The Second Attempt
"You want to do it again," Ilka said, on the third of Ash. "Say so."
"I want to know whether I can."
"Those are the same sentence in a different coat, and you're going to have to get comfortable with that, because from here on every single thing you do is going to be both." She was packing the satchel: nippers, loupe, a folded rag, a stub of chalk. "I've got someone. Sarrow. Cooper on the Weir. Three months and eleven days outstanding, Tarn instrument, and I swapped his ring in Brine so he's already six weeks past his date and the query's sitting in a drawer."
"Has he asked for this?"
"He doesn't know it exists. Nobody knows it exists except the four people who were in that room." She pulled the strap tight. "So you'll be asking him. Which means you'll have to tell him what you can do. Which means by tomorrow night there'll be five."
Rook stood in the low doorway with his hat in his hands.
"Three months and eleven days," he said.
"A hundred and two days. I checked twice." Ilka looked at him levelly. "You've got eighty-six. Do you want me to say the rest of it or do you want to say it?"
"You have done the arithmetic."
"Of course I've done the arithmetic, I did it before you came down the stairs." She shouldered the satchel. "You cannot afford Sarrow. I'm taking you to him anyway, because you need to know whether the thing works twice, and there's no way to find that out except on a person, and I'd rather it was a person who is already alive on borrowed paperwork that I forged." Her mouth twisted. "If it works, you die about three weeks earlier than you were going to. If it doesn't, you've cost yourself nothing and we've learned the most important fact in this city."
"You have thought about this coldly."
"I've had a night," said Ilka Vess. "Cold is the only way I've ever been any use to anybody."
Sarrow's place was a single room behind the cooperage with a loft bed and a stove and thirty years of tools on the wall in the order he used them.
He was fifty-one and he looked seventy-two.
He listened to the whole of it standing up, with his hands hanging, and did not interrupt once. Rook told it plainly — the kitchen on Cutler's Stair, the ring, the cost, the fact that it had happened once and might not happen twice — and when he had finished, Sarrow sat down on the edge of his own bench and looked at the floor for a while.
"Say the cost again," he said.
"Whatever is outstanding on you comes to me. Your hundred and two days would come out of my eighty-six."
"That's not — " Sarrow's face worked. "That's not a trade. That's you dying earlier so I don't."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because it is the only thing I have found that I can buy with what I have got," said Rook, "and because I did not ask the last one either, and I have been trying since the thirtieth of Rime to decide whether that was a mercy or a theft, and I have come down on theft. So I am asking you."
Sarrow looked at his hands. They were a cooper's hands and they were shaking.
"My sister's in Tarnmouth," he said. "Two days on the packet. I've not seen her in nine years because I've not had two days that were mine." He looked up. "Do it."
Rook knelt and took the ring.
He closed his fist on it and put his shoulder behind it and pulled.
Nothing happened.
The iron did not soften. There was no note in his back teeth. It was a band of metal on a man's wrist and he was a man gripping it, and after four seconds he felt ridiculous, which was a sensation he had not experienced since he was nineteen years old.
"Well?" said Sarrow.
"Wait."
He adjusted his grip and did it again, harder, until his knuckles went white and his own pulse came up in his ears. The ring did not move. It did not even turn on the wrist.
"Mr. Rook?"
"Wait."
He tried it a third time with both hands, which was undignified and useless, and a fourth time with the rod seated on it first and then his bare hand after, on the theory that it might want something started, and the rod turned a quarter and drew four hours out of the man and Rook let go of it as though it had burned him and had to sit down on the floor.
"Sorry," he said. "I am sorry. That was four hours. That is my fault and I will not do that again."
"It's four hours," Sarrow said. "I've given a hundred thousand of them."
Ilka was crouched on the other side of the bench with the loupe out, watching the ring and not Rook, which was the single most useful thing anybody did in that room that day.
"Again," she said. "Slower. Tell me what you feel."
Rook took the ring again.
"Nothing," he said. "Cold iron and a man's wrist."
"On the thirtieth, what did you feel?"
"I do not know. I was not attending to what I felt. I had just—" He stopped.
"Just what?"
"I had just put the rod down on the table," Rook said.
He tried it once more. Nothing. He tried it with his eyes shut. Nothing. He tried it while deliberately thinking about Maren Coyle's arm, which felt obscene and did not work either.
After twenty minutes he stood up.
"Mr. Sarrow," he said. "I cannot do it. I do not know why, I did it three days ago, and I would very much like to tell you that I will be back, and I am not going to tell you that, because I do not know that it is true and you have had enough people tell you things that were not true."
The cooper sat on his bench.
"Right," he said.
"I have taken four hours off you and given you nothing."
"You've given me an afternoon of thinking my sister was two days away." Sarrow rubbed his face with both hands. "That's a bad trade, mister. But I've had worse ones and I signed for those."
Outside, in the lane behind the cooperage, Rook put his back against the wall and stayed there.
"Say it," said Ilka.
"It was one woman. One time. Something in that room, or that morning, or that year, and it is gone and I cannot find it." He was aware that his voice was not steady and could not make it be. "I have eighty-six days, and the only thing I have ever done that was worth anything happened by accident, and I have just walked a man up to the edge of his own life and shown him the other side and taken him back down again."
"Stop."
"I am not asking for—"
"I know you're not, I'm telling you to stop because you're doing it wrong." Ilka had the folio open against the wall and was writing in it fast, in the failing light, her handwriting going small and hard. "You're grieving. Grieve later. Right now you're the only instrument in the world that has done this and you have to report. What was different?"
"Everything was different."
"Then list everything."
So Rook listed it, against a wall in a lane that smelled of oak shavings, while a forger wrote it down: the fourteen-day notice, the blue door, the slate with the sums done twice, the penny book four days out, the woman who chose to have it recorded that she had kept a book, the girl standing at the table with no knife, the cloth squared off, the chair in the middle of the floor, the rod set down, the arm put out without being asked.
Ilka read it back.
"None of that's a mechanism," she said. "That's a mood."
"I am aware."
"I'm not being cruel. I mean it literally — there is no action in this list that you didn't also do just now, except setting the rod down, and you did that four times in there." She tapped the page. "So it isn't what you did with your hands. Which leaves what you did with your head, and I can't measure that, and neither can you, and that is a filthy place to be standing."
Rook looked up at the strip of grey sky between the roofs.
"There is something missing from the list," he said.
"Then say it."
"I do not know what it is." He pushed off the wall. "That is precisely the difficulty. I can feel the shape of the gap and I cannot see into it, and I have never in my life been unable to find a missing figure in a column."
They walked back towards the bridges in the dark.
At the corner of Weir Street Ilka said, without looking at him: "He said do it. Straight off. A hundred and two days and he didn't ask a single question, he just said do it."
"Yes."
"That's what I can't get out of my head." She had her hands jammed in her pockets. "Not you failing. Him saying yes that fast."
Rook stopped walking.
He stood in the middle of Weir Street with the fog coming up and a thought arriving somewhere at the back of his mind like a sound in another room — not a word yet, not an idea, just the shape of a gap that had begun, very faintly, to have edges.
"Say that again," he said.
"He said yes that fast."
"No," said Rook slowly. "No, that is not it either. That is his side."
He stood there another moment.
Then he shook his head and walked on, and did not find it for another three weeks.