Chapter Eleven — The Hunt Within the Hunt

The morning of the meeting he went to Hanno’s.

He did not climb the outside stair quickly. The stair took him longer than it had two weeks ago. He tapped the old pattern against the frame and Hanno opened the door at the first tap, which meant Hanno had been at the window watching the street.

“Come in.”

“Not long.”

“Not long. I have the package.”

The package was a leather folder, flat enough to fit under a coat. Hanno had held it for three days since Veros had retrieved the contents from the Tannath archive through a factor’s hand. Hanno had not looked at the contents. Hanno had made this clear when he took the folder, when he had it in his cabinet, and when he set it on the table now between them.

“You know what it is,” Hanno said.

“You know I know you know.”

“I am telling you for the record.”

“Tell me.”

“The document inside this folder is a Compact-court matter. If it enters the court through the correct channel it ends a Karath merchant house. If it enters the court through an incorrect channel it ends you, the person you took it from, me, and possibly the notary whose face you wore to retrieve it. I have held it for three days in a room I sleep in. I would prefer to stop holding it.”

“I am taking it now.”

“Good.”

Veros sat. Hanno poured tea. They drank it. Hanno did not ask what the meeting at midday was. Veros did not tell him.

At the door Hanno said, “If you do not come back by the dusk-bell I will take it upon myself to send a messenger to the house.”

“Do not send a messenger. If I am not back by the dusk-bell, go to the house yourself.”

“You are asking me to bring her bad news in person.”

“I am asking you to bring her any news at all, which if I am dead she will need from someone who knew me.”

Hanno looked at him for a long moment. He did not say I will not let it come to that. He did not say you will come back. He did not perform confidence. He said only: “I will go myself.”

“Thank you.”

“Go,” Hanno said.

Veros went.

——— ◇ ———

The minor Compact registry at the edge of the Middle City took appointments between the turn-bell and the dusk-bell for private-room meetings between parties who had agreed to meet on neutral Compact ground. On entry, clerks searched both parties for weapons. The door was locked from the outside for the duration. No third-party hearing was permitted.

Veros had booked the room under a false name. He had paid in Compact scrip. He arrived twenty minutes early. He was searched. He was shown to the private room. He sat at the only table in the room, which was round and small, and he waited.

Maren Telvir came in at exactly the turn-bell.

She was younger than he had expected and older than she looked. Her coat was the colour of old iron, as Hanno’s description had said. She was carrying a leather case with a Compact seal embossed on the strap. She did not startle when she saw him, which told him she had been expecting to see someone she did not know.

She sat across from him. She placed her hands on the table in a way that was deliberate rather than casual. She did not reach for the notebook in her case.

“You are the man who has been following me,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Three occasions. Once at the General Market. Once at a fish-counter near the Harbor Master’s tower. Once outside the Telvir house gate in the evening of the first day.”

“Those were me.”

“You have worn three different faces while doing it.”

“Yes.”

“You asked for this meeting through a channel that required me to agree before knowing your face. I agreed because a man who can wear three faces in a week and who wants to meet me on Compact ground is a man who has done me the courtesy of not simply killing me.”

“I considered it.”

“I know you considered it. It is why I am here. Tell me what you want.”

——— ◇ ———

“I am the person,” he said, “you have been looking for.”

She did not speak.

“I am the man who killed the Rellyn household twenty years ago. I took the surviving infant. I raised her in Karath under the name Irela. She is alive. She is grown. She is a scribe at a Middle City counting-house. I have been protecting her from the Tannaths for twenty years and the protection is breaking. I have an offer to make you.”

“Offer?”

“I give you the Tannath commission record for the Rellyn killing. The full record. It has been retrieved from the Tannath archive in the last six days. It is sealed, dated, signed. It proves the commission by House Tannath of the killing of House Rellyn. In Compact court it ends the Tannath house. Permanently.”

“In exchange for what?”

“In exchange for you reporting to the Tannaths that the Rellyn daughter is dead. The exact specifics of the report are yours to construct. The condition is that the Tannaths believe it and stop paying to find her. You keep the commission record. You file it. You make your name on the biggest Compact case your generation will see.”

She thought about this for some time.

“The commission record,” she said, “by itself, ends my contract with the Tannaths.”

“Yes.”

“The Tannaths do not pay me if I do not deliver the heir.”

“They do not. You lose that contract. In exchange you gain the Tannath case, which once filed is not a contract but a career.”

“A career I make at the Tannaths’ expense, having taken their money for eight weeks.”

“You did eight weeks of honest investigation for them. You are not contractually obligated to continue.”

“I am obligated to report what I have found.”

“Report what you choose to report.”

She looked at him for a long time.

“You are asking me,” she said, “to take the document and not deliver the daughter.”

“Yes.”

“And you are giving me the document on faith that I will do the one and not the other.”

“On faith and one other thing.”

“What other thing?”

He looked at her.

