A Book of Names

On the morning they made Rell a full collector, the Guildmother gave him a knife he would never use and a book he could not put down, and told him the second was far more dangerous than the first. The knife was ceremony. Every collector got one — a slim blade, Guild-marked, for cutting the seal-wax on a sworn contract and nothing else. Rell hung it on his belt next to the everyday knife he actually cut things with and thought no more about it. The book was the work. It was a collector's book of names, bound in grey hide, no thicker than two fingers, and the Guildmother set it on the desk between them with the care a person gives a thing that bites. "Your first solo book, Rell. Eleven names. Eleven debts the ordinary law of Hexgate cannot touch, because each of them was sworn on blood, and a blood-sworn debt is not a matter for magistrates. It is a matter for us." She tapped the cover. "You will collect all eleven. You will not collect them in the order that is easy. You will collect them in the order written, top to bottom, because the book itself decides the order, and the book is older and cleverer than you, and it has reasons." Rell had wanted this for six years. He had run errands and carried ledgers and watched senior collectors do the work, and he had wanted, with his whole narrow ambitious heart, to be handed his own grey book. He took it now, and it was warm, the way a living thing is warm, and he opened it to the first page expecting a name and an address and a sum. He got a name and an address and a sum. He also got a date. The first debtor was one Saviel Onn, of Threadneedle Row, and the debt was forty crowns, sworn on blood eleven years gone — and the date written beneath the name, in the Guild's own unarguable ink, was a date of death. Saviel Onn had died six years ago. The book said so. The book also said the debt now stood at four hundred and twelve crowns, because a blood-sworn debt does not stop accruing interest for anything so small as the debtor dying. Rell looked up. The Guildmother was watching him with the patient, slightly sorrowful expression of a woman who had handed this same first lesson to a great many ambitious young collectors and watched it land every time. "He's dead," Rell said. "Yes." "You can't collect a debt off a dead man." "The Guild," said the Guildmother gently, "has been collecting debts off dead men for three hundred years. It is, in fact, the larger part of what we do, and the part the senior collectors do not discuss in front of the juniors, because the juniors all want the grey book so badly and we find it kinder to let them keep wanting it a while." She leaned back. "A debt sworn on blood, Rell, is sworn on a bloodline. Not on a man. Saviel Onn borrowed forty crowns and swore it on his blood, and his blood did not end when his heart did — it went on, into a daughter, and the daughter does not know she carries the debt, and the law of Hexgate will never tell her, and so it falls to you. The first name in your book is a dead man. The debt is alive. And it has been quietly doubling, in the dark, for six years, against a young woman on Threadneedle Row who has never in her life heard the name of our Guild." Rell sat with the warm grey book open in his hands and felt his six years of wanting curdle, slowly, into something heavier. "And if she can't pay four hundred and twelve crowns," he said. "Which she can't. Nobody on Threadneedle Row has four hundred crowns." "Then you collect it the other way." The Guildmother did not look away from him; he respected her for not looking away, and hated her a little for it too. "You know there is another way. You have carried the ledgers. You have seen the senior collectors come back from a book with no coin in their purse and the name struck through all the same. A blood-debt can be paid in coin. Where there is no coin —" she let the sentence rest a moment, so he would have to finish it himself, in his own head, in his own voice, which was the cruelest and most honest kind of teaching — "it is paid in blood. The bloodline settles the debt. One way or the other, the book gets its name struck through, and you, collector, are the hand that strikes it." The book was warm in Rell's hands. Eleven names. He had wanted this so badly. He looked down at the first one — Saviel Onn, dead six years, four hundred and twelve crowns and climbing — and at the address on Threadneedle Row where a young woman was going about her morning not knowing that the Guild had, as of today, assigned someone to her. "What was her father's forty crowns even for?" Rell heard himself ask. It was not a collector's question. A collector did not ask what the debt was for. But he asked it. And the Guildmother's sorrowful patient face did something then — a flicker, quickly folded away — that told Rell, before she answered, that he had just asked the one question the grey book had put first in his hands specifically so that he would have to ask.