The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  The cars had windows, trimmed with patchy blue curtains that looked like false velvet. Rowena wondered why they were even there. There was nothing to see in the tunnels, anyway—just the stutter of signs passing too quickly to be read, arc lights blurring into white-hot smears. She supposed the under-iron cars of the lightning rail were remainders from the upper-iron fleet, old cross-country cabs retired to the shorter jaunts of the cities.

  “If you’re going to keep your knife out like that, it would serve you better to watch what’s going on inside the car.”

  Rowena turned in her seat, her fingers closing around the knife’s handle.

  Then she smiled.

  “Rare.” Rowena slipped the blade back into her boot.

  Rare wore leather trousers so supple they moved like her own skin, buttoned tight against her curves. Her black under-corset gathered up beneath the shadow blue of her blouse, and a belt with two buckled pouches circled her hips. She rested a hand on Rowena’s seat back, steadying herself against the rail car’s clatter. Her piled hair was run through with a long, heavy pin, tucked here and there with clips as useful for working at the tumblers of a lock as holding up her coif.

  She was a thief, a charlatan, and an idol to any girl of Rowena’s world—the model of the Way Out. One story had her starting off life as a courier, a bird like Rowena and Bess. Others said she’d been a bawdy house Jill. Whatever she had been, she was a free woman now. They said she had a dozen lovers in Corma, each richer and more sinister than the last. Dozens more men, gentry and underside alike, vowed to have her. They weren’t the sort to be turned aside easily, but Rare managed all the same.

  “Hullo, Rowena.” Rare nodded to the space on the padded bench. “May I?”

  She didn’t wait for a reply. Rare slid into place and offered Rowena a concerned look.

  “Have Ivor’s hours changed?”

  “Just for tonight. Well, just for me.”

  “You don’t usually go east. Where’s Bess?”

  “Gone. Ivor gave me her routes.”

  A little line appeared between Rare’s eyes. She scowled. “You shouldn’t be running new routes this late.”

  Rowena shrugged gamely. “He’s been acting off—all of a sudden, he wants me to move this package along, so—” again, a shrug, “—I’m moving it.”

  “Be careful. East of the Compass Square, you should keep to the lowstreets. I grew up around Westgate Bridge. They aren’t bad people, but they’re tough, and a stranger won’t get much help if she gets turned about.”

  “Thanks.”

  Rowena knew better than to ask what Rare was doing on the under-irons. Almost certainly she was on some job. Rare was a professional. She’d know better than to say much. That thought brought the heat to Rowena’s cheeks. She shouldn’t have said the bit about Ivor wanting to dump the package. Stupid eejit.

  “You know . . .” Rare reached into a belt pouch. “I have a letter for Ivor. I meant to take it to him today, but I had an appointment that ran late and thought he would have closed up for the night. Do you think—well, it’s an extra bit of work, maybe, but when you get back to the warehouse tonight, could you give it to him?” The letter wasn’t in her hand; she held a tight roll of sovereign bills discreetly.

  Rowena blinked at the roll. She had never had much money of her own, but she’d handled enough to eyeball a sum quickly. It was as much as she might clear in two months of deliveries.

  “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do it just as a favor,” Rare said gravely. “It’s a job. I understand that.”

  “You’ve got the letter now?”

  And there it was, an envelope with Ivor’s name written in a tall, tilting script.

  Rowena slipped it into her bag with the paper-wrapped book. She tucked the roll of bills under the leather thong wrapped around her forearm.

  “Suppose I can be back at the warehouse by eleven. Urgent message?”

  Rare smiled. “I imagine Ivor will think so.”

  The rail car slowed. Beyond its greasy windows, Rowena saw the dim light of a station platform and a sign, its letters a faded jumble.

  “Thank you,” Rare breathed. “It was going to bother me the whole night if I had to wait on that any longer.”

  “Anytime.”

  “Remember,” Rare said, stepping out of the car onto the platform’s edge. “Lowstreets after Compass Square.”

  “Lowstreets. I’ve got it.”

