by Alex Bell
The jeweller would smile knowingly, for most of them had seen this sort of thing before — young Lords dissatisfied with their allowances coming in to try and fob off some of the family jewels, no doubt pinched straight from dear Mama’s jewellery box itself — the sort of women who had so very many little trinkets that they wouldn’t miss one here and there. But attic jewellery was the very best kind for no one was going to miss that and, being older, it was usually more valuable, too.
It was all in how the thing was presented. Of course, if Lex had walked in wearing second-hand clothes and talking like the country boy that he was then he would never in a million years have been able to pass some cheap bit of costume jewellery off as the real deal. But — between his own immaculate outfit and sneeringly aristocratic manner and the dust and grime of hundreds of years with which the brooch was covered — the jewellers believed him every time. To begin with. Of course, later on, under a more careful inspection, they would instantly discover the piece to be a fake. But at the time they would be so preoccupied with their greedy eagerness to scam the arrogant young toff that they would see in the velvet box only what they fully expected to see.
After a very, very great deal of practice, Lex was even able to blush on command. This turned out to be exceedingly useful as he had taken to carrying a pack of cards into the jewellers with him. At some point, he would reach into his pocket for something, and the cards would come tumbling out — apparently quite by accident — and one of the jewellers would hurry to help him pick them up and Lex would blush crimson and mutter a bad-natured word of thanks before snatching the incriminating cards back — the clear implication being that he was indulging in gambling, very probably without his parents’ knowledge, that he was in over his head and that that was why he needed to sell the brooch in a hurry.
It was very important to make it as easy for the jewellers to believe the scam as possible and Lex had learnt that the little details were very important — and added a certain authenticity to the proceedings. He had therefore taken to spending as much time as possible in smoky bars or taverns whilst he was wearing the posh clothes so that they would smell of smoke when he went to the jewellers as if he had spent all night in a gamblers’ den. Sometimes he even rubbed a tiny amount of alcohol around the collar for good measure. He found that jewellers would fall over themselves to short-change a gambling, smoking, drinking, arrogant young aristocrat — there appeared to be a sort of special satisfaction for them in it and the nastier Lex was, the more eager they would be to get him. They would offer a sum that was far less than the brooch would be worth if it were genuine, but actually far more than it was really worth seeing as the item was, in fact, quite as fake as Lex himself.
But the day he had made his deal with Lady Luck it had all gone a bit wrong because there happened to be a ruby expert in that morning who was promptly called over in order that Lex could be given a more accurate estimation of the brooch’s worth. And, of course, it was immediately apparent that, wherever the brooch had come from, it had not come from any attic — stately home or otherwise.
‘It’s a fake,’ the jeweller said flatly, looking accusingly at Lex.
‘A fake?’ Lex repeated shrilly, looking genuinely horrified. ‘A fake, you say? Mey good man, that is quaite, quaite impossible. This brooch came from the attic at mey country house — ai found it thereyah meyself. Mey mother believes that it may once have belonged to her own great-great-grandmother Ethel, you know… ’ But he could see that there was to be no bluffing and blustering his way out of this one. He could insist that it wasn’t a fake until he was blue in the face but that seemed quite pointless considering the jeweller knew full well that it was not a genuine antique.
‘I shall call for the police,’ the man said, ‘and report you for trying to defraud me.’
‘Ah, come on now,’ Lex said pleadingly, switching back to his ordinary voice. ‘It’s a fair cop — you haven’t given me any money so there’s no harm done. I promise I won’t ever do it again; cross my heart.’
But all of Lex’s feigned sincerity and reasonableness did nothing and soon he was racing from the town as fast as his legs would carry him — his top hat falling abandoned in the dust and the tails of his ridiculous frock coat flapping out behind him as he ran towards the church where he was to have his most fateful meeting with Lady Luck herself.
