The Price of Being Right

Haddon came in at seven and stopped four feet inside the door.

He looked at the bench. Then he walked the length of it, slowly, the way he walked a bench when something had been moved.

"When."

"Twenty past five."

"Who signed."

"I did."

Haddon held out his hand. Ansel gave him the release slip, and Haddon read it standing up, front and back.

"This is a correct order," he said.

"Yes."

"It is entirely correct. Fatality material, open department, controlled room. I'd have signed it myself and I'd have been glad of it." He turned the slip over again. "Where are your drawings?"

"They took them."

"The originals went up to the second landing last night."

"The duplicates," Ansel said. "The two ruled sheets under the lamp."

Haddon put the slip down on the wiped bench.

"Show me the line on this order that covers your duplicates."

Ansel looked at it.

He read the whole thing again, both sides, and there was nothing. Fragmentary material. Controlled examination. Notification on completion. Nothing about paper, nothing about drawings, nothing about anything that had come off an apprentice's own hand.

"It isn't there."

"No," Haddon said. "It isn't."

He went to his own bench, sat down, and did not do anything for about a minute.

"I gave him your name," he said at last. "He asked me why I wanted the copper and I told him, because I have known that man eleven years and he has never once lied to me, and

because I could not think of a reason to hold it back that I'd have been willing to say out loud." He picked up his cup and put it down without drinking. "Then I went to the linen stores."

"Magister—"

"You will not go up to that office alone again. Not for a summons, not for a letter, not to be thanked. If they want you, they can have both of us or neither." Haddon looked up. "Have you got anything left?"

Ansel thought about the receipt in his pocket, and the four figures he had written on the back of his own copy, and the box under the window that nobody had come for.

"A little."

"Then put it somewhere I'm not."

Ysolde Kaine was waiting on the library stairs at two, where the common collection let out, which meant she had worked out his hours.

"Varrow."

"I'm on a shift."

"Your shift ends at six and you eat at half past. I want two of the hours after that."

Ansel shifted the grey book under his arm.

"Magister Haddon told me not to talk to you."

"Yes, I thought he might have." She did not appear especially wounded by it. "Did he say why?"

"No."

"Then he doesn't know why either, and he's being careful, which is sensible of him." She came down two steps. "I have a forty-one pattern signed out for private practice, three evenings a week, in the east annexe. Last month I put my hands on it four times a week and didn't think about it. On Tuesday a support broke under Merrit's basin, and on the sixth Edan Rill died on a forty-one, and this week I have not been able to make myself set a load on the thing."

"The finding said no fault in the apparatus."

"I read the finding. I'd like a second opinion and you're the only one in the building offering one." She looked at him levelly. "I'm not interested in what you are. I'm interested in whether the ring I'm signed out for is going to take my hands off. Eight o'clock. East annexe, room four."

She had brought four ceramic shoes from the maintenance store and laid them on a cloth, face down, with the numbers hidden.

"Two of these are condemned and two are in service," she said. "I'm not going to tell you which. I'm going to write down what you say and then we'll check it against the store list."

"You've turned them over."

"Of course I've turned them over. If I can see it, it's no use to me."

She had also brought a lamp, a rule, her own notebook, a folding stool, and a paper of cold potatoes that she ate with her fingers while he worked, did not offer him, and then after twenty minutes pushed across the table without a word.

Ansel took the first shoe.

It was clean. He said so, and she wrote it down and made him say why he thought so, which took longer than the looking had.

The second had a short grey hook under the mounting face, tight and doubled. He said condemned, and where, and she wrote that down too.

The third was clean.

The fourth had a line across it that ran nearly the full width of the seating, thicker than anything he had read since Edan's ring, and Ansel put it down again after ten seconds.

"That one's finished."

"You're certain."

"I wouldn't put it back in a wall, let alone under a ring."

Ysolde finished writing, closed the notebook, and unfolded the store list.

"One: in service. Correct. Two: condemned, hairline at the mounting. Correct. Three: in service. Correct."

She stopped.

"Four," she said. "In service."

Ansel had the shoe back in his hands before she had finished the word.

"It isn't."

"It's on the list."

"Then the list is wrong. It's across the whole seat, I can see it from here, I could see it from the door—"

"Varrow."

