The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 006: Candle Lane

Ethan didn't wait for dawn.

He packed in the dark, fast and quiet. His mother's recipe book went into a canvas bag, with the flower inside it. Her ring went on a cord around his neck. Two shirts, a knife from the kitchen drawer, the heel of the bread. The band stayed in its sock at the bottom of the bag. He left the rest on the shelves. There wasn't much, and none of it was his anyway.

Then he stood very still at the window and let Stalker's Instinct open.

The street below was empty, as far as his eyes could tell. His other sense said otherwise. Two breaths, down at the corner, near the well. They were slow and patient. Neither of them moved in the twenty minutes he stood there. Nobody sleeps that still.

One was by the wall. The other was in the shadow of the baker's awning, across from his door.

Wardens, he thought. Or Garrick's people. Same thing, maybe.

He glanced at the silver token on the table. It sat in a square of moonlight, small and bright, like an eye.

If it was a tracker, it was telling them exactly where he was. If he left it in the room, they'd come in the morning and find nothing. If he took it with him, he'd lead them wherever he went. If he threw it away, they'd know he'd found out.

None of those were good. He thought about it for a while, and then he heard a sound in the street, wheels and a slow wet clopping, and an idea arrived.

He slipped the token into his pocket.

The window opened onto a sloped roof, and the roof dropped to a lean-to shed over the neighbor's yard. He had climbed this way a hundred times as a kid, hiding from Dorian, from his cousins, from nobody in particular. His body remembered where to put his feet. The tiles were cold and wet. His left arm ached where the scar pulled tight.

A heavy cart rumbled down the lane below. The night rubbish collector, a hunched old man on the bench, a donkey with its head down. The wagon bed was piled high with cabbage leaves, ashes, and broken crockery. Its route ended at the north gate, where the city dumped everything it didn't want.

Ethan crouched at the edge of the shed roof. The cart passed underneath, slow as a funeral.

He dropped the token into the pile. It vanished under a heap of fish bones.

The old man never looked up.

The two breaths at the corner didn't move either. He watched the cart go past the well, past the awning, past the baker's door. Nobody shifted. Nobody followed it. Maybe the Wardens were tracking the token from somewhere else, or maybe they weren't tracking it at all. But in the morning, if anyone checked, a silver key would be leaving the city in a pile of garbage, and Ethan Vale would be somewhere else.

He swung down off the shed into the neighbor's yard. A chicken screamed at him. He froze, one hand over its beak, until the lights in the house stayed dark.

Then he went over the back wall and into the maze of the lower ward.

Candle Lane was the crooked street where the city kept people it preferred not to think about. Scribes who had lost their licenses. Book-sellers who sold the wrong books. Mapmakers who drew things the Crown disliked. At this hour the lane was black, except for a single window halfway down, where a stub of candle burned behind dirty glass.

A sign over the door read HOLLOW PAGES, BOUGHT AND SOLD.

Ethan didn't know why he'd come here. His feet had brought him, the way they brought him to the library when he was twelve and wanted to be somewhere quiet. In the lower ward, everyone said the same thing about the owner. Old Tomas knows old words. He had been a scholar once, they said, at the Royal Library. Then he'd asked a question in public and lost his post.

He knocked.

Nothing. He knocked again.

"Go away," called a voice from inside. "We're closed. We've been closed since the year the bakery burned."

"I have something I can't read."

A long pause. Then a bolt slid, and another, and a third. The door opened a crack. One eye looked out, magnified by a thick round lens.

"What kind of something?"

"Metal. With letters on the inside. I don't think they're any language I've seen."

"Hm." The door opened wider.

The shop was a cave of books. They climbed the walls in leaning stacks and covered every chair. A narrow table in the middle held an oil lamp, a half-eaten pear, and a heap of scrolls under a brick. The man who owned it was seventy at least, bald, with a grey beard stained yellow at the edges and ink to the elbows.

[Tomas Wren. Human. Level 6. Surface attitude: Wary, curious.]

"Show me," Tomas said. "Slowly. If it's a bomb, I'd like a moment to say a prayer."

Ethan took the sock from the bag and shook the band out onto the table. It landed with a dull clink. In the lamplight the metal looked darker than it had in the tower, and the scratches inside showed up as a line of tiny, tight symbols, packed side to side.

Tomas stopped breathing.

He didn't pick it up. He leaned over it with both hands flat on the table, his lens nearly touching the metal. His lips moved. His fingers twitched, tracing the air above the letters.

"Where," he said, "did you get this?"

"Off a monster. A Rift Stalker. It was wearing it. It had grown into its skin."

"A collar." Tomas said it softly. "Of course. Where else."

"You can read it?"

"Some. This isn't common script, boy. This is Sundering-era. Before the kingdoms, before the Crown, before anyone in this city thought to write down who owned whom." He turned his head. The lens flashed. "Why are you here at midnight with this? Who sent you?"

"Nobody. I just, I didn't know where to go."

The old man studied him for a long moment. The anger drained out of his face, and what was left looked tired and scared.

"All right," he said. "I won't ask. Not yet." He pulled out a stool with his foot. "Sit. Don't touch it. It may not like to be touched by strangers."

Ethan sat. The lamp hissed. Somewhere on the shelves a mouse scratched in the paper.

Tomas read for a long time. Ethan watched his finger move from the left end to the right, stopping, backing up, stopping again. At one point the old man muttered a word that Ethan was fairly sure was a curse. At another he stopped altogether and put a hand over his mouth.

"What?" Ethan said.

"There's a small mark here, near the clasp." Tomas pointed. "Do you see it?"

Ethan leaned close. Pressed into the metal, almost too small to see, was a tiny stylized key.

His stomach dropped.

"That's the sign of the Wardens," he whispered.

"No. It's older than the Wardens." Tomas's voice was dry. "The Wardens borrowed it. I'd like very much to know who from." He straightened up, his spine cracking. "The body of the text is a binding formula. Three lines. The first says what the wearer is. The second says whose hand holds the leash."

"And the third?"

Tomas looked at him.

"The third is one word," he said. "Repeated, over and over, all the way around. Obey."

On the table, the band started to hum.