Aah — those were simpler days before Lex became so ambitious. Fobbing off fake brooches couldn’t possibly compare to the skills he had trained himself in since coming to the Wither City. Everyone knew that he spent hours and hours at a time in his rooms studying and this was true — in a manner of speaking. But he had not been studying the law. With his practically photographic memory, he only needed to flick through the textbooks to get a grasp of the basics anyway. The majority of the time spent in his room had been practising on the ropes.
No one ever came into Lex’s room for he insisted on doing all the cleaning himself, much to the landlady’s pleased surprise. But, if anyone had gone in, they would have seen a most strange arrangement of ropes hanging from the ceiling. They were of different thicknesses and different materials and had several different types of safety harness attached to them. Lex spent hours and hours and hours practising on what he called the Climbing Frame. If you’re going to fall, better to do so when you’re only hanging four feet above the floor over a carefully-positioned mattress. For whilst it was true that Lex may have been lucky, he was also careful, and he certainly had no intention of lowering himself through any holes in great, cavernous ceilings before he’d practised climbing, spinning, lowering and twisting on his own precisely-constructed spider web. He wasn’t doing anything for real until he could climb those ropes like a monkey. That sort of preparation was — he felt — what truly separated the men from the boys in this game. But he was vigilant that no one should ever suspect what really went on in his bedroom, to which end he had put about the story that he was a sap who studied all the time.
There had been one occasion, though, when he had been dangling from the middle of the ceiling in one of his safety harnesses when the landlady had started hammering on his door saying that she absolutely must speak to him about some triviality or other.
‘Can’t it wait, Mrs Humphrey?’ Lex called, praying that she wouldn’t notice that his voice was coming from nearer the ceiling than the floor.
‘I’m afraid not, dear. I’ve got to talk to you about the new locks.’
Lex sighed. There was no use arguing with her. She wouldn’t go away until he opened the door. He made to lower himself down to the ground on the rope. And that was when he found out that it wouldn’t move an inch and, no matter how he tugged, he didn’t seem to be able to go up or down. He was stuck — dangling there ridiculously like a fly caught in a web.
‘Are you all right in there, dear?’ the landlady called after a moment, pushing down on the door handle, which thankfully was securely locked.
‘Yes! Just a minute!’ Lex called, desperately unbuckling himself from the harness before doing a sort of half-leap through the air to catch the nearby rope and slither down to the floor by hand, landing lightly on the mattress.
He was a little out of breath by the time he opened the door, which instantly made Mrs Humphrey suspicious.
‘What have you been doing in there?’ she said, trying to see over his shoulder.
But Lex stepped out into the corridor and closed the door behind him. ‘I was… ’ He quickly racked his brain for an excuse, then, once he’d found it, willed the colour to rush to his cheeks in a blush. ‘Exercising,’ he said. ‘Weight lifting, actually. There’s… this girl… and… ’ He trailed off pathetically and looked morose.
Mrs Humphrey eyed his scrawny frame and instantly looked understanding and sympathetic, fully believing that Lex had been in there bodybuilding to impress some girl.
‘There’re more important things than muscles, dear,’ she said kindly.
Of course, the truth of it was that Lex didn’t ac
tually have any interest whatsoever in having a neck that was thicker than his head. He may have been slender, but all that time going up and down the ropes like a monkey had given him a wiry strength as well as a certain agility. But he didn’t mind Mrs Humphrey’s comments. In fact he liked it when people underestimated him. It was only ever a help and never a hindrance to have people think that he was less than what he truly was.
In actual fact, Lex had very few of the vices that most teenage boys had. He stayed well away from drink and drugs and, indeed, was rather horrified just at the very thought of using them. For Lex liked to be sharp and quick — sharper and quicker than everyone else where possible — and intentionally dimming his mind and his wits was not something he was ever likely to do. Nor had he ever had much time for girls. They were something nice to look at when Heetha’s sun was out and they were sunbathing, not wearing an awful lot; but he certainly didn’t want to date. Growing up without a mother and no women in the house, the fairer sex was a bit of an enigma to Lex. He had the feeling that a girlfriend would probably spend most of her time complaining at him, whining at him, demanding that he spend all his free time with her, asking if she looked good in this dress or that dress when the truth was that he simply didn’t care… But Mrs Humphrey wasn’t to know all that, so when Lex told her he was working out to impress some girl, she believed him completely.
