Chapter 14: Settling Accounts

ELODIN WAS SITTING on my windowsill when I got back from Imre.

It was past dawn. I had walked the whole way from the Stonebridge with my father’s song in my chest and my public failure hanging off me like wet clothes, and I wanted nothing in the world except my narrow bed. Instead I opened my door and found the Master Namer perched in the open window with his back to the drop, eating an apple, as though three stories of empty air were a kind of furniture.

“Two hundred people,” he said mildly, without turning around. “Give or take.”

I closed the door behind me. There did not seem to be anything to say.

“You stood up in a room full of a spell and tried to argue with it.” He took a bite of the apple, chewed thoughtfully. “In front of two hundred witnesses. Loudly. With your own name attached.” He turned then, and there was no humor in his face at all. “Tell me, Re’lar. When a man is picking the lock of your house, do you stand in the garden and shout your objections at the lock?”

“Somebody has to—”

“The lock does not care,” he said, so gently that it stung worse than shouting. “The lock is not listening. The lock is working.” He tossed the apple core out the window and stood. “You have been fighting this song as though it were an opinion. It is not an opinion. Come with me. It’s time you saw what it is knocking on.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere the walls don’t listen.” He glanced suspiciously at the stones around my narrow room. “These walls listen. Did you know that? Very rude of them.”

He led me through the Masters’ Hall and into a passage I’d never noticed before.

The entrance was behind a tapestry on the second floor, a narrow door set into the stone wall, unmarked by handle or hinge. Elodin pressed his palm against it and whispered something I couldn’t hear, and the door swung silently inward.

The passage beyond was old. Older than the University, if the stones were telling the truth: they were darker than the ones above and rough-hewn, and the air came up cool and damp, carrying the mineral smell of deep earth.

“The Underthing is a boil,” Elodin said, leading me down a spiraling stair that went on far longer than the building’s height could account for. He stopped mid-step, pressed his palm flat against the wall, and held it there for three heartbeats. Then he licked the stone.

I stared.

“Calcium,” he said. “With a hint of sorrow. Don’t look at me like that.” He went on down the stairs placidly, as though nothing had happened at all. “The founders built on this site because something was already here. Something needed guarding.”

We reached the bottom. A corridor stretched ahead, its walls lined with stone doors, each one carved from a single massive block and set so precisely flush with the wall that no gap showed between stone and frame.

I counted them as we walked, seven, twelve, twenty, and more beyond those, stretching into the gloom.

“What are these?” I whispered.

“What do they look like?”

“Doors.”

He crouched and pressed his ear against one, stayed there for six heartbeats, then straightened and moved on. “The four-plate door upstairs is a showpiece. A front entrance with a plaque and a legend. These are the forgotten ones.” He glanced back, almost cheerfully. “Puppet says there are exactly one hundred and eight. I’ve counted thirty-seven.”

He stopped at the next door and put his ear to it, carefully, as though there might be something on the other side listening back, and his face went pale.

“Most of them are sealed?” I asked.

“Most.” And he walked on faster.

We stopped at a door that was different from the others.

It was smaller, barely five feet tall, set low in the wall, and it had a crack in it. The door was not open, you understand, only cracked: a hairline fissure running diagonally across the stone, thin as a thread and dark as ink.

Elodin stood before it with his hands at his sides.

“This one has been weakening for eleven years,” he said quietly. “Since long after I first came back out of the Rookery.” He traced the fissure gently with his fingertips. “You know the story. Youngest Chancellor. Cracked under pressure. Named the stone to escape.” He shook his head. “That’s not what happened.”

“What did happen?”

“I opened one of these doors.” He pulled his hand back quickly. “I was young and arrogant and convinced that knowing was always worth the price.” He stared at the cracked door. “Behind the one I opened was a room. Old stone. Writing that moved on the walls. And in the center, on a table…” He stopped. Swallowed. “A name. The actual thing, sitting on a table. You could pick it up.”

“Whose name?”

