# Chapter 2: The File

I left Chandler's Row before the second bell because I preferred arriving early and sitting in a hallway for ten minutes over arriving late by the margin a busy corridor could produce. The walk was what it was — dockside out of Chandler's Row, across the canal bridge at the first of its two working mornings a week, up through the northern warrens at the time of day when the warrens cleared their throats and then went quiet again, and into the guild quarter on the route Ledger had never asked me to take but I had taken for months anyway because the alternative ran past a baker whose bread I was not going to stop buying just because I had developed routines.

(*Four months.*)

The bracelet, warmed last night for the first time in weeks, had not cooled again overnight. Not hot — not any of the things it had been while Kae was tearing people apart with a crystal and a grievance — just on. The way a lamp is on without being bright. A reminder that the thing on my wrist had moods of its own and had decided, at some point between the seventh bell and the second, that today was worth paying attention to.

I reached the guild hall at five minutes before the second bell.

The receptionist did not look up when I came in. She had not looked up when I had come in for eight months straight, and whatever game she had been playing at the beginning had long since become the way she worked and I had stopped reading it as strategy. Second floor. Corridor. Third door. Not the office.

(*Not the office. The file room. The file room is where he goes when he's going to hand me something heavy. The file room means the thing is not the briefing. The thing is larger than most.*)

I had spent most of a walk's worth of noise not thinking that sentence and then had arrived and thought it anyway.

The door of the file room was closed. Not ajar — a courtesy Ledger usually extended when he wanted a conversation to feel volunteered. Closed. Which meant he had preferred, today, the door say *come in* rather than the hallway say *I'm already here.* I stood in the corridor for the five-count that constituted my one superstition about Ledger's geometry, listened to the second bell begin, and turned the handle.

* * *

The file room was smaller than the office and the table was bigger. Three stacked files on it — arranged not in a row, not a pile, in a deliberate single-file, ruler-straight column in the near quarter of the table where I would sit. Ledger was already sitting, on the far side, elbows not on the wood. The chair he had set for me was the near one facing the window, which meant my face would be lit and his would not — a room he had dressed before the bell.

"Varrant."

"Ledger."

I sat.

The top file was leather, not cloth, and the leather was old. The second file was institutional — guild cloth, the weight of a file that contained a journal. The third was thin. I read the column without appearing to read it and filed each item before Ledger said a word. He let me. He always let me. It was a concession, and it was also data — he was watching what I did with the five seconds he gave me.

"Top of the pile, first," he said. "Then we'll go down."

He slid the leather file across the table.

I opened it.

*Kade Reach Survey Report. Pathfinder Contract. Requisitioned by House Varnesse, Thorngate. Sealed, archived, deferred.*

The cover page said the date and the date was twenty years old.

(*Twenty.*)

"Duchess Pamira Varnesse," Ledger said. "Duchy of Thorngate. Her late husband put the contract up. She paid it out. The team walked a forty-five-acre stretch of her eastern coast that the family had been sitting on for three generations under the assumption that it was woodland. The team found a walled compound, three mines in the cliff face, and a gate."

I turned the cover page. The map came out. I had seen Pathfinder maps before; this was one. Ink on linen, contour lines that did not lie, notations in the margin in three different hands. Clean work.

"The compound is pre-Compact," Ledger said. "The survey team's read. Confirmed across three independent lines — the palisade timber carries a preservation working the Compact has not replicated; the inscription panels inside use a notation that predates Runic Flow standardisation by at least a century; the gate ward is outside current technique."

I was not listening to him. I had listened to him enough over enough sessions to hear him from the next room. I was reading.

The senior surveyor's hand was neat and aggressive and broadcast itself on every page. The junior's hand was clean and confined. The third hand was scattered across the gate pages — smaller, faster, bracketed, doing what the third hand on any survey does, which is refuse to stop thinking after the senior has called it. It was the hand of someone who had drawn the gate twice more, from the side, from below, and once from inside looking out, to see if the shape had a weakness when you changed the angle you looked at it from.

*The gate is a ward, not a door. —DF*

I read it twice.

(*Devod. That's Devod. Before I knew him, before he was the Wolf to me, before anything — that's him. The shape of his noise. The angle he reads terrain from.*)

"DF," Ledger said.

"I saw."

