At home, every bank had a gratification policy, and every officer had read it exactly once.
It came as a booklet on your first day, between the uniform form and the parking form, with a photograph of the president director on the cover looking disappointed in you in advance. It said, in eleven pages, what could have been said in one sentence: anything a customer gives you, you write down. A box of mooncakes at the festival. A basket of fruit from a grateful widow. An envelope you did not open. You wrote it in the register within a few days, and Compliance decided whether you kept it, returned it, or put it in the staff pantry for everyone.
Nobody liked the policy. Everybody understood it. A gift you don't write down becomes a debt you don't know you owe.
On the morning of Day 421, a young man walked into the Aubrelle Trust House with an armful of flowers.
It was the second bell. The shutters were up. Wat stood at the strongroom door with his key on its cord and his enormous, patient hands folded, Corvin was on his stool on my side of the counter, and Ivo was on the step outside with Gil's broom, sweeping the street of the goldsmiths for the third morning running, with the grim dedication of a man paying off a loaf.
The young man stepped over the broom.
He was tall and lean, about twenty-five, with black hair cut short in a way that had clearly cost money, warm brown eyes, and a quick, easy grin that showed one crooked tooth at the side, as though the grin had been put together in a hurry and nobody had minded. He wore the green coat of the Adventurers' Guild, but not the way Liesl wore hers: this one had been taken in at the waist and shoulders by a tailor who knew his business. A small silver ring glinted in one ear. And he talked, I discovered almost at once, with his hands.
"You're here," he said. "You're actually here. They said the escort came in on Day 417, and I thought, well, the court's on Day 427, she'll be busy, she won't open—" one hand waved at the shutters, "—but you have. Good morning. These are for you."
He held out the flowers.
They were very good flowers, blue and white, the kind sold in the square by the river, tied with a ribbon. I looked at them. My face did nothing.
Flowers. FLOWERS. At the counter. In front of witnesses. During business hours. Is this a bribe? Is it a test? Is Compliance watching? There is no Compliance here. I am Compliance. Oh no. At home this goes in the register within the week, or Compliance sends you an email with no greeting and no sign-off, and I have never been so frightened by an absence of punctuation.
"Thank you very much," I said. "Please wait a moment."
I took out my notebook, turned to a fresh page at the back and ruled it into columns, while the young man watched with growing delight. Date. Given by. Given to. Description. Estimated value. Action.
Day 421. Given by: a young man from the Guild Hall (name to follow). Given to: the keeper. Description: flowers, blue and white, one ribbon. Value: perhaps four bits. Action: returned with thanks.
Then I held them out to him again.
"I'm afraid I can't accept these," I said. "Gifts to an officer of the house must be written down and returned. It's a rule."
He looked at the flowers. He looked at the register. Then he laughed, delighted, as though I had just shown him a very good card trick.
"You wrote them down," he said. "Rook said you would. He wrote, she writes everything down. He underlined it." He took the flowers back without the least offense and tucked them under one arm. "My name's Kit. I've read every letter Rook Varga has sent to the Guild Hall about you since last year. I know your rate board. Savings fee, five bits a year. Term deposit, one part in twenty-five. Trade loans, one part in twelve. Transfers between doors, one part in a hundred, never more than a mark, never more than fifty crowns a person." He ticked them off on his fingers. "An escort every six weeks under Hedda Brask. I was in the crowd at the gate on Day 127, when your partner counted the crowns out onto the tailboard. I've wanted to work behind this counter ever since."
There was a short silence in the Aubrelle Trust House.
Behind me, Corvin made a very small sound, like a man who has bitten a coin and found it exactly the right weight, and does not trust it.
"Thank you for your interest," I said. "Applications are made on a form."
"Of course they are," said Kit, beaming, and went off down the street with the flowers under his arm, presumably to find someone who was allowed to keep them.
Outside, Ivo had stopped sweeping.
He was leaning on the broom, watching Kit go with his narrow grey-green eyes, the way he had watched me on the first morning in the loft. When the green coat had turned the corner, he came to the doorway and looked at my notebook, at the new page with its ruled columns.
"He wants something," he said.
"Yes," I said. "That's why I wrote it down."
Ivo looked at me a moment longer than usual. It was not the look from the loft. I didn't know what it was. Then he nodded once, very slightly, the way you nod at a sum that has come out right, and went back to the step.
He agreed with me. About something. For the first time. He nodded! Was that a nod? It was half a nod. It was a nod at a sum, not at me. Does that count? Why do I want it to count?
At home, that would not have been worth writing down. I'm going to write it down anyway. Small. In the margin. Where nobody reads.
He came back after the noon bell, without the flowers, and filled in the form at the end of the counter, standing up, with a borrowed pen, while the queue went round him.
Name. He wrote Kit, with a flourish, and nothing else.
Age. Twenty-five.
