‘What was it?’ Lex said again.
‘Perhaps it was that time I caught you scamming the clients that tipped me off,’ the lawyer said. ‘Honest students do not skim a little off the top for their own usage, Mr Trent. So tell me, have you always been this way or did you fall in with a bad crowd, or have you just been consumed with greed all your life? What is it? What made you this way?’
Lex looked him right in the eye and said, ‘My parents died when I was five.’
This was, in fact, perfectly true, but it was not what had made Lex the way he was. He had been born like this. Born for adventure and excitement and misbehaving, and he would probably have been exactly the same even if he hadn’t been orphaned at a young age. Still, no sense in admitting that to the old lawyer. Lex could tell from the expression on Schmidt’s face that he was struggling with himself, trying to work out whether Lex was even telling the truth, and if he was, whether dead parents constituted a valid excuse for theft, lies and fraud.
‘You disliked me before that thing with the clients or you wouldn’t have bothered checking on me to begin with,’ Lex went on. ‘Tell me, Mr Schmidt, what did I ever do to deserve such hostility?’
‘Did you know about Mr Lucas’s wife?’ the lawyer said with sudden sharpness. ‘You who knows everything about everything; did you know about her, Lex?’
‘Of course. She’s ill,’ Lex replied promptly.
As an actor, he knew the value of playing to an audience. And he understood the importance of knowing that audience. It was crucial. So he always took in any information that any of his audience unwittingly gave out about themselves. Mr Lucas rarely said anything about his personal life, but Lex knew from what he’d heard other people saying that Mr Lucas’s wife was in a bad way and that he was increasingly withdrawing from the time-consuming responsibilities of the law firm to care for her himself.
‘Do you know what illness? Do you care?’ Mr Schmidt asked, in that same unnaturally calm voice.
Lex shrugged. What did it matter? All old people became ill, sooner or later. It was the natural way of things ‘She has the soulless wake.’
The caustic remark that Lex had been preparing died in his throat. The soulless wake. Old people became ill and died. It was nature; it was inevitable; it was something that everyone accepted. Sooner or later, everyone died. No arguments there. But to die before death.. that was surely cheating, wasn’t it? The soulless wake was no illness. It was a curse from the Gods of the very worst kind. It could not be fought or beaten. It could only be endured.
The soulless wake caused people to forget their loved ones, forget life, forget themselves. It stripped them of everything they were inside. It was said to be the result of the Gods prematurely taking away a person’s soul whilst they were still living, leaving nothing but an empty, wandering shell-of-a-person. This wasn’t true, Lex knew. If it were, then you wouldn’t be able to catch those occasional glimpses, those tiny little moments, of the person they had been before. But it was certainly true that the disease carried a stigma. For the condition was a rare one and it was said that the Gods would surely not curse anyone in such a way unless that person was immensely vile and despicable.
‘You wouldn’t think it to look at him, would you?’ Schmidt said softly. ‘The kind manner he has with the clients and… the interns.’ He gave Lex an evil look. ‘The way he left her to rush out of his home in the middle of the night to assist you and vouch for your character. You would never have guessed, Lex, would you?’
‘Of course I knew about her condition,’ Lex lied. ‘As you rightly pointed out, I know everything about everything. A conman has to, you know. I didn’t see how the issue could benefit me personally but I consigned it to the back of my mind, just in case.’
He almost wanted the lawyer to strike him. Mr Schmidt didn’t raise a finger, although, if looks could kill, someone would have had to use a bucket and shovel to scrape Lex off the floor.
‘You know, Lex, I think I’m going to go have a lie down in the wagon,’ Schmidt said, with exaggerated courtesy. ‘I’m not as young as I once was, after all, and you seem to be handling the mantha so expertly.’
Lex frowned as the lawyer swung his long legs round, pulled back the curtain and clambered into the warmth of the wagon. Lex caught a glimpse of the interior before the curtain fell back. There were blankets back there, piled up on flat wooden beds. Gods, it looked tempting! Lex hadn’t slept properly since fleeing the Wither City. The gypsy ship had been moving too much on the restless waves and he had kept jerking awake.
Now that the lawyer had gone, Lex realised that he had been left outside to drive the mantha alone through Gertha’s savage gales. It hadn’t seemed so bad when they were plodding through the winding streets with tall, crooked buildings piled up on top of one another on each side of them to block the wind. But out here in the open, the gales were painfully chafing.
Lex pulled back the curtain of the wagon slightly and turned his head to yell inside, ‘Pass me a blanket would you, Monty? It’s a little chilly out here.’
‘Here,’ Mr Schmidt said, throwing out the thinnest, most moth-eaten blanket there was.
Really it was more a bit of rag than a blanket. Lex stared at the thing in disgust but let the curtain drop. He wasn’t going to beg, if that was what the lawyer wanted. He would rather die before asking any favours of the man. Well… okay, perhaps not actually die but.. well, he would rather be really quite uncomfortable, anyway.
Lex was a hoarder when it came to money, so he had quite happily stood by and let Schmidt purchase the wagon and the blankets. Now it didn’t seem like such a good idea. He had no right to the blankets now and the lawyer had made it quite clear that he was not in a sharing mood.
‘Selfish sod,’ Lex muttered.
As is a common characteristic with the selfish, Lex simply couldn’t stand selfishness in others. The mantha beast plodded solidly on as the sky began to dim to twilight and Lex tried not to think about the soulless wake. When they at last arrived on the outskirts of Gandylow, the boats were all moored in the docks for the night, so they took a couple of rooms at a boarding house with the idea of seeking passage on a ship in the morning.
They ignored each other over dinner and went to their separate rooms afterwards. As he fell asleep, Lex vowed not to think about the soulless wake any more, or the person he had left behind at the farm back home, and promised himself that all his energy would be put into playing the Game.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lex’s definition of a boat was something that travelled on water. The magical boats of the enchanters then, strictly speaking, were not in fact boats, for they hovered above the sea rather than floating on its surface. They were quite different from the gypsy ships. Being propelled by magic instead of wind they could sail against the currents. They could glide above the treacherous coral reefs. And they could keep right on travelling once they hit dry land if they wanted to.
When they reached the docks that morning Schmidt again voiced concerns as to whether they would be able to find an enchanter willing to take them. They rarely took passengers since they had no need for paying customers and it was unheard of for an enchanter to allow non-magical people on board his boat.
‘You’d be amazed at the endless supply of luck I seem to have,’ Lex had said with his most insolent smile.
Schmidt had simply shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘Then I will leave you to it, Mr Trent. You’ll find out it’s hopeless quickly enough.’