The boy’s name was Pip, and he was nine years old, and he had seen everything.
Aren found that out on Monday evening, sitting in the back of Old Mag’s shop with a cup of her terrible black tea.
Mag had heard it from a fishwife, who had heard it from Pip’s mother, who had been crying about it in the market that morning.
The men in grey robes had come back to the east bank.
They had walked through the streets around the old dye house, stopping children, asking polite questions, giving out copper coins for answers.
Most of the children had nothing to tell them.
Pip had something to tell them.
“He sleeps in the old rope shed behind the dye house,” Mag said.
“Steals leather scraps through the drain, like you did at his age.
He was there that morning, the one after the Night of Bells.” She looked at Aren over her pipe.
“He told the grey men he saw somebody climb out of the cellar at dawn and go up over the roof.
Somebody with bandages all over his face.”
Aren put down his tea very carefully.
“His mother says the grey men gave him a whole silver piece for it,” Mag went on.
“Patted him on the head.
Said he was a good boy.” She blew out smoke.
“They asked him if he’d know the man again.
He said no.
Said all he remembered was the bandages.”
All he remembered was the bandages.
False Face had held.
Pip could not describe him, could not say how tall he was or what his voice sounded like.
But the bandages were not part of the System.
The bandages were just cloth.
And the whole east bank had been telling jokes about a man named Wraps for three weeks.
It would not take a very clever cult to put those two things together.
He did not sleep that night.
He sat on his mattress in the dark and did what he had always done when a position went bad.
He listed what he had, and what he could not afford to lose.
The Choir knew the person who took their nail wore bandages.
Soon, if they did not already, they would know about Wraps.
Then they would want to know who Wraps was.
They would ask the Tanners’ boy from the bell room, and the hired swords from the barracks, and the people of Salt Lane.
They would follow every story about a bandaged man back to wherever it started.
Every one of those stories started in places Aren went.
He could stop being Wraps.
He would, for a while.
But that would not make the Choir stop looking.
People who stopped looking for something were people who believed they had already found it.
So give them something to find, he thought.
Rook listened without looking up from his book, the way he always did.
“You want me,” he said, when Aren had finished, “to start a rumor.”
“Several,” Aren said.
“In the right taverns.
Through the right mouths.
That the man with the bandages was a Guild scavenger.
A free hunter, the kind who picks over Rifts after the real hunters are done.
That he went into the dye house cellar alone to steal cores before the Guild arrived, got cut up, and wrapped his face to hide it.
And that he left the city two days later on a barge to the Free Cities with a sack full of something he wouldn’t show anyone.”
“And is any of that true?”
“It doesn’t need to be true.
It needs to be boring.” Aren kept his voice even.
“A greedy scavenger who got lucky and ran south.
It’s the most normal story in the lower city.
People will believe it because it’s what they’d do.”
Rook turned a page.
“And why would I spend my men’s time spreading a story for you?”
Aren had thought about that too.
“Because men in grey robes are walking through your streets on the east bank, asking your people questions and paying them in silver,” he said.
“You don’t know who they are.
You don’t know who they work for.
And every copper they hand out is a copper your people aren’t spending in your taverns.” He paused.
“You want them gone.
So do I.
If they think their man is in the Free Cities, they’ll go and look for him there.”
Rook was quiet for a long moment.
Then he closed his book and looked up.
His dark eyes were thoughtful.
“You’re afraid of them,” he said.
Aren did not answer.
“Interesting,” Rook said softly.
“I have never seen you afraid of anything, stone-seller.
Not me.
Not Hesk.
Not the Hawk Knights.” He set the book aside.
“Very well.
My men will tell your story.
The price is one more month of your ten percent.” A thin smile.
“Consider it insurance.”
[Rook.
Hostility: 89% → 91%.]
Aren bowed.
It would put him a month behind on everything.
He had already done the math.
It was cheaper than being found.
He spent the rest of the week on the other problem.
It had been sitting in the back of his mind since he lay in the sand of the training yard with Vivienne’s sword on his throat.
The knot in her breath.
The half-second too long before every crescent.
If he was right about it, she would hit a wall the day she tried to break through to Rank D, and every core her family had bought her would make the wall higher.
If she broke through, he would get a return.
If she broke through because of something he had given her, the return would be large.
And if she failed, his Primary Anchor would be stuck at Rank E, and so would he, because his own Trial would never let him pass her.
He could not tell her.
He could not walk up to the heir of House Ashgrave and explain her own body to her.
She would have him whipped for the insult.
But he carried books for a living.
On Wednesday, he went up to the Chronicles room on the fourth floor of the library with the head librarian’s keys, and spent two hours going through the shelves of old manuals that nobody had opened in fifty years.
He was looking for anything about moon classes, about breath, about essence that caught in the body.
On the bottom shelf, behind a row of crumbling star charts, he found a thin grey book with a cracked spine.
On the Tides of the Breath, for Those Who Draw the Moon.
It had been written two hundred years ago by a Silver Moon class from Valdris.
Half the pages were about breathing.
He read it twice.
Then, on Thursday afternoon, when Crane sent him up to the third floor with a stack of ledgers, he walked past the table by the window where Vivienne always sat.
She was not there yet.
Her books were.
Three thick volumes on Rank D Trials, and a stack of notes in her neat handwriting.
He set the thin grey book on top of the stack, open to the chapter on breath, as if someone had left it there and forgotten it.
Then he put his ledgers on the shelf and left.
He did not look back.
He did not wait to see what she did.
[Investment recorded.]
[Type: Hidden aid.
Anchor unaware.]
On Saturday, Mag told him that the grey men had left the east bank.
“Gone,” she said.
“Nobody’s seen them since Thursday.
Word is they asked about a barge to the Free Cities, then left on one.” She looked at him with her one eye.
“Funny thing.
Half the taverns on the river are telling the same story this week.
About some scavenger with a sack.”
“Strange,” Aren said.
“Very.” Mag sucked on her pipe.
She did not ask anything else.
He walked home lighter than he had felt in two weeks.
The Choir was looking south.
Pip was safe.
The grey book was on Vivienne’s desk.
He even went down to the docks that evening to help Mira’s father with the boat again, and it did not feel like hiding.
On Sunday morning, they pulled a body out of the river by the east bank.
He heard about it at breakfast, from a girl in Class C whose brother was in the city guard.
A man had been found floating under the Salt Bridge.
An old scavenger called Hob, who had lived on the east bank for thirty years, picking through burned houses and old Rifts for scraps the real hunters left behind.
Everyone on the river knew him.
He was easy to recognize.
Twenty years ago, a fire in a tannery had burned half his face, and he had kept it wrapped in grey bandages ever since.
Someone had cut runes into his chest.
Small ones, very close together, like scales.
Aren put down his spoon.
He had not known about Hob.
He had invented a scavenger.
He had made the story as boring and as normal as he could, so that everyone would believe it.
He had not thought, not once, that somewhere on the east bank there might already be a real man who fit it.
He sat at the long table in the dining hall, with the noise of a hundred students around him, and the window at the edge of his vision did not open.
There was no message.
No hostility to record.
Hob had never hated him.
Hob had never even known his name.
He thought about the flooded town he had bought in his old life, cheap, from people who needed the money.
He had never learned their names either.
It had been the best trade of his year.
He thought about that for a long time, while his breakfast went cold.