The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  Chalmers didn’t ask who “we” was. Nasrahiel seemed to have his own sense of how this business ought to be done, and he had little strength and less will to challenge the creature anymore.

  The aigamuxa walked. Phillip Chalmers followed. It seemed all he could do.

  Inspector Gammon peeled off her gloves and dropped them into the bin beside the morgue’s frosted-glass door. She winced at the thick, steady chunk-chunk-chunk of Knox’s suturing gun punching its way up the body. The reek of viscera steeping in bowls of formaldehyde had soaked into Gammon’s skin and hair. She ached to return to her flat and pump up the tap for a good washing.

  “I’ll need your report on my desk by midday tomorrow,” Gammon said. With a handkerchief, she dabbed away the camphor gel under her nose. “File it as a Jane Doe and send up a disposal request. It’s getting crowded down here. We need to clear the decks.”

  “Inspector,” Knox called. Gammon turned back. “One last detail. The digitus annularis on the right hand—”

  “Plain language, Knox.”

  “The subject’s right ring finger,” the old man continued. He was moving the bowls of excised organs onto a little trolley. “It’s broken.”

  “And?”

  “Usually that’s consistent with the forcible removal of a ring. Lividity and rigor suggest it occurred postmortem.”

  Gammon made a mental note to check with her confederates come morning. The ring was supposed to be gone, yes, but breaking the finger taking it was sloppy. Sloppy was the same as dangerous. She concealed her consternation under a shrug.

  “People will steal anything,” she said grimly.

  Knox began shuffling the trolley away. “It’s a devil of a world we live in, Inspector, I’ll tell you that.”

  The old man butted the cart through the swinging doors opposite the morgue entrance, rolling back to the laboratories. One bowl splashed a carnation of blood on the ground, narrowly missing his feet.

  Gammon watched the doors swing in Knox’s wake. “Indeed it is,” she sighed.

  She cut the gases running to the globe lamps, plunging the room back into darkness and silence, leaving the body of the Reverend Doctor Nora Pierce to its empty rest.

  10.

  Rowena Downshire stood in the shadows outside the Abbey, a single-storied pub sprawled across three storefronts. Inside, she heard a din of voices, the mob monotone interrupted by laughter. Rowena hadn’t the schooling to read, but she knew her letters well enough to make out the sign and assure herself the local folk had steered her right.

  When Rowena arrived at the Scales a half hour earlier and discovered it locked up for the evening, she’d nearly bloodied her knuckles banging on the door before realizing it had a knocker. Hammering with it had proven equally useless. Rowena pressed her face to the window glass. She’d squinted and could make out the shapes of shelves and tables. A dog started barking within, but that was the only answer her ruckus raised. If the Alchemist was in, he was determined not to answer, and if he wasn’t . . .

  That was the devil of it. If the Alchemist was expecting his package, why wasn’t he there? And where was he?

  She’d spied a sooty sweep and a ruddy-faced longshoreman making their separate ways down to the lowstreets and asked where she might find the Alchemist at this hour.

  They’d answered her with a look as if she was half a fool to have not already known. Everyone in Westgate Bridge watched the comings and goings of the Alchemist.

  Rowena put her hand to the Abbey’s door, the smell of ale and the warmth of a peat fire hitting her full in the face.

  The pub was crawlingly busy, better than a hundred people playing out an old neighborhood’s nightly theater. The bar maids carried trays of food to long trestles with built-in benches that broke up the field of snooker tables and six-sided card tables. There was no musician’s stage, but a few buskering types sat about, strumming a guitar or sawing a violin.

  Rowena knew how to move through a crowd—and, just as important, when not to. She danced to a clear space near the scullery entrance and stood on a chair. Usually, her height was an asset in her trade, in that she didn’t have much of it. Nearly fourteen years old, she had only recently crept an inch closer to five feet even. She could dart and duck about with wonderful ease, but if she didn’t get the lay of the land before she started, she was as good as trod underfoot.

  In less than a minute, she’d found her mark.