  And Rare was gone.

  The Compass Square was an intersection of six streets that left an impression, when viewed on the city map, rather like the points of the compass rose. The square lacked only the northwest and due east arms.

  Rowena studied the eastern paths, southeast and northeast—the lowstreets and highstreets—and considered Rare’s advice.

  The lowstreets ran far south of the Stone Scales, skirting the banks of the tidal River Corma. They were broad, well marked, and well lit. There would be some merchant seamen, perhaps, and some night watchmen, but the streets would be quiet and Rowena could see well by the lamplight, especially with the cold clearing the fog.

  The highstreets were old, unnamed routes, lit with alchemical globes that were broken as often as not. One had to climb long sets of stairs to go higher into the borough’s old quarter, where the oldest businesses sheltered between row houses of slate and plaster. Those streets were crooked and steep, full of Reason only knew who at this hour.

  Rowena shifted her bag on her shoulder and blew on her gloved hands.

  She was four steps down the southeastern road, heading low, when she felt her hackles rise.

  Seven times in seven years of courier work, Rowena Downshire had been robbed. With each experience she’d learned a little more about how to sense the next coming.

  Rowena looked to her right and saw a hulking shape slip free of an alley’s shadows, not far from the lowstreet path. There was no mistaking its hunched shoulders or its curious, high-stepping gait.

  The aigamuxa raised its left leg and held it aloft. The pink eye on its heel seemed to stare right through Rowena, slicing skin and muscle, bone and sinew.

  Rowena closed both hands around the satchel’s straps. She tightened them slowly.

  And then she turned heel toward the northeast, taking the stairs to the highstreets three at a time, scrabbling with her fingers as her feet slipped.

  She was at the first summit and running. From somewhere below, she heard the aigamuxa’s furious bellow.

  The fear left Rowena almost as quickly as it had come. She had her wind and felt good. The aigamuxa were worse than bad runners, all but blind with both feet on the ground. They were confined to a plodding pace to keep from careening into walls or stamping through some debris that would grind into their eyes.

  The alchemical lampposts flashed by Rowena’s head, one after another. When she passed the sixth, she realized the flashing movement in the corner of her eye wasn’t from her own passage into and out of pools of light.

  It was from the aigamuxa swinging in the upper reaches of the street above her.

  The highstreets were old, narrow things, full of houses with porches and railings and gutter works, washing lines and window ledges, a perfect jungle for the aigamuxa to swing through. The creature bounded against the face of a laundry house and was suddenly two buildings ahead of Rowena, dropping hand over hand toward her on a route of downspouts and balcony rails. The aigamuxa’s legs dangled, angry pink eyes blazing downward.

  Rowena ducked a swipe from the creature’s swinging arm, lost her footing, and skidded on both knees into a wall. She scrambled to her feet just as the aiga scuttled, spiderlike, within an arm’s reach, swaying from a row house shutter.

  Its clawed hand grazed the satchel as she bolted again.

  That was when panic took her.

  Rowena rounded a curve and plowed down a short stair, climbed back up around a bend to her left, and tore through a straightaway, dark except for moonlight pooling between broken cobb
les. She ran hard, trusting the straps and buckles of her bag to keep it from flying off. She ran until her chest tightened under a screw and her breath tasted of cotton and copper. Rowena turned another corner she hoped would bear toward the lowstreets and found only a dead-end yard with a tumbledown well and broken ash cart.

  There was another flash of movement at her right and then a blow that crushed the wind from her lungs.

  The cobblestones were black with lichen. They surged up to meet Rowena’s chin, rattling her teeth. Her eyes watered as she bit her tongue. Her mouth filled with blood.

  The aigamuxa’s hands planted in front of her, long, four-jointed fingers splayed wide, wrists touching. Slowly, Rowena looked up.

  Even in its customary crouch, an aigamuxa was the height of most any man. This one seemed a little larger than most, or perhaps it was the darkness and the way its eyeless, hairless face loomed. Its legs were swung up over its back, ankles resting on its shoulders. Its eyes glared at her from either side of its head.

