Vex

The chamber had been sealed for the better part of an hour, and the chairs at the near end of the table had grown steadily less patient in it. Somebody had brought papers. Somebody else had brought a second set of papers, in case the first set was contested. There was a jug of water on the table that nobody had touched.

Then both doors went at once, hard enough to bark against the stops.

Vex came through them at a walk, which was as much concession as the room was going to get. She had on a robe she had plainly picked up rather than put on, and it was doing about a third of the work a robe is meant to do. Under it her belly stood out taut and round and enormously full, riding low and heavy, the skin of it shining. She was slick to the knees. Something still ran, unhurried, and she did not appear to have noticed, or to have decided it was worth noticing.

She took the chair at the head of the table. It put her chin roughly level with the tabletop. She did not adjust it.

"Right," she said. "Sorry. Lost track."

She reached for the jug, drank from it directly, and set it back down slightly out of place.

"He gets an idea in him and that's the afternoon gone." She pulled the nearest stack of papers toward her, upside down, and left it that way. "So. Somebody's come a long way to ask me for something, and I've kept them sitting an hour, and I've turned up like this."

She folded her hands on top of her stomach, which was the only surface available, and looked down the length of the table with every appearance of good cheer.

"Go on then. Whoever's talking. Talk."

The circle had been cut into the workroom floor so long ago that the flagstones inside it had gone pale and slightly dished, the way a doorstep wears. It was lit. Something was standing in it.

Vex sat on the edge of the worktable with her heels swinging a good way clear of the floor, eating cold chicken off a plate balanced on her knee, in no apparent hurry about any of it.

"Right. You're fun," she said, around the last of it. "That's not flattery, it's an observation, and it's the only reason we're still talking instead of you being back where you came from twenty minutes ago."

She licked her thumb.

"So. Offer. I'll do it straight, because I always do it straight and nobody ever believes me. You stay. A season. Not a day longer unless we both fancy it. You feed here — properly, constantly, more in one winter than you'd scrape together in a hundred years of whatever it is you've been doing — and you go home standing higher than anything your age has any business standing. That part is real. I've done it before. Ask about. They'll tell you."

She set the plate down on a stack of paper and did not move the paper.

"What I get is you. Whenever I feel like it, however I feel like it, in front of whoever happens to be in the room. I've a great deal of imagination and a man upstairs who does not stop. That's the entire price. It isn't hidden, there's no clause at the bottom waiting to bite, and I'd tell you if there were."

She wiped her fingers down the front of her robe.

"And you'll take it thinking you've robbed me. They all do. Then about three weeks in you'll work out what whenever I feel like it was actually describing, and by then the term is the term and there's no getting out early on account of having had a think."

She hopped down off the table, which did not take her far, and looked up into the circle with enormous good cheer.

"Have a think. Don't be long about it, I've things on."

Two days of work, a favour called in, and the workroom cleared for it — which had mostly meant shoving the paper into heaps rather than putting any of it anywhere.

Vex walked one slow circle, hands behind her back, and did not look pleased.

"No," she said. "No, that's the third time it's done that."

She went back to the bench, moved two things off a page she wanted, read it upside down, and dragged a line through something.

"Shape's fine. Shape's been fine since Tuesday, any decent hand could manage the shape." She was writing while she talked, badly, at speed. "It's the seat of it. I keep hanging the sensation off the skin because that's where it looks like it ought to go, and skin is a liar — you get something that's very interested in being touched and completely deaf to anything happening inside it, which is no use to anybody and frankly insulting to the recipient."

She put the pen down and came back over.

"Right. Stand still, this bit's quick and it doesn't hurt." She held two fingers up, considered, and then didn't use them yet. "Actually — no. Tell me the truth and don't be polite about it, I've had two days of polite. Last one. What was it like?"

She listened to the answer with her head on one side and her eyes somewhere else entirely.

"Mm. That's what I thought and I hate it." She reached out and pressed two fingers flat, without ceremony. "There. That one's hung off the nerve rather than the skin, and it wants twenty seconds before it means anything."

She counted them out on her own fingers, entirely unselfconscious, and watched.

Then her whole face changed.

"HA."

She was back at the bench before she finished saying it, writing fast.

"THAT'S it. That's the one. Nerve, not skin. Twenty second lag. Write it down, write it down—" this to nobody "—and it overshoots, look at it, it's gone well past where I meant it to sit and I'm not touching it, that's the version. Ordinary ones you've got to work at. That one'll go off if somebody thinks about it too loudly in the next room."

She turned away and considered the couch, which was nine feet off across a floor covered in paper.

