What the Heart Remembers

POV: Dex

"It's a meteorite," said Josiah, for the third time, in the voice of a man trying to hold a door shut with his back. "It is a stone. The legend is quite clear. It is a stone that fell from heaven."

"It's a human heart," said Roz.

"It is glass."

"Captain, I have had my hand inside forty women while they were bleeding. I know what a heart feels like through a wall." She had backed against the plinth, with her right hand clutched in her left. "It's beating. It's slow, it's so slow, once and then nothing and then once, but it's beating. And it's not stone, and it's not an animal's. It's a man's."

"Or a woman's," said Felix, faintly.

"Does it matter?" said Hollis.

They had all gathered round the plinth, in a ring, in the pearl-colored light. Seven people breathing, and an eighth thing that did not. The black sphere sat in its brass cup, perfectly still, with the hairline crack running over it like a vein, and the small pink shape suspended at its center, curled, folded, patient. It looked, Dex thought, like something asleep.

Debt: one heart. He heard it in his own handwriting. Price: Everything.

He had not understood. He had written it in the cellar, with Whitcomb's gold on the barrel-head, and thought it a figure of speech.

"Somebody," said Hollis, "has to say it. What do we do?"

"Leave it," said Roz.

"We were hired to take it."

"We were hired to take a stone."

"The client said—"

"The client lied," said Roz. "Or didn't know. Either way, I won't carry that out of here in a bag." She stopped. She looked at Dex. "Someone has to touch it. Someone has to find out what it is. And I can't. I won't. It hurts."

There was a silence.

"Not me," said Felix, quickly. "I'm, I'm fairly sure it's not meant for chemists."

"Not me," said Hollis. "I'll bend a bullet. I won't bend a heart."

"I am not permitted," said Josiah. "The Order forbids us to touch the Council's relics."

"That's a very neat way of saying you're afraid," said Viv.

"It is a very neat way of saying I have been told," said Josiah, "and it is no longer clear to me that that is a reason."

Dex took off his glove.

…

He did not decide to. That was what he would say, afterward, when he said anything. He watched the glove come off his right hand, finger by finger, as if it were someone else's glove. He heard Viv say his name. He heard it as a sound from the bottom of a well.

I'm the coldest of the six of us, he thought. That's why. That's the reason. I've got the steadiest hands.

It was a lie, and a good one, and he let it stand.

He put his palm on the sphere.

It was warm.

It was the warmth of a living thing, of skin, of a hand held in his own. The glass moved under his fingers. A single slow pulse went up through his palm, through the wrist, the arm, the long bone of the shoulder: thud. It was not a sound. It was the size of a sound. It was a bell struck deep underground, and its echo went through him like a wave through a pier.

Thud.

And the world went white.

…

...the table was laid for supper, with the good cloth.

It was a long table, scrubbed pale, in a long low room with a hearth at one end and a window at the other, and the window was open on a garden full of roses. Late sun poured over the cloth. There was bread, and a brown dish of beans, and a jug of cider sweating on the board. The smell of it was so enormous that it filled his whole head. Rosemary. Woodsmoke. Hot crust. Jasmine, drifting in at the casement from the vine by the door.

He was small. He was nine. He was sitting in a chair with a cushion on it, kicking his heels against the rung.

"Nate, sit still," said his mother.

She stood at the hearth with her back to him, stirring a pot. She was tall, and slim, and wore a blue shawl over her shoulders, and her hair was coming down. It was brown. It was the color of strong tea in a clear cup. She was humming. He couldn't see her face, but he knew it was smiling, by the sound.

Hush now, little rattler, put your warning by,

The dark is wide and gentle and the dark won't ask you why.

What you carry, set it down, it was never yours to keep.

Hush now, little rattler. Let the quiet do its sleep.

"Mama," he said, "sing the other one."

"There's no other one, my love."

"Yes there is. You said there was."

She laughed. She turned, finally, with the wooden spoon in her hand, and the sunlight caught her face, and it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Gray eyes. A wide mouth. A small scar through one eyebrow. She looked at him with an expression of such complete and tender amusement that his chest ached with it. "Marian," said a man's voice, from the door. "He's got your ears. He'll hear anything."

"He's got your stubbornness."

"Heaven help us."

His father came in with a leather case under his arm.

…

Thomas Aldridge was a big man, red-bearded, with a laugh like a barrel rolling downstairs. He put his case down and kissed his wife and lifted his son in one arm, effortlessly, and swung him round. The room spun. The roses spun. He was laughing, helplessly, and the big hand was warm on his back, and it was shaking.

That was the thing he noticed, even then. His father's hands shook.

