The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  Rowena tucked in so fast she forgot to offer a thank-you until she was nearly half-done. The Alchemist waved absently. He set his empty bowl beside his feet. The hound slavered it clean, full of noisy gratitude, and collapsed on his master’s boots with a contented wheeze.

  “Your dog,” Rowena ventured. “He’s—”

  “Lame. An idiot, even as beasts go.” The old man set his pipe down and folded the gazette.

  “I like him.”

  He indicated her dirty dish. “Offer him that and you’ll win a friend for life.”

  Rowena copied the Alchemist’s technique and watched the dog come trotting awkwardly around the table, all tail and earnestness, to bury his nose in her dish.

  “It’s a shame about that leg.”

  “Always been that way. We call him Rabbit.”

  She looked up. “We?”

  The old man removed his spectacles. “I,” he amended. “Old habits.”

  Rabbit turned three tight circles, half-hopping his way through the last, and settled with his head on the toe of the Alchemist’s boot, still licking his chops. Rowena glanced at the old man, wondering if she should ask—if she could ask—if he’d been in her room.

  “Rabbit,” she echoed. “That’s a nice—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about the woman you met on the lightning rail?”

  For a moment, his tone left Rowena frozen. She cursed herself for rattling so easily. “What woman?”

  The Alchemist’s dark eyes narrowed. Rowena propped up a rickety smile. She had her own habits, her need for secrets, and they’d served her well and long. She sized him up, figuring the next move. He was angry—and, she saw, something more than that. It was the something more that made her shift uncomfortably in her chair. She thought of the candle again but pushed it aside.

  “I’m sorry,” Rowena said finally. “Rare just wanted a letter delivered to Ivor. We’ve met a few times before, and she en’t ever done me wrong. I didn’t mention it because . . .” She shrugged. “It just didn’t seem important. I guess the aigamuxa have the letter now, too.”

  “You guess,” he snapped “Did you give it to the aiga?”

  “It was in the same bag as the book.”

  “Then you can spare yourself guessing.”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  “And what will you say to Rare if the aigamuxa decide to look for her?”

  Rowena’s cheeks burned. “But . . . they won’t. Why would they?”

  “The letter shows she’s connected to Ivor. Ivor was afraid the book would bring him trouble. That seems a fair assumption, given what befell you. Why should it stop there?”

  “I said I’m sorry,” Rowena insisted. The room had gone blurry. She swiped a hand across her eyes. It came away damp.

  The Alchemist’s jaw was tight below his graying beard. “You did.” Abruptly, he stood. “Sorry begins the redress. The rest is yet to be done.”

  “Can it—” Rowena asked then stopped when he turned and leveled those piercing eyes at her again. “Can it wait for a little more breakfast? I’m really very hungry.”

  The old man opened his mouth, some reply about to come. He closed his teeth on it and sighed. “I need to check for a spark,” he said, passing through the curtain to the front desk. “Tell me when you’re ready to go.”

  “Go where?”

  The curtain closed. The Alchemist let silence make his reply. Rowena stared at the table, then reached down to the empty bowl on the floor. She carried it to the little copper sink to rinse away the dog’s spittle, emptied the last of the porridge into it, blew on it awhile—and found she couldn’t bring the spoon to her mouth. Her hunger was still there, but her guts roiled, full of something indigestible.

  She put the bowl on the floor, her head on the table, and listened to Rabbit enjoy second helpings.

  14.

  With Anselm, a message directing someone to meet him “here” might have any one of a dozen meanings. Long practice had taught Rare the trick of telling to which “here” a given message referred. It was all in the context, and the hour of day, and the weather, and the smaller subtleties of his temper. She’d learned to read all these things, sifting them out of the thin phrases of a galvano-gram. This particular day, in this particular circumstance, “here” would mean the Hangman’s Market, already in its midday rush. It was a place she had learned to lose herself in years before, a trick mastered under Anselm’s watchful instruction.