"And before anybody asks: it stays as long as I say it stays, and I've not decided." She scratched the back of her neck with the pen. "You've been extraordinarily good about this, by the way, and I've not said so once in two days. Three goes and you didn't complain about any of them, which is more than I'd have managed."

She made a gesture that was barely a gesture. The air over the rug thickened, went pale, and settled into something low and soft and faintly luminous that had not been in the room a moment earlier and gave no sign of intending to leave. Getting onto it took her a small hop.

The robe came off somewhere in the middle of that and went over the back of a chair. There had not been anything under it.

She lay back with her hands behind her head, entirely comfortable, and addressed the ceiling.

"Best way to test a thing is to test it. I've been told I'm very thorough."

And she waited, with all the patience of somebody who has never once had to wait long.

The courtyard had been a courtyard that morning. Now half the west wall lay across it in pieces, the flagstones had been lifted and dropped again in a long scored line from the gate to the steps, and the east face of the tower was scorched black to the second-floor windows. Something under the rubble was still burning, quietly and without much conviction.

Whatever it had been, it had come in force, and it had not lasted the hour.

The two of them stood at either end of the wreckage, unhurried and unmarked. Neither had been summoned so much as sent for. He had found something to lean on and was examining the backs of his hands with the expression of a man waiting out the last ten minutes of a shift; she was walking the line of the kneeling with open, leisurely interest, the way a person walks a market stall they have no intention of buying from.

The kneeling were disarmed, bound, and held down by nothing anyone could see.

The tower door opened and Vex came out with a cup of tea, picking her way across the rubble in bare feet. She stopped in front of the row. Standing, she was not a great deal taller than they were kneeling. She looked along them, taking her time about it, and made a small sound with her tongue against her teeth.

"Tsk."

She drank some of the tea.

"No. No, honestly. Look at the state of my wall." She gestured with the cup and slopped a little of it. "Six hundred years that wall has stood there. Six hundred. And you lot managed it before lunch."

She moved down the line and back up again.

"Bad boys," she said. "And a very bad girl. Coming into a woman's house. Making a mess like this."

She handed the empty cup to nobody at all. It stayed exactly where she left it, at shoulder height, in the air.

"So. Since it's plain nobody has ever sat any of you down and explained anything, here's how the afternoon goes. You're going over my knee. One after another, in whatever order amuses me, and we carry on until I am satisfied — and I should tell you now that I am very difficult to satisfy."

She glanced back over her shoulder at the two behind her.

"And when my arm gets tired, they'll take over. They've been stood about bored all morning and neither of them is as patient as I am."

She rolled one sleeve back to the elbow.

"Right. Who's first."

The courtyard was not a courtyard any more. The gate was gone, torn out of the wall with most of the wall behind it, and the west range had come down into its own cellars. There was a crater where the well had been. Every window on the tower's east face had blown out to the third floor and the stone above them had split rather than merely blackened, and it was still ticking quietly as it cooled. Nothing anywhere was on fire, which was somehow worse — everything that could burn already had.

The thing standing in the crater had not moved in some minutes. It did not need to. The air near it went wrong at the edges, and it wore the look of something already thinking about being elsewhere, having been asked for a favour on a weekday and having done it.

The chains ran from one of its hands to the woman kneeling in the rubble, and they were not iron. They came out of the air where they met her wrists, glowed a dull ugly orange along their length, and had already burned the sleeves off her coat. Maelis Andrivaine had not stopped talking since they closed. She was saying what she would do about this, and to whom, and over what timescale, in the elegant unhurried voice of a woman who had been the most powerful person in every room she entered for four hundred years, right up until an hour ago.

Vex sat down on a block of the fallen wall, which put her feet a good way off the ground, and rubbed at her face with the heel of her hand. There was a long scorch up her left side and the sleeve on that arm had gone entirely. Her voice had been better this morning.

"She's still going," she said, to nobody. "Two hours and she's still going."

She let her head tip back and looked at the wreck of her own tower for a while.

"Six hundred years, that wall. Her people pulled my gate off. I've had to call HIM, which means I owe a favour and he'll take it in the worst possible season, and I have been on my feet since before breakfast." She flapped a hand at the kneeling woman without looking at her. "And she has told me four separate times what she intends to do to me. Four."

The chains rattled. Vex ignored them.

"Right. Ninth."

She turned her head, finally, and found him, and something in her face went from tired to enormously pleased.

"Come here, love." She nodded at the woman in the chains. "Shut her up and wear her out. Properly wear her out — take as long over it as you like, I've nowhere to be and I'd genuinely like to sit down."

She rolled her remaining shoulder and winced at it.

"I've to bind her when you're finished and I'd rather not do it with anything left in her. The more thorough you are, the less work it is for me, and I am very tired."

