by Kevin Sands
Follow the sheep.
Could it be that simple?
In my—I didn’t know what to call it. Dream? Vision? Visit to another world?—the painting had transformed into a window. The lamb, and the land beyond, had been real.
I already knew the painting was just a painting again. Still, I reached up and inched the frame away from the wall.
There was nothing behind it, just more ugly wallpaper. I lay back down, disappointed.
* * *
While Gareth scratched away on his papers, I replayed my conversation with Shuna. Even now, the whole thing gave me goose bumps. I’d actually met the Fox. Even crazier, she’d claimed Artha the Bear was her sister. Magic, the Eye, the Spirits . . . it was all so strange. And the worst part was I couldn’t tell anyone what I’d seen.
Thinking of Shuna and Artha made me think of the tales of Fox and Bear. Sisters, the whole time. Why wasn’t that in the stories? Wondering, I suddenly remembered something I’d been meaning to ask. “Gareth?”
He turned.
“The first day we met,” I said, “after you came back from the library. Why were you so startled when Meriel found that page of a Fox and Bear story?”
He flushed. “I . . . I just—”
“Don’t tell me it was because you were embarrassed,” I said. “You weren’t embarrassed. You were alarmed.”
He stared at me for a moment, then dropped his eyes. “You’ll think I’m mad,” he mumbled.
“Gareth . . . I just had my eye ripped out by a woman made of fire. At this point, I’d believe anything you said.”
He stayed quiet, shrinking into his chair. I probably could have pushed him into telling me, but I didn’t want to do that. He was entitled to his secrets. It’s not like I wasn’t keeping my own.
“Never mind,” I sighed. “Forget I asked.”
I lay back down again. He turned to face his papers, but he didn’t start writing.
“May I ask you a question?” he said, back turned to me.
I sat up.
“Why don’t you want to do this anymore?” he said.
“You mean be a thief?” I motioned to the bandage on my face. “It’s not like it’s turned out so well, has it?”
“But you . . . you wanted to quit before. I mean . . . before that happened. When you woke up, after Foxtail brought you back, you asked us if we would have stayed in this life. After getting paid. You said no.”
“So did everyone else.”
“Yes, but you’re a g-gaffer. I’ve met your kind before. Some have been friendly, like you. Some have been cruel. But . . . I mean . . . the one thing they all had in common was that they loved what they did. They loved the power, the control. You could have paid them a hundred . . . a hundred times what Mr. Solomon promised us, and they’d still have ended up thieves. They liked it too much. Why don’t you?”
I sat there, silent. I’d thought about that question a lot in the past six months. I hadn’t told anyone the answer, not even the clockmaker. I’d never even considered sharing it. But here, today, sitting with this odd, quiet boy, I found I wanted to.
I was finally ready to tell.
CHAPTER 49
I told you before, Gareth, that I grew up on the streets. That there was this girl who looked after me, but then she disappeared, and I got caught by the Stickmen. I don’t have to tell you what they did to me. You already saw my scars.
When the Old Man found me afterward, I was almost dead. He took me in, took care of me until I’d healed. To this day, I don’t really know why he chose me. Maybe because I was a survivor. Or maybe because a scared little boy could tug at a sucker’s heartstrings, and I was the first one he saw. Either way, he taught me his job: how to read people, how to pull a jolly gaff.
You asked me why I didn’t love it. Thing is? I did.
The first time I ever read someone’s thoughts from nothing more than the way they tilted their head, I didn’t just feel good. I felt like a god. Like the world was my playground, and I could have anything I wanted. Nothing, nothing ever made me feel so powerful.
So in the beginning, I didn’t care that what I was doing was wrong. After what the Stickmen had done to me, I was so angry, so full of rage. All I could think was: Why did other people get to have money, when I was starving? Why did they deserve to have families? Who were they to think they were better than me?
And yet, somewhere inside, every gaff we pulled gnawed at my heart. The anger that had fueled me began instead to burn me out.
By the time I’d turned thirteen, I was a mess. I didn’t know what I was doing anymore, or why. I’d learned what the Old Man had taught me, but where I’d once hated other people, now I hated myself. Still I kept at it, because what else was I going to do? What other life was possible for someone like me?
But then we cheated this girl.
The Old Man brought me out to Fenton, down in Orlagh. The weeping sickness had taken hold of the Lower Quarter. Have you ever seen what it does to a person? I still have nightmares.
Anyway, the Old Man says there’s money to be made here. “Doing what?” I asked him.
“Selling false cures,” he said. And he was right. People that desperate, they’ll grasp at anything. No matter how absurd it seems.
Here was our gaff: I was to play the role of a healer. A child, imbued with the blessing of the Bear. And I was to claim I’d put all my power into this crystal—a four-sept piece of quartz—and if a mark held the crystal against their body, it would heal them.
I figured the Old Man would get a bunch of crystals, we’d run the gaff for a week or two, then take off when a dupe came looking for blood. The usual. Instead, the Old Man told me clear: we were here for only one mark.
