The School for Thieves, page 19
“We weren’t making a fool out of you,” said Enzo earnestly. “You know that.”
Tom conceded the point with a shrug and a nod.
“So are we going to be all right?” asked Jericho.
Tom sat still for a few seconds and then, with another deep sigh, nodded again. And in that motion, it felt as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and the shadows were gone.
“Phew,” said Enzo with a huge grin. He gathered up a great fistful of snow, compacted it into a ball, and then tossed it over the edge of the roof toward Half Moon Street. “Just give them a minute.”
“Give who—” began Tom.
There was a noise behind them, and he turned to see Mitch and Connie climbing up onto the roof, closely followed by the Guile House Tenderfoots. They were all there—Genevieve, Benoît, Allegra, Gina, Michael, Angus, Neha, and Cleo, and even Jaroslav and Zhu. The group skidded down the snowy rooftop and collapsed next to the three boys.
“Everything sorted out, then?” asked Connie with a hopeful grin.
“Yeah, everything’s sorted,” said Tom, offering a smile in return.
“Good to have you back,” said Benoît, flicking some snow at him.
“Well, maybe we shouldn’t count our chickens too soon,” said Enzo with a slight grimace. “There’s still someone that needs to have a word with Tom.”
Tom saw a crown of dark braided hair appearing up over the edge of the rooftop. Maxine looked nervous as she made her way toward the group. Jericho tactfully stood and led the others back the way they had all come, giving Maxine a little bump on the arm as he passed. Michael was the last to leave, shoving a handful of snow playfully in Tom’s hair as he went.
A moment later, there was just Tom and Maxine.
Tom stood to face her, ten feet of disturbed snow between them that felt a mile wide. She shifted uneasily on the spot, the snow creaking under her boots.
“I’m so—” she began.
“I thought we were friends,” he said flatly. “But you betrayed me. You betrayed all of us. We opened our door to you at McVain’s, and we promised to look out for you from the moment you joined us. We were a family. It was imperfect, but it was a family.”
She nodded.
Tom tried to articulate all the millions of thoughts and feelings that had raged through his head over the last few weeks. “But since I’ve been here,” he said eventually, “I’ve learned what it is to be a student at Thieves School, what’s required by the League. I’ve learned about the cost of failure and what might happen if you refuse to take part in something. I understand why you agreed to take on the assignment and why you lied to us the way you did. I want to believe—I do believe—that you didn’t take on the assignment to be malicious. You could never have known what was going to happen to the others.”
“I would have saved them if I could have,” said Maxine quickly, her voice high as the words spilled out. “But what was I supposed to do? I had to save you. I tried to save the others… but the snatchers, there were too many of them.”
Tom paused. “It wasn’t your fault they were taken.”
“I’m sorry,” she began again.
“You don’t need to apologize anymore. I want to move on from all this now. With you, anyway.” Tom frowned. “I’m not sure about the Corsair. And the others—the McVain lot, I mean—I can’t move on from them. Somehow, someday, I will find a way to help them.”
Maxine seemed about to say something but changed her mind.
“But you and me,” Tom continued, “we were friends once, and I don’t think it was all fake.”
“It wasn’t.”
Tom could feel all his pent-up anger and disappointment and sorrow not disappearing exactly, but changing shape, becoming something new, something more wholesome. “In which case,” he said carefully, “maybe… we can be friends again.”
The change in Maxine’s expression was remarkable. The worry, the anxiety, the shame that had been there, it all melted away to be replaced by a smile, her eyes bright. “Do you mean it?” She couldn’t hide the relief in her voice.
Tom nodded with the same thin, crooked smile he’d given Enzo and Jericho just minutes before. It was a smile that was more poignant than joyous, but no less genuine for that.
“Yeah, I mean it. Friends. But for real this time, no hidden agendas.”
She nodded. “For real.”
“Come on, then, let’s go in,” said Tom. “It’s bloody freezing out here, and I’m starving.”
Maxine laughed and waited for him to climb the slope of the roof toward her before swinging an arm across his shoulders. He didn’t shake it off and, after a moment, he wrapped his own arm across her back.