  The Hangman’s Market owed its name to the disused gallows casting skeletal shadows across its snarl of tents and carts. Men and women were still hanged in Corma, but now the gallows were shut up in the outbuildings of the Court and Bar, away from the riot of the streets. The Ecclesiastical Commission didn’t much involve itself in the business of law and order, but it had lobbied against public executions years before with a compelling study of the crime rates in the days following them. If the goal of such spectacles was to scare the people straight, it was a goal better reached by other means. That had been enough to shift the custom’s location, though not to stay its practice. Now only the hotels and public houses ringing the Hangman’s Market recalled its past with winking names like the Pine Box Inn and the Bitter End.

  Passing the rotted scaffold, Rare recalled that a younger Anselm had been among the last to take the long ride to that infamous stair. He’d given the clumsy gendarme left in charge of him the slip and escaped in spectacular style. Years after, Anselm had purchased a café called the Last Drop. He still owned it, a little snub directed toward the Fates, though no one but his accountant and the maître d’ ever recognized him as more than a wealthy patron on his occasional visits.

  Rare found Anselm in a perfumer’s tent, browsing phials of every shape and hue with practiced disinterest. The space reeked of jasmine, sandalwood, and cherry bark. Rare wondered how the wizened, hood-eyed merchant could bear so much oppressive scent.

  She slipped between two matronly women in broad, feathered hats and settled in beside Anselm.

  Rare lifted a phial the color of sunset. “Your message was uncommonly direct.”

  Anselm made a tsking sound. “Not that one. You need something with wood undertones.” He offered her an alternative and moved a few paces off.

  Curious, Rare sniffed. Beech and amber. It was a good fit—a dark scent to balance her fair features. She set the bottle down, following Anselm’s path.

  “But lavender is most certainly your color,” he observed. “Where did you find that gown? It’s lovely.”

  “You only start with nonsense when there’s something important going on.”

  “I had thought my uncommonly direct message should give you some idea of it. You’ve gotten into something that concerns the Bear. He’s asked to see us about it.”

  She put a hand on Anselm’s elbow, directing him out onto the boulevard. The market air was comparatively free, its treacle puddings and cinders and ales mingling with the closeness of humanity.

  Rare twined her arm with Anselm’s. “I’m listening.”

  “I had always thought you clever.” Anselm’s voice dripped acid. “But you seem determined to make me regret that assessment. What have you put your nose in now, kitten?”

  She shrugged. They turned a corner and walked past a lanyani busker pulling sovereigns from the ears of idiot children, the shining coins secreted between its willow-whip fingers.

  “Nothing that involves me with the Bear.”

  “I hear different.”

  “And what do you hear?”

  “Ivor sent him a package last night. He ended up with an empty-handed courier instead. Now he thinks you’re connected. I was hoping you might clarify what led him to that conclusion.”

  “I may have met one of Ivor’s birds on the lightning rail last night.”

  Anselm pulled them up beside a stall half-buried in an avalanche of shoes. A cobbler knocked away at the heel of a lady’s boot, the hammer punctuating Anselm’s words.

  �
�You may have. And if, peradventure, you did?”

  Rare rolled her eyes, untangling her arm from his. “I may have given her a letter to pass on to Ivor, encouraging him to consider me a candidate for a mutually beneficial partnership.” Rare smiled at Anselm’s narrowing gaze. “You really should lock your desk drawers. Not all the help can be trusted.”

  “Nor all the houseguests.”

  Rare spread her hands innocently.

  “You planned to lever Ivor with your knowledge of Gammon hunting for foul play between Chalmers and Pierce,” Anselm said. “The letter was an offer to take their goods off his hands, perhaps find a buyer for them?”

  “I had a buyer for them.”

  Anselm raised an eyebrow. Rare bristled at that, hoping the claim was not so plainly an exaggeration. The lanyani’s aigamuxa housekeeper had said the clan might be interested in Ecclesiastical goods, in light of the conference being in town. But that was enough. It was a lead, and she intended to make it useful.

  Rare added, in a honeyed tone, “I learned from the best.”

  Anselm scoffed. He stalked toward the Last Drop.

