Thieves' Quarry (The Thieftaker Chronicles) (31 page)

The sheriff reached into Ethan’s pockets and removed a few coins—maybe five shillings and as many pence. He made a quick count and pocketed the money, smiling up at Ethan again. “My thanks.”

Ethan glared at him, wanting nothing more than to speak a spell that would flay the sheriff’s skin from his bones or perhaps crush his skull. But while Greenleaf had never given any indication that he knew the first thing about conjuring, on this day he had managed inadvertently to render Ethan powerless. He didn’t need to say anything aloud to conjure, but in order to break free of the chains and the prison he did need blood. He didn’t know if he could move his hands enough to cut or scrape himself. With the gag in his mouth, he couldn’t even bite his cheek or tongue. Apparently, Greenleaf was as lucky as he was ignorant.

“Someone will come by later, I suppose,” the sheriff told him, sounding calm and confident now that he had Ethan tamed. “You’ll need some water and some food, such as it is.” He stepped out of the cell, closed the door and threw the bolt, the metallic ring of the lock reverberating in the walls like a spell. “Enjoy yourself.”

Greenleaf laughed as the click of his boots on stone retreated down the hallway. The two soldiers remained outside the cell. The sheriff wasn’t taking any chances.

Ethan’s arms and shoulders were already starting to grow sore, and the manacle around his neck held his head at an odd angle, making his neck and back ache, too. But like the pain of the soldiers’ grips on his arms, the agony in his shoulders served to clear his thoughts, searing away those haunting memories of Charleston and Barbados, and concentrating his thoughts on his predicament.

Gant was dead. Osborne, it now seemed, never had been. All this time Ethan had assumed that Gant was the killer, the one who had killed every man on the
Graystone
and attacked Mariz. But Ethan would have bet the ten pounds Geoffrey had promised him that a
revela potestatem
spell would show that Gant had been killed by that same orange power Ethan had seen on Sephira’s man and the dead soldiers aboard the ship. He wanted to believe that it had been Osborne all along, but how could he explain Osborne’s presence among the dead soldiers aboard the
Graystone
? It was clear to him now that Osborne and Gant had been working together all this time, but how much conjuring had Gant done? How much had he been capable of doing? Rickman might have learned of Osborne’s escape from Castle William today, but Ethan guessed that the thief had made his way back to Boston two days ago.

Too many questions still remained. And right now, there was nothing Ethan could do to answer any of them.

It occurred to him that he still had two leaves of mullein in the pouch in his pocket. Greenleaf hadn’t thought to search for those. But while two leaves
might
allow him to break one cuff, he couldn’t break all of them. And even if he could free himself of the chains, he still had to get through the door and past two armed regulars.

He turned and stared out the window. The sky was darkening; it would be night before long, at which point the only light would come from the single torch flickering in the corridor just outside his cell. He remembered the nights in the Charleston gaol—that had been the worst time.

No.
He wasn’t going to give in to those thoughts.

Rain still fell, driven by a cutting wind. Drops slapped against the side of the prison, chiming against the bars in that high window and splattering on the floor of his cell. Rain. Water.

Videre per mea imagine ex aqua evocata,
he chanted silently to himself. Sight, through my illusion, conjured from water. Power hummed in the prison walls, tickling Ethan’s back and legs. Uncle Reg appeared before him, gleaming like fire in the dim light of the cell. He stared at Ethan solemnly, with none of the mockery he sometimes showed upon finding Ethan in dire straits.

The prison was no more than a stone’s throw from King’s Chapel. Ethan hoped that Pell was there. He closed his eyes and cast his awareness west to the chapel.

Candles burned in sconces that lined the main aisle of the sanctuary, and the high windows glowed with the last light of this dreary day. Henry Caner stood at the pulpit, reading the great leather-bound Bible by the light of candles in another iron sconce. He didn’t look up, of course. Ethan’s illusion made not a sound. More to the point, Pell was nowhere to be seen.

Ethan shifted his illusion downstairs to the crypts, which were also illuminated by candles. He could almost smell the spermaceti over the reek of his cell. A corpse lay on the stone table in the center of the corridor: an old woman, her white hair unbound and hanging loose nearly to the floor, her body looking frail and tiny beneath a white cloth. Pell sat on a wooden chair near the table, his breathing heavy and slow, his eyes closed, his head lolling to the side. A sleeping vigil. Under other circumstances, Ethan would have laughed at the sight.

