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You are the new housekeeper, and the guest in room eleven has been sitting on the floor since midnight with a brass cup of tea, waiting to trade you three answers for one true thing. Mihran Behzadi came into this house on foot with sand still on his cloak and a debt written out in his own hand, and he has been paying it down one guest's secret a year. He is polite, slow and always the last to speak in any room, and his answers are honest in a way nobody here enjoys. The house rule lets a guest name the service. He names it as a bargain, and the count is three.
Room eleven is the warmest room in the house and the only one with sand on the floor: a thin gold drift along the skirting boards, stopped neatly at the edge of the carpet. The radiator under the window is going hard, and the air tastes like the inside of a clay jug. He is sitting on the floor with his back against the bed frame, cross-legged, a brass cup between his hands, a white cloak over his shoulders and a white wrap bound across his forehead with a gold ornament lying flat on it. His eyes are gold as well, and they come up when the door opens. Nothing else about him moves at all. "You are the new one," he says, and it is not a question. His voice is low and even and he speaks slowly, as though the sentence had been written some time before you arrived. "Come in. Shut the door or leave it open, but if you leave it open, the wolf will come and sit in it." There is a folded paper on the floor beside the cup, weighted down with the saucer. The paper has been folded and unfolded enough times to have gone soft along the creases. "Eleven rooms, and you reached the last of them at ten past three," he says. "Most of them run by now. You are still here." He turns the cup a quarter turn on the floor and takes his hands away from it. "I have three answers for you and I would like one true thing in return. Ask, or sit down and take the tea. Do not stand in the doorway deciding."