Chapter 22: First Blood

It had felt like the piece of a lock someone had pressed into his palm at last, a small shape that knew the shape of the rest of it by touch alone.

The map of the city lay across the table like a skin, pins placed where the old lanes bent on themselves and where there were corners that made men slow before they knew they had done it. Tom reached for the last of the red thread. The gas-fire in the grate fought a dampness in the brick and made a tired hissing noise. The window stood open an inch to keep the room from feeling as though the air had been breathed twice already; it let in the smell of rain off the river and a damp wool stink from the cloaks piled on a chair.

“Leave the door on the latch,” he said, without lifting his head. “If they knock, you want the hinges to sing.”

Abraxas, who had a way of standing as if he had been set there by hand, made a face at the latch and let it down to the bar it knew without a sound. Nott crouched on his heels by the hearth and fed the fire slivers of crate-wood that fizzed and snapped sharply when they found a pocket of pitch. Dulac had rolled up his sleeves in a way that suggested he had forgotten to do it and had only realised when the cuffs went damp in the sink; his dark hair was tied back with a strip of red ribbon and his jaw had the beginning of a bruise on it that was starting to green at the edges.

Rosier stood by the window, smoking as if it grandly owed him something and was paying in small instalments; he had been told to put it out twice and had flicked the ash into an empty ink bottle with an expression of martyrdom.

“If the hinges sing, the neighbours wake,” Abraxas said, low.

“If the neighbours wake, they have seen us already,” Tom said, and moved the last pin half an inch. “Either way, we are done here at midnight.”

He had chosen the house because no one had ever thought of choosing it. It sat in a terrace that sagged a little in the middle like a coat hung too long on the same peg; above the fanlight, there was a knotted iron charm in the shape of a thistle that had turned everyone's socks a little damp the first week they used the place. The kitchen smelled of old onion and strong tea and there was a coal cupboard that had refused to be anything but what it had always been for the first three days and then yielded all at once as if it had been waiting for the correct word, which Tom had found by leaving it alone until it grew tired of being stubborn.

The layout was simple: front door to hall, hall to kitchen at the back, kitchen to scullery and yard. Off the hall, a narrow stair climbed to the rooms above. To the left of the kitchen, a door led to the cellar—and from the cellar, through the coal passage, to the alley behind the neighbouring house. The back parlour sat between kitchen and scullery, with one window facing the yard and one door that could be barricaded if necessary. Tom had walked the escape routes a dozen times. Front to back: four seconds at a run. Kitchen to cellar: six seconds including the stairs. Cellar to alley: eight seconds if you knew where to put your feet in the dark.

The others were where they had been told to be: Avery with his back against the cellar door and a rope coiled in his hands; Elspeth Stone in the back parlour with the ledger and the little iron lock-box that had nothing of value in it and so would be taken first.

“We don’t stay,” he said, to the room and to himself. “If they come, we go.”

Nott looked up from the fire and half-smiled, a narrow, quick thing that did not push his cheeks into his eyes. “If they come, we’ll be ready.”

“They’re already here,” Rosier said, in the falling voice of someone making a joke that would have been better if it had been true.

Tom laid the last length of thread and looked at the line it made. It was clean. It was almost elegant. He sat back and let his hand fall to the table; the pewter went cool under his palm. The breath he had been holding went out of him without a noise. He could feel the door beyond the hall and the way the frame took the weight of the house; the wards he had set had a tightness to them like the stretch of drumskin. It would take a certain sort of knock to make them give voice.

There was the knock. It began as a fingertip, three light taps, a polite caller on a wet night. The fourth blow pushed into the wood and made the hinges ache. The fifth was a fist in a coat that had an official badge on it.

“Aurors,” Rosier said, as if he were saying the word to get the taste of it out of his mouth.

Abraxas’s cigarette went out in his fingers. Nott stood up and pushed his hair out of his eyes. Dulac came out of the scullery with water on his wrists.

Tom raised his wand and the wards answered him, a quiet lifting under his ribs as if the skin at his sides had tightened. He had put the house into his hand the first night, his palm on the old table and the door, his fingertips to the sill and the brick. It answered now as a well-kept door answers: it took the blow and gave back a noise loud enough to tell the street it would not be had politely.