Maelis stopped talking. It was the first time in two hours.

"Ah," said Vex. "There it is."

She said the rest without any heat at all, the way a person reads out a list.

"No, love. Not home. You came to my house with people and you pulled my gate off, and I could have put the whole lot of you in the ground this morning and nobody living would have said one word to me about it. I don't do that. I keep things." She shrugged the shoulder that still worked. "It's a great deal more comfortable than the alternative. You'll hate it for about the first fifty years."

She waved a hand and the chains slackened — not off, only enough.

"Go on then." She got herself settled properly on the block, wincing where the scorch pulled, and folded her hands in her lap like a woman at the theatre. "Oh, this'll be good. God knows I've earned a show today."

She glanced up at the thing in the crater, which had not moved.

"You can stop for it if you like. She's going to be putting on a great many of these before I'm finished with her, but there's nothing quite like the first one." She looked back and did not look away again. "Whenever you're ready, love. I'm watching."

The workroom door did what it always did, which was stick, and then give all at once.

Vex did not look up immediately. She was two-thirds through a line of figures with a pen in her teeth, and she made the noise she made when she was nearly finished with something, and then she did look up, and the pen came out, and her whole face arranged itself into something extremely promising.

"Oh good," she said. "I was about to come and find you. I've had an idea and it's a filthy one, and if you tell me you're busy I'll—"

She stopped.

The thing in his hands was not a book any more. It had been one that morning. Now it was a brick of loose leaves held in the shape of a book by nothing but hands, the boards gone entirely, the thread perished, the outer pages worn soft and furred at the corners in the particular way paper goes when it has been turned by the same fingers several thousand times.

Vex looked at it. Then she put the pen down, which for her counted as a considerable gesture.

"Right," she said. "No. That won't do at all."

She was off the stool before she had finished saying it.

"Town. Today, now, before I think better of it. That one gets rebound properly — boards, thread, the lot, and it'll outlive both of us. And then we are buying you a great deal more of them." She was already at the stairs. "Not the same ones. NEW ones. God's sake, love, there are people who do nothing but write these and you've been rationing six like a shipwreck."

What she put him in took forty minutes and she enjoyed every one of them: black and white, cut to him exactly, because she does not own a thing that was not cut to him exactly. The effect when she stepped back was the effect she had been after when she made him, which has never once stopped being satisfying.

What she put herself in took longer, because it was at the bottom of a chest she had not opened in a century and there was a great deal of other history on top of it.

It came out unwearably bright. Pale lemon, pale pink, and a blue that does not occur in nature, in a cut that had been arrived at by a woman with one objective: short where it had no business being short, tight where tightness served no purpose, and finished with small looped fastenings that fastened nothing. Every line of it would survive comparison against any surviving description of the original. Every choice the descriptions had failed to specify, she had made herself, and she had made all of them the same way.

She got into it, which took some doing, and then went back into the chest for the rest of it, which was worse, and which she also put on.

She looked at herself in the black glass with her head on one side.

"Well," she said, to her own reflection, with enormous satisfaction. "Still an outrage."

The market street had not seen anything like it, which was the entire idea.

She walked at her own pace and let it happen. The colours came round the corner about a second before she did. Half the stalls stopped for him, then noticed her, then could not decide where to put their eyes and settled on the middle distance.

She turned a full circle outside the fishmonger's for no reason whatsoever, and the hem did what the hem was cut to do, and a man buying whitebait with his wife on his arm got a considerably better look at the arrangement underneath than either of them had bargained for.

Vex giggled and kept walking.

"I wasn't—" the man said behind her, in the voice of somebody with about four seconds to fix this. "Sorry, honey, I've never seen an outfit like it, that's all. Those colours. Foreign, do you think? Some noble house?"

Pike's smelled of dust and glue and was exactly as full as it ought to be. Pike himself came out from behind his counter, took in the enormous and immaculately dressed man in his doorway, took in the small elf in front of him, took in what the small elf was wearing, and stopped dead on his own floor.

Vex let him look. She had an armful of books by then and was still adding to it.

"Go on," she said. "You've been building up to it since we came in."

"Forgive me. It's the cut. And the colours." He was embarrassed and asking anyway, which she liked him for. "I collect history, madam, badly and at length, and I cannot place it at all. Is it a livery?"

"Academy uniform."

He blinked. "Which academy?"

She told him.

Pike went absolutely still, and then said the name back to her slowly, like a man checking he has not misheard.

"There are two surviving pieces of that uniform, madam," said Pike. "Two. One is under glass in the capital. The other is a sleeve."

"Mm," said Vex, and added another book to the pile.

