WARDEN NO MORE

Day 59 of 100

They took the badge from him on Tuesday morning, in the loft of the Post, with the sun on the floor and a canary singing in the baker's window across the street.

It was Hartwell who did it. They had given him the duty as a kind of cruelty, or a kindness; Rooke could not tell which. The broad red-faced man stood in the doorway with his cap in his hands, and a sheet of paper, and a face so wretched that Rooke almost felt sorry for him. Behind him on the stair waited two men in Bureau gray. One carried a leather satchel. One carried a pair of handcuffs, held low and out of sight, in the manner of a man who hoped not to be asked.

"Captain," said Hartwell.

"Tom."

"I'm instructed to read you the order."

"Then read it."

Hartwell read it. It was brief. By authority of the Director of Special Dispositions, under Section Four of the Wardens' Regulations, Captain Callum Rooke, #0041, was suspended from his command pending inquiry into charges of obstruction, insubordination, and the harboring of a Doubled Person. He was to surrender his badge, his sidearm, and his keys. He was to remain at the Post, within the precinct, under the guard of two officers, until the Director saw fit to examine him. He was forbidden to communicate with any person outside the Post.

It ended: By order. A. Halloran.

The paper rustled in Hartwell's hand.

"I'm sorry," he said, in a low voice. "God knows I'm sorry. I'd not have taken it if there'd been any—"

"It's all right."

"It isn't."

"It is, Tom." Rooke unpinned the badge from his breast. It was a small thing, a tarnished silver shield with a number, worn smooth at the corners by ten years of his thumb. He turned it over once. He held it out. "You've a family. Do it properly. I'd sooner it was you."

Hartwell took it. His fingers trembled. He took the revolver, which Rooke handed over by the barrel, and the ring of keys, and a notebook, and a pen; and stood there a moment holding them all, the whole small clutter of a man's authority, with the air of one who has been entrusted with a dead bird.

"They've searched the lake," he said abruptly. "All night. The Director had boats out. They found the hole where she went in. They found her slipper." He swallowed. "They did not find her."

"No."

"I'm glad."

Rooke looked at him.

"Don't tell anyone," said Hartwell. "I'm a Warden. But I'm glad."

He went out. The two men in gray took up their places at the head of the stair, and the door closed.

…

For two days he did nothing.

It was the thing he had never been able to do. He lay on the cot in the loft with his arm across his eyes and watched the light go slowly round the wall; he heard the Post go on below him, the creak of the stair, the clank of the stove, Pip's cracked whistle, the telegraph's idle chatter. He heard strange voices. He heard the heavy tread of Calder, whom he had not known to come to the Post, going through the files. Sometimes in the night he heard the two men outside the door, talking low about their wives.

He did not sleep.

He lay and looked at it. He looked at all of it, in the dark, with the cold clear dispassion of a man examining a wound. The dock. The book. The tearing. Ten years of walking, with his head down, like a man carrying a lamp whose flame he cannot see. A long ledger of small good works, balanced against one enormous debt. I put the right name on the right paper. I stood between a family and a summons.

And the debt had not shrunk by a farthing.

You saved me, she had said. And you ruined me.

Both at once.

He turned on his side and put his face against the wall. The plaster was cool. It smelled of old whitewash and the damp of a hundred winters. He thought of a figure in a fisherman's coat, walking away across the ice in the dawn. He thought of the long, level, unhurried tread of her, and how it had not faltered.

She is safe, he told himself. She is at Ruth Pellam's. Okafor said so.

She does not wish to see me.

She has every right.

…

Okafor came on the third night.

He came up the stair at midnight with a lantern and a tin plate of bread and cold ham, which he set on the floor with a clatter, and a bottle of porter under his arm. The two guards had been sent off for the night. Rooke did not ask how. The Irishman set the lantern on the table, and the bottle beside it, and sat down on the only chair, and stretched his boots out in front of him with a groan.

"They've put Hartwell in your office," he said.

"I heard."

"He sits at your desk with his hat on, as if it might bite him. He's a good man, Hartwell. Terrible clerk." He uncorked the bottle with his teeth. "Pip's been crying. He thinks it's his fault."

"It's not."

"I told him. He doesn't believe me." Okafor took a long pull and passed the bottle. "Drink that. You look like the dog's dinner."

Rooke drank.

It was thick, bitter, and warm. It went down like a fist. He sat on the edge of the cot with the bottle between his knees, and the lantern threw their two shadows up the sloped ceiling, huge and bent, and for a while neither spoke.

"She's well," said Okafor.

His head came up.

"I had it from Josie Tull, this afternoon, in the infirmary, with the door shut. She's at Pellam's. She's eating. She's sleeping a bit. She has the old woman's cat on her feet and a poultice on her chest, and she says—" He cleared his throat. "She says to tell you she is not angry. That she is still thinking. That she'll send word."

Rooke said nothing. He found that he could not.