“By authority of the Ministry of Magic,” a man called through the wood in a voice that carried without becoming a shout. The next blow shook dust out of the ceiling. “Open this door.”

Nott took a breath as if to say something that would be either brave or fatal. Tom did not look round. He opened his hand and the lights went out, his fingers closing again on the dark. The map, the pins, the little glass ash that clung to the lip of the empty ink bottle, all of it disappeared. The kitchen narrowed in the dark. He saw where everyone stood because he knew where they had been a moment ago.

“Avery,” Tom said, quiet. “Cellar. Now.”

There was no time for anything elongated. He heard Avery’s foot on the first stair and the coal scuttle make a soft metal-in-metal sound. He saw the hall as the door went in, and the wards, under pressure, did as they had been told: they gave way shyly to keep from drawing the eye and then they tried to bite.

The door and half the frame went out into the street with a good deal of sound. The men on the stones outside stepped back smartly, and the man with the official voice sent a shield ahead of him that made the brick dust slide away like water. Four shadows crossed the threshold at once, two crouched low, two standing in a way that said they had practised in rooms where someone blew a whistle. At the back of the house, something went into the yard with a crack of boards.

“Abraxas,” Tom said. “Back.”

Abraxas moved, and Rosier with him, their shoulders almost touching as they went. Dulac did not move; he had an old habit of standing and seeing who would move around him first. Tom caught his sleeve and pushed him left, put him behind the kitchen table, his hand on the back of Dulac’s neck as if he were telling a dog to stay.

“Wait for my word,” he said, and moved into the hall.

The man with the official voice had a square face and a coat that did not fit his shoulders; his left hand moved as he spoke and the wand in it made quick, neat quarter-circles as if it were making a speech of its own. On his right was a younger man with a watchful, wary set to him and a mouth that had been taught not to smile; the bone above his temple caught the light and his coat sat right on him because he had made certain of it. The left eye flicked to the ceiling and then to the kitchen, and then found Tom.

“Riddle,” he said.

“Mr Moody,” Tom said, and allowed himself the time to know it was him. The boy who had watched without blinking in the corridor at Hogwarts, who had moved so carefully around sudden noises that one wondered if he practised making them to get used to them. The Auror Office had put him at the front of six older men. That was either arrogance on their part, or sense. Tom took his foot down one stair, slow.

“Wands down,” said the square-faced one, and lifted his own in one smooth polite motion that ended in a shield across the whole of the hall. “By authority of the Ministry of Magic, you are all—”

In the yard, a board broke and one of the older men swore under his breath. The kitchen door rattled in its frame. There would be another two in the yard and one at the alley mouth; he had seen them come down the street from the window in a way that made them look like men who had never once used a silencing charm to open a gate and were now finding it a nuisance to be quiet.

“—ordered to lay down your wands and submit to—”

Tom sent the first spell into the gaps between the floorboards. A silent shove. The boards bloomed upward under the Auror's boots. The shield shivered but held. The older men did not break.

The younger one on Moody's right lifted his wand. Something dull and heavy rolled into the air—it did not stop at the top step but came down slow and deliberate. Tom's counterspell met it with a thick, glassy noise. The smell of burned wool filled the hall.

“Your last chance,” the square-faced man said, in a tone that wanted to be tired and only managed official. “You’re outnumbered.”

Tom smiled. It was small and had no teeth in it. “You are,” he said, and told the house to shut.

The door between the hall and the kitchen slammed of its own accord, the latches Tom had set finding where they were meant to be without looking. The men in the yard hit the new barrier without expecting to and made noises that would have been funny in other circumstances. Rosier sent something sharp and green through the door from the scullery that made the top hinge squeal and a man suck air through his teeth. Abraxas, with admirable economy, pinned the back latch with a nail of light and then stopped up the keyhole with smoke.

In the hall, there was no space for grand gestures. It went to noise and light quickly.

The square-faced Auror kept his shield up like a moral position. The man to his left sent hexes along the stair—neat little slices aimed at wood and tendons. Tom moved. The banister took the first hex. The second skated off something not there and made a mark in the plaster. The third would have taken him in the throat if he had been the height he was last year.

