The Facefaker's Game

by Chandler J. Birch

NIGHT came. In the districts near the river, it came with fog. In Burroughside it brought silence.

  The streets were deserted, picked clean of everything valuable. There were no police to coarsen the quiet with their footsteps and no young lovers to sweeten it with whispers. There were no scurrying thieves out in the dark; the second-story boys had long since departed for other districts, and would not return until well after sunup. Burroughside had all the stillness and pallor of a corpse.

  It was only playing dead, of course. Its silence was an intentional, held-breath quiet. Behind tightly fastened doors, beneath false floorboards, nestled in hideaways too high to reach, the gutter-folk clutched whatever weapons they could find and waited for morning. Very few of them slept. Folk said you were safe behind a threshold, but no one was stupid enough to trust that.

  An outsider might be tempted to think the makeshift blades were defenses, and would not notice how few of the gutter-folk carried cudgels or coshes. An outsider would not think how the broken-glass knives might be used if there were no hope for survival.

  The moon had hardly risen when the howls began.

  Ashes froze and felt his guts turn to water. A prayer to the Face of Cunning tumbled out of his mouth, and another one to the Face of Kindness followed, for all the good it would do. The Faces had no power over Ravagers.

  The howl had come from the south. That might have given him hope, but an answering cry rang out from the north, and another from the east.

  Still fifteen minutes from home at least. He could try his luck banging on doors, but there wasn’t a Burroughsider living who’d open their door after nightfall. No hiding places nearby, either.

  He could feel his heartbeat in his ears.

  More Ravager cries broke out, coming from every direction, wild and hungry. Hunting howls.

  Ashes’s hands started to shake, and he clenched his fists to stop them. Fear would do him no good here. He slipped off the main road and slid inside the scattered patches of deep darkness, and tried not to think what would happen if they found him.

  He kept moving toward home, careful and slow now, stepping where the mud wouldn’t suck on his shoes and his skin wouldn’t flash in the moonlight. He had to be silent now. Silent and invisible.

  Sloshing footsteps from down the street. He pressed himself against a wall and held his breath.

  Three figures loped into sight, backs hunched, heads thrust forward. Their naked skin was striped with scars, mottled with rust-colored blood.

  He caught their scent, foul and rotted, on the wind; his stomach twisted.

  The Ravagers would have looked human, almost. Their shape was human; one even looked female. But their eyes were wide and bloodshot; they moved like wolves. Raw red sores dotted their bodies. One let his mouth hang open, revealing something glittery inside—his teeth had been replaced with shards of glass.

  Ashes heard a rumbling growl. Another Ravager appeared at the other end of the street, twice the size of the others, powerfully built, chest crisscrossed with puckered scars. Blood dribbled from his mouth, staining his patchwork beard. He looked vicious and formidable until he moved, and Ashes saw he was favoring one leg.

  The other Ravagers saw it, too. There was not a moment of hesitation; all three dashed forward. The large Ravager stumbled backward, tried to run, but they were too quick. The female caught his leg in her teeth and jerked her head, ripping a bite out of his calf.

  The other two landed on him together. They underestimated the brute; he grasped one by the arm and flung it headfirst into a wall, so hard Ashes heard its skull crack. The brute grasped for the next, but not quickly enough. The glass-toothed male grabbed the brute’s head with both hands and wrenched it savagely to one side. Ashes flinched, though the snap was almost inaudible.

  The feeding took far longer than the fight. Wet, sloppy noises filled the street as the Ravagers disemboweled their kill, piece by piece by piece. The third pack member lay still by the wall, blood pooling around him, until the other two finished with the brute, and moved to their former comrade.

  Minutes crawled by. Finally the noises stopped. Sated, the two Ravagers clambered to their full height and retreated back the way they’d come.

  Ashes’s muscles ached. He let out a breath.

  The glass-toothed Ravager stopped, turned. His nose flared. Ashes pulled his coat tighter, suddenly aware of the meat hidden in it.

  The female stopped to watch as the male crept nearer to Ashes. The male’s lips curled back over ruined teeth.

  Ashes didn’t dare move; the Ravager would hear him. So he held perfectly still and pretended with all his might that he was invisible. He closed his eyes, not wanting the whites of them to give him away.