Trade. Clerk, Guild counter, Aubrelle Hall. Seven years.
Ties to this house. He thought about that one for a long time, with the end of the pen in his teeth. Then he wrote: None yet.
Previous employment. See above. Before that, three seasons on the road with a Guild crew, at seventeen. Hopeless with a sword. Good with the crew's accounts.
Where do you see yourself in five seasons?
He did not think about that one at all.
Behind that counter, he wrote, beside you.
He slid the form across to me with both hands, the way people at home slide their documents across to a teller when they very much want the transaction to go through.
I read it.
Behind the counter, beside the keeper. In five seasons. A clear career goal! Ambitious but realistic! Expressed with confidence! HR would underline it twice and put a star next to it. Pak Haris would have hired him on the spot and handed him a target sheet by lunch. Why is Corvin making that noise?
"Thank you," I said. "Your family name, please."
"Ah," said Kit.
"The form needs a full name."
"I know." He ran a hand through his expensive hair. "I'd like you to read the rest of it first. Without the name." His grin went a little crooked. "People read me differently once they've got the name. I'd like one form in my life read the other way round."
A candidate withholding information at application. That's the first item on the list of things that make a recruiter say "hmm". It makes ME want to say "hmm". I don't say "hmm". That's Rook. Is it spreading?
Except that he told me he was withholding it. Out loud. To my face. Nobody at home ever did that. What do you do with an honest withholder? Is that a category? I'll make it a category.
"Then your application is incomplete," I said, and wrote it at the top of the form in small, neat capitals: INCOMPLETE. "When you bring your family name, it will be complete."
"Pending," said Kit, delighted. "Like your rows. Rook wrote about those too."
"Yes," I said.
He leaned his elbows on the counter, uninvited, and looked past me at the rate board Corvin had painted for this door, the twin of the one at home.
"May I tell you something about your transfers?" he said. "Not to impress you. Well. Partly to impress you." He nodded at the sign by the door, the one about run days. "An adventurer comes into Aubrelle off the east road with a Guild Card. He can draw at our counter on any working day, at any of thirty-one halls in the kingdom. It costs him three in a hundred, which he hates, because it's robbery, which it is. The crystals cost a fortune to keep lit, and we charge him for it." He turned one hand over. "Now he comes in with one of your passbooks instead. Your fee's better. For a big sum, far better. But your door here is shut for most of every six weeks. What does he do on all the other days?"
Nobody answered.
"He uses the card," said Kit gently. "And he grumbles. And next season he puts his coin back in the Guild's vault, because a door that's shut isn't cheaper. It's just shut."
Corvin had stopped writing.
He's right. He's completely right. He said it in the time it takes to count a stack of marks, the Grandmaster is going to say exactly the same thing to me within days, and I don't have an answer. I don't have an ANSWER. Breathe. Nod. Nod like a woman with an answer.
At home, this is called a pain point. You pay consultants a fortune to find them for you. This one walked in free, with flowers. Is that worse? It feels worse.
"Thank you," I said. "That's very useful."
"I know," said Kit, and grinned, and went.
Corvin waited until the green coat had turned the corner. Then he put down his pen.
"Guild spy," he said.
"He told us the Guild's weak point."
"Exactly," said Corvin. "Who tells a rival the Guild's weak point on his very first morning? Either a fool or a man who's been sent." He clicked my pen four times, viciously. "And he isn't a fool."
Gil Harker, who had come in to deposit the takings from three barges and stayed to watch, shook his sunburnt head so hard his enormous moustache swung.
"Spy?" he roared. "That's no spy. I've seen that face on bargemen. That lad's sweet on her."
"On the house," I corrected. "He's very enthusiastic about the house."
Gil looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at Corvin, and Corvin looked at the ceiling.
I turned to Tamsin, who was leaning against the doorframe as she always does, crossbow and all.
"What do you think of him?" I asked.
Tamsin considered the empty street where Kit had been.
"Coat," she said.
Good coat, I translated. The courier said that too. Two independent sources. At home, that's enough for a report. What would the report SAY? "Applicant: well dressed." I can't put that in a report. Can I?
Lotte said the most about him, that evening in the loft, without looking up from Ivo's lesson.
"He came to the door twice last season," she said, "when I had it. Asked when the keeper would be back. Never opened an account." She paused with the chalk in the air. "He asked if you were well. Both times."
"That's very conscientious of him," I said.
Lotte looked at me. Her dimple appeared, and this time, I think, she meant it.
On the floor in front of her, Ivo had written his first whole word on her board, in careful, upright letters that looked, I noticed, a great deal like the ones on my sign.
It said BREAD.
On Restday, the pastries came to the inn.