Moody did not throw light. He moved into position and watched. He lifted his wand once and the room breathed in as one expects to do before someone says your name. Tom frowned, felt the thing Moody was doing with the air and the pressure of the room, and broke it with a minor spell that had once been meant to set tea-water to a pleasant simmer; the air flattened again. Moody’s mouth twitched in what might have been respect or annoyance; he did not stop watching.

“Now the cellar, Avery,” Tom said, and let the wall take a cut meant for the place where his leg had just been. The hall was thick with plaster dust now and the smell of hot brick. He could hear Elspeth in the back parlour saying, in a voice so steady it angered him, the names of the streets they would go to, the order of the sequence, the lie for anyone who asked and the truth for no one at all.

“Lumos,” Dulac said from the kitchen, under his breath, as if he were ashamed to need it.

“Keep it down,” Abraxas said.

“I should like to see the floor,” Dulac said, in that ironic little roll of his that made the words flatter and made people underestimate how much he knew. “I’ve an attachment to not falling through it.”

The Aurors did not aim to kill. They broke things, they pushed, they sealed. The square-faced man lifted his shield and made it into a wall. The younger man put out the little lantern on the hall table with a pinch of his fingers at twenty feet. There was a woman in the yard—Tom heard her say, “Careful, for pity’s sake,” and someone obeyed her—and there was the hard crack of a spell meant to bind going off in the wrong place and catching on a pot-rack instead. The house did not understand kindness and did not repay it.

Tom took the measure of the shields and the skill and where the weaker wrists were. He could have sent something forward like a nail into the square-faced man’s shield and then his shoulder and then whatever lay behind it. He did not. He sent a cold fold down the length of the hall and turned the floor into a sheet of wet stone; boots went out from under them with a sound that was not dignified. He sent a Stunner at the thigh of the man on the right as he went down; it took him low and quiet and the body folded around the knee with an awkward respect for the carpentry.

“Take him,” Moody snapped, and one of the older Aurors moved without question, hands out to catch the falling man, shield up like a plate. “Up.”

“We could end this,” the square-faced Auror said through his teeth, the shield trembling, “by speaking like reasonable men.”

“We could,” Tom said. “You first.”

The kitchen door took a blow from the yard that knocked flakes of paint off the panel and sent them skating across the flagstones like salt. Abraxas said, “Enough,” very softly, and the end of his wand made a line in the air that had force behind it; the doorframe took the hit and then refused to be a doorframe any longer. The men on the other side found themselves with their faces against brick that had been a beam and shouted. It would not hold them, not long, but it would remind them that a house built before you were born could be taught new tricks at any time.

“Moody,” the woman said sharply from the yard. “Back of the cellar—someone—”

Avery made a noise Tom did not like much. “Trap,” he said. “We’re fine.” There were footsteps on the cellar stairs in the sequence Tom had cut into their heads the first night—two, then pause, then three, then silence. That was Abraxas. Good.

“Stone,” Tom said. “On me.”

She came out of the back parlour with the ledger hugged to her chest and her mouth set. Elspeth Stone had a way of making neat notes look like a form of rebellion; the men who read them sometimes did not realise they had been made to agree to the wrong thing until there were six copies in the street. She looked at Tom as if she were waiting to be told it had all been a pleasant game. He nodded once and sent her past him, up the wall, which took her weight and placed her on the stair as if she weighed what a piece of paper weighs.

The square-faced Auror saw it too late. He sent a binding net up and it caught the wall and stuck as if it had been made for it. Elspeth went past and did not look down. Moody’s wand twitched, a small, controlled movement that put a thin yellow circle around her ankle and drew her one inch back towards him. Tom cut the circle with a slicing charm that did not cut anything else. Moody’s mouth thinned.

“Take the left,” Tom said to Nott, who had stacked plates on the lower stair where the Aurors could not see them; the first of them shattered at the second step and the second at the fourth in a neat little sequence that made the back of Tom’s neck feel sensible and alive.