"That's the lot," said Okafor gently. "That's what she said. I asked Josie, I asked twice, was there any more? There wasn't. But the lass was smiling when she said it. I'd not put much on that, but I'd not take it off, either."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. I'm only the postman." He leaned forward, and his heavy face was suddenly grave. "I've something else, Callum. And I'll need you to sit up and hear it."

…

He took it from inside his coat.

It was a flat oilcloth packet, tied with twine, and so thick that it had made a visible bulge against his ribs. He laid it on the table and undid the knot. Inside, in a neat sheaf, lay a hundred or more sheets of foolscap, closely written in a small, precise, familiar hand.

"I didn't steal it," said Okafor. "I'd have you know that. It was given."

"By whom?"

"Dr. Ines Calder."

Rooke stared.

"She came to the Post last night. Alone, at the back door, at half past ten. In a cloak, with a veil, like a woman going to a séance." The Irishman's blue eyes were a little wild. "I thought it was a trap. I had my hand on my gun. She said, 'Lieutenant, I wish to speak to you, and I wish to do it before I lose my courage.' She gave me this. She said, 'It is the whole of it. The Reservoir. The Rite. I have kept it for three years. I cannot keep it any longer.' And then she sat down on the step and was sick in the rhubarb."

"Calder."

"The very same."

"But she's his—"

"She's a woman who has been writing down what she saw, and is afraid of where it goes." Okafor shrugged his vast shoulders. "I don't ask. I'm only the one she found. She said, 'Give it to Rooke. He is the only one the Director fears.'"

He pushed the packet across.

Rooke took it. He opened it on his knee. The first page was a heading, in a clerk's copperplate: BLACKFROST VAULT. RESERVOIR INTAKE REGISTER. 1887–1894. Compiled by I. Calder, M.D., from the Director's private ledgers. Confidential.

He turned the page.

…

It was a list.

It was a long list, closely ruled, in columns. Date of intake. Name. Age. Source. Name after name after name. He ran his eye down it, and the figures swam, and a cold stillness settled on him like a hand.

14 Oct. 1887. Marsh, Abigail. 31. Hartford. Doppel pair. Both drawn.

2 Nov. 1887. Garrity, Thos. 44. Burlington. Doppel pair. Both drawn.

Both drawn. Both drawn. Both drawn.

It went on for seven years. A clergyman. A girl of sixteen. A piano-maker. Sixty-seven pairs. A hundred and thirty-four souls. And beside each name, in the last column, a small neat notation in the Director's own hand, which Calder had faithfully copied: Yield. 3 yrs. 4 yrs. 2½ yrs. Exhausted.

Exhausted.

He turned the leaf.

Interim entries. Non-Doppel sources.

His eye ran down the page, and stopped.

9 Sept. 1875. Rooke, Thaddeus. 44. Lake Merrow, Vt. Complaint: drowning. Soul extracted in the course of examination, Burlington Office, 14 Oct.–29 Nov. Subject returned to family, stripped. Yield: 11 years, 1 month. Exhausted Jan. 1887.

Note (A.H.): The first. Proof of principle. Subject chosen for absence of gift and low connection. Recommended: continue the program under cover of the Doppel Act.

The room had gone very quiet.

He read it a second time. Then a third. The letters were quite clear and black on the white page, and each one seemed to him to stand out from the paper, an inch above it, as if cut from metal.

Exhausted Jan. 1887.

His father had died in January of 1887. In his bed, in the cottage, with the stove going. He had been sitting upright, looking at the window, as he had sat for eleven years; and Rooke had gone to him with the soup and found that the thing which had been looking out of his eyes was no longer there.

He had thought it a mercy. He had thought, at last. He'd closed the eyelids with his thumb. He had wept for the first time in a year, because it was the first time in a year he'd been permitted.

Exhausted.

It was a battery, thought Rooke. He was a lamp. They lit him and left him burning in a room, and I fed him with a spoon, and it was in the register the whole time.

…

He didn't hear Okafor speak. He was aware of the Irishman's voice somewhere very far off, a rumble, like thunder on another side of a hill, and then of a hand on his arm.

He found that he was standing.

He did not know how. He was on his feet in the middle of the loft with the register on the floor, scattered in a fan of pale sheets, and his breath going in great ragged gulps; and the lantern light swung wildly over the beams. He put out a hand. It met the wall. The plaster was cold. He leaned his forehead against it and shut his eyes.

"Cal—"

"Don't."

"It's a terrible thing."

"It is not terrible." His voice cracked like a whip. "It is a bookkeeping entry. The first. Proof of principle. They chose him. Out of every man in the county. For a drowning. They wrote a complaint and sent a man with a paper, and he looked at my father and thought, a good one, no gift, no friends. He took him to Burlington and he put his hands on him." He struck the wall once with the flat of his palm. "And I became a Warden. Of my own free will. Because I wanted to find out. And all the time—"

"You were used."

