THE HOUSES CLOSE IN

The news came by the Glass Relay, which meant that it came to everyone at once.

I was in the Copper Lantern at the time. It was a Tuesday evening, and the saloon was crowded; half the Junction had come in to drink and gossip and pretend that they did not care about the Gauntlet. The big crystal behind the bar, a dusty, scratched, second-hand thing, had been showing a quiz-program for an hour. The barman was polishing a glass. A card game was in progress in the corner. Hawk, Declan, and I sat at a back table with a bottle of rye and a plate of cold chicken, in the particular warm lull that follows a long day.

Then the crystal flickered.

It went white. A strange discordant chime sounded, like a cracked bell. The picture dissolved in a spray of colored static, and reformed as the face of a woman I did not recognize: thin, gray-haired, haggard, in a plain black dress, standing in front of a crumbling stone wall. She looked into the camera. Her mouth was trembling.

"My name is Marta Dellow," she said. "I am a laundress. I live on Fish Street in Ravenport."

The saloon went quiet.

"Forty-three days ago, I was offered work by a man in a gray coat. He said it was a government project. He said it paid double." Her voice shook. "I went. There were a hundred of us. They took us to a granary, and fed us, and then they took us down to a cellar." She swallowed. "My sister's husband didn't come out."

A glass fell. Someone swore.

"I am the only person who has spoken," said Marta Dellow. "The others are afraid. They say the Whitlocks will kill them. But I have a little boy, and he's seven, and I will not have him grow up in a world where people can be... where people can be used like that." She drew a long breath. "I am telling you what I saw. In the cellar of Whitlock Manor, at the new moon, a hundred and four of us were bound in a circle, and forty-three of us died."

The picture cut to a hasty, jerky, handheld image. A cellar. Chalk circles. A pedestal and a cracked bowl. And on the floor, in rows, forty-three still shapes.

Nobody in the Copper Lantern moved.

"I have this because I took it," the woman said, from off-screen. "I had a pocket-glass. I was hiding in the stair. I'm sorry for the quality." A pause. "The Chancellor has been told. He has done nothing. You may do what you like with it."

The picture went black.

For a full ten seconds the saloon was silent. Then a man at the bar said, quietly, "God Almighty."

And then everyone spoke at once.

…

"She is brave," said Declan, very low, in my ear.

"She is mad."

"She is both. It is how one gets anything done." He had not moved. He sat with his hand on the table, perfectly still, but the gray eyes were as sharp as I'd ever seen them. "You did not do that."

"No."

"Nor did I. Nor Mabel, I think." A pause. "The Chancellor did not. He would not have risked it."

"Then who?"

"I suspect someone who wished to see the Whitlocks fall." He leaned back. "The pocket-glass was well hidden. It was an expensive one. She is a laundress. She did not buy it herself."

I turned my head.

"Mabel," I said.

"Perhaps."

"Or Josie."

"Perhaps." He looked at me. "Or you."

"I did nothing."

"You did a great deal. You made the Patriarch desperate." His mouth moved. "One does not always have to light the fire. Sometimes it is enough to leave the house full of straw."

I did not answer. I was watching the crystal. It had come back to life, and now showed a different scene: the Senate floor in Ravenport, a vast pillared amphitheater, tiered in marble. It was a live feed. A hundred senators in their sashes rose from their benches, shouting. The Speaker banged his gavel. Someone had brought in a bundle of broadsheets and was waving them over his head. A fistfight had broken out in the back row.

"Order!" roared a voice. "Order, gentlemen, I will have order!"

…

I will not tell the whole of it. It took nine days, and it was the most fascinating spectacle I had ever seen.

The Houses fell upon the Whitlocks like wolves.

