The man came in on the last hour of a Thursday, which is the hour that brings me my liars.
He had an Albion coat gone shiny at the elbows and shoes with no nails in the soles, which in Black Market Alley marks a man as surely as a bell round his neck. Everyone here walks on nails. He stood at my counter with his hat in both hands and asked forty krone on a looking-glass.
It was a hand mirror. Black frame, close-grained, no maker's mark on it anywhere, and the glass grey the way old glass goes grey, so that my own lamp came back at me from a long way off. Ten inches of it, handle and all. I have taken in a Terrassian clockwork familiar, brass, cat-sized, ticking, and given eleven krone on it and thought myself generous.
I told him eight groats and I was being kind to his coat.
In this Alley a man will argue over eight groats until the fourth bell. That is not haggling, it is the whole of our society. He did not argue. He said twenty-two and I said twenty-two because I wanted to see what he would do next, and what he did next was ask for my longest term.
Thirty days, I said. There is no longer.
He took thirty days. He gave the name Bede and no other name, and he did not want the counter-ticket, only the money, and when the glass came over the boards into my hands he wiped his palms down the front of his coat. Then he went out and I heard him turn uphill, which is the wrong way for a man with silver in his pocket.
I should tell you what my trade is, because people are always sure they know.
I lend money on things. The thing sits in my back room with a paper tied to it, and the man who brought it has a month to come back with what he had off me and a fifth on top, and if he comes I hand it over and we both bow and nobody is shamed. Two out of three come. My father's shop was in the Kereskedo where the rents are honest. Mine is in the Alley, where the rule is triple prices and every man expects to be sold to the Guard by his own cousin. I have had the three balls over my door nine years.
A pledge that runs its term and is not redeemed, we call dead. The pledge falls dead, and the thing becomes mine to sell. That is the whole of the business and it is not cruel, whatever the sermons say. It is just the clock.
The glass showed me Verka Toth on the second day.
Verka has pawned the same garnet brooch to me on a Monday and redeemed it on a Friday for six years, which tells you everything about her household and nothing bad about her. She was at the counter with the brooch in a twist of cloth, complaining of the price of flour, and the glass lay face up under my hands where I had left it, and I glanced down.
There was a woman there in Verka's brown dress. The dress was exact, down to the mend at the shoulder. What was in the dress had been in the ground a fortnight. The cheek had gone in on itself, and the eye was not an eye, and the hands holding the twist of cloth were the colour of a candle stub, and up in the room the mouth went on about flour.
I gave her four krone and my hands did it without me.
When she had gone I sat on my stool with the shutters still open and looked at the glass a long while. There was a hair of a crack in it now, from the frame inward, no longer than my little fingernail. It had not been there in the morning. I would swear to that on anything you like.
I went up to the Marrow the next day, to Koss.
You will know the place if you have ever needed something you should not have. Above the condemned textile warehouse, and the stair is the safest part of the building. Devorlen Koss was a Terrassian officer once and is a shopkeeper now, and what he actually sells is knowing. I put the glass on his table and he did not touch it. He put his hands behind his back like a man in a gallery.
Sorrow-glass, he said. Where.
I told him a coat with shiny elbows.
He said they were made for the old wars, when a general wanted to be sure his own staff were still breathing, and that there might be three left in the city and he could not name the other two. Then he told me the thing I had come for without knowing to ask. The glass does not spend itself on the living. You may hold it to a hundred honest faces and it costs you nothing and shows you nothing, because there is nothing to show. It takes its price only when it finds one. Seven, he said. Seven of them and the glass is finished.
He offered me ninety krone. I told him I could not sell a pledge inside its term, which is the law and was also true, and he smiled at me with real fondness and said the term would run out, Ilka.
Walking home I understood he had told me two things and charged me for one. The other was this: a woman who holds a sorrow-glass in Kormor Kirak is worth killing for it.
That night I counted the cracks.
I am an appraiser. What that comes down to is counting. Threads in a cloth, points on a stone, links in a chain, and the difference between a thing and the same thing worth twice as much is nearly always something you can count if you will be patient.
There were four threads in the glass.
I had put one in. So three had been spent before that coat ever came down my Alley — three faces found, three names somebody knew, and then the thing carried to a lender in Black Market Alley for twenty-two krone on the longest term I had.
I did not sleep, and I did not go back to Koss, because I could hear what he would say. He would say sell it to me tonight. He would be right.
Here is what I did instead.
I kept it under the counter with a cloth over it, and when the shutters came up in the morning I moved the cloth. I told myself it was prudence. Every door frame in my street had been painted over fresh in ochre by frightened people, and it was plain to anybody with eyes that the ochre had stopped working, and here I was with the one thing in the city that could tell me who was alive on the other side of my own boards. What would you have done. Say it aloud before you answer me.
Four weeks it hung behind that cloth, and in four weeks it found two.
The first was a woman in mourning black who wanted nine krone on a wedding band and would not set the band down on the counter, and in the glass she was a wet thing with river weed in her collar. I told her the band was pinchbeck and sent her out. It cost me a customer and a thread.
The second was Corporal Bakos.
