“I need—” said Wick, and stopped, because the end of the sentence was not a thing a Marsh said. He tried it again with his face hot. “Help. I need help, Ilsa.”
She was on the crate still. The sun had gone over the towers and the pit-mouth was in blue shadow, and the Watch had torches up on poles, and the hut with the Ashborn in it had a coat each side of its door. Quill’s tent stood a little apart under a black oak, the mule tethered by it; the old man had gone to the hut an hour ago with a writing-board under his arm to take, he said, the Ashborn woman’s statement, and had not come out.
Ilsa looked at him. She did not make anything of it, which was the kindest thing she could have done.
“Go on.”
He told her. The wink. Veyra. The crest on the crates, and the bookplate; he showed her the book, and she looked at the two marks side by side without a word and gave it back. Two of one blood, and willing, and the contract drawn the morning after the lamps. He told it quick and flat, the way she told things, and when he had finished she sat with her elbows on her knees and her knife across her palms.
“That’s a lot of maybe.”
“I know.”
“A wink’s not evidence. A crest is a crest; he could have sold those crates to Sel for all we know. She’d say anything, she’s in a hut.” Ilsa turned the knife. “And if you’re right, we’re camped in a pit-mouth with fourteen of Vosk’s lot in Watch coats and six boys who think they’re on the right side, and Brakka’s sat on a chest with his paper in it thinking she’s rich.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve not told her.”
“If I tell her and I’m wrong she’ll have my ear on the board. If I tell her and I’m right, she’ll stand up and say so, at the top of her voice, because that’s what she does, and then they’ll—” He stopped. “I need something she can’t laugh at. Paper. He’s an archivist, Ilsa. He writes everything down. Oswin said so. It’s practically a disease.”
She looked at the tent under the oak.
“He’s got a case,” she said slowly. “Leather, with a lock. Penn carried it off the mule for him. He’s had it in there since.”
“Can you open it?”
“I can open anything.” She stood up. “Can you keep two coats looking at you for the time it takes?”
“No,” said Wick. “But I know who can.”
Skritch was in the oak.
He had been in one oak or another since the first coat came through the trees, with his wrist tucked under him, and he came down this one head-first when Wick whistled and sat on the lowest branch with his tail hanging.
“Skritch heard,” he said, before Wick had opened his mouth. “Skritch hears everything up a tree. The old one’s bad. Skritch knew the old one was bad. He smells like the pots in the fire-Pell’s bag.”
“You could have said.”
“Skritch said the Tally was bad and got put out.” The whiskers twitched. “Skritch is learning when to say. So. What?”
“The tent. Under the oak. There’s a case in it, and two men on the hut door who can see the tent-flap, and I need them not to.” Wick swallowed. “I’m asking. Not telling. You can say no.”
Skritch looked at him with his bright black eyes for a moment, and then put one webbed paw flat on his chest, over the tin button.
“Big-folk never look at corners,” he said. “Skritch goes in. Through the back, under the wall. Skritch finds the case and passes it out to the knife, and the knife does the lock in the dark where nobody’s looking, and nobody looks at the flap at all. Better.” He dropped off the branch. “Skritch is good at tents.”
It took the time it takes to boil a pot, and Wick spent all of it standing by the mule with his hands on its neck, in plain sight, being a boy who liked mules.
He saw the canvas at the back of the tent stir once and go still. He saw Ilsa go round the oak as if she were going to make water, and vanish into the shadow under its roots. He saw the two coats on the hut door, bored, talking. He saw Brakka by the company’s fire with her arm bound up, telling the four Grey Hounds something that needed both hands, and Oswin bent over Pip with a screwdriver, and Seven sitting a little apart with its face turned toward the oak and its eyes on him, and he looked away from Seven, because he could not stand it.
Then Ilsa’s hand came out of the roots and made a small flat movement, here, and he said something to the mule, and went.
The case was open on her knees in the dark under the oak. Skritch crouched beside her with his whiskers flat.
“Fast,” she breathed. “Read.”
He read.
He read the way he had read the harbour wall, letters first and then the shape of the thing, and the shape came up at him out of the pages like a face out of water. Half of it was Carrovan, in copied hands, diagrams of six rings and the words into and against underlined in a fine scholar’s script. A ledger, bound in green, with a column of dates and a column of sums in old crowns, and against the sums a line of entries: Vosk, on account. Rope, lamp-oil, Greystep, via V. Grey Hound contract, paid in full, via V.
And under the ledger, loose, a single sheet in the hand he had seen on the map, on the contract, in the book with the bookplate.
The second Marsh boy. Same blood. The gift is confirmed (the lamps, 14th, witnessed by Mabry). He must come willing. A taken Kindler is a dry well; the brother has proved it a hundred times and will not last another hundred. The company is the way. Let them walk him in. Let him trust me by the fire. If need be, let him love them and let me hold them. He will give for that. Any boy would.
Wick read it twice. Then his hands stopped working and the sheet lay on the open case and he looked at it, and the torchlight came through the oak-leaves and moved on the words, and somewhere behind him a man coughed.