  He heard another step. The Ravager’s stench filled his nose, a stink of rancid meat and infection. Ashes scrunched his eyes tighter.

  I’m not here.

  Every muscle in his body clenched. A warm, foul wind brushed across his face.

  There was a scream in the distance, wordless but human. Ashes heard the Ravager grunt, then hurried footsteps. When Ashes opened his eyes, the monsters were gone.

  When his knees were not shaking, he continued creeping toward home. He had gone half a mile before the screams stopped.

  The Fortress was a slipshod building. Five stories tall and slender as a maiden, it looked ready to fall over if it could ever find a reason. It shook in high winds, couldn’t keep out rain or snow, and was cold as a witch’s heart. Someday he would leave it, or it would crumble to ruins while he was asleep. For now it was home.

  He had named it the Fortress to be funny, and realized sometime afterward that no one larger than him could possibly enter. The building’s innards were mostly burned away except for one floor at the very top, which could only be reached by the rickety iron staircase welded to the outside wall. The staircase didn’t touch the ground, but a ladder hung from the bottom of it, nearly ten feet off the surface, and there was a window just below to serve as a jumping-off point.

  Ashes glanced left and right, wary in case a Ravager tried to creep up on him. He saw nothing, and so took a running start and jumped, first to the window and then the ladder, catching its lowest rung with the tips of his fingers. Pushing against the wall with his feet, he worked his way up, and made the top in a matter of moments. He caught his breath there, pulling the ladder onto the staircase to prevent followers.

  He ascended the stairs, and near the top he got on his belly and crawled through a slim gap in the wall. The fit was uncomfortably tight. On the other side was another flight of stairs, this one missing its bottom half. The top half still held weight, though it regularly made vague threats to collapse on itself.

  The room on the highest floor was small, and latticed by shafts of moonlight that slipped through the empty places where brick and mortar ought to have been. It was made even smaller by the eclectic junk inside: rags and bits of string, bottles with the ends broken off, castoff Ivory handkerchiefs too wretched to be sold to the ragmen, and—strangest of all—nearly two dozen books. Books of all sizes and types, on all subjects, some with original covers and others swaddled in cloth to keep the paper dry and sorted. Each and all were stacked with precise care, largest to smallest, in five short towers. Not one corner was out of place.

  Barely one Burroughsider in twenty could read. Even those who had their letters weren’t likely to own books, not for very long: paper made good kindling in wintertime. A collection this size, so rigorously tended, would have drawn a great deal of notice.

  “Blimey,” he said softly. “Blimey?”

  There was a soft rustling, and a silhouetted head appeared behind the farthest tower of books. Its hair stuck out at odd angles, making the head seem misshapen and lumpy—or, rather, more misshapen and lumpy than it already was.

  “Ashes!” the boy exclaimed, and scurried out from behind the books. “You’re alive!”

  The streaks of moonlight revealed him in greater detail: slender-shouldered, shorte
r than Ashes. Probably younger, too, but it was difficult to be certain of anything where Blimey’s face was concerned. It had the usual details—nose, eyes, mouth—and they were all in their standard positions, but they didn’t seem to belong on a face, and certainly not all together.

  His nose was large and crooked, as if it had broken and never quite healed. The whites of his eyes were slightly yellowed, his irises mismatched: one blue and the other green. A long, pink scar stretched from his mouth to one oversized ear, reigning over a spiderweb of white scars scattered across his face. A noticeable lump marred his temple, though it lay buried beneath unkempt hair.

  “Got you supper,” Ashes said, producing the chicken-stuffed bread from his coat. “Bread and meat today. Sorry I’m so late.”

  Blimey didn’t seem to notice the food. “I heard howls—”

  “Weren’t nothing,” Ashes said, contorting his lips into a confident smile. “Got caught up doing things, is all. They can’t catch me. I’m too quick.”

  Blimey’s mouth thinned, just a little, but he took the half-loaf that Ashes offered. “What were you doing?”

  “Had a bit of a run-in with a copper,” Ashes said, keeping his voice perfectly level.

  The blood drained out of Blimey’s face. “Why? Did he ask— What did you do?”

