Thieves' Quarry (The Thieftaker Chronicles)

by Jackson, D. B.

  “Ethan Kaille?” Greenleaf said.

  “What can I do for you, Sheriff?”

  “You’re to come with us to the city gaol.”

  At the sheriff’s mention of the prison, Ethan’s stomach began to knot like wet rope, but he kept his voice steady as he asked, “And why am I being arrested?”

  “You’re to be tried and hanged for murder.”

  “Murder!” Ethan repeated. “And who am I supposed to have killed?”

  “Simon Gant, of course.”

  Ethan’s legs nearly gave way beneath him. “Gant’s dead?”

  Greenleaf chuckled. “Dissemble all you like, Kaille. But this time you’ll not wheedle your way to freedom. I have witnesses who heard you asking about him, talking about how he had beaten you.” He reached out and grabbed Ethan roughly by the chin, turning his face so that he could see Ethan’s cheek and jaw. “I can still see the bruises a bit, though not as much as I would have expected. I’d wager we both know why, don’t we? If I can’t hang you for a murderer, I’ll hang you for a witch.”

  Ethan jerked his head out of the man’s grasp. “Where did you find him?”

  “Gant you mean?” the sheriff said. He shook his head. “I’m not going to play your games.”

  “I don’t believe this man killed anyone, Sheriff,” Rickman said. “He’s been with me for some time now, and prior to that he was in that tavern there. When is this man, Gant, supposed to have died?”

  Greenleaf’s eyes narrowed and he looked the doctor up and down. “Never mind that. Who are you?”

  “My name is William Rickman. I’m ship’s surgeon aboard His Majesty’s ship the Launceston.”

  “And what are you doing in the company of this man, Doctor?” Preston asked.

  “You know as well as I do, Captain. Mister Kaille has been asked by agents of the Customs Board to look into a … a matter of some importance to the British fleet. I worked with him at Castle William, where you met with us. And I continue to work with him here in Boston.”

  “Well, you’d be best off keeping your distance from him,” Greenleaf said. “I wouldn’t expect a man of your position to be aware of this, but he’s known to be a witch, not to mention a mutineer, a liar, and a cheat. Gant beat him to within an inch of his life, and he wanted his revenge.”

  “He came to the camp where my regiment is billeted,” Preston said, taking up Greenleaf’s story so smoothly that Ethan wondered if they had rehearsed it beforehand. “He asked one of my soldiers about where he might find Gant, and even offered to pay the man in treasure that he planned to recover once Gant was taken care of. His bruises were more obvious then. Thinking back on it now, we all should have known why he wanted to find Gant.”

  “Is any of this true?” Rickman asked.

  “All of it,” Ethan said. “And none of it. I did go looking for him, I did speak with a soldier, and I did offer to share some plunder with him. Gant was a smuggler, and this man knew it. It was the only way I could think of to learn whatever it was he knew. But I wanted to find Gant, not kill him.”

  “I think it’s clear that you did both,” Greenleaf said.

  “Let me guess,” Ethan said. “There wasn’t a mark on the man. He just seemed to have dropped where he stood.”

  A cruel smile stretched across the sheriff’s broad face. “Very good. It’s almost like you were there.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rickman said.

  “He was killed by a conjuring,” Ethan told him, still gazing at the sheriff. “Just like the others.”

  Greenleaf’s face fell. “What others?”

  “You have to let me see him, Sheriff,” Ethan said.

  “See who?”

  “Gant. You have to let me see the body.”

  Ethan might as well have said that Greenleaf had to give him the keys to the prison.

  “Why in God’s name would I let you do that?” the sheriff asked, a sneer twisting his face.

  Because I can see the color of the power used to kill him. Because I can learn what kind of spell it was, and perhaps find the conjurer who cast it. But of course Ethan couldn’t say any of these things. Greenleaf’s threat to have him hanged as a witch was just that: a threat, empty and meaningless. But as soon as Ethan admitted to being a conjurer in front of the sheriff and Preston and all these men, his life would be forfeit.

  “I can help you find the person who killed him,” Ethan answered, not daring to say more, knowing that this wouldn’t be enough to convince Greenleaf of anything.