He has collected the Alley's fee for the Red Guard four years, twelve krone the quarter, and he takes it at the door and gives you a receipt and has never once come inside without wiping his boots. He went out to the northern causeway detail in the summer with the night gangs and came back thinner. He stood in my doorway on the last Friday in August with the comet coming up white behind the roofline, because it does not set now, it only goes round, and he said good evening Ilka and asked after Miklos.
In the glass there was a man three days dead in a crimson coat. Every button as it should be. Boots wiped.
I counted out his twelve krone and wished him a good evening back, and I have thought since that the pleasantest thing about him was always the boots.
That made six.
Rozito Vallikozo came the week after, which I do not think was chance. The market manager himself, down off the Kereskedo into my Alley in that grey coat, smelling of the earth he is always so freshly out of. He asked with tremendous courtesy whether I had taken in any glass lately. Any mirrors. He had heard a price mentioned and thought I ought to have the benefit of it, one honest trader to another.
I said I had a shaving glass from a barber's estate and he could have it for a krone.
He looked at me a while. Then he bought a brass candlestick at the full asking price and thanked me and left, and if you do not know why that frightened me worse than a threat, you have never worked a counter.
The pledge fell dead on the third of September.
Bede did not come. I had known for weeks that Bede would not come and I sat up until the fourth bell anyway with the ticket on the boards in front of me, and at midnight I wrote it into stock in my own hand: one glass, black frame, dead pledge, mine.
Ninety krone from Koss, or more from Rozito if I could stand to be in a room with him. Either would put me and my boy on a Terrassian carrier's wagon and out through the gate before the Festival. Attendance at the Convergence is compulsory, and I had decided already that whatever the Queen wants with a square full of standing citizens, I would not be in it.
That was the plan at midnight. At four in the morning I was at my own kitchen table with the glass in my hand.
Miklos is sixteen. He hauls at night for the tower works because the tower works pay in silver with her face on it, and he sleeps in the day like every boy on that detail, and in August he came home thin and cold and stopped eating. Nine days I had counted. Nine days of a plate going out and coming back. I had said the words every mother in this city says. He is sixteen. It is the work. They are all like that.
I am an appraiser. What I do is count, and then I look.
He was sitting where he sits, with his hands on the table where his hands were. In the glass the hands were on the table too, and they were the colour of a thing carried down from the Hallaset Fields, and the throat had a hollow in it that a throat does not have, and his eyes were open and they were not eyes.
The seventh thread went across the glass while I was still holding it up. It did not break. It went milky, all at once, the way water goes when you drop flour into it, and the frame in my hand was suddenly full of grit.
He asked me what I was doing. He has his voice. He asked me for water and I got him water, and he held the cup and did not drink it, and I sat down across from him and we listened to the fourth bell together.
Olivia Faren came into my shop at nine o'clock that same morning.
I knew her at once. Everyone in the Alley knows the Albion woman who does the delegation's accounts, because she is the only foreigner in Kormor Kirak who pays the asking price and then writes down what she paid. Plain grey, ink on the second finger, a satchel she never sets on the floor. Koss had sent her. She said so straight out, as though it were a courtesy to me, and it was.
She wanted the glass. She had real money with her, Albion paper and forty gold imperials in a roll, and she told me what it was for, which nobody in this city ever does. She had to go up the Cliff Road within the week and sit at a table in the castle with eleven other people, and she needed to know how many of the eleven were dead. She said dead the way a clerk says overdue.
I put the frame on the counter and pushed it across the boards.
She turned it over twice. Then she tilted it to my lamp and I watched her find the threads and count them, and I watched her get to seven and stop. She is a very controlled woman. She still had to put her hand flat on my counter for a moment.
Who, she said.
I gave her three. Verka Toth, in brown, on the Kereskedo. The woman with the wedding band, no name, river weed. Corporal Bakos of the Red Guard, three days dead in August and still collecting the station fee at the doors of this street. She put the three in a little book in pencil, in a column, with the dates.
Three more, I said, were spent before it ever came to me, by somebody I never met, and I could not help her there.
That is six, she said. Then she asked the seventh, and I said I would not tell her.
She did not ask twice. I will think well of her for that as long as I have anything to think with.
She paid me nine krone for the frame and the names. At the door she said, whoever pledged that glass to you did not want it back, and I said I know, and she went out and up the Alley the wrong way for a woman with money.
Twenty-two krone. Thirty days, the longest term in my book. A shop in Black Market Alley where a glass would get used up on brooches and neighbours and a fee-collector and a boy, and be a fistful of grit before anybody could carry it up the Cliff Road and hold it over a dinner table. Three spent before it came to me, in some other shop, by some other fool who thought she was being prudent. I was not robbed. I was the term. I was the clock they set it down in front of.
I have the frame on the shelf behind the counter and I am not going to sell it.
I have stopped painting the ochre on my door. There is no sense in it and I would rather have the doorway plain.
Miklos sleeps in the back room in the daytime with the shutter closed. In the evening I carry his supper in and set it down, and take away last night's plate with nothing gone off it. He says good night to me and I say it back. He has his voice, and his hands go where his hands have always gone, and he asks after the takings.
I do not need a glass. I am not going to be talked out of him.