Burning Docks

POV: Josiah

The first thing the Order taught a recruit about fire was that it moved in the direction of the wind, and the second was that it did not care what you believed.

Josiah lay on his belly behind a stack of coal sacks at the shore end of Pier Nine, with the roar of the oil tank in his ears and a rifle he had not fired across his forearms, and watched the whole waterfront turn to flame. The night had gone orange. A great black pillar of smoke stood up from the middle of the jetty, rolling and flattening against the stars, and from its base a tide of burning kerosene was running down the planks toward the freight yard. Gulls shrieked. Somewhere on the water a ship's bell was ringing the alarm. And all along the dock the Lamp Order's gray coats were scattering, coughing, shouting, in the red glare.

"Forty," said Roz, beside him, flat. "Thirty-one now. Some of them are running. The rest are coming this way."

"How long?"

"Perhaps a minute." She had her palm pressed to the sacking, her head tilted, her eyes unfocused. "They're afraid. They're all afraid. I can hear it. It's, it's like a field of mice."

"Can you see the others?"

"I can hear them. Hollis is on the water. Felix is with him. They went off the end." A breath. "Dex is down. He's alive. They have him. I can't, there's too much noise." Her hand curled. "And Viv..."

She did not finish.

He did not ask. He had seen it as she had: a gray figure pinned in a silver net, dragged toward a carriage. He had been forty yards away, behind a crate, with a rifle in his hands and no clear shot. He had lain there with his finger on the trigger, counting, until the carriage door shut. He would remember that count for a long time.

We have lost one.

"We cannot reach her," said Josiah. "Not now."

"I know."

"We must go."

"I know." It cracked. She rose to a crouch. "Which way?"

He pointed with his chin. "Barge slip. Third bunker. Follow me, stay low, and do not stop for anything."

"Josiah."

"Yes?"

"If I stop, you go on."

"No," said Josiah.

He did not wait for her answer. He rose, and ran.

…

They were nearly clear when the three men stepped out of the smoke.

It was at the foot of the bunkers, in a narrow alley between the coal sheds and the wall of a warehouse. The fire lit it from behind in a dull copper glow. Three Lamp Order privates, in dove-gray coats, with their rifles at the port and their faces black with soot, stood spread across the lane. One of them had a cut over his eye. They were young. Their eyes were glazed. And they were looking at him with the particular blank placidity that he had once seen in his own mirror.

"Captain Pruitt," said the one with the cut.

"Private Calloway."

"The Colonel says you are to be taken alive."

"I am glad to hear the Colonel is so well-disposed."

"If you come quietly, sir, nobody will be hurt."

"I see." He lowered the rifle. He laid it carefully on the cobbles at his feet, and straightened, and spread his bandaged hands. "Roz, stand back."

"Josiah—"

"Stay behind me."

He had no gun. He had no knife. He had a pair of hands that were still seamed with half-healed cuts, and thirteen years of the Order's forms, which had been drilled into him in a hot dark gymnasium under the eyes of a sergeant with a whip. They came back to him now like a prayer. He settled his weight. He saw the first man's front foot slide an inch left, and knew what he would do. He felt his heart go slow.

Do not kill. Do not kill. Rule three.

The private lunged.

He took the rifle butt on his forearm and let it roll off. He stepped inside, and put the heel of his hand under the jaw, and the man's head snapped back and he went down like a stone. The second came from the side, wild. Josiah ducked. The third raised his weapon. There was a flat ringing click as the bolt went home—

And all three men stopped.

…

They did not fall. That was what he noticed. They simply stopped, in the middle of what they were doing, as clockwork stops when the spring runs out. The man with the raised rifle swayed. His arms drooped. The barrel dipped toward the cobbles. The second private, who had been reaching for Josiah's collar, let his hand fall, and stood there with his mouth a little open and an expression of the most profound and peaceful drowsiness.

Josiah turned his head.