“Yes,” said Benedek Quill, gently. “I was afraid of that.”
He was standing at the edge of the roots with his writing-board under his arm and his cloak about him, and he looked very old, and sorry. Beside him, wheezing, stood Vosk. Up out of the pit in the dark, by the basket, while the honest coats were looking at the hut; he had not been seen all day because he had not been meant to be.
Ilsa was on her feet with a knife in each hand before Wick had got his head round. Skritch had simply gone, into the roots, under the dark, without a sound. Wick stayed where he was, on his knees, with the page in front of him, because his legs would not do anything else.
“Do not,” Quill said to Ilsa. He did not raise his voice. “There are four men behind me and six on the far side of this tree, and I should very much rather nobody was hurt. Please.”
She did not put the knives down. She did not throw them, either.
“You,” said Wick. His voice came out of him like something dragged. “It was you. All of it. The Hounds. The chains. Aldo.”
“Yes.”
“You cried.”
“I did. I do, quite often, these days; it is the illness, it loosens things.” Quill coughed, and when it was done he wiped his mouth and looked at Wick over his spectacles with an expression Wick had seen before and could not place, and then could: Hettie, at the top of the cellar stairs, with her white face. Fondness. “I am dying, Wick. I have been dying for three years, and the physicians on the Terraces have run out of things to say that are not goodbye. I was not ready. I am still not. I have read every Carrovan text that survives, and there is a thing beyond that door the Carrovans called the Unending, and I believe it is what it sounds like. I believe the Murk can be handled, carefully, by someone who has read enough and is not greedy. I have read enough.” His voice was mild and precise and absolutely sincere. “I only want more time.”
“You chained my brother—”
“I chained a Kindler who would not kindle for me, and it did not work, and I am sorry for it, because he is a brave young man and it has broken him.” The old man’s hand moved, a small apologetic gesture. “A forced Kindler gives a trickle. I did not believe it until I had seen it a hundred times. Then I read that there could be a second, of the same blood, and I had your name from him. But your mother had hidden you so well that for a year and more I could not be sure. I came to the Lantern. I asked after you. I brought you sweets.” He smiled a little. “I liked you. That is not a lie. And then one stormy night Sergeant Mabry came up to the Archive with his hat in his hands and told me about twelve lamps, and I knew.”
“Then why not just take me? That night. Off the Lane.”
“Because a boy snatched off Lampwick Lane is a Tidewatch matter, with a captain who is honest and a landlady who would tear the city apart. A boy who walks into the Thornwood with a doomed company and does not come back is nobody’s matter at all. And because a taken Kindler, Wick, is a dry well. I did try, once, on the Old Road; I was ill that week and impatient, and Vosk’s men made a mess of it, and I was sorry afterward. They had been told, if they were taken, to describe a woman with hot hands; that part at least they did well. There was to be a man at the Crossing. There was. He waited two days on the wrong bank of your ice and went home. The proper way was always this. You were to come down my stair with your company beside you, and come to me by the fire with your hands open.” He sighed. “Instead you came through the drains with a Skitter and broke my bridge, and I have had to improvise, and I am too old for improvising. But I have you now, and I have them, and it will do.”
“It won’t. I won’t.”
“You will.” Quill said it without any triumph at all; he said it the way he had said I did not know one weaver could do that, a thing observed. “Willing, Wick. I need you willing. And you will be, because you love them. The captain. The Pell. The girl with the knives. The tree. I shall put you in a cell with your brother, and I shall put them in the one next door, and I shall not touch a hair of any of them, and every day you do not kindle for me I shall tell you what they ate. It is not a threat. It is only the Ledger, as your captain would say. You give; they are kept.” He took a paper twist from his pocket, looked at it, and put it away again. “Any boy would. I would have, at your age. I am sorry it is you.”
Ilsa threw.
Wick never saw her decide. One moment she was standing with the two knives low and the next the right-hand one was in the air, and it was not for Quill. It was for the wheeze. Vosk moved his head the width of a hand and the blade went past his mask and took a strip of leather off it and buried itself in the oak behind, and then the four men behind Quill came through the roots, and Ilsa went into them.
She went under the first man’s arm and put her shoulder in his stomach and came up with his cutlass and threw that, and the second man went down with it in his thigh. The third got a hand in her collar and she turned inside it and hit him across the face with the pommel of her own knife, twice. She was yelling. Not words. Just noise, the kind you make to be heard across a camp, and across the camp Brakka was coming up off the ground with Auntie in her good hand and a roar in her chest—
“Mabry,” said Quill, not loudly.
The whistle went. Twice.
And out of the dark on every side of the pit-mouth came the coats, with torches, with cutlasses, a ring of them closing on the company’s fire, and the six honest boys among them came too, because the sergeant had whistled and they did not know what else to do, and Tobias Penn was one of them, with his big ears and his squeaking boots and his face in the torchlight gone the colour of milk.
The fourth man got Ilsa by the wrist and twisted. The knife dropped. She kicked him in the knee and he went down and took her with him and two more landed on her, and she was still yelling when they got the rope round her hands, and the thing she was yelling, Wick heard at last, was his name.
