Chapter 19: These Are My People

Frankie

“The door,” Mara said.

“Yeah.”

She read the line again and looked at me.

“You noticed.”

“I noticed.”

Her shoulders lowered for the first time since she’d sat down.

The letter knew the watch, the money drawer, the broken window, and which nights I worked late. It described the tavern like somebody who had spent hours watching it.

Then it told an assassin to pick a lock I never locked.

Anyone but Mara could have made that mistake.

She knew about the meat locker. The lamp. The strip of dark I left between the door and the frame. Nobody else in town knew why those things mattered to me.

Whoever wrote it knew the room.

Mara knew why I couldn’t sleep in it.

“This doesn’t clear everybody else,” she said.

“No.”

She studied my face.

“Good.”

I almost smiled.

Only Mara would insist I investigate her friends properly while they were still wondering whether she had sold them.

“Can you bring everybody back?” I asked.

She stood, but kept her hand on the back of the chair.

“Frankie. I was afraid.”

“I know.”

“Not only that you would believe it. That you would decide believing it was easier.”

She left before I could answer.

I had an answer ready after she’d gone. Sounded pretty good. Would’ve sounded better if I’d believed it.

* * *

Nobody took their usual chair at first.

They hovered around the table, watching one another make room. I had seen this happen in Chicago. A crew spent years learning where everyone belonged. Then somebody said rat, and suddenly every place looked like a position from which to draw a gun.

I put the letter down.

“It’s wrong.”

I explained the door without explaining why I left it open.

Mara met my eyes. That part stayed ours.

“So the letter is forged,” Brannik said.

“And the voice can be copied?”

Liora nodded. “A glamour. An echo charm. There are several ways. None requires the person whose voice you borrow to cooperate.”

“Then Renn may have told us exactly what he heard.”

“Yes.”

Hobb rubbed his face.

“And somebody stole the rest.”

“Or copied it. Or put enough truth around it that we’d stop looking.”

I took Brannik’s receipt.

“Why’d you join me?”

His expression hardened.

“If this is a loyalty—”

“It ain’t. I’m asking.”

“You let me choose my work.”

“And when I lied about your work?”

“I told you what would happen if you did it again.”

“In front of witnesses.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t burn your own shutters to tell me something you’ve already said to my face.”

He looked at the receipt again.

“No. But don’t mistake my staying for forgetting.”

“I ain’t asking you to.”

I turned to Liora.

“You spent months in a dungeon rather than stitch something you didn’t want your name on. Now I’m supposed to believe you suddenly got less particular about murder for a purse of coins.”

“I might commit murder over the right hem,” she said.

Hobb gave a short laugh. It helped.

“Hobb could’ve stayed in the pit. Benny and Rosella could’ve kept their heads down. Mara could’ve taken her release and gone anywhere.”

“None of that proves innocence,” Aldric said from the door.

I looked at him.

“No. It tells me what questions to ask before I decide people turned into strangers overnight.”

He came in.

This time, everyone made room without thinking.

* * *

We went through the evidence together.

Brannik’s workshop mark had been copied from a public invoice. The little flaw he used to distinguish an original impression was missing. He had never mentioned it. Explaining competent work wasted competent people’s time.

Liora’s silk was real, but accessible. Benny’s knife was real too. He had left his spare coat hanging near the kitchen after the flood. Anyone delivering flour could have reached it.

Hobb’s paper was older than the contract I’d burned. The fighting-club owner had kept a duplicate ledger slip. Dren fetched him, and the man admitted selling scraps from his accounts to a stranger who claimed to be checking taxes.

He wanted to know if he was in trouble.

“Depends how useful you get next,” I said.

He became extremely useful.

The stranger had worn a gray hood, paid in good coin, and asked questions whose answers seemed harmless separately. Ask a man where the money is, he gets nervous. Ask when the carter comes, he tells you about the carter.

Same answer, if you know what to do with it.

By midnight, we had a pattern. Somebody knew what people said in my office. Somebody knew what my crew used, wore, signed, and handled. They could pay thieves, borrow a voice, and plant evidence.

They had the papers, the voices, the right damn knife. Still got the door wrong.

Still expected me to look at Hobb and see forty-three crowns walking away.

I heard myself say it aloud.

“After everything I did for you, why would any of you—”

I stopped.

Benny looked at me.

The room waited again.

There it was.

Forty-three crowns. All the rest of the money.

I sounded like the bastard from the fighting pit.

“That ain’t what I mean,” I said.

