A Split Worlds Omnibus

by Emma Newman

  “Why didn’t you offer this before?” the gargoyle asked, eyes narrow, its teeth brushing against her ear as it spoke.

  “I didn’t think of it. I haven’t been planning this out like a game of chess, you know. And this isn’t the only shit-storm in my life right now, OK?”

  “If I let you go now, without using this, we’re back to square one and there’s no guarantee you’ll see it through,” Max said. “The way I see it, we use the mask, we get what we need before dinner.”

  “And be left without an insider,” she reminded him. “And I reckon if you put that thing on me, and it hurts me, Lord Iris would know and kick up a stink. Then my uncle would find out and that would make things awkward between him and the Sorcerer. Do you want that?”

  “Shit,” the gargoyle said and let her go. “She’s right.”

  She staggered and hit the wall again. “Look, if it’s any consolation, I’d much rather deal with you than anyone else.”

  Max pulled the folded piece of paper from his pocket that Ekstrand had given him in case Cathy needed to come back. “If you don’t come through the Way this opens at midday tomorrow, everything’s off. No second chance. You’ll get the file on Rainer when we know your information is legitimate.”

  “I’ll be here,” she said. “I promise.” She looked at the gargoyle, as if about to say something, then didn’t.

  Max opened the Way and she left. The gargoyle sat next to him, staring at the place she passed through. “We need whisky,” it said.

  “I don’t drink.”

  “I know. I definitely have the worse half of this relationship. I feel like shit now.”

  “Why? She wriggled her way out of it, just like any other puppet would.”

  “No, not like any other. I believe her. I don’t think she was trying to pull one over us; she’s not like that.”

  Max turned to face it fully. “Were you here just now? Didn’t you see what she did?”

  “I saw her keep it together when being held by me and threatened by you. Not many could do that. And don’t get angry with me, there’s no denying she’s—”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “You are, and now I don’t know whether to admire her or be pissed off with myself. Thanks.”

  Max shrugged. “We’d better report to Ekstrand and hope he sees it the same way.”

  19

  For the fifth time on the journey Cathy opened her reticule to be sure that her tiny digital camera was inside. She pulled it out, checked the battery level and that the flash was set to activate in dim lighting, and put it back in her bag again. She was alone in the carriage travelling on the Nether road to the Emporium of Things in Between and Besides, something her uncle had advised her never to do. She had no choice; she had to be alone at the shop.

  Cathy chewed a thumbnail as she went over the plan again. If it didn’t work she’d be back to square one and wouldn’t get the file on Miss Rainer. She had no idea how many Sorcerers there were, let alone how to find another, and didn’t want to have that problem on top of all the others. As time went on it would only get harder to avoid Will, especially once all the silliness over the Dukedom was over and no longer distracting him. The days had been rushing by in a blur of social engagements and hours had been wasted with Dame Iris. She’d tried to get the Dame to agree she’d be better suited to painting but it had achieved nothing.

  The carriage soon stopped and she reined in her impulse to climb out straightaway. The footman opened the door and lowered the step. She accepted his help climbing out; the last thing she needed was a sprained ankle.

  “I won’t be long,” she said to the driver.

  “I’ll wait here, ma’am,” he replied, and the footman walked ahead of her to the shop’s door.

  Even though the basic building was the same as the anchor property, the Emporium’s Nether frontage looked very different with its traditional signage in elegant script above the door and window display of bottles and packets. The footman knocked twice and then entered. Having worked there, Cathy knew that those two knocks activated a Charm that adjusted the clock above the door inside to indicate that Londinium clientele were about to enter, as opposed to those from Aquae Sulis, Oxenford or Jorvik.

  Cathy walked in as a customer for the first time in years and was relieved to see that the shop was empty. The Shopkeeper looked up from his book and smiled before tucking in the bookmark.