I assumed he had sights on someone rich, someone powerful. But it was just some woman. She was working as a scullery maid for one of the local lords. Her husband had died from the weeping sickness, and now her daughter had it, too. And we were going to sell her the crystal for every sept she had. You know how much it was?
Eleven crowns.
I couldn’t understand it, Gareth. We’d stolen from magnates. Nobles. Even royals. Why were we snaffling this poor woman? It didn’t make sense.
So I asked him. “What are we doing here?”
“I’m pulling a gaff,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
I didn’t know. I argued—I’d begun to argue a lot, lately—but he just shut me down. “Do as you’re told, boy. Or find somewhere else to be.”
I stayed, and he knew I would, because I had nowhere else to be. Anyway, we pull the job, and the woman gives the crystal to her daughter. The girl had to be about six—same age the Old Man found me. The sickness was all over her: rotting skin, open sores, such pain. And she looked up at me with these big, trusting eyes and said, “Will this really make me better, blessed one?”
I said yes. Shuna forgive me, I said absolutely, it would. And we left.
I didn’t say a word to the Old Man until we returned to Redfairne. But I couldn’t live with what I’d done. For days, I could barely get out of bed. I just kept hearing that girl over and over in my mind. Blessed one, she’d called me. What a knife that was in my heart.
For a whole week, her words rang in my head. After that, I realized she must have died, her sickness had been far enough along. And I wondered: As she died, was she thinking of me? Did she understand why my blessing hadn’t saved her?
I broke. I didn’t want to go on anymore. I made it through the night, but in the morning, all that hate and rage I’d been carrying for so long was gone. I had nothing left but sadness, and guilt. So I went to the Old Man and told him we were going to have new rules.
He was sitting at the table, reading the newspaper. He didn’t even look up at me. “Oh?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “From now on, I agree to every job we d
o.”
“Is that so?”
“It is. And no more decent people. We take only from those who’ve cheated others, exploited them. It’s not like there’s few of them to be found.”
“I see. And what if I don’t agree to this ultimatum?”
“I don’t care whether you agree or not,” I said. “That’s just the way it’s going to be.”
“Well, then,” he said, still not looking up from his paper. “It appears I have nothing left to teach you.”
I avoided him for the rest of the day. I thought he was just being stubborn, as usual. But when I woke up the next morning, he was gone. He’d taken the few things he owned and left without a word.
At first, I figured he was trying to teach me a lesson: I don’t need you, you need me. Then, as the days passed, I wondered if maybe he’d got caught by the Stickmen, and that’s why he hadn’t returned. It took a whole month for me to wise up.
He was gone. And that was just the end of it.
I thought he’d cared about me. I mean, he could be awfully prickly, but he’d been patient while he taught me, and he’d always made sure there was more food on my plate than his. I’d lived with him, in hotels, in woods, in slums, for eight years. He’d always looked after me, and he’d never done me wrong. How could he not care about me?
But I guess he didn’t. That was the final lesson he taught me, the final lesson I learned.
Never trust a gaffer.
And I never saw him again.
CHAPTER 50
I surprised myself. I’d made it through the whole story without crying. Gareth sat quietly, listening.
“Did you ever figure out why he stole from that woman?” he asked.
I sighed. “I wondered about it for a long, long time. In the end, I understood. It wasn’t about the woman, or her daughter, or the money. It was about me.
“He could read complete strangers with a glance. How much better did he know me? We’d been together so long, he must have seen I was growing unhappy. So he tested me. Was I really cut out for life as a gaffer? I guess the answer was no. I failed.”
“Maybe you succeeded,” Gareth said.
I shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe he thought he was doing me a favor. Sometimes I like to think so. Even if I know it isn’t true.”
Gareth went quiet for a while. Then he said, “What would you have done with it?”
“With what?”
“Mr. Solomon’s money.”
“I was going to pay a Weaver to heal my scars. Then I was going to buy an apprenticeship. The Airmen, if they’d take me. Live in the sky, live a new life. Where no one would ever know what I used to be.”
Gareth’s eyes grew distant. He gazed at the painting over my bed, at the lamb in the pasture, as if imagining what it would be like to live in some place like that. Somewhere your past didn’t matter, wouldn’t keep you down forever.
“The Old Man,” he said. “Do you ever miss him?”
For the last six months, I’d been sure I’d known the answer. Not a bit. Good riddance.
Just as sure as I knew now, every word of that was a lie.
“Yes,” I said, and it felt so good to say it. “I miss him every single day.”
Gareth nodded. He turned back to the scratchings he’d made on the paper. “She was wrong, you know,” he said.
“Who was?”
“Whoever gave you this m-message. I mean . . . I like puzzles. But they’re not my favorite thing. Books are.”
“I get that,” I said. “It must be very peaceful to just sit and read.”
He nodded.
He wanted to tell me, I knew. He wanted to say what had alarmed him about that page of Fox and Bear. So I didn’t push it. I just let him start his story in his own way.
And what he told me made my blood turn to ice.
* * *
My parents were Breakers, out in Westport, Gareth said. They were cracksmen—opened safes for a living—and they were great at it. They both died when I was a baby, killed by Stickmen while pulling a job.
