She was right, at that. “And what,” Anselm said, sounding the words out coldly, “did your homework yield?”
“Five thousand sovereigns and an offer of future sidelines.”
Anselm raised an eyebrow. Her success was an order of magnitude greater than he’d expected. That did more to fan the flames of irritation than to cool them. “No loose ends?”
Rare sniffed. “Ann. Really. You’re not my mother.”
“I’ve thought otherwise before.”
“Are you going to ask me what I know about this Pierce business, or must I beg you to let me be helpful?”
Anselm stalked back into the solar and took Gammon’s chair. He spread his hands: Fine. I’m waiting.
Rare swung her legs back around to the front of the chair and spoke with the soft, conspiratorial eagerness that always came when she had a good line. Angry as he was, Anselm had trouble not finding that electric intensity engaging.
“Two days ago, I was down at the quayside’s Rotten Row, near Misery Bay. I go there once a fortnight, just to keep appraised of who’s moving things around on the underside. You know how it is. There was a fagin and his pack of urchins peddling all the usual trash. Ordinarily I’d pay it no mind, but they had a very nice roll of jewelry and oddments, and one of the things laid out was an Ecclesiastical commissionary’s signet. The band was engraved. Care to guess?”
“No.”
Rare sat back triumphantly. “‘NP, ThD, PhD, Order of Physical Sciences.’ They claimed it was on a woman’s body washed up beside the wharf the night before—black and blue around the neck and not in the drink overlong. Said they threw the body up on the docks after they’d stripped it down, hoping one of the constabulary patrols or perhaps the lanyani pit-poachers would find it before it drew a stink. Someone must have done a little sweeping up. I checked the docks, and there was no sign of a body.”
“So you think Nora Pierce is dead.”
“How many reverend doctorates of physical sciences with those initials could there possibly be?”
“Usually I wouldn’t venture more than one or two in this city, but you forget that Corma has been filling up with the visiting members of the Ecclesiastical Commission. That changes the odds.”
Rare snorted. “You can’t be serious.”
“If you’re right and the constabulary already got their hands on a body—say a body matching Nora Pierce’s description, even—why is Gammon sitting in my solar asking me about a missing person case?”
“She said this is all procedural, yes? She’s putting on a show of due diligence to hide what she already knows. Maybe she’s trying to cover up Pierce’s murder.”
Anselm considered the idea. The visit had been odd. Gammon smoked a cigarette and took the whisky. For six years, they had exchanged information and favors, looking the other way at all the right times. But as a matter of principle, Gammon had stoically refused all Anselm’s hospitality—and, he considered with a frown, other things he had clearly offered, too. He could think of no reason today should have been different. And yet, somehow, it was.
The inspector hadn’t quite been herself. That much was plain.
“You are,” Anselm said grudgingly, “a very clever kitten for being such a damned reckless fool, you know that?”
“Of course I know it. Now what do you know that you weren’t giving up?”
He smiled. Very clever kitten, indeed.
“Around the time I wrote Pierce’s gambling debt as a note, she was looking for a private courier. I recommended Ivor. If there was something between Pierce and Chalmers that could shed some light on this affair, he’s probably had his hands on it recently.”
“When were you planning on telling Gammon that?”
“Never,” he said. “If you’re right and Ivor’s had some role in foul play, I don’t want on record how Pierce met him in the first place.” Anselm glanced at a grandfather clock set between two bookcases. He sighed. “It’s half to six. I’m going to the club now—shall I expect you?”
“Later. I have a meeting.”
Anselm raised an eyebrow.
She smiled her most perfect, petting grin. “Nothing you’ll need to clean up after. On my honor.”
“Your honor tempts a very particular kind of retort.”
Rare aped Anselm’s eyebrow raise with needling accuracy.
“Fortunately,” he said, pushing himself to his feet, “my nature as a gentleman forbids me to make it.”
