Then what do they want?"
"I don't know." She was silent for a moment. "But I'd like to find out before they do."
◆
By noon the cooling beds were nearly full.
Marrow came with her chalk and her drum and a face I could not read, and she walked the rows twice before she told me the number. Forty-four. Nine more, and a full day left. I had never thought I would hear those words and feel something like peace.
"We'll make it," she said.
"If nothing else goes wrong."
"Don't say it."
"I didn't."
"You were going to." She almost smiled. "Go sleep. Tobb says he can finish the last nine in a day if you stay out of his way."
"I haven't been in his way."
"You've been in his head. It's worse."
I did not argue. I went to the cot in the corner of the east hall and lay down fully clothed, and the last thing I remember is the sound of hammers through the wall, steady and ringing, a sound that had begun to feel like a pulse.
◆
I woke in the dark to someone shaking my shoulder.
It was Kaelen. He had a lamp in one hand and a look on his face that I had learned to dread, careful and almost gentle.
"Sparrow," he said.
I sat up so fast the room swung.
"Corvin was on the wall. She saw it first." He held out a slip of paper. "She copied it in the Warden code. She hasn't been able to read the whole thing. There are a few groups she doesn't know. But the first part is plain."
I took the paper. It was a row of tiny marks, long and short, grouped in threes, and beneath them, in Corvin's blunt hand, a rough translation in pencil.
COME. ALONE. BROTHER.
And below it, smaller, underlined:
HE ASKED FOR YOU BY NAME.
I looked up. Kaelen's face in the lamplight was grey with something that was not tiredness.
"It's from the tower," he said. "The second one. It started an hour ago."
"Who's it addressed to?"
"That's the part Corvin couldn't read." He swallowed. "She said it was in a code she didn't know. But she could read one group at the end. The same one, three times."
"What does it say?"
"Your name," said Kaelen. "In the old Warden hand. Aren."
I stood. My legs were steady, which surprised me, and the ache behind my left eye pulsed once, slow and clear.
"She told me she was only a signaler," I said. "She said she didn't know who was giving the orders."
"Maybe she was telling the truth."
"Or maybe she's decided to tell it now." I took the lamp from his hand. "Either way, I'm going."
"Alone?"
"It says alone."
"It says a lot of things." Kaelen did not move. "I'll bring the rope. I'll stay at the bottom of the tower. If you're not down by the count of three hundred, I'm coming up."
"That's a long count."
"I'm a patient man."
"You're not," I said.
"No," Kaelen agreed, and for the first time in a week, something very like a smile crossed his tired face. "But I'm learning."