Six Rules for Six Thieves

POV: Dex

The basement of the Tallow Exchange had never held six people who disliked one another this much, and Dex, who had once run a card game for two rival gangs in the same room, was beginning to think it showed.

He had put them around the long table, the one with the burn scars and the ink rings, under the hanging lamp. Ma Tilly had laid out bread, cold ham, a pot of black coffee and a plate of the hard little ginger biscuits she called snaps, and nobody had touched any of it. Roz sat at the far end with her back straight and her hands flat on the wood. Josiah sat as far from her as the table allowed, which was exactly the diagonal, in a borrowed shirt too short in the sleeves, looking at nothing with his whole face. He had shaved. He looked like a man who had been told to attend his own funeral and had decided to be punctual.

Hollis lounged between them, one boot on a chair, rolling a coin across the knuckles of his good hand. Felix had taken the seat nearest the lamp so that he could see everyone. He was sitting on his hands to keep from fidgeting, which meant that every few seconds the whole chair squeaked. Viv perched on the table's edge, not in a chair at all, swinging one foot, eating a ginger snap and watching the room as though it were a play she had paid for.

"Well," said Hollis, to the ceiling. "This is nice. Nobody's shot anybody yet."

"It's early," said Viv.

"I'm told it's an excellent vintage of silence."

"If you'd like to leave—" Josiah began.

"If I'd like to leave, Captain, I'd have left at the Palisade, where there was a better view."

"Friends," said Dex.

He did not raise his voice. He had learned long ago that raising it was a tax, and he didn't have the money. He simply stood, using the cane, and the room, which had been made up of six people looking at one another, became six people looking at him. It wasn't comfortable. He did it anyway.

"Thank you for coming. I'll say a few things, and then you can hate me individually." He took a sheet of paper from his waistcoat. It had been folded, and unfolded, and folded again, and the creases were soft as cloth. "You've all agreed to a single job. I haven't told you everything, and I won't, because what you don't know can't be taken out of you. That's not an insult. It's the way the Council works. They don't ask. They take."

A quiet. Roz's fingers curled on the wood.

"What I can give you is rules. There are six. I'll say them once. After that, if you break one, I'll know, and I'll say your name, and we'll all pretend to be surprised."

He read from the paper, though he knew it by heart.

"One. No one goes alone. Not to the privy. Not to the corner shop. Two sets of eyes at all times, and the second set doesn't blink."

"Two," said Felix, at once, "Two of everything." He looked startled. "I'm sorry. I thought that was the next one."

"It is. Two. Two of everything. Two ways in. Two ways out. Two plans. Two copies of any paper that matters. If we've one road, we haven't a road." Dex permitted himself a very faint smile. "Three. No killing, unless a gun is pointed at you."

He didn't look at Josiah, and he didn't look at Hollis, and he felt both of them not look back.

"Four. Say the price out loud. Every gift has a Cost. You all know it. Some of you are paying more than you've admitted. I don't want to hear the whole shape of your grief. I want to hear the name of the thing. That way someone else knows it's gone. That way it doesn't go quietly." He paused. "I'll write it down."

Viv's foot had stopped swinging.

"Five. If the plan breaks, the plan was mine. Whatever goes wrong, I carry. Nobody in this room is to blame anyone else, or themselves. You blame me. I'll be the one who made it."

"And six," said Dex, and found, to his annoyance, that this was the one that stuck in his throat. "Nobody leaves without telling me."

No one said anything.

"I mean it," he said. "If you're scared, you tell me. If you quit, you tell me. If you die, I'd like to hear about it from you first." That earned him a small, surprised snort from Hollis. "I've dealt with people who vanish. I've found out what it costs the ones left behind."

He sat down. It was more abrupt than he'd intended; the leg gave under him a little at the end. He saw Josiah notice, and saw him look away with courtesy so scrupulous it was almost an insult.

"That's it," Dex said. "Questions."

"Will there be a salary?" said Felix.

"There's already a retainer."

"Oh. Yes. So there is." He beamed.

"I have a question," said Roz.

Everyone turned.

"Rule three." She spoke without moving her eyes from Dex. "If a gun is pointed at me, and he's the one pointing it—" she did not so much as glance at Josiah— "I'd like to know whether rule three covers me."

A very long silence.

"It covers everyone," said Dex.

"I see."

"I have no weapon," said Josiah, in a voice like cold iron, "and I will not be pointing one at anyone in this room."

"I'm sure," said Roz.

Hollis picked up his coin, flipped it, caught it. "I'll put that down as a no questions and we'll proceed."

…

The plan, such as it was, took an hour.

Josiah drew the Undervault. Dex had expected reluctance, but the man took the stub of pencil as though it were a rifle and set to work on the back of a roll of wallpaper, with the single-minded neatness of a draftsman. He stood to draw it. He had a way of locking his heels together, Dex noticed, and of stopping every few lines to look at the page with a flat, bitter attention, as if reading an old letter.