  There was a booth at about two o’ the clock, horseshoe shaped and large enough for five with room for elbows. It afforded a good view of the main room and probably should have belonged to some little knot of chums who came regularly. It was clearly the home of a regular—a solitary one.

  It would take an effort to move about the front room of the pub without passing that booth, but all the patrons managed it—or managed, at least, to pass by with the widest possible berth.

  If that man was not the Alchemist, Rowena was the bloody governor’s mistress.

  She stepped off the chair and glanced about, looking for her reflection, and finally caught it in the mirror behind the bar. There was some blood matted about her right temple and a hot-red mark on her cheekbone. It would turn black soon enough. She reached up to scrub the blood away, but the wound stung fiercely. She let it be. Rowena needed courage. She manufactured it by practicing her best look—her tough and savvy look, the one she’d used on Sticks, the lanyani fence, that morning.

  Her brow furrowed, darkening her stark, blue-gray eyes. She considered adding a curl to her lip, or perhaps—

  Rowena sighed and gave it up. One didn’t glower at a man who could half-clear a room just by sitting in it. Perhaps she should try something pathetic, something wounded and fearful? She played at that look for a moment—

  No. She’d sooner convince the Alchemist she was a guppy than a damsel in distress.

  Disgusted, Rowena stalked from the mirror, spitting curses down at her grazed knees as she picked her way across the room. It was no good. She had lost the Alchemist’s package, and now she would interrupt his leisure, and nothing—no face, no words, no perfectly affected pose—would keep him from skinning her down to her marrow with nothing more than the blade of his gaze. If she was lucky, that would kill her faster than Ivor’s truncheon, and she could at least be done with running and hiding and scraping up every last unguarded coin to drop into the gaping maw of Oldtemple.

  Sorry, Mama, she thought as she neared the border of the Alchemist’s kingdom. Mags tried. Jorrie tried. I tried. Maybe there’s no use in trying after all. I’m never going to buy you out, am I?

  And then, she was standing before him, hands balled at her sides. She was sure these words would be her last. There seemed no point in dragging things out any longer, so she spat her story in a breathless rush.

  “Sir, I’m sorry to trouble you, but I had a delivery for you and it’s gone now.”

  For a moment, his only response was silence.

  His eyes were dark, flecked with some glinting, uncertain color. They might have seen through stone. There was no doubt they saw clear through Rowena. He had a beard, trimmed short and shot through with the same gray salting his close-cropped hair. Broad shoulders. Tall enough, he looked Rowena in the eye from his seat, the crow’s-feet set deep in skin as black as saddle leather. Older, but not precisely old. Not to the order of magnitude she’d imagined. There was a beaten frock coat hanging from the peg at the end of the booth, brown like his trousers and boots and bracers. He wore a linen shirt with its sleeves rolled up, and there was tobacco staining his right thumb and forefinger. He looked more like a shopkeeper than a scholar or an EC squint. For a moment, Rowena wondered if she’d approached the wrong man after all.

  And then she realized the silence belonged not just to the Alchemist but to the whole room. The neighboring patrons stared, nodding her way, nudging each other.

  She had chosen right, Reason save her.

  “I’m sorry,” the Alchemist said at last. “I’m af
raid I don’t know what you mean.”

  Rowena stepped closer, keeping her voice low. “I’m from New Vraska Imports. I had a package for you.”

  The Alchemist surveyed her critically. “You’re injured.”

  “When the aigamuxa—”

  His dark eyes narrowed. “Aigamuxa?” He pushed his pint aside. “Come with me.”

  The Alchemist slipped out of the booth and into his coat. It was as if she’d thrown a switch and it had simply turned his intentions for the night off. The bar maid headed toward them stopped short of the booth, looking down at the tray held before her—a second pint of ale, a bowl of something hot, a half loaf of bread, and a slice of beef.

  The Alchemist dropped a folded bill on her tray as he passed. Rowena snagged the loaf and tucked it inside her jacket before hustling along in the old man’s wake.

  Rowena almost tumbled into the Alchemist’s backside as he stopped to let a velvet-curtained clockwork carriage roll by. She stumbled into a puddle instead.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You said you had a delivery. Even if it will never make it to the Scales, we can.”

