He moved to stand over Tom Wesel and stared him fiercely in the eye. “And mark me, here. If any of you bastards touches these kids, I will have it out from you in blood. Folk won’t even remember what I did to Reynard ’cause they’ll be so horrified at what I’ve done to you.”
Wesel’s eyes widened in terror, and he nodded eagerly. Ashes could feel the fear pouring off him in waves.
“Good, then,” Ashes said. He straightened. “The rest of you, let’s go talk to Mr.—”
The door to Ragged House opened. Light poured out from it, blocked only by Carapace’s tall, bulky shadow. The butler took one step forward, surveyed the Motleys, and then stood aside. Mr. Ragged followed.
“Mr. Smoke, I take it,” the Beggar Lord said. He did not sound frightened. He didn’t even sound wary.
His mistake, Ashes thought.
“That’s right,” he said. “Mr. Smoke and the Motleys, to be precise. Seems you’ve got a problem with your doormen.” Ashes gestured brazenly to the Broken Boys.
Ragged stepped down off the porch. He looked out at the small army Ashes had gathered. “They weren’t doormen,” Ragged said, sounding mildly annoyed.
“You going to come out, then?” Ashes demanded. “Or am I going to have to bust down your little gate and drag you away?”
“By all means, use the gate,” Ragged said. “It’s not locked. Carapace, you didn’t lock it, did you?”
It was at this point that Ashes realized he should be frightened.
Ragged’s attitude did not match that of a man with a mob on his doorstep. He was too calm, too disinterested. He barely sounded annoyed.
Ashes looked at the children around him. His instincts were screeching at him that this had to be a trap of some kind. The children wouldn’t turn back now, though, not when victory was so close. What could Ragged do, anyway? It was only him and Carapace in that house, just like always; they’d had no warning that Mr. Smoke was coming. Maybe it was a bluff?
Don’t be daft! everything in him screamed. Get them out of here.
He turned to the children. “Listen,” he said, “we ought to—”
“Let’s get him!” Jasin shouted, yanking the gate open. The children cheered behind her, and they flowed in a swift tide into Ragged’s courtyard. Ashes found himself being pushed forward against his will, but there was no way to stop them now. Whatever gambit Ragged had, Ashes would have to play it out.
“All right!” He held out his hands, trying to take command back. “Nobody touch him!”
The children bristled at this, but Mr. Smoke’s reputation was powerful enough to drag them to a stop. They formed up in a loose semicircle around Ragged, with Ashes at the center. The Beggar Lord only looked bored, his hands clasped neatly behind his back. Carapace, motionless on the porch, matched his master’s expression.
Ragged lifted an eyebrow. “Something wrong, Mr. Smoke? You are here to take me by force, are you not?”
“If you don’t come willingly.” Ashes tried to sound threatening and powerful, but he couldn’t quite manage it.
“Oh, fear not,” Ragged said with a faint grin. “I will not be doing that.”
“Then this is going to get ugly.”
“I expect it might.” Ragged’s faint grin got a little wider. “Are we going to begin, then?”
This was all wrong. It wasn’t how he’d expected things to go. Ragged should be frightened, shouldn’t he? Why was he not afraid?
“Take him,” Ashes commanded, and then felt the air shift.
The little ones felt it first; you could tell because they started wailing, as if they’d been badly burned. It took the older ones only a moment more: Ashes heard Slippery Rafe’s knees strike the ground beside him. Jasin fell to the ground in a heap, unconscious.
It seemed to strike Ashes last. A cloud seemed to wrap around his mind, dark and red. His vision narrowed, his breath came short. He stood under open air, and that was far, far, far too small, he was trapped in a tunnel and there were monsters down here—
He looked at Mr. Ragged, and felt an overwhelming need to beg for mercy.
“That’s better,” the Beggar Lord said placidly. “Everyone in the appropriate positions. It would seem that I am not so vulnerable as you think, am I, Mr. Smoke?”