“Wick — run — the rat’s gone, go after the—”
A hand closed on the back of his neck, and the wheeze was by his ear.
“Hello, small one,” said Vosk.
The company did not fight.
That was Brakka’s doing, and it was the bravest thing Wick ever saw her do, and it looked like nothing. She stood by the fire with Auntie in her good hand and fourteen cutlasses round her and the four Hounds behind her, and Oswin with a flash-egg in each fist, and Seven standing very still with its grey arm in its coat; and she looked at Ilsa on the ground with three men on her, and at Wick with Vosk’s hand on his neck, and at the old man on the roots, and she did the sum.
“Down,” she said. “All of you. Tallowby. Down.”
“Captain—”
“I said down, Pell, I’ll not have you burned for nothing.” She laid Auntie on the ground, slow, and straightened up, and her tusks were out. “Archivist. You’ve something to say. Say it.”
Quill had come across the trampled mud with his writing-board under his arm and the page in his hand, and he stood in the torchlight and spoke not to her but past her, to the coats, to the six boys among them, in the voice that carried.
“Sergeant Mabry. Watchmen. I had hoped not to have to say this.” He held up the page. “First: the man beside me is Captain Vosk, whom you have heard named as the Ashborn woman’s creature. He has seen which way the wind sits and come over to the Compact this hour, under my parole, and the Compact will weigh his help against his sins. Second. I have this hour found the Lantern Company’s scout in my tent, with my case forced, and this in her hand. A letter. In the Ashborn woman’s cipher, which I have been at all afternoon.” His voice shook, and it was not acting; Wick could not tell what it was. “I had thought them honest. I had thought them used. I see now that they came to this wood on the Compact’s purse and the house of Sel’s silver both, and took the one to spend the other. Who freed her prisoners, so that there should be no witnesses? They did. Who broke the bridge, so that the Watch could not go down? They did. Who was in my tent?” He let the page fall to his side. “The boy is a child, and has been lied to, and I will take him into my own keeping. The rest are to be held for the Compact. Bind them. Gently. I will not have them hurt.”
“That’s a lie,” said Wick, and Vosk’s hand tightened until the words stopped.
“The boy is overwrought,” Quill said, to the coats. “Sergeant.”
“He’s the client,” Wick got out, through the hand. “Captain, the crates, the mark on the crates, it’s his, it’s in the book, the book he gave me, Captain, look—”
Brakka looked.
Not at the book. At him. Across the fire, with the ring of cutlasses between them and the torchlight on her scarred grey-green face, and it was not an angry look. He could have borne angry. It was a slow look, a weighing one, the look she had given the red seal on the paper and the Skitter on the scree, and it went over him from his white hands to his face and stopped there.
“How long have you known, Sprat?” she said.
He could not lie to it.
“Since this morning.”
She nodded. Just once, as if that settled an account somewhere. Then she held out her wrists to Sergeant Mabry without looking at him, and said, “Mind the arm, it’s cut,” and they bound her.
They bound Oswin, who said “I want it on record” and then could not think what he wanted on record, and stood there with his mouth open. They bound Seven, who held out its hands before they asked, and looked at Wick as they did it, and smelled of nothing at all, which was worse than wet earth. They bound Marta Keel, who spat at Mabry’s boots, and Jory and Sal and Ennis, who had been free for one day. Penn held a torch and did not bind anybody, and his hand shook.
Auntie, Mabry picked up himself, with both hands and a grunt, and carried off toward the hut, and Ilsa’s knives went after it in a sack, every one, down to the one in her boot.
“The windlass,” said Quill. “The boy first, in the basket, and then the stair up to the cell-shelf. Captain Vosk, with me. The rest to the pens.” He folded the page, and put it in the case, and closed the case, and held it out to the nearest torch. “Penn. Keep that by the mule and let nobody touch it. The Compact will want every word.” He pulled his cloak about him, and in the torchlight he was only an old man in a wood, cold and coughing and very far from his kettle. “I had wanted to do this kindly,” he said, to nobody. “I did try.”
The windlass basket was a wooden cage on a rope, and it went down the pit into the dark with Wick in it and Vosk beside him, and the torches at the top got small.
He counted. He could not help it. The stone went past, grey and wet, one, two, three, and at forty the lantern-light of the dig came up round them from below, yellow and low, and the great black disc of the gate stood in its far wall with the frost white in its rings, and the song-stone in his pocket was a dead cold thing against his leg.
Vosk’s hand had not left his neck.
“He said willing,” Wick said. His voice was very small in the shaft. “He said a taken one’s a dry well.”
“He did.”
“Then what’s the hand for?”
The mask wheezed. It might have been a laugh.
“The hand’s for the stairs, small one,” said Vosk. “The willing’s for after.”
The basket hit the floor. The gate looked at him. And somewhere behind it, deep in the rock, a long way under the pink dawn and the towers and the oak with a knife in it, something cold lifted its head and knew his name.