Rare watched her lover depart, listening for the click of the master bedroom door down the hall. Anselm would dress, would take the back lift down to the carriage garage, and would be late to his casino’s nightly opening. He was always late for everything. He would wear his evening jacket with the high, banded collar and matching jacquard vest. That was his habit whenever he made a trip to the Empire Club, crown jewel of Uptown. He would leave a dress lying out for her—almost certainly the red-and-gold corseted affair with the black lace gloves and open-netted stockings. It was her most striking gown, and he had both his pride as the club’s proprietor and her lover to consider.
Rare waited a full ten minutes before she stirred from the chair. She stole behind his escritoire, opening and closing its drawers, lifting the trays. She knew the catches and latches that led to its better compartments—spaces so well hidden it was only the faintest clue in the wood itself, the slight wear in the lacquer where Anselm’s hands had brushed over many years, that reminded her fingers where to stop.
There were two ledgers of private notes, a stiletto like an adder’s tooth, a sheaf of documents sealed with sticking gum—even a datebook going back to the summer before she first arrived on Anselm’s doorstep, more than thirteen years ago. She leafed through it, curious, and found a few entries that made clear why he had kept it so long.
Even impossible finks, she supposed, were prey to moments of nostalgia.
She found, at last, a folded galvano-gram, sent to Anselm’s private line.
It was only a few hours old.
A. Meteron, Regency Square, for immediate delivery
New Vraska Imports, 1st Elevenmonth, 1500
Have unwanted goods—research text collects data. Comes from Pierce and Chalmers. Want clear of it. Have interested EC connections? Spark back today. Ivor.
Gently, Rare set the message down on the blotter and refolded it, following its creases precisely. She returned it to the hatch underneath the file drawer. A smile drew the bow of her lips.
If Ivor had something he wanted to get clear of, the lanyani had given her an idea how to help him be about it.
7.
Ivor Ruenichnov’s interest in books had always been limited. He had grown up puddling iron in the smelting houses of Czernobog, six in the morning until seven in the evening, six days a week, and had used very little of his Seventh-days for attending lectures or studying at the EC free schools. His forbearers had been peasants before the Unification, believing in witches and saints and devils. The only difference the marriage of science and theology had made in their lives or those of their children’s children had been the names they gave to the many things they did not understand.
Now, Ivor’s books were ring punches of shipping manifests, ledgers of transactions, address diaries. The scholarship that passed his office door was always en route from Someone to Someone Else. Such packages usually drew far less notice from him than the letters sent between lovers or conspirators or business partners.
But this book—the book that had been staring at Ivor since he’d snatched it from Rowena Downshire’s dirty hands—held him rapt.
It was not attractive or elaborate. It resembled a notebook, unassuming, with a thick paper binding and stitched white spine. The cover was pasteboard, glazed with wax to repel a laboratory’s tinctures and acids. It was as thick as his hand, fingertips to wrist. Long stretches of pages sat dull and vacant. Others were crammed with notes written in a rapid hand littered with strike-throughs, arrows, substitutions, correction
s. Ivor could make no sense of why some portion of the text would be dense with scrawl and why another would be all but blank.
But that was not the thing he wanted most to understand.
Ivor stared at the page laid out before him, watching its letters and numbers write themselves into existence.
The words were not in any language he knew. Though he lacked schooling, Ivor could work his way through two dialects of Vraskan, bits of Trimeeni, and Corma’s particular idiom of Amidonian. The alphabet of these steadily appearing words resembled nothing he knew, its framing geometric and angular. Here and there, he recognized Amidonian words or perhaps . . . initials? Abbreviations? Impossible to say.
Numbly, Ivor reached for his wodke bottle. He was, at present, quite terribly drunk. That knowledge did nothing to dull his amazement at the self-scribing book. He’d noticed a graph taking shape as he riffled the pages long before, when his bottle was still in his desk drawer and still half-full. There had been a field of points being plotted and then some kind of line tracing them, hills and valleys of data without labels on the x and y axes.