Roz stood against the wall with both hands pressed flat to the brick and her eyes shut. Her face was gray. A thin thread of sweat ran down her temple. Her lips moved, soundlessly, as if she were speaking to a child. "Easy," he heard her whisper. "Easy now. It's all right. You're so tired. It's a long night. Lie down."

The first man's knees folded. He sat. He lay on his side on the cobbles with his rifle in his arms, like a man falling asleep in a pew. The second followed. The third, with a long soft sigh, subsided against the warehouse door and slid down it, and was still.

Roz opened her eyes.

"They're all right," she said. "They'll sleep for an hour. I only slowed them." She swayed. "It's, I'm all right. Don't."

"You are not all right."

"I'm fine."

He caught her as she fell.

…

It was a cistern.

He found it by chance, at the end of a lane behind the Sugar Exchange: a round brick tank sunk in the ground, with a rusted iron lid and a ladder, long since drained and forgotten. He got the lid up with a crowbar. He lowered Roz down into the dark and followed, pulling the lid shut above them, and stood a moment in the black with his back against the wet brick and his heart pounding, listening.

Boots went by overhead. A shout. The crackle of fire. A dog barking. They passed. They faded. A long, long silence.

He struck a match.

The cistern was fifteen feet across, domed, dry, smelling of rust and old rainwater and cold. There was a stone ledge round the wall. Roz sat on it with her back against the brick and her legs stretched out in front of her, her head tipped back, her eyes shut. Her chest was heaving. Her left leg, the one that had been pierced by the glass spikes, was bleeding again through the bandage.

"Let me see that," said Josiah.

"It's nothing."

"It is not nothing. It is bleeding through two layers of linen." He knelt. "Hold the match."

She held it. He unwound the old wrapping. The wound was ugly, a ragged purple furrow across the calf, and the sutures she had put in it herself two nights ago, with a darning needle and silk, had torn. He cleaned it with water from his flask, and a corner of his shirt. His hands were clumsy. They still shook. He bound it up again, tightly, in a strip of cloth he tore from the hem of his coat, and tied it off, and sat back.

"That will do until morning."

"Thank you." She was silent a moment. "Josiah. I should say the price, shouldn't I? Dex isn't here to write it. Someone ought to hear it."

"Say it."

"The first child I ever delivered. I was fifteen, in my grandmother's kitchen, and it came out blue and I breathed into it until it cried. A boy." Her voice thinned. "I had his name. I carried it nine years. I have just looked for it, and there is a hole."

"I will remember it for you," said Josiah, "if you ever tell it to me again."

"I'll hold you to that."

"It is nothing."

"No," said Roz. "It isn't."

She had opened her eyes. She was looking at him in the flare of the match. The dark glimmered in them. Her face was drawn, and old, and very tired, and there was a look in it that he had not seen before: a naked, wondering, uncertain look, as of a woman who has stepped off a curb and found it was a step.

"You asked me something," she said, "once. In the Archive. I never answered."

"I asked you nothing."

"You said you wished you knew what to do with it." She drew a long breath. "I don't know either."

He said nothing. The match burned down to his fingers, and he shook it out, and they sat in the dark.

…

"You could stop their hearts," said Josiah.

He did not know why he said it. It rose out of the silence like a bubble from a pond. He said it quietly, in the dark, with his eyes on the black dome above his head.

"Yes."

"All of them. The three in the alley. The forty on the pier. You heard them. You could have reached in and stopped them."

"Yes."

"You did not."

"No."

"Why?"

She was silent for so long that he thought she had fallen asleep. He heard her breathing in the dark, slow and uneven. Water dripped somewhere. A rat scurried. At last she said, in a low voice, without any heat:

"Because I'd know."

"Know what?"

