The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  Bess narrowed her eyes, standing almost inside a school of Ecclesiastical fishes. She watched the smallduke’s lips.

  Doing well. . . . Not much longer, an hour . . .

  Fragments, at best. Jorrie would not have been impressed. Bess kept trying. The Reverend Doctor Pierce’s back was to Bess, but she glanced over her shoulder. For a flashing moment, Bess could see her mouth.

  . . . make sure sees me?

  No, this is good . . . too far . . .

  And then Abraham Regenzi saw Bess. For a moment, his eyebrows lowered and his nose scrunched, a mime of a snapping comment: Where have you been all this time?

  Regenzi met Bess halfway. Two other guests came up to stand with Pierce, ushered into the gap by Fredericks. The little crowd was all handshakes and well-wishing for the upcoming keynote.

  Bess offered Regenzi both drinks, but he ignored them, instead turning in a fashion that concealed their conference from passersby.

  “Vinas,” he sighed with relief. “Perfect. Good. This will do.”

  Still, he didn’t take the flutes. Instead, a gold-ringed hand slipped with surreptitious grace into a pocket of his dress coat, fishing briefly—

  Bess sighed her own relief. “She likes vinas? The page gave me them before—”

  And then she stopped, staring. Regenzi’s hands hovered over one of the flutes, tilting a slender aluminum flask. It held a crystallized rod of something Bess remembered seeing in a liquid form so many hours before. Her heart thundered as the thin, brown blade sagged into the vinas, finally dissolving. The music and people and porcelain smiles had all but washed the Alchemist’s words down the basin of Bess’s mind. But now, she remembered.

  “Your lover has need of rather dangerous things. Be mindful what that might mean for you.”

  “Abraham,” Bess whispered. “Abraham, what are you doing?”

  Regenzi took the doctored drink, his fingers brushing the back of her hand. When their eyes met, Bess felt her color drain.

  He was smiling. It was the same smile he offered her in the moment before they made love—the same smile that accompanied a good dinner, a useful introduction, a piece of good news. It was, Bess realized, the only smile Smallduke Abraham Regenzi had, utterly utilitarian, and if hers was made of painted porcelain, his was forged of iron.

  He kissed Bess on the lips, pressing painfully hard. His breath burned against her ear.

  “I’m tidying up a mess, Beatrice.”

  Regenzi straightened and raised the glass in salute to a passing member of the governor’s cabinet. The minister raised his in reply.

  And then he was gone, excusing himself back into the Reverend Doctor Pierce’s company. Bess stood frozen, the heels of her ankle boots driven into the ground. When Pierce took the flute of vinas from Regenzi’s hand, Bess managed to pivot one boot, pull the other up from the polished granite floor, and walk away.

  She achieved her retreat quickly in spite of the crowd. Old instincts from the courier’s loft took over. They knew how to slide through busy spaces and still look natural, even if Bess herself hardly knew where she was anymore.

  At the farthest end of the room, Bess paused and looked down at her vinas. No one seemed to be paying her any mind. She drained the flute and clutched the emptied crystal in her nerveless hand.

  She stood beside a waterfall clock draped in green sashes. Two o’ the clock in the morning—a new day, Second-day Elevenmonth, sixteen days since she’d first walked through the doors of the Regenzi manor.

  The room was full of whirling animal faces. She caught her own in the reflection of the clock’s glass door, the jewel-bright plumage haloing her face.

  Bess felt a sudden, stinging certainty that there was no such bird as the tropical Trimeeni dove. Whatever looked back at her in the glass was splendid and lurid and an absolute fiction. A storybook creature. Something children would believe in because they wanted to. Or needed to.

  Over the strains of the string quartet, half a world away, Bess heard a shriek and an avalanche of china. In the glass, she could see a space clearing at the far end of the gallery where a page boy’s serving cart lay on its side, toppled by the spastic form of a small woman, a convulsion of black-clothed limbs on the dance floor.

  A man’s voice called, without irony, for a doctor.