“Mister Pell,” he made his illusion say.

The young minister jerked awake, sitting up so quickly that he nearly overturned his chair.

“Ethan!” he said. “You startled me. I didn’t hear you—”

He stopped, his mouth opening, his eyes growing wide. He shot to his feet, and this time the chair did topple over.

“What are you?” he asked, breathless, reaching for the wooden cross that he wore around his neck.

“Easy, Mister Pell,” Ethan said through the image of himself. “This is a casting, an image that I’ve conjured so that I might speak with you. You have nothing to fear.”

“How do I know that? How can I be sure that you’re not some demon sent from hell?”

“You were a rascal as a youth. You once told me so yourself. And I once healed a bruise on your face, a bruise that I gave you when you surprised me outside my room. Do you remember that?”

The tension appeared to drain from the minister’s body. “Yes, I remember,” he said, still looking troubled. “Why have you come to me this way?”

“Because I can’t come to you in the flesh. I’m a prisoner in the city gaol, chained to a wall and gagged.”

Pell looked aghast. “Why?”

“Simon Gant is dead, killed by a conjuring if Sheriff Greenleaf is to be believed. A number of powerful men, including the sheriff, are convinced that I’m responsible.”

“I assume you’re not,” Pell said, his tone dry.

In his cell, Ethan smiled. “No.”

“And you believe I can help you.”

“I hope you can. I didn’t do this, Trevor. You know that I wouldn’t. But I’m not going to be able to convince Greenleaf or anyone else of that so long as they have me trussed up like a pig waiting to be slaughtered. If they don’t hang me as a killer, they’ll burn me for a witch. I need your help, and Mister Caner’s as well, I’m afraid.”

Through the eyes of his illusion, Ethan saw the young minister frown. “I’ll do whatever I can to help you, of course. But I can’t speak for Mister Caner, except to say that he doesn’t like you very much.”

Ethan started to say that even so, Caner wouldn’t want to see an innocent man hanged. But Caner knew for a fact that Ethan was a conjurer; so much for being innocent.

“There’s a murderer loose in the streets of Boston,” he said to Pell. “And he’s every bit the conjurer I am. At least Cane—” He swallowed. “
Mister
Caner, knows me, and he knows that you trust me. That should count for something.”

Pell didn’t appear convinced. But he said, “Yes, perhaps it will.”

“If you can, you should also ask Geoffrey Brower for help,” Ethan said. “It’s because of him that I’m in this mess in the first place.”

The agony in Ethan’s shoulders and arms had worsened, and though this was a relatively simple conjuring, he felt his hold on the illusion spell slipping.

“I need to end this conversation. Come quickly, please. I don’t know how soon they intend to carry out whatever sentence they’ve chosen for me. And I can’t hang from these chains forever.”

Pell glanced toward the dead woman, and Ethan knew what the minister was thinking. He had been directed to sit vigil with the body. He couldn’t leave her.

But his friend fixed a brave smile on his youthful face. “I’ll do whatever I can. God bless you, Ethan.”

“And you, Mister Pell.”

Ethan released the spell and slumped against the wall of his cell, the chains at his neck and legs jangling. He opened his eyes and saw that the last glimmer of daylight had almost faded. The rain still fell, and the prison air had grown colder. Uncle Reg stood in the middle of the cell, staring up at him like a man in mourning. At last, the ghost raised a hand in farewell—something he never did—and vanished. Was it possible that Reg thought they would not meet again in this world? Could he have foreseen Ethan’s fate? Ethan had not felt so forsaken since his incarceration.

It promised to be a long, miserable night. Every muscle in his body burned. His jaw had grown stiff around the gag. He was chilled and damp and bone weary. And right now his bladder felt uncomfortably full—what he would have given to have skipped that ale in Janna’s tavern. No doubt Greenleaf and his prison guards wanted him to soil himself, to soak in his humiliation. Ethan refused. Before the night was out he might well have no choice in the matter. But for now, he would cling to his dignity.

