For a quarter of an hour after Prit tucked the oilskin packet back into his coat, Noll Vey obeyed his new bookkeeper like a choirboy at catechism.
Without a single flourish or joke, he recited the exact wording of the midnight boast he had pushed through the cellar riser to scare the red vixen (D-02, one heavy watch-hound in the dark, blind to lantern light, hunting by warm breath), while Prit’s white chalk went scritch-scritch-tap across the iron-framed slate.
“Witness weight: one wild vixen,” Prit read aloud as he ruled a neat vertical line beside the entry. “Maturity clock: slow accumulation, currently standing at twelve percent saturation. Because you did not specify breed, flesh, or mortal birth—only weight, blindness, and tracking by warm breath—the ledger is presently assembling the hound out of whatever raw rubble sits beneath the cellar steps. If you refrain from gorging yourself on reckless human claims, we will have several weeks to prepare a kennel before it walks up the stair.”
“A dog made of cellar rubble,” Noll mused from the wall seam. “Well, at least he won’t cost much in mutton bones.”
Now that the five grim files were out of sight inside Prit’s coat lining, Noll’s natural buoyancy—the stubborn, cork-in-a-storm instinct that had kept him talking through nineteen years of bad inns and worse constables—began to bob back to the surface. It wasn’t that he doubted Prit’s stories about the cistern, the bridge, the orchard, Luma’s orphans, or Ossa Flint’s iron collar. They had chilled him right down to his rear mortar cramps.
Yet Noll Vey had spent his whole life around people who told him that the game was rigged and the bailiff always won, and his answer had always been the same: they simply pitched the wrong crowd.
“Still, Master Prit,” Noll said, letting a little velvet warmth creep back into his mortar baritone, “you have to admit those first five masters of yours were working in terribly rough trades. Waterworks, toll bridges, apple orchards, army barracks—that’s heavy contractor work! No wonder the dukes and the taxfarmers squeezed them dry. Now, you and I are in the entertainment and hospitality business. Suppose—purely as an exercise in arithmetic, mind you!—two or three plump wool-merchants from the south road take shelter here during a thunderstorm.”
Prit’s chalk paused. His hollow eye-sockets lifted half an inch toward the wall. “Go on.”
“Suppose,” Noll said brightly, warming to his theme, “we don’t say a word about military forts or municipal water or hiding orphans from the Crown. We simply offer them a cosy parlor, a glass of spring water, and a modest, gentlemanly rumor that a draught from our well cures the gout and takes ten winters off a rich man’s knees! Think of the witness weight on three gouty aldermen, Prit! They’d leave ten silver crowns on the bench out of sheer gratitude, we’d have enough points to roof the whole fort in copper slate before Tuesday, and even when the debt comes due, what’s the harm? Three old skinflints walk down the hill with spryer knees! Nobody gets burned, nobody gets crushed, and everybody goes home smiling!”
Noll paused, rather pleased with the humanitarian neatness of the pitch.
Prit looked at the wall for five seconds.
Then, without saying a word, the small bone imp reached inside his right-hand coat lapel—not the left pocket where the five old files rested, but a separate stitched pouch over his collar-bone—and drew out a single loose tablet of grey slate no larger than a playing card.
Unlike the five older files, the chalk marks on this sixth tablet weren’t faded at all. A smudge of dried mineral mud from the lower valley still clung to its lower corner.
“You noticed,” Prit said in his dry, level voice, “that when I introduced myself, I mentioned six former masters, and showed you five files.”
“I thought you were saving the sixth for an encore,” Noll said, though a sudden draft seemed to have got into his mortar flute.
“Master the Sixth,” Prit said, laying the small grey tablet beside the white ledger on the pine bench, “was The Young Spring. Four years ago, three leagues south of Mere where the warm sulphur creek crosses the old pilgrimage track. A Hearth-rank core set inside a roman bathhouse ruin. And unlike the bridge or the orchard, Master Vey, The Young Spring had your exact bright idea.”
Noll watched the grey tablet through his floor sight. At the top of the card, in Prit’s square hand, was written:
FILE VI: THE YOUNG SPRING — RAZED 14 OCTOBER (4 YRS PRIOR). CAUSE: FULFILLED BENEVOLENCE.