“Back,” the woman said again from the yard. “Back, back, I said—”

The back door blew in. Smoke and wet air and the smell of old wood came in with it. The woman stepped from the cloud as if pulling a curtain aside and brought her wand up underhand, leftward; she was slight, with a mouth that had made up its mind not to be moved and eyes that had already decided to be somewhere else and were making an exception.

“Tabitha,” Moody said, warning.

She flicked her wand in a little slanting motion and the kitchen table went up, hit the ceiling and came down into a lot of unhelpful pieces. Dulac swore, brief and vivid, as the leg of it struck his hip. Abraxas stepped across the debris with a mind to the plan and took the alley with a square-set shoulder.

Tom turned to cut the room in half and found the crack in the plan at the same moment as the woman did. The coal cupboard, offended at being useful, had opened a crooked gap where the brick had moved. Avery got one foot through and then the other and was gone, and Abraxas behind him. Dulac went to follow and then checked, eyes on the ledger under Elspeth’s arm and the little iron box by her heel.

“I’ve got it,” she said, seeing him think and shaking her head. “Go.”

“I can carry two,” Dulac said stubbornly, and with that he bent and his leg made a small, betrayed sound as something in it tore.

The woman heard it. She set her wand and sent a marrow-cracking curse straight at his thigh. Tom threw his shield forward so hard it made his wrist go numb; it took the curse at the last moment and sent most of it into the door-frame, which splintered with a dry hollow knock. The edge of it clipped Dulac’s leg where the bone lay shallow, and he cried out once and then bit the sound down. He went down on one knee and did not drop his wand. He reached for the ledger with his left hand and set his jaw as if he had decided he had no patience to be in the world at all unless it did exactly as it was told.

Tom put his hand on Dulac’s shoulder and shoved, a short violent thing that put him through the gap by force. “Go,” he said, and there was no courtesy in it.

“Riddle,” the square-faced Auror said, over the noise, “stand down now and I can—”

“You can what,” Tom said, and the hall snapped, as if its patience were thinner than the plaster. The banister splintered forward; the shield took the brunt but the man behind it blinked and had to remember to keep breathing for a full count. The younger man on his right—Moody’s other flank—sent a bright ribbon of light at Tom’s wand-hand without warning; Tom answered it with something as delicate but older, and the light split into three and in its surprise bit a bannister post instead of a wrist.

Elspeth reached the bottom of the stairs. Someone at the top put out a hand and took the ledger. Her shoe slipped on dust and today’s failure, and in that piece of a second when the weight shifted and her heel lifted and she was not touching the stair and gravity had his say, the woman who had blown the table to flinders put her wand up and sent a curse at the shape she could see through smoke and noise.

It was a clean curse, the sort you teach in a room with good light, neat as a line on a page. It took Elspeth across the ribs just below the heart and went through her as if good-quality paper were not there. She made a small foolish sound like someone who has lost a pin they liked and reached for the wall and did not find it. Tom watched her hands open and close as if they were trying to remember how to do it. She turned her head as if she were listening to someone telling her that she had been foolish and late and she had agreed. She fell the way a card falls.

There was an ugly silence in the middle of the noise where something in the room knew, and then the stair decided to be wood again and made a wooden noise at last.

“Hold,” Moody said, low and hard, and the woman in the yard caught her breath.

Tom was not close enough. He crossed the space between what he meant to do and what was possible as if walking on stone across a river. He went down on one knee in plaster and knife-points of broken table and put his hand to Elspeth’s breast. It was already wrong. There was blood under his palm but it came in a pulse that had no business being there; it ran and then slowed as if realising it had misjudged and meant to apologise. He saw her mouth move and he put his cheek to it, once. Nothing. The hand he laid over the wound came away red, slick and warm and not at all dramatic.

“Tom,” Abraxas said from the gap, a shape in smoke with his collar turned up. His voice had something in it Tom had never heard from him before and did not intend to hear again. “We have to go.”

Moody used those seconds. He set his wand and flatly spoke a binding, sharp as snapped wire. It came for Tom’s wrist with a small sound like a breath in a quiet room. Tom broke it. He stood up and the motion shook dust out of his hair and sent it onto the gloss of Elspeth’s new boots. He did not look at her face again. He would see it his whole life; there was no use being sentimental about the first of anything.