They had been waiting for it. I understood that now. For three hundred years the great Houses had lived in a state of armed truce, bound by the Compact, by marriages, by the shared secret of the Tithe. But the truce had never been friendly. The Aldrins had been in a feud with the Whitlocks for four generations. The Brandts coveted their coastal shipping. The Fairchilds, despite the betrothal, had been quietly furious at the way the girl had been used. And the lesser Houses, the Houses of the third and fourth rank, who had been bled for years to keep the great ones fat, saw their chance.

On the first day, the Senate voted to investigate. On the second, it voted to censure. On the third, a motion was brought to strip House Whitlock of its seat. The vote was close. It failed by four.

On the fourth, a second laundress came forward. On the fifth, a stevedore. On the sixth, a boy of twelve who had hidden under the stair. Each of them told the same story. Each was given a platform on the Relay. Each was followed by a crowd of angry commoners, who gathered outside Whitlock Manor in the thousands, in the rain, with torches. By the seventh day, the iron gates had been broken. By the eighth, the Marshals had been called out, and had stood in a long gray line before the Manor, and had refused to fire.

On the ninth, the Senate met in emergency session.

I watched it in the Copper Lantern, with the saloon full, on the dusty crystal over the bar. The whole Junction crowded in: ranchers, miners, railmen, their wives and children, jammed shoulder to shoulder. They had stopped drinking. They had stopped talking. They watched in silence, with their hats in their hands.

"Honorable members," said the Speaker, "we are called on this day to decide the fate of House Whitlock."

He read the charges. Murder. Conspiracy. Violation of the Compact. Perversion of the Rite. It took four minutes. Then he put the question.

"Aye," said the Aldrin Senator.

"Aye," said the Brandt.

"Aye."

The count ran down the benches. Seventy. Eighty. A hundred. I held my breath. I realized that I was gripping the edge of the table so hard that my knuckles had gone white.

Then I noticed the box.

It stood at the north end of the chamber, a gilded balcony hung with plain black, higher than the rest. The High Chancellor's seat. For nine days it had been empty. Now, as the count passed a hundred and ten, a figure rose in it, in a plain coat, with his silver hair combed neatly back.

"Mr. Speaker."

The chamber stilled. The voice was mild. It carried perfectly.

"I beg leave to address the House," said Everett Crane.

…

I leaned forward.

I had not seen him in the flesh in a year and a half. I had seen him on the Relay, in the box at the Gauntlet. I had seen him through the eyes of a cat. But I had not, until now, heard him speak to a crowd. He did it beautifully. He stood at the rail with both hands resting on it, in the calm of a man who has decided the weather, and spoke without notes.

"I have followed the proceedings of the last nine days with the deepest grief," he said. "I am an old man. I have served this Republic for forty years. I have seen wars, famines, plagues. I have never seen anything so shameful as what was done in that cellar."

A murmur.

"I knew nothing of it. I wish that to be clear. If I had, I should have stopped it, or died in the attempt. The Whitlocks, whom I once called friends, concealed this crime from me." His voice dropped. "I am, in a sense, as much their victim as the poor souls who perished."

I felt my lip curl.

"I therefore support, with a heavy heart, the motion before the House. I urge every member to vote his conscience. And I pledge, on my honor as Chancellor, that I shall see the guilty brought to justice." He bowed his head. "God help us all."

He sat down.

The silence was enormous. Then, from the benches, a vast roar of approval went up. Senators were on their feet. They were clapping. They were weeping. A man in the third row embraced his neighbor. In the Copper Lantern, a rancher beside me wiped his eyes and muttered, a good man, a good man, God bless him.

I sat very still.

"Look at his hands," said Declan.

I looked. On the rail of the Chancellor's box, the long white fingers were folded neatly, one over the other. But the index finger of the right hand was tapping, once, twice, on the back of the left. A tiny, precise, regular movement. Like a man counting.

"He has just thrown away a piece," said Declan. "And is deciding where to put the next."

"The Whitlocks."

