The Empire's Ghost

by Isabelle Steiger

  Tom sniffed. “There’s always just one thing with you, Halfen—’cept you come armed with ten of ’em at a time, and you reckon that means you can buy ’em cheap. This business don’t work that way.”

  Roger smiled. “All right, there’s just one thing today. But I can be reasonable; I know I’m always coming around to bother you, and you’re a busy man. There are bound to be things you don’t know, after all. So I’m prepared to give you this coin regardless, just for making an honest effort.” He tossed it up again, then caught it easily out of the air. “Thing is, this lovely’s got a twin, and they sure would hate to be parted. And I figure they’d be just as happy in your pocket as in mine, so…”

  There was the glint in Tom’s eyes, the reflection of silver that he’d been looking for. “Eh,” he said, and scratched his chin. “Eh, well, I could hear you out. I’ll hear you out.”

  “Delighted,” Roger said, “but I don’t need you to listen so much as look. Here.” He drew the parchment from his pocket and unfolded it on the table so Tom could see.

  Roger was a decent sketch, so it looked more or less the way the mark in the passage had; trouble was, that mark was clearly supposed to be a copy of something else, and he didn’t know how accurate the original artist had been. It wasn’t as if he remotely enjoyed asking Tom for help, but he wasn’t about to let pride get in the way of finding an answer, and he’d exhausted every idea he was able to come up with on his own. Tom did have a way with such things, and these days Roger could spare the coin.

  Tom blinked at the parchment, wrinkling up his nose. “Looks like some old lord’s sigil.”

  “Yes,” Roger said. “That’s what I thought too.”

  “Been no sigils since the end of the empire.”

  “Yes, I know that, Tom. Why don’t you tell me something I don’t know.”

  Tom grunted. “All right, all right, let me see what I’ve got.” He turned away from Roger to a trunk in the far corner, his thin, knobby hands sifting through its contents expertly.

  That was his one talent, or maybe it counted as two—he found ways to collect bits of information that slipped through everyone else’s fingers, and he could recall where he’d stashed them with surprising accuracy. Roger would’ve given much to learn how Tom had amassed his hoard, but he supposed a man could have only so many talents at once.

  Tom came up for air, a tattered old piece of parchment in one fist, and frowned. “Nope, that’s two branches.… Hold a tick.” He descended back into the mess, but before long he was out again, and this time he let out a rusty giggle. “Ah, here it is. You owe me two silvers, Halfen.”

  “Let’s see,” Roger said, leaning forward as Tom tugged an entire book free of the clutter. Or no, it wasn’t an entire book—it was a fragmentary ruin of one, the spine torn down the middle and pages ripped out of the surviving half in chunks. “Well, it doesn’t … er. What is it?”

  “Heraldry,” Tom said, cracking the book open—well, more open. “I’m sure I saw that damned branch in here somewhere, I just have to find it.”

  Roger watched him flip the pages, barely glancing at the centuries of history he was passing by, all the houses that had scrabbled for glory and fought one another and risen up from nothing and collapsed into dust. That was the end of every story in the capital: and then it fell, never to rise again. There were no more knights, and men who called themselves lords now had only names, where once there had been all this color, all this intricacy. The famous ones he knew, the ones from the tales, like Eglantine’s red-green hummingbird and the melancholy moon of House Valerian; he did not see the single white feather of House Darrow, but it flickered behind his eyes anyway. When Tom came to a bloody sword, Roger made him stop, peering curiously at the name written there. “Wait, House Radcliffe? As in the House Radcliffe?”

  “Don’t know that there was ever more than one,” Tom muttered. “The Palindors always claimed they were once Radcliffes, but they don’t count.”

  The gods only knew where he’d learned that. “What about Trevelyan? Is Trevelyan in there?”

  “Ought to be.” He flicked through a dozen more pages and suddenly stopped; Roger whistled, staring at the page. House Trevelyan’s sigil was a single golden branch on a field of green—brighter colors than in Roger’s sketch, perhaps, or than had been etched onto a dusty stone wall, but the design was the same.

