The cough that woke Noll Vey on his third morning in the wall sounded like two dry oak leaves rubbing together inside an old hymnbook.
Ahem.
Noll’s awareness snapped out of the cold mineral drift of the western masonry. For a second, disoriented by stone-sleep, he thought the one-eared rat had come back with a head cold, or that the copper adder had learned to clear its throat. Then he looked down through the damp mortar veins toward the middle of the floor.
Directly beneath the bleached ribcage of the dead goat, where a frost-crack split the hearth flagstones three inches wide, a small grey hand made entirely of clean, articulation-wired finger-bones was pushing a loose slab of slate aside.
First came a round, dome-browed skull no larger than a turnip, polished to the warm yellow-white of an old billiard ball and completely devoid of ears, nose-gristle, or hair. Next came two narrow collarbones buttoned neatly into a moth-eaten charcoal wool coat whose tails had been hemmed up three times with black linen thread so they wouldn’t drag in the mud. Last of all came a pair of bird-thin shinbones tucked into patched leather gaiters, an iron-bound ciphering slate tucked under the left elbow, and a canvas tool-roll tied around the waist with butcher’s twine.
The creature stood two feet high from the crown of his bare skull to the heels of his boots. He set the displaced flagstone neatly back over the foundation crack, brushed a flake of cold hearth-ash from his wool lapel with three brisk taps of his finger-bones, and looked straight up at the soot-tinted mortar mouth beside Noll’s blue stone.
“Forty-eight hours,” the bone imp said in a dry, papery voice that carried the crisp precision of an assize clerk calling the morning roll. “Forty-eight hours since your core seal drank a mortal breath, Master Vey, and not a single intake line entered on the parish slate. Your front door is missing, your eastern roof-truss is down in the nettles, your west drain is choked with three winters of beech leaves, and you have already encumbered the estate with a nocturnal vermin loop and an unmatured kennel claim.”
Noll stared down from his five-foot niche.
In thirty years of traveling the nine royal roads between Mere and the southern duchies, he had seen two-headed calves pickled in brandy, a woman in High Fen who could whistle two tunes at once through her teeth, and a clockwork Turk that played draughts with a magnet hidden under a baize table. He had never been lectured on real-estate maintenance by a two-foot skeleton in a cut-down wool greatcoat.
“Good morning to you too, sir,” Noll said through his mortar lips, falling back on theatrical courtesy while his thoughts scrambled for footing. “Take a seat on the bench—mind the split in the pine—and allow me to welcome you to the Grand Hall. Are you from the parish vestry, or did the Duke’s bailiffs send a very small man to collect a very small rent?”
The imp did not sit on the bench. He walked to the base of the western wall with a light, clicking step—tock-scrape, tock-scrape—and set his iron-framed slate against the stone pier below Noll’s socket.
From an outer pocket of his moth-eaten coat, he drew three short, neatly beveled stubs of chalk and laid them in a row along the wooden ledge of the bench: one of clean white tallow-chalk, one of dull slate-grey, and one the dark, rusty red of dried ox-blood.
“My name is Prit,” the imp said, folding his bony hands behind his back. “I am a certificated dungeon steward of the Old Registry, formerly attached to the Young Spring in the lower valley, and prior to that to five other wild and chartered holdings whose accounts I carry in my lining. When your blue seal woke on Tuesday evening, the foundation chime rang in the lower drift. It took me two days to climb the dry culvert because someone—I presume a badger, though I shall list it under natural subsidence—collapsed the middle drain pipe.”
“A steward,” Noll repeated, warming to the word immediately. “A butler! A stage manager! Why didn’t you say so at the start, Master Prit? You couldn’t have arrived at a better hour. The acoustics in here are capital, the location commands the entire pass above Mere, and as soon as we patch the roof and paint a signboard—”
“Before you pitch me a signboard,” Prit interrupted without raising his voice by a single fraction of a note, “we will state the articles of my service aloud so the wall may record them.”