Ashes’s throat constricted. The air was too heavy, pressing in on him from all sides. His eyes stung, and tears streamed down his cheeks. He could feel sweat tingling on his forehead and his palms.
“What’ve you . . . What’ve you done?”
“I think you ought to take your constructs off, Mr. Smoke,” Ragged suggested. “Else I will have to kill you.”
My face—
He’ll know my face—
He’s going to kill me—
Ashes turned and ran. The children were packed together tightly in the small space, but he had found something even more frightening than being confined, and it was standing right behind him.
“Damn,” he heard Ragged say. “Carapace, fetch him.”
Ashes pushed through the press of the Motleys to see his guards standing over the Broken Boys. The guns were all on the ground. The young Motleys looked stricken and pale, dead eyes staring forward. They turned to see Ashes as he burst, frenzied, through the gate. He heard Carapace’s relentless footsteps behind him.
“Time to go,” said a soft voice in his ear. A column of blackest smoke burst into existence around him; the monster had caught up. He screamed.
“That won’t do, either.”
Something struck the back of his head, and the world melted into black.
ASHES woke in a room that smelled sharp and clean and empty. The smell burned, forced its way up his nostrils and rooted around in there, setting fires on the edges of his brain . . .
He had not died, then.
He sat up. The world wanted to spin, but he was an Artificer’s apprentice. He focused, and the spinning stopped. What had happened?
He’d been shot. He’d gathered up an army to storm Ragged House. They had dispatched the Broken Boys. They’d taken the guns. Mr. Ragged had come out . . .
And then horror. Fright like he had never felt before. A certainty that he was going to die, be crushed to death or eaten or consumed entirely, body and soul and mind, by the dark. Ragged’s face was carved inside his brain, and even remembering what had happened made him want to vomit.
He heard footsteps. He knew it was Jack before the Artificer even entered the room.
“Oh,” Jack said as he came around the corner. “You’re awake.”
“How long’ve I been out?”
“A pair of days,” Jack said tonelessly. “I doubt I’ve ever seen you so lazy.”
Two days?! “Blimey!” Ashes said. Two days without seeing or hearing from Ashes except their last argument—what would Blimey think? What would he have done? “Oh, bugger bugger bugger.”
“Missed teatime with the Queens?” Jack asked drily.
“I need to leave.” Ashes swung his legs off the table and was pleased that both landed adroitly; Jack hadn’t taken him to a witch. That was good. He would need to get back to Burroughside quickly. “What time is it? Bugger, I can’t even— Where’s my cloak?”
“In the sitting room.” Jack’s voice was patient and calm, and something about it made Ashes pause.
He looked at the Weaver. “How the hell’d I get here?”
Jack smiled, but there was pain in it. “Got there at last.”
“Jack, what’s going on? I remember— How’ve I been asleep for two days?”
“Exhausted your magic,” Jack said. “Your body, too. You’re still quite young to be doing so much Artifice so quickly.”
Ashes peered at him. “You followed me?”
Jack nodded. “I’ve been keeping tabs for a little while.”
“Where d’you get off doing that?”
The Weaver shrugged. “Try not to sound quite so indignant, boy. It saved your damn life. As for where I get off, it’s likely the same pl
ace you get off using my Anchors and my aether to enact your little vendetta.” His gaze bored into Ashes, unrelenting.
The boy froze. “I dunno what you’re talking about,” he said, but much too fast.
“Don’t you,” Jack said tonelessly. “Well, that’s very interesting, because it would mean that someone else has been nicking my materials for some nefarious purpose. I was really hoping it was you. Better the petty thief you know than the petty thief you don’t, and all that.”
“I . . .” Ashes bit his cheek. “Look, Jack, you don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand, Ashes?” Jack asked. His voice had the deceptive calm of a lake in the winter, layered in ice as thin and frail as paper.
“I was going to pay you back.”
“Were you indeed.” Not a question. There was irony twined in the words.
“And I needed them,” Ashes said. “For something important.”
“I would never doubt that.” The Weaver gave him a flat stare.