  “Tell me what you meant before,” the sheriff said. “What others?”

  Ethan glanced at Rickman, who stared at the ground, but gave one slight shake of his head.

  “It was nothing,” Ethan said. “I misspoke.”

  Greenleaf regarded the doctor. “Very well.” He looked back at Preston. “Captain?”

  Preston said something to his men that Ethan couldn’t hear. One of the soldiers took Ethan’s knife and two others grasped him firmly by each arm and started to march him back the way he and Rickman had come. The other regulars fell in around him. Preston and the sheriff followed.

  “Is there someone I should tell?” the doctor called after Ethan.

  Ethan craned his neck to look back. He stumbled, and the men beside him tightened their grips on his arms. “Kannice Lester, the woman who owns the tavern where you found me.”

  “I’ll go to her right now! And I’ll do everything in my power to win your freedom! I swear it!”

  Ethan nodded once, and faced forward again. The soldiers’ fingers dug into his flesh like manacles of steel. The wind blew, the rain pelted down on his bare head and drenched his coat. But these were nothing to him. Already Ethan could smell the fetor of the cell awaiting him in Boston’s gaol.

  Chapter

  EIGHTEEN

  Despite all his scrapes with Greenleaf and his encounters with representatives of the Crown, Ethan had not set foot in a prison since the night of his release from servitude in Barbados. Even then, the cell had only been a place where he could sleep until he set out the following morning for the Town of Saint Michael, whence he was to depart by ship for Charleston. He hadn’t truly been a prisoner in a cell since the days of his trial for the Ruby Blade mutiny.

  And yet as he neared the prison, memories of that old cell and of his captivity in Barbados flooded his mind like a rising storm tide. War had never frightened him, even in his youth. He had sailed through ocean storms that would have reduced some grown men to sobbing babes. He had been beaten and threatened; he had come close to dying more times than he could count. None of that scared him. But prison … He found himself choking back tears. His legs trembled as the regulars led him down the length of Queen Street that passed before the courthouse and gaol. One would have thought that he had just run up to the very top of Beacon Hill, his heart labored so. He could smell his own sweat, his own fear, and he hated himself. He recalled that feeling, as well. The one small mercy was that neither Kannice nor Diver, nor any of the other people in his life, could see him at this moment. He was entirely alone and for now at least he was glad.

  The gaol sat in the midst of one of Boston’s finer neighborhoods, as out of place as a beggar—or perhaps a thieftaker—among men of society. It was a plain building, not particularly menacing and noteworthy only for its ancient, heavy oak door, which looked to Ethan as implacable as a mountain. A few small windows broke up the solid, ugly façade, but otherwise it was nothing more or less than a great stone box. And they were going to put him inside of it.

  The soldiers halted. Greenleaf stepped past them, gesturing with a quick wave of his hand for the two who held Ethan to follow him. He led them through the prison entrance into the rank shadows within.

  “Bring him this way,” the sheriff said, his voice echoing in the cramped space.

  The two regulars steered Ethan down a narrow corridor and through a second door nearly as ponderous as the one in front. As soon as they stepped into this second p
assageway, the smell hit Ethan, and he gagged. Sweat, urine, feces, vomit, fear, desperation, hopelessness. He was drowning in a noisome sea. The men holding him practically had to carry him along the stone corridor, his feet half walking, half dragging. The soldiers’ fingers were like iron, gouging the muscles in his arm. And Ethan clung to that pain as a respite from his memories and his terror.

  The last door on the left side of the corridor stood open. Greenleaf stopped beside it, smirking at Ethan as the men ushered him past and into the cell. It might as well have been the same cell in which he had been held during his trial. A shaft of silvery gray light shone through the small window high on the wall opposite the cell door. A pallet, tattered and leaking straw, lay along one wall with a single brown woolen blanket folded at the foot. The foul smell from the privy hole in the far corner permeated the chamber, forcing Ethan to clamp his teeth against a wave of nausea.

  But he made himself stand on his own two feet, and tried to wrest his arms from the hands of the soldiers. He had survived prison before; he would do so again.