He picked up the white chalk stub between his thumb-bone and forefinger and held it poised over the dark slate.
“First,” Prit said. “I am a sworn steward, never a slave, a familiar, or a piece of furniture. A dungeon core and its steward enter into a bilateral covenant of house management. Once witnessed, our bond allows me to feel structural breaches across your claimed masonry, to draw upon your stored force for legitimate maintenance, and to read the public face of your ledger.”
“Reasonable,” Noll said. “Every leading man needs a treasurer who knows where the ticket box is kept. And second?”
“Second,” Prit continued, his empty eye-sockets fixed steadily on the mortar mouth, “the bond grants you zero dominion over my mind, my movement, my speech, or my conscience. You cannot compel me to strike a guest, you cannot lock a door against my departure, and if you attempt to use my voice as a proxy for an unbacked claim, the ledger will bill your own stone before the ink is dry. Do you accept the customary terms of stewardship, or shall I pack my chalk and walk back down the culvert?”
Noll looked down at the small figure standing in the cold draft.
There was no swagger in the bone imp’s posture, and no fear either. The moth-eaten wool coat had been darned in twenty places with three different shades of grey thread, the iron frame of his slate was rubbed bright at the corners from decades of thumb-wear, and the three stubs of chalk on the bench were trimmed with a knife so they wouldn’t crumble in a pocket.
Noll had worked with enough stage carpenters and tent-riggers to know a professional when one walked into the barn. A man who boasted that he could build anything in an hour always stole the brass screws before Saturday; a man who started by reading you his union rules and showing you his own clean tools kept the roof from falling on your head in a gale.
“Master Prit,” Noll said, dropping the carnival drum-roll out of his baritone and speaking in the plain, level voice he had used behind the curtain after the crowd went home, “I have no hands, my roof has a tree growing through it, and until five minutes ago my only conversational partner was a copper snake that went out to look for frogs. I accept your terms down to the last stitch on your coat. You are the steward, I am the host, and neither of us owns an inch of the other’s skull.”
Prit tilted his round skull a fraction of an inch to the left, listening to the resonance of the mortar seam as if testing a silver coin against a countertop.
Apparently satisfied that Noll had not tucked a mental finger-cross behind the vow, the imp brought the white chalk stub down on the slate and wrote two lines in a small, square, copperplate hand that did not wobble once.
Immediately, a warm, steady thread—nothing like the feverish jolt of a believed lie, much closer to the quiet click of an oak mortise sliding home on a tenon—linked the western wall niche to the small bone chest standing below it.
STEWARD COVENANT REGISTERED. HOST: NOLL VEY. STEWARD: PRIT.
Through that thin thread of connection, Noll suddenly felt the outer edges of his room with twice his former clarity: he knew without looking where the mortar was sound behind the north sconce, which three roof timbers were too rotten to bear snow, and how many ounces of dry barley-lime remained in the tub under the cellar stair.
Prit blew a speck of white chalk dust off the corner of the slate, tucked the grey and red stubs back into his lapel pocket, and turned his hollow eye-sockets toward the middle of the floor.
“Now then,” Prit said briskly. “Intake item the first. The deceased goat beside the hearth—are we listing it under permanent room furnishings, or were you saving it for provisions?”
“Put it down under late tenants who died owing rent,” Noll answered brightly. “And tell me what those other two pieces of chalk are for before you start marking up my walls.”
Prit tapped his finger-bones against his slate frame with a sharp, dry clatter. “The grey stub is for audits, Master Vey. The red stub is for emergencies, structural hazard warnings, and notices of foreclosure. With proper bookkeeping, you will never see the red chalk leave its cloth wrap. With improper bookkeeping, it will be the only thing visible between your ceiling and your floor.”
“A comforting doctrine,” Noll said, the mortar lips curving into something that sounded very much like his old platform grin. “Spoken like a true man of business.”