  INTERMEZZO

  The diary of the Reverend Doctor Nora Pierce

  Sixteenth-day Threemonth, year 269:

  I have received a reply from Phillip Chalmers; he is willing to discuss the project. He believes the equipment he designed to check atmospheric concentrations of the particles can be modified to suit my present objectives. We’ll meet on the morrow. I pray it goes well. I need a partner.

  I am afraid.

  Now that I write the words, I feel a little better. It is good to be honest for a moment: I, Nora Pierce, scholar and researcher, the Shrew of Semiotics—was that what they called me in seminary? I think that was it. All those man-children, thinking themselves so clever. Damn them. I, Nora Piece, am afraid.

  I remember Phillip from my post-seminary in Rimmerston and hope he’s grown a little since. He lacked something in the way of discipline; I will need someone with me who can be reasonable and steady. My strength for that is nearly spent, and it’s only six months I’ve had the text.

  Usually it unfolds before me slowly. The recorder is very precise. But now, that invisible hand has drawn an “X” through the whole of the last page.

  I can’t decipher the notes well enough to fathom what the error might have been—not without Chalmers’s equipment to test my hypothesis first. Meantime, I am struck by how carefully the recorder’s work is done and how much of it is still being undone.

  Does God make mistakes? Does He—can He—misperceive?

  If anyone finds these notes, they’ll think me mad. Let them. I am a reverend doctor, a theosophical scientist. It is my duty to record without passion, and so I will carry on. The observations are all here; I can move on to constructing my claims.

  Claim #1: I am looking at the shadow of the hand of God, tracing the silhouette of the universe.

  The silhouette has only nine figures comprising it. Only nine. I am a long time from my Apocrypha seminar, but I remember that number and the theories of Ruchell Bennington in 236. She thought she had finally traced a liturgical path to an exact number for the Grand Experiment, and she proposed the term Vautnek, with its Old Religion translation of thirty-six, be revised to the Nine.

  She was pilloried in the journals for her ideas—called a raconteur. Arrogant. Self-serving. She retired three years later, though she was only forty-eight.

  But there are nine sections to the book, only nine sets of data.

  Such an absurdly small number, nine. And if it truly is an experiment—the Grand Experiment of Creation itself—there must be (Claim #2) a control out there, somewhere. That is another reason I shall need Phillip. His paper on the Many-Worlds Interpretation suggests there could be many other earths the Creator might compare ours against, many sets of nine or ninety-nine or nine billion to compare against these, our Vautneks. It makes the madness of it all at least a trace more . . . Rational.

  I wish I had been there with you in 236, Ruchell. I wish I had had this book in my hands when you gave the lecture in the old cathedral of Aerion so I might have stood up from the pews and shouted down that sneering Bishop Meteron and his pedantic objections. I wish I had known that I would sit in his study some thirty years later, that I would agree to make a delivery for him to the grand librarian in Nippon—and that I would agree to take something from the librarian too.

  Did he know it was true, all those long years ago? Or did he find out later?

  I wish I had been at Aerion, Ruchell, so you could see these pages, too, and tell me I’m not mad—or if I am, save me from it.

  It’s been two years since I saw Phillip Chalmers last. I should put my vain hopes for some miracle in him aside. He was always a fool. People do not change, even when t
hey must. I will need his equipment, his maths, his ciphering, and he can keep his nervous, narcissistic nonsense and go to the devil with it. I will have to find the answers. I will have to save myself. If the nine shadows on these pages are who I think them to be, I may have to save them, too.

  I didn’t bring the book back to Rimmerston. And the bishop has not forgotten.

  DAY TWO

  2ND ELEVENMONTH

  12.

  Anselm Meteron stared at the pages spread before him, the spidery ink of some dead scribe’s calligraphy swimming in his vision. He stifled a yawn and stretched. The water clock ticking away on his solar’s mantelpiece showed eight thirty. God’s balls. His temples throbbed with the dull, persistent pain of a sleepless night—not such an unusual thing for him, perhaps, but still. He had his limits.

  He glanced at the escritoire’s right-hand drawer and considered the bottle of ether lurking there.

