Chapter Nine — The Work Begins Again

Three days. Five faces. Two weeks of his life.

He counted them as he went. He had promised Irela he would count.

——— ◇ ———

BELLEN

He wore Bellen on the first morning for four hours.

The Third Registry smelled of old parchment and older ink — a smell Veros had known as a young man and had forgotten he had known. The clerks on the Rellyn-era desks did not know Bellen personally; Bellen had worked a different wing. They knew the face, though. A familiar greeting produced the warmth a seventy-year-old retiree drops into a room when he visits his old colleagues. One of the current clerks gave Bellen a cup of tea. One asked about his garden. Veros answered both as Bellen would have, having heard Bellen speak about these subjects at a tavern two years ago and remembered the phrases.

He found the Rellyn suit in the eleventh box of the third shelf. It was thicker than he had expected. The Tannath-Rellyn feud had generated fourteen separate Compact-court filings over eight years, of which only the last three had closed before the killings. He copied three specific references onto a folded sheet in the scribe’s half-notation Irela had taught him to read: redemption claim numbers, witness-of-record names, document-storage locations.

The fourth reference on his list — the Tannath commission paper — was not in the Rellyn suit. It would not have been. He had not expected it to be there.

Bellen left the Registry at the turn-bell. The clerks wished him well. Veros dropped the face in an alley six streets inward.

Three days of life. His hand shook when he went for the door-latch of his own house afterward, and he stood in the street for a breath before he put his key in.

——— ◇ ———

THE FACTOR

The second face was an Anchored merchant-house factor named Arvin, who worked the Tannath contract department on the scrip-redemption side and had done for nineteen years. Veros had not planned to wear Arvin. Hanno sent him in the middle of the first afternoon, with the name and a photograph drawing and the specific note that Arvin had been sent north on house business that morning and would not be back for six days.

Six days was more than enough.

Veros wore Arvin for three hours at the Tannath compound. The compound’s lower office was staffed by clerks who knew Arvin by his habits — the specific cup he used, the order in which he opened the morning accounts, the ink he favoured. Veros performed Arvin for them. He asked, in the course of a morning’s work, to see the scrip-redemption ledger for the Rellyn-era claims. A junior clerk produced it without question.

Veros read what was in the ledger. He did not copy it. He did not need to. He had an exact memory for ledger pages, and the page he had come for was a single entry that took less than a minute to read and would stay with him as long as he needed it to.

The entry confirmed what Ishmen had not said aloud. If ever claimed by a recognized heir, the Rellyn redemptions would strip the Tannath house of the copper trade that was now sixty percent of its revenue. No house survived a reversion of that size.

Arvin left the compound at the end of a morning’s accounting, on the pretense of carrying papers to a subsidiary office. Veros dropped the face behind a warehouse.

Four days. He had to sit on a crate for seven minutes before he could walk.

——— ◇ ———

THE DOCKYARD MAN

The third face he wore was a stevedore whose name he did not know — the dockyard men rotated their crews, and there were dozens of faces Veros had seen from a distance over the years. He wore one for ninety minutes. The purpose was narrow. Confirm that the Tannath-contracted ship Second Vigil was carrying Anchored-mainland copper rather than atoll copper. The distinction meant the Tannath copper routes still ran through the channels the Rellyn redemptions would have reverted.

He confirmed it. The Second Vigil was out of its Anchored-mainland berth three days hence, carrying Tannath seal-marks, copper consigned to a Tannath warehouse in the Lower City. Ishmen’s declining house was still running on the business its decline threatened to lose.

Two days of life for that one. A bargain.

He came home that evening to find Irela at the table with a stack of Compact-court copies she had made at her master’s Registry desk during the day, under the cover of legitimate apprentice business. She looked up. She looked at his face. She did not speak. He sat down across from her and drank tea.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “I will be working the Rellyn witness statements from the year before the killings.”

“Good.”

“I may be home late.”

“Good.”

She looked at him a moment longer than usual. She did not say what she was thinking. He did not ask.

——— ◇ ———

THE PORT WATCH OFFICER

Day two of the three.

The face was a Port Watch officer named Kerrin, senior, forty-two years in the harbour, whose retirement was eighteen months off. Kerrin was known to Maren Telvir’s Port Watch contact — a junior officer named Thold who had given Maren the name that had moved her list. Kerrin could approach Thold in the Harbor Master’s break room, the way a senior officer might stop a junior one over tea, and ask casually about the investigator who had come by last week.

Veros wore Kerrin for an hour and a half. The conversation with Thold took nine minutes. Thold was pleased to be spoken to by Kerrin, which was a thing Kerrin did not do often, and Thold gave up more than he should have about what he had told the investigator and what she had asked next.

