Chapter 7 - Motivated Seller

I woke up with a dungeon ring swinging over my face and Kaniz’s mouth already on my cock.

It took me a second to work out which one had woken me up. The ring was turning slowly on its hook in the draft from the window, black against the gray light, and every time it came round it showed me the bent end of its bolt. Under the blanket, Kaniz was taking her time. She had one hand flat on my stomach to keep me still and the other wrapped round the base of me, and she was moving her mouth up and down, slow and steady. She’d woken up before me on purpose, and a good while before, from how far along she was.

“Kaniz,” I said. My voice came out in pieces. “It’s morning.”

She took her mouth off me long enough to answer. “It is the start of a day,” she said from under the blanket. “You said, last night, the ring goes back in the morning. If you are busy, it does not go back.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“And yet,” said the blanket, and went back down.

I had plans for the day. I had made them in the dark after she fell asleep on my chest: I would take the ring back, or at least take it down, and I would go down to breakfast and tell Fenwick, firmly, that I had seen enough listings. I had been clear with myself about all of it. My hips came up off the mattress. My hand went into her hair. Every plan I had made in the dark went out of my head in the order I had made them, and I came hard with my heel braced against the footboard and the ring swinging over my face, and Kaniz swallowed and climbed up the bed and lay down on my chest again as though nothing had happened.

“Now it is morning,” she said.

The Tome’s eye opened on the table under my coat.

“FINALLY,” it said. “Now that the slave has finished her devotions, perhaps the boy can turn his attention to the PROMISE that was made to me in this room last night. A FORTRESS. She said she knew one. I heard her say it. I have been lying awake under this verminous garment all night, waiting for the sun to come up so I could hold her to it.”

“You don’t sleep.”

“I did not SLEEP, I said I was lying AWAKE. Your ears are as stupid as the rest of you.” The coat heaved. “Kaniz Delight. Which fortress?”

Kaniz didn’t answer. She had her cheek on my chest and her eyes open, and she was looking at the ring on the hook, and she hadn’t blinked since the Tome said fortress. The hair stood up on my arms.

“Kaniz,” I said. “What fortress?”

“Fenwick is downstairs,” she said. “I heard his pony. It bit the post.”

Fenwick was in the common room with a pot of Maple’s tea, his tall hat on his head, and his folio already open on the table in front of an empty seat meant for me. Lily sat across from him in her shop apron with flour on one cheek, which I wanted to lick off, and a heel of bread in her hand. She looked up when I came down the stairs, looked at my face and then at Kaniz behind me, and smiled with one side of her mouth.

“Busy morning?” she said.

“I was asleep.”

“You were very loud for somebody asleep.” She pushed the bread across the table to me. “Maple heard you in the kitchen. She said to tell you the hook in that beam was put up for a lamp, and if it comes down on your head she’s not paying for the doctor.”

I sat down in the seat in front of the folio with the back of my neck hot, and Lily put her foot on top of mine under the table and left it there. She had walked over from her shop in the snow before her own breakfast to be here for this. I wanted to kiss her for it, with my hand up the back of her apron, in front of Fenwick and Maple and everyone. I took the bread instead.

“Fenwick,” I said. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Excellent.”

“I’ve seen a farm with ghouls in it. I’ve seen a tower with a hole to the underworld in the cellar. I think that’s enough listings for anybody. I think the Guild can come down here and argue with me in person, and I’ll stay at the Nail, and we’ll all get along.”

“The Guild,” Fenwick said, “has sent a second letter.” He took it out of the folio and laid it beside my bread. It had the Guild’s seal on it, broken. “It was delivered to my office, as your agent of record, yesterday afternoon. It reminds you of the date. It notes, with what I consider unnecessary relish, that the Tome is still inside the walls.”

“Who made you my agent of record?”

Fenwick looked across the table at Lily. Lily took a bite of her bread.

The Tome had come down under my arm, wrapped in my coat, because it had threatened to scream the house down if I left it upstairs. It chose this moment to shout through the wool.

“The FORTRESS! Show him the fortress, you condescending little gnome! The slave knows a fortress!”

Fenwick turned his head to Kaniz. Kaniz stood behind my chair with her chain looped over her wrist, and she looked down at the folio and didn’t say anything for so long that I started sweating under my shirt.

“The last page,” she said at last.

“I had not intended to show the last page,” Fenwick said. “It is outside our radius. It is in the mountains. And the circumstances of the sale are, as I am sure you will appreciate, unusual.” He turned the folio round to face himself, licked his thumb, and leafed through it to the back. He turned it back round and laid it flat in front of me. I got the feeling plenty of clients had told him they’d seen enough listings. “I will say only that the discount is considerable.”

It was a full-page woodcut, and whoever cut it hadn’t bothered making the place look nice.