  And then he was off again. The Compass Square fell away as they wound past the quay and the fullery on its banks, the steady beat of its automatic clubs thumping the woolens keeping time.

  The Alchemist took a short staircase that curled off the quayside, away from the sounds of the fullery and the murky waters pooling around its dyeing house. The stairs were narrow, their edges worn and crumbling. Soon the quayside lane joined with a terrazzo level winding between the slated roofs of shops down at the water’s edge.

  And there they were, back at the Stone Scales, a building crooked as a constable, tucked between a haberdashery and a money changer’s offices. The shingled sign showed balances and an odd beast, a bit like a rooster with a lizard’s tail. It was drawn over a rough line of script—

  The Stone Scales

  The Alchemist turned an iron key in the lock and ushered Rowena past the threshold. He reached up to the left and right of the doorframe, where two brass sconces waited, and flicked their tiny switches. The alchemical globes set there burst to life as the gases in their chambers mingled. In a moment, he had a kerosene lamp beside the till going and the alchemical chandelier at the room’s center, too.

  “Sir?” Rowena ventured.

  “Hm?”

  “Why is there a rooster on the sign?”

  The Alchemist stooped under the front counter. “Rooster?”

  “The sign calls this place the Stone Scales. But there’s just a rooster and balances on the sign. No stone.”

  “It’s a cockatrice. A creature whose gaze turns things to stone,” the Alchemist clarified. Some expression must have crossed Rowena’s face, for he paused in his search and regarded her flatly. “They’re entirely fictional beings, girl.”

  Rowena nodded. She glanced back outside. Her mind clicked along, summing the situation, dividing it and moving remainders about. The old highstreet was empty. Foreboding. She was indoors, and that meant she might be able to stay the night, and that meant she’d have time to think of what to tell Ivor about the lost package. Perhaps, she might dodge going back to him altogether.

  She started sizing up the place. The Alchemist let her wander as he arranged bottles and gauzes on the counter.

  To the left, the room was a maze of bookcases, some only as tall as Rowena, others high enough that ladders ran along rails before them. Most of the shelves were too full to justify bookends, but here and there a sable statuette or miniature globe broke up the lines and rows and ranks and columns.

  The alchemical lamplight stretched shadows across the walls. To Rowena’s right stood display tables and glass cases. Skeletons of tiny, flightless birds. Strange, rune-covered jars and bundled herbs. Stuff Rowena had seen being carried onto ships by sailors: astrolabes and barometers and spyglasses. Along the wall stretched a map of the six continents, looking as if it had been skinned from the surface of a globe and had only to be folded around some ordinary sphere to make the world over again.

  “I like this place,” Rowena announced.

  If the Alchemist regarded that as a compliment, he felt no need to acknowledge it. Instead, he beckoned Rowena to a stool beside the cash counter.

  “Let’s have a look at that face, girl.”

  Rowena had nearly forgotten her scrapes and bruises. She’d never seen a physick before. There were never enough of them to look after the prisoners’ health during the years she spent at Oldtemple, and Ivor didn’t go in for coddling his birds. Still, she did as she was told. The Alchemist knelt before her, paused to polish the spectacles lifted from his collar, and started his work.

  In the light of the cash counter, Rowena could see him better. Even crouched before her, the Alchemist looked big.

  “I’m sorry about your package,” she said.

  The Alchemist dabbed at her temple with gauze treated in something brown and pungent. Rowena squeezed her eyes shut at its acrid sting.

  “I mean, it en’t really my fault, exactly,” she continued. “Aigamuxa don’t usually bother with the likes of me, and I don’t see what I was supposed to do about it. But still, it’s been an age since I lost a package, and I know Ivor’s got a lot of good business with you and I don’t want you to think I wasn’t trying, or—”

  She stopped talking and opened her eyes. The old man was using his little finger to swab an ointment from a pot. His half-rolled sleeve shifted as he raised his hand to apply another dose. Rowena saw the dim tracery of an old tattoo on the dark skin of his forearm, blurred letters and a seal, the image half-familiar.

  “Anyway,” Rowena finished lamely, “I’m sorry.”

