Sect Year 4 · seventh month · night of day 9 · the thirty-eighth life: the Vault quarter of Serai, his fourteenth year
Lisk was waiting on the Vault steps with a bundle of blank tallies under one arm. He had come up from the river street before the runners were out, and he fell into step beside Jorn without asking whether he wanted company.
“The widow was at the window again this morning,” he said. “With empty hands this time. The clerk sent her away.”
“The Vault takes coin from the carrier,” Jorn said. “Not from the widow.”
“That’s what the clerk told her.” Lisk shifted the tallies to his other arm. “She said she would wait until somebody in the Vault heard her.”
“The Vault doesn’t hear.”
“That’s what I told her, after.” Lisk looked down at the canal for a while. His face was pale under the grime of the river street. “My mother says the Vault takes what it’s given and gives nothing back. I didn’t tell her she was wrong.”
Jorn did not answer him. He climbed the last of the steps and pushed open the door on the cold hall, and Lisk went off along the wall toward the tally-cutters’ bench without another word.