“Go,” he said. He reached without looking and took Dulac under the arm and hauled; Dulac made a noise like a laugh and swallowed it. “Rosier—”

“On you,” Rosier said. He had blood at the corner of his mouth. Tom did not remember seeing it arrive there.

They went through the coal gap in order because he had ordered them, and order would keep more of them alive than bravery would. Avery last, then Nott. Abraxas counted them without being told to and then pushed through with the little iron box under his arm. It would jingle and some idiot would think it held coin. Good.

Tom turned once in the hall and sent the last of the wards down over the stair-head and the parlour door and the ceiling beam. The house would not like this; you could ask too much of old wood and it would pretend to be agreeable and then punish you. He caught Moody’s eye over the tilt of the square-faced man’s shield and said, not loudly, “You shouldn’t teach good people to use that curse.”

Moody’s left eye—still his own, still level—did not move. “You shouldn’t put them in front of it,” he said. “Move off, Riddle.” It was not a plea. It was not a threat. It was the armoured middle of a thing he intended to say every day for the rest of his life.

Tom went. He folded himself through the coal passage and the dark put its hands on his shoulders like something that meant to be friendly and might be convinced. The passage smelled of damp and rust and old carbon that had gone soft and took a print if you leaned. He went bent, one hand on Dulac’s belt to make certain he did not go down, his wand up and pointed at a future that would be better organised if he had anything to say about it.

The second cellar opened into the yard of the next terrace and then into a lane that knew how to be empty. They came up under an old brassiere sign that had lost every letter but two and hung like a question. The rain that had been threatening finally began, quick and practical. Tom put Dulac against the wall and went on his knee again and touched the wound. It had been a neat slice; the marrow-curse had grazed and made the bone hinky and the muscle obedient while it remembered its instructions from the hit.

“Episkey,” he said, clean and flat. The skin drew together and then sighed apart. It was never enough. “Ferula.” Bandages leapt into his hand; he wound them tight. The whites of Dulac’s eyes showed and then went away as he found somewhere to put himself.

“I’m very attached to that thigh,” Dulac said, setting his teeth in the corner of his mouth. “We’ve been through a lot.”

“Keep talking,” Tom said. He put his hand below the wound and sent a little heat into the place to keep the blood from doing anything dramatic. “Rosier, take Nott. Avery, ahead.”

“Stone,” Abraxas said, hoarse. He was not asking a question.

Tom’s hand on the bandage tightened a fraction and then loosened. “Gone,” he said.

Abraxas stopped moving for the space of a breath. His face did a small, terrible thing that no one could help seeing. He looked politely away from Tom and at the alley wall, as if reading something there that had always interested him but which, until now, had not had the benefit of his full attention. He nodded once, as one acknowledges a debt. He said, “Right.”

There were footsteps at the end of the lane; water ran in the gutter and carried light with it so it looked as if there were silver snakes going home in the rain. Tom lifted his hand from Dulac and stood; his knees protested, like a man who had been interrupted at his tea. His wand felt calm in his palm.

“Take him,” he said to Abraxas without looking at him. “Get home.”

“My mother will be—” Abraxas began, as if he had remembered that he had one all at once.

“At the theatre,” Tom said, because he knew. “Go.”

They moved. Rosier had Nott under the shoulder because somewhere along the way Nott had acquired a cut at his scalp that made blood run impressively down his jaw like grease. Avery had the iron box and an expression of delicate outrage that anyone would make him run. Dulac tested his foot and made a dry noise but kept it under him; Abraxas took some of his weight without either of them appearing to admit it. The rain made everyone sensible and quiet.

Tom went last. He heard the house go, a juddering groan like an old man getting to his feet for the last time. He had set a fold in the beam above the stair that would refuse to be a beam if anyone put too much of the wrong sort of weight on it all at once. The wards laid into the plaster gave a sort of howl then, an old fox’s scream; the square-faced Auror would hate that. Good.