  Time enough passed that Rowena began to wonder if he’d heard her words at all. Then he spoke: “What’s your name, girl?”

  “Rowena.”

  He grunted. “Family name?”

  She focused on holding her head still as he traced his finger along the rise of her cheekbone, spreading the ointment with a pressure just at the edge of what her bruise could bear. “Downshire, if it please you.”

  “I can’t imagine what your name has to do with my pleasure, Rowena Downshire.” The Alchemist studied her carefully, taking an inventory of something quite apart from her injuries.

  Rowena’s heart fluttered. It was like locking eyes with a hawk. She sat frozen as a mouse waiting for its talons. Her mind bolted for a piece of cover.

  “What’s your name?” Rowena blurted. “I mean Ivor, he tells me, ‘Bring this to the Alchemist of Westgate Bridge,’ and that’s all. Everybody knows who the Alchemist is. There’s only one.”

  The old man returned to the ointment, then her face. “Not true.”

  “Only one who matters in Corma. En’t heard anyone call you by a name.”

  “Then in my case—” he set the pot aside and lifted her chin with a finger, squinting, “—a name would be superfluous.”

  Rowena felt her tongue volunteer itself to be swallowed.

  He fetched out his chronometer. “When was your last meal, Rowena Downshire?”

  “Midday, I think. What time is it now?”

  The Alchemist made a dyspeptic noise. He stood and waved her on behind him, muttering something that sounded cross and involved Ivor’s name. They shrugged behind a heavy curtain at the back of the shop, Rowena’s hopes—and her stomach—suddenly lively.

  A half hour later, she sat cross-legged on a spindly stool in the back storeroom where a potbellied stove warmed a crock of beans and rashers and a pot of black chicory. A ragged, old hound slept in a knot near the coal bin, snoring. Rowena shoveled the food down. She’d singed her mouth on the chicory, leaving her tongue in cinders, but she didn’t care. Ivor’s grub was cold sandwiches and watered ale. He’d once treated Rowena to a wedge of good cheese and a jack of wine, a reward for running four important jobs in a day. But that was the best it had ever been. Apart from the puddings or chestnuts nicked off carter
s’ traps, she hadn’t had a hot meal in six years.

  The Alchemist sat in a high-back chair made of driftwood. He watched Rowena demolish her supper, a smile threatening the corner of his sober mouth. There was a table between them built of scrap from a shipping crate where he let his mug of chicory cool. When Rowena hauled the half loaf of bread snatched back at the Abbey from her jacket and dredged her bowl, the old man snorted. He busied himself stuffing his pipe, then struck a lucifer against the table. A bluish smoke, smelling like damp leaves, marjoram, and fennel trailed from the pipe bowl.

  Her dish molecularly empty, Rowena wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

  The Alchemist set his pipe down to stir another lump of sugar into his chicory. Rowena was fairly sure it was his third. She’d lost track, with her face buried in her meal.

  “What do you know about the aigamuxa?” the Alchemist asked.

  “The one who took the package? Nothing.”

  “I meant generally.”

  “They’re ogres of some kind, aren’t they?”

  “You might as accurately say we are monkeys of some kind.”

  Rowena frowned. “But we aren’t.”

  He waved dismissively. “A matter of scientific debate. Not important. What do you know about what they are?”

  “Well . . . nothing special, I suppose.” Rowena rolled her mug between her palms, thinking. “I know we used to keep ’em—the business folk and the gentry types, I mean, used to keep ’em—as servants. Or slaves. I guess the difference was if you paid ’em. Then the governors changed the laws to get more human folk back in labor, and they’ve been sort of shifting about Amidon ever since.”

  The Alchemist nodded.

  Rowena spoke into her mug. “I know I’m afraid of them. Everybody is. They’re huge and strong and angry.” She looked up. “I know it’s because of the way they’ve had it here in Amidon, but still, they’re so angry. You can feel it on ’em when they walk by. It’s like a cloud. Why are they that angry?”

  “Imagine having to walk on your eyeballs all day,” the Alchemist suggested dryly. “It might put even a saint in a bad mood.”