THE ROOF OF THE AUCTION HOUSE
Thaumiel was crouched on the parapet above the entrance side, forearms across his knees, watching the street.
There were four thousand people in it.
"Let's talk," he said.
"There's nothing to talk about." Alphonse had not moved from where he was standing. "I can't stop you. I couldn't stop any of it. So finish it and be done."
"That would be a waste."
"Then it's a waste."
"No." Thaumiel turned his head. "There's something I'm expecting from you, Alphonse Graves. So I'd like to talk."
Lilly stood where she had been standing since the roof door opened. Samuelle had not moved either. Neither of them looked at Alphonse at all.
"There's nothing to share," Alphonse said. "You're a murderer who belongs in a cell. Your opinions, your morals, whatever it is you imagine you stand for, none of it matters to me and none of it matters to anybody else."
"That's a sad way to live."
"Don't."
Thaumiel went back to watching the street.
Alphonse made himself breathe.
Keep him talking. Every minute he sits there is a minute he hasn't gone.
"You had a child with you," he said. "In the hall. You were Magath Lumian and she was his daughter."
"We were."
"You could impersonate faces, must be the girl's power, I assume, that's how you got past the gate and up twenty floors." Alphonse's voice found its footing on the procedure. "What I don't understand is the rest of it. You had the vault. You didn't need a paddle. So why sit through six lots. Why bid."
"It was fun."
Alphonse waited for the rest.
There wasn't any.
"…Fun."
"There isn't much more to it than that."
Something went wrong in Alphonse's chest.
He had built this man for months, worked out what he wanted, what he was owed, what he thought he was owed. He had told himself he'll come, he can't not come, he's the only man alive who thinks he's owed it, and he had been right about every part of it.
Fun.
"ONLY FOR FUN?"
"Obviously not."
"Then WHAT." He was three steps closer than he had been. "Why the lots. Why the undercity. Why put four thousand people against a line of crown soldiers when you know exactly how that ends for them. Why did you kill…"
"Your mentor."
Alphonse stopped.
"The previous Supreme Judge," Thaumiel said. "Edw…"
"DON'T."
His foot came down on the roof hard enough to be heard.
"Don't you dare say his name."
Thaumiel looked at him with what appeared to be honest confusion.
"Why not."
Alphonse opened his mouth.
There was a letter in the second drawer of his desk. It had been there since spring, and he had put things on top of it every morning for four months and had not once picked it up.
"Because…"
"Because he's so high and mighty. Is that it.", Thaumiel said.
Alphonse crossed the roof.
Samuelle came off the wall to intercept him and Thaumiel raised two fingers without turning round, and Samuelle stopped where he was.
Alphonse got both hands into the front of Thaumiel's coat and hauled him up off the parapet.
"That man was the most righteous person I have ever met. Thirty-one years and he never did one thing wrong. Not one. His whole life went into serving justice in a place that didn't deserve him, and you…"
Thaumiel took Alphonse's wrist and moved it off his coat. He did it without effort and without hurry, and then he straightened his collar.
"Because he disgusted me," he said. "The same way you do."
Lilly's eyes came up.
Samuelle had gone very still.
Neither of them had heard him say a thing like that about anybody.
"…Disgusted you."
"Yes."
Alphonse took a step back without deciding to.
"I put myself inside people," Thaumiel said. "I can't help it and I've never been able to. I get into how a man's head is arranged, how the world looks from behind his eyes, what he tells himself at night so he can sleep." He said it pleasantly. "And when I do it with you, I want to be sick. Not as a figure of speech. I want to put my fingers down my throat and get rid of it, puke as hard as I can until my organs come out, that is how disgusting it feels."
The irritation was there for about a second and a half.
"What the fuck are you…"
"I'm saying people like you are where the tragedy comes from. Not because you think you're better than them. Everyone thinks that." He put a hand out flat toward the street. "It's that you never chose it. You were born into that chair the same way the men under it were born into the dark. You didn't pick it. Nobody picks it."
He let that sit for a moment.
"And you should be punished for it anyway. Severely. It doesn't matter where it came from."
Alphonse had it.
For about four seconds he had the whole of it, the shape of the thing, the exact place where it came apart, the sentence that would take it to pieces. You just said nobody chooses, and then you…
And it went.
It went the way things had been going for an hour, sliding sideways out of his hands.
"…Where are you going with this," he said.
Thaumiel stood up off the parapet and straightened, and lifted one palm in front of him and opened it.
"I'm going to fix the world. That's all. And I'll go any distance for it, and if a few have to die so that many don't, then a few will die."
"That means nothing. Men have said that sentence over every grave ever dug."
"They have."
"And?"
"And they were mostly lying and I'm not."
Alphonse laughed. It came out wrong.
"You've decided you're the exception."
"No. I've decided somebody has to be the author." Thaumiel turned the open palm over. "If people are born into it, if the book is written before they can read and they follow it to the end of their lives, then there's no point arguing about the ones already on the shelf. I'd rather write the next ones."
