“Do you know Malcolm Sloane?” I asked. My father was already on his way to the foyer, to see me out. He stopped.
“What did you say?”
“Malcolm Sloane. Is that name familiar to you?”
Alexander crumpled the paper in his hand, then returned to his chair and sat down heavily.
“Sloane. Yes. How do you know that name?”
“We met, at Tomb’s party on the Heights. Who is he?”
“He’s… a friend to the Council. To some of the Council.”
“Is he a friend to you?”
Alexander winced and looked out the window. “We have worked together, but no. I would not call a man like that my friend.”
“What does he do?” I asked.
Father kept his eyes out the window, leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees. His eyes were watery, I thought, like an old man’s rheumy eyes.
“Difficult things,” he said. “Things Councilors can’t do. Not directly.” He turned to me. “I ask again, how do you know that name?”
“Like I said. We met at Tomb’s party. It was casual.”
“There are no casual meetings with Malcolm Sloane. In the same way that there are no casual meetings with bullets, or back alley knives. Sloane is a weapon, Jacob, an animal. He’s a damn summoned monster for the Council. Whatever business you have with him, abandon it.”
I laughed. “Gladly. But I seem to have his attention. I’m in some trouble, and he keeps popping up, everywhere I look for a way out.”
“So here we go, at last. You’re in some trouble, and you need the old man to get you out. Upfront, Jacob, you could have told me that.”
“I can get my way out, sir. All I need from you is information, and a little good will.”
He stood over me, not a tall man, but an angry man. “Both are in short supply, boy. What do you need?”
“I need to know what Sloane has to do with the current trouble. Because, for gods’ sakes, it seems to involve me.”
“It doesn’t,” father said firmly. “It’s nothing to do with you.”
“Angela thinks differently. As does Sloane. Now out with it. What’s splitting the Council, and how bad is it.”
Alexander ground his teeth, staring at me with his dark eyes. The newspaper was still in his hand, crushed and smudged. He walked firmly to the window and stared out at the weedy remains of our formal garden. The room was quiet. Billy came, poured fresh coffee and then left. Father’s cup had stopped steaming before he spoke again.
“Stay here,” he said without turning around.
“Excuse me?”
“Stay here. Until it blows over. I can’t keep you in your rooms, but you could be comfortable. Safe. Gods know they would never look here.”
I stood up and went to the breakfast cart. The sausage was cut-rate, but the eggs had been cooked properly. Too bad they were cold. I made myself a plate. Father wouldn’t look at me.
“That your plan, dad? Keep me safe and hidden away. Maybe use me to bargain with whatever rogue element in the Council is hunting me down. Maybe, if you’re lucky, get the artifact in the bargain.”
“Artifact?” he asked, half-turned towards me.
“Coy, old man. Yes, the artifact, the one you and Angela sent Marcus and his boys downriver to collect. The one that came in on the Glory of Day, right up until the whole ship burned up. That must have been a bitch, huh? All those plans, and the damn zep flames out at your doorstep.”
He turned to face me, his mouth set in a distasteful grimace. He looked like he’d drunk bad milk, lumps and all.
“You seem to know more than you’re letting on, boy. Trying to trick your old man?”
“Seems fair.” I ate a mouthful of eggs while I watched him pace the circle of chairs. “You weren’t going to tell me anything useful, not willingly. First you act like there’s no problem in the Council, then you offer to shelter me? So who do you stand with, pop? Sloane or Angela?”
“Would it matter?”
I shrugged. “Sloane hasn’t shot me, yet.”
“You’ll be lucky if, when he finds you, all he does is shoot you. He’s an unpleasant man.”
“Sure. So who are you with, Alexander? Who has your loyalty?”
He set his shoulders and leaned against the chair opposite me. He was still angry, but the anger was trimmed in shades of cold pride and desperation.
“The Family Burn. Always, Jacob, always my first loyalty is to the Family. As yours should be.”
“I lost track of loyalty about the same time you threw me out on my ass, Alexander. So tell me what this is about, or tell me to get out. I don’t care which way it goes.”
He let out a long, slow sigh, then sat down and drank from his cup of cold coffee. He stared at me with his wet eyes while I ate. When I set the plate aside he laced his fingers together and set them in his lap.
“Angela Tomb came to me, a couple years ago. Probably three years now. She was talking to someone inside the Church. Maybe someone who had access to the Church, but whose purposes lay in direct opposition to the Algorithm. This person had an artifact that they wished to sell.”
“Those guys are a pretty devoted lot, father. I have trouble believing that a Wright would be negotiating with the Council to sell a bit of his God.”
“We had trouble believing it, too. And the deal itself was complicated. Many proxies, many dead drops. A deal of many hands. But the deal was made.” He stopped and took a drink of coffee, grimacing as he swallowed. He set the cup aside. “But the deal came up in open session. At first it was just us, just the Founders. What’s left of them. But the others found out. The industrialists. They were… very interested. And they held enough sway in the Chamber to force their way into the deal.” He reached for the cup, paused, then wiped his brow. “That’s how Sloane got involved.”
“He was the representative for the Young Seats, then?” I asked.
“Yes. He put a couple of his own men on the team. Some marines-”
“Wellons?”
“I don’t remember the names.” He squinted at me. “How do you know them?”
“After the fact. I found Wellons’s body, shortly before I met the Angel for the first time.”
“Ah. Angela mentioned that. Anyway. We had a map to something… something marvelous, Jacob. And we sent a group of people after it.”
“And they never came back.” I said.
“Until a couple weeks ago, correct. By then, the Young Seats had split from us. They were already organizing another party to head down. When Marcus made contact with us via messenger, both sides started maneuvering. He must have been in BonnerWell at the time.” BonnerWell was the furthest of the messenger stations, barely a scratch of dirt on our maps. “He was coming in. And he had trouble.”
“I’ll say. So you brought him in?”
“On the contrary. We told him to stay put. We’d send someone. Whatever was following him, we didn’t want it in the city. So, Marcus stopped talking to us. Maybe he started talking to the Young Seats. Maybe he stopped talking at all. We don’t really know. And then,” he shrugged, “he just showed up. Sent a message from Havreach. Nothing but the name of his ship.”
“ Glory of Day.”
Father nodded. “We had teams on the shore, waiting. I can’t properly express my shock at how things went. We were going to quarantine the ship until we had Marcus and his artifact in hand.”
“Looks like he found a way around that.”
“Probably not how he planned it. Anyway. We wrote it off, figured he had died in the explosion, and the artifact destroyed. And now we’re learning that we were wrong.”
I nodded my head, and doubted. Alexander told the story like Angela had come to him with the artifact, but Patron Tomb had been pretty clear that my father had initiated whatever plan was being undertaken. I’m sure there was some truth in what my father was telling me. I just didn’t know which parts were honest, and which were careful lies.
“And all this business in the meantime. Angela shooting me, the Badge chasing me out of Emily’s apartment, and then Wilson’s place. That’s just you guys trying to recover the artifact?”
“I can’t speak for the actions of the Badge, Jacob. Or for Angela, for that matter. But yes, we’re just trying to get that artifact.”