by Ginn Hale
Then he saw Beadle. The picture had cropped off half the mask he gripped in his long, dark hands, but Jack clearly remembered the graceful planes of polished white bone and Beadle staring out from behind them. Here in flat print, his face laid bare and frozen in one moment, Beadle didn’t look quite as Jack remembered. He appeared thinner and more angry.
No doubt, Beadle had resented exposing his real face for the photographer. Likely he would rather have kept his mask down and posed as anyone else in the poster—or everyone else. In fact he would’ve had a laugh doing that. Turning himself broad boned and hirsute as Haddad and then melting into Amelia’s delicate features, Beadle had always been his happiest when fooling everyone around him with his impersonations.
There’d even been days when he’d been a better Jack Swift than Jack had managed.
Beside him, Finch picked up a worn matchbook and lit several amber lumps of copal. Blue, perfumed smoke rose from the incense burners, curling and twisting in ghostly ribbons. Jack rubbed at his eyes, like the smoke could be blamed for making them go glassy and red.
“I’m sorry.” Finch’s quiet, low voice broke into Jack’s melancholy reverie.
“What the hell for?” Jack snapped.
Finch didn’t say anything, just looked him in the face. Then he handed the matchbook to Jack.
“Thanks,” Jack managed, feeling like an ass for letting his sorrow turn him pointlessly surly.
Jack set fire to another three studs of copal. The fragrant smoke drifted over his fingers but he didn’t hold it. Instead, he released the smoke to rise up into the lazy blades of a ceiling fan.
Then, following Finch up the rung ladder, Jack made his own ascent.
Chapter Six
He supposed that it reflected something unseemly about him that he found the clean comfort of Finch’s flat strange.
Dirty dishes, empty beer bottles and a trashcan overflowing with the remains of cheap dinners wouldn’t have taken him aback. The tidy square sofa-bed, neat bookshelves, and four wooden chairs gathered around a simple dining table, however, surprised him.
Ugly memories had turned his expectations dank and sour, he realized. Probably because of that damn poster.
With Rachael and Beadle so present in his mind, he’d only been prepared for filthy floors, moldering walls and mattresses blanketed in wads of stiff, blood-soaked bandages. A funk of sweat, vomit, and spunk wouldn’t have alarmed him any more than stockpiles of porn, bones, and guns.
But that was a past that Finch didn’t inhabit. Instead this place smelled like fresh laundry. It felt warm and unguarded. Jack glanced over the framed photographs hanging on the far wall. A smiling couple posed with a slim boy hugged between them. A large family grouped around a holiday dinner table dressed in their modest best. In another two tin frames, a glossy black mastiff flopped across a grinning boy’s lap. Something in the boy’s smile made Jack feel certain that he was looking at Finch as a youth.
Jack wanted to move nearer and study those happy faces more closely, but resisted. That was a world that didn’t belong to him.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Finch said. “Linda will probably send up the beer in a few minutes.”
While Finch disarmed and locked his machine gun away in its rack, Jack took in the straight line of paperback spines on the nearest bookshelf: history, philosophy and poetry. Odd reading for anyone born to the Bone Ledge. Odd for most of them to read, at all.
Then Jack noticed the neat stack of political flyers on the table. Finch lay his coat across the back of one of the four chairs and offered Jack another of his easy smiles.
“The toilet’s through that door and if you pull back the drapes there’s a fire balcony, if you want some fresh air.”
Jack nodded and absently pulled a cigarette from the pack in his pocket.
“Let me get the ashtray,” Finch offered and then turned into the small nook that served as his kitchen. A toaster stood beside the sink but there was no sign of either an icebox or a stove.
Jack picked up one of the flyers while Finch brought a tin ashtray from his cupboard.
“New Progressive Party?” Jack asked.
Finch grinned like Jack had mentioned his favorite singer and set the ashtray down on the table.
“Support has been slow growing but this year we’ll likely win a majority in the Ministry of Justice and in the Ministry of Health.” Finch swung down into one of his straight-backed chairs and stretched his legs out beneath the table. “That would be something, wouldn’t it? Decriminalization of consensual crimes and financial programs for the low ledges.”
