Six Weeks
[POV: ILKA]
Her grandmother was married in the Cooper's Hall.
That was the first thing Ilka Vess had ever been angry about, and she had been angry about it at seven years old, standing on the sea-wall at the end of the Ninth with the old woman's hand in hers, looking out at a row of chimneys standing up out of the water like teeth.
"Which one?"
"You can't see it, love. It's the one with the round roof and you can't see the round roof any more."
"Where is it?"
"Under."
"Under how much?"
Her grandmother had thought about it, and had put her free hand out flat at about the height of her own shoulder, and then had lifted it above her head, and then had lifted it as far as her arm would go and said, "More than that."
And Ilka had said, "Who did it?"
And her grandmother had laughed, actually laughed, and said, "The sea did it, you daft article. Who do you think did it, the mayor?"
That was the moment. Ilka could put her finger on it exactly. Seven years old, on the wall, being laughed at for asking a sensible question — because everybody in Corvane had decided, at some point before anyone now living was born, that a district going down eleven feet in one lifetime was weather.
She had never once believed it. Not at seven and not at twenty-three. Weather does not take the oldest ward fastest and leave the First Island exactly where it was.
Her mother went on a Vasse instrument in the year thirty-six: six years at three hours the day, for a debt that was not even hers, a cousin's guarantee that came apart in a bad Ash.
Ilka was fourteen. She watched the whole six years.
She learned what everybody who has lived with a bound person learns: that the afternoons go first, and that the body ages unevenly, so that a woman can have a girl's hands and an old woman's neck, and that there is a particular way the bound sit down, in stages, which you can spot from the far end of a street once you know it and can never afterwards unsee.
And in the fifth year, with the verdigris at her mother's collarbone, Ilka had done the thing that decided the rest of her life. She had waited until her mother was asleep at the table and she had taken a jeweller's saw and cut through the band of the tally-ring on her wrist.
She had expected it to be solid.
It was hollow. There was a channel in it no wider than a hair, and in the channel there was a thread, grey-green, that was not metal and was not gut and was not anything she had ever seen, and it did not part when the saw went through the iron. The saw went round it. It sat in the cut like a nerve in a bone.
Her mother had woken up. The ring had still been drawing.
They had filed the cut smooth and wrapped the wrist in a rag for four months so the collector would not see it, and neither of them had ever spoken about it again, and her mother had died in the year forty-one with two months and nine days outstanding, and Ilka had been twenty.
But by then she knew the one fact that nobody in Corvane knew, which was that the ring was a sleeve.
The trade came later and came sideways.
She had gone into the foundries at seventeen because that was what you did, and had been quick, and had ended up in the pattern shop, which was where the good hands went; and by nineteen she could cast a band and cut a stamp, and one night in a bad week she had cast a Ferrow band and stamped a Ferrow mark on it for no reason except to see if she could.
She could.
The first swap was a woman on her own stair with four months outstanding. Ilka had explained it badly and the woman had said no. The second was a man in the Sixth who said yes, and Ilka had taken the real ring off him and put the fake on and buried the real one in the salt flats with a marker she could find again, and had then spent eleven days being unable to eat because she had realised — far too late, lying awake — that she had no idea whether the draw would stop when the ring came off.
It did not stop. That was the discovery. The thread was not in the ring; the ring only held it. Take the sleeve away and the thread stays in the arm, running to nothing, drawing just the same, and the verdigris goes on climbing.
So the fake did not save anybody. It just broke the paperwork.
She had wanted to give it up then. She had sat in the workshop for a week with sixty castings in front of her thinking: this is useless, this is a trick, I am selling people a coat of paint.
And then the man in the Sixth had come and found her, and had said: the collector came, and looked at the ring, and did not turn the rod. He filed a query. He went away.
Six weeks, he had said. They gave me six weeks.
He had brought her four marks and a jar of something his wife had made, and Ilka had taken the four marks and been sick after he left.
Six years. Two hundred rings cut and measured. A folio with every one of them in it: band weight, channel width, thread length, principal, rate, House. Her own handwriting getting smaller and angrier year by year.
Because here was the thing she could not get past, the thing that had her at the bench at the third hour of the morning with a loupe in her eye more nights than not:
She could not make one that drew.
She could cast the band better than the Assay cast it. She could stamp a mark that their own clerk could not call. She could lay a thread in the channel — she had tried horsehair, spun glass, silver wire, gut, catgut, hair from four different animals, a drawn fibre of her own blood dried on a wire, which she did not tell anybody about ever.
Nothing. Dead iron with string in it.
The thread came from the Assay and only from the Assay, and the Assay did not sell it, did not lose it, and did not explain it; and that meant the actual business of this city was not lending at all.
It was spinning.
And she had known that, alone, for six years, and had never had one single person she could say it to.
The Coyle job was nine days of casing because the Coyle job was the hardest kind: a minor in the house.
If Ilka swapped the ring and the House filed a query and then somebody looked twice, the balance came down on a thirteen-year-old. She had run it four ways and had got it down to about a one-in-six chance of making a child's life catastrophically worse in exchange for six weeks of a woman's.
She had decided to do it anyway, on the eighth day, and had hated herself, and had gone up to the stair on the thirtieth of Rime in the fog to do it.
And had found a Ferrow collector already on the stair.
She had stood in the doorway of the second house down and watched him knock twice and wait, which collectors did not do, and take his hat off, which collectors did not do.
She had stood there the whole time.
She had been ready to hear it: the chair, the quiet, the daughter. She had heard a woman's voice raised once and a girl's voice raised once and then a sound she did not recognise at all, a low grinding note that came through the wall and into her teeth and was gone.
And then the collector had come out onto the stair and put his hand flat against the door and stood there like a man who had been hit.
And then he had rolled up his sleeve and looked at his own arm.
And then, four minutes later, Maren Coyle had opened the blue door and stood in it, on her own legs, to watch him go — with her sleeve pushed back and her forearm bare and the colour of an arm.
Ilka had put her fist in her mouth.
She followed him four bridges because she had spent six years getting very good at following people and because she needed to be sure of one thing before she said a word to him, and it was not whether he was dangerous. It was whether it had cost him.
If it had cost him nothing, he was a new kind of House and she would go home and start planning how to kill him.
He sat down on the Ash Bridge like a man twice his age. He opened a ledger and did a sum with a pencil, and stopped, and sat there with his head down for a long time in the fog, not moving, while the tide knocked at the pilings underneath him.
Then Ilka Vess stepped out of the fog and said the first thing that came into her head, which was about his handwriting; and afterwards, for the rest of her life, she would be quietly pleased that the first thing she ever said to him was a compliment, because she was not by nature a generous woman and it had been entirely sincere.