Chapter 5: Payment in Kind

Rook’s hands were not clever. Fortunately the yarn’s previous author had not been much of an artist either.

He worked by the square of window with his back against the wall, and he did it by looking at a thing until it told him what it wanted. The head was finished and tied off. Under the head there were four loops going the wrong way, the start of an arm, and a long loose end that led nowhere, and one knot that had been pulled out of true — the fast way a child pulls a knot, with hands not yet strong enough to pull anything tight.

A doll, he was nearly sure. There had been a time, he was fairly sure, when a thing like this would have meant something specific to him: a poppet, a doll with a curse worked into it, the kind of gift you gave a man you wanted to see come to grief. But you could only work with what the last hand had left you, and what the last hand had left him was a head, a knot, and a great deal of blue.

He finished the body. It took most of a night and it was bad work. The arms came out two different lengths. The legs were one tail of yarn wound around and knotted in the middle and called two. Held up, the thing hung with its knot eyes pointing slightly different ways, gray worked into the blue where his fingers had been greasy, so that from across the room it looked like something dragged out of a drain.

The worse it was, the better. He knew that much about the man by now. A doll that came out well would have raised questions — who taught you that, what did you do before, how does an idiot with a hole in his chest keep his hands that steady. A doll like this one had obviously cost him something. Anybody could see he had worked at it until his eyes crossed and produced this anyway.

So when Charles came through the door with the cans and the keys, Rook was sitting up on the cot with the thing in his lap, and he held it out in both hands and made a sound in his throat with nothing in it.

Charles stopped in the doorway. The cans hung off one paw. Behind the spectacles his eyes went wide, and then all his whiskers came forward at once.

“For me?”

Rook made the sound again and moved the doll up and down a little, which was as much as he meant to commit to.

Charles crossed the floor faster than a thing with legs like that ought to be able, took the doll in both paws and held it up to the light. He turned it over. He turned it back. There was already a smear of gray fur stuck to one of the arms.

“Look at this,” he said. “Look at it. It’s got a face on it. That’s a poppet, Rook. That’s a regular poppet.” He turned it toward the matron, who was on her knees at the drain with the brush. “He made me this. Look at it.”

The brush went on. Shush, shush. The matron did not turn her head.

Charles did a turn in the middle of the floor with the doll held up over his head, and its crooked arms went out, and he began to talk to it — how he would carry it in the pocket of his overalls, how it would sit on the shelf by the door where the buyers could see it, how nobody in this yard had ever made him anything before. Mid-sentence he stopped, reached under the strap of his overalls, scratched hard at his chest, and came away with a pinch of gray fur between two claws.

“It’s working,” he said, delighted. “It’s taking my fur off me. Look at that. I’ll be bald by the end of the week.”

He laughed until his spectacles fogged, and then he held the doll against his chest, which put more of him onto it.

The contract let go of him.

It went the way a receipt goes when the clerk takes it back off the counter — a thin flat pull at the palm, and then the hand was empty and lighter and there was nothing left in it to argue with.

The brush went shush, shush. Charles told the doll about the shelf.

And in the same moment the payment arrived, and Rook remembered his left eye.

Not that it had been gone. It was that he had spent years not thinking about a door and walked past it every day, and now he stood in front of it with his hand on the handle, and it was all he could do not to be annoyed. The remembering came with a smell of dust and cold metal, and with something he had not expected: a low, fond ache, and no explaining to be done about it.

The eye had a name. He had not chosen it. It had been filed in a book somewhere under the name grave robber, and he could hear the nib on the paper when he thought about it, and he could not for the life of him remember which book.

He reached for it. He got a smooth place where the door should have been, and gave up, and it did not trouble him. It felt like something he had given up on a long time ago and got over.

“— and in the pocket,” Charles said to the doll. “When I go down to the pens. In the pocket of my overalls.”

The brush went shush, shush.

The eye took from the dead. That was the whole of it. If somebody died where they had left a bit of themselves behind — a print in the dust, a hair in a comb, one finger’s worth of a hand on a doorframe — he could go across on that and have the last few minutes of them, and the thing they had wanted at the end. Do the thing they wanted and you got paid. He had been at it long enough that his palm knew the shape of the panel that came with it.

Paid in what, though. Paid in whatever was in the drawer. It did not scale with the work: three days on your knees for a dead stranger, and the bequest was a set of knitting instructions you would never use. Another time he had been left an inability to sleep, and he had turned it down, and he remembered the tone he had turned it down in — roundly, at length — though not who he had been talking to.

