Published 2017 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
The Nine. Copyright © 2017 by Tracy Townsend. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover illustration © Adam S. Doyle
Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke
Cover design © Prometheus Books
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Townsend, Tracy, 1979- author.
Title: The nine / Tracy Townsend.
Description: Amherst, NY : Pyr, an imprint of Prometheus Books, [2017] | Series: Thieves of fate ; 1
Identifiers: LCCN 2017011546 (print) | LCCN 2017027054 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633883420 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633883413 (softcover)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3620.O975 (ebook) | LCC PS3620.O975 N56 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011546
Printed in the United States of America
For my mother.
I never found my tears for you. I wrote a book, instead.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
DAY ONE 1ST ELEVENMONTH
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
INTERMEZZO
DAY TWO 2ND ELEVENMONTH
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
INTERMEZZO
DAY THREE 3RD ELEVENMONTH
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
INTERMEZZO
DAY FOUR 4TH ELEVENMONTH
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
AFTER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAY ONE
1ST ELEVENMONTH
1.
For years, Ivor Ruenichnov had run New Vraska Imports with the glass-eyed hunger of a shark. He wasn’t a man prone to sentiment or waste, and so it was scarcely a surprise to Rowena Downshire to find the old man waiting for her up in the warehouse’s courier loft when she returned from the Shipman’s Bazaar.
“You saw Sticks?” he asked by way of greeting. “Gave it that damned monkey-rat it wanted so much?”
Rowena nodded. Her hands still ached from the dozen half-moon cuts the little beast had taken out of them as she’d carried it, stuffed into the smallest cage she could manage, down to the lanyani merchant’s sad curiosities booth. The damned thing had gone half-mad when she hauled it free for Sticks’s inspection. Then again, Rowena hadn’t exactly found the lanyani’s rutted face of old oak or its white, iris-less eyes soothing, either.
Every kind of animal, it seemed, knew better than to trust the walking trees.
Ivor thrust out his hand, fingers flexing greedily.
Rowena passed her purse on. She was glad she’d thought to nick the spare halfer out of it before coming back to the warehouse. If there was anything the old man could do fast, it was count. He’d know an extra half-piece would mean she’d been engaging in . . . What was his phrase? Extracurricular profiteering.
“Get caught stealing while you’re my bird,” Ivor had snarled the day he bought Rowena up from Oldtemple, “and I’ll buy you back from the gendarme so I can slit your neck myself, savvy? I have a reputation to uphold.”
Rowena looked down at Bess’s foot chest on the loft floor between them.
A reputation, she thought. He certainly has that.
Ivor grunted approvingly at the bag before stowing it away. “Now, business. Been days since we’ve seen Bess, poor bird. She en’t coming back. Let’s see what we can make of this lot.”
Ivor unlocked the chest and shoved it toward Rowena with a hobnailed boot. It was large enough she could have curled up in it and shut the lid. She had, actually, in the days when she and Bess were small and playing their games in the loft above Ivor’s stocking rooms and offices. Rowena still recalled the wallop of his false hand when he’d discovered their muddy footprints on the fine clothes inside. Since then, the key had rattled from the remoteness of Ivor’s belt, hidden among half a hundred others of every length and heft a locksmith could craft.
It had been a little better than two weeks since Bess went out on delivery to Smallduchess Avergnon. The smallduchess had offered Ivor only a shrug and her apologies when he came calling the day after Bess’s scheduled delivery. “But really,” the smallduchess tutted, “could one be surprised by a street lark taking leave of her work and her senses to go back to the rough life whence she’d come? It happens all the time. A pity.”
Mick’s familiar laugh jolted Rowena to attention. The boy was her age but big and craggy-looking with a broad, flat nose. He could have passed for eighteen, and it was well for him he often did. His delivery routes ran along the rough wharves of Oceanside. Rowena had started keeping the knife in her boot on Mick’s sage advice. Bess had kept her own knife ready for Mick himself.
Mick sat on his pallet by the coal brazier, warming his hands. He winked. “G’wan, Rowie. Give us a look, eh?”
“You turn your back, Mick, or I’ll sock you in the neck,” she snapped.
“Enough,” Ivor growled. His iron gray moustache hunkered down like some burrowing creature. “I’m not your bloody ladies’ maid, Downshire. Try the fit in your own time.” Ivor threw open the chest, then put a hand on a gouty knee, rising with an effort. “Last of the ladies now. Need you to pretty up for the gentry’s goods.”
Rowena lifted a muslin skirt and tucked it against herself. Bess had been tall. Pretty, too—a favorite among customers for discreet, sensitive jobs, with clothes that were nearly costumes. The chest was full to bursting with blouses, chemises, and skirts; little fitted jackets, broad sun hats, and tidy bonnets; even a decent fur muff and wool shawl. There were two pairs of walking slippers and a lovely pair of ankle boots the color of cream, laced with silk ribbons wound around polished brass frogs. Everything would need hemming, but Rowena knew the trick of it and could work at it on slow days.
