The Counting Room was the size of a chapel, and every inch of it was a ledger.
Brass plates, thumb-sized, set into the walls from the skirting to the vault, each stamped with a name and a figure. Thousands. Dagny lifted the lantern and the whole room moved, gold to gold to gold.
“Don’t touch anything,” I said.
Dagny touched one.
“Nothing happened,” she said, injured.
“Nothing happens to you. You’re fifteen.”
“Fifteen and a half.”
Silwen had not come in. She stood in the arch with her bow in her hands and her ears up, the way she stood when she was counting exits. “It’s warmer in here,” she said. “Warmer than the corridor.”
“It’s a warm room.”
“It’s a warm room because we’re in it.”
I let that sit. It was the sort of thing she said that took a day to land.
The plates ran in columns. Surname first, guild script, and beside every name a figure — no currency mark, no unit, nothing to say what was being counted. I found Thunder Pike in the fourth column. Brannoc Tarr: 6,200. Kaeli Vast: 5,150. Elowen: 3,900. Dax: 2,050.
And under them, lower, smaller, in a hand cut into the brass with something very fine and very patient: DELACOURT, Y. — 61,000.
I looked at it for a while.
Sixty-one thousand of nothing, in no unit at all, and I knew what it was the way you know a debt from the shape of the envelope.
“Found yours?” Dagny said.
“No.”
Pell was two columns over with her spectacles fogging. She read hers out flat, the way she read components. “Lanthe, P. One thousand two hundred.”
“Mine’s two thousand one hundred,” Dagny said, delighted. “Is that good? It sounds good.”
Rourke, D. Two thousand one hundred. Mine was thirty times theirs, and the room had gone warm enough that my collar was wet.
Then my knees went.
Not a stumble. A decision, made somewhere under my ribs without consulting me. My palm hit the brass and the brass was warm and the warmth went up my arm like a lit fuse.
“Yvan.”
“I’m fine.”
“Course you are,” Dagny said, and got her shoulder under my arm. “You’re just going to be fine sitting down.”
They sat me against the wall like luggage. Silwen took the lantern off Dagny, checked the corridor behind us, came back, and put her hand flat on my forehead — which is not a thing anyone had done to me in six years of adventuring.
“You’re burning.”
“It’s a warm room.”
“It’s a warm room,” she agreed, “and you’re burning.”
Pell had stopped looking at the plates. Her satchel was open on her knees and the scrying-stone was out of it — glass and brass, the size of a fist, the kind the guild rents to parties who want their descent recorded.
“Put that away,” I said.
“No.”
She breathed on it. The glass went milky, then warm, then bright.
“Pell.”
“They need to see this.” Her voice was doing the thing it did when she was frightened and had decided to be brave instead. “If they see it, they pay for it. If they pay for it, we can afford to go deeper.”
“Who’s they?”
But I already knew, because the room had changed. The plates had picked up a shine that wasn’t the lantern. Somewhere above us, in a city I couldn’t see, a great many small things began to turn over.
And none of the three of them were looking at the stone.
Dagny was looking at her boots. Silwen was watching me watch them, ears flat, and she did not say a word.
“You knew,” I said.
Silwen looked at the stone, then at me. “I’ve been warm before,” she said.
Something came up through the floor, and it sounded pleased.