The Price of a Heart

POV: Dex

Forty-one steps down to the cellar, and Dex Hallam had counted every one of them before he was fourteen.

He counted them now, because it was a quarter past six and the coal smoke lay on Soot Row like wet wool, and because a man who knew exactly how long a staircase would take him was a man who could not be surprised by it. Forty-one. Eleven were rotten at the outer edge. Three had no riser at all. He took the stairs left foot first, the good foot, and brought the bad one down after it with the walnut cane planted on the step below, and the carved rattlesnake that capped the cane clicked against the stone at every landing. Click. Step. Drag. Click. A rhythm. He had stopped hearing it years ago, the way a clockmaker stops hearing the shop.

The leg hurt. It always hurt. It was a fact like the weather: the left knee was a hot wire this morning, which meant rain by noon, which meant the courier would be late, which meant he should plan for it. He put the pain where he put all such facts, on a shelf at the back of his head, with a label.

"You're slow today," said Ma Tilly, from the bottom of the stairs.

"I'm exactly as slow as I was yesterday. Forty-one steps in two minutes and ten seconds."

"Two-fifteen." She stood with her fists on her hips in the lamplight, a broad gray woman in a man's overcoat and a kerchief, her sleeves rolled to the elbow. "I was counting too."

"Then I owe you a nickel."

"You owe me a good deal more than that, Dex Hallam, and you know it. Mind the third from the bottom. It's moving again."

It was. He stepped over it.

…

The cellar of the Tallow Exchange had been a candle warehouse once, and it still smelled of tallow when the weather turned damp. Long tables ran down the middle of the room, strewn with the instruments of the Saints' real trade: inkwells, steel pens, a rack of rubber stamps, a hand press that had cost more than the building. At the nearest table a girl of thirteen with an ink-black thumb bent over a sheet of cream stock, copying a signature with her tongue between her teeth.

"Mortgage deed, Brannigan," said Dex. "Show me."

She held it up. He took it to the lamp and tilted it until the watermark showed, a crouched stag with a flaw in the left antler.

"Good."

"Good?" The girl looked wounded. "It's perfect."

"Perfect is the thing they notice. Good is the thing they don't." He handed it back. "Now the other one."

She slid a second sheet from under the first. It was the same deed, down to the crack in the wax, with one difference: a single digit in the date was transposed, so slightly that only someone who knew to look would see it. She had put it in the file with the others. It would be found, in time, by a clerk who was being paid to find things.

Two of everything, Dex had told her, the day she came. One for them to catch you with, and one for you to be caught with. The better liar of the two goes home.

"Sergeant Voight is upstairs," said Ma Tilly. "He's brought the lady."

"Is he sweating?"

"Like a pig at Christmas."

"Then we'll let him sweat a little longer." Dex took out the Ledger.

…

It was a plain black book, no bigger than a hymnal, its cloth spine gone shiny under his thumb. Nobody else in the Saints was allowed to touch it. Inside, in a hand so small and square it looked typeset, ran three columns: Owed. Paid. Price. Every favor, loan, cut lip and borrowed coat of six years was in it.

He opened to the day's page and wrote: Brannigan, widow, Soot Row — house note, $412. Voight, Sgt. — to be bought at 38 cents on the dollar. Cost to Saints: 2 days' labor, 1 forged seal. Gain: one house; one cop with a reason to be afraid of us.

"You can't put a price on that woman's face when she finds out," said Ma Tilly.

"I can. Four hundred and twelve dollars. The face is extra."

"Heartless."

"Accurate."

She snorted. She had been looking at his leg, as she always did, without saying anything, and he moved the weight off it and she looked away. It was an old dance. She had pulled him out of a collapsed mine at nine, with half of him crushed and all of his past missing, and she had never once said the word cripple. She'd just kept a chair at the end of every table.

"Send up the Sergeant."

…

"Send up the Sergeant."

…

Sergeant Aloysius Voight of the Charter Watch was a big man gone soft, with a purple nose and a waxed moustache, and he came down the stairs in a cold sweat with a small gray woman in a black bonnet clinging to his sleeve.

"Mrs. Brannigan," said Dex, from behind the table. "Please. There's tea. Sergeant Voight is mistaken about one thing. Your note hasn't been sold. It's been lost, in the Watch's property room. Isn't that so, Sergeant?"

"Lost," said Voight. "Aye."

"This is a clean copy with the bank's stamp, dated eight months ago. Your note, paid in full. The Sergeant, a conscientious officer, will testify he saw it filed." Dex pushed the sheet across. "Sign here. You owe the Saints nothing. You may bring us an apple pie if you like."

She signed. Her hand shook. When she looked up at him with the kind of look Dex had never learned to hold, he turned his eyes to the lamp until it passed.

"God bless you."

"He's welcome to try."

At the foot of the stairs the Sergeant turned back, and neither man said a word. Voight had taken eleven dollars from the Saints last month to look away from a shipment. He had just committed perjury for the price of a pie. One more rope, Dex thought.

