Chương 60: Four Thousand Marks

The essence market was under an arch on the north side of the river and it was not a row of tins. It was a hall with stone floors and a glass roof, and it had a hundred and twelve stalls in it. There was a number painted on the last one and Abe went and looked. At the door there was a line of people in coats that cost more than Peg made in a year. Above the door was a board of rules with a seal stamped at the bottom.

Abe had been seeing that seal since he walked in, on lampposts and gate arches and the side of a tram. OFPRAC, it said around the outside of it, in letters small enough that you had to already know. Somebody in this town wrote the rules for everybody in the country. This hall was one of the things they wrote them for. He walked it once in the still, from end to end, before he let anybody see him. Most of it was past what his body could take, and he worked that out fast.

He could not read half the labels on the good stalls, and the prices on the other half were somebody's rent. He couldn't use any of it. A Kindled body takes what a Kindled body can take, and standing in front of the deep stuff just meant looking at it. The far end had cases with the lids down and a man sitting beside them doing nothing at all, which meant the man was what the lock was. But the cheap end of that hall had more dying lots in one afternoon than Prescot's whole lane had in a week.

Then he had the problem he had been walking around for two days. He could not sell anything to a frozen man. The shop the morning before had cost him eleven marks and about four minutes of being looked at. None of it had been hard. He had put money on a counter and a girl had taken it. This was the other way around. He would have to stand still while two people he did not know turned an unlicensed core over in their hands and decided what to ask him.

He came back at nine the next morning, in the world, with the world running, and stood in a line of forty people to get through the door. Nobody in Prescot had been able to see him since the twenty-ninth of December. Nobody looked now either, and he had not expected that. In Calder a boy in a wet coat with a bag got read by four people before he reached the counter, and two of them knew his aunt. Here he was one of eleven hundred. The woman on the door looked at his hands and not at his face.

The stall he picked was on the good side and had a name across the back of it in gold on green. Openshaw. The man under the name was about forty, with his sleeves rolled and a jeweler's glass on a cord. Abe put the green core on the cloth. Openshaw picked it up without being asked, which nobody in Calder would have done, and turned it over twice under the glass. Then he put it down, said "wait there," and went to the back. He came out with a woman in her sixties in a cardigan with the sleeves pushed up.

She did not look at Abe at all. She picked the core up, held it away from herself, and said a word Abe did not know.

"It's not," Openshaw said.

"It's near enough it that I'm not standing here arguing."

"Kell."

"Weigh it." They talked about it in front of him for six or seven minutes as though he were part of the counter. Abe stood there and let them, and got about one word in three, and the one he kept hearing was a place name he had never heard of. Then Kell put it in a tray, and Openshaw counted out four thousand marks in front of him without discussing it first. Abe opened the bag and put six gray ones on the cloth beside it.

Openshaw looked at those a good deal longer than he had looked at the green one, and he did not pick any of them up.

"Six."

"I've got more."

"How many more." Abe gave him a number. Openshaw's hands stopped.

"Right." He counted out eighteen hundred and sixty for the six, and put the rest of the notes back in the drawer.

"That's you done for today."

"Why?"

"Because six is a kid who got lucky in a marsh. That number you gave me is a license, and you haven't got one. Six a week goes through here and nobody asks me a thing. Bring me forty and I am filling in paper about you until March." Abe had spent an hour on the walk down working out what to ask for and how to hold his face while he asked. He never got to use any of it.

"Where'd you get it," Kell said. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

"Marsh south of Prescot."

"Whereabouts south."

"About a mile past the sea road." Kell did not say anything for a moment. She was holding her face still, and Abe could see her doing it.

"Right," she said. Openshaw wrote something on a card. Kell took it from him without looking at Abe once, and carried it through the curtain. Four thousand marks. Abe sat on a bench in the middle of that hall with the notes inside his coat and both arms across them. He counted the notes again with his thumb, inside the coat, where nobody could watch him do it. Peg made about ninety marks a week and stood up for all of it. Four thousand was ten months of his aunt.

It was also the first time in his life he had walked into a room and been the richest person on his own bench. Two million was the number on the kitchen wall. Four thousand was two thousandths of it. He had cut the green one out of the thing in the channel, kneeling on it in eleven inches of water, on a gray afternoon. It moved June's number by nothing you could see. He let himself have that for as long as it lasted. It did not last.

Then he got up and went to the cheap end to spend it, because that was what it was for, and that was where the afternoon went wrong. The lot he wanted was eight marks. He bought forty of them at once, sealed, and the woman on the stall counted them into a crate without looking up. Three hundred and twenty marks. A body starts one a day. A man on a hill had told him that in December, and Abe had spent six weeks proving it on himself, one tin at a time, by his own count and not the world's.

So the crate on the floor was five weeks of his own life, and it had come off the top of four thousand marks without making a dent anybody could see. He could have carried it home instead. Five weeks of lots go in a bag, and a bag goes forty one miles in nine hours. He told himself he was staying for the market. Then he sat down with the crate against his leg and made himself say the other one. June had four pages of him in a school notebook, and he was not ready to walk back in and be read.