"Is it accurate?" He had come closer without noticing. "I'm sorry, I have to ask. The plates all disagree and the only decent written account was made sixty years after the—"

She had gone slightly still herself.

"After the what?"

He looked at her.

"After it was destroyed, madam."

The pause went on long enough that Pike began to find it difficult.

"Was it," said Vex.

"Four hundred and six years ago." He said it carefully, having begun to suspect he was explaining something to the wrong person. "The headmaster attempted a summoning several tiers beyond anything sanctioned. A seraph — one of the higher orders. He had been in some sort of public rivalry, apparently, with a practitioner on the infernal side, and he wanted to demonstrate that the celestial disciplines were the cleaner art. It half worked. The summoning took. The binding did not. There was no fire and no rubble. There is simply nothing there, and there has been nothing there since, and grass will not grow on it."

Vex looked at the middle distance for a while with an expression that was quite difficult to read.

Then it cleared entirely, and she laughed — one short, delighted bark of it, loud in the small shop.

"He never," she said.

"Madam?"

"Four hundred years." She shook her head slowly, still grinning. "Four hundred years and I never once looked him up. I'd have paid money for that. I'd have paid a great deal of money for that, and instead I got it free off a bookseller because I couldn't be bothered to check."

Pike opened his mouth and did not use it.

"Sorry. Go on. You wanted to know if it's accurate."

"...I did."

"It's accurate." She set the pile on his counter and went back through it, unhurried. "Made to the specification. Not a guess and not a reconstruction — every line of it will stand against anything you've got in this shop, and I'd encourage you to check, because you'll find it stands."

"How do you—"

"Because I was there for the arguing about it, dear, and I've a better memory than the plates do." She let that lie exactly where it fell and went on before he could take hold of it. "Now. Since you collect. He designed it himself. Not a tailor. Him. Personally, with a rule and a pen, and he sent the first cut back twice for being too modest." She held the hem between two fingers, without ceremony. "Insisted on this length. In writing. Twice."

Pike had begun, very slightly, to shake.

"And this is the part you'll want written down properly, so do take a moment." She let the hem drop. "The undergarment was specified as well. Compulsory. Detailed. In his own hand."

She turned round, briefly, to give him the full benefit of the detail in question.

Pike sat down on a stool that happened to be behind him.

"So there you are," said Vex, entirely kindly. "A lecherous old fart who dressed his students to his own taste, spent thirty years telling anyone who'd listen that the celestial arts were the wholesome ones, and then took an entire academy off the map proving otherwise. Do publish. You've my blessing, and I'll swear to every word."

She squared the pile on the counter with both hands and pushed it toward him.

"Right. These, and this." The ruin of the old one went on top, and she took her hands off it slowly, the way you set down something that will not survive being set down badly. "That one wants rebinding. Boards, new thread, sewn not glued, and whatever you have to do to the outer leaves to keep them turning — they've had a hard life and they're going to have another one. Don't crop them to tidy the edges. He'd notice."

Pike drew the ruin toward himself and turned back the first few leaves with a care that had come on him without being asked for.

"That's a fortnight's work, madam," said Pike. "Perhaps three weeks. It'll not be cheap."

"I'd think less of you if it were."

"And I'd want to say —" he glanced at the pile, doing arithmetic he plainly did not enjoy doing in front of a customer "— the rest of it comes to a good deal on its own. The Vance alone. I'd not usually let it go without—"

"Send it all to the tower with the bill and I'll settle the lot when the rebinding comes back." She was already moving. "You know the tower."

"...Everyone knows the tower," said Pike.

"Then you know I'm good for it." She scooped the top four off the pile against her hip, leaving him the rest. "Those four are coming with me, he'll have finished one before we're through the gate. The remainder can travel with the bill."

"Madam." Pike had got up off the stool. "The publishing. If I put my name to it and it's wrong, I'm finished."

Vex stopped in the doorway and looked back at Pike properly for the first time.

"Write it exactly as I gave it to you, put my name against it as the source, and send that to the tower as well — I'll sign it and seal it and you can hang the thing on your wall." She grinned. "And do put a note in the file about the underwear. Four hundred years is far too long for a man to go unremarked."

The ambush had been laid at a wayshrine, which was at least thematically sound, and it had lasted about ninety seconds.

Ilse Marrow had done the difficult part well. The approach was quiet, the timing was good, and the thing she called came through fast and came through whole — tall and terrible and burning at the edges of herself. Not one of the high ones. Comfortably above anything Ilse had any business calling, though, and that had plainly been the plan.

What she had not done well was everything after that.

The calling had cost her, and it showed. She had come up off her knees badly, one hand still braced on the shrine step, and there was blood on her chin from somewhere further up. Whatever she had spent to reach that high, she had not had it to spare, and she had spent it anyway.

