[INTERLUDE] THE WHITLOCK GAMBLE

Cordelia Fairchild had stopped weeping on the ninth day.

It was not that the pain had eased. If anything it was worse. The lines of fire in her arms had spread, as the healers had promised, up past the elbows to the shoulders, and now crept in slow white threads across her collarbone. At night she lay awake and listened to her own Sigil dying. It made a sound, she had discovered: a thin, dry, papery whisper, like a moth against a lamp-shade. By morning she could scarcely lift a spoon.

But the tears had stopped. They had simply gone, one night, as water goes from a dried-up well. In their place had come a cold, clear, curious stillness, like the stillness in the eye of a storm.

She lay in the blue room at Whitlock Manor, propped on a wall of pillows, and watched the lindens bend in the wind. The nurse snored in the corner. A clock ticked on the mantel. And Cordelia, very quietly, in her head, drew up a list.

It was a good list. It was short.

Tamsin Reeve. Alden. The Patriarch. The Chancellor.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she crossed out the last two.

…

"It is the only way," she said.

She said it to the Patriarch, in the library, on the evening of the fifteenth day. She had insisted on being carried down. Two footmen had set her in the leather chair by the fire, and propped her slings on cushions, and withdrawn. The old man sat across from her in the lamplight with his cane across his knees. He had aged ten years in a month. His face had hollowed. The great gray head hung forward on his chest, as if the weight of it had grown too much.

"You are a child," said the Patriarch. "You do not know what you are asking."

"I know exactly."

"It is forbidden."

"So was the Heart." She smiled faintly. "So was the Warlord's sealing. So is every useful thing in the Republic, until a Whitlock needs it."

He lifted his eyes.

She held them. She had learned to hold a gaze when she was nine, in her father's study, with a cane across her palms. She had learned what looked back from a man's eyes when he was cornered: fear first, then anger, and then, at the very bottom, something small and tired and a little pleading. She waited for the pleading. It came.

"The Tithe is a ritual of the Chancellor's," said the Patriarch heavily. "He has a mechanism. We only supply the draw."

"The Chancellor has abandoned you."

"He has not—"

"He did not bid at the Exchange. He did not offer a single dollar when you wept for the crystal. He did not send you a note." She spoke softly. "He is cutting the House loose, my lord. He has been doing it for a month. He has seen the girl on the Relay. He has seen what she can do. He is deciding which of his pieces will be left on the board when she arrives."

The old man said nothing. A log shifted in the grate.

"You have the Rite," said Cordelia. "You have the old text. You told me yourself, when I was twelve. A local Tithe. Not the Engine, not the Senate's. A Hearth-draw, a lesser one. One hundred souls, bound in a ring, and drawn all at once into a single vessel." Her voice was low and even. "One hundred. It would give the House fifty years of strength. It would restore Alden's gift. It would restore mine."

"They would be commoners."

"They would be nobodies."

"The Senate would learn of it."

"The Senate learns of everything," said Cordelia, "after it is done. And it will be done in a night, in the cellar, at the new moon. By the time anyone looks, the Whitlocks will be as strong as they were in the days of the Compact, and the Reeve girl will be a rumor."

She watched his hands. They had tightened on the cane. The knuckles stood out like pebbles.

"It would be murder," whispered the Patriarch.

"It would be arithmetic," said Cordelia Fairchild. "A hundred lives, for a House of two thousand. For a family of three hundred. For a name that has stood for four hundred years." Her small voice did not shake. "You are a ledger-keeper, my lord. You will do the sum."

He did.

She saw him do it. She saw the numbers move behind his eyes, the cold calculation, the slow turn of the great gray head. She saw the moment the sum came out. And she lowered her eyes, demurely, as a child lowers them in prayer, and kept her face quite still, so that he would not see the thing that rose in her, hot and bright and sweet.

…

They took them from the river-towns.

It was not hard. The Whitlocks owned half the shipping in Ravenport and a good deal of the labor. There were warehouses by the docks, tenement rows in the mill districts, and a thousand men and women who owed their wages to the House. A dozen agents with lists went out in the night. They called at doors. They offered work: good work, a month at double pay, on a government project in the north. They offered transport. They offered food. Within a week they had gathered a hundred and four.

They were housed in the old granary on the Whitlock estate, a long stone barn behind the stables. Cordelia visited them once. She went in her chair, with a footman, at dusk. She looked at the faces: the ironworkers, the laundresses, the clerks, the dock-hands. They sat on benches along the walls, eating a very good stew from tin bowls, and looked up at her with shy, grateful, uncertain smiles.

A woman of about thirty rose and curtsied. "Miss," she said. "Are we to start soon? Only my little boy's with my sister, and she's ill—"

"Very soon," said Cordelia, sweetly.

The woman beamed.

Cordelia was carried out. In the yard she asked the footman to stop. She sat in the chair in the twilight, and looked at the stars, and tried to feel something. She examined her heart, delicately, as one probes a tooth. There was nothing. There was a faint, flat curiosity. There was a tingle of excitement. There was no pity.

It was a relief, in a way. She had half feared there would be.

…

The Rite was held at the new moon.

They had prepared the cellar. It lay beneath the east wing, a vast vaulted chamber of black stone, cold and dry, that had been built by the first Whitlock and not used in two hundred years. They had swept the floor. They had chalked a great circle, forty feet across, in white and silver, with a hundred smaller circles ranged round its rim. At the center stood a pedestal of black marble, and on the pedestal a vessel: a plain bowl of dark iron, the width of a man's two hands, etched inside with runes.

