Chapter 12 - House Rules

“Rules,” I said.

I said it with my trousers round my thighs, in my own dungeon, to two dead men and a slave in a frame, and I pulled my trousers up while I said it so I would sound like I owned the place. It didn’t help much. Kit was looking at my hands on my buttons with enormous interest, and Jory was looking at my face all polite and patient, waiting for my order, and at the end of the passage Felix had begun, slowly, to clap.

“Stop that.”

Felix stopped. He went on smiling in the dark.

“Rules,” I said again. “One. Lily. You know about Lily.”

“The salt,” said Kit, at once. “We know about the salt.”

“You don’t touch her. You don’t touch her dress, her hair, her pony, her spade. You don’t flirt with her. You don’t take anything off her or out of her pockets. When she comes, you’re polite, and you stay out of her way.”

“We would never,” said Jory.

“Two.” I got my last button done up. “My room is mine at night. You don’t come in it after dark. Not through the door, not through the wall, not up through the floor.”

“Your room,” said Jory, “at night.”

“At night.”

Jory nodded slowly, dead serious about it, and Kit looked at him sideways and didn’t say anything, which should have warned me.

“Three. My clothes stay on me unless I take them off. And my smallclothes come back.”

“Your smallclothes are folded on your pillow,” said Jory. “We put them there this morning. The gnome sent word that the purchaser required them.”

“Four.” I pointed at Kaniz, who was still hanging in the cuffs with her ass in the air and hadn’t moved, because nobody had told her to. “Nobody touches Kaniz unless she asks me first.”

“Unless I ask,” said Kaniz, from the frame, “and you say yes.”

“That’s what I said.”

“It is not what you said, master. You said unless I ask you. That would mean I must beg you to give me to them. I would ask you for many things.” She turned her head and looked at me over her shoulder, perfectly calm. “But not that.”

“Fine. Unless she asks, and I say yes.”

“And you can’t touch anybody anyway,” I added to the two of them, because it had just occurred to me, and it was a great relief. “You need the fire. You need somebody holding your hand at the fire. So most of this is…”

“Theory,” said Jory.

“Theory,” I agreed.

Kit drifted closer. He put his see-through hand out toward my stomach, and it went into my bare stomach, cold and tingling, and he looked at it with a small frown and took it back.

“For now,” said Kit.

“That’s all,” I said. “That’s the rules.”

“That’s four,” said Jory. “Is that all of them?”

I opened my mouth. I tried to think of a fifth. There was a fifth, there had to be, there were probably fifty, and every one of them was somewhere behind the long day and the wagon and the seven strokes, and my head was empty and my legs were shaking and I had owned the place for less than a day.

“For now,” I said.

“For now,” said Jory, and he and Kit looked at each other, and I knew that look. It was the look Kaniz and Lily gave each other across a table, and it meant they had already decided something about me.

I unbuckled Kaniz. When I turned round with her wrists in my hands, the passage was empty all the way to the stair. Of course it was. Felix never stays for the part where somebody might ask him to carry something.

“He went out the window,” said Kit helpfully. “The little one in the cellar. We have a door.”

“He knows,” I said.

Kit and Jory kept the rules. That was the trouble.

I lay in Kit’s wide bed in the warm room above the kitchen, under the quilt, with my smallclothes on, which I had found folded on the pillow exactly where Jory said, cold, which meant one of them had been sitting on them. Kaniz lay against my back with her arm round my chest and her knees tucked behind mine, and the egg was down by the common-room fire, and Bertha was in the stable, and the Tome lay on the table under the window with its eye shut, still not speaking to me. The shutter was closed. The fire in the little hearth burned low and red. It was a better room than mine at the Nail, and I hated that.

It was the quietest room I had ever slept in, and I couldn’t stand it.

At the Nail there was always noise. Somebody was always singing in the common room, or a cart was going by under the window, or Maple was banging a pot, or the carter next door was snoring through the wall. Here there was only the fire ticking, and Kaniz breathing, and the river creaking under the ice somewhere past the wall, and I lay there with my eyes open and waited for something to happen.

Nothing happened for an hour. It was the worst hour of my life.

I knew they were there. I knew they were outside my door, or in the gallery, or in the wall, keeping to the letter of rule two so carefully that I could almost hear them doing it. I kept turning my head on the pillow to look at the door. Every time the fire cracked, my whole body went tight. My cock had been wrung out twice in the dungeon and had no business being anything but asleep, and it lay against my thigh and waited too, half hard, interested, the stupid thing, in what was going to happen.