It showed a fortress on a crag of black rock, and my stomach turned over before I had even counted the towers. There were seven of them, crooked, joined by covered walkways, and the tallest one leaned out over the ridge at an angle that looked like it was about to fall and had been about to fall for three hundred years. The engraver had put mist round the base of the walls and gargoyles on the roof ledges, every one, with the anatomy the Tome had once made me look at for an hour. Down at the bottom of the keep, a long dark mark ran across the cellar floor, labeled in small careful capitals: ORIGINAL FEATURE.

Under that, in fancy curly lettering: BLACKROCK HOLD. REDUCED FOR QUICK SALE. MOTIVATED SELLER.

“The seller is dead,” Lily said.

“The estate is unclaimed,” Fenwick said. “The heirs are unlocated, and the Crown has developed a pressing interest in the liquidation of unclaimed assets. The previous owner is understood to be on the premises.” He turned a page in a smaller book. “In the feature.”

“He’s in the hole,” said Lily.

“He is extremely motivated,” said Fenwick.

I knew that fortress. The engraver hadn’t drawn the room under the keep, but I knew it anyway, because I had seen its ceiling from a board, flat on my back with my clothes gone and iron shackles on my wrists and ankles, while a slave girl ran her hands over my chest and recited a spell she had learned from the pictures. The slave girl was standing behind my chair. The old man in red robes who owned that room had come through its door at a run, and I had shoved him into that pit, the dark mark at the bottom of the drawing, with my own hands, and I had heard him hit something on the way down, twice.

My wrists and ankles went cold in four thin bands where the iron had been. My mouth filled with spit, and sick came up the back of my throat, hot and sour, and the cut on my breastbone, the inch Kaniz had drawn with her knife, burned under my shirt. My cock had been hard on and off since I woke up with Kaniz’s mouth on it. It went small and cold and pulled itself up tight against me, and stayed there, and I had never felt it do that in my life.

I didn’t say anything. I sat in front of the woodcut with a heel of bread in my hand and stared at the place where I’d nearly got my heart cut out.

The Tome found its way out of my coat.

I don’t know how. I had it wrapped twice, and it must have pushed the wool open with its own cover, because the coat fell open on the table beside me and the eye came up out of it and fixed on the woodcut, and the whole book went rigid.

“HOME,” it shrieked.

Maple dropped something in the kitchen.

“HOME! Boy! BOY! That is MY HOUSE! That is my LECTERN, under the third arch on the left, you can see the top of it if you squint, and you will, you will squint at it, you squint at everything else! Seven towers! SEVEN, boy, the number of the ancient courts! The leaning one was built that way on purpose, the vulgar think it is a flaw but it was built by a duke who wished his enemies to believe it was about to fall on them, and it HAS been about to fall on them for three hundred years, and every one of them is DEAD and it is STILL STANDING! The gargoyles! Look at the gargoyles! Look at the one with the spleen! I picked that spleen! I told the carver it was wrong and he did it over twice!”

“Please put it away,” Fenwick said.

“I will NOT be put away! Gnome! What is the price? No, I do not care what the price is, the boy will pay it, he has gold, he has a large sack of the Guild’s gold that he thinks nobody knows about, and he will pay what you ask and he will THANK you!” Its eye swung round to me. “Boy. Boy, look at me. I will forgive you everything. The inn. The mule. The saddlebag. The PIT that you would not leave me on. Take me home and I will never again mention your great-great-grandfather the pig.”

I put my hand over its eye. It was the only thing I could think of to do. The cover was warm and it went on talking against my palm, muffled and furious, about vaults.

Kaniz moved beside me.

She didn’t touch me. She stood a half step behind my shoulder, where she had stood since the day the bond took, but she leaned past me over the table and put one finger on the leaning tower in the woodcut, on the narrow window two floors under its roof.

“That is my window,” she said. “That one. I could see the road from it when the shutter stuck open.”

“Kaniz.”

“It stuck often,” Kaniz said, in exactly her ordinary voice. “I liked it.”

In the kitchen, Maple had stopped moving. Lily’s foot had gone still on top of mine, and then it pressed down, once, hard.

“It’s too far,” I said. “It’s in the mountains. It’s in the mountains in winter. The Guild wants the book out of the walls, it didn’t say put it back where I found it.” I could talk again, a few words at a time. “And the cellar. It’s got a pit in the cellar, and the pit has a resident.”

“The listing,” said Fenwick, “describes it as a long-term occupant. I had assumed you were acquainted.”

“We’ve met.” I took my hand off the Tome to push the folio away, and my hand was shaking, and I put it in my lap under the table where nobody could see it. Lily saw it. Lily’s hand came down under the table and closed round mine, warm and floury, and held on without a word.

“Please,” the Tome said, in a small voice I had never heard out of it. “Please. I do not ask you for things.”

“You ask me for things every day.”