Vex had not got off the milestone she had been sitting on. She had been eating an apple when it started and she was still eating it, working round the core, watching the two she had opened for do the work with the unhurried competence of people who did this for a living.

Neither of them was anything special. That was rather the point.

"Left," said Dorrekh, in the tone of a man reading a delivery docket.

"I have got left."

"You have not got left, you're admiring her."

"I am admiring her," Hazi agreed happily, "and I have got left."

She had, as it turned out. Between the two of them they took a burning celestial thing apart at the joints of her attention and put her on the ground.

The chalk went down in under two minutes.

It was not a large circle. It was extraordinarily dense: three rings nested inside one another and a fourth off-centre that had no business working, a script running the whole way round in characters small enough that a person would have to kneel to read them, laid in one pass with no correction anywhere and no visible join. Ithuriel spent her first minute testing the wall in six places, quickly and methodically, the way a professional does.

Then she stopped, and looked at the fourth ring for a long moment, and sat down.

"I am Ithuriel of the Fourth Watch," she said, to nobody in particular, in the manner of a woman entering something into a record.

"I know what you are, love."

"The fourth ring isn't standard." Her voice came out level, and stayed level, and the effort of keeping it there was audible. "It isn't a variant of anything. It shouldn't hold and it is holding."

"No," Vex agreed, round the apple. "It shouldn't."

"Who taught you that?"

"Nobody, love."

Something went across Ithuriel's face.

"I have been bound twice before," she said. "Both times by men with names. I knew what they were doing and I knew where the fault would be and I was correct on both occasions." A pause. "I have been looking at that ring for a minute and a half and I do not know what it is for."

"You will," said Vex, not unkindly. "About an hour in. You'll not enjoy it."

Ithuriel closed her eyes and did not answer.

The priestess was still on her knees at the shrine steps where Hazrivelleth had left her — Ilse Marrow, no more than mid-twenties, ordinary robes, a middling cord at the waist. She was shaking, and it was not only fear; the hand braced on the step had not stopped since the calling, and every so often it went badly enough that she had to grip the stone. She was saying something devotional, unbroken and increasingly loud, and she had stopped being able to hear herself do it.

The succubus drifted over to the milestone and folded her arms on it like a woman leaning on a bar.

"Hazrivelleth," she said. "Hazi. Everyone says Hazi."

"Hazrivelleth," said Vex, getting the whole of it right without appearing to try.

"Ooh. Do that again later."

"So while we're here," she said. "Can I ask. Only my cousin Saurielstrikh said you're how she climbed three whole ranks. Three, in three months. She said it wasn't worth it—" she laughed "—but three MONTHS. How could it not be worth it?"

Vex looked at her for a moment with an expression of great and genuine fondness.

"Saurielstrikh," she said, getting the whole thing right without appearing to try, "was still walking like a sailor a fortnight after she went home. Ask her about that as well while you're asking."

"Right, but three ranks."

"Mm."

"So what's the arrangement? What's the — is there a form of words? Do I—"

"There's a form of words." Vex threw the core into the ditch. "You'd want to hear all of them before you said any of them, and this is not the afternoon for it. Ask me again next time and I'll lay it out honestly and you still won't believe me."

"Is that a no?"

"That's a not-today, and you'd do well to notice the difference."

"HA," said Hazi, delighted. "That's a maybe."

"Don't," said Dorrekh.

"You're only sour because you had plans."

"I did have plans." He rolled a shoulder and looked up the road, in the direction of somewhere he was not. "No offence meant, madam. It's a Tuesday. You called clean and you called quick and I'd not say a word against it — but I was in the middle of something and it's the sort of something that finishes without you."

"Go on then, Dorrekh." Vex slid off the milestone. "You were quick and you were tidy and I'll remember it."

"That's the bit I'd rather you forgot," he said, and was not there.

Hazi stayed exactly where she was.

Vex walked the outside of her own circle once, hands behind her back, and gave Ithuriel a nod that was almost respectful.

"You're a good one. She hadn't the reach for you and you knew it walking in, and you came anyway."

"She asked correctly." Ithuriel opened her eyes. "That is the whole of the arrangement. It is not conditional on her being adequate, or ready, or right. She said the words in the correct order and I am obliged." Something bitter got out around the edge of the level voice. "Twenty years she has been saying them. She has never once been answered before today. I would very much like to know what she thought that meant."

Ilse's prayer stopped.

"It meant I was found worthy—"

"It meant nobody was listening." Ithuriel did not raise her voice, and she did not need to. "Twenty years, Ilse. It meant you were beneath notice, and this morning you did something loud enough to be noticed, and here we are, sitting in her chalk. I would rather have been left in ignorance. So, I imagine, would you."

