Across Infinities: The Twelve Games · Book 2
The Kingpin's Fall
Prologue: The Host
Welcome back.
Those of you who were here for the premiere: hello again. You look exactly the same, which is the whole problem with us. Those of you who heard about the premiere and came for the sequel: you’re late, sit down, there’s a seat at the end next to the woman who hasn’t stopped crying since Lantern Bridge. She’s fine. She’s having a very good time.
World two.
First, a correction, because I have standards and because three hundred thousand of you wrote in, eternals, and some of you swore at me, and you were right, damn you.
At the end of the last episode I told our boy he’d wake up in the next world “with that rock in your hand.” That was wrong. The rock was a world-one tool. It belongs to Kogsworth, and it folded with Kogsworth. In world two he’s born. Born players don’t wake up holding things. They wake up holding a whole life: a mother, a street, a broken tooth, a debt. They don’t get to bring anything in.
I said a kind thing to a man in the gray and it wasn’t true. Add it to the list.
The list, for those of you who are new, is a document I keep called Things that weren’t in the build. It isn’t long. It’s longer than it was last season, and I’d like it to stop growing, and it won’t.
Second item of business. The Architect has read my flag about the linked channel: the little broadcast over the road, the pursuer who got folded five days into his city, mid-sentence. The Architect has filed it under acceptable losses. They have asked me, very courteously, to stop flagging it. They say the clocks have been unlinked. Separate builds now. Separate worlds. A clean break.
I believe them. They’re always right. It says so on their door, in brass.
Third item, and then I’ll get out of your light.
Our boy went into the gray last time carrying something. Not the rock. You can’t carry objects through the gray, I’ve just finished explaining that. He carried a thing he’d decided. On the last morning of world one, in a hot kitchen, he decided not to tell his oldest friend about a house. A blue door, an apple tree, a woman with two shawls, all of them real, all of them in my city files, and one thing that wasn’t real anywhere. A big brown dog asleep on a step.
He kept it from Jonathan to be kind. Then the light went, and there wasn’t a walk home, and now his friend’s on a different channel and as far as anybody upstairs has told me, they won’t be in the same world again. That’s the design. I didn’t write it. I only read it out.
So: he’s carrying a secret he can’t remember, about a dog that doesn’t exist, for a friend he may not see again.
I’d like to tell you that won’t matter. I’ve been doing this a very long time, and I’ve never once been able to tell anybody that.
Lights down.
Calder City. Fog, canals, count-houses. A kingpin, a ledger with teeth, and a girl with seventeen months of paperwork. Our boy’s name is Callum Reyes now. He’s thirty-one. He’s good at his job.
That’s the bad news.
* * *
Chapter 1: The Fixer
Callum Reyes woke up at the bottom of the fog and had to kick the door to get out.
That was every morning in Calder in the back half of the year. The fog came up the canals in the night like a tide that had forgotten it was supposed to be water, and it filled Wick Lane to the gutters, and it got into the hinges of every door in the Narrows and swelled the wood. His door was the worst on the lane. It was blue, or had been: somebody had painted it a long time ago in a color like the sky going out, and the weather had been taking the paint back ever since, a flake at a time. It stuck at the bottom. Always the bottom, always the left-hand corner. You turned the handle and shoved with your shoulder and kicked, low, in the one place, and it gave.
He’d lived behind it four years. He’d chosen the room for the door, and couldn’t have told you why. Mrs. Dabney, who owned the chandler’s downstairs and the three rooms over it, had shown him a better room on Coin Street first, with a south window and a door that opened like a door. He’d stood in Wick Lane in the drizzle and studied the blue one and said, “This one,” and she’d said, “It sticks, love,” and he’d said, “I know,” as if he had known. As if somebody had told him.
He kicked it now, and it gave, and he went down the outside stair into the fog with his collar up and his hands in his pockets, and the lane swallowed him.
* * *
Calder was built on mud and money, in that order, and neither had ever quite forgiven the other.
The mud had been there first: a wide gray estuary where three slow rivers came down out of the hills and gave up. The money had come later, on ships. Somebody had drained enough of the mud to put a quay on it, and somebody else had put a count-house on the quay to count what came off the ships, and in four hundred years of that the mud had turned into a city: canals instead of streets in the old half, bridges every hundred yards, warehouses with their feet in the water and their heads in the fog, and count-houses. Calder had more count-houses than churches. It had more count-houses than pubs, which was saying something, because it had a great many pubs.
The fog was the city’s oldest resident. It came in off the estuary from the end of summer to the start of spring, and it didn’t so much lift as get bored and wander off around noon, then come back at dusk with friends. Nobody in Calder talked about the fog. You didn’t talk about your own feet.
Callum walked through it as you walk through your own house in the dark. Left out of Wick Lane. Down the six steps to the Tanners’ Cut. Along the towpath with the water on his right, black and quiet, and the hulls of the moored lighters bumping at their ropes like cattle in a shed. Over the Dyer’s Bridge, which had a loose stone on the fourth step that he stepped over without looking. He knew this city in his legs. He’d been born in it, in a room half a mile from here that wasn’t there anymore. He’d run messages through it at nine and collected debts through it at fourteen, and at thirty-one he could have walked from the Narrows to the Customs Steps blindfold, which in the fog was more or less what everybody did.