Chapter Eighteen CLUES AND COUPS
Blizzards battered the school throughout January. As term resumed, the students, staff, and residents of the town had to wrap themselves tightly in heavy coats, thick scarves, and fur hats whenever they ventured outside, and paths had to be dug daily through the snowdrifts. The morning runs through the woodland obstacle courses were canceled, replaced instead by workouts in the Spike, where a gymnastics course had been set up—the students having to negotiate high beams and tightropes, leap over pommel horses, climb ropes, and perform all manner of acrobatics.
Moving from class to class was a severe and unpleasant experience in the bitter cold and driving snow. Many students made the best of it by strapping on short skis and whisking this way and that through the streets. Returning to Guile House each evening was always a great pleasure by contrast—Locke worked hard to keep the boiler stoked and the fires in each room piled high with logs and coal while the kitchen staff turned out hearty meals that warmed even the bluest of bodies.
The weather began to turn at the beginning of February, and although it still snowed almost every evening, the days were bright and clear. Tom began skiing lessons under the instruction of Master Ritter, alongside five other Tenderfoots also new to the sport. He enjoyed the lessons immensely and would return to Guile House cold, exhausted, and with thick clumps of snow in his hair.
He was pulling on his thick white skiing trousers one morning in early March when he spotted a group of students from his window, moving among the trees on a distant slope. With the help of binoculars, he was surprised to recognize Guile House Greenhorns Matthias Hoffmann, Lance Dorling, and the other two boys who had attacked him—the thickset boy who he now knew to be Olaf Blister, and the spidery boy, Milo Wormwood—out for a hike, skis strapped to their backs. Were they doing extra training? Maybe Hoffmann was trying to prove himself after the embarrassment of his broken leg. Or maybe it was at the insistence of his father, to get fitter after Novgorod’s slight during their meeting in Templeton’s office.
The breakfast gong was due in a few minutes. Laying down the binoculars, Tom tapped a quick message on the wall to see if Enzo was awake and was answered a few moments later by a single bang. Grinning, Tom went next door to find his friend still in bed, the book he’d thrown against the wall lying splayed on the floor.
“All right, sloth boy,” said Tom, dipping his fingers into a glass of water by Enzo’s bed and flicking some drops in his face. Enzo swore at him and buried his head under the pillow.
“Another late one last night?” asked Tom, plonking himself on the foot of the bed.
“Mmmm,” came the muffled reply.
On Enzo’s bedside table, Tom saw a copy of Probing and Perplexing Problems, Puzzles, and Peculiarities by Axel D’Arcy, Beaufort’s graduate no. 271431.
Enzo peeked an eye out from under his pillow. “I was studying.” He paused to yawn loudly. “I want to specialize in codes and cryptography, but it’s popular and Mistress Skarsgard only lets the top students study it from fifth-grade Initiate level onward.”
Tom had never considered what subject he might want to specialize in when he got to that stage. He thought there would be several years before he would have to even think about it—but perhaps he needed to narrow his focus sooner than that. Enzo clearly had.
“Come on,” he said, shoving the thought to one side. “Breakfast’s in a few minutes—I don’t want to miss the best stuff.”
They collected Jericho from his room and headed downstairs. The doors to the dining hall weren’t open yet, and they caught sight of Maxine sitting by the fire in the library, reading that morning’s edition of the Shadow League Argus, her right leg elevated on a pillow beside her.
“Up a bit early, Max, aren’t you?” said Jericho, sliding onto the arm of the sofa next to her.
“Haven’t you heard, Jer? Geniuses like to get a head start on the day,” said Maxine without looking up, then added, “No, you probably haven’t.”
“Oh, so you’re a genius now, are you?”
“Always have been, always will be.”
“Terrible night vision, though,” said Enzo through a yawn. “I heard about you nearly breaking your ankle last night at the Black Tusk Crag.”
“For your information,” she said, eyes still fixed on the paper, “my fall was Eloise Duchamp’s fault—she let out too much slack on the line.”
Tom sat beside her, making sure he didn’t knock her leg. He eyed the paper cursorily. “So, what’s happening in the world?”