He said it like a man describing where he intended to put a wall.
Alphonse felt the ground go.
Not because it was madness. Because it wasn't. Because it was assembled, and load-bearing, and a man was standing on top of it, and the words holding it up were the same words Alphonse had used in a courtroom.
"The girl," Alphonse said.
"Which girl."
"Amara Thagirion. Nineteen. Seven months gone." He had found something solid and he put his weight on it. "You had murderers come up through the floor of her house this morning and take her hostage."
"Yes."
"So say it."
"Say what."
"Say the sentence you've been saying for ten minutes. She didn't choose the womb that bore her either. She didn't choose to be given to Malthane at eighteen, her house chose that, and she went where she was sent, the same as any of them down there." He was steady now. His voice had come all the way back. "And the thing inside her hasn't chosen anything at all. It hasn't even got a face yet. So say it out loud. Say she deserves it."
Thaumiel did not hesitate.
"She doesn't."
"Then…"
"She doesn't deserve any of it and I did it anyway." He said it the way he said everything, warm, without a break in it. "I needed one man out of this building. There's exactly one thing on this continent that moves him and it isn't gold and it isn't the crown. I used it. It was the cheapest thing I had."
"Cheapest."
"Fewest dead. That's what cheap means." He counted it off on his fingers, one, two, three. "She hasn't been touched. She won't be. I said so before anybody went through her floor, and my people know precisely what happens to them if they put a hand on her."
"Your word."
"Yes, and putting her life on the line is a cheap price for the great goal."
"Your word." Alphonse came forward again. "Does she know that? Is she sitting in a chair in her own house right now, with strangers in the doorway knowing that your word is good? Has anybody told her? Or is she just a nineteen-year-old girl who thinks she's about to be killed with her child inside her, for the last hour, and the hour after that, and however long it takes?"
Thaumiel was quiet.
It was not a long silence. It was long enough.
"No," he said. "She doesn't know."
He looked at the street.
"That one's mine. I'll carry that one."
And then, in exactly the same voice, as if the last thing had finished being true and was over:
"How many do you think die if he stays in this building."
Alphonse said nothing.
"Go on. You did the arithmetic out loud twenty minutes ago and you were right, that's why he left. So do it again. He fights me here. The floor goes and I get captured.", Thaumiel added.
"More important than all of that, my plan fails, and I never get to change the world, how many lives do you think are in the balance now"
He turned slightly to the left.
"You're angry about a girl who is unharmed. I understand it. I'd be angry too."
"That is not…"
"It isn't the same, no. It's just cheaper."
Alphonse stood there with his hands open at his sides.
"WHY."
It came out of him from somewhere below the argument.
"Why would you go to these lengths. What happened to you. What did they do, what did somebody do to you, that you, "
He wanted a story. He wanted a dead mother, a burnt house, a debt collector at a door, anything with a shape to it, because a wound is a thing you can hold and a thing you can hold is a thing you can be finished with.
"Because I hate humans," Thaumiel said.
Lilly did not react. Neither did Samuelle.
"Because the way you're made is despicable. A creature that can see as far as its own feet and no further, and calls that far-sightedness." He turned round fully and there was nothing hot in his face at all. "You think you're going to tell me what justice is. You think you're the one who decides my work is wrong. What if it kills hundreds and saves millions? What about the ones who'll be born into whatever's left afterwards, instead of being born into that…"
He put a hand out over the parapet, palm down, at the street.
"That. There. Three hundred feet under your chair, all your life, and you and your righteous judge spent thirty-one years between you deciding which of them to punish. Because they stole. Because they shouldn't have taken what wasn't theirs."
"You could always, "
"Who do you think you stand for, Alphonse."
"YOU COULD ALWAYS CHOOSE." He was shouting now and he knew it and he could not stop it. "EVERY ONE OF THEM COULD CHOOSE. You work, you work harder, you take the honest thing over the easy one, you help instead of hurt, people do it, people do it every day, people climb out of worse than that. Your logic is a murderer's logic with a coat of paint on it. You are a killer who got strong enough to act out what's inside him and you have wrapped it in the language of good men. Do not stand there and tell me you understand how the world works. Do not stand there and tell me you know how it ought to."
The silence afterward was worse than the shouting.
Thaumiel let him get his breath back. He seemed to want him to have it.
"Thirty-one years," he said.
"…What."
"Your judge. He had the highest office in this kingdom for thirty-one years. He was righteous, he was never once wrong, and his whole life went into serving justice." Thaumiel tilted his head. "What did he change."
Alphonse opened his mouth.
"Take your time," Thaumiel said. "I'm not being clever. It's a real question and I'd like a real answer. Thirty-one years, the top of the law, in a city with Nauz under it. Name the thing that's different because he was there."
"He… there were reforms, there were…"
"Name one."
"The magistracy was…"
"Name one thing that's different for a man in that street."
Alphonse could hear his own breathing.
He knew the answer. He had known the answer for a long time and had kept it somewhere he did not go, in the same drawer, under the same roster.