  “Mrs Reticulata-Iris,” he said with the briefest glance at the footman before the door was shut behind Cathy and the two of them were alone. “Catherine,” he said more softly and came out from behind the counter. “How are you?”

  “Oh, you know,” she replied, feeling very strange standing there in a late Victorian style dress replete with trimming and bustle, not dissimilar to the one Dame Iris had been wearing. “Things could be better.”

  His smile was sad, then it faded as he laced his fingers in front of his chest. “I’ve been told the Charm you ordered should be delivered next week.”

  That would leave less than a week to paint something to satisfy Lord Poppy. She hoped the Charm was worth such an agonising wait. “Great. Thanks. I was hoping to buy some of that…what was it you called it…atmospheric mist of beautifying?”

  “Do you mean the Beautifying Mist of Atmospheric Improvement?”

  “That’s the one!”

  The Shopkeeper frowned at her over his glasses. “Really? I recall you disliked the name and the scent, two rather critical elements of that product.”

  “Well, I wanted to give it another chance.”

  “In fact you described it as smelling of cut grass and almonds, and it made you sniffle like a mundane street urchin in February.”

  “OK, I’ll come clean,” she said. “I want it for a parlour game. I didn’t want to tell you in case it offended you.”

  “Oh, well, that makes sense now.” He smiled and she breathed out in relief. “I’m afraid it’s in the stockroom, I won’t be a moment.”

  It was exactly what she’d hoped for. She knew the Shopkeeper never threw anything away; there was a box tucked away on one of the highest shelves in the stockroom for failed products. He hated heights, so it would take him a few minutes to collect himself after the trip up the ladder and re-emerge.

  Once she heard the door of the stockroom shut Cathy scurried behind the counter and through to the cubbyhole office which contained the ledger. There was barely any light to see by, and she couldn’t strike the globe to wake the sprite as it would indicate she’d been there. She fished out her camera, switched it on and felt for the ledger. Mercifully it was open and in its usual place. Cathy took a close-up picture of the two exposed pages, checked it and took another in a slightly different position. She flipped a page back and took a couple of photos of those pages too. She risked repeating the process a couple more times, taking care to count how many times she’d turned the page so she could leave it open at the correct place. It was worth the risk; the more data she had, the easier it would be to crack the code used by the Shopkeeper to track sales and purchases. All she had to do was work out who’d been buying the most expensive Shadow Charms since the night the Rosas fell and she’d know where to send the Arbiter.

  The camera was in her reticule and she was back in the main part of the shop before the Shopkeeper returned.

  “Here it is, I’ll wrap it for you,” he said and she smiled, hoping she didn’t look flustered. “I’ll charge it to your husband’s account.”

  “I suppose that’s one of the few advantages of being married.” She wondered if she was convincing.

  He tucked the tissue-papered atomiser in a small box, then wrapped that in brown paper and tied it with string. “I do hope you can find some happiness, Catherine,” he said as he handed it over.

  “I’m not giving up yet,” she replied. “Take care.”

  “You too, my dear, you too.”

  Unable to wait until she got back to Lancaster House, Cathy looked at the picture
s on the camera’s small display screen whilst still in the carriage, but the Shopkeeper’s scrawl was too small to read. It wasn’t until she’d got back to her bedroom and uploaded them to her iPad that she was able to start work, after she’d told Morgan that she wasn’t to be disturbed.

  The Shopkeeper only wrote the customer name in code and listed an abbreviated product name alongside it. Just a glance at the latest page confirmed her suspicion; a lot of Shadow Charms had been sold recently. However, without any dates entered alongside the sales, there was no way to know whether she was looking at sales over the last week or the last month. Flipping back and forth through the pictures she’d taken it was clear the Great Families had a lot of things to hide.

  She had to narrow down the entries; the Shadow Charms likely to have been procured to conceal rogue Rosas hiding from the Agency would have been bought in the last two weeks. Based on her memory of the accounts she could make a reasonable guess that no more than the last two pages would cover that time.