“Just the usual,” she said in a bored voice. “There was quite an interesting piece about a painting being stolen in New Avignon. Sounded clever… and a Shadow Assassin took out a presidential candidate in Bolivia—using spiders, apparently. One bite, dead, no other evidence left behind. The journalist writing the piece loved it. Then the rest of it is all pretty much Vincent Crowe and his lot banging on about League reform as usual.”
Tom stiffened at the mention of Crowe’s name. He was about to ask more when Maxine turned the page of the paper—and all thoughts of Crowe were pushed from his mind.
LEGENDARY THIEF MARCUS SILVERMAN DIES AGED 74
BLAZE RIPS THROUGH WAREHOUSE AND CLAIMS LIFE OF ESTEEMED FENCE JESSICA CHAFFINCH
Tom grabbed the paper from Maxine, ignoring her cries of outrage and the slap she gave his arm, his eyes rapidly scanning the page. Silverman had passed away in his sleep two nights previously. On that same night, a fire had destroyed the underground warehouse in Spitalfields where Jessica Chaffinch had run her fencing empire. Her remains had been recovered from the wreckage a day later.
“What’s up with you?” asked Maxine sourly, snatching the paper back. She looked over the articles. “You didn’t know them, did you?”
“I met both of them,” said Tom, his voice feeling strange. “Back in London.” He summoned the image of the catlike Jessica Chaffinch and her mind-boggling collection of antiques and paraphernalia. Then he thought about the suave Marcus Silverman at the French ambassador’s mansion, the night he had stolen the bracelet from Madame de Beauvoir. It seemed so peculiar that two people he had met on the same day should die, months later, also on the same day.
The others gathered around Maxine to study the paper.
“Urgh,” said Enzo, grimacing. “What a horrible way for her to go.”
“I’ve heard my dad talking about Silverman,” added Jericho. “Apparently he was one the greats, back in the day. But I actually thought he’d died ages ago.”
“Never heard of him,” offered Maxine. “But everyone knows who Jessica Chaffinch is. Or was,” she corrected. “Shame. I’d always wanted to go there.”
“I went once with my mum a few years ago,” said Enzo. “We got some old land registry papers that Mum used to sell a chunk of Schleswig-Holstein to a Prussian prince—not that they were worth the paper they were printed on. You could get almost anything there.”
“Yeah, it was cool,” said Jericho. “My dad took me along when he needed to kit out a building like a private bank for one of his long cons. We got portraits and clocks and desks and all sorts of stuff like that. Even the door to a vault, which we put up against a wall. It looked brilliant. Her place was amazing.”
“Yeah, it was,” said Tom quietly, but all he could really think of was Jessica’s body lying in the smoldering ruins of her warehouse. He felt sick.
There was a loud creak from the hallway as the doors to the dining hall were swung open, followed by the clang of the breakfast gong. Enzo and Jericho leaped to their feet and raced out of the library. Tom helped Maxine up, and they both followed.
As he slid onto the bench next to Enzo, who was piling rashers of bacon onto his plate, Matthias Hoffmann and his friends bustled in. Hoffmann had a thick leather leg brace strapped over his ski trousers. His lopsided gait was more pronounced now, his leg obviously aching from the exertion of skiing.
Tom thought of Silverman and Chaffinch again, dying on the same day. Was there a connection? Tom knew of one for sure: both had been working on jobs for Lysander Hoffmann. But that had been months ago.
“Guys,” he said, looking at Enzo, Jericho, and Maxine. His low tone made them stop their conversation in midflow. “I need to tell you something.”
Tom told them about his visit to see Chaffinch with the Corsair, the mission she’d sent them on, their meeting with Silverman—an encounter he had barely thought about since it happened. And about one other occasion when he had heard their names discussed in conversation: when Vincent Crowe had been talking with Julius Knotweed at the Spike on Tom’s first day of school.
By the time he’d finished, they were alone in the dining room. It was Saturday, and all the other students had finished breakfast and had dispersed to the common-room areas, leaving the little group in peace.