  “Give,” the creature hissed and lifted one of its huge hands, fingers flexing slowly. “Or I will take.”

  Rowena blinked the tears from her eyes and spat at the cobblestones. Trembling, she pushed herself up to her grazed knees.

  “I don’t know what you—”

  The hand lashed out with blinding speed. It cuffed Rowena to the ground, and for a moment, the world was filled with explosions of green-and-yellow light and a horrible keening between her ears.

  Slowly, the sound died away. She could hear the aiga’s voice again.

  “Give,” it rasped, “or . . . I . . . will . . . take.”

  Rowena rolled onto her side and bucked her shoulders, trying to worm free of the bag. It took two tries to get the first shoulder out; the second came away with a jerk as the aigamuxa tore the satchel from her.

  The creature’s shadow passed over her, its eye heels on the ground, and then she heard scuttling, scraping noises and the roof tiles slipping high overhead.

  For a long time, Rowena lay still, waiting for the lights in her eyes to clear and the sick feeling in her belly to sweat itself away. When the nausea passed, leaving a throbbing pain behind her eyes, she sat up.

  The yard was empty. Quiet. It seemed strange that it could be so quiet again. There was that thundering sound, though. . . . She clenched her jaw and realized the pounding in her teeth was her heart coming down from full speed.

  When she finally stood, Rowena didn’t think about her ringing head, or her skinned knees, or the blood coating her tongue.

  She thought about Ivor and the Alchemist.

  Running from the aigamuxa had been frightening, but she had at least known what she should try to do. Get away. Keep her bag. Failing that, keep her hide.

  Now she was terrified, wondering what to do next.

  Slowly, Rowena retraced her steps, hoping to wend her way back to the Compass Square. She didn’t remember running into a rain barrel or kicking over a wire caddy of empty milk bottles, but she found these things, and a scattered crate of old gazettes, and an overturned dustbin. Her route back to the square was clear enough. She’d done a fine job marking its way.

  If I tell Ivor I lost the package, she thought, I’ll be lucky to crawl back up into the loft after the beating he’ll give me. Rowena remembered the courier girl from the Brixton workhouse Ivor had beaten unconscious the spring before, and the three days she’d lingered, black and blue and feverish, before finally dying. When Albert and one of the stock loaders carried the body away, three teeth fell from her slack mouth—the only teeth the poor bird hadn’t spit out the night Ivor took the hawthorn to her.

  If I go to the Alchemist without his package, Rowena thought . . . And then, the thought trailed away because she didn’t know what to do with it.

  If I go to the Alchemist without his package . . . what then?

  Rowena kneeled beside a downspout, tugged off her gloves, and cupped a little water from a puddle beneath it. She threw the water in her face, sipped some from her fingers, then rinsed and spat. The water had been brackish. Now it was pink with her blood.

  If her brother Jorrie had been here, rest his soul, he’d tell her to go with the devil she knew. Probably Mick would say the same. They never went in for gambles. But they were strong boys. Rowena was an underfed scrap, not at all likely to come away from Ivor’s beating as well as they would. She tried to remember what Bess had told her about the Alchemist. Bess knew him better than anyone, Rowena supposed—had gone to the Stone Scales dozens of times over the years.

  Nothing came. It wasn’t just that the tables of her mind had been upended by the aigamuxa’s blows. There was simply nothing there. Bess had never said anything about the Alchemist at all. But whatever happened to her once she found him, Rowena wagered it wouldn’t cost her any teeth. That seemed more hopeful than the devil she knew.

  She was standing back in the Compass Square. This time, checking all the shadows before she chose her path, she headed for the lowstreets.

  9.

  The coroner on duty was William Knox, a man City Inspector Haadiyaa Gammon considered both cautious and incisive—traits Gammon usually desired in her staff. Tonight, they gave her pause. Knox was a bent creature with a look at least half as sepulchral as the subjects he tended. His rheumy eyes goggled under the magnifying lenses cinched tight around his bald, spotted head. Still, Gammon knew they missed very little.