  “Kitten, I daresay you’ve forgotten half of what I taught you. Do you even know what those goods were?”

  She tossed her hair dismissively. “Some kind of research text. There was something in the message about it containing data. Lots of EC collars have records full of data. It’s all worth something to someone. With so many of them mucking about the city, nosing into one another’s interests, what better time to move it along?”

  “You didn’t pay attention to the grammar of Ivor’s message.”

  Rare laughed. “Did you just use the words ‘grammar’ and ‘Ivor’ in the same statement?”

  “The book,” Anselm said in a cool, poisonous tone of correction, “collects data. It was the subject of the sentence, in the active voice. It collects data by itself.”

  “A ridiculous conclusion. If Ivor wanted to tell you something so incredible, he’d put it plainly.”

  Anselm shook his head. “No, kitten. Ivor is cheap. You pay for galvano-graph transmissions by the character. And the constabulary has a whole department listening in on the shorts and longs. They can’t catch everything, but they get enough to keep savvy people nervous. Helps keep Ivor running a brisk trade in letter delivery. He’d know better than to make matters plain.”

  Rare cursed inwardly, keeping her face neutral. If the delivery hadn’t been stolen, she might have made something of the debacle—brokered a deal for the package with the Old Bear. Things were not so bad between them, she supposed, that she couldn’t at least make a show of mending fences. But it had been stolen, and Ivor—

  “Ivor’s already had his trouble,” Rare said, taking Anselm’s arm again. She patted it consolingly. “When he didn’t respond to my letter by the morning deadline I gave, I strolled by Blackbottom End on my own. New Vraska Imports is a wreck. There’s a lot of blood in the offices above the loft.” She considered mentioning what she’d taken from Ivor’s office before leaving, the half-rifled sack of correspondence squirreled away from customers. She’d had to leave it unexamined in her apartments to make this meeting. But . . . no. That was her business, at least for now.

  Anselm pinched the bridge of his nose. He and Ivor had their history. Rare knew that very well—and she knew equally well the look of a man expecting the other shoe to drop.

  “So you left a letter with a courier implying that you wanted to work with Ivor and obtain this self-writing book for your own purposes. The delivery and the letter were stolen, and now the old bastard appears to be dead. Does that roughly embody your recent escapades?”

  “I do try to keep busy.”

  The blow was not the hardest Anselm could offer, but it was cruel—the back of his hand, knuckles grazing her mouth. Curt. Punitive. Rare’s eyes misted before she could push the pain back down. Nearby, a governess holding a little girl’s hand tugged her charge away from the row.

  Rare gentled her lip with the lace of her sleeve. “You bastard.”

  “I’m not the one who contacted an old ally contemplating usury and extortion,” Anselm snapped. And then, the sigh. It was the one he’d used when she was still a girl, learning her way around the dark places at his heels. His sighs were a language unto themselves, complete with tones and grammars. Once, they’d had the power to pare Rare down a size. Now, they slid into her, silent as a sharpened knife, and turned.

  “You’ve rattled the Bear’s cage,” he continued. “Probably the girl confessed the whole business to him.”

  “Who has the delivery now?”

  Anselm stared at her for a long time. He pulled her forward, a hand about her waist, another cupping her chin, and kissed her. She felt the familiar rasp of his tongue and shivered. Then he held her at arm’s length, a gesture of mock admiration, the teacher sizing up the pupil and finding her wanting.

  “Some aigamuxa, silly kitten. And because of your clever little note, now it has your name, too.”

  Rare pushed him away. “What of it?”

  “Nothing. Everything. If there are aigamuxa willing to steal this delivery, and someone willing to kill for what Ivor used to have, why should you fare better? Even if there were no monsters to contend with, there’s still the Bear to shake off. You’ve put a deal of effort into avoiding him.”

  “I’m not afraid of him. Or them.”

  Anselm sniffed, shaking his head. He resumed his walk down the cluttered lanes of the Hangman’s Market, hands folded behind his back, the stump of his shortened finger tap-tap-tapping. Rare set her jaw and followed, shrugging her shawl close.

