Chapter 76: The Big Store

Chapter 76: Chapter 76: The Big Store

The last of Jack’s points went just before sunrise. He felt it leave the same way all the others had, a cold little pinch behind his ribs, except that this time, nothing came after it. Then the brassy words appeared, hovering over his bed in the dark.

[Current divinity points: 0. All future divinity will be applied to the outstanding balance.]

Jack lay there and stared at the zero for a long while.

[Jack]

"I’m fine," Jack whispered.

[You are not. But you have me]

"I know," Jack whispered. "That’s why I’m fine."

By breakfast, he had the entire group crowded into Hale’s dining room, which was far more people than it had ever been built to hold. Mira, Garrick, Hilde and Sunny sat around the table with Princess Tamsin and Justiciar Hale, and Aldous sat at the end eating his porridge, as always. Constance had her chair by the fire, and Agathe stood behind it with her two guards. Bors leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed, because there were no seats left, and Brannoch, who had come up from the Forge District at the crack of dawn, was standing in the corner with his head tilted sideways so that he wouldn’t hit the rafters.

Jack stood at the head of the table and looked around at all of them, and for a moment, he felt exactly the way he used to feel on Earth, right before the start of a very big job.

"Where I come from," Jack said, "there’s a kind of con called the big store."

"A large store?" Brannoch asked.

"Kind of," Jack said. "You build a whole fake world around one person, with fake shops and fake customers and fake friends, and every single person in it is working towards one goal, which is to convince the mark that something is true." He placed his hands flat on the table. "But the mark has to want to believe it. You can’t force him into it. He has to buy into it on his own, and the whole time, he has to think that he’s smarter than everyone else in the room."

"Fenwick always thinks he is smarter than everyone else in the room," Princess Tamsin said.

"Which is why it’ll work," Jack said.

Hale rested both hands on top of his cane and studied Jack with his piercing old eyes.

"And what is it that you want Lord Fenwick to believe?" Hale asked.

"That I’m going to betray him," Jack said.

The whole table looked at him as if he had gone completely insane.

"He already knows I won’t really hand her over," Jack said. "He’s a con artist, just like me, and no con artist believes anyone who says yes that easily. So he’s going to walk down into that cellar expecting a trick." Jack shrugged, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "So we give him one. We let him catch us pulling a sloppy double-cross, and he’ll be so busy feeling clever about catching the first trick that he’ll never even notice the second one is there."

[That is quite devious]

"Thanks," Jack whispered.

[I did not say that it was a good thing]

"What is the second trick?" Sunny asked.

Jack gave him the same crooked smile he used to give marks back on Earth.

"If I tell everyone," Jack said, "then it’s not a trick anymore."

Then he began handing out jobs, one by one, around the table.

He asked Brannoch whether his smiths could build him a lantern, and when Brannoch assured him that his smiths could make anything out of iron and glass, Jack asked him to make one that looked old, as old as possible, and to make it quickly. Brannoch stared at him for a long moment and then nodded once, without asking a single question, which Jack appreciated more than he could say.

He asked Bors to find out which thieves from the lower district had been hired for the night before the new moon, and who had hired them. He also asked him to have the fish woman start a rumor around the market that the God of Failure was frightened and trying to make deals behind closed doors, and he wanted that rumor to reach Fenwick’s ears by the end of the week.

"She can do that in a day," Bors said, grinning.

"I’m counting on it," Jack said.

He asked Princess Tamsin and Aldous to go through every page of the contract again, not looking for flaws this time, but looking for names. He wanted a list of every person in Kessford who had ever made a deal with the bargain god in the last forty years.

"Why?" Princess Tamsin asked, already starting to write.

"Because a god who has never been loved has a lot of customers," Jack said. "And customers talk to each other."

He told Garrick that his job was to be loud, which Garrick said was the easiest job anyone had ever given him. On the night of the meeting, Garrick would lead the sloppy double-cross, and he would make enough noise doing it that every thief hiding in that cellar would be looking straight at him.

"Make it convincing," Jack said.

"I always try," Garrick said, looking offended. "That is why it always looks so bad."

He asked Sunny to go back to the Cathedral and speak with the priests who were still there, and to find out how many of them had ever been taken down to a cellar by a polite young man in very nice shoes. Sunny’s face hardened, and he nodded. Then Jack looked over at Hilde, who was sitting quietly with her sword across her lap.

"I need you to learn what that god feels like," Jack said. "Every coin it ever touched, every glamour, every rock. When we get down there, I need you to be able to tell me exactly where its light is coming from."

"I will need a coin," Hilde said.

Bors reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a single gold coin that nobody had bitten yet, one he had saved from Pell’s split sack in the market square, and he set it on the table in front of her. Hilde wrapped her hand around it, and her lips tightened.

Jack didn’t ask Constance for anything, but when he glanced over at the old woman by the fire, she gave him a slow nod, as if she already knew what he would ask her when the time came.

Mira waited until everyone else had a job, and then she crossed her arms and looked at him.

"And what about me?" Mira asked.

"I need you to come with me," Jack said. "Into the cellar."

"He said alone," Garrick said.

"He also said to bring her," Jack said, and he looked across the table at Mira. "He thinks her means Syraphim. But I only have one true believer with a pulse, and she’s not staying home."

Mira blushed all the way to her ears, and she uncrossed her arms and didn’t say anything else.

The group slowly began to break up once everyone knew what they had to do. Brannoch ducked out of the door with a list of measurements that Aldous had given him, and Bors went whistling down the hill towards the market. Princess Tamsin and Aldous spread the eleven pages out across the table again, and soon the only sounds in the dining room were the scratching of charcoal against paper and the popping of the fire.

Jack went out and sat on the edge of the well, staring at the gold circle on his palm. In sixteen days, he was going to walk into that cellar to face Fenwick and a god that had been counting for forty years, and he was going to need Lesser Revelation to work the very first time. He had never used it once, and he really didn’t want to learn how in front of an audience.

"I need to practice," Jack whispered.

[On what?]

Jack turned his palm over and looked at the little stamp of the man pointing and missing.

"On this," Jack whispered.

[Jack, I do not know what will happen if you use it on the mark]

"I don’t know either," Jack whispered. "That’s why it’s called practice."

He pointed the first finger of his left hand at the center of his right palm and took a deep breath.

"Lesser Revelation," Jack said.

There was no burst of light this time, and no bolt flying off in the wrong direction. Instead, the gold circle on his palm went clear, like a thin sheet of ice on a pond, and for a few heartbeats, he could see straight through it to what was written underneath.

There were three lines of tiny writing, glowing faintly in the brassy color of the debt. The first line said Aldous, and someone had drawn a neat line straight through it. The second line said Jack Mercer, in fresh, bright ink.

Below both of them, there was a third line, written in the same faded brown ink that he recognized from the last page of the contract.

Guarantor: Castor Fenwick.

Then the circle clouded over again, and the writing disappeared, and Jack sat there on the edge of the well with his mouth hanging open.

[Jack, what is a guarantor?]

"It’s the person who has to pay," Jack whispered slowly, "if the debtor can’t."

He looked down at his palm and started to laugh, softly at first, and then louder and louder, until Princess Tamsin leaned out of the dining room window to see what was wrong with him.

"Fenwick isn’t collecting for his god," Jack said, still laughing. "He’s collecting so that he doesn’t have to pay it himself. He’s been on the hook for this debt for forty years, and if I don’t pay, he will."

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