"It's the cold," said Thomas, when his wife looked at him. "It's the damp in the court. I spent the day at Charter Hall."

"What did they say?"

"They said they'd consider it." He set the boy down. He took off his coat. There was a sheaf of letters in the pocket, tied with string. He laid them on the table, face-down. "They said it was a matter of civic order. They said a tenth was a small price for the common good. Marian, I've counted. I've sat all week with the Registry. Nobody has ever got back the tenth."

"Thomas."

"The Council takes it, and it doesn't come home." He said it very quietly. "It's not a tenth. It's what they like. It's what they need."

His mother put down the spoon. She came to the table. She laid her hand on his father's, and the two hands lay there together, the big brown one and the long white one, shaking just a little.

"Then we'll tell people."

"We'll be hanged for it."

"We'll be Aldridges," said his mother. "We were always going to be."

On the wall above the hearth, over the mantel, a shield was carved in dark oak. A coiled snake, a rattle raised, a motto in a ribbon. He knew the words without reading them. He had been taught them before he could talk. His father had cut them with a penknife into a block of walnut one winter, and given him the block, and shown him how to turn the grain into scales.

Warn first, then strike.

…

It was the smell that woke him.

Smoke. Not woodsmoke. Not the clean sweet smell of the hearth. A thick, sour, oily stink, with something burnt in it that he did not know. He was in bed, in his nightshirt, with the quilt tangled round his legs. It was dark. Through the window, over the garden, the sky was the wrong color. It was orange. It rippled.

He heard something heavy fall downstairs. Glass broke.

"Nate!" said his mother.

She was in the doorway in her nightgown with a candle. She was not smiling. Her face was white, and her hair was loose, and her eyes were huge. She crossed the room in three steps and snatched him up out of the bed, and he put his arms round her neck and his face in her shoulder and smelled jasmine, and smoke, and terror.

"Hush," she said. "Hush. Hush now."

"Mama, what is it—"

"Hush."

She carried him out. Down the dark stair. Through the hall, where the portraits hung, and the clock stood ticking in its case, and a lamp lay smashed on the floor, burning. There was a man on the flagstones by the door. He lay on his side. His red beard was black with blood. One big square hand was stretched out in front of him, palm up, shaking, and then it stopped.

Her breath caught.

She did not scream. That was what he would remember. She stopped on the stair, with her son in her arms, and looked down at the hand, and then she lifted her face to the open doorway, and the dark, and the smell of smoke, and the sound of boots.

A man came in.

He wore a gray cloak. He had a lamp in one hand, a small hooded lamp, and in the other something that glittered. A vial. He stood quite still on the threshold, in the wash of the burning house, and his boots were black, and they were very clean.

"Marian Aldridge," he said.

His voice was soft. It was the softest voice Nate had ever heard.

Somewhere, in the room, a clock ticked. It was not the tall clock in its case. It was a small clock. A pocket watch, with a golden lid. It ticked quickly, and then it paused, a hair too long, and then it ticked again.

Tic... tic... tic.

"Don't," said his mother.

"It's very simple," said the man. "I need the boy."

He lowered the hood.

…

Dex came up out of the dark with his mouth open and no sound in it.

He was on his knees. He didn't know how. There was stone under him, cold, hard, and his hand was still on the black glass, and the glass was still warm. He tore it away. It left a print of sweat on the surface that faded as he watched. He heard a high thin ringing, and under it, close, sharp, frightened voices.

"—seconds, he's only been, it was about eleven seconds—"

"Dex! Dex."

"Don't touch him!"

"He's not breathing."

"He's breathing, I can hear him. Dex. Come back. Look at me."

He looked.

Roz's face hung over him, brown and drawn and very close. Her eyes were wide. She had both hands on his shoulders. And she was listening: he could see it, in the tilt of her head, the stillness of her mouth. She was not looking at his face. She was looking through it, to something else, and the thing that she heard was making her lips go gray.

"Your heart," she said, under her breath, so softly that nobody else could hear.

"What about it?"

"It's not there."

"It's there."

"It's dead." She said it with a kind of horror. "I can hear it, it's going, it's going, but there's nothing in it. It's gone cold. It's like a, like listening to a stone." Her fingers tightened. "What did you see?"

"Nothing."

He got to his feet. Hollis caught his arm, and he shook it off, politely. His legs would hold. His hands would hold. He pulled the glove on, finger by finger. He found that he was extremely calm.

"It's cold," said Dex.

"What?"

"The glass." His voice came out thin, clear, polite. "It's cold. It was a trick of the light. I thought for a second it was warm. It isn't." He looked round at the ring of faces. "I'm sorry. It's the air down here. I must have been dizzy."