"The Undervault," he said, "has three levels. The first is the Archive of Tithes, where the vials are stored. The second is the Chamber of Receipts. The third is not on any plan I've seen." He drew a line. "You enter through the Gallery of Founders. It's a long portrait hall on the lowest public floor of Charter Hall, and the way down is behind a painted door."

"Painted," said Felix.

"A portrait of Hannah Merrick, the Founder. The frame is on a hinge." Josiah's mouth thinned. "On the night of the Masquerade, the doors of the Hall are opened for the Founders' Oath, and the portrait swings aside, and the Houses go down by the Hush Stair. Two hundred and twelve steps. There's a rite. Each of the twelve Houses lays a candle at the foot. It takes twenty minutes."

"And we're there for the twenty minutes."

"We are there for as long as we can be there without being seen. The stair has no landings. The walls are black glass, polished, and in places they're set with mirrors." A flick of the eyes toward Viv. "The Council doesn't care for reflection. At the bottom there is the Hall of Hands, a room of statues. And after that—" he drew a square, and put in it a smaller one, and a dot— "the Mirror Room. Which is a thing I have not seen. I know only that it is where the Chartered keep their reflection, and the Unchartered are not meant to enter."

"Why not?" said Viv, who had stopped eating.

"I'm told," said Josiah, with stiff reluctance, "that it swallows them."

A pause.

"Wonderful," said Hollis.

"Past the Mirror Room, a corridor. Trapped. Then the Triple Seal." He put a mark at the bottom of the page, and underlined it three times, hard enough to cut the paper. "A door. Three locks. Three keys, held by three different Houses. Each of them has to be turned in order, within a count of nine. That is the vault door. Beyond it is where they keep what is theirs."

"The Stone," said Dex.

"The Founder's Stone." Josiah did not look up. "It's said to be a lump of black glass the size of a child's head, fallen from the sky before the city was built. I never saw it. I never believed it existed."

"Does it?"

"I believe," said Josiah, "that every secret in a vault has a use."

Dex let the silence stay. It was not a lie, exactly. He had told them what was in the Stone: a meteorite, black, ancient, in the care of the Council. He had not told them that it was the size of a human heart, and that it beat once an hour. He had not told them whose voice could wake it.

He was beginning to understand that there were a great many things he had not told them. He was surprisingly tired of it.

"And the masquerade?" said Hollis. "How do six paupers in boots get invited to a ball?"

"We don't," said Dex. "We get hired."

He took a card from his waistcoat and laid it in the lamplight. It was stiff, cream-colored, edged in gilt. The Brandywine Quintet of Philadelphia. Engaged for the Founders' Masquerade, Charter Hall, the fourteenth of October at eight o'clock.

"They're real," said Felix. "I read about them in the Gazette."

"They're real. They arrive in ten days, by train, to play for the Houses. They're about to receive a very handsome offer from an anonymous benefactor to spend a month in the Hotel Crestwood on the Terrace. All expenses paid." Dex turned the card between his fingers. "Their instruments and their invitation will be borrowed. Their reputations will be briefly worn."

"By us," said Josiah.

"By us."

"I haven't played the viola in fifteen years."

"Then you'll be a genuine Philadelphian," said Dex. "They never play it well either."

Hollis laughed, a short surprised crack of sound. Felix, who had been holding it in, laughed as well, and then put a hand over his mouth. Even Viv's mouth twitched. And down at the end of the table, very faintly, in the dark by the lamp, something happened to Roz's face. It was not a smile. It was the memory of where one would go.

That, thought Dex, is a beginning.

…

"A word, Captain."

It was past ten. The others had gone upstairs for Ma Tilly's supper, a smell of frying onions and steamed pudding sliding down the cellar steps, and Josiah had stayed to roll up the wallpaper. He did it precisely, with the corners square.

"Mr. Hallam."

"The Hush Stair." Dex kept his voice level. "Two hundred and twelve."

Josiah's hands went still. For a moment he did not turn around. Then he said, with great care, in a tone that had no pity in it and no contempt, which was somehow worse than either, "Can you manage it?"

"Can I manage a stair?"

"I should like to know before I stake my life on the answer."

The question was fair. Dex had expected it. He had spent two nights in the cellar with a measuring tape and the cellar steps, counting seconds, adding minutes, and the number at the end had not been good.

He thought of the cold on the day the roof came down, of a dark so complete it had a weight. He thought of the long climb afterward, on a stranger's back, in a bundle of aprons. He had been nine. He had not known his name. He had not known anything at all except that if he stopped the dark would stay.

"Captain," he said, "I managed Number Nine."

Josiah turned.

