Assembling the Debt

Edra the cracksman lived above a clockmaker's, which was either a joke or a confession, Mira could never decide which. She was not dead. She was sixty-three and looked ninety, because she had spent her best years cracking time-locks and a time-lock, when it catches you, does not break your fingers. It charges you. Every failed attempt on a Lending House vault had docked Edra a tariff of her own hours, and twenty years of failures had left her a young woman's mind in a body it had outrun by three decades. She sat by her window in a shawl and watched the clockmaker's apprentices come and go and she did not, at first, want anything to do with Mira Quill. "I know the sermon," Edra said. "Fence sent word ahead. Years for the crew, years back to the Flats, rob the rich of nothing they'll miss. It's a beautiful sermon and I've heard nine of them and the men who preached the other eight are all in pauper's lime now, so." She turned her face back to the window. "Go away, girl. I've got fewer years than you and I'd like to spend them sitting down." "That's exactly what I came to offer you," Mira said. Edra did not turn. "You sold nothing," Mira went on. "Everyone thinks the Lending House aged you. They didn't lend you a thing — the lock taxed you, hour by hour, every time you failed it. Twenty-three years, Edra. I counted from the court tariff rolls; they're public if you know which clerk drinks. Twenty-three years the vault's lock charged you and never gave back." She crouched down by the old woman's chair so they were eye to eye. "Here's the part of the sermon nobody else preached you. Those twenty-three years didn't vanish. A time-lock doesn't burn what it charges. It banks it. Tariff hours go into the vault, same as loan hours, on a shelf, stamped — and a tariff stamp carries the name of the person it was taxed from. Yours. Twenty-three years on a shelf in the Grand Lending House with Edra written on them in the city's own ink." Now the old woman turned. "You crack that vault for me," Mira said quietly, "and you are not getting paid. You are getting reimbursed. You walk to the tariff shelf, you find your own name, and you take back every hour that lock ever stole from you. Twenty-three years, Edra. You'd leave that vault forty again. You'd have done the one thing nobody in the history of this city has done — robbed the Lending House — and the prize would be your own youth, off their shelf, back in your own blood." Edra was silent for a long time. The clock downstairs ticked, and ticked, and the apprentices laughed about something in the street, and the old woman who had lost twenty-three years to a lock looked at the young woman who had lost a father to a loan. "The lock runs on a borrowed century," Edra said at last, and her voice had changed — there was a craftsman in it now, waking up. "You don't pick a century. I tried for twenty years to outlast it and it outlasted me, it'll outlast anyone, that's the whole point of it. Unless." She stopped. Her ruined old face did something complicated. "Unless you didn't try to outlast it. Unless you spent it. A century lock counts down — but a count, girl, a count can be made to count faster. If you fed the lock enough loose hours, all at once, from outside — overpaid it, drowned it — it'd run its hundred years out in a night and click open thinking the century was done." "And where," Mira said, very carefully, because she had been waiting two years for someone with the trade to say this sentence, "would a person get a hundred years of loose, unstamped hours to feed a lock in a single night?" Edra looked at her. And for the first time the old woman smiled, and the smile was young, it was a forty-year-old's smile on a ninety-year-old's face, and it was not kind at all. "There's exactly one place in Sallow holding that much loose time," she said. "It's called the Grand Lending House. You're proposing to rob the vault. Using the vault. Of course you are." She pulled her shawl tighter, and it was the gesture of a woman settling in to work, not to sit. "Sit down, Mira Quill. Properly. If we're going to do the impossible thing we should at least do it organised. Tell me about the other three you mean to bring. And tell me true — because I'll know if you flatter them — what each of their reasons is for saying no, because a crew is just a stack of reasons, and a heist is just unstacking them in the right order." Mira sat down. Outside, the cruelest bell in the city rang the hour. For once, she did not flinch at it. For once it sounded less like a debt compounding, and more like a clock — someone else's clock — beginning, very faintly, to run out.