Nobody believed him. He could see it. But they were tired, and frightened, and they wanted to be told that nothing was wrong, and they were willing, for a moment, to be told.

"Time," said Hollis.

"Yes."

"We've got maybe fifteen minutes before the next patrol. We should be moving."

"Yes," said Dex.

He looked at the sphere.

…

It was a very odd thing, to know the name of the man who had killed your parents.

He had expected, if he'd ever expected it, to feel something. A fire. A flood. He'd imagined, in the years of fevers and blank pages, that the truth would hit him like a blow. It had not. It had slid into place with a soft small click, like a key in a well-oiled lock, and what it left behind was a vast, clean, glittering stillness. He could see everything. The room. The vials. Each of the faces round him, in terrible detail. He could see how the light fell on Felix's spectacles. He could see every thread in Roz's collar.

Augustus Whitcomb.

Younger. Eleven years younger. His hair not yet silver. A gray cloak. A lamp. A vial. A clean pair of boots.

I need the boy.

He thought of the cellar. The black carriage. The man in the plain gray coat, with his clean shoes, sitting on a barrel and setting five ingots in a row. Debt: one heart. The faint small sound in the pocket. Tic. He thought of the fifty thousand dollars in gold in the safe in his office, with a Meridian Trust stamp on each bar.

He came to me.

He walked into my cellar, and he sat down, and he looked at me, and he didn't know me. He didn't know. He thought I was a boy under a mountain.

He hired me to steal the one thing my family died to keep from him.

He understood, with that same gleaming clarity, what it meant. Whitcomb had not come for the Stone. He had come for the thing in the Stone, the thing that his own Council could not touch, that lay in the lowest vault of the city, behind a door that only the Unchartered could open. He had come to a thief because the Founders' wards would not listen to a thief. He wanted the Heart. And once he had it...

Once he has it, what then?

He did not know. He didn't know what the Heart did. He did not know why it was beating. But he knew, with the cold bright certainty of a man who has seen a snake in the grass, that whatever Whitcomb wanted it for, he would not be allowed to have it.

Not today.

…

"Felix," he said.

"Yes?"

"The replicas. You have them?"

"Of course." Felix had gone pale, but he went to the cello case at once. He worked the catch; the false bottom lifted; from a nest of felt he drew two black spheres, one in each hand, and held them up to the light. They were beautiful. They were perfect. A hairline crack ran pole to pole across each, and in the center of each a faint pink glimmer hung, a trick of mica and rose glass, a pulse of light that waxed and waned on a slow, steady count. "I did the best I could. I haven't a proper annealing oven, so the weight's a hair off, but the assayer won't catch it. They're, I think they're the finest things I've ever made."

"Put one on the plinth."

"One?"

"Decoy A," said Dex. "We replace it. The cup is weighted. The ward will count the mass. We have ninety seconds from the moment we lift, and then the Council knows." His voice was steady. He listened to it with a kind of distant admiration. "The other is insurance. It stays with me."

"Insurance for what?"

"For the day something goes wrong," said Dex. "Rule two."

Felix hesitated. His eyes went to the real sphere, and then back to Dex, and for an instant there was a question in his face. It was a very small question. It died unasked. "Two of everything," he said, and nodded, and swallowed, and turned to the plinth.

And Dex took a breath, and understood that in the next ninety seconds he would do the most dishonest thing of his life.

The real one comes with me.

Decoy A goes on the plinth. Decoy B goes to Whitcomb. And the Heart, my family's Heart, stays hidden where no one on this earth will find it.

Not Josiah. Not Roz. Not Felix. Not any of them.

Not Viv.

He looked at her.

She was standing a pace off, with her arms crossed and her hair coming down, in the pearl light. She had been watching him for some time. She was frowning, a small tight frown, the frown of a girl doing a sum she didn't like the answer to. When their eyes met, she didn't look away.

"Are you all right?" she said.

It was low. Only for him. It was the question of a person who really wanted to know, and had no tact, and had come a long way in the dark for the answer.

He thought of the table with the good cloth. The roses. The blue shawl.

"I'm fine," said Dex.

It was the first time he had ever lied to her. He did it well. He did it the way he did everything: smoothly, kindly, without a flaw. He saw her face change, a little, very quietly, as though a hand had passed across it. She nodded. She looked away.

And that, he thought, is that.

Somewhere above them, in the dark, a patrol was coming down the stair. In his waistcoat pocket lay a small, flat key to a safe in a cellar, and in the safe lay fifty thousand dollars in gold bars, each stamped MT, paid in advance by the man who had killed his father.

He had spent three nights pricing his own death. He had been, the whole time, on the payroll.