  Ashes shrugged. “Nowt he could prove.”

  The lie, though necessary, niggled at him. Blimey claimed he was rasa, and that he’d received his unusual name from the first person he met in Teranis. But something about the claim had always seemed off to Ashes; Blimey knew things. Things about Teranis, about Ivories, about Yson’s exports and Boreas’s colleges and the countries outside the city. He could read and do sums.

  A real rasa was lucky to remember their own name.

  Ashes had never pressed him about it. Everyone had the right to their secrets. Besides, whatever secret Blimey was keeping, it had to be terrible indeed if he would rather be rasa.

  Blimey eyed him skeptically. “A copper held you up and you didn’t get tossed in the Basty?”

  “I’m a quick talker.” His confident smile came more naturally this time. “You know me. Here, now, I brought you something.”

  “Apart from supper and mendacities about pliable policemen?” Blimey asked innocently.

  “What’s mendacities?”

  Blimey blinked. “Stories.”

  “Mendacities.” The word had a unique shape, a fancy-sounding sneer inside it. Ashes could put that to good use. “That’s Ivorish?”

  “Lyonshire and Yson, mostly.”

  Ashes mouthed it to himself a few more times, getting a feel for where it could fit in his sentences. “You got more words for me?”

  A grin twisted onto Blimey’s face as he hefted his book. Of everything Ashes had ever scrounged, bought, or stolen, this was Blimey’s prize possession. Within it were more words than either of the boys could readily count, each followed by detailed definitions. Blimey spent much of his time sifting through it, memorizing new Ivorish words to teach to Ashes. On days when Blimey tired of new words, which were rare indeed, he read from a slimmer book Ashes had found outside a window in Glades. In it were all the rules for proper Ivorish speaking. They were far more numerous than Ashes could have guessed; the print was tiny. Blimey had read through it a dozen times.

  “I used one of yours today,” Ashes said proudly. “Streperous. For being loud and nasty, right?”

  One corner of Blimey’s mouth turned down. “Obstreperous?”

  “Right, yeah. That one.”

  “You said it ‘streperous’?”

  “So what if I did?”

  “It’s nothing. It’s just wrong, is all. Probably whoever heard you say it thought you were stupid, though.”

  Ashes prickled. “I ain’t stupid,” he said.

  “Say it in Ivorish, Ashes. We have to practice.”

  He blew out a breath. “I am not stupid.”

  “There you are. And I know you’re not stupid. Just—if you muck it, somebody will notice. And the coppers won’t take kindly to you twice.”

  He was right. The Ivorish language was a world unto itself, nowhere near as easy as imitating accents. It was complicated by the legions of arbitrary rules that Denizens, apparently, understood from the womb. Speaking it properly was like walking through Boreas Gutters on a moonless night: the roads were never where they ought to be, and a single misstep could be ruinous. In its own way, pretending to be Ivorish was near as perilous as sewer-scouring.

  He had to be perfect. At the end of the year, Bonnie the Lass—queen of Teranis crime—would come to Burroughside to take her Tithe from Mr. Ragged, and Ashes would catch her eye. He had to. Winter was approaching, and if things didn’t change soon, he and Blimey would starve or freeze to death.

  “Sorry. S’been a . . . long day.” He realized he was rubbing his neck, and dropped his hand. It was, fortunately, too dark for Blimey to see the bruises. “What’re your other words?”

  Blimey’s gargoyle-smile returned, and he began to recite them, referring only occasionally to the book in his lap. Ashes paid dutiful attention, memorizing what he could and keeping himself from looking bored or tired. Finding new words was all Blimey had; he hadn’t set foot outside the Fortress in almost a year. Yet another necessary sacrifice, because, as far as Mr. Ragged knew, Blimey was dead. Ragged would be displeased to learn otherwise.

  He reached the end of his list and beamed at Ashes. “Do you like them?”

  “I do,” Ashes said, patching the smile on again.

  “Which was your favorite?”

  Ashes chewed his tongue before saying, carefully, “Pussy-mouse.”

  Blimey stared for several seconds before he said, “Pu—pusillanimous, Ashes. Pusillanimous. Cowardly.”