  Cathy made a list of all of the coded names of those who’d bought Shadow Charms. There were four different people, but only one that had bought more than one Charm, so she focused on that name.

  “‘Nasal Climber 6-1-L’,” she muttered.

  The Shopkeeper had made all sorts of comments about his customers whilst she’d worked for him but she couldn’t recall anything about one having nasal problems. She realised that cracking a code without a reference point was going to take far too long and then hit upon the idea of finding an entry that she could tie to a person. It could give an insight into the numbers and letter after the pseudonym, at least.

  With no date reference and only the product names to go by it seemed an impossible task at first. Then she remembered the day Tom had found her and how they’d rushed to the Emporium to find something to save Josh from Horatio. The Shopkeeper had given her a Luck Charm and it had only been a couple of days after she’d reconciled the accounts at the end of her vacation.

  Cathy flipped back to a picture of the earlier entries and scanned the list until she saw the entry “Luck Egg—short duration”. It was only a few rows beneath the last product she remembered tallying up. Under “payment” the Shopkeeper had written, “One kiss of genuine gratitude and affection”, and she knew it was the charm he’d given her to protect Josh.

  Her name was entered as “Flanders cockerel 5-2-L (AS)” and when she scanned up the list she spotted “Flanders cockerel 5-1-AS” against a purchase of a Seeker Charm. She deduced that was Tom, as the Shopkeeper had warned her he’d bought another Seeker Charm just before Lord Poppy found her. That meant “Flanders cockerel” was the code for their family name and that the second number was an indicator of where in the sibling pecking order they came; Tom was 1 as the eldest and she was 2 thanks to being the middle child. After a few moments of chewing the end of her thumbnail, Cathy hazarded a guess that the first number was the number of generations down from the Patroon, or at least something along those lines to identify which set of siblings the second number related to. AS was most probably Aquae Sulis and the L against her name was because they’d entered the shop from Londinium, even though officially she was an Aquae Sulis resident. She wondered how he kept track of cousins but his memory was incredible—perhaps he only needed the prompt.

  If she applied the same logic to the one who’d recently bought the shadow charms, that person was the eldest child of their generation and a Londinium resident. “Well, that’s bloody useless, I need to know the family.”

  Flanders cockerel…how could that signify Rhoeas-Papaver? The Flanders part was probably because of the First World War association with the red poppy, but why cockerel? Then she recalled a painting by Monet that hung in the drawing room of her childhood home, one of a woman and child walking through a corn field dotted with poppies, and it was called Les Coquelicots. Could cockerel simply be a play on the French word for the red poppy?

  “‘Nasal Climber…’” Cathy whispered the epithet. People often referred to the Wisterias as climbers; it was a rather pathetic pun, the plant named after their line being a climbing vine and the family constantly trying to climb higher in social circles. Did any of them have a particularly large nose? Could the Shopkeeper be that childish with his nicknames?

  She tried to remember the names of the Wisteria families resident in Londinium and recalled one that had been on Dame Iris’s list of people she should know about: the Sinensis-Wisteria family. “Sinensis” was fairly close to “sinuses” and the eldest son did have notably large nostrils. She shook her head. Surely it wasn’t so simple?

  If it didn’t turn out to be the right family there would be no real harm done. With nothing better to offer him, it was time to contact the Arbiter and hope the Wisteria was buying the Shadow Charms to keep an illegal Rosa hidden. She needed to keep the Arbiter and Sorcerer on side. Even if they couldn’t get her out of the Nether by the time the painting was due, perhaps they’d get her out before Poppy realised how bad it was.

  Max handed the piece of paper to Ekstrand and the Sorcerer scanned the information he’d copied from the Gallica-Rosa’s file. He would have given him the information sooner but the Sorcerer had been having one of his bad days.

  “I have absolutely no idea what this means,” Ekstrand said. “There were lots of files?”