Lex’s past experiences had taught him very well about playing a part and playing it faultlessly, even when no one was looking. He knew he hadn’t faltered the whole time he’d been working at Lucas, Jones and Schmidt. He had kept up the charade, he had worn the mask and played the role, so what had Mr Montgomery Schmidt seen in his performance that had given him away? What hairline crack in the otherwise perfect jewel had his gimlet eyes picked up that no one else had been bright enough to spot?
‘What was it?’ Lex said again.
‘Perhaps it was that time I caught you scamming the clients that tipped me off,’ the lawyer said. ‘Honest students do not skim a little off the top for their own usage, Mr Trent. So tell me, have you always been this way or did you fall in with a bad crowd, or have you just been consumed with greed all your life? What is it? What made you this way?’
Lex looked him right in the eye and said, ‘My parents died when I was five.’
This was, in fact, perfectly true, but it was not what had made Lex the way he was. He had been born like this. Born for adventure and excitement and misbehaving, and he would probably have been exactly the same even if he hadn’t been orphaned at a young age. Still, no sense in admitting that to the old lawyer. Lex could tell from the expression on Schmidt’s face that he was struggling with himself, trying to work out whether Lex was even telling the truth, and if he was, whether dead parents constituted a valid excuse for theft, lies and fraud.
‘You disliked me before that thing with the clients or you wouldn’t have bothered checking on me to begin with,’ Lex went on. ‘Tell me, Mr Schmidt, what did I ever do to deserve such hostility?’
‘Did you know about Mr Lucas’s wife?’ the lawyer said with sudden sharpness. ‘You who knows everything about everything; did you know about her, Lex?’
‘Of course. She’s ill,’ Lex replied promptly.
As an actor, he knew the value of playing to an audience. And he understood the importance of knowing that audience. It was crucial. So he always took in any information that any of his audience unwittingly gave out about themselves. Mr Lucas rarely said anything about his personal life, but Lex knew from what he’d heard other people saying that Mr Lucas’s wife was in a bad way and that he was increasingly withdrawing from the time-consuming responsibilities of the law firm to care for her himself.
‘Do you know what illness? Do you care?’ Mr Schmidt asked, in that same unnaturally calm voice.
Lex shrugged. What did it matter? All old people became ill, sooner or later. It was the natural way of things ‘She has the soulless wake.’
The caustic remark that Lex had been preparing died in his throat. The soulless wake. Old people became ill and died. It was nature; it was inevitable; it was something that everyone accepted. Sooner or later, everyone died. No arguments there. But to die before death.. that was surely cheating, wasn’t it? The soulless wake was no illness. It was a curse from the Gods of the very worst kind. It could not be fought or beaten. It could only be endured.
The soulless wake caused people to forget their loved ones, forget life, forget themselves. It stripped them of everything they were inside. It was said to be the result of the Gods prematurely taking away a person’s soul whilst they were still living, leaving nothing but an empty, wandering shell-of-a-person. This wasn’t true, Lex knew. If it were, then you wouldn’t be able to catch those occasional glimpses, those tiny little moments, of the person they had been before. But it was certainly true that the disease carried a stigma. For the condition was a rare one and it was said that the Gods would surely not curse anyone in such a way unless that person was immensely vile and despicable.
‘You wouldn’t think it to look at him, would you?’ Schmidt said softly. ‘The kind manner he has with the clients and… the interns.’ He gave Lex an evil look. ‘The way he left her to rush out of his home in the middle of the night to assist you and vouch for your character. You would never have guessed, Lex, would you?’