The shock of seeing those lines writing themselves had been enough to cut the string of muttered curses he’d been spinning since Rowena returned from Coventry Passage. He’d been happy to see her, at first—glad to say he was done with Pierce and Chalmers and whatever trouble was passing between them. And then he spotted Chalmers’ package under her arm. He’d boxed the girl’s ears, sending her staggering up to the loft in a daze—and that was before he even knew what the package would do.
God, if he’d known, he’d have used his brass fist and made a wreck of that pale, pert little face.
After the first ten minutes of watching the notations take shape, Ivor’s amazement gave way to shock, and then concern. That was when he began consulting the wodke bottle.
It simply didn’t make sense. There was no such thing as magic—science, yes; God, perhaps; and, to any reasonable folk, no distinction between them. But magic? Pierce’s letters ended with a plea to destroy their research. Ivor started to wonder if this book—this thing—was what she meant. If it was an invention, how did it work? Where was the information coming from, and what made it appear on the page?
He saw the script pause in writing itself. And then a line sliced through the last four words. Ivor shivered. What kind of book corrected itself?
If this was the thing Pierce wanted Chalmers to destroy, and if Chalmers was as desperate to be rid of it as Rowena had insisted, was it dangerous? Did destroying it require some kind of specific knowledge, some special equipment? Was it as simple as throwing it into the fire?
Ivor very nearly had, stirred by the bottle’s bitter courage. He’d stood before the open stove door, staring at the roaring coals, ready to hurl the book in. And then he’d stopped. If the book could be destroyed, and if it was some mad scientific device, was it full of chemicals or gears, something that might blow up and take the whole warehouse down with it? Ivor considered himself a hard man, but since that moment, he’d been frozen, staring at the text and willing it to tell him what to do.
Ivor resisted the urge to throw open his office door a fourth time to see if Anselm Meteron had sent his response. It was scarcely past eight o’ the clock. The scoundrel was probably just starting his rounds of the Empire Club. Ivor supposed he might even still be sleeping with his face buried in some scandalously young thing’s tits. In his guts, Ivor knew he could not rely on Anselm to rid him of the book, even if his recommendation to Pierce had, in a fashion, brought the book to Ivor in the first place.
Ivor’s guts also knew he’d found his way into something of strange and terrible consequence. What that consequence might be was still a vague effluvium of fear. Ivor only knew that this Bad Thing, this reckoning, was stalking steadily closer.
The writing stopped.
Ivor put the wodke bottle aside. He inched toward the book with his gaff hook and, as if piercing and flipping a venomous snake, quickly turned the page.
Nothing. All blank.
He rubbed his eyes, then reached to close the book. Under the shadow of his flesh hand, sepia-colored lines crawled.
Ivor stared at the growing image, its borders sketched in fine, careful lines. It was as if they followed an unseen straight edge, conforming to careful measurements. Waypoints appeared, one by one. Ivor recognized the slant and cross of the image, the intersections. . . . He saw a grid being drawn, very lightly, over the map itself. He saw street coordinates, the junction of the Blackbottom market square, the immediate environs of his business. In the margin of the page, notations appeared in small, geometric print. Ivor saw something he was suddenly very sure were initials, and two words he did recognize beside an arrow.
Subject Six.
The street coordinates were exact. A little carat in the margins pointed at New Vraska Imports.
Ivor felt the galvanizing touch of something more real than he had words for, like the point of a dissecting pin driving through to his heels. It lasted only a moment.
And then he staggered out from behind his desk and through the office door. The clerks had gone for the night—all except Albert, who snored with his face against the blotter, waiting beside the galvano-graph register.
Ivor kicked the stool out from under the boy. He landed in a flailing heap, scarcely pulling himself up onto his rear before the old man crouched over him.
“Get Rowena,” Ivor demanded. “Tell her to fetch her bag.”
8.
Rowena jogged up Blackbottom End, her breath fogging. Her stomach growled sullenly over her abandoned supper back in the loft—cold salt beef and black bread she’d never get her hands on. By now, Mick was gobbling it up and stacking her straw mattress on top of his own in front of the loft stove. Rowena might once have been able to curl up on Bess’s old pallet when she returned, but the fleas had gotten in the first night she forgot to powder it. She’d find no sleep on that pest trap, now.