A figure appeared at the end of the alley and lifted a wand with the sort of care you give to delicate things. Tom put a shield up and moved his shoulder half an inch. The light slid off his sleeve like rain. The figure swore under his breath—the younger one, he had the sound of it—and then did something that made the water in the gutter stand up in a sheet as if someone had put a pane of glass into it. Tom did not wait to be impressed. He sent the sheet back at its maker as if the night had decided to have a private joke at his expense. He felt the resistance of another wand, hard and present; Moody had come around through the yard faster than anyone had a right to do.

“Take your dead,” Tom said, softly, although he did not know if anyone heard him or if he meant the words to be kind.

He Apparated without ceremony. The alley took a breath behind him and closed over the space where he had been.

The safehouse they went to ground in had been a haberdasher’s once and neither forgave nor forgot the change. It had glass cases that did not quite understand that they were now meant to hold books and safe places where a gentleman’s gloves had been had been used for the seditious business of leaflets. Tom took Dulac into the back room, laid him on a counter that had been made for handsome men who did not mind waiting to be paid attention to, and set his wand to working in the particular way that made time slow down and money ride in on other people’s impatience.

“Hold still,” he said.

Dulac laughed once, gently, as if he had remembered a joke from a year ago and wanted to see if it remained true. “Anyone ever tell you,” he said, “you’ve a gift for reassurances.”

“Constantly,” Tom said, without looking up.

“Let me see,” said a voice from the door, cool and steady and older than the room. Miriam Dolohov, who never flinched until she was alone at night and then did it properly, leaned in under Tom’s arm and put her thin hand to Dulac’s brow and then to the bandage as if she were comparing temperatures. “Fine. He’ll keep the leg. He won’t thank you for it in the rain.”

“I never thank anyone in the rain,” Dulac said, and swallowed as a knot tightened under Tom’s hand and then loosened again under Tom’s words. “Elspeth.”

Miriam’s hand stopped. Tom bound the last of the bandage and set his palm over it, not for magic now but for the old sense in it. There would be a bill for this. He would be the one to pay it.

“Dead,” he said, and the word lay on the counter with a small sense of propriety. “We’ll see to her.”

Dulac shut his eyes. The line of his mouth smoothed. He nodded once without opening them and said, “Right.”

There were people in the front room now, voices muffled by the velvet drape they had never bothered to take down, the room trying to remember how to hold people differently to the way it had done before. Someone said, “Look at that,” in the tone of a man who cannot keep it to himself no matter how much he intends dignity. Tom cleaned his hands without noticing and went to see what that was.

On the top of the heap of yesterday’s paper someone had put this morning’s Prophet, wet and bright and self-satisfied. The headline did not care that it had arrived in the middle of the night and was being read by people with damp hair and dust in their eyelashes. It had long been waiting to use the font it had set for itself when it had written the first ever piece on Bluish Fire discovered in South Wales, and it looked pleased to be put to its use again.

DARK LORD TERRORISES LONDON

The letters took up the top half of the page. Under them there was a smaller line that said, in a tone of polite alarm, Seditious Cult Leader Behind Violent Night Raid; Auror Office Sustains Injuries. A photograph below had found a way to make a listless bit of smoke look as if it were trying to be a person.

Abraxas stood a little off to the side and watched Tom without obviously watching him. Rosier’s mouth did the thing it did when he meant to bite his thumb and did not because he had stopped doing that when he was seventeen and had no intention of going back. Nott leaned his shoulder into the wall as if someone had told him it would keep standing if he put his weight there. Avery had found a chair and put his ankle on his knee and looked at his cuff as if it had nearly done something unforgivable.

“They name you so you’ll behave as if the name belongs to you,” Miriam said, behind him.

Tom put two fingers on the wet edge of the paper and turned it as if it were a thing with a hinge on it and some small pleasure to be had in the craft-world. The article did what it meant: it told people the story they would be relieved to have told to them. It said that a group of dangerous men had struck at a quiet neighbourhood; that the Ministry had responded heroically; that a small number of brave Aurors, led by up-and-coming Alastor Moody, had gone in to protect citizens and suffered for it. It said that the ‘so-called Coalition’ had attacked first, had used ‘unforgivable’ magics in crowded streets, had left behind innocent casualties.