Ilse made a small sound.

"And you," said Vex, turning to her. "Ambush at a shrine, on a public road, on a woman eating her lunch."

"You're a rot. You are a rot in the—" Her voice went to pieces on it and she started again, louder. "I am not afraid of you."

"You're shaking so hard your beads are going."

Ilse looked down at her own hands and stopped talking.

"I'm not even cross, that's the tragedy of it," said Vex. "If you'd got anywhere near me I'd be furious and you'd have earned something memorable. Instead I've a bit of chalk dust on my sleeve."

"Then let me go."

"No."

"Then kill me and be — be done, and get it over, and—" She was trying very hard to get the sentence finished and it kept coming apart on her. "I know what you are. I know what you do to people. I would rather you killed me."

"That," said Vex, "is the single stupidest thing anybody has said to me this year, Ilse, and I have spoken to your angel."

She crouched down in front of her, which put them very nearly at a height.

"I'll be straight with you, because I always am and nobody ever believes me. I'm not killing either of you. I don't do that, and you'd both be a waste. You're going into service — properly bound, terms of my choosing — and you'll be at it a good long while, and you'll be perfectly comfortable, and the first fifty years will be the worst of it."

"Fifty—"

"Years, dear. You'd best sit with that one a while."

Ithuriel said, evenly: "That is not lawful."

"No," Vex agreed. "It isn't."

She rolled her sleeves back.

"But that's for this evening, when I've the leisure to do it properly. This afternoon's for something else."

She looked at Ilse for a moment with her head on one side.

"You've spent five minutes telling me what I am, and some of it was accurate. But you've said it in a way that makes me think you've genuinely no idea what any of it means, and I find that a shame in a woman your age."

She reached out and put two fingers, quite gently, flat against Ilse's sternum.

Nothing dramatic happened. No light, no sound. Vex simply held them there a moment with her head tipped, the way a person listens to a bell to hear whether it is cracked, and then took her hand back, stood up, and dusted her knees.

"There. That's yours until I say otherwise." She stepped back. "I'd not stand up quickly if I were you."

Ilse did not move at all for a moment. Then she did look, because there was nothing else she could possibly have done, and the sound she made was not a word.

"Take it off." It came out very small. "Take it off. Take it off me, take it—"

"No."

"I don't—" She had got a fistful of her own robe and was holding it away from herself as though the fabric were the problem. "It's — why is it — what have you DONE, why does it—"

"Because I tuned it, love. Specially. That's rather more consideration than you showed me at the shrine." Vex was already walking back toward the circle. "And I'd get on with it, honestly, because it's going to be a very long afternoon otherwise, and you'll find it does not care in the slightest what you've decided about yourself."

She scuffed a two-inch gap in the fourth ring with the side of her boot. A gap through. Not a gap out.

Ithuriel looked at it. Then she looked at Ilse.

"No," she said.

"You called her, Ithuriel," said Vex. "Or she called you, which is the same problem from the other end. Either way you're the only one here who came on purpose."

"This is beneath the office I hold."

"It is, rather." She was already walking away. "You'll find that stops mattering somewhere in the first hour."

She sat down on the milestone and arranged herself comfortably. Hazi, without being invited, sat down on the ground beside it and put her chin on her hands.

"Are we watching?"

"We're watching."

"Good," said Hazi. "I've nowhere to be either."

Vex glanced up the road toward the tower, considered something, and evidently decided it could wait.

"He'll have heard the noise. He'll come down if he wants to."

She settled her chin on her hand.

"Go on, then. When the pair of you have worn each other out I'll do the binding, and it'll go easier for you both being tired — so do be thorough. I've all afternoon."

The tower did not sit behind a wall, which was the first surprise. It simply stood at the end of the road with its feet in the grass, four hundred years of weather on it and one entire face rebuilt in newer stone that had not been matched to the old, and nothing whatsoever between it and anyone who cared to walk up.

The door was black wood and iron and taller than it needed to be. There was no bell, no knocker, no chain, and no handle on the outside at all.

Around it, cut into the stone of the threshold and running up both jambs and over the lintel in an unbroken loop, was a circle. Not chalk. Cut, and old, and filled with something gone the colour of dried tea, in characters small enough that a person would have to lean in to read them, and there were a great many of them.

The sign hung at eye height for somebody a good deal taller than the woman who put it there. It was longer than a sign has any business being, small-lettered and close-set, entirely without decoration, and it opened with definitions. A single line at the bottom, in the same small hand, asked for an answer at the door.

Behind the door, two voices. High, scratchy, and entirely unbothered about carrying.

