Chapter 9 - Business Partners

The street had gone dim while I was inside. The eye above the rooftops had faded to a pale, tired gold, more moon than sun.

I unrolled the map. The two buildings that had been pressed together were slowly drifting apart, making room. Between them, line by line, a small square sketched itself in.

'That must be the store. At least I can come back whenever I need to...'

I rolled the map up and stood on the street for a while, not quite ready to move. Without meaning to, I'd slipped my hand into my pocket. Through the fabric, my thumb found the marble and rolled it slowly, back and forth.

I didn't take it out. I was afraid I'd lose it, or make some sort of mistake.

Somewhere the gods don't look.

Gods. Not God.

I'd only met one, but I didn't even know if he counted.

I looked up. Golden iris. The same gold as the boy's eyes. The same gold as the ticket in my pocket.

'...Does that thing count?'

It didn't answer. It just kept staring.

I stared back for a while. Then I went back to rolling the marble.

* * *

Eventually, I reached the narrow road to The Last Drink. It was even emptier than it had been two days ago, yet a bit of light still leaked from under the door.

Stepping inside, I found that nothing had changed. The same dim lighting, the same stained walls, a few murmurs from the round tables, and the same sleeping bartender, his cheek resting on his folded arms.

I found myself envying him a little.

I cautiously walked to the back corner, where the painting of a ship hung beside the crooked coat hook. No one watched me go. More accurately, it seemed nobody wanted to, as if they'd decided they'd rather not be witnesses.

Standing in front of the wall, I thought back on how Igris had opened it. Twice, then once, slower.

I tapped twice, then once more. Nothing.

The wall stayed a wall. Somewhere behind me, a glass was set down a little too loudly.

"Not like that."

The voice came from directly behind me, low and slow, so close I felt it more than heard it. I turned around and had to look up to see who was speaking.

It was the bartender.

I'd only ever seen him slumped over the counter, so I'd never realized how tall he was. He had to stoop to keep his head clear of the ceiling beams, his shoulders broad enough to hide most of the bar behind him. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow over forearms thick with old, pale scars, and his eyes were still half-closed, heavy with sleep.

But as he looked directly into my eyes, I couldn't really say he looked sleepy.

He looked patient.

"...Sorry," I said. "I was—"

"Business?"

"Yeah..."

He looked at me for a long moment, those half-lidded eyes moving over my face. Then he reached past me, and with one thick knuckle, tapped the wall twice. He paused, long enough that I almost thought he'd forgotten.

Then he tapped once more.

Click.

"He's expecting you," he murmured.

By the time I'd turned to answer, he was already walking back toward the counter. He folded himself back over it, laid his cheek on his arms, and was asleep again before I could decide whether to thank him or not. The rest of the bar went back to its murmuring, as if nothing had happened.

I stepped through.

Instantly, the bar's noise cut off, and the dark completely took over my vision. I took a step forward.

Fwoosh.

One by one, the torches along the walls burst into flame, and the long hallway stretched out ahead of me, a single wooden door waiting at the end.

Last time, Igris had walked ahead of me, making the steady trek feel almost casual. Alone, it felt longer. Every footstep echoed back into my ears.

Reaching the door, I hesitated, then knocked. Years of being polite to people behind desks hadn't left me just because I was dead.

"Come in." I recognized the voice immediately.

Calm, gentle, and polite, the kind of voice that soothed your mind the more you listened.

But it was strange. I'd only heard it once, two days ago, but I was certain I could have picked it out of a crowd.

Yet when I tried to put a face to it, there was nothing there. Just a blank space where a face should have been.

Entering, I found the office exactly as I'd left it. Wooden floor, wooden walls, the torches at the back. The big brown desk with its feathered pen, its leather book, and its stack of golden tickets, some bright, some barely glowing.

And the man, leaning back in his chair with a cup of tea, as if he hadn't moved since I'd gone.

His face was plain. I'd remembered that much. Yet, now that I was standing in front of it, I decided to take in every detail: the neatly combed hair, the pale eyes, the small crease that showed beside his mouth whenever he smiled. I tried to hold onto it, repeating each detail to myself.

Yet something told me I'd lose it the moment I walked out the door.

He smiled, wider than I remembered, just enough to show his teeth.

"Ah. The one who kept his ticket," he said with a small laugh.

"Yeah," I said. My usual office tone came out on its own, polite and even. "Thanks for seeing me again."

"Of course. Tea?"

"I'm fine, thanks."

"I thought you might be." He set the cup down. "Sit."

There was a chair on my side of the desk. I would have said it hadn't been there a moment ago, but I'd stopped trusting my eyes when it came to things I'd seen in this room. I sat as he said, though my back didn't quite touch the chair.

He didn't speak right away.

