The Broken Lands (4 page)

“I don't know about this.” Walker looked across at the docks of New York on the opposite shore. “I mean, the place is perfect, but . . .” He turned and surveyed the smoking chimneys of the city behind them. “There's only two of us.”

“It's perfect,” Bones retorted. “Obviously it's perfect.” He didn't sound pleased, though.

“Obviously, but it's . . .
ambitious,
” Walker said quietly. “That's the point I wanted to make.”

“Yes.”

“You think we can do it?”

“He's expecting us to have made significant progress before he arrives,” mumbled Bones. “He may understand if we need a bit more time before the taking of the place, but if we can't at least identify the pillars of the cities first, we're in trouble.”

The other man didn't look like he entirely agreed. “No. If he arrives and we aren't ready—properly ready, I mean—Jack will never forgive us. Not after last time.”

“I don't care about being forgiven,” Bones said, his silvery eyes glinting as a ship under sail passed beneath the unfinished bridge. “There are worse things than not being forgiven.”

"So this is our crossroads, is it?" Bones mused.
 

Walker nodded under his hat. “There are, indeed.” He pulled a gold silk handkerchief from his pocket, tied it across his nose and mouth, and pulled his hat down low over his eyes. Then he backed into the shelter of a doorway. “Get on with it.”

Bones nodded. He turned to the river and faced westward, toward the city of New York. Then he took a deep breath, and a breeze lifted itself off the water and stirred through the empty street.

He sucked mouthful after mouthful of air, and the breeze strengthened into a rough wind, carrying to him the dust and dirt, flotsam and jetsam, and random detritus from the city of New York across the river. Bones breathed it all in, eyes closed.

Walker shrank his lanky frame as far away from the wind as he could. Then the bald man turned eastward, facing into the depths of Brooklyn, and took in three more breaths, hauling the winds to him again. He stood at the center of a whirling vortex of dirt and debris, inhaling and tasting it, while his blue felt coat flapped around his ankles.

Then he opened his eyes and frowned. The air stilled.

“Brick dust and stone dust, riverside muck . . . coal and offal, paper and steel and sewage . . .” Bones spat on the street. “I cannot taste the veins of this city, or the one across the river. There is too much in the way, too many people, too much industry. We will have to find the pillars some other way.”

Walker's mumbled curses were muffled by his handkerchief. He yanked it away from his face and snapped it once to shake off the dust. “I don't suppose you have any thoughts on what that other way might be.”

Bones gave him a cold look. “Two days is not enough time to do it well. We would be lucky to find even one of the pillars in that time. We certainly can't take all ten.” He looked up at the bridge again. “We'll have to do it by cinefaction, I suppose. If we can manage that, we can claim the city for him before he even arrives. Please tell me you have tinder.”

Walker reached into his watch pocket and tugged loose the chain. At the end of the fob was a small, cylindrical box of punched tin. “Jack said not to use it if we had any other choice. The coal was small to begin with. He can't go hacking pieces off all the time.”

“Well, we had other choices until you wasted two weeks on that idiot riverboat. Any other means of taking the place requires more time than we have.”

“Well then, we'd better use it,” Walker retorted, stowing the tinderbox back in his pocket.

“Yes, we'd better.” The hard-packed sand that made up Bones's face shifted and his mouth cracked into a smile like a break in stone. “And I do like a good fire. We're going to need someone to perform the cinefaction. If we can't find the pillars, but we locate a conflagrationeer . . .” he mused. “Might be time to try digging up a few of Jack's old chums.” Then he raised a hand thoughtfully to his chin. “Hang on.”

Walker shot him a wary look.

“Speaking of old chums, before we resort to a taking-by-fire, why haven't we talked about going to see
him
?” Bones asked.

Walker's wary look shifted into a red-eyed glare. “Who.” It wasn't a question, so he didn't wait for an answer. “Christophel.”

“Obviously.”

“Why would we talk about going to see him, Bones?” Walker bit the words off sharply.

“Oh, I don't know, remind me again why we got here with only a couple days to spare?” Bones's gray eyes hardened. “If there was ever a time for the two of you to put your grudges aside, this is it. We need to find ten people, fast. He probably knows exactly who we're looking for.”

Walker adjusted his immaculate shirt cuffs. “Neither Basile Christophel nor I consider what you are referring to as a mere
grudge
.”

“Your pigheaded mutual stupidity, then.” Bones rolled his shoulders under the heavy coat, wincing at the grit. “He has . . . tools at his disposal. We should take advantage of them.”

“I don't know what he has at his disposal, and neither do you. Nobody does.” Walker folded his arms. “And I can't imagine, even if I did know, that it would make up for the fact that he's a conjure-thieving maniac without the sense to be afraid of anything.”

“What's he got to be afraid of?”

“Those things he calls up.” Now Walker rolled his shoulders, a motion more like a shudder than he would've liked to admit. “What
are
they, even?”

“As long as they do what he tells them, who cares?” Bones laughed, then coughed up sand. “As long as they get the job done, isn't that what matters?”

“You ever consider that maybe he might not think helping us is in his best interests? He
lives
here, after all, and he and Jack aren't precisely blood brothers.” Walker shuddered again. “Blood. I had to get
that
image going in my head.”

“He'll help us if we pay him,” Bones said coldly. “And we can. As for whether he thinks giving the place to Jack is in his best interests, my guess is he won't care. It isn't as if he'll see it as Jack taking charge of
him
.” The bald man regarded his colleague for a moment. Then he ripped one of the gold buttons from his coat and held it in his fist. When he opened his hand, a coin lay in his palm. “Shall we?”

Walker's red-rimmed eyes sharpened. “All right,” he said casually.