“I am going to prove to you,” he said, “that I am the man I am claiming to be. After I have done so, you will have seen a thing that will stay with you, and you will carry it in the way that people carry such things. You will not be able to unsee it. You will report what you choose to report. I think you will report what I have asked, because I think once you have seen what I am about to show you, you will understand what is being offered and you will not want the other arrangement.”

“Show me.”

“I need to look at you for three-quarters of an hour first.”

“Look.”

——— ◇ ———

He looked at her.

He did not speak. She did not speak. She understood at some point in the first five minutes what he was doing, and he saw her understand, and he saw her decide not to ask. She sat and allowed herself to be looked at. Her eyes moved over his face in return — she was reading him with an investigator’s attention, and he was reading her with the attention of a man who had spent a career reading people to wear them.

She was thirty-one. She had her mother’s mouth. Her hands had a small fine tremor when she was concentrating. The line of her left eyebrow was slightly higher than the line of her right. Her left shoulder sat a hair lower than the right — visible in the set of her collar. She had a habit of touching her thumbnail to the inside of her ring finger when she was thinking. Her breathing was even. She did not blink at the rate an unconcentrated person blinks.

Three-quarters of an hour passed. He saw the bell ring through the registry’s windows without hearing it; the room was quiet enough that the bell was felt and not heard.

“I am ready,” he said. “What I am going to do is put your face on in front of you. I will hold it for a short time. I will drop it. I will then be older than I am now. That is the cost of it. You will understand it is mine, and not a trick, when you see how tired I am afterward.”

“Show me.”

He let his own face go. The old discipline of quieting his own face under another. For a breath he was no one. Then he drew her up.

She was in him. He felt her across his shoulders and in the set of his hands and in the way the collar of his coat sat differently on his frame and her frame. He held himself as her. The weight of her shoulders was slightly uneven. Her thumbnail found the inside of her ring finger.

He did not look in a mirror. No mirror was in the room. The room only had her face, which was across the table from him, watching her own face appear on the man who had told her, a quarter-hour earlier, that he was the Hundred.

She did not make a sound.

He held the face for less than a minute. He dropped it.

The dropping was harder than any dropping had been. She resisted him in the way a living face might resist being put away — which was new. He had never worn a face whose owner was in the room. Her face did not want to come off. When it came off, it took something with it that he did not have a word for. A minute of it. A year. He could not count. He felt it go in his left shoulder first, and then in the soft place at the base of his skull, and then in his hands.

He looked at her.

“That was my face,” she said. Her voice had no shake in it.

“Yes.”

“On you.”

“Yes.”

“You are the Hundred.”

“Yes.”

She sat with it for a moment. He did not speak. He did not try to help her process it. He was holding himself up with his hands against the table. It was not an act. It was visible.

“I accept,” she said.

——— ◇ ———

They went through the particulars.

She would file the commission record under a routine Compact procedure that would put it before a three-judge panel within a week. The procedure did not require identifying the originator of the document. It required only that the document be verifiable, which it was, and that the filing investigator be Compact-licensed in good standing, which she was. She would file it tomorrow. The Tannaths would be on the defensive by the following dusk-bell, and in formal Compact proceedings by Arhen.

She would send word to the Tannaths that the Rellyn heir had died in childhood at the southern atoll foster-house, of a fever. The source would be a record she had located. The record did not exist. It could be made to exist with a clerk’s signature and two hours of her time. The Tannaths would believe her because they wanted to believe her. They would stop paying her. She would be fine.

She would not come near Irela. She would not, for the rest of her professional life, mention the existence of the Rellyn heir to any party.

“The only person alive who will know she lived is me,” Maren said.

“Yes.”

“And my word against yours, in any future scenario in which that word became useful to me, would fail because you can wear anyone’s face and I cannot.”

“That is one way to look at it.”

“It is the accurate way to look at it.”

“It is.”

She stood. She picked up the folder. She looked at him one more time across the table.

“You are a specific kind of man,” she said, “and I do not yet know what kind.”

“I do not either.”

“I will not need to see you again.”

“No.”

“Go home.”

——— ◇ ———

He walked home slowly.

The dusk-bell rang while he was still on the upper road. He paused at the wall above the Second Port. It was the first time he had stopped there since the day he had seen the impossible face in the market. It was only the second time in the last ten days that he had been there at all. The Second Port was loud with end-of-day ships. The harbour lamps were being lit one by one along the lower piers.

He did not know if he had saved her or lost her.

He knew the documents were gone. He knew the Tannaths were gone. He knew the work was finished.

He did not know what Irela would say when he came home.

He walked on.

He did not count the walk. He was too tired to count. His left hand did not answer when he asked it to take his coat at the door. He used the right. The face he had worn for less than a minute had cost him something on the order of months — perhaps a year, perhaps more. He did not yet know how much. He suspected he would never know precisely. The body would tell him over time, in the slowness of his hands and the speed at which his hair greyed and the years that were not going to be there when he expected them to be.

He came through the door at the turn-past-dusk-bell.

Irela was at the table. Two cups. The tea was fresh.

She looked at his face. She did not speak.

He sat down across from her.

——— ◇ ———

END OF CHAPTER ELEVEN.