Chapter 75: Spend It Before the Bank Does

Chapter 75: Chapter 75: Spend It Before the Bank Does

The next morning, Jack woke up to the cold sting of another point leaving him, and he just lay there in bed, counting how many he had left. It was the same kind of math he used to do back on Earth whenever his landlord was knocking at the door.

[It is the middle of the morning. 336 days. Current divinity points: 66.]

Sixty-six points sounded like a lot, but at one point an hour, it would take the debt less than three days to drain every single one of them, and after that, every point he earned would just go straight into its mouth. He remembered how his grandmother used to hide money inside her recipe books so that his uncle couldn’t borrow it, and he sat straight up in bed.

"Show me the shop," Jack whispered.

[Jack, you should not be spending anything right now]

"Now is exactly the time to spend it," Jack whispered. "If the bank is going to take my money anyway, I may as well spend it before they do. It’s the oldest trick in the book."

Syraphim stayed quiet for a moment, and then the shop appeared in the air above his bed, glowing with her familiar soft gold.

[I do not think that is a trick. But I cannot see why it would not work]

Jack scrolled through the skills he already had and the ones he couldn’t afford, until he found one near the very end that he had never noticed before.

[Lesser Revelation (40 points): For a few heartbeats, shows what lies hidden beneath a single thing. A glamour, a hidden message, a secret passage. It cannot show you what someone is hiding in their heart.]

Jack read it three times, and a slow smile spread across his face.

"That one," Jack whispered.

[How do you know?]

"Because Hale told me that every contract has a weakness somewhere," Jack whispered. "And if there’s one hidden in a book written by a god, I want to be able to see it."

[Skill learned: Lesser Revelation. Divinity points remaining: 26.]

The brassy gold numbers popped up a moment later, as if they had been waiting for him.

[Current divinity points: 25.]

Jack looked at the number and laughed out loud. It was the first time since the mark had appeared on his hand that he felt like he had actually beaten the debt at something, even if it was only by forty points.

When Jack went downstairs, he found Aldous already sitting at the dining table with Princess Tamsin, the two of them bent over Fenwick’s eleven pages, which were now covered in charcoal notes. Aldous looked up when Jack came in, and his face was very pale.

"I have been thinking about the name on the last page all night," Aldous said. "Castor Fenwick, clerk. I never knew his family name when I met him. But I remember him now."

Jack took a seat across the table from him.

"Tell me," Jack said.

"He was only a boy," Aldous said. "Eighteen or nineteen at the most. He worked at the Exchange as a clerk for one of the money lenders. He was very poor, and very clever, and always hungry, and he had the finest pair of shoes I ever saw on a clerk. He was the one who led me to it." Aldous looked down at his cracked hands. "I was at the Cathedral one night, counting the blessing money we had taken in that day, when he came to me. He said that he had heard me praying, and that he knew of someone who could help me, if I would only follow him."

Nobody at the table spoke for a moment.

"He brought you to it," Jack said slowly.

"He held the lantern for me," Aldous said. "He stood behind me while I made my bargain, and when I had finished, he wrote his name below mine." Aldous swallowed hard and stared down at the table for a long moment. "I have wondered for forty years what he asked for. Whatever it was, it has kept him young and wealthy for a very long time."

Jack thought about Fenwick’s handsome face, and his silver hair, and the rings on almost every one of his fingers. He thought about the way Fenwick had told him that gods were a business back at Ironwatch, and he realized that Fenwick hadn’t been explaining anything to him at all, because he had been showing off.

"He’s not its customer," Jack said. "He’s its salesman. He has been from the very beginning."

Justiciar Hale came in from the courtyard, leaning on his cane, and he listened to everything with a grimace growing on his face.

"Then we cannot get to the book without going through Lord Fenwick," Hale said.

"And we can’t get to Fenwick," Garrick said from the doorway, with his mouth full of bread. "Bors has searched everywhere for him. He’s gone."

"He’ll be back when it’s time to collect," Jack said. "Collectors always come back for their money." He tapped his finger on the letter lying on the table. "So we tell him he’s going to get paid."

Mira had walked in behind Garrick, and she stopped in her tracks when she heard what Jack said.

"You can’t do that," Mira said.

[Jack]

"I’m not giving her to him," Jack said, loudly enough for everyone to hear. "I would never do that to her. I know that, but Fenwick doesn’t. He thinks everyone has a price, so I’m going to give him exactly what he thinks he wants."

[You are going to lie to him]

"I’m going to let him believe whatever he wants to believe," Jack whispered. "That’s different. I learned that at the Conclave."

[No. You learned that from Fenwick]

"Well, at least I’m using it on him," Jack whispered.

Mira sat down in the chair beside him, and after a moment, Jack felt her hand find his marked one under the table and hold onto it. She didn’t argue with him anymore. She knew him well enough to recognize the look on his face when a plan was coming together, and she also knew him well enough to know that he would never hand Syraphim over to anyone.

[I know that you would never sell me]

"Then why are you shaking?" Jack whispered.

[Because I have felt his god, Jack, and it has been counting for forty years. I am not afraid of what you will do. I am afraid of what they will do when they find out]

"They’ll be angry," Jack whispered. "And angry people make mistakes."

[That does not comfort me at all]

They spent the rest of the morning working out a plan around the dining table. Jack would write to Fenwick and tell him that he was ready to pay, and a payment that large would have to be recorded properly, which meant that Fenwick would have to bring the ledger. When he opened it, Jack would only need a few heartbeats with Lesser Revelation to see whatever weakness was hidden on the page.

"And what are you going to do once you see it?" Garrick asked.

"I’m working on that part," Jack said.

"He is always working on that part," Princess Tamsin told Aldous, without looking up from her notebook. "Most of his plans work that way."

Aldous looked up from his bowl of porridge, and for the first time, Jack saw something flicker in his faded eyes that reminded him of the clever young priest who had once been very good with numbers.

"When I made my bargain, the god spoke to me through the lantern," Aldous said slowly. "Not through Fenwick, and not through the book. It only ever spoke through the light. If you are going to stand in that cellar and argue with it, God of Failure, you should know where its mouth is."

Jack wrote the letter himself, in the best handwriting he could manage, which wasn’t very good. He kept it short, because when you are lying, you always keep it short, and because the surest way to ruin a con was to explain too much.

Dear Fenwick, you win. I will pay. Tell me when and where.

K.M.

Then he walked out to the front gate, set the letter on the step where the other two had appeared, and went back inside to wait.

[Current divinity points: 21.]

The answer came back faster than either of the others. Jack had only just finished his lunch when the cook walked in holding a cream-colored envelope between two fingers, looking as if she had found a dead animal in her pantry, and dropped it on the table in front of him.

Dear Mr. Mercer, a wise decision. We will meet at the Gilded Exchange at midnight, on the night before the new moon. Come alone, and bring her with you. I will bring the book.

C.D.

Jack read the letter out loud, and then he set it down on the table very carefully.

"The night before the new moon," Princess Tamsin said. "That is sixteen days from tonight."

"Come alone," Mira said, and there was worry in every word.

"He always says come alone," Jack said. "He won’t come alone himself. He’ll have Brask’s old smiths and half the thieves in the lower district hiding in that cellar with him, and I’d do the same thing if I were him." He looked around the table at all of his friends, and he felt the old, familiar grin start to spread across his face. "Which gives us sixteen days to plan the greatest con this city has ever seen."

[Jack, sixteen days of interest will take every point you earn]

"I know," Jack whispered. "That’s why I spent them first."

[336 days. Ninety-seven true believers to go]