“A rich leather-tanner from Crosskeys came up the creek in a horse-litter with the dropsy and eighty-two years on his back,” Prit said quietly. “The core wanted points to rebuild its colonnade and tile the plunge-pool. So it whispered through the steam-vent that three dips in the mineral basin would wash forty years off a pilgrim’s bones. The tanner believed it. He paid four gold sovereigns into the alms-box, climbed down into the mud with two servants holding his elbows, and soaked until midnight.”
“And?” Noll asked. “Did the ledger balk at curing him?”
“The ledger never balks once the stake is accepted,” Prit said. “The tanner was small weight by himself, so the clock ran thirty days. During those thirty days, the tanner told six other wealthy elders in Crosskeys and Greyford—two wool-factors, a retired magistrate, a widow who owned three river-mills, and a pair of brothers who held the salt monopoly. All seven of them came up the hill with their purses open. All seven believed with the terrifying, desperate ferocity of old people who are afraid of the churchyard. By the twentieth day, the core was swimming in silver and had raised a marble dome over the pool.”
“There, you see!” Noll said, though he kept his voice cautious. “A marble dome and seven paying guests!”
“On the thirtieth morning,” Prit continued as if Noll had not spoken, “the debt matured. All of it at once. The seven elders stepped out of the sulphur water with dark hair on their scalps, sound teeth in their jaws, straight spines, and forty years of hard labour left in their muscles.”
Prit picked up a pinch of cold hearth-ash between his bony fingers and let it sift back down onto the flagstones.
“Within forty-eight hours,” Prit said, “the tanner’s three fifty-year-old sons, the widow’s nephews, the magistrate’s son-in-law, and the salt-monopoly heirs rode up the valley with forty hired quarrymen, six kegs of blasting powder, and a writ from the duchy court.”
Noll blinked inside his facets. “Wait. Their own children? Why in the name of the seven dukes would their own children blow up a bathhouse that cured their parents?”
“Because,” Prit said with bone-dry precision, “a forty-year-old man who returns to his counting-house with black hair does not hand the keys of the tannery over to his fifty-year-old son. He takes back his ledger, cancels the allowance, moves back into the master bedroom, and tells his grown children to go haul hides in the yard for another thirty years until he gets old a second time. Furthermore, the parish tax-assessor immediately reclassified all seven rejuvenated elders as prime able-bodied corvée laborers and billed the town back-taxes for their years of exemption.”
The silence in the Grand Hall stretched out until the drip in the chimney sounded loud as a hammer.
“The heirs called it theft of lawful succession and generational labor,” Prit said, brushing a speck of grey dust from the corner of the sixth slate with the cuff of his wool coat. “The rejuvenated parents fought their own sons on the bathhouse steps with walking-sticks. The quarrymen drove three iron drills into the marble dome, packed the vents with black powder, and blew The Young Spring into gravel while the pilgrims were still arguing over the salt-house deeds in the courtyard. I spent three nights in the creek mud with a sieve gathering enough fragments of my master’s stone to bury under the willow tree so the road-menders wouldn’t use him to fill ruts.”
Noll looked at the small bone imp sitting on the split pine bench.
In the grey morning light filtering through the elderberry roots, the three different colors of darning thread on Prit’s coat—where the wool had been torn by brambles or flying shale and painstakingly stitched back together by fleshless fingers—suddenly looked very different to Noll Vey.
At first glance, he had taken Prit for a fussy little parish beadle who loved rules because rules gave a small creature an excuse to boss a larger one.
Now Noll saw how Prit’s bony thumb lingered for half a breath on the mud-stained corner of File the Sixth before setting it upright on the stone ledge right beside Noll’s core socket.
Prit didn’t keep lists because he had a cold heart. He kept lists because in sixty-eight years of watching greedy dukes, lazy clerks, and desperate mortals tear everything gentle to pieces and then rewrite the court records afterward, a neat slate with the true names on it was the only grave-marker his friends had left.
“Leave that card right there on the shelf, Master Prit,” Noll said quietly, all the stage brass gone out of his voice. “Right where I have to look at it before I open my mouth.”
Prit adjusted the grey slate a sixteenth of an inch until its edge stood parallel with the mortar seam.
“It is already filed under permanent cautions, Master Vey,” the imp said, picking up his white chalk again. “Now, if we are quite finished planning our career as a spa for litigious aldermen, I suggest we inspect the northern doorway before the frost-heave brings the lintel down.”