Charles had gone quiet. Rook looked up. The rat had the doll in both paws and was bending one crooked arm straight, patiently, and it would not stay straight.

He had once been told he had the wrong devil’s name. The one with the famous contract wanted living souls and paid in gold and cities. Rook took from the dead and got paid out of a drawer.

White devil. Somebody had called him that, and it had stuck, and he had always assumed the white was the white of a whitewash — a cheap coat over a rotten post so the buyer would not look too close.

The police could probably have used a thing like this, on a murder. Assuming there was still such a thing as criminal law.

So what had the yarn’s previous author paid with?

He looked down at his hands, which were empty, and then at the room, and the room had changed. Not the walls. The people.

Charles was still working at the doll’s arm. The matron was still on her knees at the drain. And every one of them had a label on, the same as the cans had labels, and the labels said what they were called, and he did not have to look twice or sound anything out.

Charles. He had that one already. Six. Gone to the pens; he had that one already too, and it did nothing for him now.

The girl with the yarn. He had not had her before, and his throat closed on it: Snowball. Seven years old, not through her second teeth. She had come into the world, put one foot down, gone out again, and left him everything she owned, which was the names of everybody she had ever met, handed over with the generosity of a child who does not know that a thing can be valuable and therefore cannot think to keep any of it.

Knowledge was the one bequest he could not refuse. You could turn down insomnia. You could not turn down knowing.

The matron was working the brush around the rim of the drain, and when he turned his head the name came up off her before he had decided to look, unasked, the way the labels did now — the Countess.

His mouth opened.

He closed it.

An idiot did not know anybody’s name. An idiot did not reliably know his own, and the idiot he was playing did not know it either, and that was the one piece of stupidity he had never had to fake. A man who could put a name to every soul in the building was not an idiot anymore, and then where would he live, and who would bring him cans. He would have to wait to be introduced.

The brush lifted, and the matron looked up at him. It was the long look, the one from the dark end of the room, and he let his face go slack and stupid and looked at the drain instead. After a while the brush went back to work. Maybe she had been looking at the drain. He did not know.

He had a name for her now and no use for it. He went on not calling her anything, and she went on not answering to it.

The client was satisfied. Charles carried the doll out of the room that night and could be heard, halfway down the corridor, telling somebody about the shelf.

The ones who died in that building were mostly children.

He knew their names now. That was the whole of the payment, and it was not a small one: every soul in the building came up lit when he looked at them, name first, before he asked. There were men in the Undercity who would have paid well for a list like that. A man pretending to be an idiot could do nothing with it at all. He went around anyway.

The first was a boy at the end of the corridor, in the room with the tap that never stopped. He was not much past the age Six had been, and he had been going down for a while. His wish, when Rook sat with him and got close enough to hear it, was a small one, and he was embarrassed about it. He wanted the hurting to stop. Not to be well; he was not asking for the moon. He wanted to lie there and not hurt.

Rook sat on the floor by the bed. That was not what the boy had asked for. He stayed until somebody needed the floor.

The second was a girl who wanted a song sung to her. Not later, not at the end — now, while she could still hear it properly and enjoy it. Rook did not know the song she named. Rook did not know any song, and he sat there with his mouth open and nothing in it, and she got tired of waiting and turned her face to the wall.

The third wanted oranges out of a can. He got the can open and he ate the oranges, because it seemed to him that the point was the oranges getting eaten. His spoon was scraping the bottom when he offered her the empty can with the syrup still in it, and the offer was declined, and the job fell through.

He had two beliefs, and they had carried him through everything he could remember, and he did not need a third. The first was: All right. The second was: Then never mind.

So he ate what was put in front of him, he slept on the cot, he counted the marks on the wall without reading them, and he was, on the whole, in good spirits.

On the fourth or fifth day after the doll, Charles came in the morning instead of the evening, put the cans down, and looked him over with his head tipped to one side.

“Well,” he said. “That’s you done, then. You’re well.”

Rook looked at him.

“Stand up. Go on. Walk.”

Rook stood up and walked the width of the room and back, and his knees held. He had been able to do that for days. Charles made him do it again anyway, and then took his paw off the strap of his overalls and turned Rook’s chin with it, and looked at his eyes and his tongue and the color of the inside of his lip.

“You’re well,” he said again, as though the first time had been a proposal. “Buyer’s not getting a sick one off me. Come on, then. We’ll get you out of this room before you grow roots.”

He picked up the cans and the keys. The matron came up off her knees with the brush in her hand and stood back against the wall to let them by. Charles took Rook’s hand in his dry hot paw and pulled him toward the door.

Behind them the brush started again.