No one said Elspeth’s name. No one spoke hers at all.

“They’ll be angry now,” Nott said, quiet. “Everywhere.”

“They were angry yesterday,” Rosier said. “This helps them enjoy it.”

Abraxas looked at Tom. “What do we do,” he said, no flourish, no title. He looked ready to spit and ready to listen and not sure which to do first.

Tom folded the newspaper once, sharply, and then again, neat. He set it on the counter and smoothed it with his palm without needing to. The room had not warmed yet; the light had the greyish cast London had when it meant to be mean and had got its wish.

“What we said we would,” he said. “We take them out of the script they’ve written for themselves. We protect ours, and the ones we can make ours. We put the right words in the right ears. And we mind what doors we leave open behind us.”

“Dulac?” Miriam said, a small angle of her chin towards the back.

“Stays,” Tom said. “Two days. Then he goes to ground in Bloomsbury. No heroics. He will walk with a stick for three weeks and complain; he will not go near the river.”

“I’ve no intention of going near the river,” Dulac said from the other room, cheerful and far away in a way that meant he was either braver than everyone else or a fool. “They’ve never done anything for me.”

Abraxas said, “We owe her something.” He did not look at Tom when he said it. He looked at the space the word her occupied.

“We do,” Tom said. “We will pay it.” He took a breath and let it sit where breath sits when it does not need to go anywhere quickly. “We don’t put her name in a paper that would use it to sell advertising for brooms. We say it in the rooms where it will keep people alive.”

Rosier made a small noise. “They’ll call you that, you know,” he said, glancing at the folded paper in Tom’s hand like a man who has seen a jacket on a shop mannequin and is trying to decide if he can wear the same style. “Dark Lord. They’ll fit it to you and then expect you to preen.”

Tom smiled without mirth. He had always been precise about his names. He had spent a year and a half deciding what to do with his own. He would not take any that owed a debt to men who wrote headlines after supper. But there were uses in other people’s foolishness. Names made people organise themselves. Names made lines on maps.

“Let them,” he said, softly. “It’s a coat, isn’t it. You can wear one and not be owned by it.”

“Coats can be held,” Miriam said. “They can be pulled.”

“So can headlines,” Tom said. He put the folded paper down and set a glass on it as if to teach it something about being still. “Avery, go through the ledger. Cross names that can be spared for a week. Rosier, arrange for fifty more leaflets by noon. Nott, the watch. Abraxas—” He hesitated the smallest part of a second, and then did not. “With me.”

The two of them went into the back room and stood beside Dulac, who had his eyes shut and his mouth open like someone who has fallen asleep without meaning to and is not proud of it. Miriam passed Tom the bowl of water she had used to clean the last of the blood from her fingers and did not say anything sentimental.

“Two things,” Tom said, taking a cloth and setting it into the water with care. “We see to her. We see to him.” He put a hand flat on the counter, palm down, and left it there until the water in the bowl stopped showing the tremor of a room whose heart was still beating too fast.

Abraxas nodded and said, in his old, precise voice, “Yes.”

They carried Elspeth Stone out of the house where she had fallen when the street woke up proper, under a quiet that had made itself and then did not want to be seen. They did it by the book: covered her face, set her on the board, did not hurry. They took the long back streets to the place where her people would know what to do. No one stopped them. No one helped. A woman looked up from her step and then looked down as if she had just remembered some potatoes and did not wish to burn them.

They told the ones who needed telling. They stopped in the small rooms with their curtains drawn where the right stories were written and their words used up slowly. They did not leave a mark on any door they knocked on.

By ten o’clock Tom was behind the counter in Borgin & Burkes with his sleeves rolled to his elbows and his hair laid down as if it had been taught better. Mr Burke looked up from the ledger with the wet, resentful eyes of a man who dislikes paying for ink. He opened his mouth to say that the Daily Prophet had been in to ask questions about a certain set of goods that had gone missing from a private collection in Knightsbridge, and then looked at Tom’s cuffs and shut it again.