He only looked at me, thoroughly. My face. My shirt, two nights slept in. Then his eyes came back to mine, and I realized I had been staring at him.

"Looking for something?"

"Sorry." I looked away for a moment before meeting his eyes again. "I was trying to remember your face."

He didn't answer. He just leaned back in his chair, a faint smile settling on his face, and waited.

"Erghm, on the way here," I said, coughing into my fist. "I tried to, but couldn't picture it at all..."

Getting the words out, I expected him to deny it, or at least pretend he didn't understand. Instead, he looked pleased.

"Most people never notice they've forgotten," he said. "You did."

"Is that a good thing?"

"For me? Rarely." He picked up his cup again. "For you, it might be."

I couldn't tell if that was a compliment or a warning.

Subconsciously, my thumb found the marble through my pocket and pressed against it, hard enough to feel the chip.

He must have seen it, because his voice softened into the same tone I'd once used on nervous clients.

"There's no need to be so tense, Oliver. We're about to be business partners, aren't we?"

Oliver..? I'd never told him my name...

Although I wasn't surprised.

"...I suppose we are," I said.

"I said you wouldn't walk away."

"I did..."

"And then you walked right back." He opened his hands, as if that settled the matter.

It did.

"So then, Oliver. Why are you back?"

As he spoke, his calm, polite demeanour seemed to thin. It wasn't gone entirely, but it settled into something more professional.

I'd spent the whole walk here thinking about how to answer that. Yet none of the versions I'd rehearsed sounded right, now that I was actually sitting in front of him.

"Last time, you said there were ways to get more tickets," I said. "Trades. Deals. Risk."

"I did."

"I'm not handing over my ticket to trade." I kept my voice even. "And I'm not interested in any deals."

He didn't react this time. He only continued to listen.

"Then you mean risk?"

Lifting a hand to his chin, he nodded at his own question before speaking.

"Well, risk is simpler. I tell you what I need, and you do it. If the job's done well, I'll pay you. Sometimes it's transporting something. Sometimes it's watching someone. Sometimes it's worse."

"Worse?"

"Well, that kind of job will depend on how long our partnership lasts."

Then, for the first time since he'd asked his question, his smile came back. Softer.

"But if you're looking for an opportunity, I do have something small. Think of it as a trial."

He drew the leather book toward him and rested a hand on its cover.

"I need you to find someone."

"Who?"

"A man named Marcus."

I didn't let anything show. Years of meetings had taught me how to keep my face from doing anything at all.

But the name caught on something. The woman in the ivory coat I'd seen at Peanut's. The gold coin on the counter, and an offer of six hundred crowns.

If you ever find anything on Marcus, the offer still stands.

It wasn't something I could forget.

And Igris. His response had seemed strange at the time, but if this Marcus was someone with a bounty on his head, it would make sense why he'd brushed it off.

For a second, I was certain they were the same person. Then I forced myself to slow down.

Death had probably been taking people for as long as there had been people. There had to be thousands of Marcuses here. Tens of thousands. It wasn't a rare name.

"Where is he?" I asked.

"If I knew that, I wouldn't need you."

"So where do I start?"

"Somewhere you can't reach from here," he said, unfolding his hands and leaning back comfortably into his chair. "You don't need to bring him to me. You don't need to speak to him. All you need to do is find out where he is, and tell me."

"That's all?"

"That's all."

"And what do I get?"

"One hundred crowns."

"..."

The number echoed in my head for a moment.

'One hundred crowns?' I did the maths quickly. One hundred crowns was twelve hundred obols.

That was six hundred days in an apron and a paper hat. Over a year and a half of scooping ice cream.

Just for finding one man.

But I'd processed enough invoices in my life to know that when a number is that generous, it's usually for a reason.

"That's a lot," I said slowly, "just for finding someone."

"Of course, finding is the hard part, after all." He said it kindly. "Everything after is easy."

Everything after. I filed that portion away and focused on something else.

One hundred crowns...

My eyes subconsciously drifted to the tickets on his desk.

"Can crowns buy a ticket?"

"Hah! You don't have a single crown to your name, Oliver." His smile grew. "You should get your hands on a few before you start asking useless questions."

I held his gaze for a moment. Then I nodded.

"Why me?"

He turned his cup a half-circle on its saucer while he considered it.

"Well, you did ask, no? Perhaps I'm just a generous soul?"

I didn't say anything. I just looked at him for a moment.

He watched me for a moment. Then he let out a short sigh and set the cup down.

"Because no one will be looking at you."

I squinted at him. At first, I wasn't sure what he meant. Then I thought about it.

Three days dead. No name anyone knew, no history, nobody who'd recognize me or know whose errand I was running. Wherever I was going, I'd just be another face.

