Chapter Two — Hanno’s Room Above the Shop

The Lower City was darker than Veros remembered. That was a mark of the hour, not the city — he had not been out after the dusk-bell for a long time, and a man’s memory of a place shifts when he is not there to correct it.

The shop was on the second tier of the lower road, between a cooperage and a house of small magistrates. Hanno’s room was above the shop, up an outside stair that had been built to look neglected on purpose. Veros climbed the stair slowly. He gave his left knee its time. He did not knock when he reached the door; he tapped twice against the frame and once against the jamb, a pattern he and Hanno had agreed on a long time ago and never revised.

The door opened a finger-width. An eye looked out. The door opened fully.

“You’re ten years late for this visit,” Hanno said.

“I was busy.”

“Busy being respectable.”

“Busy being a father.”

Hanno stood aside. “Those are the same thing, the way you do them. Come in.”

The room was small, clean, and warmer than the stair. A single lamp burned on a table. Two chairs. A cabinet along one wall, closed. A window that faced nothing in particular. The smell was tea and ink and a faint underlayer of tallow that Hanno had never been able to clear from the walls.

Veros sat in the chair nearest the door, because that was where he always sat. Hanno closed the window-shutter, set a second cup beside the first, and poured. He did not ask what Veros wanted in the tea. He did not need to.

“Before you say anything,” Hanno said, “I want to note that this is the first time in twenty years you have come up these stairs without sending word ahead.”

“I know.”

“I want to note that because whatever brings you here is not small.”

“I know.”

“Fine. Proceed.”

Veros held the cup without drinking. The warmth was good against his hand. He thought about what to ask, and then he thought about what not to ask, and then he noticed Hanno watching him think and understood that Hanno had already answered most of the question.

“Someone has been asking,” Veros said.

“Yes.”

“Old work.”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Eight weeks, that I know of. Possibly longer. The asking has been quiet. The asking has been by someone who understands the shape of what they’re asking about — and that is the part that should concern you.”

Veros drank from the cup. He set it down.

“Tell me what you can.”

Hanno refilled his own cup. He did not refill Veros’s, because Veros had not emptied it, and Hanno had never in their acquaintance wasted a movement.

“A young investigator. Anchored. Compact-licensed. A Karath house that has been making its name on old cases. The coin-side of it is that the house is paid on results, which means whoever hired them wants this closed, not merely inquired into. The scrip-side of it is that the house has already made a junior partner out of whoever is running the investigation, which means the house is betting its reputation on finding what was asked to be found.”

“Name?”

“The investigator’s, or the house’s?”

“Either. Both.”

“Not yet. I have a letter I can send to a cousin. The cousin works on the Port Watch pensioner side of things — he sees names. He doesn’t always see them fresh, but he sees them eventually. If I send tonight, I hear in three days.”

“Send tonight.”

“I was going to.”

Veros lifted the cup again and did not drink. “Anyone else?”

“Nothing I’ve caught. Which is not the same as nothing happening.”

“Understood.”

Hanno set his cup down. He looked at Veros across the small table. “I am going to say one thing that is not business and you can pretend you did not hear it. You came up these stairs slowly.”

“I came up these stairs the way I came up them last month.”

“You did not come up them last month.”

“I came up them when I needed to.”

“Your hand when you reached for the cup. A year ago it would have been steadier.”

Veros held Hanno’s eye for three seconds and then looked at the lamp. He had known this was coming. Hanno was a reader of people in a specific way — not the way Veros read faces, but a cousin of it. Veros had allowed Hanno closer to the truth than anyone else living, and the price of that nearness was that Hanno saw things Veros would have preferred unread.

“I am fine,” Veros said.

“I did not ask whether you were fine. I made an observation.”

“Your observation is noted.”

“Good.” Hanno picked up his cup again. “I will send the letter. You will hear in three days. I will also, without being asked, put out two other threads, both quiet. If the answer comes back smaller than I expect, I will tell you to be less worried. If it comes back bigger, I will tell you that too. The worry-side of it, I leave to you. The information-side, I’ll handle.”

“Thank you.”

Hanno made a dismissive gesture that meant you are welcome, now leave. Veros finished the tea in one swallow and stood.

At the door, he turned back. “Hanno.”

“Yes.”

“You have not asked what the asking is about.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because if you tell me, I become someone who knows, and I am too old to be someone who knows.” Hanno set his cup down precisely. “When you want to tell me, you will. Until then I will do the work of a man who does not know, and who is better at the work for it.”

Veros stood at the door a moment before he went through it. There was nothing he could say that would not be a lie. He nodded once and went out.

——— ◇ ———

The walk back to his own quarter took twenty-two minutes at the pace his left knee would set. Veros knew the number because he had counted it once, as a younger man. He had needed to know how long it would take him to get from Hanno’s door to his own if something went wrong and he had to move. The number had been fourteen minutes, then. Now it was twenty-two. The eight minutes were what twenty years had cost him, and tonight was the first night in twenty years he had needed to know what they had cost.

His eyes had begun to work the street as he walked. He had not told them to. They catalogued doorways, lit windows, the angle of shadows in the narrow places between buildings. They noted which lamps had been lit from the outside and which from within. He had not done this work for twenty years. He was doing it now without knowing he had started, and the knowing-without-deciding was itself a tell — the body remembered what the man had told himself he had finished with.

His own street was quiet. The quarter-hour after the first night-bell had passed. Lamps burned in two of the four houses nearest his own. The kitchen-window of the household two doors down was lit; the woman who lived there slept late and worked late both, and the light was a reliable thing.

He let himself in. He closed the door with the careful pressure that did not wake the hinges. He did not light a lamp.

Irela was asleep in the common room. She had meant to read after dinner and had fallen asleep over the book, as she did perhaps one night in four. The lamp she had been reading by was out; she had lit a candle instead, and the candle had burned most of the way down. Her head was on her folded arm. Her hair had come loose on one side.

Veros stood at the edge of the room and watched her sleep.

He had done this every night of her life. He had not decided to do it; he had simply never stopped, because watching her sleep was the proof he gave himself, every night, that the work he had done before her existed had been worth the cost of doing it.

Her hair had come loose on the right side. He raised his hand to tuck it back, and then he lowered it without moving closer. His hand was not the hand that should touch her hair tonight. The hand that had walked up Hanno’s stair and counted shadows on the way home was not the hand of the father he had taught himself to be over twenty years. It was the hand of an older man, the one he had buried when she was born — and he was not yet sure which hand he would still be wearing in the morning.

The candle guttered. He did not move to replace it.

——— ◇ ———

From the street outside came a sound he had not heard in twenty years. A runner’s footfall — light, quick, carrying the economy of a body that had been trained to move quietly and had not forgotten. The footfall passed his own door and continued down the street, toward the lower tier, toward the direction of Hanno’s shop.

Veros knew what the footfall meant. Someone had been watching the door of his house when he had left for Hanno’s tonight, and that someone had now sent word — not to Veros’s house, where the watching-work was already done, but to Hanno’s. Whoever was asking after Veros’s old work had decided, in the hours he had been gone, that Hanno was a thread worth pulling.

He stood at the window. He did not go to it. He listened until the runner’s footfall was past the next turn and lost in the distance of the lower city.

Then he sat down in the chair across from his sleeping daughter, and he put his hands in his lap, and he counted slowly to fifty so that his breathing would settle before she woke.

——— ◇ ———

END OF CHAPTER TWO.