Thieftaker tc-1

by D. B. Jackson

  “But you must have some family.”

  “I want to talk about the brooch,” she said.

  Ethan shook his head. “No. What’s your last name?”

  Anna started to walk away. “Fine,” she said, tossing the word over her shoulder. “Then you’ll never find it.”

  She didn’t walk quickly, and in turning her back on him she showed no fear. But neither did she give any indication that she was doing this for effect. If he let her go, she would leave.

  “Wait!” Ethan called in surrender, as she reached the next illuminated window. “Come back. Please.”

  She had halted beneath the window at his first word. Now she started back toward him. There was something odd about her, though Ethan couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

  “No more questions about my family,” she said, as she drew nigh again. “Or I’ll leave.”

  “All right,” Ethan agreed reluctantly. “Can you at least tell me who sent you?” He glanced around again, his unease growing by the moment. He still sensed someone conjuring, closer now. But where?

  She frowned, then shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Ethan took a step toward her, and then another. She didn’t flinch, but he didn’t want to risk scaring her off. He squatted down so that he was looking her in the eye. “Listen to me, Anna. Whoever sent you could be dangerous. That brooch-it was taken from a girl-”

  “Jennifer Berson.”

  “That’s right,” Ethan said. “She’s…” He hesitated. He didn’t want to frighten the girl, but she needed to understand her peril. “She’s dead now.”

  “I know,” the girl said solemnly.

  “Whoever sent you-whoever has that brooch-might well have been the person who killed her.”

  “You’re a thieftaker,” she said. “Isn’t that right?”

  He nodded, frowning. “Yes, but-”

  “Then all that matters to you is the brooch. If you find that and give it back to her family, you’ll be paid.”

  “How is it you know so much about thieftaking?”

  “Am I right?” she asked.

  Ethan stared at her. He wasn’t just talking to the girl, he knew. This was a negotiation with the person who had sent her, who might well be close enough to hear everything they said. In the end, he decided to treat it that way. “It’s not that easy,” he told her. “Jennifer Berson is dead, and her family is entitled to know why, and who’s responsible.”

  The girl shook her head. “You’re a thieftaker. The brooch is all that matters. And I can get it for you. I know where it is.”

  “Can you take me there now?” Ethan asked.

  “I can get it for you.”

  Ethan shook his head. “No. The person who has it now-”

  “Is none of your concern,” the girl said sternly. “Meet me tomorrow at this time, right here. I’ll take you to it. You can give it to Berson and get your money.”

  “There’s more to this than the brooch,” Ethan said. “Even if you don’t understand that, the person who sent you does.”

  He was still squatting, and his knees were starting to ache. Ten years ago, he could have stayed thus for longer. But not anymore. He straightened his legs slowly, stiffly. His stomach and sides ached from the beating.

  As he stood he realized two things simultaneously. First, the girl had said nothing about the bruises on his face. And second, standing in a dark portion of the street, Ethan could see his shadow cast on the cobblestone lane by the glow of the moon.

  The girl cast no shadow. That was why she had looked so strange before, when she had walked away and then faced him again. She had cast no shadow then, either. Not from the moon; not from the window. And the light on her face hadn’t changed in the least.

  “What are you?” Ethan asked, in a breathless voice.

  A faint smile touched the girl’s lips. “Tomorrow night,” she said. “I’ll take you to the brooch. Or else you’re a dead man.”

  With that, she vanished, like a candle flame extinguished in a sudden wind. Ethan spun around, searching for the conjurer who had created her, summoned her from the air, much as Ethan had summoned that white horse the night before. An elemental spell. An illusion. That was why he had felt a casting, but not a potent one. And yet this spell went so far beyond any he was capable of wielding, it struck him dumb.

  The vision Ethan had conjured to scare Daniel the previous night had lasted mere moments, and Ethan hadn’t even managed to make the horse’s hooves click on the wharf fill. But this conjurer had sustained his illusion-or hers-for several minutes. The girl had spoken to him, asked him questions, responded to Ethan’s words. She had been… alive, or as close to alive as a creature of a conjurer’s art could be.