What Maren had asked next was the more important information. She had asked whether anyone on the Port Watch had handled Rellyn-era passenger manifests for the week of the killings. Thold had said yes — there was a retired clerk who had, and the clerk’s name was Vellen, and Vellen lived in the fisher’s district now.

Three days at most before Maren reached Vellen and found whatever Vellen had kept. Possibly less. Veros built the estimate as he walked away from Thold and could not tighten it past days, not weeks.

Kerrin’s aging cost him two and a half days. He did not count them carefully. He knew the direction.

He went to find Vellen before Maren did.

——— ◇ ———

THE DRIFTBORN VOICE-KEEPER

The fifth face was the hardest.

A Driftborn voice-keeper — the older role in the Driftborn companies, the person who held the oral record of a ship’s voyages and of the events the ship had witnessed in harbour. The voice-keeper he chose was named Iseth, long retired, living on a pensioner’s berth in the Second Port, who had been at anchor in Karath harbour on the night of the Rellyn killings twenty years before. Iseth had preserved — as voice-keepers did — the Driftborn-side account of what had happened.

Iseth was alive. Iseth was ninety-one. Iseth did not often receive visitors, but Iseth would receive another voice-keeper from the same circle, for the ceremonial purpose of the younger voice-keeper requesting inheritance of a particular account before Iseth’s memory thinned further.

The wearing was four hours. Pelrin was her name — a woman Veros had watched work the Driftborn voice-keeper’s circle at the Second Port three years ago, across a market.

Sitting with Iseth at a low table on the covered deck of Iseth’s pension-boat was what the ceremony required. It required receiving tea in a wooden cup carved with a voice-keeper’s mark. It required using the voice-keeper formal openings — I come to carry what you have carried — and then waiting. Iseth did the rest. Iseth recited the Rellyn killing in the Driftborn oral form, which was longer than the Anchored record and contained several things the Anchored record did not.

The thing that mattered was this. Three Driftborn crews had been moored in Karath harbour that night. Two had heard the alarm only after the killings were done. One had not heard an alarm at all. That one crew had seen a man leave the Rellyn house through the upper-door kitchen service entrance at the third hour of the second watch, carrying a bundle. He had walked to the harbour and taken a ferry. Driftborn crews did not report Anchored household matters. Only the voice-keeper’s record preserved the detail.

This detail was not specific to Veros. The man could have been anyone carrying anything. But the Compact-court witnesses had reported no one leaving the house with a bundle. The two records did not agree.

Veros spoke the formal closing. Iseth drank the last of the tea. The ceremony ended.

Veros walked six streets before he dropped the face.

Four days. Five. He could not count cleanly. His left hand was slow enough that he had to use his right to open the house’s latch.

Irela was at the common-room table when he came in.

He sat down. He did not speak.

——— ◇ ———

WHAT SHE HAD FOUND

She had been working through the Rellyn witness statements from the year before the killings. She found them clean. She moved to the week of the killings. She found them clean also — the statements lined up with the Compact record.

She moved to the week after the killings. Two servants had been dismissed. A senior clerk had been transferred to a sister house on the atolls.

The senior clerk’s statement was the one she sat with for an hour.

The senior clerk had told the Compact-court investigator that he had seen the youngest Rellyn son, Teral, return home on the night of the killings by the upper-door kitchen service entrance. Teral had not spoken. Teral had gone directly through to the dining room.

Irela had checked Teral’s travel records. Teral had been on the road to the northern atolls that week. He had left Karath four days earlier. He had been found dead on the road — killed by bandits, according to the record — three days earlier.

The clerk’s statement placed Teral at the family house four days after Teral’s death.

The clerk had either been lying or had been wrong — or had seen Teral’s face on someone else.

She knew her father could wear faces. He had told her so eight days ago.

She put the pages down on the table. She sat with them. She did not go home at the turn-bell. She worked until the dusk-bell and came home then.

——— ◇ ———

He sat across from her now. His hand would not stop shaking. He put it under the table.

She looked at him for a long time.

“You are tired,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Drink your tea.”

He drank his tea.

She watched him drink it. She watched him set the cup down. She did not say anything about what she had found.

She did not have to.

He saw it in the way she looked at him. He saw that she had done the arithmetic. She had made the last calculation and had arrived at the answer. She had not yet decided what she was going to do with the answer. She was watching him to see whether he understood that she had understood.

He held her gaze. He did not speak.

She did not speak.

After a while she stood up, and she went to her room, and she closed the door. He listened to the door click. He listened to the silence after the click. The silence was the sound of his daughter knowing what he had done to her family before she existed, and not yet having decided whether knowing it was a thing she could carry.

——— ◇ ———

END OF CHAPTER NINE.