They came at the first bell, in a flat basket lined with a clean cloth, carried by a boy from a bakery on the hill that baked on Restday for people who could pay for it. He would not say who had sent them. He had been paid, he said, to say nothing and to wait for an answer. There were twelve. They were glazed with honey and filled with something that smelled of almonds, and they were, without question, the most beautiful pastries I had seen since a hotel buffet in Jakarta on the night of a regional sales award, which I did not win.
Gratification, second instance, I thought, standing in the inn yard in my blazer with the basket in both arms. Perishable! Twelve! Glazed! They'll spoil before I can return them, and if they spoil it's waste, and if I eat one it's a bribe, and if I send them back he'll send thirteen—
Wait. There was a clause for this. Perishable gifts: write them down, then share them with the whole branch, so that nobody in particular has been given anything. Our branch ate a great many mooncakes that way. Nobody's judgment was ever affected by a mooncake. That was the theory. Share them. Quickly, before they turn into a bribe.
I wrote it in the register. Day 422. Pastries, twelve. Value: perhaps two marks. Action: perishable; shared among all present. Then I gave the bakery boy a bit for his trouble, which I also wrote down, and carried the basket to the wharf.
All present, on Restday in Gil Harker's loft, turned out to be Gil, Wat, Lotte, Tamsin, Corvin, Ivo and me. Gil ate three. Wat ate two, very slowly, considering each bite. Tamsin ate one and said nothing whatever about it, which from Tamsin is the highest possible praise. Corvin ate one with deep suspicion, looking inside it first, as though Kit might have baked a letter into it.
Ivo did not eat any.
He sat on his pallet with his slate on his knees and the basket at his elbow, and did not look at it once. When Lotte held one out to him, he shook his head.
"I'm not hungry."
It was perfectly clear to everyone in the loft that this was not true. He had eaten two loaves on his first morning in about six bites. He was, as far as I could tell, someone who had been hungry for two years and had not yet caught up.
"They're not from me," I said. "They're shared. Nobody owes anybody for them."
"They're from him."
"Does that matter?"
Ivo looked at the basket at last. Then he looked away again, out through the gap in the planks, at the river.
"Every door in this city opened for him before he knocked," he said quietly. "The porters' hall. The warehouses. The clerks' benches. He's never once had to say nobody." He picked up his chalk. "I'm not eating his bread."
It was not jealousy. I want to be very clear about that, because Gil Harker, later, was not. It was the look of a man who has walked from door to door in a city of thousands with nothing to attach, watching another man walk through every one of them carrying flowers.
At home we had a word for the difference between those two young men, I thought. We called it orang dalam: someone on the inside. We all said it didn't matter, and everybody's cousin got hired anyway.
Corvin began the numbers that afternoon, as he had promised. He did it the only way Corvin does anything, with a column.
He wrote eight figures on Lotte's board, one beneath the other, drew a line underneath them, and handed Ivo the chalk.
"Add it," he said. "From the top."
Ivo added it from the top. It took him a long time, and he used his fingers, without shame, the way Fenn does. He got it right.
"Now from the bottom," said Corvin.
"It's the same numbers."
"From the bottom," said Corvin.
Ivo added it from the bottom. He got a different answer. He stared at it, and then at Corvin, furious, as though Corvin had changed one of the figures while he wasn't looking.
"Good," said Corvin. "Now find out which one of you is lying."
It took Ivo the rest of the afternoon. He found it in the end: a carry he had dropped on the way up, between the fourth figure and the fifth. When he found it, he did not say anything. He just sat back and looked at the column for a long time, the way Master Arden had looked at a coin the second time.
"That's the whole job," said Corvin, standing up and brushing the chalk off his coat. "The rest is detail."
In the evening, as the light went out of the gap in the planks, Ivo came and sat down on the crate beside mine without being asked, which he had never done before.
"Why did you write the flowers down?" he said. "And those." He nodded at the empty basket. "Nobody here does that."
"Because a gift you don't write down," I said, "turns into a debt you don't know you owe."
He was quiet for a long time.
"The miller gave my father a sack of seed," he said at last. "The first bad year. For free. He said so. Everybody heard him say it." He turned the chalk over in his fingers. "The second bad year, there was a paper. The seed was on it."
I didn't say anything. There was nothing I could have said that would have been better than nothing.
Ivo stood up, went back to his pallet, and did not look at me again that night. But before he lay down, I saw him reach over to the empty basket, take out the clean cloth the pastries had come in, fold it into a neat square, and lay it on the crate where I had been sitting.
To go back with the basket, I understood. So that nothing of his was kept that hadn't been written down.
On Day 423, he brought the tokens.
He came in at the second bell, as the shutters went up, and he did not have flowers this time. He had a small wooden box under his arm, about the size of a loaf, and he set it on the counter between us with great care, the way Fenn sets down his nail.
"For the door," he said. "Not for you. I listened."
I opened the box.
