Torvan

In Tavellin, debts are paid in years. The year is the city's most honest money, because no one can forge it. It was a rainy winter in 1195 AS. AS means After Stillness; it is how Devran counts its years. Dock worker Torvan's five-year-old daughter, Liessa, was burning with fever. Torvan asked the price of the Olumre sap that would break the fever. The apothecary looked at the seal-watch on his wrist, then at the girl. He named a single number: forty years.

Torvan did not bargain. The apothecary pressed the pawn seal into his wrist. Something cold walked up his arm toward his heart. The balance on the dial dropped in an instant from his youth to his old age. That night Liessa sweated and slept. In the morning she woke up and asked for bread. To this day, Torvan calls it the cheapest purchase of his life.

It was plain he could never pay forty years. The Pendulum Council offers debtors two roads. They either wait in the slow time of the Rust Prisons, or they work off the debt. The Council offered Torvan a third road. They needed a big, patient, honest man. Torvan would become the warden of the prison. His service would slowly melt his debt away. But he too would live inside the prison, by the prison's clock.

In the Rust Prisons, time runs four times slower than outside. Prisoners there do not age; they rust. They rust slowly, like iron bars, with a red-brown dust. They fitted Torvan with a debtor's helm. This is a caged helmet that hides his face. The pale green light inside the cage shows his remaining time. Prisoners look at the light and guess how many years he has left. Torvan never looks in a mirror.

He lived thirteen years inside. Outside, fifty-two years passed. He wrapped chains around his arms, because the prison needed chains most of all. With them he pulled out prisoners who threw themselves into the canal. He freed people trapped under doors that had rusted and collapsed. He never sharpened his hooks to wound anyone. He has pulled a great many people from the water with his hook. More than have ever walked out with their sentence served.

He knows every prisoner by name. A young Digger named Olvek mutters gunpowder formulas all night. He believes his brother will come for him one day. Torvan never asks him whether his brother has come. One prisoner he guards not in the prison but in the palace. One day Queen Oriane stopped in the middle of a sentence and stayed that way. Because of this, the debt she had guaranteed was counted as unpaid. The Council then wrote the throne room into its ledger as a cell of the Rust Prisons. The warden of that cell is Torvan. Every watch, he brushes the dust from the queen's cloak. If she ever finishes her sentence, he wants to be the first to hear it.

He entered the Arena through a loophole in the law. In the Arena, every champion gives their oath, a pledge of loyalty, to a patron. A debtor warden's oath belongs to the Council. A champion earns a share of Dem with each victory. Dem is time in solid form in Devran. But no law says which ledger that share must go to. Torvan sends his share not to his own debt but to other people's debts. After every Swing, every match, some prisoner's sentence grows a few months shorter. No one knows why. The Council thinks it is an accounting error.

Ten years remain on his own debt. Liessa is fifty-seven now. She mends clocks in one of the fast districts. She is older than her father now. Torvan has seen her from a distance twice. Both times he kept his helmet on. He does not know what he would say to her. Would he say "I went away for you," or "I have forgotten how people live outside"? He has heard his daughter has a son. He has not dared to ask the boy's name.

The ring of keys at his belt jingles with every step. Torvan knows every door in the prison. But one key on the ring fits no door at all. It is not really a key, but a small gear. Its workmanship is nothing like that of Tavellin's masters. It is far older. Torvan does not remember when it came onto the ring. Perhaps the Arena took that moment too. A champion who dies in the Arena is rewound, and the price is an erased moment. Torvan has never tried the gear in any lock. He is afraid of which door it will open.