  “Enough to store information on every single puppet in Albion, past and present,” Max replied. “Including detailed records on what the Agency provides for them. We’ve always assumed they’ve found their own ways to live in the Nether but I think we were wrong. This Agency arranges everything for them in return for payment.”

  “Payment in charms or money?”

  “Both, as far as we could tell, but there’s something more to it than that. I think the coded information is an evaluation of some kind, I just don’t know what Horatio Gallica-Rosa was being evaluated for.”

  “Most worrying. This is far more complex than I’d anticipated and we’re under-resourced.”

  “I pulled the file on that Miss Rainer,” Max said. “Seems she used to be the puppet’s governess. She was removed from the Rhoeas-Papaver household following a complaint from the puppet’s mother. Apparently Miss Rainer smuggled seditious materials into the household and exposed her student to ‘dangerous and inappropriate’ ideas.”

  “So that’s why she’s different from the other puppets?”

  “It seems so, sir. She requested asylum the first time I met her.”

  “She’s still one of them though,” Ekstrand said, “whether she likes it or not. If she doesn’t produce the information we need, use whatever means necessary to determine where the hidden Rosas are. I want them found before the Moot.”

  “Yes, sir,” Max said and left his study.

  Axon was waiting in the corridor with the gargoyle. “Samuel Westonville is waiting for you in the sitting room,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Max found Sam in front of the fire, slumped forwards, face in his hands. “Sam?”

  His eyes were bloodshot and circled by shadowed skin. He had new stubble and the dishevelled state of his clothes suggested he’d been wearing them for a few days. “Axon picked me up earlier, he said you wanted to see me.”

  “I’ve been looking into the forge where you made your wedding rings. I think you need to know what I found out.”

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  Max didn’t say anything until he was sitting down with the gargoyle next to him. “You weren’t the only couple Neugent recommended the forge to. There were ten others before you, and all of them made their own wedding rings like you did.”

  “What a romantic guy,” Sam said. “So you gonna tell me they’re all dead now or something?”

  “How did you know!” The gargoyle’s mouth dropped open, making his face look like a grotesque designed to have water pour from it.

  “What?” Sam broke out of his misery and jolted to the edge of his seat. “That’s not what you found out, was it?
”

  “Not exactly,” Max said.

  “It was only one person out of each couple that died,” the gargoyle said.

  “What the fuck?”

  Max decided that next time he had to deliver news likely to upset someone he’d make sure the gargoyle was locked in a cupboard on the other side of the house. “Not straightaway, but at a young age.”

  “How did they die?”

  “Different things; a couple of cancers, a few heart attacks, a few I just couldn’t find out because they weren’t reported in the press. The forge isn’t the only thing linking them, Sam. The ones that died all worked for Neugent over the past ten years.”

  “In Pin PR?” Sam was on his feet.

  “One of them, yes, five years ago, but not the others. He’s worked for several companies over that time. Sam, please, sit down until I’ve given you all the information.”

  “But my wife—”

  “Please.”

  The last thing Max needed was to have him run off into Mundanus and do something stupid. Sam sat down. “I looked into Neugent more closely. He’s never been married and he’s in his thirties, whereas you described him as being in his fifties, so something doesn’t add up there. Every company he’s worked for is owned by one massive international corporation, one I didn’t know existed until I started looking into all of this. It’s called CoFerrum Inc.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “From the name I suspect it has something to do with Lord Iron,” Max said. “And I suspect he’s using Neugent to interfere with your wife in some way, resulting in her change in behaviour and physical weight loss.”

  Sam was on his feet again. “I’m such an idiot. She wants to divorce me and it’s all because of Neugent. He’s been sniffing round my wife for bloody ages, he puts her in an apartment that’s got an iron cage built into it and now you’re telling me people who wear wedding rings made at that forge and work for him die young? That’s it.”

  He marched to the door.

  “Where are you going?” Max asked, struggling to get back on his feet.