Jack nodded though Finch’s words didn’t quite seem real to him. It had taken seven years of blood and murder to pull the Tyrant from his throne. After that, did anyone believe that the fat tics who had seized the ministries after his demise would relinquish their power when threatened by mere votes? What force did people imagine their political posters and ballots actually possessed? Who fought ministers and wizards with mere scraps of paper and actually expected to win anything?
“We took a significant percentage of positions across all the ministries in the last major vote.”
Jack frowned. He couldn’t remember if he’d bothered to weigh in the last time the polls had opened. Though he distinctly recalled getting booted out six years back, when he’d shown up too filthy and foul-mouthed for the liking of the prim volunteers running the place.
“It’s going to happen,” Finch said and he sounded absolutely certain. “You made it possible, Jack. We aren’t ruled by a Tyrant anymore. Our leaders are answerable for their actions. Common people have a vote and we’re going to use it to make things better for all of us.” Taking in his handsome confidence, two very different thoughts occurred to Jack. First, he hoped that somehow Finch could be right, because it would be an amazing and beautiful thing if justice and equality could be more than empty words splashed across propaganda posters. Second, Finch was nothing like Beadle, despite a slight similarity to their eyes and jawline.
He wasn’t anything like any of them had been back in the revolution. If anything Finch resembled one of those film incarnations, who truly believed that a better world was possible and worth the struggle. Idealists like that only survived in fiction. If Peter discovered that Finch had helped him—even this much—he’d gut Finch and let him die slow in a dank cell.
Jack dropped his cigarettes back into his coat pocket.
“I just came for the gun,” Jack said firmly.
“Right. Of course.” Finch sounded a little disappointed but immediately pointed to a tin box on one of his shelves. “It’s there.”
Jack set the flyer back down on Finch’s table and went to the shelf. The tin box felt hot as he picked it up and when he opened it, that familiar choking stench rose up from the sleek, pearly body of the gun.
Finch made a sour face and bounded up from his seat to draw back his pale green drapes and throw open the door to the fire balcony.
Jack carried the tin box out, like he was removing the decomposing carcass of a rat. The late afternoon breezes swept away the worst of the stink, but couldn’t clear it all. The odor rose in waves.
“I can’t help but think that you might not have to shoot anyone with the thing to overwhelm them,” Finch commented.
Jack laughed and then coughed on the foul air.
“Has it gotten worse? Or was it always so…strong?” Finch asked.
“Hard to say. It’s been a while, but it does seem remarkably pungent, even for what I remember.”
In fact, Jack had expected that with Beadle’s death the gun would have diminished to a shade of what it had been. He’d seen it happen before, spell-bound bone thinned to a frail lattice, steel turned translucent and brittle as glass. The Tyrant’s spells had all dissipated within two years of his death. Even the blazing horrors of the Fireguard dulled to char and dust eventually.
But the ivory gun appeared as solid and polished as the day Beadle had made it. The
red scrimshaw spider still crouched just below the hammer looking bright as a drop of blood. The fine lines of its web decorated the grip like a veil of lace. Small skulls grinned over each of the chambers of the cylinder and a delicate script curled down the barrel proclaiming, you’re already dead, Fucker.
The words echoed a quote from one of the pulp novels that Beadle had loved.
He was already dead on the inside. I just drove in the bullet hole to drain the corpse.
Jack had never bothered to read the book. He’d never liked stories about lovers murdering each other. But he wondered now if he should have.
Even from within the tin box, the gun felt heavy and warm. The sickly fumes coiled up around him like a shroud of revulsion and guilt. If the stench hadn’t grown stronger it had certainly become more grasping and corrupt.
Maybe there was something about Beadle’s Way—the fact that he’d stolen the bone-craft from another Wizard—that had imbued the ivory gun with greater permanence.