The old man must have been punishing her for nicking the teaspoon. He’d already given her a drubbing for bringing back the book, and this rage was too fresh to be old business. Ivor’d been slobber-drunk and roaring. Probably the landlady had counted the silver after Rowena left and sent a complaint down. Never mind that it wasn’t her fault. The spoon was gone, pawned for two sovereigns against Mama’s ledger in Oldtemple, and Ivor and his cups now conspired to teach Rowena a lesson about getting light-fingered around the quality.
The lesson wasn’t just in the lateness of the job, or the missed dinner, or the lost spot by the stove. It was the job itself—Westgate Bridge, nearly the whole city’s width away. It would take far more than an hour on foot, even at a jog, to cross it all.
And that was only the where of the job—the what of it was far worse.
She was taking the reverend’s book to the Alchemist.
Rowena paused at the intersection of Harper Lane and Buskerton to let a dray cart groan by under alchemical lamplight and fog.
The Alchemist.
She would not have said it aloud—not to anyone, and not for anything—but Rowena knew she was powerless. She would have been satisfied with any kind of power. The power to buy a meal with money she earned. The power to tell Ivor to go hang himself from the courier’s loft, for all she cared. She would never have any such power, and knowing that was as bad as the powerlessness itself.
The rumored power of the Alchemist, on the other hand, was something unknown and unknowable. No one believed in magic, not even the mad Kneeler beggars preaching the Old Religion to curious passersby. Not even the lanyani. Magic was just what the ignorant called systems they couldn’t understand in an organized universe. Rowena had heard a young seminarian lecture some pretty girl outside a tavern with that line once. Probably he’d only wanted to get under her petticoats, but it sounded good. The other alchemists weren’t quite respectable enough to be scientists of Ecclesiastical rank, but they weren’t fairy stories, either. The Stone Scales was different, its propr
ietor a figure cloaked in contradictory legends. The idea of approaching him for the first time in the dark, unknown, set Rowena’s teeth on edge.
This had to be a punishment.
She stopped under a globe lamp and shifted her satchel over her shoulder. Across the way, she spied the phosphor-painted sign for the underground lightning rail. The cold was working through the weave of her gloves and into her bones. She’d have to run at least another three quarters of an hour, and she expected her burning lungs to give it up for a walk long before then. And a girl of her age, her size, walking to the east end of town, past the river wharves and fulleries?
There was nothing else for it. Rowena reached into the breast pocket of her jacket and drew out a quarter-sovereign chit. She’d been saving it since midsummer, a little piece of just-in-case. It was enough for one ride on the underground.
The stairway to the lightning rail pitched down from the cobbled sidewalk, burrowing to the tunnels below. Rowena dropped her quarter clink into a brass turnstile and squinted through the dusky air at the platform beyond. The dense crowds of early evening had already gone their ways. The factories were empty, the pubs and clubs filling up. Only big, young men and a few red-faced women, bleary with drink, shuffled about, waiting.
Rowena claimed a bench underneath a guttering alchemical lamp. She set her bag on her lap and drew her boot knife slowly, hoping no one nearby had failed to see it. She laid the knife down on the satchel and folded her hands over its handle, letting the blade stay in full view.
No one strayed nearer. Rowena stared at the empty tracks, lips pressed tight.
The tunnels were hazy with cigarillo smoke and golden chemical light. Rowena’s eyes were watering badly by the time a dim, yellow eye appeared in the distance, the low thunder of wheels on rails running close behind.
The lightning rail always ran on time, say what you might about its eerie electric crackle and shrill, screaming wheels. A conductor stepped off the narrow ledge and put his ratchet in the socket of the door, holding it open. The doors scissored apart with a clatter of toothy gears, and as soon as a knot of passengers pressed its way out, another shouldered in after. Rowena waited for the human clog to pass. She darted in just as the conductor ratcheted the doors shut.
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