…

The carriage arrived at half past eight.

He heard it before he saw it, because Soot Row did not have carriages. This one was clean: two matched horses, iron-rimmed wheels on wet cobble, the soft chirp of good springs. The whole street went quiet like a flock that has seen a hawk.

"Dex," said Ma Tilly, from the head of the stairs. Her voice was odd. "You'd best come up."

He climbed. Two minutes and eighteen seconds, because he did not hurry and he did not stop. At the window he looked down at a black coach with no crest on the door, no gilt, no lantern, the plainest expensive thing he had ever seen. A boy of eight had crept up to the wheel and was touching the paint as if it might be hot.

The door opened. A man stepped down.

He was of middle height, and middle age, and wore a gray overcoat of excellent cloth, cut so simply that it might have been made for a clerk. A black silk hat. Gloves. His hair beneath the hat was silver and fine. He stood in the muck of Soot Row with the unconcerned air of a man who is used to rooms being clean wherever he enters them. And his shoes were polished to such a shine that, when he took a step, the reflection of the gutter slid across them like water over glass.

Too clean, Dex thought. Nobody walks in this street with shoes that clean unless someone has carried him.

"Mr. Hallam," said the man. He did not raise his voice. "I wonder if I might have a few minutes."

That was when Dex heard it.

It came from the pocket of the gray coat, as the man stepped nearer: a small, bright, metallic sound. A watch. A gold one, by the ring of it, a good repeater with a sound like a spoon touching a wineglass. Tic. A pause. Tic. A pause that was a hair too long. Tic.

Half a beat behind where it should be.

Dex's heart hit his ribs like a fist.

It was absurd. It was a watch. Half the men on Crown Hill carried one, and half of those ran slow. He stood in the doorway of his own building with his own cane in his own hand, and the hair stood up on the back of his neck, and his palms went wet, and a cold, sick, formless thing rolled over in his belly as if it had been asleep for years.

He did not know why.

His body did.

…

"Augustus Whitcomb," said the man, once they were seated upstairs in the office. "Of the Meridian Trust."

"I know who you are, Mr. Whitcomb." It came out steadier than Dex had expected. "Your name is on half the mortgages in the district. I've forged a few of them."

"I'm aware." The smile was small and unhurried. "That is rather why I came."

Dex sat behind his desk, an old door laid across two barrels, and set his cane against his knee. He had put the Ledger in the drawer. He had put Ma Tilly in the corner, where she stood with her arms crossed and her broad face shut like a trunk. He kept his eyes on Whitcomb's face, the pleasant, fine-boned, lined, intelligent face, and not on the pocket, where the small gold sound went on. He couldn't stop hearing it. Tic. Tic.

"You have a reputation," said Whitcomb. "A boy of twenty who runs the cleverest band of forgers and fixers in the Bay. A man who cannot be bought, and whose prices cannot be paid. I have a proposal that I suspect will interest you."

"Everyone has a proposal."

"Not like this." He folded his gloves in his lap. "In the Undervault, beneath Charter Hall, there is an object known to every child in Merrick Bay. You were taught it in school, I think, though perhaps not at yours. The Founder's Stone."

"Hannah Merrick's heart," Dex said. "Turned to meteorite. Guards the city from harm." It was the line they all recited. "It's a story."

"It is a stone, certainly. A black sphere about the size of a man's fist. It sits on a plinth in a vault at the bottom of two hundred and twelve stairs, and it is guarded by a ward that recognizes the resonance of Charter glass and sounds an alarm if any Charter House member sets foot near it." Whitcomb's voice was as even as a ledger. "Which is the difficulty. I am, as you know, the Treasurer of the Council. I cannot go in. Nor can anyone I trust."

"You want it stolen."

"I want it removed. Before the Black Noon."

The room was quiet. Outside, a dray rumbled by. The eclipse had been the talk of the Bay for a year: the great black noon, once in a hundred years, thirty days off now. The Council would gather at Meridian Dome. There would be a Rite. Children had been sold sooty glass for a nickel to watch it.

"Why?" said Dex.

"Because House Prescott intends to use it." And now, for the first time, the pleasant voice cooled. "The Prescotts own the woolen mills on the river. They have done very well, these last twenty years, from the Tithe. You know the Tithe, Mr. Hallam. Every citizen of Ash Docks knows it, though most don't know that they know it. A child with no parents is a child nobody will miss a year of. The mills have been taking those years for a decade. They intend, at the Black Noon, to use the Stone to Tithe the entire Docks in a single stroke. Every man, woman and child. A whole district made docile, in one afternoon."

Ma Tilly had not moved. But her knuckles, where her fists were gripped under her elbows, had gone the color of bone.

"I will not permit it," said Whitcomb. "But I cannot oppose Prescott in open Council. The votes are not there. So I propose to take the Stone out of reach. Into a vault of my own, where it can do no harm to anyone, and no one can use it." He leaned forward slightly. "I need a crew that the ward cannot see. Unchartered. And I need them led by a man who cannot be traced back to me."