The thump came through the wall by my head.

It was a bedframe hitting plaster. It came once, then again a while later, then again, slow and patient, six inches from my ear, and I lay there in the dark and listened to it with my mouth open.

“Jory,” said Kit’s voice, through the wall. It came out high and breathless. “Jory, slower, he’ll hear.”

“He’s meant to hear,” said Jory. “That’s what walls are for.”

The thumping got faster.

I sat up. I didn’t mean to. I was sitting up in bed with the quilt at my waist and my cock standing straight up in my smallclothes, wide awake, the traitor, and my ear was turned toward the wall, and the knocking went on, harder now, the bed next door banging the plaster so hard that the hearth in my room puffed ash, and Kit cried out on the other side, a long, broken, filthy cry, and the bell over the front door rang.

It rang once, deep, out over the river. The shutter rattled in its frame. I decided I didn’t want to know what had rung it.

“They’re at it,” I said.

“Yes, master,” said Kaniz. She was awake. She was lying on her back beside me with her hands folded on her stomach and her eyes open, listening, with an expression of deep professional interest. “The quiet one is very good with his hips.”

“They’ve been at it for an hour.”

“Mmm.” She tilted her head toward the wall. “The Tome says the old ruling houses of the Crimson Empire put two boys in every nursery, so each prince grew up with one friend he could trust, and the friends always ended up in the same bed, and nobody minded but the wives.”

“I DID say that,” said the Tome, from the table, without opening its eye. “It was a different time. The wives were very bitter.”

On the other side of the wall, Kit begged for something. He begged for it in so much detail that my face went hot, and Jory answered him calm and even, the same voice he used behind the bar, and told him exactly how he was going to get it and how long it would take, and the bed hit the wall, and hit it, and hit it. My cock throbbed in my smallclothes in time with the bed. It didn’t care who was doing what to whom. It had never once in its life cared about anything I said.

I banged on the wall with my fist.

“Some of us,” I shouted, “are trying to SLEEP.”

The words came out of my mouth, and I knew them, and my stomach went cold and dropped. Some of us WORK, Thornwood. I had laughed at him for a week. He had lain on the other side of a wall just like this one, night after night, listening to Kaniz and me, and banged with his fist, and I had banged back, and now he was dead on four brass bowls under the Nail and his room was empty, and I was the one banging.

The thumping stopped.

Kaniz turned her head on the pillow and looked at me. She kept quiet and put her hand on my bare back and left it there.

“Is that a rule?” said Kit’s voice, through the wall.

I didn’t answer for a while. I sat there with Kaniz’s hand on my back and my heart going hard, thinking about the carter. It was their wall too. I was lying in their bed; Kit had told me he’d had it made wide on purpose. They had built this inn so that people could be loud in it, and they’d waited three winters for somebody to live here, and I was the man they’d waited for, and I had banged on the wall.

“No,” I said. “It’s not a rule.”

“Oh, good,” said Kit.

“Just… quieter.”

“Quieter isn’t a rule,” said Jory, reasonably, through the plaster. “Quieter is a request.”

The bed hit the wall.

It went on most of the night. It stopped twice, for a while, and both times I lay there in the silence and listened to them talking in low voices on the other side of the wall, and laughing, and once Kit said something I didn’t catch and Jory said, “Ask him,” and Kit said, “At night?” and Jory said, “Rule two,” and they both laughed harder, and I was fairly sure the joke was me, and the bed started again.

At some point after that, a face came out of the wall above my pillow.

It came out as far as the plaster and no further. It was Kit’s face, gray in the dark, with his hair in his eyes, and it stopped flush with the surface of the wall, nose and lips and chin and eyelashes pushed out of the plaster, only his face, with the rest of him still in the next room. He looked down at me with his eyes enormous, and I nearly pissed the bed.

“Kit. Rule two.”

“I’m not in your room,” Kit whispered. “I’m in the wall. The wall’s between the rooms. Jory says it’s a boundary.”

“The wall is not a boundary.”

“Jory says it’s a shared boundary, which belongs to both rooms equally, and therefore to neither.” His face looked down at my lap, where the quilt had slid, and his eyes went wider. “You’re hard.”

“I’m asleep.”