The Patriarch stood at the pedestal in his robes. Torrance stood at his side, grim and silent, with a drawn sword. Alden stood a little apart, pale as paper, with his hands clenched at his sides.

Cordelia sat in her chair at the edge of the circle, wrapped in a shawl.

They brought the hundred and four in by the stair, in a line. The people shuffled in, murmuring, looking about at the vaulted roof. They did not know where they were. They had been told it was a place of blessing. They were placed, one by one, in the small circles, with Torrance's men pressing each into place with a hand on the shoulder. When the last of them stood in her ring, the Patriarch lifted his arms.

"Close the door," he said.

It shut. The bolt shot home.

The first of the people began to speak.

…

Cordelia would remember it all her life.

She would remember the chant: a deep slow drone, rising from the old man's throat, in a language she did not know. She would remember the way the chalk lines caught fire, silver and white, spreading from circle to circle round the rim like a fuse. She would remember the moment the first of them cried out, a man in the front, a broad red-faced stevedore, who put both hands to his chest as if he had been shot.

A thread of light came out of him.

It was thin, and white, and bright. It drew out of his heart and trailed across the floor to the iron bowl on the pedestal. He swayed. He looked down at himself, astonished. Another thread rose from the woman beside him. Another from a boy. Another, and another, until the whole cellar was a web of silver light, a hundred and four strands, converging on the black bowl at the center like the spokes of a wheel.

The people began to scream.

It was not loud, at first. It was a murmur of bewildered distress. Then the murmur became a wail, and the wail became a roar. They clawed at their chests. They fell. They reached for one another, for the door, for the walls, with their mouths wide and their eyes huge. A woman threw herself against the bolted door, hammering it with her fists. A man dropped to his knees and prayed aloud.

"Hold the rite," called the Patriarch. His voice was hoarse. "Hold it! It is begun!"

The bowl was glowing. A column of light was building above it, white and gold and green, thick as an oak. The air was hot as an oven. There was a smell: sweet, thick, nauseating. Cordelia put her hand to her mouth. She had not thought there would be a smell.

"Father," said Alden.

He had taken a step. His face was livid. "Father, stop it. Stop."

"Be silent."

"They're dying! Look at them! Father, stop!"

"It is too late." The old man did not turn. "It cannot be stopped."

Alden turned. He looked about wildly: at the door, the circle, the pedestal, the shuddering silver strands. His eyes met Cordelia's across the floor.

She looked back. She did not look away.

He saw something in her face. She watched him see it. She watched his lips part, his eyes widen, his color drain until he was gray as the stone. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He staggered, caught himself on a pillar, and was sick.

She felt a flicker of contempt. She felt it clearly. It was the first emotion she had felt in weeks.

…

It went wrong at the thirty-first minute.

She could not have said how. She was not a rune-wright, and the Rite was not hers. But she felt it in her bones, the way one feels a change in the weather. The hum in the cellar, which had been smooth and steady, hitched. The column of light flickered. Something in the iron bowl cracked, with a sound like a pistol-shot.

"The draw is too strong," cried Torrance. "It's tearing the vessel!"

"Hold it!"

"It's not holding!"

The column of light buckled. It swelled, and shuddered, and spat a lash of white fire across the floor that struck a man in the nearest circle and burned him to the bone. The people shrieked. The chalk lines flared and blew apart. The Patriarch staggered back from the pedestal with his robes smoking, and threw up an arm. Torrance dropped his sword.

"Out!" bellowed someone. "Get out, get out—"

It was too late for that. The Rite had its teeth in them. The silver threads had thickened into cords, and the cords were burning, and where they burned, the people fell. Cordelia saw it. She saw them fall in rows, like wheat. She saw the stevedore collapse, still clutching his chest. She saw the woman who had asked about her little boy fold slowly to the floor, her face turned up, her hands open.

It lasted four minutes.

When it was done, the column of light collapsed in on itself with a deafening crack, and the cellar was dark. Only the bowl glowed, a dull red, split down the middle like a cracked egg. The air was thick with smoke. There was a ringing in Cordelia's ears.

She sat in her chair, and looked at the floor.

There were forty-three of them. She counted. The rest had been spared, by the failure of the Rite: a few dozen survivors, huddled in the corners, gray-faced and shaking. But forty-three lay in their circles, with their eyes open, quite still. Their faces were empty. A thin white smoke rose from each of their mouths.

The Patriarch was on his knees by the pedestal, with his hands over his face. Torrance was leaning on the wall. And Alden stood in the center of the circle, among the dead, with his arms hanging, staring at nothing. His lips moved. He seemed to be counting.

Cordelia looked at her own hands.

She flexed her fingers, slowly, one by one. The pain was no better. If anything, it was worse. She felt the white threads in her arms, in her shoulders. She felt them throb. The Rite had given her nothing. It had given nothing to any of them. The bowl was broken. The draw had failed. Forty-three people had died, for no reason whatever, on a cold floor in the dark.

She waited to feel horror.

She waited for a long time.

She felt a stirring, instead, deep in her breast. It was cold, and bitter, and slow, a thing that had no name. It was not grief. It was not guilt. It was a single flat, ugly, aching thought, like a stone sinking in black water.

It was not enough.

I am not strong enough.

Why am I not strong enough?