“I can’t believe you never told us about meeting Crowe,” said Maxine, her face pale. “And that he spoke to you like that.”
Tom asked a question that had been on his mind for a long, long time. “Who on earth is Vincent Crowe?”
“A scary guy,” said Enzo, who looked frightened saying even that.
“He’s just like the old Duke of Nîmes,” said Jericho.
When Tom looked blank, Jericho expanded. “The Duke of Nîmes was a powerful Shadow Politico. This is quite long ago. He’s dead now—the Directorate had him executed, and they burned the castle on his private island to the ground. Anyway, he believed that the League was wasting its potential. He believed that we should be running the world, instead of hiring ourselves out to the highest bidders.”
“And how would we do that?” asked Tom. “Run the world, I mean?”
“By controlling it,” said Jericho. “The League could place people in positions of power in every country, every government, every political movement, every town hall, every bank, everywhere. We could weaken any opponents by finding out their deepest secrets. We could steal their wealth. We could assassinate any enemy. The duke believed that rulers and elected governments could stay, but it would be our people rising to the top, our people making the real decisions, our people profiting. ‘Empires rise and fall,’ he said, ‘but ours could last forever, because the world outside the League wouldn’t know it even existed.’ His followers called him the Forever Emperor.”
“And he had plans for a weapon to start a war in the Americas and create opportunities for the League to enrich itself,” added Maxine.
“That’s why he was executed,” said Enzo. “The Directorate feared that, ultimately, he would move against the emperor and take the throne himself, then use the power of the League to crush the kingdom of Prussia and the Japanese Empire and rule the whole world. But the League would never allow itself to be ruled—and nor would these rival empires just roll over.”
Tom thought of the koma. “There would be war,” he said with a shudder. “A world war.”
Enzo nodded. “So, naturally, he had to be stopped.”
“But Crowe agrees with the old duke?” asked Tom. “Even though it got him killed?”
“Yeah, he’s obsessed,” said Jericho. “And Crowe’s got a lot of support. Those who follow him are wild about his plans. The most loyal like to call themselves Chevaliers de Nîmes—‘Knights of Nîmes.’ It’s like a cult, mate. It’s crazy. You’ll have seen the graffiti, so you know what I mean.”
“What graffiti?” asked Tom.
“All around town,” said Maxine, as if Tom had said the stupidest thing in the world. “Don’t you ever wear your glasses?”
Tom remembered the pair of spectacles the Corsair had given him so that he could read the Argus while at the house in Eaton Square. “Oh! You mean the ones with the special lenses?”
“Yes,” said Maxine, exasperated. “Put them on next time you go out. You’ll see the graffiti all over the place. The crossed swords of the Chevaliers and messages like ‘We are the shadows who will steal the world.’ That kind of thing. Crowe says that the League could pull off the greatest theft there has ever been: to steal the world without it even knowing.”
“But how could we actually do that?” asked Tom, completely baffled.
“By getting ahold of the duke’s mysterious weapon? Who knows?” said Maxine with a shrug.
Tom tried to imagine what the weapon might have been. He asked, “Are the current Directorate on board with Crowe’s ideas?”
Maxine gave a mirthless laugh. “Not at all. Crowe likes to posture and make big pronouncements, but the Directorate are dead set against them. They don’t want Crowe making himself emperor.”
Tom shuddered at the thought of Crowe sitting on the emperor’s throne, underpinned by all the extraordinary expertise and ingenuity of the League. All that power in his hands. He would make the whole world his workhouse. And it would be sport to him.
“So why don’t they just silence him? Or put him in the Penumbra?” he asked.
“I suppose because he’s not actually done anything yet,” said Jericho. “If the Directorate got rid of him, he’d become a martyr to the cause, which would attract more sympathy and support. The Directorate don’t want a revolution on their hands.”
“Yeah, that’s the last thing they want,” added Enzo. “They’re precariously balanced as it is. Or so my dad says. Apparently, maintaining the balance of power among the Shadow Guilds is a nightmare. If the Directorate make a move against Crowe, it might spark a civil war and the whole League could collapse.”