“I was too broken to read it by the time I understood what I was looking at.” The words came so faintly I nearly lost them. “Someone had cut a living name out of its owner and locked it in a room.”

“And that’s what you mean by changing names.”

“Yes.”

“And if you remove someone’s name…”

He pulled a smooth stone from his pocket, turned it slowly. Put it back. “Have you ever tried to remember a dream? The feeling of it, I mean, and never mind the events.”

“Yes.”

“What keeps a dream from fading completely? You tell it to someone. You make it into a story.” His voice went strange, distant. “And a story, once told, becomes…” He frowned, hunting after the word that had slipped away from him. “A container. It holds what would otherwise be lost.” He touched the stone door again. “Stories are the oldest doors. And the oldest locks.”

Something deeper stirred in me, like a string stirring when its own note is struck nearby. I thought of her song, working through Teven’s borrowed voice. A story, told and retold, sealing itself shut behind the telling.

He blinked and came slowly back to himself.

I stared at the fissure. A living name, cut out and sealed away. Someone had done this. Someone with power, and doctrine, and a place to put what they took.

And I had a list of names in my memory, written in Lorren’s precise hand. Scholars who asked, and vanished. Seven entries across thirty years, and how many entries across three thousand? The answer assembled itself with the smooth, satisfying click of a well-made lock. The Amyr had never merely burned books. Books were the smallest part of it. You prune a library; and when a mind has read too far to be pruned, you prune the mind. I had heard Elodin say too broken a quarter hour before, and watched him pull his hand back from the stone. And when a mind is too strong even for that, when the knowing has gone too deep to be cut out cleanly, then you cut out the name that holds the knowing, and you lock it in a room, and what walks away is a man leaving himself behind and never arriving anywhere again.

For the greater good. It even sounded like their motto, which was how I knew I had it right.

“The Amyr,” I said. “This is where they put the people who learn too much. Not dead. Filed.”

Elodin didn’t confirm it. He didn’t nod and he didn’t speak, but his silence had a shape to it, and I mistook the shape entirely. A locked door and an empty room are the same silence from the outside, and I had nothing that morning that could tell them apart.

I was wrong, though not in every particular, as a map drawn from a single hilltop is true in all its bearings and mistaken in its meaning. That morning I walked up out of the corridor holding my beautiful wrong answer, and it warmed me like a coal, and I was glad of it.

“Why show me this now?” I asked, at the top of the spiral stair.

“Because last night you tried to pick a fight with a song.” He held the tapestry aside. “And the song is not the weapon, Re’lar Kvothe. The song is the knock. I wanted you to see what the door is.” He looked at me with his old, tired eyes. “And who keeps the locks.”

He let the tapestry fall closed behind us and smoothed it flat, as if settling a nervous horse. “Come here without me and you won’t find the tapestry. I’ll have moved it, and very possibly the stair along with it.”

The note was waiting under my door that evening, the paper fine and expensive, the handwriting precise.

Come see me. Time to settle accounts.

No signature, but none was needed. Only one person in Imre sent notes on paper that cost more than a week’s meals.

I grabbed my cloak and headed across the river.

I climbed the narrow stairs above the butcher’s shop once more and knocked at the door with the iron bands.

“It’s open.”

Devi sat behind her desk, her strawberry-blond hair catching the lamplight.

“You came quickly.” She didn’t look up from the papers she was reading. “I half expected you to run.”

“Running would be foolish. You have my blood and hair.”

“I do. It’s such a comfort.” She finally looked up at me, smiling her thin, knowing smile. “Relax. I’m not collecting. Sit down.”

I sat in the chair across from her desk, the only other seat in the room, set carefully to face both Devi and the door. Everything about that room was deliberate.

“Knowledge for knowledge,” she said crisply. “That was our arrangement. You’ve been paying your side of it. The ring’s grammar, the missing-titles list, everything you’ve learned about your Denna’s binding.” She opened a drawer and withdrew a leather folder, thick and disordered, and set it on the desk with both hands. “Tonight I pay mine. I have sources Lorren doesn’t know about.”