  Very little. Gammon breathed deeply to steel herself and immediately regretted it. She’d never gotten used to the smell.

  Knox stood over the examination table, its cured slate top glossy with scrubbing, its trough drained. He regarded the woman’s naked, fish belly corpse with utter dispassion. The principal examination had been conducted some hours before. Now, she was slit up the middle and held together with surgical clamps and vises, her skin drawn tight like a white pudding’s wrappings. The woman had not been beautiful. She had a soft, round body and a square jaw better suited to a man’s face. Her black hair was cut with severe, conservative precision—disturbingly familiar, too much like Gammon’s own coiffeur to pass unnoticed. Even in death, the woman somehow looked reprimanding.

  Knox donned a pair of thin gauze gloves, careful to draw them on slowly. Inspector Gammon had ruined three pairs already, forgetting as she tried to gentle them on how easily they would tear. Now she stood across the table from Knox, the phonocorder whirring along at her left.

  Gammon had been a constable almost twenty years. She’d seen her share of corpses yet had not lost the feeling of sick sympathy that always accompanied an inquest. Here was the way of all flesh. Its indignity had not ceased to shake her, and that, she supposed, was a good thing.

  Gammon watched the paraffin cylinder of the phonocorder as it revolved steadily on the bobbin. A crooked needle scratched a groove into the creamy yellow cylinder. Waxy curls thin as spiderwebs peeled away, drifting to the morgue’s cold floor.

  Knox cleared his throat and began the formal record.

  “First-day Elevenmonth, year 276. Subject Jane Doe, found 0530 Thirtieth-day Tenmonth, Misery Bay docks. Chief Medical Examiner William Knox presiding, City Inspector Haadiyaa Gammon attending. The subject, female, approximately thirty-five years of age, shows signs of contusions to the ventral region of the neck, just below the windpipe, suggestive of strangulation. . . .”

  In the dimness of his study, the alchemical globes illuminating only the surface of his cluttered desk, the Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers read over the letters many times, thinking he could tell their intended order and then realizing he had lost the front page with the date, or that in his haste he’d skipped one ahead. It had taken some hours, but finally he’d worked the sequence out. Still, he scratched his head over the whole affair. Nora was gone, yes, and it seemed from these letters it would be for good. But why?

  He lifted his gin and tonic to his lips but felt only the stones, long since warmed to room temperature, butting against his lip. Glancing down at the
glass, then the gin bottle three fingers emptier than it had been an hour before, he shook his head ruefully.

  “Can’t make whole sense of it with or without you, girl,” he sighed. There was something to gin’s character that had always struck him as particularly feminine. He addressed it as such, and often.

  He returned to the last letter, poring over its final paragraph.

  I hope these notes have found you well, Phillip, for that would give me some hope for the days to come. Keeping them has been hard. I hope they will be much remembered and that I will, too, someday. That will fall to you, for I am afraid it is all out of my hands now. You’ve done a little of the mapping before, and so I trust you will find your way through it—with any luck, a little better than I have done.

  The sooner you can destroy our notes, the better, Phillip. They will be following not far behind these letters.

  He ran a hand through his thinning hair and muttered several phrases unworthy of his office as a reverend doctor.

  “The level of decay suggests the subject has been dead approximately seventy-two hours,” Knox continued. “Distally, the digits and hands show abrasions consistent with attempts to fend off an attacker, but coagulation and skin condition suggest these wounds preceded death by as much as forty-eight hours.”

  Gammon regarded her shoes to avoid seeing Knox lift up a flap of skin cloaking the larynx. The jar of camphor cream was near at hand. She considered dabbing it under her nose to combat the odors rising from the gray-and-purple mass of the body cavity, which the old man had methodically ratcheted open.

  “Was it murder, Master Knox?”

  “The contusions on the neck are principally ventral and dorsal, with fainter bruising around the lateral regions. Typically this suggests manual strangulation.”