Chapter 47: The Quota
ULF
Marsh sent a boy up the hill before the Keep sent anyone at all. That told me everything about who I actually worked for.
The boy was nine, barefoot, and had run the whole way from Gin Alley with his ribs going like a bellows. "Gold Cloaks in Cobbler's Square," he got out. "They've got a list. They're not reading it out."
I gave him a copper and took the servants' stair down through the kitchens, and I was through the Iron Gate before the bells finished the hour.
Four days. Four days since I'd sat at Helaena's table and eaten roast fowl and let Jaehaerys steal the bread off my plate. Otto's program had been three sentences in a council chamber then. Now it was in my street.
Eight of them were working the square, and a cart, and a rope run from the cart's rail with men strung along it by the wrists. Not manacles. Rope. Manacles would have looked like an arrest.
Ser Bryce Waters stood at the head of it with a warrant open in his fist and a knight's cloak on him so new it still held its fold lines. Twenty-four, maybe. Brown hair, a bastard's surname, and the careful stillness of a man who has just been given something he can lose.
He saw me and didn't run and didn't bow. I gave him that much.
"You're the White," he said.
"I'm from here."
"So am I." He turned the warrant so I could read it. Green wax, the Hand's tower pressed clean into it. "Forty names by week's end. Lord Hand's writing, Lord Hand's seal. I've eleven."
Behind him two of his men were pulling a boy out of the doorway of Marsh's tavern, and my stomach dropped a foot.
Hobb. Fourteen, pot-scrubber, carried beer with one hand and my messages with the other since he was ten. His mother had been a Lysene whore with hair like new tin, and that was the whole of his crime.
"That one's mine," I said.
"That one's got Valyrian hair and no father." Bryce didn't even look. "You'll want to read the warrant properly, my lord."
"I'm not a lord."
"You sat at the table that voted it." He said it without heat, which was worse. "I've read the minute. Lord Hand proposed, Prince Regent approved, and the queen's sworn shield offered to vet the candidates. That's you. There's no rank on you that can countermand a thing you helped make."
I walked into him. Close enough to smell the wine on his breakfast.
His hand went to his sword and the eight of them dropped their spears level, and for the length of two breaths I did the arithmetic I always do. Soru into the flank. Weight into the first man's chest. The cart over, the rope cut, the square empty in nine seconds and nobody dead who mattered.
And then eight Gold Cloaks broken in front of two hundred witnesses. By nightfall, a bastard dragonrider who beats the Hand's writ in the street. By morning, every door in the Red Keep shut at once. Three months I'd had at that table. Three months, built out of nothing but being useful.
I stepped back.
"Take your hand off it," I said. "You'll cut yourself."
Bryce didn't laugh. "Week's end. Forty. Then we're gone from here, and we work the Hook, and I never see this square again."
They put Hobb on the rope. He didn't fight. He looked for me over the heads of the crowd, found me standing still, and stopped looking.
Marsh came out of his own doorway when the cart pulled off, wiping his hands on a rag he'd already wiped them on.
"Twenty-two years I've kept that door open for you," he said. "Since before you had boots."
"I know it."
"There's men in this quarter who carry for you and wouldn't carry a sack of flour for the Crown." He folded the rag. Folded it again. "Fix it by week's end, or there's no network. Not a smaller one. None. I'll burn my own book myself."
"Marsh."
He looked at me then, and took his time about it, and it wasn't the look he'd given me since I was a boy stealing off his shelves. It was the one he kept for Gold Cloaks.
Then he went back inside.
OTTO
Otto had chosen Waters for the work precisely because the man was a bastard, and had explained this to nobody, since explaining a thing halved its worth.
Eleven names in four days. The tally lay under his palm, and as an instrument of recruitment it was contemptible. As an instrument of provocation it was performing beautifully.
Ser Bryce stood at the window with his helm under his arm and reported that Flea Bottom wasn't cooperating, that the White had come down to the square that morning and stood a foot from him and then walked away.
"Walked away," Otto repeated.
"Yes, my lord."
"And how did he look, doing it?"
Waters took a moment. "Like a man paying for something."
Good. Very good. A creature who couldn't be bought and couldn't be frightened could still, reliably, be invoiced. The bastard had purchased his place at the table with usefulness; Otto had simply arranged for the bill to be delivered to the one street in the world he couldn't walk past.
Forty names would be found. Otto didn't much care whose hand found them. He cared that when the Dragonpit filled with corpses, and it would fill, the finger pointing at the man who chose them wouldn't be pointing at the Tower of the Hand.
A steward knocked and said the White was on the stair and hadn't asked to be announced.
"Then he needn't be," Otto said, and slid the tally into the light, where it could be read from across the desk.
ULF
I got as far as *pull them out* before Otto agreed with me.
That was the worst of it. No argument. No pause, no eloquent little silence while he weighed the realm. He set two fingers on the parchment and turned it toward me.
"The Gold Cloaks were never suited to it," he said. "They lack discrimination. You have it. You told me so yourself in that corridor, and I have thought about little else since."
"You want forty names."
"I want forty candidates. Whether you find them in Flea Bottom or on Driftmark or in a septry is your affair, and no man alive can tell me you would choose them badly." He tapped the sheet once. "Ser Bryce is withdrawn from the district as of this hour. The warrant is yours. So is the roll."
Bryce brought it to me himself, with both hands, and his face carried something I hadn't expected and didn't want.
"I'm not sorry to hand it over," he said. "Eleven in four days. I'd have made forty by Sunday and hated every one of them."
I took it. Eleven names in a clerk's flat hand, and the eleventh was *Hobb, potboy, Cobbler's Square, mother Lysene.*
"Four days," Otto said, comfortable as a man remarking on the weather. "I had allowed six. Ser Bryce owes me a fair sum on it."
He didn't bother to hide it. That was his courtesy: he thought I'd earned the truth, and the truth was that I had taken nothing from him at all. He had put it down where I couldn't leave it lying, and now every name on that page was mine, and every name I kept off it was mine too.
"My thanks, Lord Hand," I said, and lifted his pen off the desk on the way past, and he let me.
On the second landing I stopped, unfolded the roll against the wall, and struck a line through Hobb's name. The ink went on too heavy and bled into the fibres.
One saved. Thirty-nine to find.
I folded the parchment into my fist and went down the stair, already thinking about the tanner's twins on Ragman's Lane, both of them silver-fair, both of them strong, and how one of them would be enough.