Ivor snatched the skirt from Rowena’s hands, hissing like a kettle. “Look at your hands! You’ll get this filthy.” His hands were scarcely better, the right stained with tobacco and ink, the left an ever-changing array of filthy prosthetics. Today, it was a rough brass replica of a hand, its digits stiff and brutish. But it might have been worse. Some days, it was a rust-flecked gaff hook. Others, Ivor attached h
is “experiment,” a sharp, scissoring riot of gear teeth and cranks bought from a Nipponese tinker with too little language to keep from getting skinned down to his britches. Today, the false fist merely punched about Rowena, as if it could attach the clothes to her frame by main force. He paused and held the skirt out, squinting at Rowena eclipsed behind it.
“Bah. You haven’t any hips.”
The old man dropped the skirt and pulled out a high-collared blue day dress. Rowena felt him clamp down on her chest with a metal thumb and forefinger, pinching through her clothes. She stared down at his hands. The fleshy one drifted a bit lower than was needed to mimic a fit.
“No tits, either, damn you,” Ivor spat, casting the dress back into the trunk. “How old are you now, Downshire?”
“Thirteen.”
The reply was a long, indigestive noise peculiar to Ivor. Rowena had been running for him for nearly seven years and still wasn’t certain if the sound meant agreement, or displeasure, or thoughtfulness.
Probably not thoughtfulness.
“Not so bad,” he decided. “Thought you were fifteen. You’re a hopeless-looking girl, but at least not a hopeless woman. You’ve time yet.”
He picked up his braided hawthorn walking stick, all knots and lacquered thorns, and stumped toward the long ladder stretching down to the warehouse floor.
Ivor tucked his stick under his false arm, easing his bulk through the square cut around the ladder. “Stuff the brassieres until you’ve grown something of your own,” he advised. “Folks in Bess’s districts like a girl who looks like one. Makes ’em charitable. Some even tip.”
Rowena listened to the ladder moan as Ivor descended. These days, by the time he reached top or bottom on a visit to his bird’s nest, he was flushed and snorting like an ox. The stick had once been a weapon; now it was a prop for his gouty constitution. Still, under his straining belt, that barrel body was as much muscle as fat, and all it took was one crack to remind you of it.
Rowena looked down at the chest. She tucked a lace apron back inside. She folded the muslins and damasks and little tartan lovelies. Then she shut the lid. On his pallet, Mick snored like a steel grinder.
“Some even tip.”
Rowena sat with her feet dangling over the railed edge of the loft. Casting a furtive glance to be sure Ivor was well out of sight, she reached for the leather strap hidden up her right sleeve. It was where she tucked all her “extracurriculars.” So far, it had outmatched the old man in half a hundred friskings. She dug for the halfer she’d pinched off the pudding man just an hour before. There’d been no time to go to Oldtemple and put it against her mother’s ledger before she was due back at the warehouse. Rowena ran her thumb down the coin’s imperfect edge. A bad break, really more of a third-piece than a half, but if she was lucky, the prison accountant wouldn’t be bastard enough to take out his scales. She leaned against Bess’s chest and felt its latch dig into her back, nagging.
I’ll probably have to learn how to act ladylike, too. At least until Ivor gets a new bird.
If he got a new bird. Three years before, the courier staff had been Rowena’s older brother Jorrie, and Bess, and Mick, and of course Rowena herself. But consumption had taken Jorrie, and none of the birds Ivor had sprung from the debtors’ prison of Oldtemple or the workhouse of Brixton since had worked out. One he’d clouted so hard the poor girl took a brain fever and never awoke again. The other tried to steal from the office strongbox. In her darker moments, Rowena still wondered where that boy’s bones lay. Now with Bess swallowed up by the streets, the little aerie of couriers had grown spacious and the routes long. Enough of Ivor’s business was aboveboard he could carry on moving the illicits with a small staff, but not for very long. There were always new clients, and Corma’s districts were forever swelling.
Bess had been careful. So very careful.
Rowena recalled Bess’s knife and how quickly the older girl could make it appear. The blade had only been as long as her thumb, but its edge was ground to a faint, blue blur. It looked like a serpent’s tooth, full of menace and purpose. Now, it seemed very small in Rowena’s memory.
Rowena shivered. She might have looked down at the ground floor of Ivor Ruenichnov’s warehouse shop. But there was no point. It always looked the same. Desks with busy clerks. Pallets of goods. Instead, she gazed out the windows running along the wall of the space between floor and ceiling she called home.
In the distance, Rowena could see smokestacks and steeples, clock towers, jail towers, and the low, rude walls surrounding them. The city was the gray of pigeon wing and granite here, the black of soot and brackish mold there; the rust stains on the teeth of gargoyles; and the faint smells of charring meat and alley fires and sour ale. The cracking whips of carters driving loads and the screams of balking horses making reply echoed down the cobblestone streets.