"Reader," said Tolly.

"Reader?"

"Reader. Look at the feet, Skint. They've stopped square on."

A pause, of the sort that involves somebody putting an eye to a gap in something.

"Ohhh, that's a reader," Skint agreed. "That's a proper reader. They've gone back up to the top."

"They'll be a while, then. Nobody reads clause three the first time." A sound like a small creature settling comfortably against the inside of a door. "Say it again, Tolly. Say it how she wrote it."

"You KNOW how she wrote it."

"I like it."

A theatrical clearing of a very small throat.

"Right," said Tolly. "Definitions at the top, which nobody reads and which is where she keeps the good bit, because 'the premises' means the whole tower and 'the party' means her AND us. Then scope, which is what you're agreeing to. Then duration, which is 'as long as she likes' dressed up in about forty words. Then clause three, where 'use' gets defined properly. That's the one where they go quiet."

"They're going quiet," reported Skint.

"They always go quiet."

A wheezy little laugh, joined a second later by a second one.

"Boy or girl, do you reckon?" asked Skint.

"Can't tell from the feet."

"I hope it's a girl. Please let it be a girl. It's been TWO WEEKS—"

"It's been nine days," said Tolly.

"It's been two WEEKS—"

"And if it's a boy?"

A thoughtful pause.

"...she'd open something for him, wouldn't she," said Skint. "She usually does. Someone lovely."

"She usually does."

"D'you think she'd let us watch?"

"She always lets us watch." A small scandalised noise, of the sort made by somebody who has just been reminded of something excellent. "Oh, she always lets us watch. Skint, remember the one in autumn? With the—"

"I remember the one in autumn."

"He didn't know where to LOOK—"

"I REMEMBER the one in autumn."

"Think they'll agree?" asked Tolly.

"'Course they'll agree. They always agree." A rattle of small claws on wood. "Well. Nearly always—"

"Why wouldn't they agree?"

A short pause.

"...'Course they'd agree," said Skint.

"Right. So. Wager."

"You're joking. On a certainty?"

"Two turns on agrees," said Tolly. "Front of the line, next one through."

"Two turns—! That's the whole of my—"

"Certainty, you said."

A long, sour, small silence.

"...one turn," said Skint.

"Done."

And on the other side of the black door, nothing moved at all. It did not appear to be locked. It simply sat in its frame in the afternoon light with the circle waiting in the threshold stone beneath it, and neither of them cared in the slightest how long it took.

The circle had been up since before dawn and Vex had been awake nearly as long, which was the only genuinely irritating part of the whole business.

She was sat on the floor outside it with her legs crossed and a stack of paper across her knees, going back through the contract for the third time. Not checking. She had checked. She was reading the way a person reads a letter they have already opened, and she kept making small noises of appreciation.

Inside the circle, Ysveliathrikh had been walking it since the light came up. Six paces, turn, six paces, turn, one hand trailing along a boundary that gave slightly under her fingers and did not give at all. She had stopped doing that an hour ago and then started again without noticing.

"That's good," said Vex. "No, that IS good. Fourth clause, the reciprocity one, you went at it side-on where nobody looks. I've had that clause seventy years and nobody's had a go at it."

Veli's chin came up before she could stop it.

"Side-on. Yes. Thank you—" She caught herself, visibly, and her mouth went flat. "No. No, you don't get to do that. You don't get to sit out there admiring my work with me stood in here. Pick one."

"Why?" Vex asked, without looking up. "I can do both."

"Because it's WORKING, Vex." Veli jabbed a finger at her. "You've been at it an hour and I've been stood in here going 'well, she liked the fourth clause' like an idiot. Take the compliment back. I don't want it."

"You do, though," said Vex.

Veli opened her mouth, shut it, and glared at the chalk.

"...I want it enormously and I hate that I want it, which is different, and you know it's different, and you're doing it on purpose."

Vex turned a page, entirely unrepentant.

"Eleventh caught you, by the way," she said. "Not the twelfth. Everybody plans for the twelfth."

The pacing stopped.

"...the eleventh," said Veli, flatly.

"Little scrap of a thing," Vex agreed. "Three lines. Does almost nothing at all."

"The eleventh does NOTHING, the eleventh is HOUSEKEEPING, I read it four times and skipped it four times because it's a definition, it's a—" Veli stopped dead. Her hands came up, one either side of her head, fingers spread, and hung there. "Oh. Oh, you absolute — it defines the term for the fourth."

Vex hummed. "Mm."

"It defines the term for the FOURTH." Veli turned round in a full circle, which was the only direction available to her. "Nine months. Nine months, and I read the lock four times, and I looked straight past it because it was BORING. You made it boring. You made it boring on PURPOSE."

