第4章 The Face on Lantern Row

Braccus had been working Lantern Row for three weeks already, and by the time Ophira went up to look at him, half the row knew his face and none of them knew his business, which was the mark of a man who was very good at exactly one thing. Lantern Row climbed the Third Terrace in a shallow curve, and during the Lumenfast it was where the city spent its money. String after string of glass lamps hung between the eaves, gold and green and a deep red that made the whole street look, at dusk, like something inside a furnace. Stallholders were already selling Lumenfast tokens, brass discs stamped with the year, which children collected and adults traded and everyone pretended were worth more than they were. Ophira walked the row twice before she found him. He was at a card table in the lee of a lamp-post, running the three-shell game with a confidence that was itself a warning, because nobody ran shells on Lantern Row in festival week unless the row was paying them to be the entertainment. He was young. That was the first thing. Twenty-four, maybe. Wearing a coat cut like money but not cut for him. His hands were fast and clean and his eyes never stopped moving. She watched him take a merchant's boy for two silver and then give one of it back, with a smile, when the boy started to cry. That was the moment she decided she could use him. "Your second shell is a cork," she said, sitting down across from him without being asked. "You've shaved it. If anyone with an eye watches you for ten minutes they'll see the weight." The young man's hands paused. Then he grinned, which was the right move and the wrong face, because the grin came a half-beat late and told her more than he wanted to give. "And if anyone with an eye watches me," he said, "I'd want them to tell me over a drink. You buying?" "You're buying. You just took two silver and gave one back." She slid the coin across the table before he could answer. "I need a face. Someone who can stand in a doorway in the Aureole in a festival coat and be so obviously a guest that nobody asks them a question." "Ambitious." "It's Lumenfast. Everyone's ambitious in Lumenfast week." He picked up the coin and bit it, which was theater, and then he turned it over and looked at the milled edge, which was not. "Bettany," he said. "You've heard of me." "I've heard of you. I heard you work the harvest fairs, not the big city." "I came up for the festival." He set the coin down and did not push it back. "It's the tenth year. Nobody who can cross a room should be anywhere else. The Cognate opens the Aureole, the terraces all light up, and for ten nights every person in this city is either drunk or pretending to be. It's the best crowd in the world to work." Ophira studied him. There was something under the confidence, and it had a particular shape, and she could not yet read it, and the not-reading of it bothered her the way a loose stone bothered her. "I'm not offering a festival job," she said. "I'm offering a share of whatever the Reliquary is holding, minus three crates, and I'm offering it to be spent somewhere far from Vessant, because after the tenth night there won't be a place for any of us on these terraces." Bettany's grin went away entirely. He looked at her, really looked at her, and his face did something complicated that she filed away and did not understand. "You're Ophira," he said. "I am." "I know your face." "You've read about the Aureole job. Everyone has." "No." He shook his head slowly, and for a moment he was not young at all. "I know your face because I was in the room on the fourth tier three years ago, wearing a festival coat, standing in a doorway, being so obviously a guest that nobody asked me a question." The row went on around them. Somewhere up the curve, a stringer dropped a lamp and swore, and the crowd laughed, and the glass did not break. Ophira did not move. Under the table, her hand found the edge of her pick-case by reflex, and held it, and did not open it. "Say that again," she said. "I was hired to stand in that corridor and count the wardens." Bettany's voice had dropped to the flatness of a man telling a story he had told himself many times. "I counted them, and I gave the count to the man who paid me, and I went home. I didn't know what he was going to do with it. I swear to you I didn't." "And then Harlo died in a corridor you had counted for somebody else." "Yes." The lamps over the row swayed in a wind that had come up off the lower terraces, and the colors moved across Bettany's face like water crossing a stone. Ophira was aware, distantly, that she should walk away. A crew built on this would kill itself before the festival ever opened. Any sane thief would take her pick-case and use it, or take her silence and go, or climb back down to the Undercroft and tell Grissa the job was off. Instead she heard herself say, "You counted their wardens for a man who wanted Harlo dead." "I didn't know that's what he wanted." "Then you were the clumsiest tool in Vessant. Or you're lying." She leaned forward. "I'm not going to sort out which tonight. What I'm going to do is tell you something true, and I want you to hear it, because it's the only thing you get to keep for free." "Go on." "Right now you're the only person in this city who has guessed I'm planning to go back into the Aureole. That makes you a danger, and it also makes you useful, and I have never once in my life let being angry cost me a tool." She stood. "You're on the crew. Nine days. If you run, I'll find you. If you tell anyone, I'll make sure the Cognate has your name before I have to run, and then you'll be the one they hang as the example." Bettany sat looking at the shells. Somewhere behind his eyes a man was doing arithmetic that he had been avoiding for three years, and Ophira watched it happen and did not help him. "You're not going to ask me who the man was," he said. "I already know who the man was," Ophira said. "I've known since you sat down. There's one person in Vessant who hires festival faces with new-minted Cognate silver and has a reason to want a thief to fail in that corridor. I just wanted to hear you say the name out loud, because a man who can say a thing out loud is a man who can be worked with, and a man who can't is a man who'll sell you the moment the price is right." Bettany looked at her. For a moment he was not young at all, and not charming, and not quick, and Ophira saw the thing under all of it, which was a nineteen-year-old who had taken money he did not understand and had spent three years discovering exactly what it had bought. "Then you know I can't be trusted," he said. "No," Ophira said. "I know you can be trusted, which is worse for both of us." Then he scooped the shells up and put them in his coat, one two three, and stood. "For what it's worth," he said quietly, "I've been waiting three years for somebody to come up this row and ask me about that day. I didn't think it would be you." "Neither did I," Ophira said. ---