“You’re not asleep. You’re hard, and you’re not asleep, and I can’t touch you.” His whisper went small and hoarse. “It isn’t fair. Two nights ago I had you on the hearthstone and I could feel all of you. Now you’re right there and I can’t do anything.” He looked at my cock in my smallclothes with real grievance. “I could tell you what I’d do. Telling’s not touching.”

“Go back to Jory.”

“Jory’s asleep,” Kit whispered. “He always falls asleep after. Every time. I could tell you instead.”

He told me.

He didn’t wait for permission. He hung there in the wall over my pillow and told me in a low, eager, filthy whisper, every single thing he would do to me if he were solid, starting at my mouth and taking a long time about the rest. I lay there with my eyes shut and my hands fisted in the quilt, and Kaniz lay beside me and listened to all of it, and when he got to the part involving the carved headboard she said, “Oh,” under her breath, in a voice of real admiration.

When he finished, he watched me for a while.

“Is that a rule?” he whispered. “The telling?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and it was the truest thing I said all night.

His face sank back into the plaster and was gone.

I didn’t sleep. I lay there and watched the shutter go gray. Kaniz slept, eventually, on her side with her hand curled round my wrist, as she had at the Nail, out of habit. The fire died. Down below, in the common room, I heard somebody start building the fire there back up one stick at a time, with long rests between. I decided it was Jory, warming the place up for customers I didn’t want.

On the table under the window, the Tome had opened its eye.

It was looking at the wall where Kit’s face had been, and it lay there in the gray light and stared at it for a long time without saying a single word, which in eight months of living with it I had never once seen it do. I liked it a lot less than the shouting.

The brewers needed their wagon back.

I drove it to Ashbourne in the morning with Kaniz on the bench beside me, because I couldn’t go anywhere without Kaniz, and with Bertha tied on behind, complaining. I didn’t take the Tome. That was the whole point of having bought a house half a morning from the walls. I left it on the table in the warm room where I could have seen it, if I had been there, and told it to behave.

“I am a BOOK,” it said. “What exactly do you imagine I am going to do?”

I told Jory I would be back by dark. Jory was behind the bar, polishing the second cup, with his face screwed up with the effort of moving the cloth.

“By dark,” he said. “We’ll mind the house.”

“You’ll stay out of my room.”

“At night,” said Jory, “yes,” and went on polishing.

I didn’t notice he’d only promised the nights. I was too tired to notice anything. I had been awake for two nights and most of a day, and the road along the river swam in front of me in the bright snow, and by the second mile I was falling asleep on the bench with the reins in my lap. Kaniz kept me awake. She did it her way, which was to put her hand inside my coat and down the front of my trousers and hold on, and every time my head nodded, squeeze. She did it seven times between the River Bell and the east gate. By the third one I was awake everywhere, and by the seventh I was nodding on purpose. The guards on the gate looked at my face, and at Kaniz’s arm disappearing into my lap, and waved us through without a word.

The brewers’ foreman took the reins back without saying anything either.

Marcus Blackthorn saw me in his office, behind his huge desk, with his pipe going and his cane propped against the arm of his chair. I put the deed down on the blotter in front of him, and he unfolded it and read it with the pipe in his teeth, and when he got to the name of the property he took the pipe out and looked up at me over it.

“The River Bell,” he said.

“Yes.”

“The haunted one.”

“Yes.”

“With the two dead innkeepers.” Marcus’s great shoulders started to shake. He was trying not to laugh. He was a mountain of a man and he was trying his hardest, and it was like watching a hill try not to sneeze. “I sent a man out there, three winters ago. To look at it for a Guild post. He came back without his trousers.”

“Everybody does.”

“He came back without his trousers,” Marcus said, “and asked to be sent again.” He put the pipe back in his teeth. He scrawled something across the bottom of the Guild order, signed it, stamped it in black wax, and shoved it across the desk at me. “The Guild is satisfied. The book is outside the walls.” He looked at me through the smoke, and the laugh went out of his face. “You know they’ll go with it.”

“I know.”

“A congregation that hears a book in its sleep,” said Marcus, “doesn’t stop hearing it because the book has moved house. They’ll hear it half a morning east just as well, and they’ll walk there.” He tapped the ash out of his pipe. “I can give you the city behind you. I can’t give you men. Not for a haunted inn outside the walls, not on a Guild post, not this winter.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I know you didn’t,” said Marcus. “That’s why I said it.”