"You recognised the hand before you saw the initials."

"I recognised the *thinking* before I saw the initials. The hand was confirmation."

Ledger's mouth did the motion where it did not move but acquired a quality. Not a smile, the architecture of one, dismantled before it reached the surface. I had written that down once, privately, and then filed it because there was no file I kept that it belonged in.

"He was on the team at thirty-five," Ledger said. "His last contract before the delivery work became his life. The senior surveyor wrote the gate up. Devod caught what the senior missed, wrote the margin note. Pamira read the report. Devod's name has been on a document in her drawer for twenty years. She has never met him."

I sat with that for a beat. The noise sat with it for longer.

(*Twenty years of his handwriting in a noblewoman's desk. Twenty years of a document nobody in the world apart from her has looked at. Three duchies between them. Never met.*)

"Contract closed — *pre-Compact adaptive ward, outside current capability, defer*," Ledger went on. "The late husband and the Duchess agreed to wait. He died. She kept waiting. Four months ago she stopped waiting."

"Why."

"Two reasons. One — Duke Garrett Holven of Aldermere has been acquiring distressed noble debt across the north for a decade. One of her husband's unresolved obligations landed in his ledger recently. He has not moved on it. He could. She is aware."

"Two."

"Through the old network she heard about an operative called the Locksmith."

(*There it is.*)

"So she wrote to the old network," Ledger said, "because they're the only people who know where the twenty-year file lives. They brought the letter to me. I have been reading on anything Wolf-related since Devod was attacked. First time I've needed the standing order."

He slid the second file across.

I closed the leather. Opened the cloth.

Field journal. A scout's hand. Precise, trained, network-neat. First entry dated the week of the wedding.

"Scout 1," Ledger said. "Tier Two, ward-breaking training, experienced. I deployed him the week you got married. His mandate was to confirm the site matched the survey, catalogue what had changed, and assess whether the gate was still active."

I read. Six weeks of working notes. Walks of the perimeter. Cross-references to Devod's twenty-year-old margin sketches, checked and confirmed — *terrain holds. Cliff edge still crumbling as noted. Mine 1 entrance unchanged. Gate intact, ward appears active, no accumulated wear.* Good work. Patient work.

The last entry was one paragraph of confident hypothesis about the gate's ward architecture and then nothing.

"He forced the gate at week six," Ledger said. "The ward adapted to his method and killed him. I did not know until the silence went past the threshold."

I turned the page. The page was blank. I turned three more. Blank, blank, blank. The journal ran out mid-book. Every journal closed by the world does.

(*Week six. He had a theory. He had a theory and he went in.*)

I did not ask if the scout had a family. Ledger would have closed that loop. Ledger closed those loops for himself and then sometimes told me and sometimes did not. Today he did not. I filed the absence as operational.

Ledger slid the third file across. Thinner. Paper, not cloth.

Forensics. An operative's hand I did not know, which was most of them, since I had not been formally read into Ledger's full network and the work I had watched him do with them over the last year and change had been at arm's length by design. Kill pattern at the gate. Defensive posture. Arcane burn radius. The report's conclusion: *pre-Compact adaptive ward, still active, unchanged from survey-era assessment, lethal to force.*

"Sabre," Ledger said. "And a forensics partner. I sent them at week fourteen when the silence was past tolerance. They recovered the body, the journal, and the report. The partner came back to me at week sixteen. Sabre stayed on site, light rotation, sending-stone updates. You'll meet her in Thorngate."

"Week seventeen."

"Week seventeen. Today."

He did not say *I'm sorry for the wait.* Ledger did not apologise for operational time. Time was what the work cost; he charged it without ceremony.

(*Sabre has been sitting on that site for eight weeks. Ledger picked someone who could sit on a site for eight weeks without filing a report that got longer than it needed to. That is not accidental.*)

I closed the third file.

The column on the table was now three files on the left and my hand on the right and the question between them.

I was going to say no. The noise had three reasons ready.

(*Four days out, ten on-site if we were lucky, four back. Three weeks north of her, minimum. She'd be further along by the time I got home. That's not the bell I want to miss.*)

(*The Compact has been trading paper with the guild since Kae. Small careful knives, back and forth. I don't want to be four duchies away when one of them stops being careful.*)

(*Thorngate is where Cass was reassigned. The one duchy I had no business walking into the week after Kae's deal closed.*)

Ledger was watching my face. I suspected he had been reading for the no since he opened the leather file. I also suspected he had a plan for it.