  It needled her to see him so knowing, so contemptuous of her work. He had always taken pride in her skills, her charm and aptitude as his apprentice. She’d been fifteen when she came to his doorstep, looking for someone to console her for the family she’d lost. He’d been the best choice. Their loss, after all, had been shared. And he was hardly a stranger to her. For years, he’d been a kind of uncle, wicked and wily, and she’d pined for him with a schoolgirl’s fancy. He was charming, rakish, canny. She had needed that kind of man, back then. He might even have needed her, too.

  The thirst for consolation had brought the younger Rare into the bed of a man twice her age. It had seemed better than a dream. She was his. His ward, his apprentice, his lover. It was a pleasure beyond any she’d known to belong to someone so completely.

  But Rare had been a child. To be reminded, thirteen years on, that he still saw her as an amateur was an indignity she’d earned an end of long ago.

  She walked beside Anselm. She did not take his arm.

  I am not a child, Rare thought fiercely. I’ve been on my own five years and made more than enough clink to show my worth. He should know that by now.

  Very likely, he did know that. Perhaps, she considered, he even resents it. Anselm had his wealth and his success, true. He was retired, though he rarely used the term. And didn’t that prove he hadn’t accepted it? A surge of triumph filled Rare’s breast. Anselm’s reputation was considerable. Cutpurses and cat burglars swapped stories of his exploits across smoky card tables. They regarded his legend as a yardstick against which to measure themselves. But Anselm was nearly all legend now—an object of admiration, yes, but so was a fossil or the shroud of some long-dead king.

  As they passed through the thinning edges of the bazaar and entered the Last Drop’s portico, Rare tried to recall the last time Anselm himself actually ran a job. It had been . . . Her brow furrowed as she fumbled through memory. Six years? That long, at least. They nodded their way past the maître d’ and took up a padded corner booth. Rare had trouble suppressing her smile.

  “You look a deal too pleased with yourself,” Anselm said, “for a woman who might need to run for her life before supper.”

  The smile unfolded in earnest.

  “You,” she purred, “are a relic, Ann. Do you know that?”

  He pushed his menu aside. A waiter sidled up to th
eir table. Anselm dismissed him with a flick of four and a half fingers. The man disappeared.

  Rare slid closer, coming round the curve of the bench to press herself against Anselm. Beneath the table, she traced a hand up the outer hem of his trousers and began to play her way to the inner thigh, imagining her smile laced with poison.

  “You think because you taught me this trade, you’ll always be my master. You think because we’ve shared a bed, I’ll always be your lover. Or that reputation will carry you through this lovely retirement.” Rare felt the heat in her cheek where Anselm’s knuckles had clouted her. He didn’t blink as she leaned very close, kissing him just below the earlobe, along the angle of his jaw, pausing just shy of his lips—and pulling away.

  Curious, Rare’s hand explored. The dance of two fingers along his trouser laces confirmed her power over him—and those, too, she pulled away.

  “You’ve certainly retired. Into the storybooks. I’d bet all the sovereigns in my purse you’re not fit enough to scale a building anymore, nor well enough connected to the prowlers to really loosen a body’s lips. You had your big take, wrote your great legend, and you settled for them. Now the dust has settled on you.”

  Anselm’s face might have been etched in stone. “Are you quite done?”

  Rare smirked. “I’m sorry. Hit a nerve?”

  “Better to say I hit one of yours. You dealt yourself into a game not even knowing what was being played, and now it’s gone bust you’d rather get picked clean than have the good sense to be dealt out.”

  “Marvelous. I tell you you’re an irrelevant bastard using facts, and you tell me I’m an ungrateful child in an atrocious extended metaphor.”

  “More or less.”

  Rare slipped back to her place an arm’s length away. “So is that what you called me here to do? Deal me out? How chivalrous.”

  Anselm rolled a cigarette, not looking down at his nine and a half fingers. It came together fast and tight. Rare had to credit him that much—whatever else might have rusted over, his hands were as fine a device as ever.