Chapter 25: False Trail

The boy’s name was Pip, he was nine years old, and he had seen everything.

Aren found that out on Monday evening in the back of Old Mag’s shop, over a cup of her terrible black tea. Mag had it from a fishwife, who had it from Pip’s mother, who had been crying about it loudly in the market that morning. The men in grey robes had come back to the east bank and walked the streets around the old dye house, stopping children, asking polite questions and generously handing out coppers for answers. Most of the children honestly had nothing to tell them.

Pip did.

"He sleeps in the old rope shed behind the dye house." "Steals leather scraps through the drain, like you did at his age. He was there the morning after the Night of Bells." She looked at Aren over her pipe. "He told the grey men he saw somebody climb out of the cellar at dawn and go up over the roof. Somebody with bandages all over his face."

Aren put his cup down very, very carefully.

"His mother says they gave him a whole silver for it." Mag puffed thoughtfully on her pipe. "Patted him on the head and called him a good boy. They asked if he’d know the man again, and he said no. All he remembered was the bandages."

’All he remembered was the bandages.’

False Face had held, then. Pip couldn’t describe his height or his voice or anything else. But the bandages weren’t part of the System, they were just cloth, and the whole east bank had been telling jokes about a man called Wraps for three weeks. It wouldn’t take a very clever cult to put those two things together.

He didn’t sleep that night. He sat on his mattress in the dark and did what he had always done when a position went badly wrong: he listed what he had and what he couldn’t afford to lose.

The Choir knew the person who took their nail wore bandages, and soon they would know about Wraps too, if they didn’t already. Then they would want to know who Wraps was. They would ask the Tanner boy from the bell room, and the hired swords from the barracks, and the people of Salt Lane, and they would patiently follow every story about a bandaged man back to wherever it started. Every one of those stories started somewhere Aren went.

He could stop being Wraps, and he certainly would, for a while. But that wouldn’t make them stop looking. People only stop looking for something when they think they’ve already found it.

’So give them something to find!’

Rook listened without looking up from his book, the same as always.

"You want me to start a rumor."

"Several. In the right taverns, through the right mouths. That the man in bandages was a Guild scavenger, a free hunter who picks over Rifts after the real hunters are done. That he went into the dye house cellar alone to steal cores before the Guild showed up, got cut to pieces, wrapped his face to hide it, and left two days later on a barge to the Free Cities with a sack he wouldn’t show anyone."

"And is any of that true?"

"It doesn’t need to be true. It needs to be boring." Aren kept his voice carefully level. "A greedy scavenger who got lucky and ran south is the most normal story in the lower city. People will believe it because it’s exactly what they’d do."

Rook turned a page. "And why would I spend my men’s time on your story?"

"Because men in grey robes are walking through your streets on the east bank, asking your people questions and paying them in silver. You don’t know who they are or who they work for, and every copper they hand out is one your people aren’t spending in your taverns." Aren paused. "You want them gone. So do I. If they think their man’s in the Free Cities, they’ll go and look for him there."

Rook was quiet a moment. Then he closed his book and looked up, and his dark eyes were thoughtful.

"You’re afraid of them."

Aren didn’t answer.

"How interesting! I’ve never seen you afraid of anything, stone-seller. Not me, not Hesk, not the Hawk Knights." He set the book aside. "Very well. My men will tell your story. The price is one more month of your ten percent." A thin smile. "Consider it insurance."

[Rook. Hostility: 89% → 91%.]

’Another month behind on everything. Still cheaper than being found in the river.’

Aren bowed politely and spent the rest of the week on his other problem.

It had been sitting at the back of his mind ever since he lay in the sand with Vivienne’s sword on his throat: the knot in her breath, the half-second too long before every crescent. If he was right, she’d hit a wall the day she tried to break through to Rank D, and every core her family bought her would make that wall steadily higher. If she broke through because of something he’d given her, the return would be huge. And if she failed, his Primary Anchor would be stuck at Rank E, and so would he, because his own Trial would never let him get ahead of her.

He couldn’t just tell her. A Servant didn’t walk up to the heir of House Ashgrave and explain her own body to her, not unless he wanted to be whipped for the insult.

But he carried books for a living.

On Wednesday he went up to the Chronicles room with the librarian’s keys and spent two hours going through shelves of old manuals nobody had opened in fifty years, looking for anything about moon classes, about breath, about essence that caught in the body. Behind a row of crumbling star charts on the bottom shelf, he found a thin grey book with a cracked spine: On the Tides of the Breath, for Those Who Draw the Moon. A Silver Moon class from Valdris had written it two hundred years ago, and half of it was about breathing.

He read it from cover to cover, and then went through the Chapter on breath again, very slowly.

On Thursday afternoon, when Crane sent him up to the third floor with ledgers, he walked past the table by the window where Vivienne always sat. She wasn’t there yet, but her books were, three thick volumes on Rank D Trials and a stack of notes in her neat hand. He set the thin grey book on top of the pile, open to the Chapter on breath, as if someone had left it there and forgotten about it. Then he shelved his ledgers and left without looking back.

[Investment recorded.][Type: Hidden aid. Anchor unaware.]

On Saturday, Mag told him the grey men were gone.

"Nobody’s seen them since Thursday. Word is they asked about a barge to the Free Cities and left on one." Her one eye rested on him. "Funny thing. Half the taverns on the river are telling the same story this week. Some scavenger with a sack."

"Strange." Aren kept his face perfectly blank.

"Very." She sucked contentedly on her pipe and didn’t ask anything else.

He walked home lighter than he had felt in two weeks. The Choir was looking south, Pip was safe, and the grey book was on Vivienne’s desk. He even went down to the docks that evening to help Mira’s father with the boat again, and for once it didn’t feel like hiding.

On Sunday morning, they pulled a body out of the river by the east bank.

He heard about it at breakfast from a Class C girl whose brother was in the city guard. A man had been found floating under the Salt Bridge, an old scavenger called Hob who’d lived on the east bank for thirty years, picking through burned houses and old Rifts for whatever the real hunters left behind. Everyone on the river knew him, because he was easy to recognize. Twenty years ago a tannery fire had burned half his face, and he’d kept it wrapped in grey bandages ever since.

Someone had cut runes into his chest. Small ones, packed close together, like scales.

Aren slowly put his spoon down.

He had never heard of Hob. He had invented a scavenger and made the story as dull and normal as he could so everyone would believe it, and he hadn’t once stopped to think that somewhere on the east bank there might already be a real man who fit it.

The window at the edge of his vision stayed closed. There was nothing to record, because Hob had never hated him. Hob had never even known his name.

He thought about the flooded town he’d bought in his old life, cheap, from people who needed the money. He had never learned their names either, and it had been the best trade of his year.

He sat there among a hundred chattering students and let his breakfast go cold.