Chapter 61: I Let Five Assassins Vote on Whether to Kill Me With My Own Payday

You’re going to take the vote," Zelina said. "You’ve already decided, and you’re still going to take it, and I’d like to know why."

"Because I want the information."

"You want the permission."

"I want the information."

I put the coin down in the middle of the table where all five of them could see it.

"You’ve each had eighty days to watch this thing work on me. One of you is going to have noticed something the other four didn’t. That’s worth nine hours of etching time."

Lunara came off the wall.

"Then I’ll go first, and I’ll be brief." She put one hand flat on the table beside the coin. "Yes. Cut it. And I’ll be in the room when you do."

"Reason?"

"Because you have been paying into that hole since January and I have watched you do it." She did not look away. "If it comes back and it kills you, you die owed nothing. If it doesn’t come back, you die a debtor. I have been a sworn sword for twenty years and I know which of those two I can carry."

"That’s sentiment."

"It’s accounting." She took her hand off the table. "You taught it to me."

Zelina did not wait to be called. She came up the length of the table instead of speaking from where she sat, which she does when she wants the other four to have to turn their heads.

The lamp was low enough by then that I could see the etching plate glowing behind her on the far bench, and Saoirse’s shoulders over it, and nobody had said the word workshop yet.

"No."

"Reason."

"Two reasons and you’ll like neither." She started counting on her fingers, which is what she does when she has decided in advance not to be persuaded. "One, four minutes is not a delivery, it’s a flood, and the difference between a medicine and a poison has been the same thing for four thousand years."

"And two?"

"Two, he told the boy to bring you the receipt." She looked at the coin. "Vaelion, he wants you to find the tap. Which means the tap being cut is a move on his board, not yours, and I would rather lose four points than make a move he has already written down."

"Noted."

"Don’t do that."

"Do what?"

"Say noted." Zelina put her hands flat. "You say noted when you have heard a thing and set it to one side, and I am asking you not to set this one to one side."

"I heard you."

"That isn’t the same sentence and we both know it."

Calista spoke from the end of the table without standing.

"I’ll abstain."

"You don’t get to abstain."

"I get to abstain because I’m the only person in this room who has ever had something taken out of her and put back." She turned her hands over on the table, both of them, palms up, and the scars sat there in the lamplight where nobody had to be told what they were. "They took my office out of me in my husband’s throne room, in front of three hundred people, and it took as long as it takes a legate to read one page." She closed her hands. "That was six weeks ago. I have spent every day since finding out what a person is when the thing that defines her is on the wrong side of a door."

"Then you of all people should have a position."

"I have a position." Calista put her palms flat again. "My position is that no one in this room, including you, has any idea what it will do to a man to be given back twelve years of proof that he was worth paying, all at once, at three in the morning, in a study."

Miralys had not moved from the window.

"Cut it," she said.

"Reason."

"You are asking the wrong question." She came to the table. "You are asking whether the man survives the payment. I am asking who owns the payment while it sits in his account, and the answer is a clerk in a river house."

"That’s true either way."

"It is not." Miralys Fae put two fingers on the table. "My father signed the treaty that made me your wife five years ago. My country has paid an indemnity every quarter since into an account it has never once been shown. Do you know what happens to a people who pay for five years into a hole?"

"Tell me."

"They stop believing the hole has a bottom." She took her fingers off the table. "And then they stop believing they were ever rich. Cut it, Vaelion. Not for the four points. So that the account has a bottom again."

Saoirse was last, and she had been etching the whole time, hunched over the plate with a lamp two inches from her wrist.

"I’m not voting."

"You get a vote."

"I’m the one holding the knife." She did not look up. "The person holding the knife does not vote on whether to use the knife. That’s how you end up with a surgeon who wanted it."

"Then give me the number."

"Sixty one percent." She turned the plate. "That’s the chance the line closes clean. The rest of it splits between the line closing and taking your window with it, and the line closing and taking you."

"How did you get sixty one?"

"I didn’t get it. I built it." She finally looked up, and there was oil smoke on the side of her face. "Vaelion, I built it out of eleven hours and one coin, and if you give me three days I can make it eighty. That is my whole vote and I have now cast it and I want that on the record."

I stood at the head of the table with three yeses, one no, one abstention, and one engineer who had just told me the truth at cost.

Then I went to the window and looked at the sky, which was still black, and did the only piece of arithmetic that mattered.

"We don’t have three days."

"Why not?" Lunara said.

"Because he told a sixteen year old to tell me the truth and I’d pay him properly." I turned around. "That’s not a threat. It’s a delivery schedule. He expects the tap cut within a day, and he has had the second container ready since Thursday, and men who prepare containers do not prepare them for events that are three days out."

Saoirse put the plate down.

"Then I need the east workshop," she said. "The Tower’s, not ours. Their etching bench is the only one that holds temperature past dawn."

"The Tower expelled you."

"The Tower expelled me for publishing." She was already wrapping the plate. "They never changed the locks. Nobody changes locks on a woman they’ve decided doesn’t matter."

We went out at four in the morning with eleven men, which is how many I could take without emptying my own gate.

The Tower workshop sat on the third terrace with a door somebody had already opened.

Lunara had her hand on my chest before I had finished seeing it.

"Back," she said.

"How many?"

"Six inside. Two on the roof." She did not raise her voice past a level a person two feet away could hear. "Majesty, they are standing in a working posture and they have been standing in it long enough to be bored."

"They’re waiting for her, not for me."

"Yes."

"Then she goes in second."

Saoirse said something behind me that I did not catch, and Lunara Marr walked through the door of a Tower workshop alone at four in the morning without drawing until she was already inside.

The first man came at her low.

She let him.

Twenty years of a sworn sword and I had never once seen her use her left hand, and she used it.

The noise the man made going into the etching bench brought the two off the roof down the outside stair in a hurry that got one of them killed on the landing.

It took under a minute. I know because I counted, out of habit, standing in a doorway I had been told to stay in.

When it was done she came back out breathing through her nose, with somebody’s blood on her jaw, and said the sentence I have not been able to put down since.

"They weren’t guarding the bench," she said. "They were guarding the door so nobody could get out."

And behind her, at the back of the workshop, under a tarp that had been laid down neatly by a man who lays everything down neatly, sat the second container.

It was already warm.