The coins were silver, and they smelled of the sea.
That's the first detail I noted, because I note everything: paces, angles, ceiling heights, the smell of a place. A cartographer who doesn't smell the coins he's handed ends up drawing maps that lie.
"Five hundred réis," the woman said. "Fifty per survey. You'll do ten."
I turned a coin over. Philip II, king of Spain and Portugal. Struck in Lisbon. A profile worn down by three centuries of pockets. On the market, a single one of those coins paid my rent. She had set ten on the table without counting.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Inês."
"Inês what?"
She smiled, and I had the very precise sensation of being a map read upside down.
"Just Inês. The rest is no longer in circulation."
The cellar lay beneath a house in the Alfama that three successive land registries declared nonexistent. I went down the next day, with my rangefinder, my headlamp, and that useless caution one keeps from grandmothers' stories.
Thirty-two steps. A door of ship's timber, swollen, its nails replaced with pegs of compacted salt — I know because I scraped one with a fingernail and licked my finger. Beyond it, a circular room. Twelve niches cut into the stone. Eleven were full.
Full of salt. Coarse grey salt from Setúbal, packed to the brim, and in each heap, planted like a candle, a long bone. A femur, I think. Human, I think.
The twelfth niche was empty. Swept. Ready.
I surveyed the room in two hours. The dodecagon wasn't perfect: the empty niche sat four degrees off toward north, as if whoever cut it had trembled. I noted the angle. I noted the smell: salt, wet stone, and something sweeter, like flowers left too long in a vase.
On the way up, Inês was waiting on the last step.
"You counted," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Eleven full. One empty."
"There have been twelve of us since 1640. Each year, each of us pays a kilo of salt, and salt keeps what it's given." She gestured at the door behind me with a tenderness I didn't understand right away. "But salt isn't enough. Someone also has to weep. A year of real tears, for one more year of life. That's the pact. That's the price."
"And the empty niche?"
"The empty niche," Inês said, "belongs to the one of us who, this year, found no one to weep for them."
She held out her hand. In it was a twelfth coin.
"You draw well, Tomás. And you have no one. That makes you an excellent candidate. For either of the two places."