Chapter 149: A Hand Across The Water
Alistair walked the city that night because the room had stopped being a place where he could think.
He went past the chapel he had sat in his first week, the small one with the cracked yellow window, and he did not step inside, since Tobian Marrow had no faith, and a watched man should not suddenly find one.
He passed the Sealed Step without slowing.
Following that, he went down through the lower districts, where the lamps thinned out and then quit entirely, and he came out at the water.
The river ran black and quick under a sky with no moon worth the name.
The far bank was only a darker line against the dark.
Verissan kept its clean face up on the high ground and gave the river everything that face refused to look at, the tanneries, the dye-pots, and the men who worked them.
A figure stood on the opposite bank.
Alistair stopped without meaning to.
The shape was too far to make out, only a darker patch against a wall that was barely lighter, yet it stood still, and there is a difference between how a living man holds still and how a post does, one the body knows before the eye does.
Even at that distance, Alistair knew him. It was Silas.
The Equalizer should have caught him before the eye did. It had not.
Even now, looking straight across the water, the reading slid off the man the way rain slides off oiled cloth.
That was simply how Silas was.
Everyone who came to know him paid for it out of his Characteristic, and Alistair knew him well, so to Alistair, Silas Webb read as almost nothing at all, a hole in the dark exactly the size of a friend.
Silas raised one hand.
It was not a wave, since a wave asks for something back.
He lifted it only to his shoulder and held it there, the way a sentry signals another sentry across a long wall in the night.
Then he tilted his head once, toward the old stone bridge downriver, and let the hand fall.
’He wants to talk,’ Alistair thought. ’He crossed the whole lower city in the dark to stand where I would see him, and he would not risk that unless it was safe tonight, or unless it had stopped being safe entirely.’
Neither reading comforted him.
Regardless, Alistair turned and followed the bank down toward the bridge, keeping his stride slow, his face arranged for anyone awake behind a shutter. He reached the black arch where the water ran loudest, and there he waited in the dark under the stone.
Silas was already there. He came out of the deeper shadow without a sound, the way he always did.
"You look worse than your letters made you sound," said Silas, in a low voice.
Alistair huffed once through his nose, the closest thing to a laugh he had managed in weeks, then he let it go. "Eight weeks in this city will do that to a man. I stopped counting the sermons I had to sit through and pretend to enjoy."
"You never could lie about enjoying things," Silas replied. "The lying about who you are, that you manage well enough. The other kind, you were always terrible at."
Alistair let the small joke sit, since it was the first thing in weeks that had felt anything like home. Eventually, he spoke again, and this time there was no ease left in it.
"The order," said Alistair. "I need to hear you say it still stands."
Silas nodded once. "It stands. If they take you, if the forgery breaks, if the Scrivener reads you wrong in that plain little room of hers, I do exactly what you wrote and nothing more. Nothing changes because you got lonely by a river."
"I did not come down here because I got lonely," said Alistair.
"You came to the water at this hour, alone, on the one night I chose to stand where you could see me," Silas answered. "Call it whatever helps you sleep."
Alistair clicked his tongue, though there was no real heat behind it.
The truth was that hearing the order confirmed out loud had loosened something in his chest that he had not known was drawn tight, and he was reluctantly grateful for it.
He was not doing this alone, no matter how alone the narrow bed had felt for eight weeks.
"Then we are finished," said Alistair. "You should not stay longer than this."
"There is one more thing," Silas replied, and the small warmth went out of his voice as he said it. "These past weeks, you have been asking yourself whether you are being followed."
Alistair went very still. "I have."
"You are," said Silas. "I have watched them watch you. Two of them, patient ones, trading off so you would never see the same face twice on one street."
’The Justicar,’ Alistair thought at once. ’Blackwood has put men on Tobian Marrow. He suspects the name.’
However, Silas was already shaking his head, as though he had heard the thought forming.
"They are not the Justicar’s men," Silas continued. "I know Blackwood’s people. I have put enough of them in the ground to know how they move, how they hand a mark off to the next man. These two move differently, and they answer to someone I do not yet have a name for."
The cold of the river seemed to push a little deeper into Alistair at that.
Alistair was honestly unsettled, because if the men behind him were not Blackwood’s, then his whole map of the danger in this city was wrong, and he had spent eight weeks walking it in full confidence that he knew where the edges lay.
"So someone else has decided that a poor scholar named Tobian Marrow is worth the cost of two watchers," said Alistair slowly.
"Someone else has decided something," Silas answered. "Whether they are watching Tobian or the man wearing him, I cannot tell you yet. I came tonight only to say this much. When you feel the eyes on your back tomorrow, you are not imagining them, and you should stop assuming you know whose eyes they are."
Silas stepped back toward the deeper dark, and the sound of the river seemed to fold over him before he had even finished moving.
"Watch the turns you take home," Silas said, from somewhere Alistair could no longer quite place. "And burn my notes to the corner next time. You always leave the corners."
Then he was gone, and the Equalizer registered his leaving the way it registers a candle going out three doors down, a small subtraction from a dark already total.
Alistair stood under the bridge a while longer, alone with the water and with the new, colder shape the problem had taken.
Eventually, he walked back toward the inn in the hour before dawn, taking a street he had never once used, then doubling through a dead-end court to see who turned in behind him.
No one turned in behind him.
That was worse, somehow, than a footstep would have been, because a footstep he could have followed to a face.