Inside, lying in rows, were wooden tokens. Forty-nine of them, round and flat, each about the size of a mark, each with a number carved into one face and a little house with a key carved into the other. They were not well made. Some of the numbers leaned. The house on the twelfth had no chimney. And the sevens, every one of them, looked a great deal like ones.
"You carved these," I said.
"Four nights," said Kit. "I'm worse with a knife than with a sword, which I didn't think was possible." He held up one hand. There was a cut across two of the knuckles, healing. "Your gate has no tokens. Your door here should have them before it opens properly. The people of Aubrelle aren't used to waiting their turn. Somebody has to teach them."
Behind me, Corvin had picked up a token and was looking at the seven on it with an expression of profound personal pain.
A gift to the house. Not to an officer. Of practical use to every customer, in equal measure, and of modest value, having been carved very badly. Which column does this go in? Is there a column? At home, Compliance would have let us keep it, stuck a label on it, and photographed it for the internal newsletter. I am Compliance. I have no camera. I have a register. Use the register.
I took out the register.
Day 423. Given by: Kit (name to follow). Given to: the house. Description: queue tokens, forty-nine, wood, carved by hand; the sevens resemble ones. Value: small. Action: accepted as house property, for the use of all customers.
Then I closed the notebook and looked at him.
"Thank you," I said. "The house accepts these. They'll be used at this door."
His whole face lit up.
"But I must tell you something," I said, "so that there is no misunderstanding later. A gift to the house brings no benefit to the person who gives it. Not a better rate. Not a place in the queue. Not a kinder reading of an application." I laid my hand flat on the lid of the box. "If anything, it means your form will be read more carefully, not less. That's the rule. It's the same for everyone."
Kit looked at me for a long moment. The grin went away, and what was underneath it was quieter and more serious than I had expected.
Then he reached into his coat and took out a token.
It was the first one. Number one. He had carved it better than all the others, the way people always carve the first one, and he had kept it back.
"I know," he said. "I took a number."
He took a number. For his own gift. And waited his turn to give it. Who DOES that?
At home nobody would believe me. I don't believe me. I am watching it happen, and I don't believe me.
"And I brought these," he said, and laid two letters on the counter beside the box.
The first was sealed in green wax, pressed with a sword crossed with a key, the sign of the Adventurers' Guild. It was addressed in a large, heavy, deliberate hand to The Keeper of the Corrinford Trust House, now in Aubrelle.
The Grandmaster of the Adventurers' Guild will receive the keeper at the Great Hall on the morning of Day 424, at the third bell.
That was all. There was no greeting, and no sign-off. It was the most frightening letter I had received since the last email from Compliance.
The second letter was not sealed at all. It was a single sheet, folded once, and it was a reference: short, plain and entirely without adjectives. It said that the bearer had kept the Guild's counter in Aubrelle for seven years without a single row out of balance; that he was honest with figures and too honest with his mouth; that he could not fight and had never once pretended he could; and that the writer did not think a counter was any place for him, but that he was a grown man and the writer had stopped arguing.
It was signed in the same large, heavy, deliberate hand as the first.
Magnus Stannard. Grandmaster.
I read the signature twice. Then I looked at the young man on the other side of the counter, with his tailored green coat and his cut knuckles and his token with the number one on it, and something in my chest made the small, careful sound of a column adding up to a figure you did not expect.
At home, I thought, a walk-in candidate with an excellent reference was always somebody's nephew.
He is not somebody's nephew.
He is somebody's SON. The son of the head of the Adventurers' Guild has carved the house forty-nine tokens and asked me for a job, and I wrote INCOMPLETE on his form. In capitals. In front of witnesses. I am going to faint on the cobbles. Ivo did it. It looked easy.
"Your family name," I said, as evenly as I have ever said anything. "For the form."
Kit took the pen. He drew the application back across the counter, found the space after Kit, and wrote, slowly, as though it cost him something:
Stannard.
Then he pushed it back to me.
"Complete," he said quietly.
Outside, on the step, Ivo had stopped sweeping again. He had heard every word. He looked at Kit, and at the green seal on the counter, and then, for a long moment, at me.
"Of course he is," said Ivo, and went back to the step.
Corvin put down the token with the bad seven.
"A Guild spy," he said slowly, "with a reference from the head of the Guild."
"Yes," said Kit.
"Well," said Corvin. "At least you're honest about it."
Day 423, I wrote that night. Gifts recorded: 3. Returned: 1. Shared: 1. Accepted for the house: 1. Applications: 1, complete as of the second bell. Grandmaster: tomorrow, third bell. Tokens: 49. Sevens that look like ones: 5.
Corvin read it over my shoulder. He took my pen, clicked it four times, and wrote underneath:
He took a number. Write that down too. (C.D.)
I looked at the line for a long time.
"I thought you said he was a spy," I said.
"He is," said Corvin. "A spy who takes a number." He handed me back my pen. "I don't know what to do with that either."