  “Chain him up,” Greenleaf said from behind them.

  Ethan tried to turn. “What?” he said, the word scraped from his throat.

  The sheriff entered the cell and jangled a manacle that Ethan hadn’t noticed before. It was bolted to the wall beside him. Several of them were.

  “As I said before, Kaille, I know what you are. I may not be an expert in the ways of witchcraft, but I know better than to leave you in this cell and expect you to be here still come the morn. My thought is that if you can’t speak your witchery, and if you can’t wave your hands around in all manner and call demons to you in that way, you’ll be powerless. And that’s what I want.” He gestured to the soldiers. “Chain him, lads. Don’t worry about being too gentle with him, either.”

  The soldiers pushed Ethan against the wall, wrenched his arms up into an awkward position, and clamped the manacles around his wrists. The chains might have been set for a larger man, or Greenleaf might not have cared a whit for Ethan’s comfort. In either case, the cuffs were so far apart that they stretched Ethan’s arms and shoulders, leaving him in a great deal of discomfort and unable to move his hands at all. The iron carved into his skin, but only enough to bruise; not enough to make him bleed. The regulars attached two more manacles to his ankles. These were less restricting, though that hardly mattered given the positioning of the cuffs holding his wrists. At last, they put an iron collar around his neck and tied a gag in his mouth.

  “There,” Greenleaf said, a smug smile on his face as he examined the chains and tested the bolts that held them to the rough, cold stone. “I don’t expect you’ll be going anywhere. At least, not until we say so.”

  The sheriff reached into Ethan’s pockets and removed a few coins—maybe five shillings and as many pence. He made a quick count and pocketed the money, smiling up at Ethan again. “My thanks.”

  Ethan glared at him, wanting nothing more than to speak a spell that would flay the sheriff’s skin from his bones or perhaps crush his skull. But while Greenleaf had never given any indication that he knew the first thing about conjuring, on this day he had managed inadvertently to render Ethan powerless. He didn’t need to say anything aloud to conjure, but in order to break free of the chains and the prison he did need blood. He didn’t know if he could move his hands enough to cut or scrape himself. With the gag in his mouth, he couldn’t even bite his cheek or tongue. Apparently, Greenleaf was as lucky as he was ignorant.

  “Someone will come by later, I suppose,” the sheriff told him, sounding calm and confident now that he had Ethan tamed. “You’ll need some water and some food, such as it is.” He stepped out of the cell, closed the door and threw the bolt, the metallic ring of the lock reverberating in the walls like a spell. “Enjoy yourself.”

  Greenleaf laughed as the click of his boots on stone retreated down the hallway. The two soldiers remained outside the cell. The sheriff wasn’t taking any chances.

  Ethan’s arms and shoulders were already starting to grow sore, and the manacle around his neck held his head at an odd angle, making his neck and back ache, too. But like the pain of the soldiers’ grips on his arms, the agony in his shoulders served to clear his thoughts, searing away those haunting memories of Charleston and Barbados, and concentrating his thoughts on his predicament.

  Gant was dead. Osborne, it now seemed, never had been. All this time Ethan had assumed that Gant was the killer, the one who had killed every man on the Graystone and attacked Mariz. But Ethan would have bet the ten pounds Geoffrey had promised him that a revela potestatem spell would show that Gant had been killed by that same orange power Ethan had seen on Sephira’s man and the dead soldiers aboard the ship. He wanted to believe that it had been Osborne all along, but how could he explain Osborne’s presence among the dead soldiers aboard the Graystone? It was clear to him now that Osborne and Gant had been working together all this time, but how much conjuring had Gant done? How much had he been capable of doing? Rickman might have learned of Osborne’s escape from Castle William today, but Ethan guessed that the thief had made his way back to Boston two days ago.

  Too many questions still remained. And right now, there was nothing Ethan could do to answer any of them.

  It occurred to him that he still had two leaves of mullein in the pouch in his pocket. Greenleaf hadn’t thought to search for those. But while two leaves might allow him to break one cuff, he couldn’t break all of them. And even if he could free himself of the chains, he still had to get through the door and past two armed regulars.