"What it felt like." She shifted on the ledge. "You think it's easy, don't you? You think it's a thing you do with your mind, like blowing out a candle. It isn't. It's like holding a bird. I can feel the whole of it, every beat, every flutter. When it stops, I feel it stop." Her voice dropped. "I've held ten thousand. Most of them lived. A few didn't. I felt every one go. I wouldn't do that to a man who didn't have to, not for the Council, not for Whitcomb, not for the Lord himself."

"Even for your mother."

"Especially for her." She laughed, shortly. "She'd be ashamed."

"It would have been justified."

"Probably." She pulled her shawl closer. "That's the difference, Captain. Between you and me."

"What difference?"

"You were trained to do it. And you didn't. I was never trained. I just could. And I don't." A pause. "It isn't a matter of whether it's right. It's a matter of who I'd be afterward."

He sat very still.

He thought of a lieutenant with a pair of handcuffs, and a kitchen, and a woman who had said You are shaking, child. He thought of how many times a man might do a justified thing before he was no longer a man who did justified things. He thought of cell nineteen, and the bar of light, and the Litany.

"I think," said Josiah, slowly, "that is the wisest thing anyone has said to me in some time."

"Don't flatter me."

"I never flatter."

"No," said Roz. "You don't."

In the dark, she smiled. He could not see it. He could hear it, in the shape of her breath, and he felt, absurdly, a small hard painful happiness open in his chest like a seed.

…

They came out at first light.

The sky above the Docks was the color of pewter. A thin cold rain was falling, and the burned reek of the night lay over everything, smoke and oil and wet char. They crept along the back lanes with their collars up, keeping to the shadows, going toward the church. And at the corner of Tallow and Cinder, where the newsboys had stood the day before, Josiah stopped.

There was a poster on the wall.

It was a large one, black on white, pasted over a half-dozen older bills. The paste was still wet. A crowd had gathered in front of it: dockers, fishwives, boys, all with their caps in their hands, reading in a heavy hush. Someone near the back was reading it aloud, slowly, in a flat voice.

BY ORDER OF THE COUNCIL OF CHARTER HOUSES

THE SOOT SAINTS

SIX ANARCHISTS

WANTED FOR THEFT, ARSON, AND MURDER

$10,000 REWARD

For information leading to the arrest of:

Below it were six portraits, engraved in coarse black lines, in two rows of three. He knew each at once, though the likenesses were poor. A lean man with a lock of hair over one eye. A boy in round spectacles. A tall woman with her hair bound in a cloth. A slim girl in a servant's cap. A thin youth with a cane.

And in the bottom row, at the left, a man in a Lamp Order captain's uniform, stiff as a ramrod, with a grim long jaw.

Under it, in capitals, in a type size larger than the others: TRAITOR PRUITT.

Roz drew breath beside him.

"Well," she said, softly. "That's one way to be remembered."

"Murder," said Josiah. He was surprised at the evenness of his voice. "They say murder."

"Someone died on the pier."

"Perhaps. Perhaps not." He stared at the likeness. They had given him a pair of black hollow eyes and a mouth like a slot. It did not look like him. It looked like a man he had once been afraid of. "They would say it in any case."

…

The sound of hooves came down the street.

It was slow, rhythmic, unhurried, a single horse at a walk, and the crowd drew back from it in a ripple, parting. Josiah pulled Roz into the doorway of a chandler's shop. A big roan gelding came round the corner, magnificently caparisoned, with a saddle-cloth of gray and gold. On its back, upright, stately, with a plume in his hat and a sword at his hip, sat Colonel Ezekiel Hargrave.

He drew rein in front of the poster.

He was ruddy and white-whiskered and benign. He looked down at the crowd with his kind blue eyes, and a gentle, rueful smile, as of a father about to scold his children.

"Good people of the Docks," said Hargrave.

His voice was lovely. It was deep, and warm, and perfectly pitched, and it carried to the back of the crowd without any strain. "I know you are frightened. I know there has been fire, and noise, and a good deal of alarm. I wish to say to you that there is nothing to fear. The criminals who set it have been identified. They will be found. The Council has the matter in hand."