He looked, for a long, level moment, at Dex's face. The look went across it like a hand across a table, feeling for crumbs. Then at the cane. Then, very briefly, at the left leg. Whatever he found there seemed to settle something. His eyes, Dex saw, were the color of dry slate, and not in the least unkind.

"Then you may be the only one of us," he said, "who knows what the bottom looks like."

He tucked the wallpaper under his arm and went up.

…

Felix was easier. Felix came to the office at eleven, still beaming, with a bag of tools over his shoulder and a smear of what looked like beet juice on his cuff, and sat on the edge of the visitor's chair as though it might ignite.

"You wanted me?"

"I want you to make two of something."

"Of course! What?"

"The Stone. A glass sphere, the size of a human heart. Black. Opaque, with a faint inner glow, if you can manage it; a pulse of light, once per beat, as if it were alive." Dex slid a drawing across the desk. It was crude, a ball, with a crack drawn through it from pole to pole. "I'll give you the proportions. The crack is important. Make the crack exact."

Felix looked at the drawing for perhaps four seconds. He did not ask why. He did not ask why there should be two. A great and shining joy was coming up in his face, like a lamp being turned up.

"Oh," he said. "A replica. Two replicas. I haven't done glass in years, there's the annealing, and I'd want an oven, a proper one— Could I use the kiln at Ferrante's?"

"If you pay him."

"I'll pay him. I'll pay him in gratitude." He gathered the drawing in both hands. "May I ask why there are two?"

"Two of everything."

"Oh. Yes." A pause. "That's rule two."

"It is."

"I like your rules," said Felix, with transparent sincerity. "They're so tidy."

He went out, humming.

Dex sat quite still for a moment, looking at the closed door. He had known he would not ask. He had known it from the moment he saw the boy in the attic, among the burned curtains, with the soot on his chin. Felix would take whatever he was given, because someone had at last given him something, and it would not occur to him to ask what it was for.

That is the cruelty of it, thought Dex. Not that I'm lying. That I'm lying to the only one who would never think to check.

He pushed the thought away.

…

He opened the ledger.

It lay on the desk where he had left it, a heavy black book with a spine cracked white from use. The columns ran down the page in his small cramped hand: Owed. Paid. Price. He turned back through the entries, past the clerks and the landladies and the girl with the stolen deeds, until he reached the one on the last full page. Whitcomb, A. Debt: one heart. Price: Everything. He looked at it for a long time.

Underneath, because he was a man who kept books, he ruled a fresh line and wrote six names.

Marchetti. Boudreaux. Quade. Whitcomb, F. Pruitt.

And, after a moment's hesitation: Hallam.

The name sat oddly. It had never looked like a name to him. It looked like something borrowed and returned late.

"You hum."

He did not jump. He had trained himself out of jumping. But the pen did slip, and made a blot, and he put it down. Behind him, in the dark glass of the window, a figure had stepped out of the reflection of the lamp, in her black dress and gloves, with her hair pinned up, and her hands in her pockets.

"I do not."

"You do." Viv came around the desk. She leaned against the edge, quite close, and the lamplight put a thin gold line along her jaw. "Whenever you're thinking. You don't know you're doing it. It's a tune. The same tune, over and over, under your breath, and then you stop and rub your leg." She cocked her head. "What is it?"

"It's nothing."

"It's got a shape. I'd know it again." She considered him with open, clear-eyed curiosity, and without any particular kindness, which he found, curiously, steadied him. "It sounds like a lullaby."

"It isn't anything," said Dex. "It's a noise."

"All right."

She said it so easily that he almost believed her.

She looked at the ledger. She looked, he thought, at the line of names, and at the blot, and at the last name written there. She did not touch the page. Her mouth made a small, odd shape, like the beginning of a sentence she thought better of.

"Good night, Mr. Hallam."

"Good night, Miss Marchetti."

And she stepped sideways into the black glass of the window, and the reflection of the lamp closed over her like water, and he was alone.

He sat for some time.

Then, because the room was quiet and nobody was there, he found that he was humming.

…

Ma Tilly had come down the corridor to bring the cocoa. She stopped outside the office door with the tray in her hands and one broad foot lifted.

She had heard it before she had knocked.

It was soft. It was low. It came through the crack at the bottom of the door, a slow turning melody, with a long soft curl at the end of it like a hand brushing back hair. A tune with no words. A tune she knew down to the bones, as a woman knows the face of her own dead.

The cocoa was going cold in the cups. She did not move.

Very slowly, as though it were made of glass, she put the tray down on the floor. She straightened up. She backed one step into the shadow of the stair, and then another, until her shoulders touched the wall. Her right hand had gone to the pocket of her apron. It closed there on something small and square and thick, worn soft at the corners with years of handling, a little book bound in cracked brown leather.

She held it so hard her knuckles went white.

And in the office, a boy hummed on, and did not know that anyone could hear him.