  He turned and stared out the window. The sky was darkening; it would be night before long, at which point the only light would come from the single torch flickering in the corridor just outside his cell. He remembered the nights in the Charleston gaol—that had been the worst time.

  No. He wasn’t going to give in to those thoughts.

  Rain still fell, driven by a cutting wind. Drops slapped against the side of the prison, chiming against the bars in that high window and splattering on the floor of his cell. Rain. Water.

  Videre per mea imagine ex aqua evocata, he chanted silently to himself. Sight, through my illusion, conjured from water. Power hummed in the prison walls, tickling Ethan’s back and legs. Uncle Reg appeared before him, gleaming like fire in the dim light of the cell. He stared at Ethan solemnly, with none of the mockery he sometimes showed upon finding Ethan in dire straits.

  The prison was no more than a stone’s throw from King’s Chapel. Ethan hoped that Pell was there. He closed his eyes and cast his awareness west to the chapel.

  Candles burned in sconces that lined the main aisle of the sanctuary, and the high windows glowed with the last light of this dreary day. Henry Caner stood at the pulpit, reading the great leather-bound Bible by the light of candles in another iron sconce. He didn’t look up, of course. Ethan’s illusion made not a sound. More to the point, Pell was nowhere to be seen.

  Ethan shifted his illusion downstairs to the crypts, which were also illuminated by candles. He could almost smell the spermaceti over the reek of his cell. A corpse lay on the stone table in the center of the corridor: an old woman, her white hair unbound and hanging loose nearly to the floor, her body looking frail and tiny beneath a white cloth. Pell sat on a wooden chair near the table, his breathing heavy and slow, his eyes closed, his head lolling to the side. A sleeping vigil. Under other circumstances, Ethan would have laughed at the sight.

  “Mister Pell,” he made his illusion say.

  The young minister jerked awake, sitting up so quickly that he nearly overturned his chair.

  “Ethan!” he said. “You startled me. I didn’t hear you—”

  He stopped, his mouth opening, his eyes growing wide. He shot to his feet, and this time the chair did topple over.

  “What are you?” he asked, breathless, reaching for the wooden cross that he wore around his neck.

  “Easy, Mister Pell,” Ethan said through the image of
himself. “This is a casting, an image that I’ve conjured so that I might speak with you. You have nothing to fear.”

  “How do I know that? How can I be sure that you’re not some demon sent from hell?”

  “You were a rascal as a youth. You once told me so yourself. And I once healed a bruise on your face, a bruise that I gave you when you surprised me outside my room. Do you remember that?”

  The tension appeared to drain from the minister’s body. “Yes, I remember,” he said, still looking troubled. “Why have you come to me this way?”

  “Because I can’t come to you in the flesh. I’m a prisoner in the city gaol, chained to a wall and gagged.”

  Pell looked aghast. “Why?”

  “Simon Gant is dead, killed by a conjuring if Sheriff Greenleaf is to be believed. A number of powerful men, including the sheriff, are convinced that I’m responsible.”

  “I assume you’re not,” Pell said, his tone dry.

  In his cell, Ethan smiled. “No.”

  “And you believe I can help you.”

  “I hope you can. I didn’t do this, Trevor. You know that I wouldn’t. But I’m not going to be able to convince Greenleaf or anyone else of that so long as they have me trussed up like a pig waiting to be slaughtered. If they don’t hang me as a killer, they’ll burn me for a witch. I need your help, and Mister Caner’s as well, I’m afraid.”

  Through the eyes of his illusion, Ethan saw the young minister frown. “I’ll do whatever I can to help you, of course. But I can’t speak for Mister Caner, except to say that he doesn’t like you very much.”

  Ethan started to say that even so, Caner wouldn’t want to see an innocent man hanged. But Caner knew for a fact that Ethan was a conjurer; so much for being innocent.

  “There’s a murderer loose in the streets of Boston,” he said to Pell. “And he’s every bit the conjurer I am. At least Cane—” He swallowed. “Mister Caner, knows me, and he knows that you trust me. That should count for something.”