Chapter 4: Conductor Sable

It was twenty-one carriages to the court, and the boy in the red tunic seemed to feel each one as a personal reproach.

He went ahead of them at a pace somewhere between a walk and an apology, looking back every few yards to make sure they were still coming. Petris walked at exactly the speed he had decided on and no faster. Caro kept up with her basket on her hip and did not complain, though by the Record Hall she had stopped answering when spoken to. Elliot walked, and counted, because counting was what he had.

An hour gone, and a little over. Under three to the bell. Twenty-odd minutes forward to the court, if the crowds let them, and however long a Conductor took to say whatever she meant to say, and then the walk to wherever this ended, and then the walk to a gangway. He had done the sums on the Meridian with nothing at stake but his feet. Here every carriage was a minute, and every minute was one he would not have later.

Back through the green. The whistle in Twenty-seven had started again behind them, up its five notes and down, as though nothing whatever had happened, which for most of the carriage was true. Past the Record Hall, its doors swinging on clerks. Over the sticking plate, which the boy jumped and Petris stepped over and Caro, with great dignity, did not acknowledge. Into the gold.

Vesh saw them go by. He had a cup in one hand and a cloth in the other, and he saw the boy in red, and the warden, and Caro with her basket, and then Elliot, and he stopped doing all four of his things at once and stood behind his counter quite still, and did not call out tea, friend. Elliot did not look away from him, and was not sure afterwards that this had been a kindness.

The gold market went past, alcove after alcove. Somewhere along it the air turned warm and smelled of bread, a long row of it, ovens behind a run of half-doors and flour on the floor of the corridor in a drift that had been swept to the sides and walked back into the middle by a thousand boots. Then cloth again, and brass, and the button woman, still singing. Then a vestibule finer than the others, with brass handles on both its doors, and on the far side of it the banners turned red.

The red was two storeys high.

The corridor ran along the ground floor with a carpet the colour of wine underfoot, and above it the ceiling had been taken away at intervals so that you could look up through a railed well to an upper floor, where doors stood open on rooms with tall windows and somebody was playing a piano, not very well, with a great deal of feeling. Narrow stairs went up at the ends of the carriages, each with a man or a woman on a stool at the bottom. The people here wore their money on the outside. A woman went by in a coat so heavily embroidered that it seemed to be walking her. Two men stood in the middle of the corridor in matching red waistcoats, talking, and did not move for the warden, and did not move for the boy, and moved for Elliot only when they had looked at his coat and decided that it would be more trouble to be walked into by it.

The Meridian’s First Carriages had been hushed to the point of discomfort. This was not hushed at all. It was a train that knew it was being looked at. Even the stair-keepers sat as if somebody might be painting them.

“Six,” said the boy, at last, at a pair of tall doors with red glass in their upper panels, and opened one of them, and stood aside with the air of a boy who would be telling everybody about this later.

The court was the whole carriage, both storeys of it.

The floor had been taken out above, all of it, so that the room went up past where a ceiling should have been to a second ceiling far overhead, painted dark red and starred with gilt. Round the walls at the height of the old upper floor ran a gallery, railed in brass, and along the rail people were leaning on their elbows — twenty, thirty of them — in the attitude of an audience that had come in at the interval and was waiting for the second half. Lamps hung on long chains from the far ceiling, every one of them glazed in red glass, so that the light came down warm and close and faintly bloody, and lay on a claret carpet thick enough to lose a coin in.

Down the middle of the room ran a long table, dark and polished, with heavy chairs along both sides of it. Nobody was sitting in them. There were people standing at the walls, and people on the gallery, and a child of about ten with a tray and a single cup on it, and a young clerk with a sheaf of folded papers under one arm who stood as young clerks stand when they have been told that standing well is most of the job. The room was half throne room and half dinner party, and nobody had decided which half was which.

At the head of the table, in a chair that was not a throne but had been made by somebody who knew exactly where the difference lay and had gone up to it, sat Conductor Sable, reading a novel.

It was a slim book in a soft cover, the spine cracked white in two places. She held it open in one hand. She did not look up when the doors opened, or when the boy announced them, in a voice that cracked on Meridian, or when Petris came to a halt three paces inside the door. She read to the end of her page. She turned it, and read a little way down the next, as if to see how it came out. Then she put a finger in the book and closed it on the finger and looked up.

She was a tall woman of no particular age, with dark hair drawn back and held with a brass pin, a long coat of deep red with brass buttons from collar to knee, and rings on three fingers of each hand, none of them modest. Her face was not beautiful in any way he could have listed. It did not need to be. Her attention came on to him as a lamp comes on in a dark room, all at once, so that he was suddenly aware of where he was standing and how, and of the state of his boots.

“Mr Marsh,” she said. “How kind of you to come.”

Her voice was low, and warm, and it reached the back of the gallery without appearing to try.

“Conductor.”