“I do not ask you for things that MATTER.”

“Turn the page, Fenwick.”

“There is no further page,” Fenwick said. “That was the last listing.”

“Then close it.”

Fenwick looked at me across the table. He closed the folio, and the woodcut went away under the leather. I got my first full breath since he had turned the page. He tucked the folio under his arm and straightened his hat, said he would call again when something came on the market, and went out through the front door into the snow without another word. I heard his pony try to bite the post on the way.

The Tome closed its eye and didn’t open it again.

Kaniz had not moved. She was still leaning over the table with her finger on the place where the folio had been, on the bare wood, where her window had been in the drawing. After a while she straightened up and stood behind my shoulder again, and she put her hand on the back of my chair, not on me, and left it there.

“Tonight,” she said, and looked up at the ceiling, toward my room and the ring on its hook.

“No,” I said. “Not tonight.”

She took her hand off my chair.

I went to the stable because nobody would follow me into it.

It was the middle of the afternoon and already getting dark, the snow coming down thick and slow in the yard, and the stable behind the Nail smelled of horse piss and hay and Bertha’s warm, dirty breath, and nobody in it wanted me to buy anything. She was in the end stall. She watched me come in with her ears back, and when I took the brush down off its nail she looked at the brush and at me and sighed through her nose, long and heavy, like a woman letting her husband explain something.

I brushed her. She let me. I brushed her neck and her shoulder and the long gray barrel of her body, and I didn’t think about anything at all, which had been the whole plan.

“You’re doing her flank twice.”

Felix was sitting on the edge of the hayloft over my head with his legs hanging down. He was in his good black coat with the collar turned up and snow melting in his blond hair, and he was eating an apple. I hadn’t heard him come in. I never heard him come in.

“Go away,” I said.

“Is that what you said to Fenwick?” Felix took a bite of the apple. “I passed him in the street. He looked like a gnome who had just watched a man refuse the bargain of the season. I asked him what had happened, and he said that a client had been made unwell by a woodcut.” His violet eyes went over me slowly, from my boots to my face, taking an inventory. “Were you made unwell?”

“I’m brushing my horse.”

“Your mule.”

“I’m brushing my mule.”

“You’re brushing her flank for the third time.” He dropped down out of the loft, landed in the straw without a sound, and walked round Bertha to stand at her head with his apple. Bertha looked at the apple. Felix did not give it to her. “Blackrock,” he said. “The Guild’s report was very complete. Blackthorn let me read it, because I asked him nicely and told him a thing about one of his clerks. It had a great deal in it about the fortress, the seventeen women, and the warlock going into the pit. It had a line in it about a board.”

My hand stopped on Bertha’s flank.

“Ah,” said Felix.

“There’s nothing about a board.”

“Isn’t there?” He bit the apple. “They found it in the room under the keep. A board, they wrote, for holding the subject during the rite, with iron at the wrists and ankles. They noted that the iron had been snapped. They noted that the subject had walked out.” He chewed. “And I thought, reading it, that’s very odd. Because I have known Samuel Thornwood long enough, and I have never once known him to be held down on anything without making a great many jokes about it afterward. And in all the weeks since, you haven’t made one.”

“It’s not funny. I nearly died on it.”

“Did you?” Felix came round Bertha’s head toward me, and I backed up until the stall boards were against my shoulders and there was nowhere else to go. He put the apple down on the top rail beside my head. He looked at my face for a long time. “That isn’t what’s wrong,” he said. “You nearly die every month. You nearly died in the catacombs, and you were hard the whole way down. No. Something about the board sits in you like a stone, and you won’t say what it is, and I would very much like to know.”

“Felix.”

“Shall I guess?”

I didn’t answer him. He put two fingers on the front of my shirt, on my breastbone, exactly on top of the cut. He had never seen it. He knew where it was anyway, and it ached under his fingers through the linen, and my breath went short.

“The report said a girl prepared the subject,” he said. “I imagine she did it slowly. I imagine you were chained down on your back with nothing on and a pretty girl’s hands all over you, and a knife in one of them.” His fingers pressed on the cut. “And I imagine you were hard.”

I couldn’t look at him. I looked at Bertha. Bertha looked back at me with her long gray face and her ears forward, enormously interested.

“That’s it,” said Felix. “You were chained to a board to have your heart cut out, and you were hard as a post, and you’ve been afraid ever since that it means something about you.”

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Of course it does.” He put his hand flat on my chest, over the cut. “It means you like being held down. It means that when you can’t do anything, and it isn’t your fault, you finally stop thinking.” His other hand came down to the front of my trousers, where my cock had been hiding since the woodcut, and he cupped me there, lightly, and waited. “It means you’re scared of the wrong thing about that fortress.”