“Call it, then,” Bones said curtly. “But if you win, you'd better have an alternative plan.” He balanced the coin on his thumb and flipped it.

“Tails,” Walker murmured.

Both men watched it tumble over and over, catching the lights of Brooklyn as it rose and fell and bounced on the cobblestone street. Walker waited patiently until it came to rest, then crouched and swore.

“My, my,” Bones said mildly. “Did I win?”

Walker plucked the coin from the street and handed it back to Bones. Then he sighed expansively. “Fine. Let's go see Doc Rawhead.”

S
LOW MORNING
.”

“Telling me.” Sam flipped a card and rolled his eyes. He sighed, leaned back with his hands folded behind his head, and watched gulls circling in Culver Plaza's cloudless sky. “Yours again. Thank God we're playing for shells.”

“If we weren't, would I be winning?” Constantine threw down his hand, a very respectable three of a kind. “Hang on. How did you know I won that hand before I showed it?”

“Con, just because I'm not cheating you doesn't mean I don't know what I'm dealing you. It's hard to turn all the instincts off.” Sam collected the cards and shuffled them. “This is just the kind of thing you're always taking credit for having taught me. Why so surprised?”

“Yeah, well, maybe I'm flattering myself about how much I actually had to do with it.” The other boy stretched, looked around. “Where the heck is everybody?”

“It's Friday. They're still working.” Sam dealt them each another five cards. “I won't have any decent business to speak of till this afternoon.” He winced, remembering the previous afternoon's business and the bruise still darkening on his cheekbone.

“Yeah,” Con said, eyeing the bruise. “That thing's just looking worse and worse.”

“So not the rakishly handsome effect I was hoping for, then.”

“Not so much, no.” Constantine looked over his cards. “Did you see Illy this morning?”

“Nope.” Normally Ilana was up early with her mother, starting the day's baking, the first few batches of which were then delivered to a couple of stalls down on Culver Plaza. “She'd already gone by the time I got up.”

“Meaning not only is she avoiding us, she's angry enough to actually wake up even earlier to do it.”

“Meaning she's really angry,” Sam confirmed. He raised his eyes from his hand and took a long look around the plaza.

“Any sign of him?” Constantine asked.

“The sharper from yesterday? No.” Sam kept expecting the fellow to appear at any moment, though. He still didn't quite understand what had happened the day before: the unbelievable, invisible way in which the man had cheated, the way he'd almost seemed to be in two places at once when he'd thrown those two punches . . . it was hard to let the incident go just yet.

“Hey.” Constantine lifted his head and looked around, too. “You hear that?”

Sam roused himself out of his thoughts and listened. It took a moment, but then he caught it, threading its way through the pound and flow of the surf: the sound of guitar music. Not the kind of music you heard in the saloons, though. This was something totally different.

Sam scooped the cards into a pile and packed them into his kit. “Come on.”

“Where?”

With shoes slung over their shoulders by knotted laces, the boys followed the faint sound along the beach: music that rose and crested, crashed, slid, clattered and tumbled. No wonder Sam had missed it at first. It blended with the sounds of the ocean, mimicking the motion of a wave reaching and receding, tumbling stones and sand and shells and making them dance in water that glittered in the sunlight.

By the time they tracked the music to an old boat-rental pavilion, Sam knew who they were going to find, although he had no idea what made him so sure.

The guitar player was perched on an overturned rowboat, trousers rolled up so he could sit with his feet in the water as it came and went. He looked up as the boys approached, and his face broke into a wide grin.

“Mornin', Sam,” said Tom Guyot.

Sam grinned back and introduced Constantine. “We heard you playing down the beach, Mr. Guyot. That's some music.”

The old man beamed. “Glad you approve. Tom'll do, though. No need to stand on ceremony.” He looked up at the sun. “Good thing you two came along just then. I think I might have lost track of the time.”

“You got somewhere to be?” Sam asked.

Tom stood and waded onto dry sand, slinging his guitar over his shoulder. “If you can believe it, I'm meant to be meeting someone for a meal. I don't suppose you know the fastest way to get to the Broken Land Hotel, do you?”

“Sure.” Sam shrugged. “I'll show you.”

 

The Broken Land had gotten its name in an act of bad translation, something to do with the way the Dutch name that had become “Brooklyn” sounded a lot like the Dutch translation for the local Indians' name for Long Island. The builder of the hotel knew this, but he didn't much care. He heard the phrase and liked it, and after he'd managed to close the dozen or so dubious deals with the town of Gravesend that had given him the lot out beyond West Brighton at the far east end of Coney Island, he constructed himself a hotel worthy of the name.
His
name was Anders Ganz, and the hotel was only the second building he'd ever designed. The other one was a mansion halfway across the country that sat half-hidden in a grove of oaks, but that had been a long, long time ago.

The hotel was built on boggy ground, bolstered in the Venetian manner by vertical wooden pilings sunk into the muck. The whole time it was going up, the Gravesenders placed bets on how long it would survive before it tumbled into the sea. The building didn't look sensible or even stable, which might have been forgivable if it had managed to look fashionable. But the builder was even less concerned about the styles of the day than he was about the provenance of the name he'd picked.

The Broken Land was a rambling hodgepodge of architecture. The main building rose in tall chateau-style towers and spires, with sprawling wings of Tudoresque timber framing perched on terra-cotta brickwork and topped by French-inspired mansard roofs and square towers outflung like the arms of a bizarre and spiny starfish. There were parapets and carved-brick chimneys, Italianate porches and English baroque domes. Its wooden-sided Carpenter Gothic bathhouses looked like tiny country churches. There was an iron-and-glass bandstand at the center of the circular drive and another on the great lawn fronting the sea, the acoustics of which were said to have driven a few bandleaders insane.