“Come down the table, dear. The middle, if you would. Then everybody can see you, and I can see you without having to turn my head, and we shall all be comfortable except you.” She gestured with the hand that was not holding her place. “The chairs are for later.”

He went down to the middle of the table and stopped there. Petris took up a place behind him and to one side. Caro was shown to a bench by the wall and given, by somebody he did not see, a cup of tea, and sat with the basket on her knees and the cup in both hands.

At Sable’s elbow, a half step behind her chair, stood an older woman in a coat the colour of dried blood. She held a small leather ledger against her breast with both hands, and it was closed with a brass clasp, and she stood so still that he had taken her for a part of the chair. She was looking at Elliot. She was the only person in the room who did not seem to be enjoying herself.

Along the left-hand wall, among the runners and the pages, a young woman in a marigold scarf caught his eye, and smiled, and touched her own breast pocket with two fingers.

Sable looked at him for some time. She did it openly, as a buyer looks at a horse, from his boots to his hair and back to his hands, and she let the whole room watch her do it.

“When were you born, dear?” she said.

It was such an odd question that a murmur went along the gallery.

“About six months ago,” said Elliot. “Under a pig carriage.”

The gallery laughed. It was a good laugh, warm and surprised, and somebody up there repeated a pig carriage to somebody else. Sable smiled with them, generously, as if it were a joke she was pleased to have been given.

“How very recent you are,” she said.

She turned to the warden, and the moment was over. It was only afterwards, when it was too late to do anything about it, that Elliot noticed he had answered before she had quite finished asking, the way a man answers a question he has been waiting for. A man with nothing behind him would have had to think what she could possibly mean.

“Warden,” said Sable.

“Toll,” said Petris. “Twenty-seven, Berth 8. Strangled in his sleep. Searched after. Not long dead.”

The gallery went quiet in stages, from the front rail to the back.

“By whom?”

“Not known.”

“And our visitor?”

“Was in the berth before me. Says so himself. Touched the body.” Petris paused for exactly one beat. “Opened the hand.”

“Opened the hand,” said Sable, as one might say read the letter. She looked down the table at Elliot. “And what was in it, dear?”

There was no use in anything else. He had known since the aisle in Twenty-seven that there would be no use in anything else.

“A strip of paper,” he said. “Three pairs of numbers.”

“May I?”

He took it out of his inside pocket and held it out. The young clerk with the folded papers came down the table for it, took it from his fingers without touching them, and carried it to Sable, who unfolded it, and looked at it, and her face did nothing whatever. She held it out a little to one side without looking. The woman in the dried-blood coat took it from her, opened the brass clasp of the ledger, laid the strip inside, closed the clasp, and went back to standing as she had been.

“Mistress Caro,” said Sable.

Caro set her cup down on the bench. “Conductor.”

“You knock on his frame of a morning, I’m told.”

“I do.”

“And did you, today?”

“No,” said Caro.

Sable waited. Caro did not offer anything else, and after a moment Sable inclined her head to her, a small, real courtesy, as one professional to another, and let her go back to her tea.

“Now,” said Sable. “Let us be honest with each other, as far as it suits us both, and no further.”

She rose. She did not push back from the table; she came up out of the chair along the line of it, one hand trailing on the wood, and she was tall standing, about his own height, and she came down the table towards him without hurrying.

“The Meridian sends a man across for Maren Toll,” she said, “on the one morning in seven years when Maren Toll can be reached. And when the man arrives, Maren Toll has been dead for an hour. I do not believe in coincidences of that density.”

“Neither do I.”

“How refreshing. Then we may skip the part of the morning I usually find tedious.” She stopped two paces from him. “What did your Conductor want with him?”

“A debt.”

“After seven years.”

“They’re patient.”

“They are,” said Sable, “very.” She looked at him a moment longer. “Your Conductor and I have known each other a long while, in the way that two people know each other who meet for four hours every seven years and spend the time between deciding what not to say at the next one. I have never once known them to send a man across a gap for money.”

Elliot said nothing, because he had nothing he had decided to give her, and the Conductor had told him what to do in that case.

Sable seemed to find this satisfactory.

“I am going to give you a choice,” she said, “and you are going to make it now, in this room, in front of these witnesses, on the understanding that whatever you choose will be held to, by my office, on this train, until the bell and past it. Are you ready?”

“Go on.”

“The first door.” She raised one finger, and the rings on it caught the red light. “A man of the Meridian lies dead on my train, and the only person who saw his room before my warden did is another man of the Meridian. A witness to a foreign death belongs to the train it happened on until the death is answered. If it is not answered by the bell, it will not be answered for seven years, and neither will you be. I should keep you. I should call you my guest.”

“I’d call it a hostage.”

“The choice of word, dear, is doing work that the choice of fact does not require.” She smiled. “It would cost me seven years of your Conductor’s close attention, which I have had before and did not enjoy. But I could bear it.”