New Vraska Imports was near enough Dockside that she could spy a little knot of squints from the Ecclesiastical Commission prowling around a new pump design some lay engineer had been tinkering with for weeks. Rumor was he meant to do away with old, heavy crank handles—the aigamuxa bars that drove clockwork ships and owed their name to the burly ogres employed turning them. Only they could wind the massive mainsprings to which the bars were linked. But the aiga had been damned hard to employ on the up and up since the workhouse laws changed three years before. If this loon could replace manual pumping on ships with a pressure engine, he’d cut the size of crews at sea by nearly half.
Rowena leaned close to the glass, peering suspiciously. If the pumping crews lost their work, she knew all too well where they’d end up.
“I hope your engine’s a pile of goat pellets,” she whispered.
Moments later, the acrid tang of scalded gears wafted down the alley. Now, the tinker was scurrying about, throwing one sloshing bucket after another on the contraption while his reverend audience staggered back, batting at the smoke with their long, embroidered sleeves. The whole scene disappeared in a cloud of spilling steam.
Stupid idea anyway, Rowena thought. Bess would’ve liked it. Bess had liked anything new and odd. Modern.
“It’s by the Grace of the Unity that we live in a city,” Bess had declared once with a solemnity that belied her comment’s obviousness. They’d been walking a delivery together, Bess carrying the real goods in a daintily covered grocer’s basket, Rowena pushing a load of decoy parcels with a grouchy old handcart, dressed every inch the good serving girl. Bess loved looking the proper lady. Loved talking like one even more.
“We should be happy to have people inventing new conveniences,” she’d gone on, “and happy to live civilly because of them.”
And Bess had punctuated the statement by slipping a bag of chestnuts nicked from a roasting cart into her muff.
Rowena had a suspicion of clockworks, let alone standing engines. They could snap a man’s arm up in gear teeth and grind him down to a paste. The coke sellers and coal men had a notion of trying to supplant them with mobile engines, but their designs were little better than giant samovars with wheels. And they left their own messes. An engineer from the Ecclesiastical Commission had debuted a hulking, awkward platform affixed to an old lightning rail undercarriage just a month earlier, trying to begin the Decadal Conference season with an inventive bang. He drew quite a crowd down by the Cathedral Commons and, in the end, had his bang. Not half an hour in, the street filled with the screams of his coaling boy, cooked like a piece of meat plunged in a kettle.
Yet Bess seemed to love the city’s danger as much as its elegance. She was perfect, or so Ivor had told Rowena when she was new to the trade and brought out to shadow her.
“Bess is a natural, little bird,” the old man had whispered in Rowena’s ear, “because she was born to look clean and proper. Look how she smiles at the woman selling scarves. Bad thieves and couriers sulk and stalk. Good ones stuff the payoff in their handbag, all smiles, and you’ll never look twice. And there she goes, beautiful thing. See? A natur
al.”
And Rowena had seen. Two weeks ago, looking more like a wealthy merchant’s daughter than a courier minx, Bess took her last package and disappeared like fog on a hot morning.
Rowena looked below. She could almost see Bess’s phantom claiming that tiny bundle, small enough to tuck in a brocade purse. Ivor had pulled her in close, his flesh hand straying low, tracing the laces of her corset. His lips almost touched her ear, whispering something. Rowena remembered the point of Ivor’s hook tangled in her skirts. Bess stiffened just slightly, and her smile became porcelain—painted on, brittle.
And then Bess threw a wave and a kiss up at Rowena and swirled away, skirts bustling about her. Gone.
Rowena wondered if she could ever make Bess’s clothes fit. She knew in an instant she didn’t want to.
She pressed the half-clink coin under her leather strap again. She knew something of getting tips, all right. But she had her own ways of scoring them.
Rowena Downshire had never been to so much as an EC free school, let alone had tutors, but she knew numbers because numbers mattered. Numbers told her if she’d been cheated and would get Ivor’s hawthorn, or if she’d saved enough to mark against the Oldtemple clerk’s ledger. Whether she had nipped away at her mother’s debt or only shaved the always-climbing keeping fees. Rowena had a number in mind. She knew it down to the quarter-clink.
Five hundred fourteen and a half more.
Ivor Ruenichnov slammed the door of his ground-floor office with enough bile to impress upon the clerk half-asleep outside that he did not wish to be disturbed. The room was hot and noisome, choked by a dense, gray smoke from his private stove. Anyone else found the heat oppressive. Ivor thrived in it. It loosened the pain in his legs and made the room feel close, tight—private.
He pushed around the papers stacked on his desk until he found the letter pouch he sought. The clerk, Albert, had attached a scribe’s ciphering of a galvano-graph spark to it—something from the Coventry Passage rectory, inquiring after a delivery long expected.
Ordinary folk kept their correspondences to posted letters and galvano-grams. The public post came twice daily, but its letters were lost near as often as delivered, eaten up by sorting gins and postage-punchers. And some messages were too long for galvano-graph. And so, there was still a brisk business in letter-carrying for Ivor’s New Vraska Imports, a legitimate way to earn coin outside smuggling off the quaysides.
The Nine Page 1