“Then say what you mean,” Mara told me.

I looked around the table.

“I know you. I oughta let that count for something.”

Hobb pulled his chair in.

Benny reached for the receipt.

* * *

Liora asked to see my ring.

I put my hand on the table.

She didn’t touch the stone.

“When did he give you this?”

“Promotion.”

“And the seal?”

“When I became governor.”

She looked at Brannik.

He looked at the shutters, then at the ceiling, then back at the ring.

“Could somebody listen through it?” I asked.

Neither answered quickly enough.

“Authority pieces often carry witnesses,” Liora said. “A record of where an order was given. Assurance that the bearer speaks for the maker.”

“Witnesses with ears?”

“Sometimes more.”

The room seemed to shrink around the table.

I remembered Azrath knowing about the supper and the seal growing warm in my hand. How little surprise he showed when I reported events from town.

A ruler hears things.

I made myself keep my face still.

“Could somebody use them without him knowing?”

Liora considered the question carefully.

“I cannot tell you that.”

I nearly asked again, hoping for a better answer.

Brannik stood.

“I have a box for unstable parts.”

“Will it help?”

“It is lined to prevent influence crossing in either direction. It may.”

“Bring it.”

Until he returned, we talked about roof repairs, flour, and a bill nobody liked.

Then I removed the ring and the seal, set them inside, and closed the lid.

Nothing exploded.

It was becoming a low standard for success.

* * *

We moved to the church cellar.

No royal objects. No servants passing through. Dren watched the stair while Aldric gave us his word nobody else had entered.

I laid two maps on a crate.

“We need to know whether an order can leave that room without a person carrying it.”

Brannik nodded.

“Something only the objects hear.”

“Exactly.”

Mara marked three empty buildings, including the abandoned granary near the old quarry. Each stood away from houses. Each had approaches we could watch without showing ourselves. I would choose which one after everyone else was together at the church.

“Tell the ring something valuable will be there.”

“Tell it when,” Hobb said.

“And keep every person from the room together somewhere else,” Liora added.

All three were old stores. Barred windows, bolted service doors, one loading entrance we could leave open without changing anything visible from the road.

“Drop a gate across that entrance once they’re inside,” I said. “One pull from outside. No running. No fight.”

Brannik put his pencil down.

“Not by tomorrow.”

“You put half a weighing house together in less.”

I heard it after I said it.

Nobody moved.

“I know,” I said. “That was a lousy way to ask.”

“Yes.”

“We need the man giving the orders.”

“And I need to know what happens when somebody falls beneath the gate.”

“There won’t be civilians inside.”

“Will every man you catch be guilty?”

I looked at the map.

“Someone could have been hired to carry a box,” Mara said.

Brannik turned the paper toward me.

“A rising gate. A counterweight that cannot fall free. A release inside as well as out. I inspect it, and I stay. Three days, with help.”

“They could hit us again tonight.”

“I know.”

“Then build the fast one and stand beside it.”

“No.”

Dren looked from him to me.

I had a royal ring locked in a box back at the tavern, and a warrant book in my office. Brannik’s workshop stood on land whose rents I collected.

I looked at his hands on the plan.

He had shown me a brass key three times.

“Can you hold the loading door with men instead?” I asked Dren.

“And the path to the road. With enough men.”

“How many?”

He told me.

More than we had. We’d have to hire carters to hold the road and trust them not to run when somebody pulled a blade.

“And if they get out?” Hobb asked.

“Then we follow them.”

Brannik took his pencil again.

We marked the places for the watchers. When Dren asked who would pay the extra men, I opened my own purse.

Aldric looked at me.

“If this leads upward?”

“Then it leads upward.”

I wasn’t as certain as I sounded.

But Oren was dead. Tovin was dead. Mara had sat in front of me offering to be hurt until I believed her.

Garran’s sister had stood upstairs with his coat.

I looked at the map.

My people. Like that made it different.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “We do it tomorrow.”

At the stair, Mara caught my sleeve.

“You have scarcely eaten.”

“Been busy.”

“I noticed.”

There was still an edge in her voice. She brushed a bit of plaster from my coat anyway.

“Come upstairs. Rosella kept something warm.”

I covered her hand with mine for a moment.

Then I followed her.

Upstairs, the church was full of sleeping people. Some had come from my tavern because they no longer felt safe there.

I stepped carefully between the blankets.

Tomorrow I was going to tell a lie to an empty room.

Then we’d find out who answered.