“And the second?”

“The second.” Another finger. “I put you back across, now, at the nearest gangway, with nothing in your hands. No debt. No man. No paper. You go home and tell your Conductor that Maren Toll is dead on my train and Sable sent you away empty. And I have a dead man nobody has answered for, on a crossing day, with two trains watching and a third one listening.” She lowered her hand. “Which will it be?”

The room waited. Up on the gallery somebody put down a glass, very carefully, so as not to be the person who had made a noise.

Elliot looked at the two fingers, and then at the woman who had raised them.

She had told him what both doors cost her. She had told him at some length, and in front of everybody, and with what seemed to him a good deal of care. She had not told him what either of them cost him, which was a strange omission in a woman who plainly knew to the chit what everything cost everybody. You did not price a thing for a man unless you wanted to see what he did with the price.

He remembered the Conductor at the dark desk, saying I would rather you asked him which he would rather, and a folder squared off on bare wood with nothing in it but a name.

“There’s a third,” he said.

The gallery shifted on its elbows, rail to rail. Sable did not move. One corner of her mouth did, very slightly.

“Is there, dear.”

“The Conductor sent me for Mr Toll,” said Elliot. “Not for the money. I don’t think it was ever for the money.” He had not known he thought that until he heard it, and he went on before he could stop to look at it. “If I go back with nothing, they’ve got a dead man and nothing. If you keep me, they’ve got a dead man and seven years of wanting me back. If I go back at the bell with who did it — they’ve got an answer. So have you.”

“I have a warden,” said Sable. “I have a great many wardens. Why should I want my answer from you?”

“Because I don’t belong to anybody on this train.” He heard it come out flatter than he had meant, and let it. “Whatever I find, nobody here can say you chose it.”

The silence that followed was the longest he had stood in since the first day in the dark office. He counted it, because he could not help it. He got to four.

“Terms,” said Sable softly.

“Until the bell. Your warden, with your authority. Whatever I’ve got, I bring here, to you, in front of whoever you like.” He thought about it. “And if I’ve got nothing at the bell, I go home with nothing, and you’ve lost nothing you hadn’t lost already.”

“Four hours of my best warden,” said Sable, “is not nothing.”

“Two and a half.”

This time the smile finished itself. It was not a large smile, and it was not kind, exactly, but it was real, and it was the first thing she had done since he came into the room that did not seem to have been done for the gallery.

“Then we had better not waste them,” she said. “The third door. You will work the matter until the bell with my warden at your elbow and my authority in his pocket. You will bring what you have to this room before you go, and you will lay it on this table, and I shall decide what is to be done with it. If you are late to my table, you will be late to your gangway, and I shall not hold either for you.” She held out her hand. “Are we agreed?”

“We are.”

Her grip was warm, and brief, and there was nothing in it at all for the gallery.

“Petris.”

“Conductor.”

“Mr Marsh is yours, and you are his, until the bell. Whatever doors he wants opened, open them. Whatever he finds, you will know, and whatever you find, so will he.” She looked at the warden, and something passed between them that had been passing between them for years. “Look after him. He has no idea where anything is.”

“No, Conductor.”

Petris came up beside Elliot. He did not offer his hand. He looked at Elliot once, sidelong, from under the patient grey brows, and Elliot had the impression of being added up and the sum carried forward.

“Mr Marsh.”

“Warden.”

“You will tell me things before you do them,” said Petris, “from now on.”

“I’ll try.”

“Try in advance.”

“The clock, please, Aini,” said Sable.

The young woman in the marigold scarf came away from the wall with a brass watch on a chain, opened its lid, and read it with her head on one side.

“Two hours, eighteen minutes to the bell, Conductor,” she said. “And some seconds. They’re going fast.”

“Two hours and eighteen minutes, Mr Marsh.” Sable had gone back up the table and stood by her chair with one hand on its back. “Go and look at him again. The body, dear, has all the time in the world. You do not.”

He turned. Petris was already at the doors. The boy in red had one of them open, and beyond it the long carpeted corridor of the red ran away aft with its banners and its stairs and its people who would not move, and somewhere down there a dead man lay in a green berth with his hand half open, and the clerk Yann stood with his back to the curtain, losing the key to anybody who asked.

“Mr Marsh.”

He looked back.

Sable had picked up her novel. She had not opened it. She held it loosely, by the spine, as if she had not yet decided whether there was time for another chapter.

“The man in the berth,” she said. “Did he look surprised?”

He thought about it. The eye open on the wall, four inches away. The mouth a little open. The grey cropped hair and the old broken nose and the fist closed on three lines of numbers.

“No,” he said. “He looked tired.”

Sable was quiet for a moment. Beside her the woman in the dried-blood coat stood with the ledger held against her breast, closed, and looked at nothing.

“Yes,” said Sable. “I thought he might.”

She opened the novel at her place, without looking for it, and began to read.