  Tom peered from the book to the parchment and back again, stringing his words together slowly. “Say, Halfen, where’d you find that mark in the first place, anyway?”

  Roger grinned. “That wasn’t part of the deal, was it?”

  “Maybe not, but I sure as hell remember what was.” He held out his hand. “I’ll take both, as promised, and thanks much for your business.”

  “As promised,” Roger agreed, reaching for the second coin. He didn’t even feel particularly bad about handing them over, despite Tom’s smug expression.

  Tom bit both coins, and appeared satisfied with them (as well he might be—they were perfectly genuine). “Do you want the page?” he asked, in a surprising show of generosity.

  Roger looked down at it, and laughed. “No, no, I don’t need any proof. I just wanted to know what it was for … personal reasons. And now I do.” He folded the parchment and stood up to go, tossing one last glance over his shoulder. “Pleasure as always, Tom. I’ll call on you again, I’m sure.”

  “Mmph,” Tom replied, still focused on the coins.

  It had been all Roger could do inside not to allow his face to give him away; it was all he could do outside not to run through the streets with a whoop. He felt the old elation rise in him, the anxious joy of knowing a secret that was just too good to keep to yourself. He wanted to yell it from the rooftops.

  Instead he returned to the Dragon’s Head, trusting the enforced isolation to keep him from blurting it out. He might’ve told Seth—easily impressed and faultlessly trustworthy, the boy was his favorite audience. He might’ve told Morgan, too; she wouldn’t have cared, but she’d at least have pretended to listen, and she wouldn’t have told anyone. He might even have told Braddock; he wouldn’t have listened or cared, but he would’ve provided an excuse for Roger to say something about it. But none of them were here. (Here or not, Lucius and Deinol were never any good, Deinol because he was the biggest blabbermouth Roger knew, and Lucius because he always eventually told everything to Deinol.) And if this secret was too good to keep to himself, it was too good twice over to let just anyone have a piece of it.

  The lack of an audience was torturous, but Roger was forced to endure. Hell, he’d even have told Lucius’s little dragon statue about it, just for the pleasure of saying the words aloud. Instead he slumped into a barstool, stretching his hands out along the top of the bar. “Friend,” he murmured to the darkness, “be it known that today I, Roger Halfen, have single-handedly uncovered the truth behind one of our land’s greatest mysteries—well, all right, I guess Morgan did help a little. She … found the passage and whatnot. And Braddock was there too. But I mostly single-handedly uncovered the truth behind one of our—nay, the world’s greatest mysteries. I have trod in the footsteps of Radcliffe and Trevelyan—double-crossers both, and of a height to which we poor swindlers can only aspire. I have trod in their footsteps, and I know their story. And I am the only one who knows it.”

  The words sent a pleasant little shiver down his spine, and he realized that at some point during the speech he’d sat up again, leaning forward over the bar. He laughed at himself, relaxing again and propping his chin against his hand.

  Radcliffe and Trevelyan, the two treasonous councilors, had been jailed by Vespasian Darrow in the last days of the empire. They had escaped together, and had gone on to help lead one of the most impressive military offensives in recorded history. Their battles were well documented; what had never been clear was how they had managed to escape in the first place. People had been known to escape from the Citadel before, of course, though such occurrences were not com
mon in the days of Elesthene. But to escape not just the dungeons but also the city, at a time when it was at its most closely guarded … no one had been able to figure it out.

  But the marks on the tunnel walls were clear. Trevelyan had used them to mark which passages he and Radcliffe had tried—and they led to the first pathway Morgan and Braddock had used, the one that ended outside the city walls.

  Roger helped himself to a tankard of ale, laughing once more. Before he drank, he raised it in a toast, holding it aloft in the darkness of the room.