With them gone, I belonged to the guild. But the Breakers hated me. I was shy, and quiet, and couldn’t speak right. I was ugly and awkward—no, don’t protest. I know what I am.
They used to call me the freak, knock me about. One coshman—a mugger, I mean—would put his pipe out on my arms; he liked the way it made me cry. But, like you, I had nowhere else to go. Once a Breaker, always a Breaker. Until the earth takes you, that’s the oath.
There was one man who wasn’t so cruel. His name was Grover. He’d been kind of a mentor to my mother when she was growing up, and though he never much cared for me, he still took me under his wing, taught me to read.
At first, that just made them hurt me worse. Book learnin’s for scholars. You a scholar, boy? But it actually ended up saving me.
One of the squads planned to pull a rum job on a vault and wanted to go through the sewers. The trouble was, the usual man who brought us maps was sitting in prison.
Grover said he’d take care of it. Then he passed the job on to me. He claimed he couldn’t go because his leg hurt too much to climb all the steps in the library. In truth, I think he was doing my mother one last favor: show the Breakers her son could be useful. Either way, he dressed me in the cleanest clothes he could find and sent me off with a forged permit to the Lockwood Library.
When I went inside . . . it was so quiet. No screaming, no fighting, no one pushing me around. I felt like I’d walked into a temple. Like I was actually somewhere holy, where the Spirits lived.
And the books. I’d never seen so many. I just stood there, gawking at the stacks, wondering if I was dreaming. So when a voice broke the silence, I jumped.
It was the librarian, sitting behind his desk in the corner. He peered over the tome he was reading and said, “Are you lost, boy?”
Too scared to speak, I just held up my false permit, as if it was a Stickman’s badge. The librarian glanced at it, then shrugged and said, “Well, don’t stand there all slack-jawed. You’re blocking the entrance.”
I rushed into the stacks, my heart pounding. For a while, I just hid there, afraid the librarian would realize his mistake and throw me out. Until I remembered I had a job to do.
Which was a different sort of problem. How was I supposed to find a map of the sewers? I didn’t know where anything was. So I just began looking.
Have you ever searched for a coin you dropped in a river? That’s what it was like. I wandered the stacks for hours, trying to find something. But I guess Shuna was looking over me, because an hour before the library was set to close, I spied a man at a table in a file room, bent over what looked like a map. I went inside, and after a frantic search, I found a diagram of the sewers. I imprinted it on my memory, sketching it over and over again with my finger on the desk until I could draw it without a mistake. Then I ran back to Grover and drew it for him proper.
The crew pulled the job and gave Grover his cut. He didn’t share it with me. But I didn’t care. He’d given me something much better: a way to be useful.
That changed everything. At first, they kept going to Grover, and he kept sending me off to find what they needed. Eventually, they realized who was getting their information. They still went to Grover—they didn’t want to deal with the likes of me—but now they told him to send me, like I was his apprentice.
I became the gopher for anything anyone needed. Want to suss out a family line? Send Gareth. Need to cheat an obscure law? Send Gareth. So that became my job. And I loved it.
Then something nearly happened to end it all. Word came to the Breakers there was a mausoleum in Oldtown that had never been looted. Digging straight down to it would alert the Stickmen, so they decided they’d tunnel through the sewers.
The problem was, a lot of Oldtown had collapsed, and the new tunnels didn’t go anywhere ne
ar there. So they sent me off to hunt down the old sewer plans.
That’s when I ran into a problem. The city clerk told me the old records had been destroyed. And I couldn’t find anything in the library. For two days I searched, no luck. I was terrified. I had to get them those plans. Or they’d take it out on me.
So when I went back to the library on the third day, I did something I’d never done before: I went to the librarian who always sat in the corner.
We’d seen each other a hundred times by now, and I hadn’t caused him any trouble. I was still too scared to say a word. I just stood there until he finally noticed me. He peered at me over his glasses, looking me up and down like that first day I’d come in, trembling. “Help you with something?”
“Y-yes, good sir.” My stammer was even worse than when the Breakers beat me. “I-I’m looking for the p-plans to the s-sewers . . . I mean . . . the o-old sewers.”
He went back to reading his book. “Old sewer plans are in City Records.”
“Y-yes, good sir. I looked there, but the c-clerk said the r-records have been d-d-destroyed.”
He looked up, one eyebrow raised. “Destroyed? In my library? I think not.”
“W-well, he s-said—”
“Now, where would the old sewers be? Hmm.” The man tapped his chin for a moment. Then he stood and walked into the stacks.
I had to run to keep up. He wandered through the shelves like a maze, turning by no pattern I could see. Finally, he stopped in the section on naturalistic advances, pulled one oversized tome from the bottom shelf, and opened it.
And there it was. Pressed between the pages and the cover, folded up tight, was the plan of the Oldtown sewers. I couldn’t believe it. It was like magic.
“H-how did you find that?” I said.
He looked offended. “That’s my job.”
If I’d been thinking clearer, I’d have wondered: What were the plans doing in there? And how could he possibly have known? But I didn’t think. I was just so grateful he’d found it. I pulled out my charcoal stick to make a copy, but he waved his hands.