Ashes felt his stomach twist. “Jack, look, I—”
“It seems that the polite thing,” Jack mused, “when you have something important to do, and you need someone else’s resources to do it, is to ask that person if you can borrow them.”
“I couldn’t ask you,” Ashes pleaded. “You’d have said no in a heartbeat!”
“Then why the bloody buggery have you been robbing me, lad?” Jack said, the mask breaking for just a moment. His eyes went perilously bright, and Ashes noticed the light in the room flicker. His heart juddered. Jack was so angry he was approaching calm from the other way round.
“It was important—”
“So you’ve mentioned!” Jack snapped. “It was important, was it, to get all those homeless children to believe you were some kind of magic man? It was important to muck around with the governor of Burroughside? It was important to sneak around, night after night, using my Anchors and my aether and my training, so you could—what, get revenge? So you could establish who could piss further between you and that bastard?”
“It’s not like that!” Ashes said, nearly shouting.
“Running around in that cloak, no less!” Jack threw up his hands. “You’ve no idea, do you, how worried Juliana would be if she knew what you were doing?”
“That’s none of her business!”
“The ruddy hell it’s not her business!” Jack leveled a finger at him dangerously. “You’ve eaten food from our table. You’ve shared our secrets, our dangers, our time together. We’ve sewn you up and let you sleep under our roof. She cares about you, even if you won’t acknowledge that.”
“I don’t need someone to care—”
“Oh, of course you don’t,” Jack interrupted, and the lights flickered again. “Since you’re so bloody cautious, aren’t you? Running about in the dead of night, getting shot at from every direction.” Jack rubbed his forehead. “I get the exhausting sense that we’ve had this conversation before, lad, haven’t we? Wherein I tell you that it’s better to be invisible until you’re holding all the cards you need? Or have I only dreamed those?”
“You don’t understand, Jack,” Ashes said again.
“Enlighten me, then, little liar,” Jack said softly. “Test my understanding.”
Ashes opened his mouth, and snapped it shut. He tried again to speak, and failed.
“I’m listening,” Jack said. His voice was just above a whisper.
“He’s evil, Jack,” Ashes said. “You don’t know, you’ve never had to live under something like that.” He searched for words. How could Jack not understand this? Ragged was a stain on the world, he needed to be removed . . . “He’s merciless and cruel and vile, and he’s not scared of anything, Jack. And it’s not right that someone that awful can do whatever he wants, it’s not fair.” Bright spots of pain lit up in his palms, where his fingernails dug into his skin. “No one in Burroughside can do anything about it. They’re too scared. But me . . .” He felt something shift in his chest; the light around him flickered, just a little. “I’ve got magic in me. What’s the use of having it if all I ever do is make pretty faces for rich folks?” His jaw locked. “Every time Saintly knifes somebody. Every time Ragged buggers some kid. That’s on me, if I could do something, and I just stand by.”
Jack’s eyes fell to his lap, but he did not speak.
“I’ve stood by before,” Ashes said, “’cause I was scared. Mari died ’cause of that. Iames died ’cause of that.” He swallowed. “I won’t do it again.”
The Artificer’s silence stretched on. Ashes chewed his tongue, and finally said, “I shouldn’t’ve stolen your Anchors—”
“You’re damn right you shouldn’t have stolen my Anchors,” Jack said in biting tones. “Or my aether. My company functions on trust, Ashes!”
“Oh, does it?” Ashes said. “I wouldn’t’ve known, really. You couldn’t bother to trust me with the actual plan when we were robbing Edgecombe.”
“And the evidence certainly seems to back me up, doesn’t it?” Jack gave him a hard stare. “I was right not to trust you. You’ve been picking my pocket since we first met.”
“I was going to pay you back!”
“Stop lying to me, Ashes!” The light around him warped violently, making it look as if the room were shaking. “No lies here. Keep your secrets if they’re precious—I won’t hold that against you. But don’t you dare lie to me. I took you in. I taught you my craft. You saved my life. Don’t sully that.”
