Parliament of Thieves

POV: Dex

The Old Cooperage smelled of wet oak and old tobacco and a hundred years of men who had made barrels for other men to fill.

Dex stood at the head of a long plank table, with both hands on his cane and his heart going like a dropped tray, and watched five people decide whether he was worth the trouble of hanging.

They had come one at a time, by different doors, in the gray hour before the shift whistles. Ma Tilly had come first, because Ma Tilly was always first, and had taken the chair at his right hand without a word. Then the others, each trailing a small crowd of hard-eyed lieutenants who were told to wait by the walls. Now the lamp burned low in the middle of the table, the cooper's tools hung dark on their pegs, and nobody had touched the tea.

Big Ned Calloran sat with his arms folded across a chest like a hogshead. He ran the Longshoremen's Brotherhood, eleven hundred men who moved every crate in Merrick Bay, and he had the broken knuckles to prove it. Sister Perpetua, small and straight in a gray wimple that had gone green at the seams, headed the Harbor Women's Mutual Aid, which was a church supper on the surface and the best-informed spy ring in the city underneath. Isidore Greeley, tall and silver-haired in the immaculate black of a Pullman porter, spoke for the Rail Porters' Benevolent Club, whose members carried every telegram and every rumor from the Terrace to the tracks. And at the foot of the table, with her boots on a barrel and an ink-stained cuff pushed up to the elbow, sat Penny Penhallow, who owned Merrick Bay's three loudest printing presses and had never printed a word she hadn't been paid for.

"So," said Penny, in the voice of a woman who bit nails. "This is him."

"This is him," said Ma Tilly.

"The cripple."

"Penny," said Sister Perpetua, mildly.

"I'm only asking what everyone in the room is thinking. Who follows a lame boy from Soot Row into a war with the Meridian Trust?" She looked at Dex with open appraisal. "No offense, Mr. Hallam."

"None taken," said Dex. "It's a fair question. I'd ask it too."

That surprised her. Her boots came down off the barrel.

…

He had rehearsed it for two days. He had written it out on the back of an Exchange slip, and crossed it out, and written it again. He had planned the order of the points, the pauses, the exact moment to let his voice drop. He was good at this. He had talked a stone-faced Charter bailiff out of his own warrant. He had made a banker weep over a forged will.

He looked at the five faces, and put the slip in his pocket.

"I'm going to ask you something," he said, "and I'd like you to think before you answer. Not for the room. For yourselves."

Nobody moved.

"Who here has lost a day?"

The lamp hissed.

"A day. A name. A face. A birthday, a street, the sound of someone's voice. Something that was yours, and then wasn't, and you can't say when it went or why." He kept his eyes level. "And you've told yourself it was nothing. That everybody forgets. That it was the drink, or the grief, or the soot in the air."

Big Ned's jaw shifted. Sister Perpetua's hands, folded in her lap, went white at the knuckle. Greeley looked at the wall. Penny Penhallow, who had been about to say something clever, shut her mouth.

"I lost nine years," said Dex. "Everything before I was nine. My mother's face. My father's name. I thought I was born in a cellar. Ma Tilly knew different, and let me think it, because the truth would have got me killed." He heard the old woman breathe beside him. "I found out ten days ago. I found out because I stole a stone from a vault and it showed me what had been taken."

"Showed you how?" said Greeley, very softly.

"The Council has a name for it. The Tithe." He let it sit. "It isn't a tax. It isn't a lottery. It's a harvest. Every month the Houses take a little from every person in Ash Docks, a morning here, a grief there, a bad night, a good one, and they put it in a vial. And the vials go down a pipe to a thing under the Dome that keeps them. That's how the Houses stay clean. That's why the Docks stay quiet. That's why none of you remember, when you ought to be burning the Terrace to the ground."

"That's a story," said Big Ned.

"Yes. It is." Dex nodded. "I've no way to prove it to you with words. So I brought someone who can."

…

Roz had been standing in the shadow by the door the whole time. She came forward now with her hands bare and her dark eyes steady. She did not look at Dex. They had spoken perhaps forty words since the church, all of them about practicalities. But she had come when he asked, and he had not dared to say what that meant.

"Miss Boudreaux can hear a heartbeat through a wall," said Dex. "She can tell you what a man feels from across a room. I'd ask her to do it for you. Only if you agree."

"I'll not be a parlor trick," said Sister Perpetua.

"No," said Roz. "Not a trick." She came to the end of the table. "I'm a midwife. I've spent seven years listening to hearts. When someone has had a piece taken, the heart keeps a place for it. A gap. Like a stair that isn't there." She looked at Big Ned. "May I?"

The giant considered her for a long moment. Then he shrugged, with a creak of leather. "Go on, girl."

She closed her eyes. For a few breaths the room was very quiet. Then she said, evenly:

"Mr. Calloran. There's a hole in you about the size of a spring. You've never known what it was. You wake some mornings and you're angry before you're awake, and you don't know at what." She opened her eyes. "It was a girl. I think you had a sister."

Big Ned's face did not change. But the hand on his arm trembled, very slightly, and the big knuckles went the color of tallow.

"I've no sister," he said hoarsely.

"I know," said Roz. "That's the hole."

She went around the table. She did not do it cruelly. She did it as a nurse sets a bone, quickly and with great care. To Sister Perpetua she said, "There's a winter, long ago. Something happened to someone you nursed." To Greeley: "A voice. A man's voice, singing. You were very young." To Penny Penhallow she said only, "Oh," and then, quietly, "I'm sorry," and Penny Penhallow, who was the toughest woman in Soot Row, looked away and wiped her nose with the back of her wrist.