  “Not to worry, milords,” he said, taking a hearty swig. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  * * *

  When the rich folk were tucked up in their manses in Goldhalls, telling their little ones stories of the thieves and gutter-dwellers that crawled about them like so many rats, they said the Night Market was a dark and dangerous place, buzzing with treachery and corruption, where any commodity on earth could be bought and sold, no matter its nature. The truth, of course, was that no one liked the notion that everything was for sale more than the rich themselves, and that if such a site of commerce had existed, its merchants would hardly set it up at a time and place known to all.

  It was a market for the strange, certainly, so perhaps it was fitting that it had sprung up in a strange place. Everyone knew Draven’s Square, but nobody knew who Draven actually was, though that didn’t stop them from making up stories. Some said he was a hero who had held the square during a rebellion, others that he was a notorious brigand who had been hanged in it. Many claimed that he was actually Daven, one of the Daven Margraines, and that the name had been changed after the sixth Daven Margraine rebelled against the capital. But no one could say which of the five previous Davens might have given his name to the square, or what cause the marquis of Esthrades might have had for lingering in such a place to begin with.

  Marceline had asked Roger about it, once, because that was exactly the kind of thing Roger cared to know and Tom didn’t. But he had only sulked. “Spent months on that one when I was a boy, monkey, and never turned up so much as a whisper. Even Gran couldn’t help me—if she ever had the memory, it must’ve gotten lost. Don’t remind me of my failures.”

  The square was a rough circle, and easy to pass through by day. But after dark it quickly became clogged with stall upon stall, crammed close together in concentric rings. Some merchants hawked their wares to the crowd, but most preferred to let an air of mystery settle over whatever they had to sell, some strange trinket looming half in shadow in the corner of a stall or glinting vaguely in the torchlight.

  What did the Night Market sell? Things you couldn’t get anywhere else—or so its merchants would have you believe. Tom liked to say that was because if you tried to sell them anywhere else, no one would buy them, and Marceline didn’t doubt that was true of more than a few stalls. But even Tom himself was known to browse his way through the Night Market every turn of the moon or so, and he hated to waste his time, let alone his coin.

  Marceline ducked around a stack of supposed spell books, their covers marked with strange letters she couldn’t read, and circled behind a skinny man in a blacksmith’s apron who claimed to be selling a dagger of vardrath steel. A sweet-sharp tangle of scents waylaid her for a moment, and she lingered in the shadow of a stall while its owner showed a wandering couple an array of strange flowers and fruits. But she wasn’t here to buy, even if she could easily have turned up the coin for it in a crowd like this. Instead she pushed her way past the gawkers and toward one of the inner circles, looking, as she’d been told, for a dark-skinned merchant with a missing tooth and the ordinary number of fingers, selling an assortment of glass bottles filled with mysterious substances, powders and oils and liquids of all colors.

  When she finally found the man, Marceline peered at him through the torchlight, looking for the missing tooth. “Are you Peck?”

  “I’ve been called that.”

  “What do you sell here?”

  He smiled, and there it was. “Why come here if you don’t know?”

  “How do you expect to sell anything if you won’t answer a simple question?”

  “I never said I wouldn’t answer it.” He indicated the bottles with one sweeping motion. “They’re medicines—for any ailment you can think of, and many more you can’t. Does that interest you?”

  On a different evening, Marceline would’ve informed him that she highly doubted that, and probably would have proceeded to rattle off as many diseases as she could, trying to catch him out. But she didn’t have time for that tonight. “Do you know they call you Six-Fingered Peck? Or did you come up with that name yourself?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not of my design, but I don’t care who uses it.”

  “But you don’t have six fingers.”

  He smiled. “You’re a very strange child.”

  “I’m not a child,” Marceline said. “And I can guess why people call you that. It’s because you’re a thief.”

  “How little you know.” He brushed his thumb idly against the cork of one of his bottles. “The name is simple, but it befits a man who comes by knowledge from different sources—many fingers in many matters, as they say.”

  It was the kind of opening she’d been waiting for, and she doubted she’d get a better one. “I don’t doubt that’s true,” she said. “I’ve heard that you know more than you should about—”

  He waved a hand to cut her off. “I know more than nothing about many things, but more than I should? Never. I’m quite careful about that.”