“Parcel for Knatchbull,” Tom said. “Someone will come.” He did not need to say from which side of this city the someone would come.

The bell on the shop door made the small, tinny noise it had made since before the last war and would still make under the next one. Outside, the street went about the business of being London, which was to provide a place for people to be exactly who they thought they were and to be wrong about it in private.

At noon Abraxas came in without looking at the shelves and went behind the counter as if he had always worked there. He put a folded thing down next to the till. Tom did not look at it for a full minute. When he did, he saw letters cut out of the Daily Prophet’s own headline, rearranged on cheap coloured paper by hands that did not care for scissors, pasted into a sentence that had rather more force than elegance.

IF HE IS A LORD IT IS BECAUSE YOU BOW

Abraxas said nothing. His mouth had taken on a certain elegance that did not belong to twenty-year-old men and should not have to. Tom looked at it and felt something at the back of his throat that angered him. He put two sickles into the till for form’s sake and then took the folded thing in hand.

“Put three boys with the pamphlets on Fleet Street,” he said. “One on each corner. Let the Prophet come out and call the Aurors. Let the Aurors be seen. Then take the boys away before anyone looks like a policeman. Not more than five minutes.”

“And if someone takes a swing at them,” Abraxas said.

“They duck,” Tom said, and his mouth twitched, unwillingly. “And then they bow, very pretty, and go on. No one remembers a bow as violence. They remember it as respect and have to decide later which it was.”

“Right,” Abraxas said. His hand brushed Tom’s sleeve as if he were straightening it because he could not help himself and because something needed straightening. Then he was gone.

The afternoon went on with the perverse obedience of a clock. Tom sold three fanged cigar-cases and a rope that had once belonged to a sailor who had tied it with a knot that made other sailors shake their heads. He found five minutes to close his eyes. When he opened them Moody was on the other side of the street.

He stood as if the pavement had moved under him and he’d decided to forgive it. He had his hands in his coat pockets and his hat was at the angle of a man who either does not care for hats or wears one to keep other people from seeing too much of his face. He looked at the door of Borgin & Burkes. He did not come in.

They looked at each other across the road and over the heads of men who did not know they were being looked over. Moody’s mouth flattened. He lifted one hand as if he meant to scratch his jaw and used it to let Tom know he had counted: one dead. He did not apologise. He did not offer an excuse. He gave a small motion of the chin that belonged to neither loser nor winner and then he went away in that careful stride that made the slightest noise of both haste and patience.

Tom’s jaw tightened and softened again. He finished counting the coins in the till even though he had already done it that morning. He set the lid on the till and let it click with a sound like a small door deciding on its own to be shut.

That night, the room at the back of the haberdasher’s was warm and smelled of frying onions and hope in small quantities. Dulac slept with his mouth open and one hand on his bandage as if to be sure it did not go anywhere without him. Rosier leaned his head against the window and looked at the shape the city made of itself when it lay down. Abraxas, who had done the work of three men without asking for a word for it, sat with his back to the wall and his eyes on no one at all. Nott slept like a boy who has not known how to sleep like a boy for a long time.

Tom sat with the map and the pins and the thread. He did not move them. He did not draw a new line. He set his thumb on the place in the city where Elspeth Stone had stopped being a person who could be put in a plan and became a person who made the plan necessary. He kept it there for a count of eight, exactly, and then he lifted it and went to work.

He would draw them again tomorrow until they were what he wanted. For tonight, he finished the list of names who would be moved before dawn and the note to the man on Fleet Street who owed him two favours and the line at the bottom of a letter that said certain people would not be home for a while and those who came looking would be told they had never lived there in the first place.

When the lamps were turned down and the room had that tired silence that comes when rooms have done what they had to do and mean to try again in the morning, Tom folded the last of the papers, set them in a neat stack, and flattened the edge with the side of his hand. He went to the door and checked the latch and let his fingers rest on it a second longer than necessary.

The world listened, as it sometimes did when it had pretended all day to be busy and now had to admit it was waiting to be told what it would have to become. He did not have any kind words for it and did not think it would appreciate them if he did.

“Sleep,” he said to the room that did not sleep, and shut the door with a click that knew what it was doing.