Securing Griffin

"You find out what a man is by what he does to the thing that can't kick back."

We came through into the Portal Cave together, the pirate and me, and whatever had been holding me up the last hour let go of me all at once, and I went down onto the stone and took him down with me. I didn't get up in a hurry. I lay where I'd landed, the cold of the floor coming up through my spine and Griffin Langley's dead weight slung across my legs, and I took stock of myself the way I'd have taken stock of a paddock after a bad night—counting off what the morning had cost me.

My cheek ached where his skull had caught me, a dull deep throb, sore to the touch but nothing you'd notice on me across a room. My shin, where his boot had come down, had a sick grinding ache in the bone of it. My hands were split and going stiff. And running under the whole of it, the shakes—the ones that always turned up once the fighting was done and there was no one left to fight, and my body was handed back to me to feel.

Behind my eyes the boy was still lying in the tray of that truck, looking at nothing. He'd go on lying there for as long as I had the wit to remember him, I knew that much—I'd a long enough tally of them by now, the ones I'd been half a step too slow to save, and he'd joined it whether I liked it or not. I never even got his name. I lay there in the cold hating the morning, and hating the men who'd made it what it was, and one of those men was breathing his wet, broken breath against my knee.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world to kill him where he lay. The thought came, and it sat down in me, and it made itself right at home, and I didn't trouble to chase it off. He was helpless and I wasn't. There was no one watching, no law in that cave but me, and not a soul on either side of any world who'd have shed a tear over Griffin Langley or asked a single question after him.

My hands had the notion taken up before the rest of me caught them at it—how little it would take, how quick, how quiet the cave would go once it was done. The boy in the truck seemed to be asking it of me. For the length of one long breath it wore the face of justice. But I'd been a long while learning that justice was the prettiest lie a tired man could tell himself, and that morning I was tired enough to near buy it.

I didn't, though, and there were two reasons, a small one and a large. The small was that a dead pirate was no use to a living soul, and this one was the only thread left in my hand that led back to Nelson Price—back to whatever Nelson wanted badly enough to send men to kill for it on a cold Hobart morning.

The large reason was Freya. She'd taken my face in both her hands, in this same cold cave, and told me she deserved a father who wouldn't stoop to the easy, ugly thing—and I'd looked her in the eye and told her she was right. A word like that was worth nothing at all if a man only kept it on the days it cost him nothing. So I took my hands back off the notion of his throat, got myself up off the floor, and set to the harder work instead.

Tying up a man who's in no fit state to help you do it was heavy, graceless, thankless work, and it took the last of what my arms had left in them. He'd gone wholly limp, and he was bigger than me to start with, and a limp man weighed a good deal more than a fighting one—I'd handled enough downed stock in my years to know that for a fact and never once to understand it.

I rolled him off my legs onto his front and set my knee in his back to hold him, in the same spot it had finished the fight, and I bound his wrists behind him, crossed over and drawn down hard, with the good coarse rope we kept in the cave for the goats and for worse than goats. I dragged his elbows back till the bones of his broken arm ground one on the other and he made a noise away down in his sleep, and I didn't ease it for him. His ankles after. Then a good length run tight from his wrists to the old iron ring driven deep in the rock at the back of the cave—a ring that had held whatever wanted holding since a long while before ever I came to this place.

Then I went through his clothes, and not gently. A folding knife in his coat. A second one, meaner, worked down into the seam of his boot. A garrotte, wound up small as a coin. I took the lot and stowed it away inside my own coat. I pulled his boots off him and pitched them into the far dark of the cave, for a man could do more mischief with his feet than most folk ever gave him credit for, and I turned his pockets out onto the stone and found nothing in them worth the turning. He travelled light. Their sort always did.

He stayed under through the whole of it, his breath thick and bubbling where the door had rearranged the front of his face, and I didn't like how far down he'd gone. You could hit a man too hard—I'd done it, more than once, and stood over the ones who never came back up from it—and a corpse roped to that ring would have been a sorry joke to have hauled the whole way across two worlds.

So I did the one thing I could least spare, with the dead boy and the living Guardian both waiting on me back on Earth. I stopped. I hunkered down on my heels in the cold, and I waited on Griffin Langley to open his eyes, so I'd know I still had something left that was worth the guarding.

He came round the way the truly dangerous ones did, with none of the slow swimming-up the rest of us managed—one moment clean gone, the next the whole way back, his eyes open and already tallying it up: the rope, the ring, the ruin of his own arm, and last of all me, hunkered there in front of him.

Whatever he read in my face, it put no fear in him. I'd put fear in men in my time and I knew it on sight, going in, and this was none of it. He looked at me near enough the way you'd greet an old mate you'd run across in a bad place and a worse year—which, the Lord help the both of us, was about the size of what we were.

"Comfortable?" I asked him. It came out of me rougher than I'd meant it.

He tested the rope—I felt him do it, down the line to the ring—found it honest, and left it alone. "Had worse beds," he said, out of the wreck of his mouth.

"You'll answer for that boy," I told him. "And for Nelson, and for the whole rotten rest of it. But not to me, and not now. Right now you're going to sit here in the cold and have a good long think on how your morning's turned out." I got to my feet. My knees gave me their opinion of the day and didn't spare me a word of it. "I've a man to go and find."

Something moved back behind his eyes when I said it—Luke, and what Luke might be worth to me, and what that in its turn might be worth to a man in his line. I watched him take it up and stow it away somewhere out of sight, the same as I'd have done stood in his boots. Two of a trade we were, him and me, working the one road from its opposite ends—and that was reason enough to be gone before my own mouth handed him anything else worth the keeping.

So I left him there, roped to the ring in the dark, and I went across the floor of the cave to my own doorway—the one screen on all that silent wall that still answered me when I called on it. I put my mind on the far side of it, on a cold and empty shed sat on a weed-choked Hobart block. The colour came climbing up through the dark, that shifting, impossible spill of it. I didn't look round at Griffin Langley as I stepped through.

There was a dead boy on the far side of that light, and a Guardian I'd somehow still never once laid eyes on, and the whole unfinished wreck of the morning waiting on me to come and make what I could of it.