Another uneasy thought skittered through Jack’s mind. He remembered Rachael’s cold, assessing gaze moving over him. She’d sent him to retrieve the gun for a reason and she’d known it would still be strong and deadly.
A sick feeling churned up from the pit of his stomach. He wasn’t sure if it was his suspicions or the reek of the gun getting to him. He closed the tin box and set it down on the iron rungs of the balcony floor.
“Something wrong?” Finch asked.
“Plenty,” Jack replied. “I’m spoiled for choices.”
Finch smiled at that and nodded. He leaned on the railing and looked out across the clutter of old brick buildings and fire escapes. Gold light from the sinking sun skimmed low across the ledge, casting shadows nearly as long and blue as the sky.
Then three black security choppers swept up from the ledge below and roared overhead. For a moment Jack’s heart pounded with the heavy thuds of their whirling blades. Finch shifted, stepping smoothly between the choppers and Jack. One of the black machines dipped and Finch offered the men inside a relaxed wave. The gunner waved back and then the chopper whirred away. The other two followed.
“Friends of yours, I take it?” Jack asked.
“Friends of yours, as well,” Finch replied. He looked Jack in the face with that same calm expression he’d given him at the shrine. “You aren’t alone in this, you know. There are a lot of us who want to bring the Minister to justice. We just haven’t had the means before—”
“Well, I’m a hell of a means, that’s for damn sure.” The words came out more bitter than Jack meant them to. He was thinking of Rachael, using him to kill herself. Using him even now that she was dead.
“No,” Finch cut through Jack’s anxious thoughts. “I meant a legal means.”
“Legal…” Jack glanced at the tin where the ivory gun lay. What could possibly be legal about breaking into Peter’s home and blowing his brains out?
“When Secretary Keys died we realized that Minister Tyber would take advantage of her weakened spells to break into her records and destroy the evidence she’d gathered against him.” Finch spoke quietly but with a calm certainty. “One of the Secretary’s loyalists realized that as well. She took everything she could carry and turned it over to our friends in the Ministry of Justice.”
“To press charges, you mean?” Jack struggled to imagine that going well. Certainly wouldn’t for the arresting officers. He couldn’t see any wizard who’d fought in the revolution meekly accepting cuffs and shuffling into a holding cell. No, there would be blood, bullets and in the end a lot of smoldering bodies.
“That flyby overhead was the signal that they found what they need to lay charges,” Finch said. The long gold light lent radiance to his broad smile. He struck Jack as so handsome, good-hearted and doomed that it made him a little sick.
Jack pulled a cigarette free from his pack and quickly lit it. He drew in a deep hot breath of smoke then exhaled and pulled the gray haze down to ring his fingers.
Finch watched him expectantly.
“So, you and your friends think that the minister is just going to roll over and let you lock him up, do you?” Jack asked.
“No. We know Minister Tyber won’t surrender peaceably.” Finch shook his head. “But there are ways to break a wizard’s power, aren’t there? A deputized wizard could come along on the arrest—”
“Fuck no!” Jack cut him off.
“Why not?” Finch didn’t raise his voice. He just asked and his calm cooled Jack’s outrage, though it certainly didn’t change his mind.
“Because going against him right up front would be suicide. He’d see you coming miles away and be ready.”
“But if you broke his power first—“
“It’s not that easy.” Jack dragged in another burning column of smoke. Bitterness filled his lungs and breath. “Not only would I need to catch him off-guard. I’d have to have something of his—something so personal that it gave me a means to tap directly into his Way. Even then I’d still have to ring him, to hold him where I wanted. That’s hard magic and he’d be kicking the life out of me while I tried to build it.”
“But you killed the Tyrant in his own palace.” The admiration in Finch’s voice and gaze was flattering. It disturbed Jack to notice how much he liked that. Jack clenched his hand around the hard edges of the tin box, feeling it bite.
“Yeah, I killed him. Took him by surprise in the dark and murdered him before he knew I was there.” Agitated sparks flickered between Jack’s fingers.
