The Broken Lands (37 page)

Next she faced Constantine. “In every city, there must also be a smith. This I offer to you. Will you accept?”

Constantine bowed his head. “Yes, ma'am.”

“Throughout time, the smith has been the one tasked with keeping the hearth of the village. You are strong, even when you feel weak, and you can tell the poor metal from the sturdy.” She kissed his cheek. “I am glad to stand at your side.”

She turned to Mike. “You, I ask to be the keeper of the roads. Will you accept?”

“Aye, sure,” he answered.

Susannah grinned. “You, too, are loyal, and even as you walk the darkest streets, you look for places to bring light. You had no reason to stay after Mr. Hawks's death, and here you are. You live in a place where violence is law, and yet you followed Hawks because he told you that even out of the dark places of the city, a person might be called to do great things. You are special, Mike. I am glad to call you my friend.”

She leaned forward to kiss Mike's cheek, and the tough boy actually closed his eyes when she did.

“Thank you, ma'am,” he said quietly.

“And now Sam.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “I didn't actually need your cards to know what to offer you. Your most beloved things are all in this room. Am I right?”

He swallowed and nodded.

“And since you brought us together, I offer you the role of keeper of the conjunction, the deep fellowship that holds the people of a place together into a citizenship. This is not a role that always exists among us, because there is not always someone suitable to hold it. Do you accept?”

Only because Jin was watching him so closely did she see his eyes flick over to where she stood before he said, “Yes.”

Susannah kissed his cheek. “I am honored to serve our home along with you.” She surveyed them all. “When this is over, if you change your minds, I'll understand. But I thank you for standing with me now.” She reached for Ilana's hand, and for Sam's. As if by unspoken agreement, each of the new stewards reached for the hand of the next. Even Mike stepped forward to take his place in the circle. And the second all hands were joined, Jin felt the change.

It was like an electrical charge, a silent, invisible crackling of energy in the room. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear—but it was impossible to miss. Here, in this grand hotel room by the sea, the new stewards took their places, and with the strange, soundless voices of ages past and years to come, the cities welcomed them.

 

Out on the stretch of beach between the piers where they'd set up in order to keep an eye on the Fata Morgana compound, Walker and Bones sat bolt upright at the same time.

“You feel that?” Walker demanded, the marks on his face flaring black as pitch.

“Yes.” Bones turned to Overcaste, who was pacing numbly a few feet away. The pillar looked up with a frightened-animal expression on his face. Bones's eyes narrowed. “You felt it, too, didn't you? And stop pacing, for the hundredth time.”

“I don't know what it was,” Overcaste said quickly.

“But you've felt it before,” Bones persisted. “You recognize it.”

Overcaste licked his lips nervously. “Once before, I've felt it, only it was nothing as . . . as strong as it is now.”

“Well,” Walker said with dangerously exaggerated patience, “when was it, man?”

“When the . . . there were four of us for a while a few years back . . . and . . . and then there was that . . . that feeling. . . . I was having a drink with Hawks at Tammany Hall, and I remember him saying—” Overcaste swallowed. “He said,
Aha, now we are five again.
” He licked his lips once more. “Someone has . . . someone has created new pillars.”

“Someone like who?” Walker stalked to Overcaste and picked him up by his lapels. “Who can do that?”

“Sawyer and Hawks were found dead in West Brighton, so it can only be the one Arabella van Cortelen was acting as a decoy for,” Overcaste sputtered. “The last one. The one we didn't—”

“The one we didn't find?” Walker finished. Red lines slid outward from the black dots, covering his face in a scarlet webwork. “So a pillar can create new ones, anytime? Meaning
you could've created new ones anytime?
I thought we had to kill the last one before we started replacing them!”

“I didn't know!” Overcaste screamed.

“Keep your voices down,” Bones warned. The beach between the piers was deserted, but the piers themselves were not.

Walker set Overcaste down roughly and waved at the faces looking down from the piers as the other man collapsed into a terrified pile at his feet. Then he knelt next to the fellow he'd just dropped into the sand. “You didn't know it could be done, or you didn't know how to do it yourself?”