"And the price?"

"One million dollars in gold bullion on delivery. Fifty thousand in advance." He took a leather case from his coat, and laid it on the barrel-head, and unfastened it. Inside, on black velvet, lay five small ingots, each stamped with two letters. "As a gesture."

MT.

Dex looked at the gold for a long time.

…

"No," he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"No. Thank you." He closed the case, slowly, and pushed it back across the desk. "I'm sure it's a generous offer. But I don't steal from the Council for strangers. I don't take work from men I haven't priced. And I don't like the way the numbers come out." He folded his hands. "A man with a million dollars to spend and a ward that can't be passed has dozens of better options than a boy in a candle cellar. Which means he's lying about something. I don't know what. But I have a rule about men like that."

"And what is the rule?"

"I don't work for them."

He had expected anger, or flattery, or a threat. Whitcomb gave him none. He only sat, with his gloved hands folded, and regarded Dex for several long seconds with eyes the pale warm brown of strong tea. Then he smiled, very slightly, as at a pupil who has given an unexpectedly good answer.

"That is a sound rule," he said. "I would only observe one thing."

"Go on."

"In the Ash Docks, everyone has something they would like to take back." The voice was gentle. "A child. A wage. A name. A year. The Undervault holds a great deal more than a stone, Mr. Hallam. There is an archive beneath it. A vast one. It holds everything that has ever been taken."

Ma Tilly's breath hissed through her teeth.

"I have never mentioned your history," said Whitcomb. "I know nothing of it, and I do not wish to. A man's past is his own. But I have noticed that you do not seem to have much of one. And I imagine that is not by choice."

Dex did not move.

It was a skill he'd had for years. When a knife touched him, he went still. It was not courage; it was a kind of shutting, a pulling-in of all the lights. He sat at the desk with his cane across his knee and the small gold tic, tic, tic in his ears, and he felt, behind his eyes, the dark shape of nine years that were not there, nine years like a cellar door he had spent his whole life walking past.

Under the Charter Hall. Everything that has ever been taken.

He knew, with a certainty that surprised him, that what he wanted was down there.

"I choose the crew," he said.

Whitcomb inclined his head.

"All of it. Who, where, when. No one on my team gives a name they don't want to give. No one is asked who they were. If you want them, you'll take them as they come, and you'll never ask me why." He heard his own voice. It was very cold. "And if I find out you've lied to me, Mr. Whitcomb, about the Prescotts or the Stone or anything else, I'll end the work and keep the advance."

"Naturally."

"Then I'll think about it."

"Of course." Whitcomb rose. He set the leather case on the barrel-head and left it there, a small black rectangle in the gloom. "Thirty days, Mr. Hallam. The Black Noon will not wait." He drew on his gloves. At the door he paused, and, with courtesy, bowed his head to Ma Tilly. "Madam."

She did not answer. He did not seem to expect it.

The door closed. The carriage rolled away. The sound of its wheels died into the usual noise of the Row, and the tic of the gold watch went with it, down the stairs and out of the building and into the rain, which had begun, as predicted, at a quarter to nine.

…

Dex sat for a long time.

Then he opened the drawer, and took out the Ledger, and turned to a new page. He wrote with a hand that was not quite steady. Whitcomb, A. He looked at it. Under it he wrote: Debt: one heart. He considered that. He crossed out one and wrote it again. Beneath that, in the third column, where he had always entered the price of everything that came into his life, he wrote a single word.

Everything.

He was humming.

He did not know he was. The sound came out of his chest the way breath comes: low, wordless, slow, a tune that rose and turned and fell like a lullaby. He had hummed it all his life. He hummed it over his accounts. He hummed it on stairs. Ma Tilly said she had heard him do it in his sleep, as a child, when the leg kept him awake.

"Dex."

She was standing in the doorway.

He had not heard her cross the room. She stood very still with one hand on the frame, looking at him with an expression he had never seen on her broad plain face. It was not anger and it was not fear. It was something deeper and older, a kind of terrible tenderness, as at a ghost.

"Where did you learn that?" she said.

"Learn what?"

"The tune."

"I don't know. I've always..." He stopped. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing." She turned away, quickly, and her hand went to the pocket of her apron, where there was a little book with a worn cloth cover; she held it there, flat, as if to keep it still. "Nothing at all. Go on with your sums."

He looked at her back for a moment. Then he looked at the leather case.

"Five people," he said.

"What?"

"I'll need five. A thief, a shot, a chemist, a healer, a soldier." The list came out of him in order, as if he had been writing it for years. "I can name them. I know where each of them is." He rubbed his thumb along the cane. "No. Not five."

"Dex—"

"Five people, and me."

Outside, the rain came down on the coal smoke, and the whole of Soot Row ran black. Dex stared at the fifty-thousand-dollar case and did not touch it. He had heard that sound before. His skin knew it. His pulse still went in his throat like a fist on a door. A small gold pocket watch, ticking a half-beat late.

He could not remember where.

But his body could.