He hated the memory of that bloody fucking night. The charred remains of the two young boys who’d burned to death in the Tyrant’s bed with him, flared through Jack’s memory. He hadn’t known they were there—hadn’t known they were chained and couldn’t escape the fury of lightning and fire that Jack unleashed into the dark chamber.
Jack scowled at the scars marring his hand.
“If I’d broken in there and tried fucking around encircling and breaking the Tyrant, it wouldn’t have just been me who died. That fight would have torn down the entire palace on top of us. Even then I wouldn’t have likely won.”
Finch frowned deeply but didn’t argue.
“It’s the difference between shooting a helicopter down and trying to catch one with your bare hands,” Jack said. He didn’t want to feel guilty for refusing. Finch had to see reason in this, didn’t he?
“I understand,” Finch told him, but he didn’t meet Jack’s eyes. Instead he turned and gazed out to the far mountain peaks where the sinking sun glowed gold-red through the distant valleys. “I’m not going to ask you to do something that could get you killed…. You’ve already done more than anyone had a right to expect of you.”
Finch turned back to him, his expression determined. The wind tossed a strand of his hair into his eyes and he shoved it back in annoyance.
“But I will ask that you let us try to do this legally before you resort to assassination. Because what’s the point of murdering a man for unlawfully killing other people? As a society we have to find better ways of enforcing our laws. Common folk or wizards, there have to be fair trials. We can’t just keep resorting to murder—”
A bell jangled from inside the flat.
Finch sighed heavily and then just shook his head as if even he wasn’t quite sure why he bothered to talk about these things anymore.
“That will be Linda with the beer.” Finch pulled a smile that looked too hard and proud. Somehow it seemed to suit him though. He strode past Jack back into the flat.
“You drink Brass Monkey, don’t you?” Finch called.
Nine years back Jack hadn’t done much of anything else, but he’d eased off since then.
“It’s a favorite but I’m not picky.” Jack followed him, with the tin box tucked under his arm and rings of smoke swirling around his fingers. He placed the tin on the bookshelf where he’d found it and then seated himself at the table.
In the kitchen, Finch pulled open a cupboard to expose the interior
of a dumbwaiter. He withdrew two yellow bottles, labeled with the red-eyed monkey that had stared Jack down on so many drunken occasions. Finch placed the bottles on the table and followed that with a huge platter of pigeon rice and fried onions. Fragrant spices filled the kitchen and all at once Jack felt how little he’d eaten in the last week. He just hadn’t had it in him to care.
Now he was ravenous.
Finch brought bowls and silverware to the table and then, to Jack’s surprise, also set down two spotless beer glasses. White cloth napkins followed. Jack eyed the napkins and glasses.
How did anyone born to the Bone Ledge develop a habit of decanting beer into glasses, much less flashing cloth napkins?
“I feel like we’re going to be saying our prayers over the feed in a minute,” Jack commented.
Finch glanced to him and following his gaze to the napkin, laughed.
“I’m not putting on too fine of airs, am I?” Finch asked. He sat down across from Jack and poured Jack’s beer and then his own.
“No,” Jack replied. “I’m just not used to anyone so well mannered being born to the Bone Ledge.”
Finch looked a little embarrassed. He served Jack two heaps of the steaming pigeon rice and then spooned some onto his own plate, but he didn’t eat.
“I was born there but my father landed a job when I was two and our whole family moved up.”
“Yeah?” Jack wetted his mouth with a slug of the mellow beer. Then he tucked into the rice. It tasted spicy and warming. “Up where?”
Finch picked up his fork and turned it over in his hand.
“Both my parents and my uncle were good with animals…” Finch stalled, taking a long drink of his own beer. “The family needed money and the palace kennels paid better than anywhere else.”
“They took the Tyrant’s coin?” Even as he spoke Jack realized he was an ass for asking. There’d been thousands of people who’d served the Tyrant. From maids, cooks and gardeners to entertainers and investment brokers. Even in the last days, the Tyrant had controlled entire economies. Not everyone taking his coin had supported his reign. They’d just needed money to survive and support their families.