Without waiting for a response, he opened the book. The pages were heavy and yellowed, and every one he turned was covered in writing. Different hands, different inks, different alphabets.

Some signatures were neat. Some shook. Some weren't letters at all, just marks pressed hard into the paper by whoever, or whatever, had made them.

He stopped at a blank page and began to write, the feathered pen moving in small, even strokes. When he finished, he turned the book toward me.

"Read it. Take your time."

Something in me settled, almost against my will. For three days, nothing had made sense.

But this, a contract, a desk, a man waiting for my signature, this I understood. This, I'd been good at.

I read it.

The terms were simple. Locate the individual known as Marcus. Report his location to the undersigned. Upon confirmation, one hundred crowns. A guide will be provided.

Then, near the bottom, in the same neat hand:

Should the signee fail to complete the assigned task, the signee shall owe one admission to the undersigned.

'There it is.'

Tucked neatly in the bottom corner, where someone less observant wouldn't have seen it. I read it twice to be sure. Then I turned the book around and laid my finger beside the line.

"This."

He leaned forward and looked. For a moment, he was perfectly still. Then he laughed, a small, genuine sound, as if I'd surprised him in a positive way.

"Haha, I apologize, an old habit," he said. "After enough of these, the pen writes on its own." He picked it up and drew a single neat line through the clause. "Better?"

I took the book back and read it all again, from the first line to the last, slowly, the way I used to read the contracts nobody else would bother with. Then I read it a third time.

There was nothing else. I was certain of it. If someone had asked me then, I would have sworn to it.

"Fine," I said.

He offered me the pen. It weighed almost nothing. I signed at the bottom, Oliver Ansen, in the same signature I'd used on a thousand forms before.

The ink sank into the page like water into dry ground.

When I looked up, his eyes weren't on me. They were on my signature. Then they came back to mine, and he smiled.

"Wonderful," he said, and closed the book.

* * *

He stood. I'd never seen him on his feet. He wasn't tall or short, just about my own height, five foot ten or so.

He turned around to face the wall behind him. There was a door there now. Plain and wooden, like everything else in the room.

I didn't bother asking whether it had always been there. He rested his hand on the handle.

"There are other ways in and out of where you're going," he said, without turning. "Some aren't mine, though. So I wouldn't recommend them."

"I see. And when I find Marcus?"

"Come back through this one." He glanced over his shoulder. "Your guide knows the way."

Then he pulled open the door.

There was no room on the other side. There was no other side at all. Just a flat, moving darkness filling the frame, rippling slowly, like looking from the surface at a deep body of water.

A few seconds after he opened it, something stepped out.

A boy.

Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Thin enough that he clearly hadn't eaten properly for a while, with brown skin and black hair falling over his eyes in a tangle that hadn't seen a comb in a long time.

His clothes were pieced together from a dozen different fabrics, mostly dull browns, with a bright patch of green near his collar. There was a pale scar across one cheek, and a few smaller ones I could see through the gaps in his clothes.

He didn't look at either of us. He stood just in front of the doorway; his eyes on the floor, and his hands cupped together in front of him.

"This is your guide," the man said. "He knows the way around that mess."

He laid a hand on the boy's shoulder.

"And if anything happens to him," the man added, in the same easy voice, "don't trouble yourself bringing him back."

I looked at him, then at the boy, waiting for one of them to react to that. Neither did.

"What's his name?"

The man seemed faintly puzzled, as though I'd asked an odd question.

"We call him Spare."

At the sound of it, the boy raised his head. Only partway. Just enough to show he'd heard.

"...Sir," he said, dipping his head slightly.

It was barely more than a breath.

I didn't know what to say back. So I nodded, and that seemed to be all he'd expected. He turned to face the darkness in the doorframe and waited for me.

I looked from the man I still didn't have a name for, to the deep, dark abyss in front of me, then to the boy beside it.

Up in Transit, the eye would be dimming over the square by now. The Waiting Hall would be filling up for the night. That little green slime would be climbing onto bed eleven, probably thinking about what its wish would be.

And in the morning, Igris would probably be waiting for an employee who wouldn't show up.

Well, I'm sure he wouldn't mind.

Before I could step in, the man gave the boy, Spare, a one-handed shove, pushing him back through the door.

He turned toward me, his smile thinning.

"I have high expectations for you, Oliver, honestly. You remind me quite a bit of myself when I first died. So before you leave, I want to give you a piece of advice." Looking at me through nearly shut eyes, he pulled the door open a little further.

"You'd do best not to trust anyone down there. The rules that apply to us in Transit aren't exactly the same in that dirty place. And if you can accomplish this job as I hope you will, I'm certain you'll find yourself with a second ticket soon."

Raising an arm, he placed his hand on my shoulder and spoke gently.

"Go on, then."

Hearing the last of his words, I stepped forward into the dark.