"Twenty-five and operational expenses is the guild split," Ledger said. "Standard. On top of that, per your tier, you take a share of the artifact sale as a named operative. I worked the number with Carter on Leon's pricing model. Floor and ceiling, both conservative. I have a range."

He produced a single slip of paper from under the third file — he had been sitting on it, literally, the whole conversation — and slid it across.

I read it.

(*The nursery. The east-facing kitchen. That number changes everything and he knows it.*)

I set the slip down. I did not ask whether the number was negotiable — Ledger's ranges were ranges because the work was not done yet, not because he was haggling. I did not ask whether the ceiling was likely — Ledger did not quote ceilings to make people feel good. I did not do any of the things a person who needed the number to be true would have done. I did them all in my head and sat through the doing of them.

"Yes," I said.

Ledger watched me say it. He did not ask why the resistance had stopped. He had, I suspected, a partial answer — enough of the arithmetic of my life to know where the pressure was. He had been to Chandler's Row once. He had seen the revision of the plans on the wall. He had noticed, as Ledger noticed, that one of the rooms was labelled in Mere's hand and the other rooms in mine. He had not commented. He would not comment. He had filed it, and the filing was a courtesy, and the courtesy was not free.

"Good," he said.

He reached under the table a second time and produced a second file. Slimmer. Darker.

I did not open it.

"Tell me," I said.

The grievance was not as heavy as I had expected and it was heavier than I had prepared for, which was the usual arithmetic of bad news.

"The Compact filed a formal grievance twelve days ago," Ledger said. "The grievance reopens the qualifications inquiry filed against you in your first year as a contractor. The one I got withdrawn at the end of the Kae case. They attached the crystal alteration as new evidence. The charge is that you are not qualified to handle magical items and should be stripped of certification and expelled from the guild."

He did not deliver it dramatically. He delivered it flat — file-tone, file-pace, which was what it was.

(*I want the filing to burn. Not *I want to burn the filing itself* — I want the hands that wrote it to be in the fire. The thought arrived without my permission and had a shape on it I did not put there. Filed.*)

(*Twelve days. He held it through the wait-on-the-ruin-brief — he did not want the grievance and the brief on the same morning. He chose today because today the ruin is a yes and the grievance is a fact, not a question.*)

"Cass is the witness of record," I said.

"Cass is the witness of record. He's been reassigned out of Drenwick — different city, different office — but the filing does not move with the man who filed it. The filing is in. A grievance lives past the man who wrote it."

"They gave it four months."

"They gave it four months. I bought you a year. They spent four of it writing the grievance. They were always coming back."

I sat with that.

"The ruin is a procedural escape," I said.

"The ruin is an assignment that is also a procedural escape. I need both to be true. The ruin is real. The site is real. The artifacts are real. The Duchess is a client. The case is the case. That is the contract. And while you are on the contract you are on guild business, which means the Compact cannot depose you without guild counsel present, which means the procedural fight runs on my terms rather than theirs while you are two duchies away on a noble estate with jurisdictional rules that favour the host. None of which wins the grievance. All of which buys time."

"Buys time for what."

Ledger did not answer.

He let the silence run the length Ledger let silences run when he wanted the other person to notice how long he was willing to hold it. I did notice. I filed it. I let him win that part of the conversation on purpose because we were both going to need the room later.

"I'm a contractor," I said. "Tier Two. The jurisdiction the Compact is filing under reaches contractors."

"Yes."

"Does it reach higher."

Ledger's eyes did the thing. "That is a question I would like you to leave with me for now."

"Ledger."

"Varrant."

I held the stare for a count, not a contest, and then took my hand off the slip of paper with the number on it. The slip sat between us like a witness.

"All right."

He let me breathe for a count, and then the third thing arrived. I had known there would be a third thing. I had not known what shape it would take until it took the shape it did.

"You've been carrying more than the paperwork says," he said. "That's about to matter."

He said it flat. Not loaded. Not ominous. A sentence he had turned over in his head enough times to have stripped the performance out of it.

I did not ask what he meant.