  For as long as Anselm could remember, insomnia had been his bedfellow. He could never stop his mind working. Perhaps he should have been a chronometician or an engineer. He thrived on moving parts, following their intersections and cascades of consequence. Without something to grind his own gears down, sleep was little more to him than a rumor invented by others for his particular torment.

  A book that writes itself.

  Anselm pressed his hands to his eyes.

  It was entirely possible that Ivor had finally lost his wits. Anselm knew his ether bottle a little too well to cast aspersions, but Ivor knew his wodke better and had been its intimate far longer. Still. The Vraskan was many things but never a blind alarmist.

  Anselm leaned for the bellpull and gave it a slow, certain draw. A gong rang, far below in the concierge’s offices. Moments later, the brass speaking tube set beside the bellpull released an echoing, tinny voice.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Coffee,” Anselm said, then paused, considering. “With a little rum in it, there’s a good girl.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Anselm passed the time before the tray came up sitting beside the empty fireplace. Rare had never come to the Empire Club, and his half hope of finding her in his bed had been dashed. Ivor’s strange question and his own books had been the alternative to her arms. A poor substitute. Damn them both. He should have turned to the ether hours before. It was too late, now.

  The long night’s unanswered questions gnawed too fiercely to be ignored. How could he have spent so many hours and have found so little? Found, really, nothing at all? Anselm loathed failure. This particular morning, it galled him like a stone.

  Anselm had made a career of knowing a little something about almost anything. His first professional expertise had been more physical than intellectual, but knowing the right people and the right things had kept him out of more than a few scrapes. He prided himself on being every bit as dangerous in his retirement as he had been in the years before. It was just a different kind of danger.

  He kept a library of surpassing eclecticism, full of volumes of Decadal Conference proceedings, gazettes from each of the major Amidonian cities indexed on lamp film, files of names and business cards, a host of scientific treatises and histories. Yet nothing in the Ecclesiastical Commission’s official literature so much as mused about self-writing texts. Nothing in the abstracts of the current conference suggested a new means of transmitting information was being presented—certainly not a wireless mode of transmission. Could such a thing even be possible?

  Ivor’s galvano-gram inspired Anselm to dig about his other sources. He’d hired an informant in the Coventry Passage rectory, the landlady Mrs. Gilleyen, in an effort to keep some track of the much-indebted, often-traveling reverend doctor Pierce. Gilleyen had furnished no new report on Pierce’s partner Chalmers since Gammon’s inquiry, and rumors moving about the Empire Club the night before, spread by young deacons and reverends visiting that most exclusive venue, said the landlady had been taken in by the constabulary overnight. In the dawn gazette, Anselm read an article about a death at Smallduke Regenzi’s masque, but the story supplied no names, no details. Nothing remotely useful. Anselm had had a spree once with the journalist who was now that gazette’s editor in chief. It was not in her nature to hold back—not without the proper inducements, of course.

  All that work and he’d earned nothing more than the ache of an abortive search and the annoyance of his spark back to Ivor going unanswered.

  Damn him. Anselm glanced at the clock on the wall. Quarter to nine. He was supposed to have been here by now. He ought to call down to the concierge and tell them to give up the breakfast preparations.

  The footman shuffled in with a silver-laden tray. He deposited it on the sideboard, sketched a quick bow, and scurried off.

  Anselm poured coffee into a cup with two fingers of rum at its bottom, nearly spilling the cup’s contents on a folded note tucked under the saucer. He returned to his desk with coffee and note, its ink still fresh from the spark clerk’s pen.

  A. Meteron, Regency Square, immediate delivery

  2nd Elevenmonth, 0830, Private Address

  Unexpected courier from our old friend last night. Package intercepted by aiga. Reason to believe your girl involved. Need to meet, your terms, spark back. E.

  Anselm tossed the note in the rubbish and made a mental note to carry the bin down to the furnace himself later.

  “My girl,” he mused dryly.

  Yes, he supposed, that is one way of thinking of her.

  Anselm reached for the bellpull again. The speaking tube hummed in reply.