  “Well, you weren’t careful enough.” Marceline folded her arms. “You know more than you ought—and more than most people do—about the resistance.”

  His expression didn’t change. “I certainly don’t know about that. Does such a thing even exist?”

  “You know it does,” Marceline said.

  “Perhaps you know it does, young lady, but if I were you, I’d keep that knowledge to myself. We can continue on in this fashion for as long as you like, but unless you wish to hear more about medicines, I will tell you nothing I have not already told you.”

  Marceline was unmoved. “I can change your mind.”

  His expression approximated surprise, but she couldn’t tell if it was genuine. “Can you?”

  “I can,” Marceline said, “or you wouldn’t still be talking to me—baiting me, even, if I’m not mistaken. How much coin do you want?”

  He smiled. “From the look of you, far more than you have.”

  “Maybe,” Marceline said, “but not more than I will have, in a handful of minutes, if that’s what you want.”

  His eyebrows lifted. “You claim more than a little skill, then. You’ll forgive an honest man for being … both cautious and skeptical, shall we say?”

  She rolled her eyes. “All right, how’s this: I’ll do what I do best, and when I’m done, you can decide for yourself how much of my spoils you want to earn. Honestly, of course.”

  Roger was a skilled pickpocket; Tom had been, in the past, but these days he mostly left that portion of his business to her. Every pickpocket needed to be quick and nimble, to be able to size up marks accurately and disappear at the first hint of danger. It took more than that to be brilliant. Tom was brilliant because he had a nose for gold like a wolf’s after blood, tempered with enough cowardice to keep his natural greed in check. Roger was brilliant because he was a born dissembler, a showman and tale-teller, diverting your attention in twenty different directions, and not a single one of them to his hand in your pocket. But Marceline was brilliant because she had, better than anyone she knew, perfected the art of not being noticed. No one could suspect her of any mischief when her very presence stirred them less than a shadow, and many a time her marks had helped her disappear by jostling her into the crowd, unaware they’d dislodged their purses into the bargain. It didn’t take her long to earn more coin than she was willing to give Peck, damn however much he asked for. At least she’d be taking something of value
back to Sheath with her tonight, even if it wasn’t what she’d sought.

  She was half surprised to find Peck still in his place when she returned, but that assured her beyond a doubt he was persuadable; he’d surely have bolted otherwise. “All right,” she said, laying one silver coin in the empty space between two bottles, “there’s a start.”

  He made no move to pick it up. “A meager one at that.” Marceline jingled the coins in her pocket, and he laughed. “How many of those are made of copper?”

  Marceline pulled out a fistful of coins and laid another piece of silver beside the first, and then another. Then she opened her hand and showed him how much she had left in her palm.

  She had learned Peck could control his face well, but she thought she saw a hint of true surprise at last. But then his face settled, and he smiled again. “It seems you have a talent.”

  “Aye, and you’re not the first to say so.” She closed her hand again, slipped the coins back into her pocket. “Well?”

  He sighed. “Well, I think you’re likely to be disappointed—” Marceline made to snatch the coins from in front of him, but he covered them with his hand, sparing her a forlornly reproving look. “I wasn’t finished. You’re likely to be disappointed, but I will tell you what I can.”

  “Then tell,” Marceline said.

  He leaned forward. “I was never anything so exalted as their comrade, but I knew one or two of them from … before their involvement, let’s say. My medicines, though you seem to have naught but scorn for them, have many uses, and I was happy to continue selling them to my old friends. If we gossiped to pass the time, who could blame us?”

  “So they came here regularly—or a couple of their members did.”

  “Not according to any schedule, certainly. But I do sell my wares in finite quantities, so when they run out…”

  “They come back for more. Fine. Who are the ones you knew from before?”

  He shook his head, and when Marceline reached in her pocket again, he only repeated the gesture more fervently. “Enough trouble came down on me and them in this place, but we managed to elude the worst of it. I am not so greedy as to tempt fate a second time.”