"For ten years."

"Aye."

"He let me join. He signed my commission." Rooke turned. His face, in the lamp's glow, was gaunt and white and utterly unrecognizable. "He sat in the Dean's study and said I knew your father. A fine man. He said, a Directorship. He said I was a man of rare gifts, and he would rather work with me than against. He meant it! He meant every word. He has been feeding on me for ten years, and he meant it."

"Callum."

"Don't tell me to be calm."

"I'll not." Okafor stood. He took the Captain by both shoulders, in his great, rough, careful hands, and held him, not hard, but entirely firmly, as one holds a boat in a swell. "I'd tell you to break the furniture, if I thought it'd do any good. There's a bottle there. There's a window. I'll hold your coat."

Rooke stared at him.

And, absurdly, a short wild bark of a laugh broke from him, and then another, and then he was shaking with it, helplessly, with his forehead against the big man's shoulder and his hands knotted in the stuff of his coat.

It was not a long storm. It passed. It left him spent, and cold, and strangely light, like a man who has been fevered and woke with the fever gone. He stood there with his eyes shut and breathed.

"Better?" said Okafor.

"No."

"Good. It'd be a poor sort of man who was."

…

There was a small round mirror on the shelf over the washstand. It had been there since Rooke took the loft, a shaving-glass, cheap, flawed, with a crack in one corner, and he had used it daily for ten years without once looking at what was in it.

He looked now.

He did not know why. He had risen from the cot, and washed his face, and crossed the room to put the register back in its oilcloth; and the glass had caught the lantern, and held it. He saw a pale oval. A dark head. And he thought, with a curious, remote deliberation: I have looked at everyone's light but my own.

He had never done it. It was a thing one did not do. A Seer's gift looked outward; a man did not turn it upon himself, any more than he put his eye to his own eye. The books spoke of madness. The cadets' masters had spoken of blindness.

He put up the Sight.

The room softened. The shelf, the basin, the lantern, bloomed into haloes. The glass swam; the pale oval deepened and brightened and came forward; and he saw, for the first time in his life, what he was.

It was not what he expected.

He had braced for a darkness. He had imagined a black thing, a stain, a rot, such as a murderer ought to have. But what stood in the glass was a column of pale gray-gold light, steady and rather beautiful, about the height of a man; and it was cracked.

It was cracked from top to bottom. A hundred fine lines ran through it, like the lines in a pane of glass that has been struck by a stone, and from the cracks, in thin dark threads, bled something that was not light. It was the color of rust. It ran down his flanks like old tears. And at the center, around the place where his heart should be, clenched in the very core of him like a pair of hands, was a shape.

Two hands. Small, black, and perfectly distinct.

They were a boy's hands. They held something. It was a ball of silver-blue fire, no larger than a fist, torn down the center; and they held it with an unbearable tenderness, as if afraid to let go and afraid to keep.

He had worn them for ten years.

He had carried them in his chest through every day of his life, and every night, and had never once known why he could not breathe.

Oh, he thought.

Oh, you poor fool.

He did not know whom he meant.

…

When the Sight left him he was sitting on the cot with his hands hanging between his knees, and the lantern was burning low, and Okafor was a dark bulk by the table, watching.

"Well?" said the Irishman, after a time.

"I'm broken."

"Aye."

"I'm broken, and I'm a fool, and I've been a puppet for ten years." He heard how flat his own voice was. "And she has forty days. And I am under guard in a loft."

"Aye."

"And Halloran has a Mirror, and a Rite, and the whole Bureau."

"Aye."

"And I have no right to ask her for anything."

"No," said Okafor.

Rooke raised his head.

The big man had not moved. He sat with his huge hands on his knees, in the lamplight, his weathered face deeply grave; and in his small blue eyes was an expression that Rooke had seen in them only once before, on a night in Rutland, when they had stood together over a dead child.

"You don't," said Okafor. "You've no right at all. You did a terrible thing, lad, and you've paid for it ten years. And you'll pay for it ten more, if you're any kind of man, because you're that sort. You'll flay yourself every day of your life. I've watched you do it." He drew a breath. "And it won't bring her back. And it won't mend a thing."

"I know."

"So I'll say what I came to say, and then I'll go." He leaned forward, and his voice dropped. "You don't need anyone to forgive you, Callum. You're not that kind of fool. You'll never be forgiven, because you'll never let yourself. That's the whole of your nature. And I'll not waste my breath."

He put a finger on Rooke's chest, on the very place where the black hands lay.

"But she does need you," said Okafor. "That lass. Out there. With forty days and a Director at her heels. She needs a man with a gift, and a gun, and the sense to use them. And she doesn't need him sorry. She needs him there."

He stood. He took up the empty bottle, and the tin plate, and the lantern, and went to the door.

"Eat the ham," he said. "I'll get your boots."