“Both!”

“So you can't do it?”

“Even if—” Overcaste took a deep breath. “Even if I knew how, you can't replace a living pillar.” But even as he said it, he looked uncertain, as if he could sense that something else had changed.

Bones swore quietly. “Of course not. That's why we had to kill all the other ones.” Then he glanced at Overcaste and caught the unsettled look before the other man could wipe it away. “What?”

Overcaste opened his mouth, then closed it again. His face had gone so pale and sweaty it practically shone.

“What?”
Bones repeated, voice deadly. Overcaste, quaking, managed a strangled noise, but no words. The bald man's oyster-shell eyes narrowed. “She replaced you, too, didn't she?”

The former keeper of the roads swallowed convulsively, which seemed to be enough of an answer for Bones. “Unbelievable,” he said. “Absolutely unbelievable.”

Walker stared up at him. “Meaning now we have to . . .
no
.”

“Yes.”

“We have a whole new batch to get out of the way?”

“Yes.”

“Son of a—”
Walker glared at Overcaste. “I am so angry I could kill you right now, just to take the edge off.”

Overcaste fainted dead away into the sand.

Walker straightened, hands in his pockets. “Well, I guess that means the cinefaction is the thing, once again.”

“We were going to do it anyway,” Bones said tonelessly. “But it's tonight or never. I'm not admitting to Jack that we had taken care of four pillars until the fifth just made up some new ones and now we're right back where we started. I want these cities claimed for Jack before he gets here. It's the only way we don't look like complete fools.”

“Or worse,” Walker added.

“Or worse,” Bones agreed. “May the roads protect us if he gets here and we have to explain this mess.”

T
HE ERRAND
Jin had sent him on turned out to be quick. Sam almost wished it had taken longer. Not much longer, just a little; he had come up with exactly one idea about how to win the bet he had to make with Walker, but it wasn't a notion he liked. But once he'd delivered Jin's message to the person she'd sent him to find and stepped outside the Broken Land, he knew he'd run out of time. He started walking toward West Brighton.

Sam understood that if there was any chance at all of beating Walker, he was going to have to find a way to stack the deck. Proverbially speaking; maybe literally, too. Ordinarily, to fill the gaps in his knowledge of cards or gambling, he went straight to Constantine, who'd taught him to hustle in the first place. For this, though, he needed something more. Fortunately, there was a person right in town who might be able to help.

If, that is, he could somehow be convinced to help Sam rather than hit him again.

The sharper still sat in Sam's spot on Culver Plaza, his feet up on a little folding table, his hat tipped back, and his face turned to the sky. He fanned himself with a creased racing form as Sam came to stand in front of him.

“Well, hello,” Sam said dryly. “Don't you just look cozy as all get-out.”

The sharper smiled with his mouth, but not his eyes. “I'll give you this, kid. I've been a lot of places and had a lot of folks try to run me out of town, but I've never had those kind of shenanigans played on me. I don't much want to know what I looked like, running for my life from a bunch of spitfires.” He slid a crate out from under the folding table with one foot. “Care to sit?”

“Much obliged.”

“You come for another game,” the man asked as Sam sat, “or you going to light another fire under my tail?”

Well, here goes.
“I came to ask for your help.”

“My help?” The sharper laughed. “Kid, you can't be that stupid. I'm here to beat you and take your money, not to be your mentor.”

“It isn't you I want to know how to beat.” Sam took a deep breath. “Help me, and I'll give you my spot.”

“It's not your spot anymore, kid.”

That was probably true. Still . . . “I'll walk away,” he said, as if he really posed any threat to this man. “I'll leave town, if that's what it takes. I'll do anything. The man I have to play . . .” He pictured Walker striding across the gravel behind the hotel, moving like a creature with nothing to give away. Nothing to exploit. A man who couldn't possibly be bluffed by a fifteen-year-old kid.

“I don't know if he can be beaten,” Sam admitted, “but I
have
to beat him, and I have no one else to ask.”