  And she had warned him, too. Tomorrow night… Or else you’re a dead man. He knew better than to dismiss this as an idle threat. A conjurer who could summon an illusion like this one could probably overcome even Ethan’s most powerful wardings.

  Chapter Eight

  Ethan remained utterly still, listening for a footfall or the scrape of a boot sole on cobblestone. Anything that might reveal the whereabouts of the conjurer who had summoned that little girl out of the mist. A horse-drawn chaise rattled by in the distance, and a dog barked. Closer, a man sang “Rail No More, Ye Learned Asses,” loudly and off pitch, the familiar lyrics slurred together. But Ethan heard nothing of the conjurer.

  “Damn,” he whispered. He realized that he was crouching again, and clutching his blade so tightly that his hand had begun to ache. Slowly, he straightened up. After another moment, he sheathed his knife.

  He started walking again, watchful, still straining his ears. He halted every few steps, to make certain that the conjurer wasn’t using Ethan’s footsteps to mask his or her own. But he was sure that the other conjurer had already managed to steal away. As he came within sight of Henry’s shop, Pitch and Shelly came bounding out of the darkness to greet him. He knelt and allowed them to lick his ears and face.

  “Where were you two when I was talking to the ghost girl?”

  They wagged their tails, regarding him with curiosity. Then they began to lick him again.

  “All right,” he said, standing. “You’ll get no food from me. Go find Henry.”

  At the mention of Henry’s name, they wheeled and ran back to the shop. Ethan followed and walked around back to the stairway that led to his room.

  Pausing at the bottom of the stairs, Ethan listened once more and scanned the stairway and the alleys on either side of the building for any sign that he had more visitors. The last thing he wanted was to end his day with another beating at the hands of Sephira’s men. Convinced that no one else was there, he started up toward his door, his legs heavy.

  As he reached the first turn in the stairway, though, he saw a shadow move above him. He grabbed his knife, slashed it across the back of his hand, and shouted the first thing that came to mind.

  “ Pugnus ex cruore evocatus! ” Fist, conjured from blood!

  He heard a man grunt, then stumble. The fatigue in his legs forgotten, Ethan took the steps between himself and the shadow two at a time. The man was still doubled over when he reached him, and Ethan wasted no time. From a step below, he threw a hard punch that caught the man square in the jaw. The stranger crashed into the banister, making the wood creak dangerously. Then he toppled forward onto Ethan, who shoved the lurker back so that he sprawled on the stairs.

  “Mister Kaille, please!” the man croaked.

  Ethan leaped forward, grabbing the stranger by his hair and pressing the edge of his knife against the man’s neck.

  “Who are you?” Ethan demanded. Before the man could answer, Ethan nicked his throat with the knife, drawing a trickle of blood.

  “ Lux ex cruore evocatus! ” Light, conjured from blood!

  A brilliant golden light burst forth above them, as if Ethan had conjured a small sun.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” Ethan muttered, heedless of what he was say
ing, and to whom.

  Staring up at him, his face pale and his eyes wide, a bruise darkening on his jaw, was Mr. Pell.

  “You shouldn’t curse in front of a minister,” the man said in a shaky voice.

  Ethan actually laughed. “No, I don’t suppose I should. What are you doing here, Mister Pell?”

  “I came to speak with you. I didn’t mean to startle you so.” He hesitated. Then, “May I get up?”

  “Yes, of course.” Ethan released him and sheathed his knife before helping the minister to his feet. “I’m sorry, but-”

  “Mercy! What happened to your face?”

  Ethan smiled ruefully. “As I was about to say, I’ve already had visitors today. I thought you might be one of them, and that you had in mind to finish me off.”

  “Who did this to you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ethan said, with a small shake of his head.