"It's the widest one I've read in a fortnight. If that's under a working with a load on it—"

"Varrow." She put her hand flat on the cloth. "Stop talking and give it to me."

He gave it to her.

She turned it over and held it up into the lamp, and then she got out her rule and measured something, and then she set it down and pushed it back across to him with the underside up.

There was a small stamp pressed into the clay, low down where the mounting would cover it. A square, with a date inside it, and two letters.

"That's a works repair mark," Ysolde said. "It cracked. It was taken out, filled, refired, and put back. Three years ago." She tapped the date. "It's been in service since. It's been inspected twice a year since. It is one of the safest shoes in that store, because somebody has actually looked at it, which is more than you can say for the other three."

Ansel stared at the stamp.

"The damage is still there," he said.

"Yes."

"I can still see it."

"Yes." She sat back. "So what you are telling me, when you tell me a thing is broken, is that it was broken. At some point. You don't know when. You can't tell me whether it was last night or before either of us was born."

It took him a while to get past that.

He went round it three or four times, out loud, badly, and she let him, and did not help, and wrote down the useful parts.

"It's still real," he said finally.

"I never said it wasn't. You called three out of four and you called the fourth accurately — there is damage in that shoe and you found it through the glaze, which nobody else in this building can do." Ysolde recapped her pen. "That isn't the problem. The problem is that you came here to tell me a ring failed because somebody closed a release, and the thing you've just demonstrated is that you can look at real damage and be three years out."

"That's not the same—"

"It's close enough that a board would say it was."

"A board." Ansel put both hands on the table. "A board has already said it. A board said overreach on two lines and closed the hall."

"And you think they're wrong."

"I know they're wrong."

"Then show me," she said. "That's all I've ever been asking. Show me the fragments."

Ansel did not answer.

"Show me the fragments, Varrow."

"They were taken off my bench at twenty past five this morning," he said. "Under a correct order. Into a controlled room. Nobody will tell me when they're coming back."

Ysolde sat very still.

"All of it?"

"Every piece. And my duplicate drawings, which weren't on the order."

She looked at the four shoes on the cloth.

"Right," she said, in a completely different voice.

They stayed until the annexe bell went at ten, and about half of it wasn't the case at all.

She told him she had failed the first-year practical twice — not the capacity part, the hands part, the holding-steady-while-corrected part — and had made her cousin drill her on it in a barn for a summer until she stopped flinching. She said it the way people say things they have decided are no longer humiliating, and watched to see what he did with it.

Ansel said that sounded like a great deal of work.

"It was. I was extremely unpleasant about it." She wrapped the last potato in the paper and put it in her coat. "My family's specialty is wards, and my family's position is that a Kaine who can't hold a correction under load ought to go into administration. So I hold corrections under load."

"Is that why you care about the store list?"

"I care about the store list because I intend to spend forty years putting my hands on approved equipment," she said. "The whole of it only works if the marks on the bottom mean something. If the stamp is a lie, I've got no trade. I've just got a family name and some good luck until the luck runs out." She looked at him. "That's why I'm sitting in a cold room on a Thursday with a boy from the Salvage. Not because I think you're interesting."

"You did ask Magister Haddon about me. Before the sixth."

"I asked him whether the equipment boy who put a wedge under a live rim knew what he was doing or had guessed," she said. "He said he didn't know yet. I found that a more honest answer than I get from most people upstairs."

She packed the four shoes back into their box, and the box into her bag, and then stood holding the lamp.

"I'll help you," she said. "I'll get you samples the store won't give you and I'll write down everything you say in front of me with the date on it, and if you ever get in front of a board I will stand up and say what I saw. Two conditions."

"Go on."

"You keep your columns. I've seen the sheet you gave Vale and I've heard you talk. You are very good at the left side and you cannot stop yourself sliding over to the right when you're tired." She held up the lamp. "Second. Seeing it isn't enough. It's never going to be enough. I can't take a board a boy who says he can see grey lines."

"Then what.

"Make something," Ysolde said. "You say you can read how a thing failed. Fine. Read one, and then build me the thing it was before it broke, and make it work. Nobody can argue with a working object."

She opened the door with her elbow.

"And when you do it," she said, "do it with somebody in the room."