He had a name to collect from this morning. It was in his pocket, on a slip of Kessler paper, in Quint’s tiny, beautiful hand: Orrin Baines, lighterman, berth 14, Tanners’ Cut. 6 crowns 4. Third week.
Third week meant it was his turn. First week was a reminder. Second week was a man called Garrow. Third week was Callum, and Callum was supposed to be worse than Garrow, because Garrow only broke things, and Callum understood them.
He found berth 14. The lighter was a long flat black boat with a cabin like a coffin at one end and a stovepipe coming out of the coffin with a little thread of smoke going up into the fog. He stepped down onto the deck. The boat moved under him, as boats do, and settled.
“Mr. Baines,” he said to the cabin door. “It’s Reyes. From Tallow Quay.”
There was a silence inside of a kind he’d learned to recognize. It was the silence of a whole family holding its breath at once.
Then the door opened, and Orrin Baines came out. He was a big man gone thin, with the stoop that lightermen get from twenty years of poling under bridges, and he’d put his good coat on to be collected in. That was the thing Callum always noticed: people put their good coats on. As if it would help. As if there were a dress code.
“Mr. Reyes,” said Baines, as if they’d met at church.
“Six crowns four,” said Callum. “You know what it’s for. I know you know. Let’s skip the part where you tell me.”
“I’ve got two,” said Baines. “I’ve got two crowns and a bit. The river’s been slow. Kessler’s raised the berth fee twice since the summer. I’m not...” He stopped. Behind him, in the cabin, Callum could see a stove and a kettle and a woman sitting very upright on a bunk with a child on her knee, a girl of two or so with her thumb in her mouth, watching him over it with enormous round eyes. “I’m not making excuses.”
“You are a bit,” said Callum.
“I am a bit,” Baines agreed, miserably.
Callum watched the child. The child eyed Callum. She took her thumb out of her mouth to see if that improved things, decided it didn’t, and put it back. Something happened in his chest.
It was a small thing. It had been happening, on and off, for a week now: a warmth, just under the breastbone, that came and went as a cat comes and goes from a room. He’d thought it was his stomach. He’d thought it was Mrs. Dabney’s coffee, which was famous in Wick Lane for being both strong and faintly damp. But it wasn’t his stomach. It was higher than that, and it wasn’t a pain. It was more like a hand. Like the palm of a hand laid flat against the inside of his ribs and pressing, very gently, in one direction.
The direction was south and a little east. Toward the harbor. Toward the Customs Steps. It didn’t waver.
He put his own hand up to his chest without thinking about it, and held it there, flat. It was a stupid thing to do in front of a debtor. He did it anyway.
“Mr. Reyes?” said Baines, uncertainly.
“Give me the two crowns,” said Callum, and took his hand away.
Baines gave him two crowns and some copper. Callum counted it, because you always counted it in front of them, because that was half the job. Two crowns, one shilling and fourpence. He put it in the purse he kept for Kessler money, which was brown leather and had a K burned into the flap. Then he took his other purse out, the one with no letter on it, and counted out four crowns and three shillings and dropped those into the Kessler purse too, and pulled the string tight.
Baines watched him with the expression of a man who doesn’t know what he’s looking at and is afraid to ask.
“There,” said Callum. “Paid.”
“What?”
“Six crowns four. Paid in full. Third week’s done.” He put the Kessler purse away. “Next month the berth fee goes up again. I can’t help that. You’ll get the first-week reminder and the second-week Garrow like everybody else, and you’ll find it somewhere, because you’ll have to. But this month you paid.”
“Why...” said Baines. His face was going a dull red under the river-brown. “Why would you…”
“I wouldn’t,” said Callum. “I didn’t. Nobody did anything. You paid. Go and tell your wife; she’s been holding her breath since I stepped aboard.”
He stepped back up onto the towpath. The boat rocked and steadied behind him. He didn’t look back, because if you looked back they thanked you, and if they thanked you then it was a thing that had happened, and then it would get about, and then Kessler would hear that Callum Reyes was paying people’s debts out of his own pocket, and then Kessler would find out how much Callum Reyes had in his own pocket, which was not as much as Kessler thought, and draw conclusions.
He walked off along the towpath. The warmth in his chest walked with him, and went on pointing south.
He’d done that perhaps forty times in four years. He didn’t keep count. That was a lie: he kept count exactly, in a column in the back of his head, as Quint kept the black ledger. Forty-one. He couldn’t have said why he did it. He’d tried to explain it to himself once, late, on the outside stair with a bottle, and the best he’d managed was that it was going to cost somebody, and he’d rather it was him. That if a thing had to be paid, he’d rather get there first and pay it before anybody else had to.
It was a stupid way to run a life. It was an especially stupid way to run a life when your job was making other people pay.
* * *
The fog was thinning by the time he came out onto the Swing Bridge, as it does around nine: not lifting, exactly, but going pale and full of light, as though somebody behind it had lit a lamp.