He stared out the small window at a sky that didn’t seem to change, and he waited for sleep to take him, welcoming the drooping of his eyelids, much as he remembered himself doing in Charleston and in Barbados, where sleep was his sole refuge from a wretched existence. He heard boots clicking in the stone corridor outside his cell, and instantly snapped awake once more, thinking that someone had come for him, for good or ill. Soon, though, he realized that it was two new guards taking the place of the men who had accompanied him to the prison.

Willing his pulse to slow once more, Ethan tried again to make himself sleep. Slumber, though, came grudgingly, and in fits. He careened from one strange, disturbing dream to the next. First, he was fleeing down an alley, pursued by the dead regulars he had seen in the vaults at Castle William, all of whom carried bayonets. The next thing he knew, he was on a lonely stretch of road near the Mill Pond, battling Osborne and Gant and Mariz, warding himself with spells that he knew would eventually fail. After that, he was at sea, alone on a fourteen-gun sloop, steering her through a howling storm, and then on a hangman’s gallows, his hands bound, a crowd of onlookers shouting for his death.

He woke often to find the sky outside his window that same dull, starless black; it seemed that time itself had ground to a halt. But even after he grew leery of sleep and the dark dreams it brought, he could not manage to keep himself awake for very long. He would stare out the window, only to fall into yet another nightmare. Through it all, the pain remained, both blunt and piercing, overwhelming, pulsing through his body with every beat of his heart.

The last dream he remembered was of Kannice. She stood before him in his cell, naked to the waist, stretching out her arms to him. But when he tried to call her name, her hair darkened, curled. Her features shifted, her voice and laughter rang in the tiny chamber, lower than they should have been. Throatier. And before he could call Kannice’s name Sephira Pryce stood before him, gloating.

He jerked awake, gasped at the anguish that shot through his limbs and back. An erection pressed painfully against the inside of his breeches and his bladder felt like it was about to burst. Ethan groaned. But looking toward the window, he knew a moment of profound relief. The sky was brightening. It remained gray; he could still hear raindrops pattering against the stone and steel. But it might as well have been a sunrise of dazzling yellows and pinks and purples. Never mind that he remained exactly as he had been the previous evening—chained and helpless; he had survived the night.

At least another hour passed before Ethan heard a set of footsteps approaching and the ringing of keys. The door to his cell creaked open and an army officer stepped in, regarded Ethan, and motioned the guards into the chamber.

Ethan stared at the man, knowing that he had seen him before, but unable to place him at first. The officer was barrel-chested and broad in the shoulders, but he appeared to be several inches shorter than Ethan. His face, open and square, might have been handsome had it not been so careworn. He had the look of a man who hadn’t slept in days, and didn’t expect to any time soon. He wore a powdered wig, and stood straight-backed despite the fatigue Ethan saw in his face.

“Unchain him,” the man said, the command tinged with a subtle Scottish brogue.

One of the soldiers searched through the keys he held until he found the right one. He unlocked the manacles at Ethan’s ankles, and then the one around Ethan’s neck. Ethan tipped his head slowly, first to one side and then the other, wincing at the loud cracks that emanated from his neck joints. Within a few seconds, Ethan’s arms were free as well, and as they fell to his sides, he staggered forward. Had the two regulars not caught him, he would have collapsed onto the filthy stone floor. His limbs trembled, and with every breath, pain coursed through his body.

While the soldiers held him up, the officer removed Ethan’s gag and tossed it aside.

“Who are you?” Ethan asked, his voice sounding like steel scraped across stone.

“Lieutenant Colonel William Dalrymple,” the man said. “Until General Gage arrives, I command the British army here in Boston.”

Ethan nodded, though even that hurt. He remembered at last. The officer he had seen at the Manufactory the day before, the one who had spoken to Elisha Brown.

“I saw you yesterday,” Ethan said. “You were trying to find quarters for your soldiers.”

Dalrymple glowered. “I still am.”

“And why are you here?”

“That’s a fine question, Mister Kaille. I have no earthly idea. But it seems that you have more powerful friends than one might expect of a man who just spent the night in Boston’s gaol.”

“So, I’m free to go?”

Dalrymple shook his head. “Not yet you’re not. The lieutenant governor would like a word with you.”