The house has been waiting for this bet since the sky went dark.

On the first Tuesday of the tenth month, the thorned stem in the Mirrow strongroom stops lying flat. For the first time in a year, it points.

What it points at is not a monster. It is a column in the guild's own contract register ? the one headed client. Someone has been buying labour from Mirrow for four years, the fees were paid on time, and the paperwork was in order.

So Nevaeh gets down on a gallery floor with a guild officer, a limping road-hand and the woman she once bought for two gold, and they lay four thousand papers out end to end and follow the money: a clerk's shilling in an archive, a standing entitlement nobody remembers granting, and eleven thousand paces under Kessing, a stone table with sixty-one ruled columns on it. It is a count. Everyone on it is alive, in the sense that they are standing up and working. Break it, and all sixty-one come off at once ? and not all of them come back.

She could decide in the dark, the way these things are always decided. She posts it instead.

The System has priced trolls, nest-kings and ancient dragons. It has never priced a list. Every debt comes due, and this time the house is the one on the books.

Book Three of DEAD MONEY.

Adult: graphic combat violence, slavery, body horror. No sexual violence.