He carried it up four flights and got quiet and opened the first one. Lot burn complete. 4 Foundation. He had come forty one miles for that crate and it was on the floor by ten in the morning. He went down to the far end of the hall once, where the cases had the lids down and a man sat beside them doing nothing at all. He read the labels he could read, and then the prices. There was not one thing on that side of the room he could use, down to the cheapest case in it.

Everything past the middle of that hall was for people who had broken and come back up the other side. So he had four thousand marks in a building where four thousand marks bought him a crate of dregs and somewhere to stand. He went back to the cheap end. After that it was one room and the same day over and over. Get quiet, three tries on a good day here and five on a bad one. Break the seal on one. Work it down to nothing. Sleep. Run the Croft form end to end on forty feet of empty floor.

He had never had that much clean floor in his life. Then do it again, while the street four floors down stayed exactly where it was. On one of those days he walked north instead, because the seal was bothering him. It took him an hour to find the street it came from. He knew it before he was halfway down it. Every building on it was the same gray. They were set back off the road behind railings, with the names cut into stone over the doors instead of painted on boards. There were flags.

There were two men on the steps of one of them who were not city guards. Their coats had no marks on them anywhere, and they stood the way Marek stood. He read the names as he went. OFFICE FOR PRACTICE was four buildings long on its own, with the seal over the middle door. Underneath the seal somebody had bolted up a smaller sign that just said OFPRAC, because four buildings of people were never going to say the long one. Next to it was the one with the tables in it.

Next to that was a building with no name over the door at all, only a number, and a barrier across its yard entrance with a man in the box. Abe stood outside the tables one for a while. Every number that had ever been said about him in his life had come out of this street. His grade. His depth. The rules Nita ruled up in green marker on a corridor wall forty one miles south of here. Nobody in any of those buildings had ever heard his name, and every one of them had already decided what he was.

One of the two men on the steps watched him go past. It was not hard and it was not for long. Abe was a boy in a wet coat on a public street and there was nothing to see. But the man's head came around and stayed around for four or five paces, and then went back, and he said something short to the other one without moving his mouth much. Abe kept walking at exactly the speed he had been walking at. Out in the world it was still the first week of January and he had been in this city four days.

Inside him it was five weeks, and nobody had seen him in any of them. He had gotten used to that. Being looked at once, by one man, on an ordinary street, went through him like cold water. He got around the corner and stood against the railings and made himself breathe. Then he walked back south. Seventy nights in Prescot, and nobody who saw him could have told you one thing about him afterward. That was what the still had always been for.

Four days in this city and he had handed over a face two people could sit down and describe, a number he had said out loud in front of both of them, and the name of a marsh. He could not think of one single way to get any of it back. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 14 Foundation: 13, 900 / 16, 900 (Body 15) Five weeks of his own. Abe sat on that floor and looked at the two numbers and understood something he did not like. A whole city could not get him a layer.

Five weeks, one lot a day, in a hall holding more essence than the whole of Calder, and the bar was not going to finish. Body 15 wanted sixteen thousand nine hundred. Body 16 would want more than that, and 17 more than 16, and there was no rung anywhere up that ladder where it stopped getting worse. He had spent three months solving how much he could get. Nobody had told him that getting more was going to stop being the answer. The next time he went down into the world for anything, Openshaw was watching the door.

Not in a bad way. He was leaning on the end of his own stall with his arms folded, looking down the hall at people coming in, and when Abe came past he straightened up.

"You," he said.

"The marsh."

"Me."

"Get any more of those, you bring them here." Openshaw was writing on a pad while he said it.

"Not to the arch, not to a runner on the street. Here, to me, and ask for me by name."

"Why?"

"Because somebody's already asked me about it once, and I'd rather it was me who answers."

"Asked you what?"

"Whether a boy had brought one in." Openshaw tore the top sheet off the pad.

"I said no." He held it out. Abe took it. It was a name and a stall number and nothing else at all. Four days ago Abe had stood in the door of this hall being pleased that a city this size had no idea who he was. Somebody in it had been asking after him before he ever walked in.

"Why did you say no?"

"Because I hadn't decided yet." Openshaw put the glass back in his eye, which meant they were finished.

"Now I have. Bring them here." Abe walked out of that hall with a piece of paper in his hand and put it in his inside pocket next to the money. He came back at two in the morning, when the hall was shut and there was nobody in it at all, and stood behind the stall and let the world in to open the drawer. There were pencils in it, and a ledger, and a roll of green cloth. The card was not in it.

Kell had carried it through that curtain on the first morning, and Abe had been standing four feet away, and he had watched her do it and thought nothing at all. He got quiet again on the second try, alone in a locked hall with the whole city asleep, and it was the easiest thing he had done all week. Nothing he had ever taken in a stopped world had left anything behind him. This had left a card, and it was somewhere in this city with the name of his marsh on it.