"The Whitlocks are nothing. They were useful. They are no longer." His voice was cold. "He did not defend them because he cannot afford to. The Engine is starving. He is short of draw. If he cannot feed it, he will lose the Senate, and then the Houses, and then his life. He needs the House's holdings. He needs its Marshals. He needs its dead to be someone else's fault."

"And then?"

"And then he will come for you."

The vote was called. It passed, a hundred and forty to nineteen. The Whitlocks were stripped of their seat, their lands, and their standing, and declared outlaws of the Republic. A cheer went up in the Senate. A cheer went up in the Lantern. Somebody started to sing.

I did not cheer.

I was thinking of a heavy gray man with a cane, sitting in a dim library. I was thinking of a boy with golden hair, kneeling on a carpet. I was thinking of a girl in a wheeled chair, saying, take it out on me.

I felt, somewhere under my breastbone, a small cold thing turn over.

It is done, I told myself. It is what you wanted.

You did not do it. They did it to themselves.

It does not matter. You are not responsible for their sins.

I picked up my glass. The rye was warm. I drank it anyway.

…

Hawk came in at midnight.

I was alone on the porch of the shop, with my boots on the rail and Nimbus asleep in my lap. The Junction had gone quiet. The stars were out. Somewhere in the dark, a train was passing, its whistle thin and mournful. Declan had gone to bed an hour before, with a curt nod and a look I could not read.

I heard Hawk's step on the boards. He sat down in the other chair. For a long time he said nothing, and neither did I. He lit a cheroot. The match flared, and the smoke went up in a straight line.

"You bought a house," he said.

I looked at him.

"Mabel told me. She said you'd done it the week after the sale, through a dummy. A big place. Out past the Ravenport ridge." He drew on the cheroot. "She said it cost three hundred thousand."

"It did."

"I figured you'd lost your mind."

"Perhaps."

"Then I read the deed." Hawk's pale eyes were steady on the dark. "Ashgrove Estate. Built in the year of the Compact by the first Ashgrove, who was an engineer and a cousin to the Founders. Passed down seven generations. Seized by the Senate forty-one years ago, on charges of treason, when the last Ashgrove lord was found to have drawn up a protest against the Tithe." A silence. "He died in a cell. His daughter was seven."

I said nothing.

"Her name was Elinor. She married a Frontier gunsmith. She never told him why she'd left the Capital." Hawk's voice was quiet. "She died in childbed with a girl-child in her arms. She'd had a bad heart for years. The gunsmith said she looked at the baby for a long time, and then she said, Tell her to remember her name."

I had stopped breathing.

"Your father told me that the night she died," Hawk said. "I never told you. I thought it a thing for later." He tapped the ash from his cheroot. "I didn't know what it meant. I thought she was delirious."

"My mother," I said slowly, "was an Ashgrove."

"She was."

"My name is—"

"Reeve is your father's. Ashgrove is hers." He turned his head. The glow of the cheroot lit the lines of his face. "I'm sorry, girl. I should've said it a year ago. I didn't know it would matter."

I sat there for a long time.

I thought of the Founders' script, which I had learned for sport. Of a cipher that no scholar could crack. Of a talent the faculty had called remarkable. Of a heart that beat twice, in the Gorge, as if in recognition.

It had not been talent. It had been blood.

"Hale," said a voice in my head, dry as dust, from a thousand miles away. "Hale's greatest friend. The engineer. Ashgrove."

I put my hand over my eyes. For a moment I felt as if the whole world had turned over, and settled, and revealed itself as a great intricate machine, every part of which fitted every other.

"Hawk," I said.

"Yeah."

"Why are you telling me now?"

He took the cheroot from his mouth.

"Because there's a telegram," he said gently. "It came an hour ago. From Mabel." He drew a long breath. "The Whitlocks are outlaws. They've no house. The Marshals have turned them out. They're on the road, the old man and the boy and what's left of them, and the crowds are after them."

"And?"

"They're riding for Ashgrove Estate." He looked at me, and his face in the glow was grim. "They'll be at your door by morning."