“Where did this come from?”

“From a man who claimed descent from the original keepers of the doors. He died about six years ago. Quite suddenly.” She said it in the same flat voice she used for everything, death filed away neatly as one more entry in a ledger. “Left his collection to me, along with a warning I probably shouldn’t have ignored.”

I opened the folder. It was not what I expected.

I had imagined, well, I don’t know what I had imagined. Answers with their boots polished, standing in rows. What I got was a dead man’s drawer: deeds to properties in four countries, most of them ruins. Pilgrim itineraries a century old, certain way-stops underlined twice. A psalter with its margins full of tally marks. A genealogy tracing a family down across centuries, seven familiar names at its head. Letters half in cipher. Receipts. A drawing of a standing stone done by someone who could not draw.

“He spent forty years on this,” Devi said dryly. “He never told me what it added to. I’m not sure he knew.”

“Then how do you know it adds to anything?”

“Because somebody thought it did,” she said evenly. “He fell down his own stairs, Kvothe. A man who’d climbed them drunk for thirty years.”

We laid it out on her wall.

It began almost by accident. I wanted the deeds and the itineraries side by side, and her desk was too small, so she pulled the pins from a shelf-hanging and we started fixing papers to the plaster. Then it stopped being accident. I fetched out everything I had been carrying in my head for a span and put it up beside the dead man’s papers.

The city-names from the song: Belen, Antus, Vaeret, Tinusa, the four names that had not drifted a hair between Denna’s mouth and Teven’s, when every ornament around them had worn like a coin in traffic. The load-bearing walls.

The locations from Lorren’s list, as well as I could remember them: where each vanished scholar had been working, and when.

The seven figures on the barrow-hall tablet, ringed around their door.

The dead collector’s underlined way-stops. His deeds. His tally-marked psalms.

And Wilem’s trade reports, the wool contracts his family’s letters fretted over and the routes gone quiet in the east. And Threpe’s complaint from a span ago, back when Threpe still spoke to me, that three troupes he corresponded with had missed their circuit dates and not written.

None of it agreed exactly. That was what convinced me. Forgeries agree. What we pinned to Devi’s wall disagreed as honest witnesses disagree, everyone standing at a different window of the same burning house. The pilgrim roads bent around certain places. The deeds clustered near the same places. The scholars had died asking about the same places. The song named four of the places outright, singing them as cities that fell in the Creation War.

I took a cord from Devi’s shelf and we strung it point to point across the wall, and I stood back, and the shape looked at me.

Seven places. Six of them fit the pattern, or near enough: old imperial ground, dead cities, forgotten shrines the pilgrim roads still bent around out of a reverence nobody could name. Two of those pins sat only within a day’s ride of where the papers pointed, and one fit at all only if I read an itinerary’s date as a copyist’s slip. I stood a long while in front of the seventh place, where the cord wanted to go and no pin held it. The deeds gave nothing. The psalter gave nothing.

It was the genealogy that gave it up, and only because I could read its last line. Seven names at the head of the page, and one of the seven lines traced down and down through centuries of careful hands, gathering land as it went, holding it, never selling, until at the foot of the page the careful hands gave way to a row of seven cipher-marks that had meant nothing to the dead man or to Devi. I counted them off against the rhyme, the long version I had gathered piece by piece in Vintas and not the scrap children skip to, and they fell quietly into place one after another, and the line had a name I knew. A name everyone knows.

I put the last pin in the old Lackless lands, in the hills of northern Vintas, and the cord sagged slightly between the pins where the fit was rough, and the seven points sat on the wall like a constellation you cannot unsee once someone has drawn it for you, however crookedly.

Devi had gone very quiet behind me.

“I’ve had those papers six years,” she said. “Six years, and I sorted them by kind. Deeds with deeds. Psalms with psalms.” Her face gave away nothing at all, but something moved in the set of her shoulders that was not quite envy and not quite fear. “You sorted them by where.”