  “That one,” Ashes said. “I like it. Good word to call people when you’re insulting them and wanna show you’re smarter, innit?”

  Blimey beamed. “It is good for that.”

  “Good words, Blimey.” He smiled winningly. “You’ll get us out of here yet.”

  He stretched out on the cold floor and closed his eyes. Faces, he was ready to sleep.

  He heard Blimey fidgeting. Ashes propped himself up on his elbows. “What’s it?”

  “You said you had something for me,” Blimey said.

  “Oh! You’re quite right I do,” Ashes said. He undid the tatty handkerchief around his wrist. “I thought you might could use it for keeping some of your books together. Some were falling apart, you said.”

  Blimey took the handkerchief with unmasked delight. “This’ll be right helpful, Ashes. Thank you. Where’d you get it?”

  “A princess gave me it,” Ashes replied smoothly. “Leastwise I figure she’s a princess, visiting from someplace. She didn’t know the city to save her life, and some foul old man kept babbling at her, so I pulled her away and pointed her off toward Balal. She gave me that to show her gratitude.”

  Blimey’s mouth quirked. “A princess’s favor, eh?”

  “I figure as much,” Ashes said, sensing Blimey’s skepticism. “Or might’ve been she were a witch in training. Maybe.”

  “Witches don’t need any training,” he said. “They’ve got magics from their first breath, Ashes. Everyone knows that.”

  Ashes smiled weakly. Blimey’s books had given him a somewhat skewed idea of how much everyone knew. “A princess, then.”

  “Wish I could’ve seen her.”

  Ashes’s stomach clenched as if he were hanging over a chasm. “Better that you stay here, mate,” Ashes said. “I need you here.”

  “Maybe you could talk again,” Blimey said. “With—him.”

  Ashes held his breath. As far as Blimey knew, Mr. Ragged had agreed to repeal the price on Blimey’s head on the condition that he never be seen in Burroughside again. Ashes let Blimey go on believing it; better that than the messy truth of how Ashes had convinced Ragged that Blimey was dead. The details would only give him nightmares.

  �
��I can’t convince him no further,” Ashes said firmly. “You got to stay here until we find some other place, Blimes. Somewhere safe.” He grinned weakly.

  Blimey nodded reluctantly. “If you say so.”

  “I say so,” Ashes said. “Reckon we ought to get some sleep?”

  Blimey nodded and climbed into the nest of rags he used for a bed. “Tell me a story?” he asked.

  “Oh, Blimey, I’m tired—”

  “Just a short one! Please?”

  Ashes grinned. “Eh, all right.” He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, burrowing in his memory for one of the stories Mari had told around their fire. “What about—?”

  “Clever Tyru!” Blimey interjected.

  “Why him?”

  “I read some about him today,” Blimey said proudly. “In my books.”

  “Do you know how he tricked his way into being an Ivory?” Ashes asked. “He snuck inside one of the great revels—”

  “Everyone knows that one.”

  “What about when he used his Glamours to convince King Cathar he was the Face of Marvels?”

  “You told me that last week.”

  Ashes sat up. “Sounds as you ought to tell me one, since you know so many.”

  Blimey didn’t even bother to look apologetic. “Something new,” he said. “Come on, then.”

  “All right,” Ashes said. He remembered another now—he wasn’t sure it was a Tyru story, but it would serve. “Here, then. So Clever Tyru—you already know, sure, that Clever Tyru’s true love was Lady Claer Elimorne, and Lady Claer loved him back. Only, her father was a greedy man, and he wanted to marry Claer off to some vile Ivory lord ’cause he was rich. Now Tyru, of course, he’d mastered Glamours, and so he stitched together a cloak for himself that’d make him look like a true-blooded Ivory . . .”

  Blimey had always been an excellent audience. He grinned when Tyru bested Lady Claer’s suitors at swordplay, and laughed when the cruel chamberlain was Glamoured to look like a pig, and looked appropriately frightened when, near the end, Tyru ran afoul of a man with eyes like the moon—an Iron Knight. The Knight destroyed Tyru’s illusions and threw him in a dungeon. Blimey didn’t calm down entirely until after Tyru tricked his way out of his cell and escaped with Lady Claer to live happily ever after.