I wanted to hit him, seriously. I thought about shoving him back into Bertha’s stall and walking out of the stable and up to my room, and taking the ring down off the hook, and lying on my bed until the feeling went away. I’d been keeping everything below my belt dead still all day, ever since the woodcut, and not letting it so much as twitch. Under his palm, my cock moved.

Felix smiled.

He took Bertha’s lead rope down off its peg. It was old rope, soft with use, and he didn’t hurry. He took both my wrists in one hand, and I let him. He held them up in front of my face so I could see what he was doing, and wrapped the rope round them twice and pulled it snug. He tossed the free end up over the beam above the stall and drew it down, and my arms went up over my head until my hands were up above the top of the stall boards and my shoulders were pulled tight against the wood.

The cut across my chest throbbed. My wrists, which had been cold all day, went hot under the rope. My cock, which had been dead and buried since breakfast, sat up and filled so fast it hurt.

“Felix,” I said. “Felix, I don’t…”

“I know.” He tied the rope off on the peg beside my head with a knot I didn’t recognize, and left a short loose tail hanging down by my right hand, and pushed it into my fingers. “It’s a slipknot,” he said, close to my ear. “Pull your right hand down hard, and the whole thing comes loose. You don’t need me for it. You never need me for anything, do you?” He leaned back far enough for me to see his face. “Pull it.”

I didn’t pull it.

I stood there with my arms tied over my head in Bertha’s stall, and I looked at the slipknot on the peg, and I looked at Felix, and I didn’t pull it. My body was shaking. I was so hard I could feel my pulse in it through my trousers, and I hadn’t done anything at all, and I couldn’t make my right hand move.

“There,” said Felix, satisfied.

He opened my trousers. He didn’t take them down. He took my cock out into the cold air of the stable and held it in his hand, and he looked at it the way he looked at a lock he had already picked, and he stroked me slowly from root to tip.

“The board,” he said, as he did it. “Tell me about the board.”

“It was cold.”

“Good.”

“The iron didn’t give at all. I couldn’t turn my head far enough to see her.” I was talking because he wanted me to, and because I couldn’t stop. “She put both hands on my chest. She kissed my neck. She was saying goodbye, Felix, she thought she had to kill me, and I could see the knife.”

“And?”

“And I got hard.” It came out of me in a rush. “I got so hard. I was going to die and I couldn’t move my hands and I got harder than I’d ever been in my life, and she saw. She put her hand on it and said pity, and picked the knife back up, and I made a joke, because what else was I going to do? I wanted her to touch me so badly I couldn’t think.”

Felix’s hand tightened round me. He sped up.

“There it is,” he said.

I lost it. I pulled against the rope, but I pulled up, not down, so the slipknot held, and I pushed my hips into his fist with my head back against the stall boards and the cut on my chest burning, and I said his name, and some other things, and Bertha stamped one hoof in the straw beside me, loudly. I came over his hand and the front of my own shirt. It went on for a long time. When it stopped, I hung there by my wrists with my knees gone weak and my chest heaving, and I felt better than I had felt in a month, and I hated him for it.

Felix wiped his hand on my shirt. He did it carefully, a finger at a time.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

“You didn’t do anything.”

“I didn’t.” He picked his apple up off the rail. “I asked you a question, and I held you while you answered it. The rest was you.” He took a bite. “You still haven’t pulled the knot.”

I pulled it. The rope dropped loose round my wrists and I nearly fell over, and I caught myself on the stall boards and stood there getting my breath back with my cock out and my shirt ruined. Felix watched me tuck myself away, and from his face he enjoyed every second of it.

“That fortress is a nightmare,” I said, when I could talk. “I’m not buying a nightmare in the mountains.”

“No,” Felix agreed. “Nobody’s asking you to. I imagine Kaniz asked you for something tonight, and you said no to her, and she’ll forgive you, because she forgives you everything. The book will sulk for a week.” He held out the apple to Bertha at last. Bertha took the whole thing in one bite, core and all, and chewed it at me. “Fenwick has one listing left, you know.”

“He said that was the last page.”

“That was the last page in the folio he showed you.” Felix reached into his coat and drew out a folded square of paper and held it up between two fingers. It had been torn from a book along one edge, carefully. “There’s a second folio. He keeps it in his desk. It’s the properties he doesn’t show to clients, because nobody has ever bought one and nobody ever will.” He tucked the paper into the waistband of my trousers, slowly, with his knuckles against my stomach. “There’s only one property in it. I thought you’d like it. It’s an inn.”

He went out through the stable door into the snow before I could ask him anything, and the door banged in the wind behind him.

I unfolded the paper by the light from the yard.

It was a woodcut of a long, low building on a riverbank, with a fortified yard and a stone watchtower at one corner and a ferry landing down below it on the water. Somebody had written across the top of it in Fenwick’s small careful hand, and then underlined it twice: RIVER BELL INN. DO NOT SHOW.