Distant tales of the Dichotomy

They did not lay out the other things. The Tallyman’s little black book was inside Veyra’s coat. The little round cap was on Thara’s head. And five amber beads, each as warm as a coal, hung on a cord about the neck of Nerissa, who had said she would not mind carrying them, and who had made it quite clear, with a certain bright level glance, that she would not be argued with.

Behind the counter, in her cage of brass bars, with her russet fur bristling in the lamplight and her round black eyes as wide as plates, Marigold Tufton was staring at the wickhair.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my. Oh, that’s lovely. That’s… you did that without burning down anything? You’ve all still got your eyebrows!” She seized a pair of brass scales, and a magnifying glass, and a very small pencil. “I’m so proud! I knew you’d do it! I said to Hemlock, I said, they’ll be back by tea, and they’ve all got such nice faces. Now, don’t tell me. Let me see. Let me weigh.”

It took the better part of an hour. She weighed the clinker plates in a great pan, one by one, and wrote the weight in a ledger. She weighed the glands, and sniffed them, and sneezed. She held a black bead up to the lamp, and gave a small cluck, and said, “Jet-glass. Very pretty. Very, very common.” She peered into the moth sacks, with her pink nose wrinkled, and counted aloud. She opened the neck of a leather bag, and weighed, very delicately, with a little silver spoon, a thimbleful of the golden paste, and her whiskers quivered.

At the end of it she put down her pencil, and adjusted her spectacles, and added up a long column of figures on a scrap of paper with her lips moving. Then she added it again. Then she looked up, with a face of the most honest, miserable, apologetic sympathy, and slid the paper across the brass.

“Sixty-one glims,” said Marigold.

There was a silence.

“I’m sorry,” said Thara. “I may have gone temporarily deaf. What was that?”

“Sixty-one.” Marigold winced. “I rounded it up. It’s the weight, you see. It’s all the weight. The Crown pays by the pound, and your clinker is, well, it’s clinker. It’s two glims a pound, and it’s a lot of pounds, and it comes to about forty. The glands are fourteen. The moths are really the best of it, the wickhair’s worth a few, and a thimble of dust is…” She trailed off. “It’s a first floor. I’m so sorry. It is a very good first floor. Nobody has ever taken the toll in a day.”

Brannoch looked at the paper. He looked at it for a very long time, with his great dark head bent, and then he said, quite gently, “Sixty-one.”

“Oh, please don’t look like that.”

“We have lost a good deal of arrows,” said Veyra. “We have a shield with a dent and a robe cut to the thigh. A healer who has broken a bone. A staff that…” She stopped. “We paid, in the Pits, a great deal more than sixty-one glims.”

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin, faintly, “that the robe alone was nine.”

“I know.” Marigold had taken off her spectacles, and was twisting them in her small paws. She looked up at them, with her round dark eyes quite soft. “I know it’s disappointing. Everyone thinks, the first time. But listen to me. It’s the first floor. It pays by the ounce. The tenth floor pays by the pound. The twentieth, the things you bring up are things that people have been looking for, and they pay in silver. Further down than that, if you ever get to the fiftieth…” She leaned forward over the counter. “There’s a thing down there called an Amolite heart. a smith in the Hundred Furnaces would pay you a hundred thousand glims for a piece the size of an egg. And every floor on the way is more. It’s always more, you see. The deeper you go, the heavier the purse. It’s how the whole city’s built.”

“A hundred thousand,” said Thara reverently.

“Sixty-one’s where everyone starts,” said Marigold. “Truly. I’ve seen Gold guilds start at forty.” She stamped the sheet, and counted out the money in a little heap on the brass, bright coins and a handful of dull ones, with the quick, quiet, tender hands of someone who is sorry to be giving so little. “Go and have a big supper, please. And a bath. I always say, there’s nothing that a bath and a stew won’t help.”

Veyra took the coins. She counted them, and did not say what she thought.

“Thank you, Marigold.”

“Oh, it’s nothing, dear.” The clerk’s fur lifted, a little, and she smiled. She looked at the five of them, dusty and bent and bruised, and she said, in a lower voice, “The Seven Sorrows. I do like it. I did hope you’d keep it.”

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