  He stepped past Pell, unlocked his door, and motioned the minister inside. Leaving the door open for the moment, so that the light he had conjured flooded his room along with the cool night air, he lit a pair of candles and gestured for the minister to have a seat. He closed the door and faced the man, frowning at the swelling of Pell’s jaw.

  “I can heal that if you like.”

  “By conjuring, you mean.” The minister shook his head. “I would rather you didn’t.” After a moment he added, “Thank you, though.”

  “Of course. May I offer you something to eat or drink? I don’t have much, but I believe I at least owe you a bit of wine.”

  Pell grinned at that, then winced. He raised a hand to his jaw. “No, thank you. Anyway, it’s my own fault. I should know better than to surprise a man in your line of work.”

  “Maybe. What do you want with me that couldn’t wait until morning?”

  The minister looked away, gently touching his bruise again, and then dabbing at the cut on his neck and checking his fingers for blood. There was none.

  “I needed to speak with you about Jennifer Berson,” he said.

  Ethan eyed him with interest. “What about her?”

  “Well, not about her exactly. But about what happened to her.”

  The thieftaker lowered himself onto his bed, eyeing the minister closely. “Do you know something about her murder?”

  Pell sat staring at the floor, absently touching the cut skin on his throat. Several times he opened his mouth as if intending to speak, only to close it again, frowning each time.

  “Mister Pell?”

  “I don’t know who killed her,” Pell said at last. “Obviously if I did, I would tell you. I… I’d like to see this person stopped.”

  “Then what?”

  Pell’s eyes, pale blue and shining with candlelight, met Ethan’s. “I lied to you today. When I said that I had never seen someone who had been murdered. That… that wasn’t true. I should have told you earlier, but I wasn’t…” He shook his head. “There was another child who died. It was some time ago now, on Pope’s Day of last year. And I thought at the time that he couldn’t have died the way people said he did. I asked you about your conjurings because as I told you already, I have speller blood in me, too. I’ve forsworn witchery for the Lord, but if ever I see another child killed this way…” He shook his head and swallowed. “I need to know how to do what you did today. I need to know how to determine whether spells have been used to kill.”

  Ethan stared at the man, not sure where to begin. He had so many questions he wanted to ask, not least among them, whether the minister had mentioned any of this to Troutbeck or Caner, or, for that matter, to Ethan’s sister.

  “How do you even know about this?” Ethan finally asked. “Was he taken down to the crypts as well?”

  “Hardly,” the man said, a note of bitterness in his voice. “He died near the chapel and was carried there by the men who found him. Mister Troutbeck tasked me with sending them elsewhere. The boy’s family-Brown was the surname-they weren’t members of our congregation. I said a prayer over the lad, and then sent them to South Meeting House.”

  Ethan wasn’t sure what to say.

  “Mister Caner wouldn’t have approved,” Pell said. “But he wasn’t there that night.”

  “Can you tell me more about the boy?” Ethan asked after a short silence. “How old was he?”

  “Very young. Five or so, I think.”

  “Was he from a wealthy family?”

  Pell shook his head. “No. A very poor family, in fact. I didn’t say anything earlier because he had so little in common with Jennifer Berson that I thought I was looking for similarities where none existed. But-”

  Ethan raised a hand, cutting him off. It was coming to him now. He remembered hearing of this boy. “You say this was Pope’s Day?”

  The minister nodded.

  “I assume there was the usual nonsense?”

  “Naturally,” Pell said.

  Every year on Pope’s Day-November 5-gangs of toughs from the North and South Ends paraded through the streets to mark the anniversary of Old Guy Fawkes’s Papist plot to blow up Parliament. These gangs met each year near the center of the city and fought pitched battles in the streets, bloodying themselves and anyone who got in their way.

  Many of those who took to the streets on Pope’s Day would have also been mixed in with the rabble responsible for the previous night’s devilry. In fact…

  “Who was leading the South Enders that day?” Ethan asked.