  “Yes, sir?” The voice was unfamiliar, male. The new footman, perhaps.

  “Bennie—” Anselm began experimentally.

  “Benjy, sir.”

  “Of course. Benjy. Send a spark down to Stillhampton, the addressee under ‘R. J.’ in my logbook downstairs.”

  He could hear the sound of paper tearing from a notebook. “Very good. What’s the message?”

  “‘Here in an hour, or I’ll feed you to the Bear.’”

  A long pause. “I . . . Feed to the bear, sir?”

  “Make sure it’s a capital ‘B,’ there’s a good lad, hm?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The connection cut off with a click.

  Anselm smiled ruefully.

  Rare would not take an hour, of course. She never did. But Anselm had a certain love of drama—there was a time he had written all his contracts out for a term of a year and a day, simply as an aesthetic gesture. But an hour, even as an overstatement, still had its value: it was time enough for Anselm to wash up and change his clothes, to roll two cigarettes, and to smoke them down to the tips of his fingers before calling up his carriage.

  And so, he did.

  13.

  For the first time she could remember, Rowena Downshire awoke to breakfast smells.

  It was still early, pink morning light seeping through the high dormer windows of the attic bedroom. Yawning, she sat up and felt a tingling deadness in her legs, something pinning them down.

  The dog raised its head and beat the mattress with its tail. Motes of dust swirled everywhere.

  “Oh,” Rowena said.

  The beast wormed forward on its belly a few inches, snuffling her fingers wetly. It was a russet hound with a blocky gray muzzle and one ear ragged-ended from some old wound. The dog from the coal bin. She scratched all up and down its neck, laughing at its eager trills.

  “Friendly cuss, en’t you?”

  It shook, ears to toes, and jumped down, trotting to the door with several backward glances. One back leg seemed a little off, somehow. The dog’s rear didn’t canter after its front so much as hop along in its wake. It whined insistently.

  “All right, all right. Let me put my knickers on already.”

  Rowena slid to the floor and found a good rust-colored coat and a pair of fine woolen britches draped over the bedstead. She fingered them as if they might have been imagined: lightly at first, and then with eager, grasping hands.
The coat’s pockets still had a few cedar shavings stuck in the lining. The britches were creased along the seams, as if they had just recently been unfolded from long years of storage. Her old jacket and knickers smelled of the courier loft’s moldering hay mattresses. She wriggled into the new clothes and buckled the britch-cuffs about her calves, finding they fell a bit too long. Still, she’d take an odd fit over rags and holes in the Elevenmonth cold. An oval mirror standing in the corner threw back the image of a lean, canny-looking girl, her rough-cut hair all chocolate waves and snarls. Rowena struck a pose, buttoned the coat’s double-breast, then unbuttoned it. She affected a casual air and examined a phantom chronometer drawn from its inner pocket, tapping her foot with theatrical impatience. But—wait.

  She looked in the mirror again, gaping. Her face should have been a map of bruises, yet somehow her cheekbone was still only red. Rowena touched the mark gingerly. A film of the Alchemist’s ointment, smelling of aspic and something grassy, came off on her fingers. Whatever it was, it had done its job well.

  Again, the dog barked, then thundered down the stairs without her.

  Rowena turned to follow the shaggy thing as it bumpity-bumped down, but something spied out of the corner of her eye made her pause.

  Rowena studied the nightstand beside the sagging old bed. A candle, a washbasin, and jug, just like the night before. She remembered the Alchemist carrying them in after he pulled the tarp from the bed and beat out the rug. But the candle, she was sure, had been new. This one was burnt nearly halfway—and hadn’t the cane-back chair been under the window before, not at the bedside?

  Something shivered the hairs on the nape of Rowena’s neck. She rolled her shoulders, as if to shake it off, and followed the breakfast smells downstairs.

  The Alchemist sat at the improvised table, flipping through a morning gazette. There were two crockery bowls laid out, one full of hominy porridge with honey, and the other only traces of the same. He glanced at Rowena, grunted something that might have been a greeting, and nodded to the untouched bowl.