The other man cocked his head. “Really.”

“Really.”

The sharper watched him across the scratched tabletop. “Who is this guy? How'd you get yourself mixed up with him?”

“He's . . .” Sam hesitated. It had never occurred to him that the man would care enough to ask what the situation was.

“Don't mess with me, kid,” he said, interrupting Sam's thoughts. “If you lie, I'll know.”

And he will,
Sam realized.
I can't bluff him any more than I can bluff Walker.

The sharper leaned on the table. “Come clean, now.”

“Fellow's name is Walker.”

The other man sat up straight. “Red-haired guy? Goes in for fancy suits?”

“Yeah. How did you . . . ?”

The sharper's grin widened. “Well, stick me in the ribs and tell me it's my birthday!” He burst into a crackling laugh and slapped his hand down on the table.

“What the heck—” Sam stared. “You
know
him?”

“Know what? Maybe.” The sharper reached a hand across the table. “Alsae Tesserian. Al.”

“Saverio Noctiluca.” He shook Tesserian's hand, utterly dumbfounded. “Sam.”

“I should apologize, probably. Anybody who's gotten himself on the wrong side of Redgore is someone I want to be acquainted with. Wouldn't have given you such a hard time if I'd known you were a roamer.”

“Redgore?” Then Sam realized what Tesserian had called him. “Roamer?”

“Redgore, or probably High Walker to you. But that's more like the term for
what
he is, not
who
he is. Redgore's his proper name.” Tesserian leaned back. “I've run into 'em from time to time.”

“You . . . you've
run into them from time to time?
”

“Weird world, isn't it?” The sharper smiled again, and Sam recalled Ambrose's words:
The country is wide and strange
.

“Are you some kind of . . . of a roamer, too?” He decided to set aside, for the moment, the fact that Tesserian had called him one. They could come back to that.

“Yep,” Tesserian replied, as easily as if Sam had asked if he was cold or tired or hungry. “Fact is, I ran into Redgore just about a week back.”

“Where?”

“Steamboat. Poker tourney. I'm not a poker man myself, except under extraordinary circumstances. But I was bored.” He sighed. “I've been bored a lot lately. Kinda hoped this place would be different.”

“Did you play him?”

“Him? Nah. Well. Not then. You got any idea how many folks were on that boat? How many of 'em were armed? Not that they were going to cause me any damage . . . or Walker, for that matter.” Tesserian shrugged. “Just that if I'd hopped into that tournament, it would've come down to Walker and me eventually, and—well, you've seen me play.”

“Sure. Looks a whole heck of a lot like cheating.”

“My point exactly.” Then Tesserian winked. “
Looks
like.”

Sam regarded him dubiously. “You're saying you don't?”

“Don't what?”

“Cheat!”

Tesserian laughed. “Kid—Sam—I don't
need
to cheat. Not you, anyway, and I wouldn't have needed to cheat anyone in that tournament, either. But by the time it got down to Redgore and me, anyone who was watching when the two of us really got to trying to beat each other would've made the same assumption you did. Fifty gamblers with pistols and knives thinking they'd been cheated out of a hundred-thousand-dollar pot?” Tesserian whistled. “I'll throw a punch or two now and then, but I don't relish violence, not really. Not like
he
does. I just like my games.”

“So you stayed out of the tournament.”

“Just about killed me, but yeah, I did. Had to watch that bastard win. And he taunted me the whole time. Called me all kinds of names.”

“He knew you were there?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Well, does he know you're
here?
”

“I didn't know
he
was here, for what that's worth. Guess he's probably the one behind this Jack nonsense, isn't he? Now I think on it, I probably should've known that carnage was his handiwork.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “So tell me about how you're mixed up with him.”

“Well, it's kind of a—”

Tesserian put up a hand. “I don't want a long story. It's beating Redgore that interests me. I play games because I like to win, and back on that steamboat I had to step aside and watch that bloodthirsty maniac take all the fun and glory. Why do you have to play him? That's gonna be worse than trying to whip your weight in wildcats.”