The Barrel and the Pin

She does not go home the next night either. Instead Wren goes down to the back room, the one with the low bench and the vice and the file-rack, where she filed blanks for three winters by candlelight. She lights the candle out of habit before she notices someone is already there. Fen is at her bench. He has the vice open and a key blank clamped in it, and he is filing — badly, in the dark, the way you file when you don't want to be heard and don't understand what you're cutting. "Fen." He drops the file. It rings on the flags. "Look — I can explain, it's not— you're doing the counting face, stop doing the—" "One blank in the vice." Her voice goes flat. She crosses to the rack and counts along the pegs where the crypt-house blanks hang, or should. "Three gone." She looks at the bench. Two ruined blanks lie there, bits scratched raw, bows nicked. This third one is going the same way. "Three scratched unusable. Fen. That's the great key you're trying to cut." "It's for Aldous." He says his brother's name like it costs him. "He's posted a debit, Wren, that night he went through the wicket — I've read it over your shoulder, it's just *sitting* there in the Dr column, no credit, no nothing, and if I can just get the crypt-key one night, one—" "You can't." "I nearly had it, the last one, the marks were coming up clean—" Wren picks up the blank from the vice. Solid stem. She turns it in the candlelight so he can see the whole shank of it, the honest brass rod running unbroken from collar to tip. Then she goes to the wall-case where the pattern-keys hang under their own small chain, and she lifts down the crypt-key, thirty centimetres of it, cold and heavy as a poker, and she holds the two side by side. "Look at the throat," she says. "Not the bit. The stem." He looks. She watches the moment it lands. The great key has no stem. Where his blank runs solid, the crypt-key is hollow — a barrel, an open pipe, filed to drop over a fixed pin standing up inside the lock. She has seen the pin herself, once, when Master Corvin let her hold the lamp. A pipe key seats over that pin. A solid rod fetches up against it and turns nothing, ever, no matter how true you cut the bit. "You've been filing bits," she says, "on blanks that can't seat. Three of them. You could file for a year. It was never going to open." Fen sits down on the bench very slowly, as if the account he'd been carrying in his head has just been struck through in front of him and re-entered as nothing. "So it can't be copied," he says. "Not from a solid stem. No." She sets the great key back on its chain and does not tell him where the true blanks are, the hollow ones, because she is not sure the district survives Fen with a working crypt-key any more than it survives him with a broken one. "You'd need a barrel blank, and you'd need a hand that could impression the pin-seat, and you'd need—" She stops. She was going to say *me*. She does not say it. "You'd need a sworn porter," Fen finishes, quiet, mean with disappointment. "Because even if I open it, I can't post the entry to close it. Aldous stays a debit either way." Wren does not answer that, because it is true, and because the woman on the far side of the sill said very nearly the same thing in her elegant, patient voice: *I would square it, if someone here would only post the entry.* Only a sworn hand makes an entry that holds. Fen can steal the key. He cannot balance the book. She sweeps the two ruined blanks off the bench into her apron. "Go home, Fen." He goes to the door. At the sill he stops — steps over it, careful, the way you're taught — and turns back. "That night you can't stop working. It's about your mother, isn't it. She's a debit too." Wren counts the blanks in her apron so she doesn't have to answer. Two ruined. One in the vice. A whole column of things that won't come clean. When he's gone she carries the crypt-key back up to the ledger-house, past the place where a door hung on no pintle two nights running, and she thinks about pins. About the one thing a hollow key needs to seat over. About how a lock with a pin standing up in it is a lock that was built to be opened by exactly one hand, and how her mother — a gate-keeper — was a hand that opened gates. She sits down with the flood-year folio. She does not open it to the phantom sum this time. She opens it to her mother's name, and she reads what her mother was keeper *of*. The crypt door. The same door. The one with the pin. She writes nothing yet. But she does not close the book.