(*He knows. He has known. Since the crystal. He watched me modify a pre-compact magical working in a way no one else could and he filed it somewhere the paperwork does not reach. He has been holding that file since before the wedding. He is telling me today because the file is going to start mattering on the trip he is sending me on, and he does not want the first time I hear him acknowledge it to be a morning where Mere is in the blast radius. He is giving me the acknowledgement on a morning where the only person it hurts is me.*)

The noise was longer than the moment. That was fine. That was what the noise was for.

Outside, the second bell was most of the way into the third. The light coming in behind me had warmed by a degree on the left cheek. I could feel the thaumometer against my chest through the coat.

"Thorngate is where Cass was reassigned," Ledger said.

"I'm aware of the geography."

He nodded once. Courtesy or positioning — I still could not tell, after a year of file rooms, and I had stopped trying. The thing I had learned about Ledger was that he did both at the same time, and the two were not separable, and the question of which one he *meant* was one he had stopped asking about himself fifteen years before I had met him.

"Take the files," he said. "Read them tonight. Read them again on the carriage. I'll have Carter's array and Leon's notes delivered to Chandler's Row by end of day. Sabre will meet you at the Duchess's gates."

I stood. I gathered the three files into my satchel, the slip of paper folded once and tucked inside the leather survey. The forensics report went in last because the forensics report was a weight I wanted on the top of the stack when I reached into the satchel later, so that I would lift it first and remember what the gate did.

At the door Ledger said, almost as though he had remembered it, "Locksmith."

I turned.

"Good to have you working again," he said.

"Yeah," I said.

I left.

* * *

The walk back to Chandler's Row was not the walk I had taken in. I went down through the canal district instead of through the guild quarter, because the guild quarter was where someone who had just been told he was being sued out of the guild would walk looking like it, and I had no intention of looking like it. The canal district was crowded and smelled of low tide and tar and did not care what my face was doing.

(*Twelve days. Four months. Seventeen weeks. Twenty years. All the wrong increments. There is no month of any of these that matches a month of any of the others, and all of them are going to compress into the four days it takes to get to Thorngate.*)

The noise was already building the case folder without asking me. Moss, thaumometer, gate, scout, Holven. Five threads. One more than my working limit. One of them was going to have to wait at the door while I did the next hour. I let the moss go to the front because the moss was what tonight was.

I reached Chandler's Row at the edge of the fourth bell. The door was unlocked, which was Mere. She was in the workshop corner with the microscope, shoulders square, a slide in her hand, not working yet — preparing. The lattice panel in the window was casting its pattern across the counter.

Sniff was in his corner. He lifted his head for the half-second it took to confirm me and then put it down again.

Mere did not turn.

"It's on, isn't it?" she said.

"It's on."

"When."

"Four days. Carriage. I leave Fifthday morning."

She set the slide down. She turned. Her hand went to her abdomen in the way that had become a sentence over the last several weeks. She did not perform it and she did not hide it.

"The file was heavy."

"It was heavier than I had ready for. It was not heavier than I can carry."

"Good."

"Also, there's a grievance."

She waited.

"The Compact reopened the first-year inquiry. Attached the crystal as new evidence. Relief sought, expulsion."

(*Relief. There is a word for it. There is a word for a man's life being taken out of his hands and it is the same word they use when a rash clears up.*)

She took this in the way Mere took things in, which was without any of the responses most people had practised for the moment. She sat down. She thought. She made one adjustment to her plan, which I could see on her face as she made it — the plan she had been holding for the evening got one new item appended to it and the new item was a sentence she was not going to say until she had thought about it for twelve hours.

"Then let's finish the cell fix tonight," she said.

"Yeah."

"The seam."

"The seam."

"Tonight we make a run at it."

I set the satchel down on the table — not near the microscope, on the far side, because the satchel had three weights in it I did not want near her instruments. I took my coat off. I hung it on the back of the chair. I crossed the kitchen to the workshop corner and picked up the slide she had put down and held it to the window for the thirty seconds that constituted my one superstition about slides that had been resting.

(*Tonight the cell. Tomorrow the carriage. Four days on the road, four months behind me, twenty years in the file. The noise will hold. The noise has been holding longer than it thought it could. One more night of only moss.*)

"Start the mix," she said.

"Starting."

Outside, the afternoon was going.