A murmur ran through the crowd.

"I know that some of you have heard unkind things," said the Colonel, "about the Order. About the Lamp. I know there are those who would have you believe that we are your enemies." He smiled. "I only ask that you consider. When the fire came, who was it that came with buckets? When the sickness came, who sat by your beds? We are your neighbors. We are your sons. We only wish you to be calm. To be at peace."

He lifted one hand, and made, in the air, a small gesture, a closing of the fingers. Josiah knew it. He had made it a thousand times, in the dim hushed hall, over the white china cups.

"Light is peace," said Colonel Hargrave.

"Light is peace," murmured the crowd.

It rose from them, soft and automatic, a susurrus of voices, the way a congregation says Amen. Not all of them. Perhaps one in three. But they said it, in that gentle, drowsy, contented murmur, and their faces were smooth, and their eyes were soft. He had never heard it from the outside. It sounded like a lullaby sung over a sleeping city.

He is calm, thought Josiah. He is so calm. A man who has just lost his Stone and half his dock to a fire. He sits there like a man in church.

He has had his cup.

The roan moved on. The crowd closed behind it.

…

They stood in the doorway of the chandler's shop for a long time.

Neither spoke. The rain fell. The poster dripped on the wall. He looked at his hands, at the bandages gone gray and stiff with soot and old blood, and thought it over, as he would have totaled a column.

They had lost the gold: the chest that Whitcomb had brought to the pier, and that would never now be paid. They had lost the decoy, taken from them on the planks. They had lost Hollis and Felix and Dex, who were God knew where, in the water, in a cell. They had lost Viv.

They had lost the church, perhaps. The Watch would be there by noon.

They had lost the name they had carried. Soot Saints. It would be a curse now in every mouth.

And somewhere, in the back of his mind, in a place he had not looked at for eight months, there rose a small and quiet and terrible thing. It was the memory of warm sweet liquid in a white china cup. Of a hand on his shoulder. Of a soft voice saying, There, Captain. Drink. You've had a shock. Of a great gentle weight settling over him, like a blanket drawn up to the chin, and all the edges of the world going soft.

He wanted it.

He wanted it more than he had wanted anything in his life. He wanted it as a man wants water. He stood in the rain, with the clarity running cold and bright through every nerve, and felt the whole of the night come down on him, the fire, the net, the screams, the posters, and he wanted to be eased. He wanted to be told that it would be all right. He wanted to be in the hall, with the lamps, and the cup in his hand, and nothing in his head at all.

It lasted perhaps ten seconds.

Then the disgust came. It came like a wave of nausea, from the pit of his stomach, hot and fierce and shaming. He saw himself, a grown man, a soldier, standing in a doorway longing for a drug that had made him a murderer's tool. He saw the girl in the gray gown with her name taken out. He saw the soft smooth faces of the crowd.

That is what they feed us, he thought. That is exactly what they feed us, so that we will want it.

He shut his eyes. He said the Litany. He said it as he had never said it, flatly, without comfort, a plain list of words, and found in it, at the end, no peace at all, only a kind of stern small cold relief.

Keep the heart that does not ask.

I will ask, thought Josiah. I will ask until I die.

"Come," said Roz, gently, at his elbow. "We should go."

"Yes."

"We'll find them."

"Yes."

"Josiah."

He opened his eyes.

She was looking at the church. It stood at the end of the street, black and gaunt against the rain, with its bell-tower leaning to the east like an old man listening. It was the only home he had had in a long time. The doors were shut. A thin thread of smoke rose from the chimney. It looked, in the gray light, absurdly small.

They had survived. Every one of them, as far as they knew, was alive.

But the house they had made, which had held them for a night and a day, with its soup and its stove and its roof of shared bread, had come apart in his hands like wet paper. He felt it. And he knew, with the plain sorrow of a man who has seen it happen before, that it would not be put together by shouting.