“It’s how a song thinks,” I said. “Verse by verse. Place by place.” I was still looking at the seventh pin. The Maer’s letters of fond regard. Meluan’s hands. The feeling in those halls I had spent a year refusing to look at. Everything in my life had begun turning around a point in northern Vintas before I had ever thought to draw the wheel.

“They’re binding sites,” Devi said. “That’s what he thought, the collector. Places where something was sealed.”

“Seven,” I said. I was thinking of Elodin’s corridor, and Puppet’s hundred and eight.

“Seven,” she agreed. “Doors are what you lock. These are what the locks are nailed to.” She stepped up beside me and touched the wall lightly, just beneath the oldest of the underlined way-stops. “And it matches what I hear. Strange dreams spreading through villages, always the same villages. Shadows that move against the light. Things are pushing, Kvothe. The bindings are failing. I’ve believed it for years, and it is a strange, ugly relief to watch someone else’s cord arrive where mine did.”

“Then we have bigger problems than my debt to you.”

“We do. Which is why the arrangement grows.” She folded her hands neatly. “A collector in Tarbean claims to have a genuine Amyr text. A woman in Vintas knows songs that predate written language. A man in the Small Kingdoms says he saw one of the Seven with his own eyes, thirty years ago, and survived.” She leaned forward. “My contacts are yours now. Everything I hear, you hear. Together we might actually accomplish something before the seals fail.”

“Why the sudden generosity?”

“It isn’t generosity, and it isn’t sudden. Trust is for people who don’t understand how the world works.” She said it matter-of-factly. “But you can trust my self-interest. Whatever’s coming, I’d prefer to survive it.”

She was quiet then, looking at the wall we had made. And when she turned back to me the performance had gone out of her entirely.

“You put real coin on this desk tonight,” she said simply. “The song’s bones. The wall.” She nodded at the seventh pin. “That’s worth more than a ring. So I’ll pay in kind, and you’ll understand why I believe what I believe about what’s under the Archives. You asked me once how I came to be in these rooms. Sit down.”

I sat.

“My grandmother was Yllish. Proper Yllish, from the old bloodlines. She taught me real knot-work before I could read, stories tied into cord that carried meanings no spoken language could hold. She told me our family had been keepers of certain names too dangerous to speak aloud. Tied into knot-work. Passed down, mother to daughter.” She paused. “She died when I was eleven. A fever, three days. She hadn’t passed the words along.”

“So you came to the University to find them.”

“I came because I was brilliant and ambitious. But underneath that, yes. I was looking for what my grandmother couldn’t tell me. And in my third year, chasing a footnote in an obscure Yllish grammar, I found a section of the Archives that wasn’t supposed to exist. I don’t mean the restricted stacks; those are known and documented and carefully watched. A shelf whose wood was newer than its neighbors, moved four inches forward from the stone. And behind it a door. Small, barely three feet high, set into the original wall. The sort of door you walk past a thousand times unless you know to look.”

The hair on the back of my neck prickled. I thought of a corridor I had walked that same morning, and said nothing.

“Steps. Forty-seven of them, cut from stone older than the University, the walls so dense with old Yllish that my eyes watered. And at the bottom, a circular room, and in the center a stone table. A writing desk, Kvothe. Ancient. Made for inscriptive magic. The Archives weren’t built on top of it by accident. They were built to contain it.”

“But you found it.”

“I found it. And I touched the table.” She swallowed. “The stone held knowledge. Fragments, packed tight and jumbled, like hearing a hundred conversations at once in a language you almost speak.”

She stopped. When she went on, her voice was very level, planed down deliberately flat with a great deal of effort, and it did not waver once.

“The next thing I remember is waking with two days gone and Lorren standing over me. There was a case open on the table beside my bed. Needles. A stoppered vial. I never saw him use them. I never saw anything, that’s the point. I only know that when I tried to hold the room in my mind afterward, the memories came apart like wet paper. Someone had stitched over what I knew.”