  “Well, that’s just it,” the minister said. “They were led by Ebenezer Mackintosh. He and the North End man were arrested for the boy’s death. But both were let go. It went to trial sometime later, but they were never convicted.”

  “Mackintosh,” Ethan repeated. The same scoundrel who had led the rioters on their rampage through Boston the night before.

  “Was anything stolen from the boy?” Ethan asked.

  “Aside from his life, you mean.” Pell shook his head. “I doubt he or his family had any property worth stealing.”

  “But you say he died like Jennifer Berson? There were no marks on him?”

  “No, it wasn’t that. He bore terrible marks. But he was said to have died from being run over by a cart. That’s not what killed him.”

  Ethan frowned. “Mister Pell-”

  “My father was a surgeon, Mister Kaille. I didn’t train as one myself, but I learned plenty from him. This boy was dead before the cart struck him.”

  “How can you know that?”

  Pell took a breath. “His head was crushed. That was the injury that was said to have killed him. But he had another wound: a break in his arm.” The minister pointed to the upper portion of his own arm. “Here. The jagged end of the bone pierced the skin from within.”

  Ethan had been in battle, and had seen such wounds before. He nodded for the man to go on.

  “I examined the wound when he was brought to us,” Pell said. “It was terrible. The boy’s skin had been ripped, as if he was mauled by a feral dog, and I could see that the blood vessels in his arm had been torn. Now, I saw my father do surgeries. I know what happens when a vessel in one of the limbs is broken that way. There should have been blood everywhere. Forgive me for being crude, but it would have gushed from that wound as long as his heart continued to labor. The boy should have bled his life away before his other injuries killed him. But there was hardly any blood on his clothing, and when I asked the men who brought him to us, they said that there was little more on the street. The poor child had to have been dead before the bone shattered.”

  Ethan pondered this for several moments. He couldn’t deny that every fracture of this sort he had seen bled profusely. “Have you mentioned this other incident to anyone else?” he finally asked.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I didn’t say that. I’m merely asking if you’ve spoken of the boy’s death in the past day or two.”

  “No. I didn’t make the connection until I watched you examine the Berson girl. That’s when I started t
hinking about the boy, and how strange his death had been.”

  “Why didn’t you say something while we were in the crypt?”

  Pell shrugged, his brow creasing. Suddenly, he looked terribly young. “I wasn’t sure my memory of the boy’s death was reliable, and… and I feared you would think me foolish for mentioning it. But tonight, as I was readying myself for bed and I was supposed to be praying, I couldn’t get the two of them out of my head. That’s when I decided to find you.”

  “Where do you live, Mister Pell?”

  “Mister Caner has been kind enough to let me a room in his home. For a most reasonable fee,” he added.

  “Did anyone see you leave his house?”

  That brought a smile to the minister’s face. “No. Back in my youth, before I was sent to study for the ministry, I was something of a rascal. I became quite adept at slipping from my home and back in again without my parents’ knowledge.” His eyes danced. “Until, of course, I got caught and wound up reading for Orders.”

  Ethan decided in that moment that he liked Pell. “And is it this same penchant for mischief that makes you want to learn a spell you’re forbidden to use, a spell that could get you banished from the Church, and possibly even burned as a witch?”

  The minister blushed and grew pale at the same time, so that the only points of color on his face were bright red spots high on each cheek. “I’m no fool, Mister Kaille. I wouldn’t get myself banished or burned or hanged. And I’ve been thinking that I’ve spent too long denying this part of my ancestry.”

  “I can appreciate that. But I’m not willing to risk your life by teaching you spells. And if by some chance my sister were to learn that I had so much as mentioned such things to you, she would have my head.” Ethan paused, looking at the minister. “Then again, if you hope to return to the Chapel without anyone knowing that you left, you had best let me heal that bruise on your jaw.”

  Pell probed it gingerly with his fingers, frowning again. “I could say that I fell.”

  “Yes, you could,” Ethan said, keeping his expression neutral.