The Swing Bridge crossed the Grand Cut where the Grand Cut met the harbor. It was iron, painted green, and it turned on a great iron pivot in the middle, twice a day, to let the tall ships through to the inner basin. When it was open it pointed up and down the canal like a compass needle and the whole of Calder had to go around by the Mercers’ Bridge, half a mile north, and swear. When it was shut, which was most of the time, it was the busiest hundred feet in the city: carts and barrows and dogs and a river of people in both directions, clerks going down to the harbor, porters coming up, everybody late.
There was a tea barrow at the north end of it. There’d always been a tea barrow there, as far as Callum knew. He’d bought tea from it at nine when he was running messages. This one was new, though. Or the woman was. The barrow was painted dark red with a little brass urn on top and a canvas awning, and under the awning, on a stool, with a shawl around her shoulders and a cup in her hand, sat a woman of about fifty with a broad pleasant face and iron-gray hair in a knot, watching the bridge go by with an expression of great contentment, as if she’d made it. The barrow stood square in the way of everybody, and nobody walked into it. They went around it as water goes around a stone, without looking.
“Tea,” said Callum, because he’d stopped, and it seemed rude not to.
“Ha’penny,” said the woman. She poured it without looking at the cup. It was very good tea, black and stewed and sweet, as the Narrows drank it. She handed it over and considered him while he drank it, a long, comfortable, unembarrassed look, as if he were a view.
“You’re new,” he said.
“I’m not,” she said. “You’ve just never stopped before.”
“I’ve stopped here every day for five years.”
“Not at mine.” She smiled. It was the kind of smile that let you in on a joke before you knew there was one. “Tea,” she said. “I read the leaves, too, if you like. Ha’penny extra.”
“I don’t like,” said Callum.
“Nobody does,” said the tea-woman. “They all ask anyway.” And she held out her hand for the cup.
He gave it back. He couldn’t have said why. He’d meant to finish it, and then he’d given it back with a mouthful left in the bottom, and she’d taken it and tipped it and swirled it and turned it over on the saucer, all in one practiced movement, before he could say that he’d only said no.
She looked into the cup for a long time.
“Hm,” she said.
“Hm what?”
“You’re a man who pays,” she said.
The fog moved over the bridge. A cart of barrels went by, rumbling, and the whole span shivered a little on its pivot, as it always did. A porter going by with a sack on his shoulder gave Callum a look, the look people keep for a man talking to a lamp-post, and went on.
“Everybody pays,” said Callum. “It’s a port.”
“No,” said the tea-woman, still looking at the leaves. “Everybody owes. That’s the port. You pay. You pay before anybody’s asked.” She looked up at him, and her eyes were gray and very kind and not at all like a fortune-teller’s eyes, which in his experience were usually doing sums. “That’s a lovely thing, in a man. It’ll get you into terrible trouble.”
He laughed. He hadn’t meant to. “That’s my fortune? A ha’penny for that?”
“That’s free,” said the tea-woman. “The fortune’s this.” She set the cup down on the barrow between them, upside down, so that he couldn’t see the leaves even if he’d known how to read them, and she rested two fingers on the bottom of it, lightly, as you’d rest them on the head of a child.
“Watch what things cost,” she said.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s the dearest ha’penny I’ve ever spent.”
“It’s free,” said the tea-woman again, patiently. “I told you. Things that matter usually are, the first time. It’s the second time you get the bill.” She took her fingers off the cup. “Go on. You’re late. Somebody’s waiting at the bottom of the harbor steps who doesn’t know she’s waiting, and it isn’t polite.”
He gazed at her. She looked back at him with her broad kind face and poured herself another cup, as if he’d already gone.
“I’m not going to the harbor,” he said. “I’m going to Tallow Quay.”
“Well, then,” said the tea-woman comfortably. “You’ll be fine, won’t you.”
He walked away. He walked away north, toward Tallow Quay, as he’d said, across the hundred feet of the Swing Bridge with the city going past him both ways, and halfway across, in the middle, right over the great iron pivot, the warmth in his chest turned over like a sleeper and pointed south and a little east, toward the Customs Steps and the Harbor Office, as hard as a hand pushing. He stopped dead.
People went around him, swearing. A boy with a barrow of oysters went around him. He stood on the pivot of the Swing Bridge with his palm flat on his chest and looked south, through the thinning fog, at the long gray front of the Harbor Office on its granite steps, with its thirty windows and its clock and its flag hanging down wet from the pole.
Somebody’s waiting at the bottom of the harbor steps.
He didn’t believe in fortune-tellers. He’d spent his whole life in a city where every second woman with a stool and a shawl would tell you your future for a copper, and every one of them had told him he’d come into money, and none of them had been right. He didn’t believe in the warmth either. He thought it was his stomach.
He stood there a full minute anyway. Then he took his hand off his chest and walked north to Tallow Quay, because Brandon Kessler didn’t like to be kept waiting, and Callum Reyes was good at his job.
He didn’t look back at the barrow.
If he had, he’d have seen the tea-woman with her hand flat on the barrow-top, watching him go, with an expression that wasn’t contented at all. It was the expression of a woman who’s put a coin into a machine and is waiting to see what comes out.
* * *