"He was one man," he said. "He couldn't…"
"No," Thaumiel agreed. "He couldn't. He was one man in a chair, and the chair is the thing, and he sat in it very well for thirty-one years and at the end of it there is a district that sells light by the candle."
He said it without any triumph in it whatsoever.
"That's what disgusts me. Not that he was cruel. He wasn't cruel, I've read everything he ever signed." A small movement of the shoulders. "He was decent, and he was in the chair, and nothing happened. Being decent in that chair for thirty-one years is the most expensive thing anyone has ever done to those people, and he'll be buried as a good man, and you'll take his job."
"You killed him."
"He died to me, I’m simply a pawn following his destiny, like the rest of you, my choices have been predetermined before I was born, though to be honest, I regret killing him."
"WHY."
"Because It’s a waste I did so." Thaumiel looked genuinely irritated for the second time that day, and it was not at Alphonse. "That was a mistake. He wasn't the chair, he was a man in it, and killing him only put the next one there. I regret it."
Alphonse stared at him.
"You regret it."
"Yes. It was a waste and it didn't work." He said it the way a man corrects a figure in a ledger. "I won't make the same mistake with you."
"…What does that mean."
"It means I'm not going to kill you." Thaumiel came a step closer, and it was the closest he had been, and there was something almost fond in it. "You're the person I hate most in the world, Alphonse. Everything I want to take apart, you stand in front of, and you do it sincerely, which is worse. So no. I'm going to leave you exactly where you are." He said the next part slowly, because he wanted it to arrive properly. "And I'm going to make sure that your mind dies. That everything you believe about how the world is arranged comes apart in your hands, a piece at a time, over years, until there's nothing left of the man standing here."
There was no cruelty in his voice. That was the thing Alphonse could not get past. There was certainty, and it was calm, and it was the calmest he had sounded all morning, even though those were the most vulgar words he had ever heard.
Alphonse hit him in the face.
Thaumiel's head went round and he took two steps back and put a hand up, and Samuelle moved and stopped. He spat once, sideways, and there was blood in it.
He touched his mouth with two fingers and looked at them with mild interest.
"Is that all of it?" He was smiling. "What else is there? You've got nothing. You came up here behind an Apex holder and a cursed girl and they've both gone, and I'm honestly impressed you walked over here at all, powerless as you are."
Alphonse drew back for the second one.
Samuelle took a step and stopped again, because Thaumiel had caught Alphonse's forearm out of the air and was holding it.
"You're powerless," Thaumiel said. "You stand for nothing. You can't do anything."
He tightened his hand.
"But do you know what would help you right now?"
Alphonse's brow came down.
"A curse."
Thaumiel let the arm go, as the resistance of Alphonse’s arm went out.
"A curse would give you everything you've ever wanted. You could serve justice on me. On all of them, every man who deserves it, personally, with your own hands." He spread his palms. "So where is he? Where's your devil, Judge? He's been to every desperate soul in the history of the epochs."
He came closer.
"He hasn't come to you because your resolve is nothing. Because you don't actually believe it. You've never believed it hard enough to be worth a visit."
It went into Alphonse and stopped.
He stepped back with his hands falling, and he looked at the man in front of him, and for the first time all morning what was on his face was not anger.
It was that it made sense.
"Go on," Thaumiel said. "Do it. Find it. Get your resolve up where it needs to be." He was watching him with real attention now, the way a man watches a kettle. "And if he doesn't come, then I'll walk away and leave you standing on this roof. And you'll have lost the only chance you were ever going to get at your precious, naive justice."
Alphonse stood very still.
Nobody moved.
Ten seconds went by on that roof.
Nothing happened at all.
Thaumiel sighed.
It was a small sound, and disappointed, and entirely genuine, and he turned away and started walking back toward Lilly and Samuelle.
"You really are a disappointment. Forget I mentioned it. I don't want to make you suffer any more, it isn't worth the trouble."
He did not look back.
"You're not worth it, Alphonse."
Alphonse was taken back by a memory, and a very old man's voice, from a room with green glass in the windows, said:
I'm counting on you, Alphonse.
Don't disappoint me.
The roof went white.
He was standing in a courtroom.
He knew it before he could see it, the way you know a house you grew up in, the height of the ceiling, the smell of old paper, the particular cold that lives in stone benches. It was his own court. Every line of it. The clock above the door with the brass hands. The rail he had put his hand on four thousand times.
It was white and it was empty and there was nobody in the gallery.
The bench was there, up at the front where it had always been, with his own chair behind it.
He was not in it.
He was standing in the dock, with the rail closed in front of him, and the gate on it had no handle.
And in the chair on the bench, looking down at him with a wooden staff laid across its knees, was a small bent thing with grey skin and a beard and two soft horns, and it had far too many fingers, and every one of them came to a point.
It smiled at him the way you smile at somebody who is very late.
"Alphonse Graves," it said. "At last."
The devil, finally invited Alphonse to his realm.