We started back after noon, on Bertha, both of us. Kaniz rode behind me with her arms round my waist and her chin on my shoulder, and Bertha walked slower than she had ever walked in her life, out of spite, and the light began to go long before we reached the willows. It went yellow, then red on the snow, and I was so tired that I didn’t see the light on the tower until Kaniz said my name.

I looked up.

There was a light on the River Bell’s watchtower. It was one small yellow flame, right up on the parapet above the fourth landing, where the stair wasn’t safe, and you could see it for a mile in every direction. Anybody could have seen it. Anybody on the ferry road or in the willows watching the inn could look up and see exactly where to go.

My stomach dropped through Bertha and into the road.

I kicked her. Bertha, who had not run since Willowbrook, felt something in my heels and ran. She ran the last mile with Kaniz clinging to my back and the snow flying up round us, and we came in under the gatehouse at a gallop with the bell over the door ringing out at us, and I was off her back before she had stopped.

The warm room was empty, and so was the table under the window, and I said every bad word I knew. The shutter was open, and from the window I could see the light on top of the tower, and the stair door at the bottom of the tower, standing open.

I took the tower stair three steps at a time.

It was narrow and dark and went round and round, and it was steep, and I had been awake for two days, and my legs were dead by the first landing. At the second landing there was something on the steps. I bent down and touched it, and it was ash, a heap of cold ash. There was another heap on the next step. There was a heap on every step after that, all the way up, and I didn’t understand it until, a few steps on, I found a stub of burned-out kindling lying in the last heap. Those two idiots had carried kindling up the stair one stick at a time. They had lit a little fire on a step to make themselves strong enough to lift the book, moved it up one step, and lit another.

On the third landing, where the stair was still sound, I stopped. I could hear voices above me.

“…eighty-four,” Jory was saying. He sounded exhausted. I didn’t know a ghost could sound exhausted. “Eighty-four steps. From the yard door. I counted every one of them.”

“Eighty-three,” said Kit. “You counted the doorsill.”

“The doorsill’s a step.”

“GENTLEMEN.” It was the Tome. It was louder than I had heard it in days, and fuller, and happier, and it rolled down the stair to where I stood with my hand on the wall. “You have been magnificent. I have been carried in my time by six abbots, a court eunuch, and an empress’s personal elephant, and none of them, not ONE, did it with such devotion, or with so many small fires. You have done for me what the boy would not. You have brought me to my tower.”

“Three quarters of it,” said Kit.

“The view,” said the Tome, “is entire.”

I stood on the third landing with my heart going and my legs shaking and listened. I knew I should go up, and pick the book up, and carry it down, and shout at all three of them, and put out the candle. I stayed where I was. I wanted to hear what they had been paid.

“You said there was a price,” said Jory, “for your side of it.”

“Price, reward. It is the same thing, said by a merchant.” The Tome’s voice dropped. It went low and rich and pleased with itself, the voice it used on Kaniz late at night when it thought I was asleep, and the hair stood up on my arms. “You want to be felt.”

Neither of them answered.

“I watched you last night,” said the Tome. “Through his wall. Your little face in the plaster, Kit, and the boy lying under it, hard as a mast, and neither of you able to do a single thing about it. It was a tragedy. It was the finest tragedy I have watched in a century, and I have watched plays that ran three days.” I heard it shift on the stone. “You can only be felt by the fire, with his hand in yours, for as long as he holds on. That is a poor sort of haunting. That is a candle in a jar.”

“We know what we are,” said Jory. His voice had gone careful.

“You do not know what you could be,” said the Tome. “I do.”

The stair above me stayed silent, and I couldn’t even hear the river. My face was burning. The nosy old thing had watched me the whole night, and I’d thought it was sulking.

“I am eight hundred years old,” said the Tome, “and I know every rite that was ever written by a man who wanted to put his hands on someone he could not reach. I know the binding on this house better than you do, who live in it. And I can make you felt.” The candle on the parapet crackled. “Felt, gentlemen. Solid, and warm, and heavy, for as long as you like, by whoever you like, in every room of this house. Whenever you want.”

Kit made a small sound. It was the sound he had made on the hearthstone, with his hand in mine, and my cock remembered it before I could tell it not to.

“What do you want for it?” said Jory.

The Tome laughed. It was a long, low, delighted laugh, and it rolled down the tower stair over the little heaps of ash, past me, round and round, all the way to the bottom.