Chapter Four — The Cost of Looking

The face he chose was a pensioner’s.

He had worn it before, twenty-two years ago, on a small job that had required him to sit on a harbor bench for an afternoon and be unremarkable. The man whose face it was had been dead a long time by then. Veros had looked at him for three-quarters of an hour from across a crowded fish-counter and had never seen him again. That was the minimum he required. Three-quarters of an hour of sustained observation. He had not known at the time that he would still be carrying the face twenty-two years later.

Carrying was not the right word. The faces did not take up room. They sat in him the way the lines of a familiar road sat in him — accessible when he needed them, gone from thought when he did not.

He went into the back room of his own house and did what he had not done in twenty years.

It took him longer than it used to. He sat in the chair by the small mirror and let his own face go first. That was the part that had always taken the most discipline — not the building of another face over his, but the quieting of his own beneath it. For a breath he was no one at all. Then the pensioner was there.

The old man was in the glass. A different bone structure. A different set to the shoulders. The posture of a man who had spent thirty years carrying loads on a pier and had carried them on his left side. His eyes were different from Veros’s. His hands were the same size but his fingers were shorter — Veros had moved the proportion because the pensioner had been a shorter man.

He put on the pensioner’s coat, which was his own coat and had never belonged to any pensioner, but which read as a pensioner’s coat once the man inside was the right shape for it.

He left by the back way.

——— ◇ ———

The Telvir house stood on the northern side of the lower road, two streets inward from the Second Port. It had a single lamp burning in a ground-floor window whose curtain had not been drawn. The lamp burned for business hours. A sign in Compact-standard letters said the house took walk-in inquiries between the turn-bell and the first night-bell. Veros had no intention of being a walk-in inquiry. He took up his position at a fish-counter forty paces from the door and waited to see what Maren Telvir did with a day.

She came out at the turn-bell. She had a coat the colour of old iron and a leather case under her arm. She did not look at the street when she stepped into it. She looked at her own hands — adjusting the case strap, checking a fastening — and when she walked, she walked at the pace of a person with a specific destination and a thirty-minute window to reach it.

Veros fell in at a distance and watched her work.

She went first to the Compact archive hall in the Middle City. She was there for forty minutes. When she came out she had two fresh pages in the case. She went from there to the General Market, where she bought a hand-pie and ate it standing at the edge of the square. She did not look at the stalls. She looked at the crowd — not searching, but reading — the way a woman in her trade read the air around her for the shape of a following step. Veros had gone still twice in that eating period. Once behind a cart of cured fish. Once in the shadow of a cloth stall. Both times he had felt the faint prickle of her attention without her eyes finding him.

She was good. He had known from Hanno’s description that she would be good. It was a different thing to watch her work.

After the market she went to the Second Port. She spoke with a Port Watch officer at the Harbor Master’s tower for nineteen minutes. She took no notes in the officer’s presence. When she stepped away, she walked three streets before she stopped in a doorway and wrote eight lines in a small book from her case. Veros could not read the lines from where he stood. He did not need to. He knew what a person looked like when she had received information that changed the shape of what she thought was true.

By the fourth hour of the day, he understood the frame of what she was doing.

She was not looking for him. She was looking for what had happened to the youngest Rellyn son. She had a list of people who might have seen the Rellyn son alive after the night he was supposed to have died. She was working through the list by date of last known sighting. The Port Watch officer had given her a name that moved the list. When she finished the list, she would reach the conclusion Hanno had said she would reach. She would not reach it today. She might reach it in a week.

He had six hours of face left in him, by his own count, before he would need to drop it.

He followed her through the fifth and the sixth.

She returned to the Telvir house by the dusk-bell. She did not stop anywhere on the way. She had done four visits, written eleven pages of notes, and spoken with perhaps twelve people. She had moved through the city as though the city were a document and she was reading it.

——— ◇ ———

Veros went home by a way that was not his own way. He went into the back room before he saw Irela. He sat in the chair by the mirror and let the face go.

It did not come off the way he remembered. Twenty years ago a face had come away like a coat being shrugged. This one resisted him. He had to pull at the edges of it with concentration he had not needed to use before. When it finally lifted, the room went briefly grey, and then it was him in the mirror again.

Him — but older than he had been that morning.

His hair at the temples had gone a shade further toward white. A line at the corner of his right eye had deepened. His skin had the texture of paper that had been left out. He moved his hand; it was slower than it had been that morning. He moved the other hand; the same.

He looked at his hands for a long time.

Six hours of wearing. Perhaps four days, by the old calculations. Possibly five — the calibration was approximate in the old days, and he had not needed to recalibrate. He did the mental arithmetic of his remaining budget without writing it down. He had never written it down. That had been the one rule he had imposed on himself at the beginning of the career — not to count. Counting would make him conservative. Conservative was the one quality that got a man in his trade killed.

He counted now.

He did not have the number precisely. He had the range. Somewhere between eight years and twelve, at his current condition and current pace, not doing any more work. Less if he kept working. Much less if he wore faces for the durations the coming days would require.

It was a budget. It had a floor. He had not permitted himself to think of it as a budget for twenty years, and looking at it now was like looking at a sum of money he had been spending freely and had not counted until the withdrawal.

He understood, sitting in front of the mirror with his hands gone still on the chair-arms, that he was going to spend most of what remained. Not all of it. Enough of it to buy Irela out of the trouble he had brought to her door. He did not know yet what that would cost in years. He knew it would be more than he wanted and less than it should have been. The price he should have been paying was the price he had already failed to pay twenty years ago, when he had walked into a Rellyn nursery and decided to take the baby instead of finishing the contract.

He stood up. His knee gave him its complaint, late now, catching up.

——— ◇ ———

He walked out of the back room and into the common room and sat down at the table where he had sat twenty thousand times across twenty years. Irela was at the counter. She turned when she heard him, and she did not, for once, hide what her face did when she saw him.

“You have aged,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Since this morning.”

“Yes.”

She set down whatever she had been holding and came to him. She put her hand along the side of his face. Her palm was warm. He had not known his own face was cold until her hand was there.

“Tell me,” she said.

He did not answer at once. He had not decided, before that moment, how much he would tell her tonight. He looked at her hand on his face. She was twenty years old. She had lived in this house for twenty years. He had watched her become the woman standing in front of him. He had paid in his own years for every week of her safety, and the price of those years had not been an unfair one.

He opened his mouth to begin.

——— ◇ ———

He told her about the faces.

He did not tell her whose faces. He did not tell her why. He told her about the mechanism, which was the part she needed to understand what she was seeing in his hair and in his skin and in the slowness of his hand. She listened. She did not interrupt. When he finished she sat with him for a long time without speaking, and then she said only one thing.

“Who are the people you are wearing the face for?”

He told her he would answer that question tomorrow.

She nodded once. She did not press.

He went to bed early that night. His body required it. Before he closed his eyes he wrote two lines to Hanno on the back of the morning’s note, asking for the merchant-house names by the morning.

——— ◇ ———

END OF CHAPTER FOUR.