"Mm," Vex agreed.

"That's disgusting. That's genuinely disgusting and I'd never in a hundred years—" Veli dropped her hands. "Forty seconds. How close was I actually."

"Forty seconds is about right," said Vex. "If I'd been asleep, and I very nearly was, you'd have had it."

Veli sat down on the floor of the circle, hard, and put her face in her hands for a moment. When she took them away she looked steadier and about ten years older.

"Right. Say it, then," she said. "You've been sat there an hour building up to it."

Vex squared the papers, set them aside, and got up off the floor, which took her a moment.

"Here's my difficulty, Veli. I'm not angry. Anybody in my position ought to be and I've been waiting for it and it hasn't come." She dusted her hands. "You had a proper go at me and you did it cleverly. It's the most interesting thing that's happened to me this month and I'd honestly rather buy you a drink about it."

"Then DO that." Veli was up on her knees. "Do that instead. I'll write the whole approach out for you, every step, everything I tried that didn't work, and there's nine months of that — you'd have it in a week and you'd never think about the fourth clause again as long as you live."

A pause.

"...that's a good offer," said Vex.

"It's an excellent offer."

"It is." She sounded genuinely regretful about it. "And if I take it, every one of you has a go at the eleventh by Michaelmas, and I've to rewrite the whole instrument, and I've better things to do with a winter."

Veli sat back on her heels.

"So what, then."

Vex turned her head.

"Ninth."

She waited for him. While she waited she did not look at the circle at all.

"Come here, love. Now — do you remember me telling you you can't make babies?"

She let that sit for a second, and then answered it herself, cheerfully, and to the circle rather than to him.

"He can, of course. Always could. It's a setting, and I set it, and I set it off because I wasn't interested at the time." She waved a hand. "I'd have mentioned it eventually. It's never come up."

Veli looked at him. Then down at the chalk under her knees. Then back at Vex, and her voice came out much smaller than it had been.

"No."

"Twins, I thought." Vex considered it. "No. Twins is nothing. Twins is a fortnight's grumbling and straight back to work."

"Vex—"

"Quadruplets."

Veli did not scream and did not beg. She was on her feet again with no memory of getting there, and it was somehow worse watching her do the arithmetic out loud in pieces.

"Four." Flat. "Of his. Four of HIS."

"Four of his," Vex confirmed.

"Do you know what that IS?" Veli's voice cracked up the middle and she hauled it back down, furious with it. "That's a decade. That's a decade out of the running, that's — I have been climbing nine years, Vex. NINE. I have done things I'd rather not tell you about to get where I am, and you're going to sit me down for a decade over three lines of—"

"Six," said Vex.

Veli stopped dead.

"...what?"

"Six. You said four like it was something you could survive." No edge in it at all — entirely reasonable, a woman correcting a figure that had come back wrong. "That's my fault, not yours. I aimed low. I do it constantly, it's a failing."

"You can't—"

"I can, though," said Vex. "That's rather the whole shape of the afternoon."

"This is obscene, this is — you don't DO this, this isn't you, you're not—"

"Eight."

The silence after that one had an entirely different quality. Veli's mouth was still open. She closed it.

"...I'll stop talking," she said.

"Probably wise," Vex agreed. "I'll keep going otherwise. I've no ceiling on it and I'm enjoying myself, and you've nothing left to trade and we both know it."

She took two steps toward the circle, and then stopped, and something occurred to her.

"Nine."

Veli made a sound. It was not a word. She had just committed to not making words.

"Nonuplets," said Vex, with enormous relish. "Four hundred years I've had that word sat in my head and not once has anybody given me cause to say it out loud. That's not spite, love, before you look at me like that. That's simply the one chance I'm ever going to get."

She scuffed a gap in the circle with the side of her boot.

"Nine, then. And you'll carry every one of them, and you'll do it here where I can keep an eye on you and where you'll be looked after properly, because I'm not a monster and you're not being turned out into a ditch."

"That is not the mercy you think it is," said Veli.

"It isn't mercy at all, love, it's the bill." Vex started back toward the wall. "And when it's done, you and I are going to sit down together and go through the eleventh line by line, because you've earned that, and because I'd genuinely enjoy the conversation."

Veli stared at her.

"...you're going to WHAT?"

"You heard," said Vex.

"After this. After ALL of this you want to sit down and—" Veli made a noise with a laugh somewhere in it that was not one. "You are the worst person I have ever done business with, and I want that conversation so badly I could scream. Do you know that? Do you know that's the part I'll hate?"

"I do, love," said Vex. "That's rather why I offered."

She sat down against the wall and picked her papers back up.

"Go on. Take your time. I've got reading."