Nobody said it was a trick. Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then the door scraped.

Josiah came in out of the gray with a heavy ledger under one arm, bound in black cloth, its corners worn pale. He crossed the cooperage with the straight back of a soldier and laid it on the table, in the lamplight, with a flat sound like a verdict.

"Orphan Tithes," he said. "Taken from the Council Archive under the Dome, four days ago. Seven hundred and twelve children, ages five to fourteen, entered by name and date. Beside each, what was taken." His voice was dry and level. "I served the office that signed the warrants. I have read my own signature on forty-one of them. I would be grateful if you would read it too."

Greeley opened the book. Sister Perpetua leaned in beside him. A little sound came out of her, like a breath through a crack.

"That's Maggie Doyle," she whispered. "She came to us at six. She never knew her mother's name."

Felix was the last to speak.

He had been sitting on a keg in the corner, with his knees together and his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, as if he hoped to be overlooked. Now he stood. He was pale and thin in a borrowed coat two sizes too big. Everyone in the room turned to look at him, because everyone in the room knew the face. It was the face on the portrait in the Chairman's hall.

"My name is Felix Whitcomb," he said. His voice shook. He did not let it stop. "I am the son of Augustus Whitcomb. He ordered me killed on Pier Nine, in front of forty soldiers. I'm not here to ask for your trust. I haven't earned it." He swallowed. "But I made the glass that burned your docks, and I'd like to help put them out. And I thought you should know who I was, before you decided."

Nobody spoke.

"I'm here," said Felix. "That's all."

…

It was Big Ned Calloran who broke the silence.

"What do you want?"

Dex let out a breath that he had been holding for what felt like an hour.

He told them. He told it clean, the way he'd told Hollis on the harbor steps, only shorter, and with the names filled in. The Heart. The Dome. The eclipse. The Memory Auction on the night before, a public sale of stolen secrets that Whitcomb would never miss, because it was the one night of the year he got to feel like a king. A false Heart, to be sold. A true one, to be sung.

"I can't do it alone," said Dex. "I can't do it with six. I need a city."

He had never said that sentence before. It tasted odd in his mouth. Like a coin he had been carrying a long time and had never once spent.

They divided it up around the lamp, in low voices, with the quick fierce practicality of people who had been surviving by their wits since birth. Penny Penhallow would print handbills, ten thousand by Monday, and feed rumors of the Auction to every tavern on the Docks. Greeley's porters would carry word up the line and keep a carriage at every corner of the Hill. Sister Perpetua's women would hide whoever needed hiding, and feed whoever was hungry, and watch the Watch. The Longshoremen would hold St. Cinder's and the roads to it. "Nobody gets past my boys," said Big Ned, "that doesn't have my say." Ma Tilly's Saints would be lamplighters, polishers, scrub-boys, and ladies' maids, in the Dome itself, in the liveries of the people they had always cleaned up after.

"And the money?" said Penny.

"I'll tell you the price out loud," said Dex. "It's a rule. You'll hear it from every one of my people." He set his hand flat on the table. "A million dollars in gold. From Whitcomb's own strongroom, in exchange for a thing that isn't what he thinks it is. Every coin of it goes to the people at this table. Every one. I take nothing."

"And you?" said Sister Perpetua. "What's your price, Mr. Hallam?"

"Aldridge," said Dex. "If it's all the same to you."

The old woman's eyes were very bright.

"Mr. Aldridge, then."

"I'll be standing on a dais at noon, in front of five thousand people, and a man who ordered my parents killed. And I will probably not walk off it." He said it plainly. "That's the price. I only wanted you to hear it from me."

…

For a moment nothing happened.

Then Sister Perpetua got down from her chair, with some difficulty, and knelt on the cooperage floor in her green-seamed habit, with her old knees on the sawdust. She bowed her head.

"Then from today," she said, quietly, "we are not the forgotten."

It was said like a prayer. It was said like a vow.

Big Ned stood up. He did it slowly, in a groan of leather. His great hand came down on the table like an anvil, and stayed there. Greeley rose. Then Penny, wiping her face with her cuff, with her chin in the air. Roz. Josiah, at attention. Felix. And Ma Tilly last of all, small and square, with her fists on her hips and her chin up, like a woman looking at a daughter who has come home.

They stood.

Dex looked round the table.

He had never seen so many people on their feet for him. He had never, he realized, been for anyone. He had been a hand on a lock, and a voice in a doorway, and a name on a slip. He had been a thing people used. And here were a dockworker, a nun, a porter, a pressman, an old woman, a soldier, a boy, and a girl with a stethoscope for ears, every one of them with their own hole and their own grief, rising to stand in the lamplight on the flimsiest promise he had ever made.

Something in his chest turned over, very slowly, like a key.

Oh, he thought. This is what it's for.

…

Afterward, when the cooperage had emptied and the lamp had burned down to a blue bead, he sat alone on an upturned barrel with the black ledger open on his knee.

He turned to the new page. The pencil was warm in his hand.

There was a number in his head. He had worked it out on the walk over. Big Ned's eleven hundred. The Harbor Women, the Porters, the Press. The Saints and their families. The lamplighters, the laundresses, the cart-boys, the children who ran messages for pennies. All the people he'd counted, in the dark, on his fingers.

He wrote it carefully, in his small cramped hand.

112.

He looked at it. It sat on the page like a small stone. A hundred and twelve: the number of heads that had nodded, in that room, in the last hour. It was a good number. It was more than he had ever had.

He drew a line through it.

Beneath, after a moment, in the same cramped hand, he wrote a single word.

Everyone.