“Lorren.” My hands had gone cold. I thought of the study chamber. The list. Be careful what you seek.

“I don’t know if Lorren is Amyr. I don’t even know, not with the sort of certainty you could swear to in front of a magistrate, that it was his hand that held the needle. But somebody stitched me shut. And the intent was the same as what’s being done to your Denna: rewriting what a person knows. What a person is.”

“But it didn’t hold.”

Devi’s smile was sharp enough to cut.

“My grandmother’s knot-work. The patterns she wove into my hair when I was small, which I always took for ordinary braids. They were protections. Shields. The old bindings resisted him, though not completely. He managed something partial, enough to blur certain memories.” She touched her left temple absently. “But it didn’t fully take. I was expelled because I couldn’t be erased. It took me seven years to unpick the threads of the inscription. Seven years of headaches and nosebleeds. But I recovered most of what the table taught me.”

“Most?”

“Some things are still locked. Knowledge shut behind my teeth like a word I can never quite say.” Her hands stopped moving on the desk for half a breath, and then she folded whatever it was away with the practiced neatness of a woman putting linens into a chest. “The teacher I still owe you; that account is too fresh to open. So now you know what I am, and most of what was done to me, and why I sleep behind three locks. We are the two people in the world with the best reasons to want the writing understood.” She looked at the wall. “And now we have a map.”

Before I left, there was one more piece of business.

“One condition,” I said. “The blood and hair. If something goes wrong, if I die, or disappear, or can’t pay what I owe, you don’t use them. You destroy them.”

“Why would I agree to that?”

“Because if the seals really are failing, my corpse isn’t going to help you survive what comes through. And if I succeed, you’ll want me to owe you a favor rather than a debt.”

She considered it. Then she nodded slowly, and smiled.

“Agreed. In the event of your death or permanent incapacitation, I’ll destroy the blood and hair.”

“And if I disappear?”

“Then I’ll come looking, and I’ll want something to look with.” She held out her hand.

I thought about that for a moment, as if there were a choice in it, and then I took it. Her grip was strong, her skin cool.

“One more thing,” Devi said, as I gathered my cloak. “There’s a woman. In the University. Someone who knows more than she should about… everything. She spends her nights in the tunnels under the Archives.”

“Auri.” My voice came out harder than I intended. “She’s a friend. She’s not involved in this.”

“She lives in the spaces between.” Devi’s eyes were sharp. “If anyone knows about doors and seals…”

“Leave her alone.”

“I’m not threatening her. I’m pointing out a resource.” Devi raised her hands innocently. “Talk to her. She might surprise you.”

I didn’t answer. I had told her about the tree earlier in the evening, while the wall went up, and I had not told her about the barrow-hall. Nor did I tell her now how far ahead of her advice I already was, or that the oldest pin on her wall stood over a hall I had walked by a brave candle’s light. Some accounts I kept closed even from my creditor.

The next day, I went to find Auri.

I’d learned long ago that looking for her was pointless. She found you, or she didn’t. Instead I went to the roof of the Artificers’ Hall at sunset, to the place where she sometimes appeared to watch the stars.

She wasn’t there.

But something else was.

A small cloth bag, sitting neatly on the spot where she usually perched. Inside was a note written in Auri’s small, precise hand, wrapped around a smooth gear-wheel no bigger than my thumbnail:

The key I gave you is waking up. Can you feel it?

Be careful of the singing.

I reached into my pocket. The iron key Auri had given me in the Underthing weeks ago was there, where I always kept it. But she was right, it felt different now. Warmer. Heavier. As if it had been sleeping and was beginning to stir.

I held it up to the starlight. The marks cut into it seemed to shift slightly, though perhaps that was only my imagination.

The gear-wheel I turned over twice in my palm. With Auri, a gift was never nothing.

I put them both in my pocket and went back to my room.

That night I did not dream of doors. I dreamed of songs, old ones, silenced since the Creation War, and in the dream someone a long way off had begun to hum them.