‘Of course I knew about her condition,’ Lex lied. ‘As you rightly pointed out, I know everything about everything. A conman has to, you know. I didn’t see how the issue could benefit me personally but I consigned it to the back of my mind, just in case.’
He almost wanted the lawyer to strike him. Mr Schmidt didn’t raise a finger, although, if looks could kill, someone would have had to use a bucket and shovel to scrape Lex off the floor.
‘You know, Lex, I think I’m going to go have a lie down in the wagon,’ Schmidt said, with exaggerated courtesy. ‘I’m not as young as I once was, after all, and you seem to be handling the mantha so expertly.’
Lex frowned as the lawyer swung his long legs round, pulled back the curtain and clambered into the warmth of the wagon. Lex caught a glimpse of the interior before the curtain fell back. There were blankets back there, piled up on flat wooden beds. Gods, it looked tempting! Lex hadn’t slept properly since fleeing the Wither City. The gypsy ship had been moving too much on the restless waves and he had kept jerking awake.
Now that the lawyer had gone, Lex realised that he had been left outside to drive the mantha alone through Gertha’s savage gales. It hadn’t seemed so bad when they were plodding through the winding streets with tall, crooked buildings piled up on top of one another on each side of them to block the wind. But out here in the open, the gales were painfully chafing.
Lex pulled back the curtain of the wagon slightly and turned his head to yell inside, ‘Pass me a blanket would you, Monty? It’s a little chilly out here.’
‘Here,’ Mr Schmidt said, throwing out the thinnest, most moth-eaten blanket there was.
Really it was more a bit of rag than a blanket. Lex stared at the thing in disgust but let the curtain drop. He wasn’t going to beg, if that was what the lawyer wanted. He would rather die before asking any favours of the man. Well… okay, perhaps not actually die but.. well, he would rather be really quite uncomfortable, anyway.
Lex was a hoarder when it came to money, so he had quite happily stood by and let Schmidt purchase the wagon and the blankets. Now it didn’t seem like such a good idea. He had no right to the blankets now and the lawyer had made it quite clear that he was not in a sharing mood.
‘Selfish sod,’ Lex muttered.
As is a common characteristic with the selfish, Lex simply couldn’t stand selfishness in others. The mantha beast plodded solidly on as the sky began to dim to twilight and Lex tried not to think about the soulless wake. When they at last arrived on the outskirts of Gandylow, the boats were all moored in the docks for the night, so they took a couple of rooms at a boarding house with the idea of seekin
g passage on a ship in the morning.
They ignored each other over dinner and went to their separate rooms afterwards. As he fell asleep, Lex vowed not to think about the soulless wake any more, or the person he had left behind at the farm back home, and promised himself that all his energy would be put into playing the Game.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE ENCHANTERS’ BOATS
Lex’s definition of a boat was something that travelled on water. The magical boats of the enchanters then, strictly speaking, were not in fact boats, for they hovered above the sea rather than floating on its surface. They were quite different from the gypsy ships. Being propelled by magic instead of wind they could sail against the currents. They could glide above the treacherous coral reefs. And they could keep right on travelling once they hit dry land if they wanted to.
When they reached the docks that morning Schmidt again voiced concerns as to whether they would be able to find an enchanter willing to take them. They rarely took passengers since they had no need for paying customers and it was unheard of for an enchanter to allow non-magical people on board his boat.
‘You’d be amazed at the endless supply of luck I seem to have,’ Lex had said with his most insolent smile.
Schmidt had simply shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘Then I will leave you to it, Mr Trent. You’ll find out it’s hopeless quickly enough.’
There were always enchanted boats at Gandylow as it was the nearest port to the Island of Algathon — the native land of the enchanters and their crones. Khestrii was situated on the western shore of the island and, although there were some humans living there, on the whole people preferred not to live so close to enchanters. There were five enchanted boats in the harbour that day — great, silver monstrosities with black runes painted across their metallic exteriors. Even the sails were thin sheets of metal, being there solely for decoration since the wind certainly didn’t dictate the places these ships went.