Ashes realized his fists were shaking. He gripped the edge of the table. “Fine, then. I needed the Anchors. I needed the aether. I figured I’d find a way to pay you back eventually. But I also figured that if you never noticed, then it couldn’t be that important to you.”
Jack’s look was heavy. “You couldn’t think of any other reason, lad?”
Ashes ignored the question. “I don’t have time to argue about it with you just now. There’s things I got to do.” Like talk to Blimey, he thought. And find out— Oh, Faces, what did Ragged do to the Motleys? “So if you’re gonna throw me out, fine. Do it. Don’t threaten about it. Play me straight. No lies between the liars, right?”
Jack set his jaw. “I need to think about that, lad. I’d hate to do something stupid because I’m mad at you.”
“Fine,” Ashes said. “Then I’ve got to go. Let me know when you’ve got something figured.”
Jack stepped in front of him, blocking his path. The man met his eyes. “I’m disappointed in you, lad,” Jack said. “In many ways. Angry, too. But I’ll tell you something.” He grinned weakly. “I’m appalled that you’re waging this little war of yours for free.” The Artificer shrugged. “If Ragged’s half the dirty bastard you seem to think he is, he must have wealthy enemies somewhere. You want my advice? Get yourself an investor, boy.”
Ashes stepped out of the Rehl Company into a dark thick enough to wear for a winter coat. He could hardly believe it wasn’t only a few hours ago that he’d set out to drag Ragged away from his precious fort.
His head spun as he hurried toward Burroughside. Everything had gone wrong somehow, hadn’t it? When he’d taken those first phials of aether, he hadn’t cared much if Jack found out. He was just another Denizen, after all, albeit one who’d done him a good turn. Back then, the Artificer had been just . . . a means, really. Someone who could guide Ashes from being a Burroughside gutter-rat to another version of himself, one with a future, one with a way out. Ashes hadn’t worried himself over what Jack would think if he found out.
But now . . .
When had it shifted? When had he started caring what Jack thought of him? It was absurd. Faces’ sake, Jack was a Denizen. Ashes robbed people like him all the time. Robbing Denizens was how Ashes found food!
Yet Ashes’s belly felt shrunken. His neck was hot. He felt shamed. He’d let Jack down. Even now the Artificer was sitting in the shop, considering Ashes’s future. And Ashes cared what the man decided. He cared quite a lot. He hadn’t been part of a fam
ily in years. The Rehl Company had accepted him with hardly a question. He belonged there.
And, in the end, Jack hadn’t been the one doing the betraying.
Blood and bones, Ashes thought. This really was his fault, wasn’t it? Jack had trusted him—not entirely, not with everything, but who would expect that? He’d confessed things to Ashes that could’ve gotten him thrown in jail. He’d taught Ashes to use magic. He’d given him a future.
Damn.
It was strange, looking back. For the last few months, Ashes had been watching the Rehl Company, wondering—though not always consciously—if perhaps he could bring Blimey to them. If the two of them would be safe in Jack’s shop. If, maybe, they’d found a Denizen who wouldn’t throw them to the police. He’d wanted to know if they could be trusted. He shouldn’t have worried. It hadn’t mattered anyway.
It was his fault. He and Blimey could have stayed with the Rehl Company; of course they could have. If he’d been more willing to trust them, if he’d told Jack the truth from the very beginning . . .
And it was too late now, wasn’t it?
He stopped beneath a streetlamp and ran his hands beneath the light. He could feel the weight of it against his skin. In perhaps a year, he’d be strong enough to draw it out of thin air. If he wanted to change the lamppost’s iron-gray to a glossy gold, he could. That was within his power.
Jack’s doing. He wouldn’t have any of it if it weren’t for Jack.
Bugger.
Ashes turned back toward the shop.
CANDLESTICK Jack, who had not been born Jacob Rehl but preferred that fiction to the truth, checked the time and rubbed his eyes. Gods, he was tired. All the time now, he was tired. It hadn’t been that way when he was young.
The Facefaker's Game Page 33
